In my English class, we have read a story about the challenges of people who learn a new language, when I read the story about Eva (I
call her Eva, but I am sure her name was something else), and her challenges with English
as second language, it reminded me of myself and my experiences, how many times
I used English, or Spanish as my second or third language.
I remember when I had to go to
Honduras for 2 years, I was looking for an English Speaking university to study
over there, and transfer the units back to USA, but my best choice was a Spanish
speaking university, a new language.
First my lawyer, my family and everyone were telling me to learn Spanish
for six months, and then go to university, but I had a different approach, and
idea about these kinds of situations. My personal quote for this kind of
situation is: “If the chance of success is only one percent, I am that one
percent”. So I said no, just find the
university, and I will learn the language by myself.
After ten
days being there, we found the perfect choice, UNITEC, which had contracts with
US universities, so me and my cousin’s wife (she came from San Francisco to
Tegucigalpa to help me out) went to UNITEC, and they told me that in mid
January our classes are going to begin,
and I had one month to prepare, and on the other hand I took the math
assessment test in Spanish, which was so funny, because I could not understand
a word, but I got 81 and I got into Calculus class.
So I had one month to
learn as much as I can, I started with words and pronunciations, it was pretty
easy, because unlike English, Spanish writing and reading is mostly followed by
rules, and there are few exceptions, then I found out that the best way for me
to get an idea of Spanish, is to find the patterns between Spanish and English
( I have studied English since I was 6 in Iran), there were so many patterns,
and similarities, then I studied the verbs, and grammar. My 20 days learning period was up, and
I had to go to school tomorrow…
2 comments:
Wow thats amazing that you only had such little time to learn spanish! I could never imagine having to learn a whole new language in such a short time and then having to go to class. I think it is amazing that people from different countries who don't speak any english come to America and take these hard high school or college courses
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