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ESL forum >
Message board > Where did you learn English?
Where did you learn English?
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karagozian
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My story then. I don �t know exactly whether my mothertongue was Dutch or French. I was born in Belgium and as you know the situation used to be, and still is quite complicated up there (I �m currently living in the south of France). As I was raised by my French speaking grandmother I suppose I can say my mothertongue was French. My mother is Flemish and didn �t speak French, so I suppose I started speaking Flemish at the same time. When I started going to school (6 years old) it was all in Dutch (though of course I can �t remember having had any problems to adjust). I later met my French husband who considers himself more Armenian than anything else. By that time I settled in France and had to brush up, revise, work a lot at my French. I then also started to learn Armenian (which is much more complicated as the alphabet is completely different). Well I have been teaching English for about 25 years now in France and have since started to learn Spanish. My father-in-law spoke Armenian, Turkish, Russian, French and German. Well it �s all mixed up, but so exciting ! |
7 Jun 2011
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SaraMariam
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My mothertongue is actually German and in Germany you automatically started to learn English at the age of 10. I was totally fascinated by the language as we were really lucky to have a great teacher. Looking back he was the best teacher of my entire school life. He came from America and always told us about his family and life "over there". I learned very quickly that with the English language you can communicate with a lot more people over the world than just German and I started to read all the books I could find in English (even 3 years too high for me :p) and started to find penfriends from all over the world. In the end I had 26 penpals in different countries of the world. We loved swapping that letters where you would put tons of stickers, little notebook pages, drawings etc. The cutest letters always came from Japan! This is actually the way I learned English - through all my penpals which made me write letters pretty much every day (and receivinggreat letters - each day was like Christmas, hoping somebody wrote back and to learn everything possible about the person on the other side of the world). This is still what fascinates me the most about this language - that you have a means to communicate with so many people of the world and learn about their way of life and how it can contribute to your own. |
7 Jun 2011
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kprichorniana
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Learning English has been the best thing I have done for my professional life! My parents moved to live to California (Bay Area)just to give my brother and me the opportunity to learn a second language. My brother was 8 and I was 15 just 10th grad in high school. I was enrolled in school, but I couldn �t take many of the courses because I didn �t speak any English...In the county I lived, they had a the most wonderful program for immigrants...I don �t know if every county in USA has it... Anyways, my counselor gave me 3 pretty basic no brainer classes (math, PE, and art) and three intense ESL classes. So you see there was no way I wasn �t going to learn (something that kept me up many nights when I first arrived---it was horrible listening to people and not being able to understand a thing they said!) In six months time, I was ready to take on History, English and Biology!!! Wow!!! I felt as if in a dream...I couldn�t believe I understood everything they were saying, it was so cool, I felt cool, so my language started improving even more!...One of my teachers encouraged me to go to collage in the States as well, so my parents found the way to send me...I studied Physical Education with a minor in Physical Therapy.
I came back to Mexico on vacations and fell in love...I stayed and got married...I have never worked as a PE teacher, everyone needs me either as an English teacher or a translator...and I discovered that I actully like doing just that full time, and I make some extra money giving relaxation massages :) I love speaking English, but I LOVE teaching it the most!
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7 Jun 2011
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