The English language is spoken by 750 million people as a second or foreign language in the world.
How did I become one of them?
I come from western Hungary (the world-famous Pannonia) and in this part of the country
German is the general foreign language in primary schools, which children start
to learn around the age of 10. In spite of this, I didn’t start with German but
with the English language at the age of 8 since one of our family’s friends is
an English teacher and she offered to me that I can attend her extracurricular
English lessons. I really enjoyed these first English lessons and despite being
the youngest one in this class, I turned out to be quite successful. This gave
me motivation to continue with English even after these extracurricular lessons
ended. I took private lessons from this teacher thanks to whom I got to really
like the language itself and the culture of the English speaking countries.
After
finishing primary school, I knew one thing for sure: I love languages and I
want to engage in English on every account. That’s the reason why I chose a grammar
school 50 km away from home where I could attend an English bilingual class. Without
doubt that was my most influential language learning experience. The bilingual
class meant that in the first year I had 18 English lessons in a week delivered
by 3 excellent teachers, one of whom is a native speaker from London. From the second
year the number of simple English lessons decreased but new subjects appeared:
World History, Geography and Civilization of the English Speaking World where
the language of the lesson was English. These subjects contributed to the
development of my vocabulary in various fields, such as sciences, culture,
literature, etc.
In grammar
school I was a member of an English drama club organized by our native speaker
English teacher. This extracurricular activity really improved my speaking
skills and made me more self-assured when speaking in a foreign language. Once
we participated in an English speaking drama contest in Hungary where we played
T.S. Eliot’s piece called Family Reunion.
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| Drama Contest |
Although I’ve
been learning English on and off for more than a decade, I still feel I’m very
far from perfect. My biggest problem is that I’m a perfectionist and my mistakes
disturb me very much. That’s one of the reasons it takes me so long to finish
my blog project for this term. I not only need inspiration but confidence as
well to write a new post. I hope by the end of my study I could become one of
the most enthusiastic and self-confident bloggers of the university.
