I started learning English when I was around five years old. I had just come from Turkey and I was speaking a mixture of Turkish and Bosnian at that time. My parents did not want me to forget Turkish so they got a special set of channels for me. Most of them were in Turkish, but there were some in other languages too. Instead of learning Turkish fully on many available Turkish channels I could pick from, I ended up learning English. I found this one cartoon channel which was named "Cartoon Network" and I successfuly learned English thanks to it.
The second grade came along and we got English as a subject. I always performed well in English and I was one of the best students in class through my entire elementary school. The methods our teacher used were not exactly that good in my opinion. I mean, some were and some were not, to be honest. I liked that our teacher always wanted us to be active in class, to read and participate in the discussion. That was really fun. But we also had to learn everything to detail related to grammar and I absolutely hated that. Do not get me wrong, I believe that grammar is equally important to learn just as words and lessons but we were basically just learning it without even understanding it. The teacher tried explaining it more, but some things cannot be explained that easily, honestly. The thing about me was that I kind of naturally knew the correct tenses, and words to put in any sentence. I had this voice in my head telling me where to put what and that voice in my head is there thanks to listening to endless videos, movies, discussions in English but when my teacher told me to explain why I put a specific word, verb, tense where I did, I could not explain it. It simply felt right, it sounded right to me. At first I hated everything related to grammar since I hated learning the rules when I just knew it all already. After some time, I understood the importance of grammar. I realized that I too, could sometimes make mistakes and after some time I understood the rules as well. I mean, I did hate my teacher for making me learn all those rules but I am also thankful to her. She made me stronger as a person and more open to critique. She also prepared me well for highschool.
As for my self-learning, I self-learn English every single day for hours, but I do not see it as a task, I do it out of fun really. I read books in English, I watch videos in English, I chat with my foreign friends in English. English has become my life in some way and I do not know how would I be without it. It would be like being poor when it came to knowledge. I believe that at this stage it is at a same level as my mother tongue. I even think in English at this point. I am not trying to brag with that though, I just want to show how thankful I am I learned English. I want to use myself as an example as to why we should aspire to learn languages. I have an endless access to information thanks to English. Everything gets translated to English literally, anything from any language because English is spoken in so many countries. I even feel powerful and happy and I want to savour that feeling by learning even more languages. That is why I chose this highschool. Since the beginning of my life, I was always surrounded by foreign languages. It has become my reality, it has become something I love. At the moment, my dream is to become a hyper-polyglot, a person that can speak 5, 6 or more languages fluently. At our highschool we learn English, Turkish and German but besides that I am interested in learning another 20 languages. I want to learn Korean, Chinese and Spanish at the moment the most. I want to learn Korean because I really love Korean pop music, but besides listening to Korean pop music, I have songs on my phone on around 15-20 different languages, so I am quite used to hearing some particular words from some languages, besides listening to songs on different languages is a fun way to learn a language better. At the moment I know the Korean alphabet and I can write in it, I can also translate some things. As for Chinese, I can write around 150 characters if I prepared a bit in advance. I was originally really attracted to learn Chinese because people consider it to be impossible and I like a good challenge, but of course I have a lot of respect for many cultures and people and their way of life, so Chinese culture interests me too. I can also translate some things from Spanish. I like Spanish because I like to flow and the pronounciation of the words. I truly love learning languages so much because learning each new language represents opening a new door for me, a new door which gives me access to all the kinds of beautiful things this world has to offer. I get to understand a different approach to life, a different perspective on things, a different culture full of its own unique ways of doing things. I can also translate a lot of things from Turkish to Bosnian but I have forgotten a large amount of it due to me not speaking it for long. My parents are a native level in it, so maybe I could try and improve it by talking to them. They lived in Turkey for fifteen years and I lived there for five years. I can also understand German well due to learning it in elementary school. Besides the languges I have already mentioned, I want to learn: French, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Thai, Afrikaans, Hindi, Greek, Vietnamese and many others.
Being only monolingual represents a jail for me. It is like I am missing out on all the wonders of the world I can only experience by knowing languages. I want to feel the same "emotions" other cultures feel, I want to understand a different thinking pattern than my own. When you think of it, the reason why there are all these wars in the world is because we do not understand each other. It is because we were all raised to believe in different things, to act a different way in certain situations and that is why there are so so many misunderstandings between all of us. As the Arab proverb says: "Learn a language and stop a war". I mean the languague barrier is not the only reason why there are wars, but it is one of the big reasons. Just to clarify that.
My advice, when it comes to learning foreign languages, would be to constantly listen, speak, write, read and translate. Those are five crucial steps in my opinion. First look up basic phrases in the language, learn the alphabet and learn the 100 most commonly used words or senstences, learn all of then go out there and speak immediately. Find a native speaker online or in real life. Try and speak to them. It does not matter if you make mistakes while doing it, it only matters that you put yourself out there and give it your best. I am sure the native speaker will appreciate any kind of effott you made and they may even try to help you out. Do not be shy but be proud because you are doing something millions of people are scared to do and that is why they have not learnt the language. But that is the catch, you are not them. Go and read a book in that language, read kindergarden texts, fairy tales, just read and try to understand. Translate some words from songs. That is all improvement right there. Break that wall and do it because you can, because there is something beautiful waiting for you behind that wall. I will end this by saying that I was so happy when I found out this would be the theme for our English assignment. I know so much related to languages and it is my passion. I could continue talkin and writing about languages and diffferent nations for days but it still would not be enough for me to express everything. I hope this text helps someone in some way or inspires them. Thank you for reading, I hope we will share the same passion one day.
Selma Maksumić, I2