My Experience of Learning a New Language

Learning a new language, or any new thing for that matter, is always challenging for human beings. It’s not an easy task to achieve a second language like the mother language but by overcoming our fear and inertia and coming out of the comfort zone can make it easy to acquire not only the language but also the structural way to use it and the accent of local people starts to seem more comprehensible that serves as a means of expediently connecting with the local people fostering new friendships and an exchange of ideas that wouldn’t have occurred prior to its inception.The sentence "the accent of local people starts to seem more comprehensible" is awkwardly phrased. A better way to phrase this sentence would be "one begins to understand the accent of the local people more easily."

Close Comments As an example, It was very hard to learn English in a country where English isn’t commonly spoken. I have gone through a hard time to learn English as a second language at the very beginning but after practicing hard and observing people how they talk, I am doing better day by day, getting used to the accent and it is getting natural and more natural to me and I came out with that it is hard to dominate but not impossible to achieve a new language.

I got afraid when I was going to join Thompson Rivers University here in Canada, which was far away from my country with totally a new culture and new people. I became nervous because I had no experience of getting adjusted with a whole new place, language and culture. This became a big concern for me to talk in English fluently for keeping my confidence on exact point while communicating with everyone in here.The sentence is unclear and poorly structured. A clearer and more concise way to phrase this sentence would be "My inability to speak English fluently became a concern for me as it affected my confidence when communicating with others."

Close Comments

After landing in Canada, I’ve started facing a lots of problem here that I knew I would face from the very beginning but something I didn’t know was how to fix it or how to adjust in here. I was in a fix what to do. I wasn’t able to communicate with people so easily because the accent here in Canada wasn’t familiar to me. As Canada’s first language is English, they have a natural way of accent which sounds like a bird singing a nice song. They use different intonation, stress. On the other hand, people from Bangladesh use a totally different accent, intonation, stress. That is why I had an inaction talking with people around me and also because of my vocabulary level wasn’t so rich. Moreover, I was afraid of making mistakes because that was breaking my desire to try on more time.

When I first came to TRU, I met up with national and international students, talked to them about our Bengali culture, like how our interactions happens, the way of our communication, our rituals and the overall the tradition we are keeping.There are several grammatical errors and awkward phrases. The sentence should be revised to "When I first came to TRU, I met with national and international students and discussed our Bengali culture, including our social interactions, communication styles, rituals, and overall traditions."

Close Comments I also gathered information about their culture and tradition. I started observing people, how they talk, their expression, intonation, stress, vocabulary, how they use phrases in their conversation. I started to talk in English with my friends. Those long conversations were growing up my confidence level.The sentence could be improved by changing "growing up" to "boosting."

Close Comments Though I was making a lot of mistake while talking, I did not give up for a single second. I kept practicing more and more to get adjusted and comfortabe with the new language, culture, tradition and everything I needed to be adjusted with slowly day by day. Especially the professors and instructors here at TRU guided me a lot to be fluent in English. As they said i kept practicing new vocabularies every days and doing better, getting comfortable to talk day by day.The sentence has a grammatical error, as "i" should be capitalized to "I." Additionally, "new vocabularies every days" should be revised to "new vocabulary every day."

Close Comments

Overall from all this I have learned a vital lesson and that is nothing is impossible to achieve. All you need to do to achieve a goal is hard work, practice and not feeling shy when you’re making a mistake. I am learning a lot by making lots of mistake. Now mistakes don’t bother me anyway.

This was obviously a great experience for me which made me learn a lot. Getting adjusted with a new language and culture was a challenge for me and I think I have managed to learn in an efficient way, although there were ups and down in the whole process.

Works Cited

1. Gardner, R. C., & Lambert, W. E. (1972). Attitudes and Motivation in Second-Language Learning. Newbury House Publishers.
2. Dörnyei, Z., & Ushioda, E. (2011). Teaching and Researching Motivation (2nd ed.). Routledge.
3. Brown, H. D. (2007). Principles of Language Learning and Teaching (5th ed.). Pearson Education.
4. Cook, V. (2008). Second Language Learning and Language Teaching (4th ed.). Routledge.
5. Ellis, R. (2008). The Study of Second Language Acquisition (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
6. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Anderson, M. (2013). Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching (3rd ed.). Oxford University Press.
7. Lightbown, P. M., & Spada, N. (2013). How Languages are Learned (4th ed.). Oxford University Press.
8. Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.
9. Nation, P. (2001). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge University Press.
10. Schmitt, N., & McCarthy, M. (Eds.). (1997). Vocabulary: Description, Acquisition, and Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.

Video Version