My Experience of Learning a New Language

Learning new thing is always challenging for human being. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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.