Personal Challenge Becomes A Life Rubric
I am Chinese, and like any Asian who comes to this country, the language is the first barrier you encounter. English is a big deal in the modern world. We may decide to lock up ourselves in our own language cocoon, but sooner than later, English would be calling. My family is quite competitive, and my parents are pro-education. One thing I learned from my father is that if you set yourself to do something, then you can achieve it. Like he once said, “challenges can be flipped to opportunities if you know how. ” He did not sound correct to me back then, but when I stepped in an American class to learn English, it did not take me long to prove him right. So this is my English learning journey. This is a story I feel compelled to tell because it shaped my thought about challenges in life.
My mother came home one evening with a smiley face and groceries in one hand. After placing them on the kitchen counter, she rubbed her hands together, raised her shoulders a little bit and planted her eyes to mine and said, “Tomorrow you begin school, my dear. We’ve found a nice school for you and a nice English teacher who will teach you proper English. My daughter, your fate begins tomorrow. Embrace it! Right WeiWei?” I did not know how to react, but I gave a smile which my dad always falls in love with virtually every time. The previous night we had seen some infomercial about rhubarb pickles, and my dad had encouraged me to begin paying attention to such examples to know more about English and how the language is used in everyday life rather than its classroom version. If my life were to be successful, then English would be my key. The next morning was school, and I had mixed emotions on how the experience would go. I knew some little broken English, as they describe English that is far from being contextually right. I knew a few words like “hi” and “hello” and “bye” perhaps because I heard them every day. The television helped me learn those few. So I felt confident, but when my teacher began by entirely new words, I felt the frustration get in. First, the syntactical arrangement of Chinese was altogether different from English. My mind labored while switching to and from English and Chinese which I came to realize later on that it was a costly mistake and a stumbling block. Secondly, I had no immediate access to Chinese translations. And thirdly, it emerged Chinese and English were two distinct languages. The formula for learning one cannot possibly be applied in learning the other.
My English classes began rough, and I almost quit. I felt I was no being understood and often-times I swung between acceptance and rejection that could possibly have been my own conviction. But my teacher used specific techniques to make us catch some vocabulary. I remember she tried to make every new word sound fascinating. Here is an example. “The three ‘a’ in word ‘banana’ looks like it has three bananas, and the two ‘e’ in word ‘eye’ look like the eyes, and the ‘y’ is the nose. ” What I found out was that if learning is combined with an event or an impression that is most likely to stay in mind, it becomes even easier to capture whole sentences. When I took the tests, all I had to do was remember the funny examples my teacher gave or what my mind had been thinking when we were learning that new sentence now being asked in the test and my memory would brighten up all of a sudden. In due time in found myself becoming ambitious and enthusiastic about English.
My competitive DNA had finally resurged and what I had thought would be a tedious experience would turn out to be my template for overcoming challenges. I learned English quite well and within a short time that my parents decided to learn more from me since they too knew modest English. As ludicrous as it may sound, I learned how to challenge myself from that English learning experience.
