I was born in China and my family moved to the U.S when I was around 14 years old. My language learning experience in China is very different from the learning experience in the U.S. Even though students are required to learn English at school, very few students could actually start a conversation with an English speaker. Students in China do not have the time to speak English in class, instead, they do a lot of grammar exercises to have a strong performance in tests and quizzes. In the past summer, I taught English in a middle school in China, I was really frustrated and confused by the way how the school teaches English because it has not changed a bit since I moved to the U.S. The English textbook has a lot of unnecessary rules that do not help students to learn English. For example, in order to say 6:40, students have to say 20 mins until 7 instead of just saying six forty. The English learning experience has not changed, and it is definitely not the right way to learn a new language. I was not in an international school, so before I moved to the U.S, I took classes with native English speakers to improve my speaking and listening skills. The classes really helped me to make a smoother transition.
My English was not very good when I first started school in the U.S, I did not have much trouble with understanding the conversation, but I had a lot of trouble to deliver my message. After two months, because I was in the English-speaking environment, I had become much better with my English listening and speaking. I did not have much improvement in my reading and writing until the second year. It took me almost one and a half years to become fluent in English.
After Middle school, I took French in high school for the language requirement. It was a lot easier compared to when I first started English. French and English have similar grammar structures except for masculine and feminine nouns. My French teachers were also very different from my English teachers in China. In class, we had a lot more conversations and speaking exercises, and I learned most of the grammar from these exercises. I am not sure it’s because I am already well experienced from my previous language learning process or is because of the teacher, I learned French a lot faster than I learned English.
In college, I took Japanese for two years, and by far it is the most interesting language class I have taken. Suzuki Sensei created a good learning environment on the first day of class by only speak Japanese to us. One thing Suzuki Sensei told us is that we have to think in Japanese in order to be fluent in Japanese. Because of the Japanese speaking environment, Suzuki Sensei created in class, I was able to learn a lot of Japanese.
I think the language speaking environment is the most important part of the language learning process, the more you speak the better it will become.
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