To this day, I still remember clearly the first moment I fell in love with English; everything is as vivid as it was back then. I don’t think that I have learned everything that I wanted to learn in English yet, and I probably never will, but I know for sure that I am going to keep on digging in it because the passion I have for it is beyond explainable. Well, the last statement is not true, because it really can be explained very well actually.
I believe that it was the summer of 1994, and I was around seven years old. “Lion King” came out that year, and that was probably the first movie I saw. I bring this movie up because it was the movie that changed my life; not only because I dove into the world of filmmaking after seeing it, but I also wondered what that sweet language was that everybody in the movie was speaking in. However, the interests I had for English did not really stimulate any of my peers in school. Everyone I knew, well, mostly everyone I knew would not step out of their little safe zone of studying and try to explore the unknown world of English. My friends all looked at English as something that they had to learn in school and probably not something that was going to help them in any way, so I was alone.
I am not trying to say that I was an excellent student in learning English; I was not. It appeared to me that the method I was using to study it was not efficient enough. I just could not get to the other side where everything gets easier from there. To me, English was a barricade that I could not cross over. However, deep down in my heart, on a subconscious level, I knew that someday, I was going to be great in English, so I did not really worry at all.
Time flew. Before I knew it, I was already in middle school, and as nobody had expected, I was still very bad in English in general. The main thing about that was the fact that I really did try, but it didn’t matter how hard I tried, I still could not get it through. At this point, my parents saw the struggle I had with English, so they made a decision for me: they sent me off to England. Now that I look back, it was probably one of the most significant decisions that was ever made for me.
See, even though I am constantly writing about how I was bad in English, I was not aware of this before I departured for England. Actually, I thought I was pretty decent at it, and I even told myself not to worry, that soon enough, my genius in English would be in good use. Oh I wish I hadn’t thought like that! Because not only did my skills not shine in anything, I could barely understand anybody when I got there. I remember that there was this moment when the cab driver that was picking me up from the airport said something like, “Where ya going mate?” and all I heard was, “mehmehmehmeh, meh?” If that’s not torture, what is?
As time went on, I became more confident each day with my speaking and listening skills. The way I did it was by talking to anybody I could find, trying to learn whatever they said to me, and then using those words on someone else. I did that over and over again for one year straight. Sometimes, people didn’t even realize that I was from another country, and whenever that happened, it would always make my day. However, at this point, I thought British English was the only thing to learn and that I did not have to worry about anything else in the English world. I did not see what was coming for me.
When I was ready to go to high school, my mom and dad made another decision for me, and that was to send me to New York in United States because they thought that US would be the perfect place for me to learn Filmmaking. They thought why not start before college so I could get used to the environment and everything. Now, I am very grateful about this decision, but back then, it was a real pain for me. I thought that all the time I spent on learning the local slang when I was in England was going to be useless when I left there. Anyway, I did not have any time to hesitate, and I had to carry on with all sorts of doubts.
In New York, I realized two things. One was that I was speaking in a different accent and people had trouble understanding it. Another one was that British English and American English were not that different after all. I could see how things were pronounced differently, and sometimes they use alternative words for certain things. However, at the end of the day, it was still the same language. Also, along with the huge impact of culture that New York had brought to me, I felt that this had been the English that I always wanted to learn and I was finally there to do it. So without any hesitation, I was going to give up my British accent, and start over with the American one.
Learning the way Americans talk was not as hard as I thought it was going to be because as long as you understand the cultural element behind every sentence, you can catch up with it in no time. I remember that I would spend days just staying in watching “Friends”, and to this day, I still think that it was the best sitcom ever made. There were ten seasons of “Friends”, and each episode of it had numerous amounts of dialogues just between friends and families, so I basically just tried to learn the way people talked in that show. After a year doing that, I felt that I could pass as an American when I talked to people.
The interesting thing about me learning English is that I don’t really consider myself as an American or Englishman, I just like the way this language is composed, and it is a great thing when I talk to people in this language, and they know that I fit in really well. I still don’t think that I can speak English as well as others who were born in place speaking this language, but I am trying, and I don’t think I will ever give up on it, because after all these years pursuing the habit of speaking it, I can most definitely tell that it is only getting better and better.