| Life in Michigan
My family moved to the state of Michigan, the United States, in 2003. We arrived there on a very hot summer day of June. I will never forget the day when I first climbed up the stairs to the apartment where my family was to stay for a year. Running up the stairs with great anticipation, my heart was fluttering at the thought of living in a new home. Everything looked and felt different. In our backyard, the dazzling sunlight streamed into the lush forest and I could breathe in fresh air from the abundant trees. Even the smell of the freshly painted walls in my new room gave me an adrenaline rush. But such feelings of excitement did not last very long. Being an only Korean student in my school, my first few months in the new country brought me an endless chain of challenges and hardships. However, by overcoming these difficulties, I could find great joy in learning a new language and gain a lifetime of memories I will never forget.
A week after my arrival in Michigan, I was immediately enrolled in a public school near my neighborhood which was a tiny little rural town called Okemos. Unlike people nowadays who have plenty of opportunities to study abroad, there were not many Asians, let alone Koreans who were living in the eastern United States ten years ago. But since I had to mingle with people from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds using the common language, English, in school, I had no choice but to quickly grasp how to speak English for communication. For the first few months in my new school, I avoided talking to other students because it was frustrating not to be able to understand or respond to what they were saying. I was always tense and living on my nerves, afraid that somebody would approach me and ask me a question. But I soon realized that I had to do something about this situation which was haunting me day and night. I had to stop hiding behind the shadow of my language barrier. Eventually, I decided to take on the attitude of a learner and accept the fact that I was a foreigner in this country without language abilities. I stopped avoiding people, but instead, approached them first. I asked people for help when I didn't know how to solve a question in class and I made new lunch buddies in school. As I was getting more used to the new environment, my language skills also showed a big improvement in the course of time. Soon, I was speaking English just like any eight-year-old native speaker. I had overcome my language barrier.
Upon moving to a new country, I initially suffered from a deep slump and growing pains of feeling isolated from my peers due to a language barrier. I had even begged my parents to take me back to South Korea where I thought I belonged. But, after acknowledging the fact that I had to adjust to my new life in Michigan, I started out from a step. I tried to view my American classmates with an unbiased eye and constantly tried to get along and fit in with others. I also made conscious efforts to think and to act like an American, celebrating their culture and mimicking their way of speaking, Eventually, I surmounted my language barrier and got over one of the most difficult crises in my life.
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Sunday, November 2, 2014
So-Eun Yoon/ Chapter4 First draft / Tuesdays 34
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1.I like how the writer described the new house.
ReplyDelete2. The house was only described briefly, and the school was not much described.
3. The writer appealed to different senses by describing the sunlight and the smell of her room.
4.I would describe her house as cozy and the school as a nervous place.
5.This place is meaningful because it is where the writer had to overcome difficulties.
6.I think this writing is mostly about the writer's experience, not a specific place. It lacks description.
Choi Hyojung
From Seon Hyuk Im to So Eun Yoon
ReplyDelete1. I like how she described the house.
2. The house was described clearly, nothing else.
3. She appealed to sight, smell, and touch, as you can see and feel sunlight, while smelling the room.
4. I would describe the house as a "home," a place of safety and comfort, and the school as a jungle, where everything is hostile since she's afraid to communicate.
5. She had to overcome the language barrier and gain confidence.
6. It's more of an experience, not a memorable place. Memorable experience. Technically it is a place, but not a specific place.
1. I liked how she described the whole situation very vividly.
ReplyDelete2.It was not that clear about the house or school.
3.The writer appealed to her sight, smell, touch and so on.
4.I would describe the place as being full of hope because she was excited to be at a new place.
5. I think it is because it was almost her first experience of overcoming such barriers.
6.She can describe more about how her house looked or how her friends were
201300854 jieun kim
Although I had become more comfortable with the new language, I still had to speak Korean when talking to my parents because both of them were not very fluent English speakers. Thus, I repeated the daily routine of speaking English with my friends and teachers in school and talking to my parents in Korean back at home. This was how I became bilingual in English and Korean. Even when I returned to South Korea in 2005, I tried my best to maintain my English fluency while readjusting to a brand new life in Korea. As for me, English was a gift I earned from my two-year stay in the United States and I never wanted to lose it. My experiences in the United States also enlightened me on some of the most effective ways to surmount a language barrier and to quickly grasp a foreign language. One method I found very effective is exposing oneself as much to the foreign cultures. I learned by experience that learning a language not only involves the language itself, but it also concerns accepting a new culture and interacting with new people. That is, accepting new cultures and showing active participation in them is crucial in learning a new language. Instead of rejecting cultures that differ from our own and considering them as something wrong, we need to exercise tolerance to foreign cultures. We must bear in mind that understanding a country’s unique cultures can significantly help us successfully acquire their language. Likewise, during my stay in the United States, I made conscious efforts to actively participate in the traditional American cultures by celebrating holidays which were not celebrated back in my native country, such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Easter. Such efforts later proved their effectiveness in bolstering my understanding of English and securing fluency in it.
ReplyDeleteUpon moving to a new country, I initially suffered from a deep slump as I had been isolated from my peers due to a language barrier. I had even begged my parents to take me back to South Korea where I thought I belonged. But, after acknowledging the fact that I had to adjust to my new life in Michigan, I started out from a step. I tried to view my American classmates with an unbiased eye and constantly tried to get along and fit in with others. I also made conscious efforts to think and to act like an American, celebrating their culture and mimicking their way of speaking. Eventually, I surmounted my language barrier and got over one of the most difficult crises in my life.