Now don’t
get me wrong, I was born in the United States but English was not my first
language. As a first generation Asian
American, I began speaking the languages of my mother and father, Laotian and
French, and most of my learning was aural.
I would listen to each hazy syllable and repeat them until an image or
meaning was subconsciously associated with certain utterances, while other
images or meanings were associated with other utterances. I hadn’t learned to write until I entered
primary school, which was around the same time that it was a requirement to
learn English. More so than association
of sounds and written characters to specific images and meanings, the
difficulty with learning English was the variety of ways a speaker could or
should pronounce something. While all
languages will have their regional dialects and accents and that language, when
oral, is always evolving, English seemingly say it more crucial to correct or standardize the manner of speaking.
And for the most part, the way English was organized and worked had been
backwards or at the very least opposite
where Laotian and French were concerned.
Speaking
English came easier than composing written English. From learning other languages before English,
I learned that it is a universal feature to use gestures and certain movements
to indicate the meanings of speech.
Because of this, it was shortly after being immersed in an all English
speaking class that I was able to fumble my way to conversing in that foreign
language. When different pronunciations of
my newly learned vernacular entered my realm, it was a struggle to realize that
English had a funky way of manipulating syllables and still making sense of its
own spoken language. But when it came
time to writing the language, I was surprised to learn that writers shouldn’t necessarily
write the way they speak. Spelling was
an immediate indicator that English worked in a less than orthodox way. There was a more institutionalized way of
ordering and organizing words and phrases in written English. It wasn’t an issue of grammatical correctness
or proper usage of punctuation so as much was it an issue of making sure a
standard sentence with subject and predicate had proper and specific
locations in context. Written English
had a universally accepted way of conducting itself so as to convey information
in a clear, concise and eloquent way, but that universally accepted portion seemed vastly different, almost too simplified, to the way Laotian and
French worked. So in practice, what I
made in mistakes were not the omission of information, but the over
compensation of information because of my unsureness. When I was at school, I would practice this
and utilize it with both teachers and peers.
But when I came home to my parents, who had also been struggling with
this issue of foreignness, I switched back to the standard I learned primarily, and whose uniformness was a feature
in each other, only alienated by English.
