Learning English

            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.