My last post Farm Girl has gotten a lot of attention on Reddit. It made me happy that many people are learning things about China through my blog. At the same time, it also sparked quite a lot of curiosity about how I learned English. This piece is my attempt to offer an honest and longer version answer to that.
English is my second language. I started taking classes for it at the beginning of middle school. It was one of the critical subjects, but I failed terribly. I could not pick up the pronunciation of certain syllables nor remember slightly longer words and phrases, let alone speaking them with confidence. It was such a miserable experience and to this day I still remember being asked to stay after school to put in more hours so that I could catch up with others in the class.
In retrospect, lack of interest on my part and the way it was being taught compounded my misery. I grew up in a small village in rural China and had never being exposed to English before that first class. My two main ways of learning about the world outside of our village were textbooks from school and watching TV. There was zero mention of English from my elementary school materials. Some of the TV shows at the time may have programs in/about English, but I never came across them. It was the 1990s and only a few neighbors had a TV and when we gathered around it, we were always watching the hottest Kongfu dramas. None of that helped me develop interests in English.
At school, rather than encourage us to speak and use the language, we’re asked to recite the words and passages throughout the English textbook. The English teacher may have wanted us to practice in conversations. But we had around 60 kids in our class and she had another 60 or more kids to teach. It was just impossible to allocate time for everyone to practice in manageable groups given the size of the class. Besides, I had never heard her speaking English to anyone other than the words or phrases from our textbook in the classroom. I wondered if she could use the language beyond our textbooks?
But none of that mattered. As students, we were trained to get good grades from the various tests at school and our teachers’ KPI (key performance index) was designed accordingly. For English, none of the exams tested speaking. It was about 20% on listening (based on a recorded material) and 80% on writing. The school was arranged in a way that we would have allocated a period for repetitive standard test preparation (training) at the end of each semester. By the last semester of middle school, we’ve finished learning anything new from textbooks and devoted the whole semester to preparing for the last big exam, the high school entrance examination. I guess it was really important to do so to make everyone look good.
In mandarin, we have a phrase to describe people who are good at taking standardized tests. It’s an exam machine.
The result of that type of teaching is, many college-educated Chinese, even the ones who majored in English still can’t properly speak the language. Some positions at my current company require the use of English and I have been interviewing potential candidates’ skill of it for about 2 years. I have sat on the other side of the table during previous job hunting and knew from experience that everyone would prepare themselves against the list of questions interviewers may ask. However, rather than follow through with that supposed list of questions, I tried to have conversations with them. To start with, I may ask random questions like
1) How are you?
2) How was your weekend?
3) Any plans for the coming vacation?
4) Or if you enjoy living in the city?
To my amusement, some of them responded with the answers they recited against the list (but not what I asked). I remember one time I asked one application how was his weekend. He started to tell me about the experiences he acquired from his last job. The majority of the candidates seemed to understand my questions but were struggling to come up with a response. Very few could carry a conversation with me during the interview.
Tip of advice, if you ever need to hire Chinese who are expected to use English, please look past the certificates they may present. Just sit down and have a conversation with that person.
Back to my journey of learning English. The fact that my sit-in schooling ended after middle school could be seen as a blessing in disguise (Yes, I did not attend high school or beyond. You may check my previous posts for details). It liberated me from trying to take in materials dumped in the classroom. Instead, I had the freedom to learn at my own pace. My interest piqued as I started watching English movies and TV and I developed a curiosity of life beyond the Pacific Ocean.
So I made another attempt to learn in the summer of 2008. Five years after I graduated from middle school. I was working at a factory but did not have money to take classes on weekends, as I sent most of my wages back to my parents to better our standard of living. Lucky for me, I had a desktop at work and I took full use of it.
After some quick internet research, I settled on one classic English textbook then bought the print copy and downloaded its teaching videos to my work desktop. I started again from the most basics. Whatever I failed to pick up, I’d replay the course and remark my notes. Yes, I was actively taking notes without any teacher pushing me. At the end of each lesson, I would go through the notes, written exercises. Besides, to practice my reading and speaking skills, I read out loud on the roof of my factory dorm each morning and sent myself to the English corner (a place for English learners to practice speaking with one another) at the city library on weekends.
That lasted for a few years until I moved to the States in late 2012 through a cultural exchange program called au pair. By then, I was able to use English for work, but only within the work context. Anything beyond, I did not know what to talk about or how to start a conversation. I was working with a few Oakley engineers and enjoy it, but I remained silent at our after-work dinner tables. How I wished to talk to them like the way I talk to any Chinese! Regardless of the occasion or situation, I could easily strike a conversation with anyone. So I made my mind to get that problem resolved. Moving to the US and working as an au pair was the solution I found.
Au pair is an international program designed for young people to live with a foreign host family as part of the family and learn the culture and language there. In return, au pairs are expected to take care of the children in the family for a certain number of hours and get a weekly stipend of about $200. It worked well for me and allowed me to experience the full spectrum of American life. I remember one day I was dining with my host family at the best restaurant in Palm Beach, Florida when we vacationed there. The next day, when I was given a day off, I was riding buses to explore the city on my own. All of that helped me understand the American people and their culture, exactly what I wanted.
To help myself have the best chance of achieving my goal, I sought out more opportunities to interact with Americans. My host mum Kristen helped me get a part-time job at a pop-corn shop across the street from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The store was run by a few college students from UNM. I loved talking to them while packing pop-corn on weekends. I was sharing with them what my life was like back in China and learned about their life at school and the anxieties about going into the workforce and paying off their student loans. I felt I could see them through the language barrier as who they were. Despite our differences in language, culture and upbringing, I felt fundamentally we shared similar hopes and dreams about the life ahead
As one Chinese saying “The palest ink is better than the best memory” suggests, I continued to take notes during my life in the US. I’d put down anything new to me from the magazine I was reading, or anything I learned during the day. For example, one day I heard Kristen say “move your ass over” when she was talking to someone on the phone. I understood every word of it but did not understand the phrase. It never appeared on any of the textbooks I studied. So I asked her. It was so funny to me after she explained it and I started to pay more attention to idioms.
Anyway, that was my journey of learning English. Since moving back from the US in early 2014, I’ve been taking a laid-back approach to learning the language. But rather, indulging myself in enjoying the fun brought by this wonderful tool. Just to name a few. I love watching the late-night talk shows by Steve Colbert, John Stewart (later replaced by Trevor Noah), and Seth Meyers. They made me laugh when I was burned out from work by the end of the week. I am also a regular listener of podcasts and enjoy shows like Planet Money, Hidden Brain, Fresh Air, etc. Through these media, I got to know about business leaders like David Rubenstein and relationship expert Esther Perel, and many more in their circles. I’ve been enjoying applying the wisdom I collected from them to my own life.
At last, I want to end by borrowing the message from former first lady Michelle Obama’s book <Becoming>. Each of us always has the potential to grow and become something more. The life I am living today is much bigger than the one I lived in that village I grew up. The process of learning English and about western culture has helped me grow and opened so many doors to me and continues to open more. I wish nothing but the same to you through reading my blog about China.
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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