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What’s your experience with English? Did you find it difficult to learn?
To me this is a hard question to answer because it has been over 16 years since I started learning English. I started learning English in 6th grade and I remember that I hadn’t been the best student in English when it came to exams or grammar (English has many different rules and the pronunciation of the “th” and “r” was a challange too). I mainly learned to speak English during my high school year in the US. I became more fluent and was able to understand almost everything. This increased even more when I started studying English at University. – Britta Zimniok, German Fellow
In my experience, learning a foreign language was both facilitated by my natural inclinations, and yet, still difficult. For one, I remember being transferred in a class full of native speakers. Students were chatting away in English, which was intimidating. I remember a guy saying “it smells funny in here”, and I had no idea what he was saying. How could anything smell ‘funny’? However, once I started reading in English, it became easier and easier to learn. To this day, I notice when people say things I’ve read before but never heard before. I firmly believe you have to find a medium that can expose you to the language more and more when you want to learn; for me, it was books. – Elisa Perez, French Fellow
When I started learning English as a middle school student, I was drawn to it by its sounds and the American culture. I was captivated by American TV shows and films, and wanted to be able to watch them in their original language. Then I discovered Shakespeare, the British culture and RP’s phonological elegance, and resolved to undertake the enterprise of emulating the standard British pronunciation. In some cases, I was doing quite a good job (according to those around me), but whenever I felt tired, anxious or paid more attention to the content than the form, my original accent became audible. These days I am being quite experimental when it comes to accent and pronunciation…
Personally, I think that English is challenging in terms of phonology. Words’ pronunciation is almost never predictable, as a great university teacher once told me, and the accent is so different from my native language – English is a stress-timed language while Italian is syllable-timed – that reproducing and mastering it, in whatever form, takes time and much, much patience. – Emiliana Russo, Italian Fellow
