Hey everyone!
In this post, I want to tell you my
personal English learning history. That means, I want to tell you, which
different experiences I made in my life with the English language. Furthermore,
you will read something about the different steps towards the English level I
obtain today.
As you might know or not, my home
country is Germany, more precise, north Germany. I lived there for 16 years
after we moved from Munich to a rather small city. I also visited the school
there and this was of course my first contact with the English language. When I
was in the third grade of the primary school, the school offered English the
first time. We did not learn something about the grammar, it was more about
some basic and easy words for instance, pronouns or some animals for example,
bird, dog and so on. I did not have the luck to be raised bilingual, thus this was
my first contact with a foreign language.
After leaving the primary school and
entering the upper school system, it got more serious. English was all of a
sudden one of the main subjects and became more difficult. I can remember my
very first vocabulary test. It was about all the pronouns we were supposed to
study. I failed this test with the worst grade you can get, because I
underestimated the difficulty, due to my memory about some easy words we
studied playful in the primary school.
I have to say that I was not that
good during the first four years in the secondary school. After some bad grades in
a row, I even took tutoring lessons. My problem was the grammar. Despite, I had
a good participation in class, I failed a lot of grammar tests. This changed
after I finished the ninth grade, due to a change in the exam system. The focus
was shifted towards writing texts instead of dry grammar training. With the beginning
of the tenth grade, I became better. English was now one of my favorite
subjects.
At this time, many school colleagues
left Germany for an exchange year. Unfortunately, I did not travel into another
country like some colleagues did. Maybe because I did not feel ready for this,
or I just was tied to my family and my familiar surrounding. I really should
have gone into a different country I know that today. Nevertheless, I had no
problems with English till I got my Abitur, the German school leaving
examination.
After my school career, it was clear
to me that I want to be more international. I had two ideas in my mind. The
first one was to travel to Australia to have one year off and travel around
there. The second was the idea to start studying abroad to broaden my horizon
this way. At the end I decided to go to the Netherlands, because I thought that
it would be even harder for me to start studying after a whole year off.
Therefore, I became a member of the University of Groningen.
At first, I was not sure if my
English skills were appropriate enough to handle a study path, in which I only
talk English. However, after a time, I recognized that I do not have any
problems with the language and that I am not worse than my colleagues who did
have an exchange year. By entering the university, I thought my English is
already sufficient enough. Therefore, it was very surprising to me that we got
an extra subject called English for IBM. It turned out that this was very
important because we totally underestimated business English. Academic English
was something else than the Smalltalk English we obtained before. Hundreds of
new vocabularies, we did not hear before challenged us. But studying them was
worth it. Academic texts are easier for us to understand and we are able to
write texts, which sound better and more appropriate.
I am looking forward to the next
years of my study and I am curious about new experiences I will make in the
upcoming years, concerning the English language. Am I going to travel around,
living in another country or having an international surrounding? Don’t matter!
English will be the last problem I would have.
It was a good decision to go
abroad, trust me.
