When we were given this task in English class the other day, it did not take very long for me to think of a very specific time period of my life which more or less formed a lot of my identity and how I react to specific things.
Straight off the bat, I am the exact opposite of an extrovert. I’m an introvert. This is clearly visible in classes which are not my strong points or in large groups of people. I feel more or less comfortable talking to a group of people not larger than 4. Any group of people larger than 4 I’ll usually stay quiet.
Now to get back to the episode of my life. I had just moved to Uganda and entering third grade. I had a tiny problem though. I could not speak proper English. It was very broken and my vocabulary was very very limited since I had lived the prior 4 years in Germany not speaking any English.
I roughly remember what happened for the first few weeks. Due to the fact that no one was really able to communicate with me, I felt fairly alone and always did things on my own. Every break and lunch I went to the library and just “read” English books. During these few weeks, I took extra lessons with my teacher, “read” a bunch of books and just did stuff by myself. But I am not going to lie, I felt happy doing this because I was learning and was always surrounded by a quiet area.
Some time into these weeks, the teacher asked a few students to do stuff with me. I was young and did not know how to react, so when one of the students asked what I wanted to do, I told them I just go into the library to read. So smooth.
I remember at one very specific moment, I met a guy from the Netherlands. I do not know why or how, but he suddenly just came to me and we became good friends. He told me that he went through similar experiences, managed to get over it and wanted me to have a good time in the school. We even managed to communicate in a Dutch-German-English cross.
This time stands out to me as an important life lesson I had learnt. You don’t need to speak a language perfectly, neither do you need a lot of friends. As long as you have a good friend who understands you and is able to communicate with you, you’ll be in safe hands.
This seems like a good moment to focus on for this type of task. However, you could have focused more on the experience of not being able to speak the language and how it affected your sense of identity. It can be a challenge to replicate a text type while engaging with a topic, but certainly achievable. I enjoyed your humour with the line "So smooth."
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