Cover Letter for WLLN

Samgar Nurlan

English 11000

I think my story can be related to most of the people in the US. Because the US is so diverse, and more and more people come here to achieve their dreams, for many people my story can seem familiar. Because all of us at one point had to learn English and speak it with locals as well. We all had awkward situations when local people didn’t understand what we said. I tried to express my feelings in those situations in order to appeal to the other people and show what I experienced at that moment.

            Through this phase I learned that I am not the only one and most of the people in my college at least experienced the sort of the same thing I experienced. We shared our stories during the group works when we reviewed our peers’ works. And not only our stories. For example the story of Amy Tan and the story of her mother. All the written pieces we went over somewhat  are connected to the “broken” English.

            During this first phase I started to think more about the purpose of my writing. I want to create a piece of writing that can actually influence the reader or just give the feeling of relief. Especially in this piece of work I wanted the reader to experience what I went through in my continuing 3 year life in the US. I wanted and tried to entertain the reader by expressing my feelings. When we went over the assignments and filled the Rhetorical Situation worksheet  I started thinking of why do people write these pieces or give speeches. And because I analyzed those pieces of work I understood the purposes of writing and that they can differ.

            This phase actually helped to analyze “in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” We went over many works like Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” or Saleem’s TED Talk. I filled out the Rhetorical Situation Worksheet. I identified the writer, text, intended, purpose, context and exigence.

WLLN

Samgar Nurlan               Written L&L Narrative                   Engl 11000

The story I am going to write and later talk about is how I learned English. In my opinion. My English is at a decent level for a foreign person. Because my first language is not English, I had many issues that I had to overcome in the process of learning it. This is the story of my journey learning English and speaking it.

For the clarity of the story, I started learning english from my childhood. Even though the learning programs in my country were not perfect, I learned the basis of my English  there. The teachers I had in my country were not native speakers, but were local people who knew English. Because they had accents and they taught other people, they sort of passed their way of speaking to their students. Most of my life, I was struggling with speaking because the sounds we pronounce while speaking English are totally different from when I speak my native language, moreover then I was not thinking of speaking as foreign people. The sounds like ‘th’ or soft ‘h’ were where I struggled the most. I needed practice, which was mostly impossible to get due to the lack of native speakers in my country. Furthermore, when your English teacher talks to class in Russian during the lesson to explain something, then you know that you are in a bad situation. So, I was improving my grammar, vocabulary, writing, reading and listening every day, absolutely neglecting my speaking.

But, how did I improve my speaking? I was fortunate enough to be in the family who moved to America. It happened almost 3 years ago when I was 15 at the end of December. A 15 year old boy at that time just accepted the fact of moving, which later changed my life.  When I just arrived in America, I still didn’t know much english. I was struggling to talk to other people and also had a very strong accent. I was used to repeating myself several times until the person understood me. There were even some absurd occasions when my other people couldn’t understand my “broken” English. For example, once I called a security guard ‘mister’ because I didn’t know his name. But because of my english he heard ‘Miss’ as if he was a woman. So he corrected me even though he heard it wrong. I was too insecure to say anything in turn so I just said “ok” and kept going. I didn’t even ask a question I planned to ask him originally. All my speaking was limited to the short phrases that I prepared in my head first. Moreover it happened a year after the Covid 19 pandemic started, which made the situation even more complicated. Everybody wears masks, keeps social distance and also usually stays inside. Back then, I was really insecure about my English, because everyone around spoke more than I and did in “perfect” english. My accent really was my problem and I didn’t know how to fix it, even though I understood everything that other people said. I wanted to speak as fast and as precisely as local people did. But every time I tried I failed miserably and had to repeat what I just said to other people.

However the change in location also changed what I encountered in my everyday life. As I moved I started watching everything in English, not only because it helped me to improve my English, but also because more different and interesting content was available. I got recommended to more and more American creators on YouTube and other social media. Just because more interesting stuff happened when the English creator did it and I got hooked on this. After some time, almost everything I watched on YouTube was in English. Every movie, every TV show and every book I read was in English. 

So one day while I was watching Youtube Shorts, I found one of Vinh Giang’s youtube shorts. So it wasn’t even a whole video, but a short, 1 minute cut from his lectures. But it was so useful in real life.  I found it pretty interesting, because the content was relatable to me(seems youtube’s algorithms work pretty well). All of his video’s were about the language, public speaking, human interactions and learning in general. He is Asian and from Australia, which puts him in a difficult situation. His parents can’t speak English(so are mine). Thus, eventually, he had to overcome the culture differences and language barriers. Based on his personal experiences he explains what is the best solution in the most difficult situations. So, in that short video I found, Vinh Giang was talking about the accent, talking about why people have it and how to overcome it. At first I thought it can’t be that easy to change the accent. But when I started reading books that way, I realized I am getting used to the hard-to-pronounce words. I was inspired by his lectures and found it really insightful. His speeches were so simple that almost anyone struggling from the language barrier could use it.  When I started actually working on my pronunciation while reading and overspeaking each word and purposefully pronouncing each syllable my speaking improved dramatically. I feel more confident now that I can properly express my thoughts and that the other person can understand it from the first time. I learned a lot from other people, even strangers. Looking at people interacting with each other and also being a part of those interactions created my way of speaking as it is now.

But how exactly it affected my life. Generally, because of all the practice I did and all the actions I took using Vinh Giang’s suggestions helped me to make first friends in America. So as mentioned before I moved to America 3 years ago and basically most of my highschool years were here. First year was pretty rough in making any connections or just talking to other people. Everything was online, and there were no events held. All the clubs were closed and literally I had 8 other students in my classes. So I wasn’t successful in my attempts, there was little opportunity there. However everything changed the next year, when I started attending Great Neck South High school. First of all the school was on-campus, meaning there were finally no zoom meetings anymore. School life was more involved and I had to spend more time in-school. That was an actual advantage for me. I joined many clubs through my 2 years there, such as Russian language club, programming club and several sports clubs. Even though most of the other students knew each other since middle school, I anyway could join their group and made new friends. Those 2 years flew by quickly and I enjoyed the time I spent there.

Still there were many stressful cases during those 2 years, and now I am not talking about tests or some projects. For example in December 2022, some 9 students from Queens school entered our school with different kinds of damaging items, like tasers, pepper spray and knives. They had a beef with some students from my school in a shared group chat so those 9 students decided to come to my school. They were all Asian- Americans, so because 70% of students in my school were Asian, they were able to blend in till the end of the school day and enter our men’s locker room. Fortunately they got caught quickly because a crowd gathered in the locker room and one of our school coaches wanted to check what was happening. They got arrested at the end and even some of them got 1 year in jail. So there were many unusual occasions in my school, but mostly they gave me an experience I needed. These 3 years I spent in America taught me more English than 10 years of education in my country. During these 3 years I realized many things and the most important of them is that to learn a new language, you have to speak it. As Elbert Einstein said: “ Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience” Adding to that he also said: “Learning is experience. Everything else is just information”. My own experience showed me that no matter how much I learn, it would be useless if I don’t use it.