Self-Assessment Essay

Nurlan Samgar ENGL11000

Throughout the Fall semester in the class ENGL 110, I drastically improved my writing skills, which was the main objective for me, personally, from the beginning. From the beginning I thought I lacked in the vocabulary stance in writing and also in the structure of the writings. However, after many attempts, I see that I actually improved those parts of my writing, not forgetting about analyzing and exploring any topic I was writing about. Everything came from practice, which we had a lot, and everytime I can see the results of my writings and the progress I have made. The most important skill I improved was the analytical skill that came from class-work. Mostly everytime we read something new, we tried, as a class, to analyze the piece and to find what strategies were the authors using in order to make them more appealing to the audience, what rhetorical strategies they used in order to strengthen their work. And when we analyzed it and saw first-hand how the great piece of writing is made, we tried to implement those strategies in our own writings, which I think was very beneficial. And the most unexpected way I improved, surprisingly for me, was that I started to type faster, on average 15 words faster. 

Through analyzing the personal essays such as, Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”, Jordan’s “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You” and others we came to the conclusion that English is not only one standard language, moreover it has more ways of speaking than many other languages and it is normal. Because we could relate to that central topic too, we could understand what messages those essays had, that language oppression is common in America. This one was also relatable because most of our parents don’t speak English well so we first-hand experienced how it is. Also there were many other personal experiences shown in the readings we analyzed. However on the other hand we saw that it also creates other type of culture around that ‘broken’ language that unites people.

After every essay we read, there was usually homework to fill in the rhetorical situation worksheet. In my opinion this was the most beneficial part, because we analyzed who the writer is, the history surrounding the writing, the audience it was responding to and in general what stood behind the writing itself. So when completing the worksheet we understood why the essay is written the way it was written. What is more important is understanding the purpose of the writing, because without any purpose it wouldn’t have been written in the first place. So all these factors, I think, helped me to understand what stands behind the great piece of writing.

Then the next practice we usually have is peer review, or collaboration. We usually worked in groups analyzing each other’s writing which gave me the perspective of other people, the audience, to think about. Of course it is important what I think, but the audience is the other major part of writing. So getting feedback not only from professors but my peers helped me to improve my writing to become more engaged with the audience I was writing for. Also seeing how my peers write and what strategies they use to enhance their writings helped me to realize what I personally could use in my writing. In this way my writing stepped into the next level and now was not only an expression of my thought, but also now has a direct message to the audience. 

In my opinion the part of the course we discussed was one of the most beneficial in this course. Not only it completely changed the way I analyze the sources for my research, but also how to express it in my essay. Rhetorical-Precis changed the way I summarize the source I use in my essay and Rhetorical synthesis changed the way I connect the two sources I use in my essay. This way my essay becomes more professional, which in my opinion is beneficial when I write any research papers. 

Overall, during this course I learned many ways to enhance my writing, I learned ways how to make my essays more professional, how to connect different sources for my essay, and in general how to structure it so that the audience I am writing for finds it more appealing to them. Throughout this course we went over many strategies on how to improve my writing, and I think it gave me an opportunity to practice it, not once many several times, and I am sure that the experience I gained will definitely help me in the future.

Cover Letter

How social media affects mental health and makes us addicts?

I recently started to realize how greatly social media impacted my life. After a failure on my project for one of my classes because I didn’t prepare enough I realized how addicted I was to social media. Because I spent all my weekend on useless scrolling I failed a project. Of course I was dissatisfied by it, but it was completely my mistake, so from that moment I am trying to be more mindful of how I use social media. In this essay I researched the effects of social media on people’s mental health and how it is so addictive to use them. I tried to reveal the truth about why the rates of social anxiety, depression and even suicides are so high now. It is happening to my generation the most so if we don’t become more mindful in the use of social media, we are in danger. Everything because people love to compare themselves to others they get more insecure in their own accomplishments and develop mental disorders. For example a person goes to the gym only for 6 months, making good progress compared to himself 6 months earlier, but when he sees the person who has been going for years, he gets insecure why his physique is worse. All it comes from the comparison.

Research Essay

Samgar Nurlan ENGL11000

In our fast growing modern world where every field is covered with different types of technologies, people created a free way to communicate with the other part of the world without seeing them in real life. It is what we call social media. Since the creation of the first social media platform in 1996, called “Six Degrees”, the popularity of social media has only risen. Then the giants in social media platforms launched, like Skype, Facebook and Instagram which are still popular till this day, years later. So as the population becomes technologically advanced, the general public health improves. However people usually forget about the other vital part of people’s health, which is mental health. Poor mental health of the population of the country slows down the rate at which the country grows the same way as the poor physical health does. Of course there are institutions that help people with mental disorders, with people like psychologists who do their best to treat those issues. However there are many hidden factors that cause problems with mental health of the population, and we, as a society, don’t talk about it. Government and society nowadays promotes a happy, peaceful life, focusing on things that go well already, completely neglecting the hidden issues of the population. 

So, as social media became a huge part of our lives, it changed how people live their lives. Now at first it may seem as a huge advantage for a society as a whole, however there is an actual darkside behind all of these social media platforms. Social media is the biggest factor affecting the mental health of people in the society, especially adolescents who tend to be more easily influenced by those platforms. There are many studies and researches showing that social media is associated with anxiety, depression and low self esteem, the problems which are disruptive to the health of adolescents. This essay emphasizes the need for less usage of social media for people and society focusing the shift from online connections to real life networking in order for population to grow into a more advanced and healthier version of themselves  

As it was stated earlier, mental health disorders, like anxiety and depression occur when people use social media excessively. It happens because people are constantly seeing other people’s lives and comparing their experiences with their own. This in turn creates a strong dissatisfaction in the mind of people. The most popular example is Instagram, where people post photos or videos of themselves for other people to watch. However, most of these posts are manipulated and show only the good side of their lives. Everyone tends to share just the highlights of their lives, and rarely the low points, the routine, that everyone experiences. (HelpGuide.org 2023) All these posts create an illusion that everybody else lives a better life than you do. It makes people who see the posts insecure about their life experiences and even envy that they couldn’t experience it too, even if they understand that all these photos are lies. 

The other popular thing that is correlated with the use of social media is an abbreviation FOMO, which stands for fear of missing out. What it means is that social media creates the feeling that you are missing out on certain things in your life, while others, as it may seem, live a better life and have more fun than you do (HelpGuide.org 2023). All this can potentially create a strong sense of anxiety, insecurity and low self-esteem. Moreover if not treated, this insecurity can develop into an addiction, when people constantly scroll the feed in order to see any updates or the replies for the messages that can be sent through the app itself. The FOMO disorder forces you to pick up your phone every few minutes and check everything you can and reply to every message you can. All this might potentially cause danger, because people do it even while driving or walking in the crossroad. 

The issues are clearly shown in the academic journal called “Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice” (20 April 2020), John A. Naslund, an Instructor in Global Health and Social Medicine At Harvard Medical School, Ameya Bondre, Master of Science in Public Health (MSPH) andGlobal Health Field Placement Fellow of Johns Hopkins University, USA, John Torus, the director of the digital psychiatry division in the Department of Psychiatry at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Kelly Aschbrenner, senior research scientist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System, assert that in general people using social media have poor mental health by addressing exploratory studies, data from all over the world , and statistics from different surveys. By supplying the reader with information about how the amount of usage of social media affects mental health, John A. Naslund, Ameya Bondre, John Torous & Kelly A. Aschbrenner built their claims about poor mental health among people . They wish to convey to readers the influence of social media on society in order to consider the role of social media as a potentially viable intervention platform for offering support to persons with mental disorders, promoting engagement and retention in care, and enhancing existing mental health services, while balancing the need for safety. The author’s audience likely consists of those interested in statistics about mental disorders as is evident through his/her references to depression and psychotic disorders; they address readers with a tone that is formal and analytical. 

The other study with similar results, but focused only in usage of Facebook is an academic journal published by “American Economic Society ”. Luca Braghieri, Assistant Professor in the department of Decision Sciences at Bocconi University, Ro’ee Levy, assistant professor at the Tel Aviv University School of Economics, and Alexey Makarin, Mitsubishi Career Development Assistant Professor in International Management and an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in their academic journal called “Social Media and Mental Health” imply that since rising popularity of Facebook, the adolescents suffer from poor mental health. They suppots their implications by providing and summarizing several statistical evidences showing that for people aged 15-24, suicides became more prevalent and are now the second leading cause of death. They wish to warn people of the potential danger in using social media, specifically Facebook, for the users mental health Authors’ purpose is to examine the effects of Facebook as a social media on adolescents in order for society to be more aware of such a huge, but hidden problem in the US. They adopt a highly analytical tone for their audience, the readers who are interested in the topic of improving their own mental health.  People who use any type of social media in general suffer from poor mental health, especially adolescents. The statistics from sources show that the amount of people experiencing depression and anxiety only rises and that most people with major mental disorders use social media at least once a week. As the authors of “Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice” say: “Initial studies from 2015 found that nearly half of a sample of psychiatric patients were social media users, with greater use among younger individuals (Trefflich et al. 2015), while 47% of inpatients and outpatients with schizophrenia reported using social media, of which 79% reported at least once-a-week usage of social media websites”. These statistics from the surveys indicate that people with poor mental health use any type of social media more, than a healthy, in general, person. Moreover these people suffer from major mental health problems such as schizophrenia, and not just depression.

After all this summarizing that social media can profoundly weaken your mental health, there is still one question left – why people still use social media on such a huge scale. According to Kepios, a digital advisory firm, “there were 4.95 billion social media users in October 2023. This represents 61.4% of the world’s population.” (Kepios 2023) It means that social media addiction is potentially the most common addiction throughout the world, and is considered a worldwide phenomenon. That is why uncovering the truths about social media use is a vital task in our society. As Jacqueline Sperling, PhD, a psychologist at McLean Hospital who works with youth who experience anxiety disorders, says: “When the outcome is unpredictable, the behavior is more likely to repeat. Think of a slot machine: if game players knew they never were going to get money by playing the game, then they never would play” (McLean 2023). Everything in nature tries to hold on to as much energy as possible, and humans are not exceptions. Energy is the source of life and our instincts understand it, even though it can be harmful for us. The scrolling of social media is a great example. It takes almost nothing to scroll up when you are lying on the couch, which means you don’t spend your energy at all doing it. Moreover, you see absolutely different, by the content, posts which constantly fill your brain with free dopamine, the hormone in your brain that gives you the sense of pleasure. A series of experiments by Princeton psychologists Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov reveal that “all it takes is a tenth of a second to form an impression”(How Many Seconds to a First Impression? 2006). It means that when you scroll to a new post, it takes less than a second to know if you like it and keep watching or scroll again if you didn’t like it. All these, coupled with the algorithms of social media, that can read interests and give the posts that one may be interested in makes a person a full addict, who doesn’t even realize that he got addicted. 

Speaking of dopamine, this is considered as one of the main reasons why people get addicted to social media. You see, the dopamine hormone should work as a relieving factor when people do hard work. So great use of it is when a person sets a goal and accomplishes it, the brain releases dopamine to cheer up the body. However when using social media, it works the wrong way. Because the use of social media is a cheap way to get dopamine (it takes nothing for one to scroll the app, which means the hard work wasn’t done), people get it in such high doses that they develop a dopamine resistance. It works the same way as any other type of addiction like smoking. People often don’t realize but a heavy smoker usually needs more cigarettes per day than a beginner. It means that now, in order to feel better, a person has to get more dopamine, to feel as he felt before, thus scrolling more and more falling in the dopamine loop.(Are You Addicted to Social Media? 2020) This way people do not realize they scroll for hours and hours trying to satisfy themselves and never achieving it. This leads to a bad mood, low focus, poor sleep and general unproductiveness. 

In conclusion, the impact of social media on mental health is complex and definitely cannot be ignored. While these platforms have dramatically changed the way we connect, share information, and network, the evidence from different various sources suggests a darkside for them. The issues like anxiety, depression and low self esteem are only a part of what the use of social media causes to the mental health of the users. Moreover the addiction caused by the use of social media leads to other health problems which cannot be neglected. For me, now that I researched the topic deeper and now understand all the effects of social media on me, I will consider deleting some of the apps I don’t actually need, or use them only for urgent cases.

Works Cited

• Robinson, Lawrence, and Melinda M.A. Smith. “Social Media and Mental Health.” HelpGuide.org, 2023, p. 9. Social Media and Mental Health, https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-health/social-media-and-mental-health.htm.

• Braghieri, Luca, Ro’ee Levy, and Alexey Makarin. 2022. “Social Media and Mental Health.” American Economic Review, 112 (11): 3660-93. DOI: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257%2Faer.20211218&ref=twelvetables.blog 
• Naslund, J.A., Bondre, A., Torous, J. et al. Social Media and Mental Health: Benefits, Risks, and Opportunities for Research and Practice. J. technol. behav. sci. 5, 245–257 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41347-020-00134-x .  DOI: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-020-00134-x 

• “Here’s How Social Media Affects Your Mental Health.” McLean Hospital, 18 January 2023, https://www.mcleanhospital.org/essential/it-or-not-social-medias-affecting-your-mental-health 
• “Are You Addicted to Social Media?” Lee Health, https://www.leehealth.org/health-and-wellness/healthy-news-blog/mental-health/are-you-addicted-to-social-media  
• “Dopamine: What It Is, Function & Symptoms.” Cleveland Clinic, 23 March 2022, https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/articles/22581-dopamine 
• “Global Social Media Statistics — DataReportal – Global Digital Insights.” DataReportal, https://datareportal.com/social-media-users. 
• Wargo, Eric. “How Many Seconds to a First Impression?” Association for Psychological Science, 2006, p. 3. How Many Seconds to a First Impression?, https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/how-many-seconds-to-a-first-impression 

The research essay was the biggest assignment yet, however because it was up to us to choose the topic I found it extremely engaging. During this phase we learned how to use specific rhetoric strategies like synthesis or rhetoric precis. In my opinion this phase not only contributed to our improvement in writing but also gave exact guidelines on how to write specific part of the essays like intro, or conclusion. And I think it is beneficial for us, especially as the freshmen who are going to write a lot of essays in the future, not only research essays.

Cover Letter

Samgar Nurlan   ENGL11000

When writing this profile I wanted to focus more on the Roman and how his past shaped him and his way of writing. I wanted to show what he felt in specific moments and explain why it happens. For example, I pointed to the fact that Roman is the oldest child in his family and how this fact affected his life. I exemplified many cases showing why Roman wrote specifically what he wrote about in WLLN. Mostly I think I answered some questions that may have arisen during the reading of his WLLN. Because I had an opportunity to interview Roman, I was able to correctly interpret what Roman was trying to say in his WLLN. So I focused more on what directly influenced his writing choices, both in subject and style.

I was mainly describing the context, the location and cultural significance of his past. I contextualized his experience and explained how his origin affected him during his life. I also tried to explain the rhetorical situation of WLLN. For example I summarized his situation and supported it with some outside, but related information in order for the reader to understand Roman’s situation.

I think that this profile is connected to the larger aims of the courses. For example the cases when he had to help his parents shows that people not knowing formal English have a particularly complicated lives when it comes to doing their work. For example Roman’s father had a rough time working with banks because service wouldn’t understand him or it would take longer than usual.

I was addressing mainly everybody, but the first generation immigrant children. Whereas Roman considered them his main audience I was considering everybody else. I wanted to show the people who didn’t experience similar situations that Roman did, through what first generation immigrant children go through and what challenges they face in their everyday life. I wanted them to understand the situation and maybe feel sympathetic towards them.

Peer Profile Review

Samgar Nurlan                                                                      ENGL11000

Roman Lu was born on April 22, 2005 in Brooklyn. He was born in an immigrated Chinese family, being a first generation Chinese-American and also an eldest in the family. Currently, he is a freshman student in CCNY- City College of New York, majoring in Computer Science.  Both his parents were born in China and moved to America in the “early 2000s” as he said. He has only one sibling, a younger brother who was also born in America. His grandparents still live in China, and moreover he is planning to visit them this year. Last time Roman and his grandparents met each other was when he was still a child and he doesn’t remember anything.  Thus, he wants to meet them again and talk to them, especially in Chinese. However Roman wasn’t always proficient in Chinese as it is now and he had his own challenges throughout his life, in learning language.

Because he is the representative of the first generation children, his main language since childhood was English. Moreover his parents started adding some English words in their everyday life, because Roman could not understand some words in chinese. Being born in America and raised surrounded by American culture, his connection with his own culture slowly weakened. All his childhood he was using English as his main language. This type of lifestyle led to Roman actually forgetting his mother tongue. As it happens with all high schoolers, they have less and less time to spend with their family(the only way of speaking Chinese, in his everyday life), thus he spoke Chinese only with parents and some friends, which caused such changes. Moreover, his everyday environment was all English, such as school, friends, movies, tv series, news, tests and so on, which worsened the situation. However it meant that his knowledge of the English language was expanding. As he mentions in his WLLN: “my proficiency in English greatly increases, to the point where I could write essays and have formal conversations”. However Roman’s dramatic improvement in English had a negative correlation with his knowledge of Chinese language. As he went from not knowing English at all, when he was young, to being able to have formal conversations with strangers, he went from speaking Chinese fluently at the age of 8, to being able to say only short phrases at the age of 15. Thus, during the time in highschool, he actually started thinking about learning his mother tongue seriously.  During his highschool years he took Chinese classes, specifically (mandarin), the language that his parents spoke. It helped him to spend more time with his family and be closer to them, speaking chinese. As he says now: “I stopped taking classes after highschool, but now I can at least maintain a conversation with Chinese people.”                 

However because he is the representative of first generation immigrant children, he had a completely different childhood and teenhood than a typical American child. Due to his parents’ spending their whole time working to be able to provide and maintain the lifestyle for children, forced them to neglect learning the English language. This, in turn, had an effect on Roman, as he is the oldest child. In middle school he started helping with translating some phone calls. Since he wasn’t old enough, his parents didn’t pressure him to help them a lot, but it changed 2 years later. During his highschool years, since he was old enough, his parents asked for more help with their bills, school meetings and various emails. Some examples would be that Roman’s  mother needed him to format a professional looking email for her, since she doesn’t know how to make one herself, or his father asking to help with calls from the bank. All this shows that first generation immigrant children actually have more responsibilities than usual American children.

Roman being the oldest child in his family also affected him. All the responsibilities that were placed on him made him more frustrated about the time he had for himself. As Roman says:  I had to take out my time in my day to help them out constantly”. As it usually happens, especially in Asian families, the oldest child has to be more accountable and sometimes take responsibility for the parents, by helping them with their problems. Typically, parents expect more from eldest children than others, because in this case, the eldest child can be a role model for younger siblings. This is what Roman partly experienced throughout his childhood. Even though Roman’s parents “were lenient in that they never forced me to take anything that I didn’t want like music or art classes” they were very strict in education. His parents sort of set a level of education that he had to maintain and never got below that.

The whole experience of forgetting a mother tongue, then learning it again, taking partial responsibilities for parents’ work, and also being a hard-working student shaped Roman as he is now. His writing skills, purpose and directed audience comes from his experiences in the past. In his last major writing assignment he chose to write about his past experiences with languages and set an example for the people in the same situation as he was once. He wanted his writing to resonate  with people with familiar situations. His knowledge in formal English helped him to express his feelings and emotions regarding his past as he chose the formal format in narrating his past, addressing his writing piece to first generation immigrant people.

Before writing any type of written piece, I always outline the basic structure of my future work. This way I can be 100% sure that my writing will go in the right direction and my thoughts will not mix up together. After the piece is done I reread it the whole thing again as if I was the reader. This way I can understand if the work is written in the way that would be interesting to the potential reader and if he/she can understand what I was trying to convey. Also in the revision I try to find the weak parts, such as weak points, that don’t really support my main claim, or any irrelevant information. Also if the way of my writing changes in my work and doesn’t match the tone I chose in the beginning, I paraphrase it again so that the writing would be done in one style.

The phase two was more interesting, in my opinion, because it was more interactive. During the phase two, we had to interview our peers, to know more about their lives and write and analysis of it. Personally I found it engaging to learn more about my peer’s previous life and how he ended up where he is now. I got to know better the lives of first generation Asian-American’s and their personal challenges. The process of interviewing our peers and sharing our stories made the major assignment more personal. We talked about many different things, from hobbies to families.

Today, in the era of technology, I think it is especially important to be able to write. Writing can be not only a way of expressing author’s feelings, opinions, but also a way of communication with the audience, with the society. The same way as nothing can replace visual aids, nothing can replace words. Moreover, there are specific reasons why languages have so many different words representing the same thing. Only words can do that. It shows that replacing writing is basically impossible. All the work that people does, is done in written from, starting from researches and projects to the assignments in schools. Everything is written. The classes like this(Engl 110) helps us, the students, to write better; be better at expressing our thoughts and feelings so that the reader would understand what was going on in the author’s mind; so that the reader would spent his/her time analyzing the written piece, because he finds it interesting.

The first Phase of the ENGL110 was very insightful for me in terms of understanding what an English language is. Throughout the Phase One we discussed what are ‘standard’ English and ‘broken’ English . I learned that a language is actually a part of the culture and how one language can actually be 2 different ones representing absolutely different cultures. We went over many examples of it including Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”, Safwat Saleem’s TED speech, June Jordan’s personal essay “NOBODY MEAN MORE TO ME THAN YOU AND THE FUTURE LIFE OF WILLIE JORDAN” and so on. All these works discuss the topic of language as the part of culture. They encourage the use of ‘broken’ English using the personal experiences. For me this part was really helpful in improving my confidence, because English is not my first language.

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.

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