Isi Luna
Language Narrative
09/13/2020
Dear Molly
When writing this my intentions where to reach those who are Hispanic or immigrants that felt anything close to what I felt and that they were not the only ones going through the hardship of adapting into a new language and environment. That there no such thing as “broken” English and that having our own way of viewing and describing something is normal because not two people have the same way of processing things.
Through drafting this essay, I managed to obtain a beautiful insight into how our literacy and language varies depending on the way we understand and view things. Not one person in this world that speaks more than one language is going to speak to them the same compared to others, reasoning to what I had said before. And this was something that did not even come to mind until I started this class.
Having the opportunity to do this assignment has made me develop strategies for drafting, collaborating with mt classmates into getting advice in bettering my drafts which helped me edit and revise my own work for the better something that would have been hard to do on my own. Having other people read your work can be stressful because you never know what others are going to think of your work. However, this was a great outcome because I was able to Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes with my peers
I’ve been living in the United States for about 8 years until this day some people consider my English “broken” this is frustrating because the first thing people tend to point out is my accent and how fast I say my sentences along with the way I Word them. If I could tell you the number of times, I’ve been corrected on my way speaking you will need more than just your hands to count. It is not like I consider my English “perfect” because so this day I’m still learning how to speak in myself in the way others want me to that being the “proper”. I’ve been accommodating my way of speech for others my whole life ever since coming to the U.S and learning such things as a sentence I’ve been my parents’ personal translator. I was 8 reading federal papers accompanied by words I hadn’t seen before and somehow my freshly learning brain needed to translate word for word back to my parents.
I’ve been Translating things to my parents if I remember being able to understand a sentence, federal documents, tax forms you know it. Everything that they couldn’t understand and do themselves I would have to help It was my job at 8 years old. My parents need my help till this day and sometimes even get upset at me for not being able to perfectly translate everything as if it’s easy to do, they’ll tell me things as “you’re in school why don’t you know this” and “you speak English so why is it hard” something no one really talks about is how it it’s to translate two languages that have zero similarities Spanish is very abstract that relies heavily in connotations created by playing with the grammatical structures. It also binds you to specify the relationship between what you are saying and trying to describe. English is a concrete language that relies heavily in having a large vocabulary towards the things you’re going to say. Overall, it’s just complicated for an 8-year-old at the time to breakdown those words.
I’ve managed to learn the language has multiple ways of being spoken. This has made more confident about the way I speak. Now being able to understand that not everybody speaks the same way makes me realize did the way I speak is my way of understanding and explaining things I was never wrong it was just that all those hard different ways of saying or describing the same object or expressing the same thought. Saying someone speaks unproper just because it’s not the way your used to say/speak is like saying we all the same brain. Which we don’t reasoning why everyone had their own way of talking and wording sentences. I’m not saying I’m perfect because no one is perfect not even those born here who claim to speak it the proper way because language is something you’re constantly improving and accommodating to.
I can’t acknowledge that I have come a long way reflecting on my first days in school after moving here, having to walk and sit around others who were also learning but knew more made me feel like pressured into having to know things. Sitting in ESL classes learning the difference of “their, there, and they’re” and thinking to myself why all these sounds the same and why the need of them. Remembering how hard it was for me to read books with mostly pictures while others were reader “chapter books” as they called them. Books for those who were advanced… at the time not being me. But after reading and watching everything in English from my cartoons to surrounding myself with English speaking people to force myself into speaking it and learning it I’ve managed to come a long way and I knew I had done so when I wasn’t struggling to understand and pronounce words I thought were the most difficult thing in the world, the would “Requested” for me was one of those words that I had struggled with and now I laugh and look back on how words I used to thing were “hard” back then are nothing but basic to me at the moment.
despite being told my English still isn’t the correct way I can look back and contradict that statement simply by telling myself I’ve come from knowing nothing to all I know today, proper or not I’ve managed to become fluent in not one btu two languages which that along is a greater complement.
