In the article “The Secret Language” by Daisy Zamora, the author explained her personal experience of learning English in her country, and how she discovered the difference between spoken and academic English.
The author explains how her passion of English language starts since the early age of her life when she influenced as a child by her grandmother exciting stories. One of her most interesting stories she liked, is the one about New Orleans Where her grandmother spent her early days of her life until she became 14 years old. This story was containing words and names in English that took the author attention. These words were very different from the English she was studying in the school. According to the author, the school English was boring comparing to her grandmother’s English, it was very classic and soulless, where she described her grandmother’s English as a magical and musical words. The writer explained how learning English became an enjoyment of her life, as she started to learn the language by actions of the words, that happened when she was watching cartoons. The simple language used in these children cartoons was direct and accompanied with its action. With the time the author uninteresting classic boring English, started to be interesting and enjoyable because of the big amount of reading she was doing.
She mentioned how the desire of reading in English started to grow inside her, and became a most important and enjoyable part of her life. Literature classes and reading poetry became the author best time in school, additionally, her passion in English songs enhanced her English, where she was listing and singing to well written songs by very famous bands and singers at that time. All these elements affected the author personality and made her a very good English speaker. The writer focused in the article on her experience with native English speakers. That happened during her first visit to the United States to spend her school vacation. The vacation that she was very excited about, right away she knew that her English was very odd to everyone that was not because her English not good as a second language, in fact her English was too good. She discovered that she was speaking as she was reading, the books language, where everyone around her from native speakers were speaking the slang English which made her English very weird to them. This experience, in some way, made the author regretting the huge effort that she made to read difficult English books and listing and memorizing very well written songs to improve her English, despite all that efforts, she couldn’t communicate with her age boys and girls. So, to be able to communicate with everyone in her vacation, the author explained how she had to reforming her way of speaking English which was not an easy task for her.
In the article, as an English student in USF, the issue that took my attention; was the passion of the writer on learning English, and how that passion helped her to be a good English speaker. I think this article is a real evidence of the creativity will be when people do what they like. So, when people study or work on majors or jobs they like, they will success in that area and they will be creative persons. Our life is full of such people, for example, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs; they were doing the job they liked the most, which made them the most famous rich people in technology industry
References
Zamora, D (2014). The secret language. In S. Bermingham (Ed.), Pathways 4 (pp. 124-127). Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning.
References: Zamora, D (2014). The secret language. In S. Bermingham (Ed.), Pathways 4 (pp. 124-127). Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning.
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