My English Journey

How are you doing? I have not talked or written to you for such a long time, and I really regret about the lost connections between us. I can still remember playing basketball, soccer, and ping pong with you everyday after school. Although you were always more athletic than me, I was still very confident to challenge you every single game. Do you still remember the good times we spent in Mr. Wang’s English class? We were the troublemakers in that classroom, but Mr. Wang could tolerate our misbehaviors because we always scored the highest in the English exams. Sometimes we dreamed about studying in the U.S., and we would paint the most satisfying picture. One of our favorite story is learning English in a highly modernized classroom with other …show more content…
Like me, you are studying in an American University too, so I am pretty sure you have realized one of our most naive misconception, learning English in U.S.A. is challenging. Now, I am going to tell you the start of my English journey with a little story about my first day in the U.S.. It was the hot summer vacation after our middle school graduation. I just got off the plane from Beijing to Washington D.C., and the weather was very unfriendly to me. It was hot and sweaty, and the airconditioning in the shuttle was broken. The air was like a sword, and it would …show more content…
My feelings on this kind of thinking are mixed. I do agree that both of us could get really high grades when we are writing the essay in Mr. Wang’s class. We would first write an Chinese version of the story, and we would simply use the dictionary to translate the whole essay word by word. Both of us are great Chinese essay writers, so the translated version will usually get a really high grade. However, our translated essay would be weird for American teachers to read if it is simply translated from Chinese to English. You may argue that Mr. Wang was perfectly fine reading our our essay, but Mr. Wang is one hundred percent Chinese just like us. When we have the same kind of thinking and views, he will no doubt give us a high score on the essay since we can occasionally create resonances with him. Chinese and Americans live in different cultural background, so they have different tones and views when they are writing the same prompt. If you directly translate the essay in Chinese to English, there is a very high chance that the some of the content would not make any sense to our professors. Actually, I have a perfect story to tell you. During my freshman year in high school, one of the assignment in my writing class is to write an essay about the difference between China and U.S.A.. At first, I was very happy about