Erick Fiallos

To be honest, my experiences with the language have not been something that stands out much or has caused me an impact as it has many other people, I think this is because I am a person who came from another country whose language is not English, so I already had in mind all the changes that I was going to go through making them common or expected, nothing that I honestly had not imagined. That is why talking about my experiences with language itself are not as dramatic as one imagines, if we talk about culture, that is different, and language is so included there, but of everything I have lived as an immigrant the change of language was never so radical or important considering the other complications I had. But if I were to talk about the strange or peculiar, so to speak, what happened to me with respect to language is that I adapted very quickly and arrived in the country with enough level to defend myself in a normal conversation. It seemed very funny, and I was proud that people were surprised that I was just three months and could hold a talk with them. With this small introduction, we enter into context.

The story begins like this. I have a piece of my family that has lived here practically all their lives, so sometimes they speak English among themselves. However, when I arrived, they expected me not to talk a word in English because they did not know that in my school in Ecuador, and in almost all schools in the country, English is important, and most students graduate with a level more than satisfactory in that language. So I took them by surprise when they saw that I understood them and laughed at the jokes or conversations they had. Among the most surprised, my brother was definitely the one who got the biggest surprise because he never expected something like that. At the first university I went to “BMCC” I was also surprised when I passed all my English vocabulary and oral exams that I had to take to be able to enter, failing only one in the essays, in my defense, the structure of the essays in Ecuador or in Spanish are very different from those in English, so it was natural that I would fail in something that I had never done before. With these two little stories, I want to emphasize what I said at the beginning, for me, there were more important things and events than seeing the differences in the language since to me, they all sounded the same. This does not mean that it does not progress or improve, I still have my failures because it is not how I speak English very often because my social circle is basically 95% Hispanic but with that 5% of people who speak English always try to do their best to learn y sonar mas fluid without abandoning my accent.