Ojanny R. Urena
Professor Rodgers
English Composition I (HD92)
22 September 2017
                                             Dominican English
I was born in the Dominican Republic, a Spanish speaking Caribbean country. Therefore my first language was Spanish and although I do have a couple of glimpses of how I learned how to read and write in Spanish is not as clear to me as, my experience with learning my second language, English was.
When I first arrived in the U.S I was already in 6th grade, with no knowledge of the English language practices at all, all my cousins use to tell me that I was doomed because they struggled with learning it and said it was very hard. One of  my cousins use to always say,
“I was born here 10 years ago and still don’t know how to spell” said Pablito.
My first couple of days I used to be super lost in school to the point that I didn’t think it could get worst but then again I had an Asian ESL teacher who barely knew English himself, trying to teach me so everything was going wrong.
I made a couple of friends here and there, from which I at least started picking up slang from. They used slang and since I didn’t know what was going on I thought of it as formal English. So here you got me a newcomer to the school writing things on my assignments such as “Yo boy I’m boutta eat yuca 2nite” also didn’t help that I was writing it all down in mostly Spanish. Which is one of the reasons I called this story, “Dominican English” because with the English slang mixed with Spanish it was technically a different language, a different type of English that mainly I understood. At the moment I didn’t know any better, good thing my teacher was super nice and didn’t get mad at me for turning in her assignments answered in something she didn’t understand. Instead, she laughed it out with me and tries to give me more time to study the language. Eventually, she started letting me go with my ESL teacher every day. I soon started picking up the little stuff like Hi, bye and stuff I also learned the alphabet in English.
The ESL lessons were complicated since I didn’t know anything but Spanish and the practices seemed to be for people who can kind of speak English just not very well. I basically had to teach myself, I watched a lot of tv in English, Mainly anime and cartoons and every time I heard a new word I would put it in google translate, learned what it meant in Spanish and tried to use it when talking to my teacher or friends. Recalling back to those days, the steps I took came very natural and weren’t per say professional but they played a big part on me learning the language. 5 to 6 months later I had a basic understanding of the language and how to read a little. One day I opened up my cereal box and there was a very small comic magazine and I picked it up and tried to read it and for the first time I felt as if I clearly understood a reading on the English language, it was such a basic writing yet such an interesting story that really gave me an enjoyable experience reading it. This was the big motivation for me because I finally knew that I was really making progress which made keep going until I eventually knew the language decently.
Learning a new language is truly one of the hardest things to do, especially when is required for one to learn it. I would say that the hardest things about me learning the language was the pressure that was on me to learn it because if I didn’t learn it quick I could have been stuck in 6th grade for a while. Although there were many times I felt miserable because I couldn’t understand a word anybody said to me back then, I still enjoy looking back on those times because with all the sorrow there were also many laughs. Overcoming this obstacle, overall made me a better person because it taught me that once I put my mind to something, I can eventually achieve it.
