Learning a Second Language

Tarek Yacoub
Reflective Essay
Feb 3rd
Learning a New LanguageMy relationship with the English language was not love at first sight, it was really frustrating to do something that you don’t want to do, and something that you think would not benefit you. At home my family and I would only speak Arabic. That didn’t bother me because I wasn’t living in an English speaking country, it was only a requirement to learn at school. I remember sitting on my desk in the early morning singing the alphabet and naming a bunch of animal pictures for an hour, it wasn’t fun at all, my teacher would get bored sometimes so he would put a Pokemon episode for us to watch in class, funny thing is that it was the same episode every time, obviously we never complained about anything other than English was great.
Three years passed like that, then I went to middle school. I foolishly thought that my frustration with English was over, but to my surprise after that I mastered naming every animal and objects name in English, and of course memorized that one pokemon episode, we were introduced to a new subject in English, Grammar. The whole time through middle school we were learning about grammar, and I honestly didn’t like it at all. I remember that the only thing I did in that class was to do my other classes homework, because English was always my first period in school. I always blamed my school that I picked up English really late. I mean who puts an important subject for the first period? Everybody would be too sleepy and not give their full attention. At that time I didn’t only hate English grammar, I also hated Arabic grammar, but I didn’t know that English grammar was different than Arabic grammar because when you write an essay in Arabic, grammar didn’t have a huge impact on writing, I thought that was the case in English, but unfortunately it wasn’t, here goes a new struggle I started to have in English. I remember that in all of middle school duration we only read one…