Mohammed Hussein
Page 1
Module 2 Short Answer
4/8/15
I move to the United States about 5 years ago. I came here as a refugee from Iraq because of how dangerous it was living there. Also because I couldn’t further my education. I got to Minnesota on July 1, 2010. It was a long trip from the Middle East. The Longest fleet was about 18 hours which was from Budapest to New York. I took the first day to just catch on my sleep. The second day was a bit of a challenge to all of my family because our English was tested by our neighbor. We had no idea what he was trying to say. Took us hours to understand him. He was simply telling us welcome to the neighborhood. We were all limited on our English Skills. Our English Skills were our first challenge that we faced. We had to communicate with people that we didn’t speak their language. We managed to find a family close by that spoke Arabic. They helped us as much as they could with English and Doctor’s appointments and shopping and so on and so forth. It was finally time to start the school year. Remember I had so limited English that I could only say “Hey how are you?” and say “yes and no”. That is almost true for every non English speak. School started and homework was the toughest thing I had faced for the first couple of weeks. I was failing all of my classes. Everything was so new to me and I had to somehow adjust to it. I got to a point where I didn’t want to go to school because I felt like an idiot. I was like a deaf person in a party if you know what I mean. I had no body to talk to in school because nobody spoke my language. I had to get over it and I had to learn English as fast as possible to start communicating with people and to start interact with my teachers and people I wanted to talk to. I went home and started to look up faster ways of learning a new language. I got different answers and different opinions. I got lost in between them till I read about this page where they tell you steps to do to test yourself and learn new ways of doing things. They suggested to listen to music and to try to memories words without knowing what they mean. And they also suggested to start conversations with people who had a similar problem or a similar English Ability. I started to listen to music and read books and learn new vocabs every day and I had my sisters test me on what they mean now to spell them. I learned five new words every day. I started to have longer conversations and started to make more friends and kept learning new words and practicing them with friends and family. I was still have problems and I started to run out of words and that is when I started to through Arabic words in my sentences without realizing it. I was forced to speak English because I had nobody at school that spoke English. I started to raise my grades and do better at school. Six months later I started to get complements on my English and how I had no accent. I finished my freshmen year with the A+ Honor Roll. A year later Second semester of my sophomore year I transferred to Richfield High School. The teachers there said that my reading and writing met the standard requirement to be done with ESL classes. ESL stands for English Second Language. I was then in regular class where students speak English as their first language. Believe it or not I did better than most students that spoke English since they were first born. I never gave up and kept pushing myself to learn as fast as I can. Later on my High School Career I started to do less learning and had most words memories and I could use them comfortably. Now I am losing words. Now I am just a regular English speaker where I lose words or forget them. But I know Enough English that I started to lose my Arabic. Now I have difficulties using Arabic with Arabic speakers. I feel like they speak too fast.