I am going to embrace the new “me”

Read about how a Chinese speaker of English, living for a time in New Zealand, is going to embrace the new “me”.

Skimming the regular guest posts of Living abroad for at least 1 hour took away my study-life balance, but Embracing the new “me” really caught my eyes. I do love the sentence “To be a really fluent French speaker, I think I have to put my English-speaking self to one side. I have to change the tone and rhythm of my voice, adjust my mannerisms, and make different shapes with my mouth” from Mihiata Pirini. We do need to put our old selves to the side for learning a foreign language.

Contrary to Mihiata Pirini, who phrased her request more directly at the bank or ordering a coffee, we need to dance around with “Could I have a” or “Would it be possible if” because Chinese lacks so many “coulds” and “woulds” for communicating. But we need to learn to express our thoughts and feelings in a different way, for we would like to be the most effective foreign language learners. For me, I have benefited a lot from my study in class and my life in the city in the last month. Taking our Monday and Tuesday classes as an example, I like to imitate the speakers of the listening parts, to learn the rising tones and perfect rhythms and to learn the daily words such as phone language, cooking language, speech language, and so on.

Talking about mannerisms, I thought of our presentation on April 12, where the last words of thanking (Please join me and give Tom another applause) to Tom made me embarrassed. Hardly had I said the phrase, when I realized my Chinese English. Later, my homestay told me that was not the common English usage, which is “another round of applause”. I still remember only Xiaohong chose the exact way our teacher taught to give thanking words because “Please join me in thanking s.b” is really beyond both our language structure and our thought-way. Anyway, we do want such English expressions and will dance around them. To be frank, I am really lucky to have learnt so many practical, lovely and native speaker-like words and expressions, which helps me project myself differently to the world.

Meanwhile, I am still expecting more native speaker-like, practical and stylish English words and phrases because I have been ready for embracing the new “me”. I am aware that there will be still a long way for me to go, but I think I am on the way. I will surely log on your blog more as long as I keep my work-life balance.

WU  -   Wellington, New Zealand