Assignment 2 (Revised)
Jian Lu
Feb 7th, 2007
Actually I have two different bad experiences with English as a graduate student here. Each of them addresses different parts of difficulties one might encounter when studying a foreign language. I really can not tell which one is the worst so I will describe both of them.
The first one is about listening. We have a course taught by an Indian instructor. No offense, but he really talks quite fast, even native speakers sometimes have difficulties in understanding him. I think the problem is not only about the speed, but also about the accent. I can feel the words bursting out of his mouth like bullets out of a gun shooting at me……I can hardly catch him and connect those words altogether……But eventually it becomes not so bad a thing because I learned a lot in this experience. I listen with all my caution and after a while I got used to his speed and start to make progress. And I also found that studying the materials covered in his class in advance would be of great help in catching his meaning even he speaks quite fast. Getting familiar about the topic is really helpful for non-natives like us to understand people’s talks.
One of my presentations this semester is another bad experience of mine. Being quite familiar with my presentation topic area, and I had practiced twice before I actually did the presentation, I thought I was able to handle it very well. But it turned out that I am wrong. One mistake I made is that I did not realize that audiences are not as familiar as I am with the topic before hand. They start to get confused by some basic concepts, which I thought to be shared by all of them and did not talk about in details in my presentation. After a while, having observed their confused expression on their faces, I started to get nervous and try to repeat my words a lot trying to make them understand, which did not achieve a good result, as you might have expected……But from another perspective, I also gained experience on presentation. I learned the importance of being aware of the audiences’ knowledge level about your topic.
These are two unpleasant pieces of experience when I am using English here. Anyway, all the experience, no matter good or bad, will definitely help me in my future, as long as I am able to learn something from it.