MY STORY (LANGUAGES)

 MY STORY WITH LANGUAGES

 

As a person who has always had an interminable curiosity about other languages, I carried out my first attempt at the age of 12 with Italian. Nevertheless, I was a petty boy without experience in language learning, thus I literally hit a solid wall. My inexperience precluded me from progressing. However, I didn't give up on my dream of acquiring another language.

 

 Next year, I started learning French at the beginning of my academic term, at the end of which I had my high school entrance exam. It might seem a little bit illogical and counterproductive; nonetheless, I had an inexhaustible spur: love. I fell in love with one of my classmates who spoke French as her native language since she was born there before moving back to Turkey because her family was a couple of expatriates in France. My plan was to impress her with my French, but it didn't work out the way I wanted it to, because I had not visibly progressed until the high school entrance exam approached. Subsequently, I had to throw in the towel and diligently concentrate on my studies in order to score well on the exam.


 After the exam and the holiday that ensued, I returned to my language learning process definitively in October 2019. However, I feel the necessity to admit that I had an overwhelming amount of issues related either to my family, relationships, or school. I didn't have any friends; violence prevailed in my family, so I was on the brink of a mental breakdown. Interestingly, I discovered that the remedy to all these problems was "at my bedside": learning languages. I realised that learning languages alleviated my pain so much that all my grievances would instantly vanish as soon as I opened a book penned in another language than my own mother tongue. I don't know why I had such a feeling, but I was pretty sure that one of the reasons would be that I was exploring another world where there wasn't a bias, that could potentially result in bullying or despise, against me. It was bewildering for me to see that people were more beautiful than I reckoned due to the racist inculcations I'd had so far. People did not judge me for speaking badly; they opened their culture to me and they accepted me. As an abused child both on a family and social scale, languages acted as a refuge and I felt safe within the boundaries of that miraculous pastime. 

With a group of Honduran tourists, 2022, Izmir.

 This immaterial sanctuary consistently grew, engendering success and confidence. Upon a complimentary remark from someone I was talking to in French, I felt a colossal syringe of incentive being injected into my veins. By dint of speaking with others, I built strong communicative skills. The girl at the beginning of the story wasn't in my life anymore, but languages were, and they had already other propellers. I was so blindly infatuated with foreign languages and cultures that I could not take my eyes off books or podcast transcriptions. By the way, I shouldn't omit the discipline and zealous ambition I had while recounting my adventure since they were the primary constituents of my success. I used to get up at 6:30 AM, while everyone else from my school was asleep, to immediately open a podcast or an e-book in French. Then, I leapt over Spanish alongside French on grounds of my whimsical character. It was a strategic move because both languages were alike in a myriad of aspects, so I could better understand the grammatical nuances. So, the time elapsed that way with these languages for years.

When I was the chair in an MUN conference in 2022

 In conclusion, two to three years later, I sat official language accreditation exams and my year-long struggle bore its fruits there in the broadest scope of the word. I was C2 in French, C1 in Spanish, and had a TOEFL score of 104.





      Thank you for reading,
          Athel.

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