If enthusiasm could get you what you want and need out of life, I'd be getting As in English, flights between Denmark and England would be free, and Becky could probably fabricate a degree in Grey's Anatomy out of thin air with her bare hands. If excitement or anticipation could set you up and send you on your way, I'd be recieving unconditional offers from my universities instead of conditional ones. If positive thinking really worked, I'd have passed every exam I'd ever taken with the top mark possible. If self-belief wasn't overrated... well, maybe we'd all have a better incentive to believe in ourselves.
See, I'm currently researching and collecting data for my English coursework. English coursework which is an incredibly exciting assignment considering I would ideally like to be a linguist; it's a language investigation where we get to choose anything we like (to do with language - which you can relate pretty much anything to) and... well, investigate it. This is what linguists do. This is my opportunity to find something that nobody has ever seen before and study it and come up with a hypothesis and an analysis and maybe someday those textbooks that occupy my classroom will be quoting me instead of the other way round.
I picked Second Language Acquisition (pretty self-explanatory but for those of you who aren't English nerds/don't know me, it's when you learn a second language)... a risky choice, considering it's a topic we don't actually cover at this stage of English Language education (it's pretty much my top choice of things to study at uni) and I've been talking to my auntie about it, since she's a teacher and she studied that as part of her degree. She says I sound extremely enthusiastic - now if only 'enthusiastic' was readable as 'really freaking awesome and guaranteed an A because it's the best idea out of everybody in the whole of the country for A2 English Language coursework'. If only I were good enough to get that elusive A! I have actually given up on getting my A now. I took my AS exam three times to try and get something better than a B, but it didn't happen, so I don't hold out much hope for getting an A at A2. To be honest I'd be happy with a B this year. Why is that, hmm? Last year I got Bs without even trying and I didn't appreciate it, and this year I'm just hoping I did well enough to get a B so I don't have to retake the exam.
But I don't care about that anymore. It's just that English has always been 'my' thing - the thing I'm good at... the only thing I'm good at. And if I can't get an A, if I can't be the best, then what else? Why does everybody else get something at which they're brilliant and amazing and talented - the best - and not me? I just wish I could kick butt at something, you know? Still. That wasn't what I came here to talk about.
I came here to use this magical invention we know and love as the internet to reach out to you all. See, I need victims. Um, I mean... volunteers. Usually, if somebody wants to look at your language skills, they want you to be fluent, yes? Not this time. I'm trying to determine when exactly you become 'fluent' in your acquisition of a second language - I want to see when you start using grammatical features like modal auxiliaries (will, shall etc), prepositions (about, in etc); and what words you use to describe certain things. So basically, I need non-native speakers of English at all stages - especially Danish people please, but everybody is welcome. I know it can be embarrassing speaking a language to a native speaker of that language - trust me, I know - but I promise you I find this fascinating and I think anybody with even the slightest grasp of language is amazing, especially those who speak more than one, no matter how basic your skills may be.
This would probably be a good place to add that I can not speak any other language but English, and even though I consider myself to have a fairly strong grasp of language - it's just one language. Is it better, do you think, to have a brilliant grasp of the structure of one language or a good or mediocre grasp of two or more? When you think about it, even having the ability to speak one language is amazing: words are stored in our brains and we can retrieve them whenever we feel the urge to construct a sentence; and we can construct a sentence, not just with words, but with the correct word order, the correct prefixes and suffixes, the correct grammar in general. When we're writing, we know which way to arrange the letters within the words so that they make sense; we know which way to put the words so we don't say the complete opposite of what we mean. The average person speaks approximately 38,000 words per day and around 200 words per minute and we never run out of things to say. Amazing, right?
So please, if you're reading this and you're not English and you are at any stage whatsoever of English language learning, please get in touch with me if you feel like taking part in this investigation. It's only for college, so it's nothing massive, but I need people or I'll never get that A I pretend not to care about... and you wouldn't want to be responsible for the downfall of my education, would you?
Thank you in advance!
Molly x
See, I'm currently researching and collecting data for my English coursework. English coursework which is an incredibly exciting assignment considering I would ideally like to be a linguist; it's a language investigation where we get to choose anything we like (to do with language - which you can relate pretty much anything to) and... well, investigate it. This is what linguists do. This is my opportunity to find something that nobody has ever seen before and study it and come up with a hypothesis and an analysis and maybe someday those textbooks that occupy my classroom will be quoting me instead of the other way round.
I picked Second Language Acquisition (pretty self-explanatory but for those of you who aren't English nerds/don't know me, it's when you learn a second language)... a risky choice, considering it's a topic we don't actually cover at this stage of English Language education (it's pretty much my top choice of things to study at uni) and I've been talking to my auntie about it, since she's a teacher and she studied that as part of her degree. She says I sound extremely enthusiastic - now if only 'enthusiastic' was readable as 'really freaking awesome and guaranteed an A because it's the best idea out of everybody in the whole of the country for A2 English Language coursework'. If only I were good enough to get that elusive A! I have actually given up on getting my A now. I took my AS exam three times to try and get something better than a B, but it didn't happen, so I don't hold out much hope for getting an A at A2. To be honest I'd be happy with a B this year. Why is that, hmm? Last year I got Bs without even trying and I didn't appreciate it, and this year I'm just hoping I did well enough to get a B so I don't have to retake the exam.
But I don't care about that anymore. It's just that English has always been 'my' thing - the thing I'm good at... the only thing I'm good at. And if I can't get an A, if I can't be the best, then what else? Why does everybody else get something at which they're brilliant and amazing and talented - the best - and not me? I just wish I could kick butt at something, you know? Still. That wasn't what I came here to talk about.
I came here to use this magical invention we know and love as the internet to reach out to you all. See, I need victims. Um, I mean... volunteers. Usually, if somebody wants to look at your language skills, they want you to be fluent, yes? Not this time. I'm trying to determine when exactly you become 'fluent' in your acquisition of a second language - I want to see when you start using grammatical features like modal auxiliaries (will, shall etc), prepositions (about, in etc); and what words you use to describe certain things. So basically, I need non-native speakers of English at all stages - especially Danish people please, but everybody is welcome. I know it can be embarrassing speaking a language to a native speaker of that language - trust me, I know - but I promise you I find this fascinating and I think anybody with even the slightest grasp of language is amazing, especially those who speak more than one, no matter how basic your skills may be.
This would probably be a good place to add that I can not speak any other language but English, and even though I consider myself to have a fairly strong grasp of language - it's just one language. Is it better, do you think, to have a brilliant grasp of the structure of one language or a good or mediocre grasp of two or more? When you think about it, even having the ability to speak one language is amazing: words are stored in our brains and we can retrieve them whenever we feel the urge to construct a sentence; and we can construct a sentence, not just with words, but with the correct word order, the correct prefixes and suffixes, the correct grammar in general. When we're writing, we know which way to arrange the letters within the words so that they make sense; we know which way to put the words so we don't say the complete opposite of what we mean. The average person speaks approximately 38,000 words per day and around 200 words per minute and we never run out of things to say. Amazing, right?
So please, if you're reading this and you're not English and you are at any stage whatsoever of English language learning, please get in touch with me if you feel like taking part in this investigation. It's only for college, so it's nothing massive, but I need people or I'll never get that A I pretend not to care about... and you wouldn't want to be responsible for the downfall of my education, would you?
Thank you in advance!
Molly x
2 comments:
It is nice to have a rant sometimes and get things off your chest. Positive thinking can be almost out of reach and it's annoying we have to be challenged in pretty much every situation of our lives. x
It's funny that this comes across as me ranting because I was actually quite content when I wrote it. Thanks though! x
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