Narrativas coletadas pelo grupo ALMS na Finlândia

Narratives collected by the ALMS team in Finland

15. Hanna, Faculty of Behavioural Sciences
Kaleidoscope reflection

Needs:
I need english almost every day. All the textbooks and articles I read are written in english. Because I read a lot I believe that my understanding is much better than producing text or speaking myself. Hopefully some day I can travel more or even move to an english-speaking country. That’s one of the reasons I would like to improve my spoken language. On the other hand I also believe that some day I should be able to write academic english, too. So I think I would need to find a balance between understanding and producing english.
Skills:
As I earlier told, I read a lot in english. Academic literature of my own field is sometimes understandable and sometimes very challenging. Usually I get the main points quite easily but I don’t understand the text completely (I don’t read books with dictionary on my other hand - it would get really slow! And I can usually figure out word meanings from the text context). Sometimes I of course use dictionary to learn new, important conceps. I also read some lighter literature in english, like Harry Potter. I’ve experienced it quite useful - getting used to english text. I understand spoken english quite fluently. I can watch most movies without subtitles and listen to an english-speaking person fluently. Sometimes a native speaker might confuse me if he/she speakes very quickly or has a difficult accent. Of course if the subjekt i’m listening isn’t familiar to me, I won’t understand that much. But most daily-based things I understand. Most difficult thing for me is writing. It feels very slow and difficult. I feel I’m forgetting all the words I would like to use and the text I create becomes very simple. I also notice that I use very simple sentence structure. Of course I realize that writing is the thing I haven’t done much. Almost not at all. Speaking is also quite challenging for me. Just during the last few years I’ve been forced to start speaking more actively. I’m not afraid of it, but I feel I haven’t had enough time to rehearse. I can speak about normal, every-day-based things but if I try to say something more complicated it get’s slower. I also feel that when I’m speaking in english all the words disappear from my head and then I can’t say what I want (sometimes I try to explain what I mean in other words but it’s not possible always). I survive with my speaking on normal situations, but when trying to speak more seriously or academically it gets very difficult (especially the pronounciation).
Motivation:
I’d like to improve my english all in all. One of the reasons is that I passionately love travelling and new people. It would be great to have friends that speak english and to be able to communicate with them properly. Of course I also think that english is my strongest foreign language and I would like to master the language not only literally but also communicatively. In the academic world it would be great to be good in english.
Personality:
It always helps me to remember new words better if I see them written down. If I just hear a word I try to figure out how it is written. I like to listen to spoken english. I haven’t had much chanses to participate in english conversations so I don’t know how I could use the listening strategy.... On the other hand I understand almost everything while listening. Lately I feel I have become more daring and been able to jump in to a discussion to say my own opinion. I’m not afraid of failing but I might get confused if I forget the words i’m trying to use or I’m not able to express myself properly. With written language I now try to concentrate on writing something, anything. I try not to be critical to myself. Yes, I might be a bit disaproving to my own poorness on writing and speaking.... Mostly I think that I like english. I like to use all the opportunities that I get to improve it.(So it could become more fluent and easy:))
Learning background:
I have quite "boring" :) language-learning history. I started english on third grade, studied it for seven years in comprehensive school and three more years in high-school. In shcool, english-lessons were mostly vocabulary, grammar, reading, some singing but nor much speaking and no cross-cultural communication. I’ve never been as an exchange student or even travelled much. At the university english became a very important language to understand. First it felt difficult to read all the big and complicated texts but then I got used to it. Reading english became something quite normal.Of course english has been part or my life in other forms, too. Like TV. I’ve watched movies and series in english as long as I can remembes. Music has brought me something too: I like to sing in english - but I’m quite bad at listening to lyrics because I prefer listening to everything else, like the melody, rhythm and stuff. During the last few years I’ve also travelled more and met english-speaking people. Finally I’ve been forced to talk and talk and talk. I haven’t travelled to any english (natively) speaking country so the communication has been this normal tourist-talk. But luckily every once in while I’ve had the chanse to talk to native englishmen – I like it a lot. Unfortunately a friend of mine, who’s irish, just moved to africa. So the chanses to talk english increased dramatically. I have couple friends with whom I can occasionally speak english. I hope I can find more... I’m also dreaming of a journey to England.