My English Learning History

Marcelo Alexandre de Sena

M

y name is Marcelo Alexandre Sena, and this is my English learning history.

Since my childhood, the English language fascinated me. My mother used to take me to the cinema, and at that time foreign movies were subtitled, even movies that could be watched by kids. I will never forget my mom taking me to see Superman 2, and she reading the subtitles for me. I was 6 years old, and since then I became very curious about languages. For me, it was amazing that people could communicate in other languages. I remember asking so many questions to my parents, about how many languages existed, where each one of them was spoken, these kind of questions.

Another thing that kept me interested in the English language in my childhood was music. We had a lot of records, and my favorite one was an Elvis Presley record, Elvis: A Legendary Performer. In that record is one of my favorite all time songs, “Can’t Help Falling in Love”. I remember vividly listening to that song, and wondering what Elvis was singing about. I knew the word “love”, so I figured it was about it, but I needed to know what exactly he was saying.

As I grew up, my love for English language grew at even bigger proportions. My mom taught me to love movies, and in 1986 I discovered the transmission of the Academy Awards. Since the transmission was live, there was a simultaneous translation, and I remember to think if everything was being translated, since I heard the audience laughing, but I didn’t hear any jokes from the translation.

An important part of my English learning was definitely videogames and RPGs (Role Playing Games). I played my first RPG on the Super Nintendo and I’ve never stopped playing these kind of games ever since.

One of the best RPG series, and also my favorite, is Final Fantasy.Each game of the series has a different story, with different characters, and since playing RPGs requires reading English all the time, I improved my vocabulary considerably by playing these games.

On the modern videogame systems, such as Sony’s Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s XBOX 360 most of the games features voice for the characters, so when I’m playing nowadays I’m not only improving my vocabulary, but also listening the right way the words are pronounced.

Basically, this is my English learning history. My interest in the language was born from the things I loved, like movies, music and games. But as I learned English I fell in love with the language also. But my learning history is not finished yet, and I think it will never be.