Project 2: Personal Narrative Essay
Project 2: Personal Narrative Essay
Shen Lin
Southern Utah University
Project 2: Personal Narrative Essay
Project 2: Personal Narrative Essay
When I chat with Americans by fluency English, they would usually say “your
English is pretty good!” But no one knows, I was a shy boy, and didn’t like study English
at all, that was a big change of my life. Everybody born with challenges, until the last day
buried to the tomb, for me, English and communicating were the big challenges in a
period of time.
When I was in kindergarten, each of us was asked to perform a show or talent in
front of parents and other kids. My turn was coming, and I planned to say a fairy tale, but
when I saw dozens of audiences, I just got shocked, cried out loudly. That was the first
time I have audiences, and the first time I realized what I lack of. Time flews, I entered
elementary school, then a new problem came to me, English learning. Every Chinese
student should start learning English from elementary school, and each entrance
examines include English. I didn’t know why a Chinese people should learn English, we
would never use it in our daily life. And Chinese language is still hard to us to learn, none
of Chinese people dare to say he learn Chinese well. I had a bad attitude in English study,
each unit test I just got 20-30 out of 100 scores. My parents tried to have a talk about my
English study: “What’s wrong with your English scores? Did you get some problems in
study?” “Nothing much, I just don’t understand why I should learn something useless.
I’m a Chinese, I’ll never use English in daily life at all,” I answered. “You shall see
further,” they gave the response, “International is coming, if China want to developing,
we should communicate more with the world. You dreamed to become a useful person to
China, now is the chance. Even we don’t know much about English, but it becomes an
important skill around the world. Language is not a terrible thing, on the contrary, it is
fun to learn and use, someday you’ll realize it.” I was not fully understand, but as they
insisted, I went to an English cram.
After a struggle time, I started to communicate more with different people and
learn English with a positive attitude. To make up those disadvantages, I tried many
things, such as participated different competitions, chatted with foreign teachers, learn
English songs, and watched English movies, etc. I had some dialogues with my
Australian teacher Nick, he is an interesting guy and love China, even have a Chinese
girlfriend, all of my classmates love him, we talked about weather, foods, culture between
China and Australia, which were so much fun and helped know each other better. For
learning English songs, everybody should always start by ABC Song, then learn some
popular and easy songs from famous singers or bands, like Bad from MJ, My Love from
West Life, and Guilty from Blue. I can’t sing that good or correct, but it do helps me
make more influence in speaking. I also watched original English version movies, The
Shawshank Redemption, Star Wars Series, Hurry Potter Series, they were guide me
mimic the way to make dialogue and communicate. With those practices I did, I became
more confident when I face to audience, explain my opinions more clearly, willing to
communicate and learn more about English.
Project 2: Personal Narrative Essay
One of the most unforgivable competition, is an eloquence competition. It was
organized by my school, Minjiang University, IEN Institute. Each one of my institute can
be a competitor, and there were three parts of this game: talent show, debate, and
sentence organize. In talent show, you can sing a song, or make a speech, or read a poem,
just gave audience a first impression of yourself. I sang a song named “One Love” from a
Britain band Blue, and other competitors were also gave us their special talent shows, so
my song were not listened that amazing. Then we went through to the debate part, all
competitors were separated in two groups, and debated for one given topic. I can’t
remember our topic anymore, just because I did too much debates, but I remembered we
have so much fun during the debating, audiences were keeping laughing, and we were all
“seriously making baloneys”. The third part, each of us just got some unrelated key
words, and we need to use one story to link all of these words. Which I got were “Art
Class” and “Lipstick”, I thought about them for a while, and walked in front of stage, said
with a balderdash voice: “It is an Art Class in the college, professor walks in with couple
of Modern Art pictures, and he shows the pictures with projector. This picture is famous
sculpture David worked by Michelangelo, but with something in his left hand. Professor
shortens the distance to the picture, students see that is a Lipstick David holding,
professor makes the picture closer, few words show up on the Lipstick: ‘Maybelline…
New York’, ‘Maybe it’s Maybelline!’” End with my girly gesture, audiences were freeze
first, with deadly quiet, then they burst to laughed out loud, I thought their noices were
the best feedback of my “Cold Joke”. Finally, the audience would vote for the winner. I
got an Excellent Award by no bad singing, logical debating, and a “Cold Joke” I made, it
wasn’t the Gold Medal, but still good enough for me.
Now I have more confidence and abilities in oral English using, also have more
interests in debate, speech, or other wordy activities. And I’m looking for my next event
in U.S., which should give me a completely different experience from China. Keeping
learning, keeping talking, my silence only come till dying.