How I learned English

I was born in Minnesota, USA so you can guess how I learnt English. I lived in Minnesota most of my childhood with my mother, father, older brother and younger brother. I never remember learning English at school or at home, I only remember speaking it to other people and learning new words.

When I was six years old I moved to Finland with my mother. It was a big change for me because I was not much of a Finnish speaker. Luckily my mom and dad got me into an English speaking school. On my first day of school I felt nervous because I did not know anybody, but thought that everyone else knew each other and were all great friends. Luckily they were not, and I am still friends with most of them today. I remember sitting at my desk on the first day of school, my teacher was calling out our names. There was one student that sat in front of me, and for some reason I could only remember his name. Maybe it was the fact that he sat in front of me or then his name was different.

In second grade we had English class almost every day. I couldn’t spell, I could barely read and I never did my homework, the only thing I could do was speak English. Although I was bad at English I had a very nice English teacher who helped me a lot with my spelling and some of my reading. We had spelling tests every week on different words that we had learned throughout the week. I did not get good scores on the tests so I started studying harder and harder for the tests. Eventually I started getting better and better. But writing was not the only thing holding me back. Reading was always a big challenge for me but at school they had a book series that had different levels of reading (level 1: easier and shorter texts, level 10: harder and longer texts). They were a big help for me and went at a good learning speed that was appropriate for me.

But I did not only learn English at school, I also learned it at home. My dad bought me a book series that we read together and we would always race who read the book first and then talk about it after we both read it. I also spoke English with both my parents and my brothers.

When I was in fifth grade I got a new home room teacher and he was my new English teacher also. The only thing I can say about him is that he was more hard working and gave more homework. He had a different style of teaching. We had the same kind of word test every week except he would put us into groups. There were three groups: Green (very good), yellow (good) and red (bad). Green had hard words and red had easy words. I was always going up and down between red and yellow but never made it to green. We would always write the ten new words after the test so we would have time to study them, but I did not really use that time studying.

In the end I do not know when I got good at English. Maybe it was from all the reading with my dad or all my spelling tests or maybe it was from everything. But this is where I am now, exe English class, Kaarinan lukio.