Maykel Mendez 

LL Narrative Final Draft

            At different stages of life, people learn and discover many new things, over time we never stop learning and continuing to discover new things A clear example is my relationship with language, it was difficult for me because as you learn about literature, almost most of the topics have to be memorized, and it was not something intuitive for me, in language you do not finish learn because there are many ways of interpreting and many points of view on a topic.  Furthermore, as time passes, the meaning of some topics can be reinterpreted or lost, I was not very good in the subject of language and literature, both reading and interpreting a text took me a long time. As time went by I grew and in these stages of life I can improve my language skills.

During my school life I was always better at mathematics, and this helped me put aside my language deficiency when I was in primary school. Nowadays mathematics is still my escape, since now it is not only my mother tongue but English as a second language. Learning a new language opened my eyes and even changed my perception of the world. By this, I mean that I can realize that the world is a gigantic place and I didn’t take those kinds of things into account, but living in New York Everything in Queens you meet people from all over the world, and each of these people has a different story to tell.

In my case, I am from Ecuador, and now I have been living in the United States for a little over three years, specifically in Queens. During this time that I have been living in Queens, I have had many interactions with people from different parts of the world and I find it very interesting to be able to get to know different cultures. Something that caught my attention is that in a group of people we can speak the same language but within this same language there can be many differences in the way of speaking and interpreting situations, and something that I will always avoid is having misunderstandings because there are words that may be normal for me but another person may have a very different meaning.

There is one moment in particular that I will remember and it was the one that made me realize that I had to change something in my native language, although I can say that there are several moments, for example, one time I was buying lunch at a bodega in Dominican food so when I go to order the ingredients I say rice, “menestra” and meat and the person who was serving the food looked at me again and told me what is the “menestra”? Now I couldn’t believe that the person didn’t know the “menestra” because it is the name of the food that I have known for as long as I can remember. So, I looked for a neutral word which this word was beans “habichuelas” for Dominican people, and that way they could understand me. Another example that there are many differences between the different Hispanic countries is the names of the fruits, for example in Colombia in a certain part they know the watermelon as “patilla” and for me, this word is a type of ant.

One of the experiences that I will always remember is that every time I had to go out, at least I had to go out thinking with something in my head to be able to communicate in English. This also happened to me at the beginning of having come to live in Queens, because When I first arrived, it happened to me a lot that I had to think a lot in my head when I had to start a conversation as much as in Spanish and much more when it was in English, because when talking to a Hispanic person who is not from my same country, almost Most of the time I had to repeat what I wanted to say up to twice. After all, I spoke in a way that was very typical of my country (slang), and when trying to speak in English it was worse because there is no literal translation if it is not a common word, because of these experiences I learned that I had to be a little more neutral and up to this point I have also learned many words from other Hispanic countries.

Finally, after many experiences, it comes more naturally to me to talk to people from other countries and I no longer have that problem of repeating what I want to say, and since I have learned more words from other Hispanic countries I have no problems communicating with them, and I have realized that by being more neutral when speaking my vocabulary has improved a lot, this was a big step in my learning of English because I no longer have to think about entering words to be able to say what I want, now I am learning more vocabulary to improve my English and to be fluent in the language in the future.