A Book About Me

If I were to write a book about me I'd call it "Who I Am? Every Day a Different Person."

I would start by telling the readers about my younger days. I would tell them I was a very talented child, and that I did a lot of creative things. I would write about the time that I was studying at school, and then the time when I was studying at university and working in youth camp. That would make them keep interested in my life.

Next I would write about the way I am today. I would say that I enjoy spending time in the U.S. and learning English, and that I would rather not nothing, even mistakes, because it made me wo I am today. I would explain that my favorite things in the world are taking care of children and taking pictures.

Then I would write about my future plans. Someday I would like to go to Russia to the city where I was studying at university with my own children, in order to show them this wonderful place. I would tell my readers that if I had one wish it would be peace on the whole world.

I hope that when my readers finish my book, they would think of me as a very intelligent, interesting, creative person.

Babel Tower

Many years ago, people from all over the world speak the only one language. They could understand each other without any barriers. As international unity, people decided to build a Babel tower. They tried to construct a tower in height up to heavens. When God recognize that he became angry - he thought if they could build a tower as high as heavens, there is no more impossible for them. And he had mixed all languages in order to people stop understand each other and couldn't build a tower.

So it was a legend about Babel tower. And in reality, just imagine how many language we have: English, German, Swedish, Danish, French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Ukrainian ... and that is not all of them! There are many dead languages like Latin. Nobody speaks Latin today, but people keep learning Latin because there are a lot of terminologies in Latin, especially medical.

Easy talk and understand when you speak your native language, but it always hard to learn different. Sometimes for people it hard to pronounce some sounds the way it could be pronounced. For example, Russian language doesn't have sound like (th). That is why for Russians people who just start learning English so hard to pronounce words like Thursday, thought, thousand, etc. It is hard to get used to put your tongue right way between your teeth in order to make sound (th), just because you never talk this way before. When you speak your native language, you don't need think about where you should put your tongue in your mouth before say something, but if you speak different language you should.

Other example: In Russia we don't pronounce sounds (p), (t), (k) with aspiration. I remember when in my university on phonetics lessons we were practicing to pronounce tongue twisters with aspiration. All students took a piece of paper in one hand and a mirror in other hand and tried to pronounce words so that a piece of paper could wave. That was so funny and hard at the same time. I will never forget that tongue twister:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,

Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

But even if you working hard and already speak very well, you will never stop learning language because there are lots of slang. Sometimes you think that you exactly understand what somebody means, while he means exactly different. First time when I just came to Alexandria, I and mom went to grocery store one day. She told me, "Let's to go Pizza Market." I asked her, "Why it named pizza? Do they make pizza or sell pizza?" No, she answered. In a couple of days I recognize that it is not Pizza Market, it is Pete's Market. I tried to explain it to my mom that it calls "Pete's" because Pete is owner of market ... only then she understand, but she still calls it Pizza - now it is kind of joke in our family. But I'm so proud of my mom; she speaks English and lives here only year and a half and she is doing great!

I don't know is that true story about Babel tower that I told you at the beginning or it is only legend, but I think that is wonderful that we have so much different languages to learn. And I'm thinking to learn something else except English.

Learner Calendar
Learning Circle Blog
Links for Learners