Coming into English
Engstrom, Karoliina

>>SPEAKER: Can you tell us your name and what your story is about?

>>KAROLIINA: Yes, my name is Karolina Engstrom and my story is about learning English or how I came to learn it. I've been thinking about this a little bit because I've been working with people on these literacy narratives for the past couple of days and I knew that it was coming. I couldn't really pinpoint one particular time or one particular even so I thought I would just kind of think about the arc of that. One of the things I was trying to think about or capture that moment where you realize that I kind of know the language where you don't have to think about it so much as a foreign language and you can make it your own in some way but I just really couldn't. But I do remember very vividly when we started learning English in school. It was third grade and we went into this classroom that we don't usually go in because it was a different person from our regular teacher because he would teach us all the time like everything else but the English teacher was a different person and it was a different classroom. So that was very exotic. But I remember we got names, we got English names; mine was Angie. There was no reason or rhyme to it; my friend's name is Lena and her English name was Wendy which I was actually jealous of because it was actually in "Peter Pan". I was also very proud that I knew that it was in "Peter Pan" because in the finished version the name is something else. So that was the first thing and we were also asked what words we knew in English and that was interesting because of course everyone knew something. So people knew stuff like "no, yes," that kind of stuff. I remember I was getting picked towards the end to say something and all the stuff I knew had already been said so I had to say "I love you" to the teacher because that was the only thing that I kind of knew aside from like numbers. So that was a little embarrassing but I think that's a good precursor to learning language. You're going to be embarrassed and there is going to be some shame in the process. Another boy was asked what he knew in English and he just kind of went, "uh," and then the teacher was very kind and was like, "Yes, in fact 'uh' is one of the most important words in the English language." He was really nice about it and he was nice about mine too. I do remember that our book was called "Jet Set" which was ridiculous and it was British and I'm sure for its time was very cutting edge because it had a lot of immigrant characters, it had a family from India, and it talked about things like somebody getting glasses or just sort of not your usual sort of "Hi, here's an apple for you," or that kind of stuff. So I remember learning English in elementary school and one of the best days was learning about third person pronouns and learning about gender and learning about he or she because that's something that doesn't exist in Finnish. So in Finnish everyone is just he or she and you can just say that and you don't know who the character or the person is. So in children's stories you can just have rabbits that are sort of not gender and it's sort of just a rabbit but that was a brilliant day because we learned that in class and after class I remember, because we were still in this other classroom that was for English, we went to our other classroom and we would continually say things like, "He is so stupid. She is the dumbest. She is ugly." You could say these things and all the boys loved it because you could say things about girls and whatever, it was about third or fourth grade. So that was fantastic about English and of course it got tricky to make sure you're using the right pronoun about the right person or if you don't know what do you say? How do you gender those bunnies in the Finnish stories when you're translating? I think sometime around middle school and especially around going into high school I remember feeling more like the language was becoming more my own especially through like a lot of popular music and TV shows and I was also kind of lucky with the teachers who were not Finnish English teachers. English teachers in Finland I think are notorious for being really strict and wanting you to learn British English as that would be the proper way to speak but I remember one time just being like asked to read something in class and the only thing I remember is that it had the number twenty in it and I remember reading "twenty" instead of "twen-ty" and the teacher just said, "Oh we have an American girl among us today." So it sort of turned into a joke but never the less allowed it and didn't say, "No, that's not how you say it," in some way. That I kind of felt happy about and then I do remember really wanting to read in English like read novels and stories and stuff like that. I do remember at some point getting a book and it was something like "Cagney & Lacey" from the TV show turned into a novel and trying to read that and I remember distinctly it being too hard, I remember just having to look up too many words on the first page; later I was able to read that. I think sometime in high school I was able to read things in English and it just sort of happened where you could suddenly comprehend a little more. But it was frustrating because - trying to read in English was frustrating when you didn't have the words, because you knew how to read, it's not like trying to learn in your own language. So I was trying to think of if there was a defining moment and no there isn't. I think it is all those Police Academy movies and watching "Dallas and Dynasty" and whatever else was on the reruns but you'd love to watch it because it was so ridiculous. One final note, I remember my high school English teacher, she was really good about popular culture and anything else, let's incorporate and use it. She was always using, I don't remember the exact song, but she was saying, "You cannot trust these bands who are writing these songs because they might not be doing their grammar correctly." She had been let down by the Beatles back in the day because they had something like "She love me do" or something like that and it was just totally wrong and I remember us having heated arguments with some of the other students who were thinking about like the Madonna song "Crazy for You" and she was like, "Oh, is that how we use it? You're crazy about something, can you really say 'crazy for'?" Then we'd pull out the dictionary and stuff like that. So that was fascinating but I think popular culture helped a lot because right now when I try to study French or I try to pick up something else, Spanish might be the easiest because I can actually watch thing in Spanish and so on. But I guess you can't always trust that either so you have to have a healthy balance of good old fashioned studying and pop culture.