An English Career

Nowadays, because of these interchange meetings I've should talk you before, many people ask me about why learning English. I'll try to explain the main reasons that made me fall in love with English.

The probably most important reason is the music. In my life, this statement applies to many different things, but we're talking about English, so let's get started. When I was a small boy I used to watch every tv show about music, and, when my father taught me how to use our old radiocasette (and not to break it in the process) all that pop from the eighties came into my life.

Duran Duran, Nena, Rick Astley, Culture Club, Human League... the list could be huge, but here I am, loving music, loving singing and no idea about English. Then Michael Jackson's Smooth Criminal appeared, I started to sing it at every place, every single moment. One day, coming back home from school a friend of mine told me that he was impressed about me knowing the lyrics of the song with so much precission. I told you that I hadn't any idea about English, and that's still true, I used to sing what I heard before! But I knew that it wasn't English but the only way to sing foreigners songs without understanding the language; so, what happened? I cannot stand to be prized for something I didn't do or know, so I started to "learn English", obviously in my own way.

With my father's Vox English-Spanish dictionary (the one he never has used in his entire life) I began to look for every word in the songs phonetically and write down the "real" word. I made uncountable mistakes, but my English got better day by day with an impressive vocabulary for a kid of my age.

Later in my life I started playing the guitar, the perfect complement for my singing desires, so I if wanted to play any English song I had to find the chords, the lyrics (I discovered the lyrics booklets inside the albums when I was 11) and the right pronunciation! Those days I was learning English at the high school, with a lower level than mine, therefore the Official Languages School made the best choice for me to go on with my everlasting desire of improving my English (in order to never be disappointed when people told good about my level). I never made it. The fifth year caught me twice in a difficult moment of my life, so I had to give up.

Though I tried to study Computer Programming at first, I finished my university days at the Primary School faculty, which specialty? English, of course. The level was not very good, but enough for me. I had learned how to keep on with my English without the formal language schools, so this time, I didnt't give up.

These days I'm very proud of my English, maybe I'm not the best student that many of my teachers have had, but listening to a song and understanding the lyrics without reading it before is one of the more important accomplishments I've made in my life. No more "wariwachu woki" when I should be asking "Annie, are you ok?".