PERSONAL ESSAY

I am Franklin. I am from Africa, Cameroon. I never knew how it felt to be deaf until I left Cameroon three years ago. There, I did not understand English at all. It did not make sense to me and, it was very painful experience. I could hear noise and people talking around me but I was not getting the meaning. It was very difficult to be around people that were learning, laughing, and joking and not be able to understand. This was the first time in my life, I felt excluded, like I did not belong here. That is how English became the subject in which I had the most difficulties in. Because I did not have any starting point, I didn’t know where to begin to learn; from the basic or at other students at my range age. I was stuck in the middle of the road not knowing which way to go.
English and I were never friends because it required too much reading. However, neither of the two other languages that I speak ever affected me the way English did. All that Because of the simple fact that I started to study them from childhoods. English was also difficult to learn for me because, I had no friends to take my hand and guide me through the first day of school in nine grades at Cardozo high school. Every time that I opened my mouth to try to express myself to a classmate, they were just laughing at me. This was very frustrating and not really motivating for me. What made it even more difficult was that everything was new to me: the language, teachers, school, country, system. It was very hard for me to learn English because I could not even focus on one thing at the time. Also, I could not base my studies in a specific rule because English does not have any rules to follow like French. What I mean is that the alphabet does not work the same all the time while reading or writing in English. The only rule that I saw that I could use is the fact that you have to pronounce every letter in English.
The funny thing is that the same reasons that put me down at the beginning helped me bounce back up. The simple fact that people making fun of me because I did not speak English that I am not smart, made me want to prove them wrong. So it gave me the strength to double my effort in English. Also, because it was the base of every other subject, I did put most of my time studying English and it worked out well. Now that I understood everything that the teacher says it is easier for me to work on my favorite subject such as math and science. However, I have struggled more in this class, always gives me hard time before I finally found the correct reasoning or understand what the teacher was asking me to do. But I never give up. As for science, it was a piece of cake to me each time to understand what the teacher was talking about. In