Osiris Caraballo
Prof. Fran Gilmartin
ENG – 1100 – 63
September 21, 2014
The Hardest Thing I Have Ever Done
Many people in this world have had different struggles that they need to overcome to reach they goals or to be a successful person. Mines was the hardest, or at least that’s what thought a couple of years ago. Coming from a foreign sub-develop poor country where the main or fundamental language was Spanish, and where English classes was taken as a joke during my high school and sophomore college initials, learning English was the hardest thing I have ever done now until date.
Around 5 years ago, while living with my Dad in the Dominican Republic, my mother Lucila spoke with my Dad, who happens to have the same name as me or it would be more understandable to say that I have the same exact name as my father for some ‘weird’ reason. And as they were talking my mother suggested or as I would say, she forced my father to send me here to the United States for that I could help and protect her as she gets older. Yes, my mother was living by herself at that point and needed a son-to-mother protection as she was feeling tired and old. Here is where my journey to learn English started.
Having just a little background on some English Courses that I never put attention in class, basically because that wasn’t my interest at that moment and also to the fact that I never use it as a priority in my job back then. But the little that I knew, was not even on the worse English taking in terms of understanding and speed talking. What I mean by speed taking is basically what happened to me when I went to the supermarket for the first time. I was trying to talk and understand what people was trying to say to me and since I felt that they were talking too fast for me I told them: “why are you speed talking to me?” “Can you slow it down?” They were just laugh at me and say: “why are you here if you don’t even know English?” “Ha, ha, ha”. After this embarrassing moment I decided to get to my full potential and actually learn English. I signed up for variety of school, and still couldn’t past the placement test to start English school.
Months after the incident I started socializing more, I started working on an English environment, I started to learned words and writing down in a piece a blank paper, just seek their meaning. I was ready to join school, at least that’s what I thought. I took the placement test again, and failed twice again. At that moment I was mad at myself, I started to regret not learning English back when I was in high schools, I started to have flashbacks of my English professor when he said to me: “Osiris, the good thing about learning