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Cheers! The movie star secret to mastering a language

By Xiao Hao (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-25 10:02

When I moved to New York, I left behind all my Chinese books. In the Big Apple, I read only English books, listened to only American music and if I had no American friend, wandered in the street by myself. I asked "what is it?" whenever I spotted a word that I did not know. Eventually my mind was flooded with so many English words and American events that memories of ancient Chinese poems and my childhood friends faded away. People began to ask if I had grown up in the US, for they could no longer place my accent. I forgot when I began to dream in English, but I remembered being very happy, and proud, like the many immigrants before me.

Then I hit a huge bump in the summer of 1999. I was interning at a big financial service company on Wall Street. During a conference call about a pending investment, Josh, the manager in charge and the only other person in the room, suddenly muted the phone and turned to me.

"Please speak English clearly," he demanded.

I was flushed with humiliation as Josh, in his perfectly starched dress shirt, turned off the mute on the phone and spoke in his perfectly accented English. I was doing my MBA internship with students from the best business schools. I had thought that seven years of trying to master English, of trying to fit in had been enough. Yet some cumbersome tongue movement that made my pronunciation slur, gave me away.

Ten years later, the burn left by that humiliation then seemed almost funny. Looking back, I could see how the incident helped me let go of my obsession with mastering English. I still watched sitcoms with a dictionary by my side. I still asked "what?" about words strange to my ears. I still did all that not because I was trying to improve on my English, but because I was curious to know what I did not know, because I wanted to enjoy my work and my life in English, however imperfect they were.

But that is not a message that my relatives and friends want to hear. A lifetime? No way. Really, how many years? What if I go to this expensive school?

Five, I feel obliged to lie. If only...

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