It is not easy for me to summarize all of my language learning experiences into these short paragraphs. I might not perfectly remember every detail, and some of the ones written here may lack accuracy. Nonetheless, I still believe it is important to write about the fragments that I recall from this long journey.

I was born in Foshan, a city on the southern coast of China, where the natives speak Cantonese. I left there with my parents at the age of five. Before my family settled down in Jiangsu Province in 2011, I transferred between schools in different cities several times. As a result, I was exposed to several different systems of language education.

My first kindergarten was a bilingual one, where English was taught through singing songs like Rain, Rain, Go Away and playing games with flashcards. One scene from the few memories I have of that period was when my teacher, a strong and tall man, holding a picture of a yellow cake with holes, told us that it was called “cheese.” I had never seen anyone eating weird “cheese” things like that except in the Tom and Jerry cartoon. Another thing that impressed me was a cartoon about “Jesus Christ,” a young man I had never heard of. We all sat silently as we watched him bleed through the screen. There were no concepts of diversity of culture in my 4-year-old mind, but I began to vaguely understand that there were some things that existed only “in other languages,” words that only made sense in a world distant from my daily life as a child. This perception continued to stay with me and grow in the following years of my language learning journey. It felt as if other languages were like capsules, held inside an unknown world. 

Once the period of moving around with my parents had ended, my education experience became similar to that of most teenagers in China. I went to a primary school where English was taught in a very traditional way. We were asked to copy vocabulary lists two to three times with the Chinese meaning and we practiced reading the textbook aloud every morning. The method we were recommended to use for practice shocked me a bit: we were supposed to read the words twice, first with a rising tone, and then with a falling tone. Some of my classmates treated practice like a great performance, during which people around them could even feel the wind blowing in and out of their chests as they spoke. For writing practice, we seldom wrote stories or any accounts in the form of long paragraphs. In the exercise textbook, sentences often appeared individually and independently. For example, if the first line read “There are five apples on the table,” the second could be “There is a man in the classroom” instead of a connecting one such as “I ate them.” It thus became hard for me to practice expressing myself with connective consecutive sentences in English. Even now, I hesitate when writing long paragraphs in English and it is hard for me to write them as fluently as I do in Chinese.

Things changed a lot after I entered university last autumn. Suddenly there were no more grammar multiple choices, reading comprehension questions or repetitive listening materials. Some older students told us that the period after the college entrance examination might mark the highest point of our English fluency since many college students do not need to take any other English test after passing the required English proficiency examination, CET4.

However, things turned out to be quite different for me. As students studying humanities in Wuhan University, we were required to take western philosophy courses, the textbooks for which were mainly in English. I was shocked when I opened Introducing Philosophy by Robert C. Solomon for the first time, with so much text squeezed in one page, and some of the excerpts written in old-fashioned English, I could barely understand those long paragraphs and felt exhausted after reading only ten pages. However, as time passed, I began to understand more and more of those abstruse words. By the end of the term, although I was not able to finish reading that thick book, I could read at a much faster pace and got less afraid of the long, compact texts. 

The textbook not only challenged my skills but it also deeply influenced my academic interests, making me ponder, for the first time, over questions about our existence as thinking beings, about memory, the human mind, and the whole universe around us. This experience remined me of all the curiosity triggered by the picture of “cheese” held by the teacher back in my childhood, that strange thing that only existed in another language.

My story did not end when I closed that thick book. Many things involved with language learning are still happening around me every day. I am interested in learning German and have also picked up some interest in Greek. While I can barely pronounce the alphabet in either of those languages for now, I am still holding on to the hope of learning with time, as I did with English in my childhood. After all, who knows what will be found in the “cheese” before you really take a bite?