Bridging the World with Languages

Congratulations Rose! Gold in the National German Exam! Its your third foreign language! exclaimed my German teacher with beaming eyes. This golden award slip aroused in me reveries about my
early experiences with languages.
When I was babbling, I lived in a room with almost every empty space posted with huge Chinese characters and folk rhymes echoing all the day. Probably due to the immersion in the atmosphere my patents
meticulously built, I exhibited an extraordinary intimacy with Chinese. In my elementary school, my Chinese essays were always examples to class, of which I put together as a little booklet entitled Footprints
in the Childhood as birthday present to my classmates. Changes always run faster than plans. I was thrust
into a convoluted maze once I stepped on the land of the US during fourth grade with incomprehensible
English sentences streaming into my ears. I tried in vain to understand my teachers and peers by watching
their facial expressions and identifying their tones. All the frustration made me miss my exemplary command of Chinese. The cultural difference brought more awkward moments. Personal space I had to keep
reminding myself to adjust while I talked with others. A teacher saw me coming to school with a bruise
on my leg and asked whether my father kicked me. But I thought she meant whether my father would
pick me up. The misunderstanding recruited two staff from Youth Protection Agency to deliver a barrage
of questions at my father regarding his abuse of me with raised eyebrows and a harsh tone until this
misconception was eventually resolved.
Such an accident really urged me to improve my English by attempting every means to expand my narrow social circle as a stranger here. I found that everyone could be my best teacher, because even the elder had patience and the little had to bear my poor English. One day my eyes were glued to the tapebooks in the library and my heart swelled with melodious American tones of my peers, instead of the
Chinese English tainted with heavy accent at home. I imitated English from the tapes and my classmates
word by word, sentence by sentence. Later I found a wealth of different libraries, including my English
teachers, my schools and the public libraries nearby, where I could absorb the honeydew of English language like a bee in a spring garden. With the size of words on English books shrinking gradually from the
size of gigantic elephants to that of tiny ants, I gradually gained high proficiency in English as my second

tongue after Chinese. Such an inspiring experience motivated my Spanish study at school and German
via private lessons.
Passion, determination, and perseverance are first and foremost in language learning. I ignored the occasional strange look when I cherished every opportunity to practice Spanish at school and German at
home. Possibly benefited from the commonalities among languages I seemingly grasped, I was praised by
my friends as talented in Spanish and German learning, as exemplified by two awards of national exams.
But I did appreciate a crystal clear lens into the culture and motivations of countries pertaining to current
events and historical chapters with four languages in my assets. Recognizing all the subjectivity and limitation in the media reports from contrasting stances expressed in different languages, I realized the truth
was sometimes distorted by the bias, and many regional disputes involving massacres could be avoided
by enlightened social-cultural, political, and economical vision. Language is a carrier of culture and a tool
of communication. I dream to gain keen insight into countries not only through official publications but
also through pressing concerns of common men with my mastery of their native tongue. This comprehension propels me to, within my reach, topple vexing barriers among countries, thereby knitting them together in a global village and minimizing unnecessary warfare.

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