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Poetry Shattered My Illusion of Language Mastery
The beautiful, hollow shell of my English
When I was sixteen, I flew to the United States for the first time. I had been learning English since the age of three, and I was proud of my crystal-clear American accent. I had refined it at home, through repetition, reading out loud dull books only to get the pronunciation just right. So, at customs, I spoke with confidence, too much confidence.
It turns out that was a terrible idea. The border patrol officer didn’t believe I was French. He took away my passport, and led me to a bleak back office and made me pass what was essentially an informal French test, just to confirm my nationality. I had to translate a list of random words such as butterfly, oven, staircase. It’s funny how many words you can get wrong from stress only.
From that day on, I had something to brag about. I had fooled a native speaker enough to get arrested at customs. I slowly developed the audacity to believe that my English was good enough to pass for native. And in conversation, it was. I could talk with exchange students with confidence. My teachers were happy with my scores, and later in life, I was always assigned to the English speaking clients.
However, this confidence started to erode. The Cambridge ESOL tests, especially the hardest…
