Hello to everybody. As you all already know, one of my main difficulties when coming to The Netherlands was (and still is) the language. Not the Dutch, for which I should consider to start learning, but English. Surfing one afternoon by internet, I found the blog of Guillermo (alias William), who is an Argentinean living with his family in
Every time that someone have asked me how to manage the language stuffs when one moves to another country, my answer has always been the same, because I believe it represents what I really think: "every bead of sweat I invested preparing the new language before emigrate, it is one bead of crying less spent in the new environment".
During the first times in
The year before emigrate, I had gave the IELTS exam (an international exam required to obtain visas) with a grade average of 7.25 out of 9 points. I continued studying a little and arrived to
In my first times I simply didn't understand almost anything of what people said me. When that was the case, the tension grew up and it was not much what I was able to produce. Along the time and training, the ear was improving and able of managing simple and informal situations, but totally impossible to handle complex situations with many details. Something as simple as answer the telephone and have a phone conversation, without seeing both the gestures and lips of the other person became in a titanic achievement. Better don't refer to phone and personal interviews, where I only understood a percentage of what they told me and I tried to guess the remaining.
When this happens, the situation is too frustrating. It is not possible to say what one wants to say, it is only possible to say what you can. One starts to elaborate an explanation of something and as you are viewing that it couldn't be presented what we were though to say as desired, we just end saying something simpler and perhaps different. More than once I stayed in the middle of one explanation that interrupted at that point sounded as a totally stupid thing.
And definitively we has the freedom restricted, because one is not free of doing what one considers to be the best, but one does what it can be managed reasonably. In this way, one learns to live (temporally while the language is adjusting) with a double personality. By one hand we that being that thinks and feels in a determined way. To the rest of the society we show a different being, more basic, more elementary, more awkward, the one that is expressed by means of our new language. Definitively, the great challenge of moving (for me) to another country is to fight with such a frustration and the double personality. The good part is that this is a variable, even when it is complicated, that only depends of oneself.
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Hola a todos,
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