You know little English but you are determined to learn. You find library is a wonderful resource, especially kids section. Those picture books for kids full of hand-written Chinese definitions, connotations or Pin Yin. I am not surprised if ten years from now, most people in toronto can speak Chinese.

You find yourself constantly stammer and stutter during a conversasion, fighting for words. Even if you manage to get some words out, in retrospect, they don't make much sense. Your listeners often give you a blank or baffled face and meet you with a short question like "sorry?". It is very frustrating, but you are convinced that you have no communication problem in work environment, just can't finish a book.

You congratulate youself on successfully exchanging banters with your collegues or neighbours since 6 months ago you were still trying to avoid eye contact so that no conversation could be initiated. You try to read a novel, but often than not you loose interest somewhere half through the book for constantly consulting a dictionary. However, you are confident that your English are more advanced than most Chinese immigtants.

Your English is still choppy and halting, but you try to speak whenever you can. You take great pride in your capability of actively engaging talks covering various subjects. Seeing your perseverance on reading newspaper everyday pays off, you decide to take on more aggressive learning pattern. But you don't know how. Vacabulary is a huge headache; Consciously you know some words from your mouth still sound funny; You like watch movies and but not sure how much you understand. After all, you only need to know 20% to get the main plot.

You are tortured by English, plucking your hair at those setbacks. Sometimes you find in horror that you are barely able to start small talks and wonder what is wrong with you, sometimes you are in excellent mood, even surprised at your fluent response in a conversation; Sometimes you can enjoy a whole movie without looking at subtitle, sometimes you have no clue what is going on. Looking around, you are secretly gleeful that most new immigrants are like you or even worse. You wonder how much you can achieve this lifetime.
You find it more and more difficult to help your 12-year-old son with his English, who is reading a book much thicker than yours. You try to burge in a talk that your son is having with his pals to show parental care and affection, only left feeling like idiot that they are speaking too fast to catch up with.

Fed up with piecemeal progress, you decide to start all over again. You observe how your 6-year-old daughter learns English, then rush out to buy English work books from grade 3 to grade 8, thinking eventually your daughter will use them anyway. Sure enough, there are a lot things you don't know in those work books, you are glad you have finished them all and feel reborn. Everyday, you read along with the slow speaker in ESL English CDs, correcting your pronunciation word by word. After one year, a 200-page book seems much easier to handle. Your English sounds more like... English. You wonder why you did not think of this in the first place. Plus 18 years learning in China, you feel you have wasted at least 23 years on learning English. You truly want to bang your head to a wall and terminate yourself right there.

Now, you are obsessed about English. You read books crazily, averagely finishing one book per month which is quite decent even for some locals. You are even able to spot spelling and grammer errors on Toronto Star, after all, editors are also humans. You watch a lot of moives, could understand 80% of them. The only thing irks you is that you fail to appreciate those comedians shows on TV. You decide maybe it is time to expand your knowledge and vocabulary. You are interested in reading anything, even instruction sheet from newly-purchased IKEA box can give you tremendous pleasure. You can't help overhearing a phone conversation on a bus and understand it all. Now, you on longer speak and write trying to impress, but to deliver your expression tersely and effectively.

Now you can finish 500-page book in a week, occasionally look up a word in a dictionary just to make sure. You almost could use it as a milestone. But your elation is short-lived when your 5-year-old son discovers in shock that you can’t tell Tyrannosaurus rex from Stegosaurus, who can identify up to 40 different types of dinausor. How did a five-year-old do that? He hasn’t start school! Before you scramble to memorize 5 types, his interest has already moved on to plants.
Life is so cruel !
Pressured to teach him something before your authority suffers total crumpling, you ventured: “ Sweetie, next time you see David Huang, don’t call him stupid, that’s rude. We have a nicer way to put it: intellectually challenged.”
Say again?” his face beaming.

You don’t know since when you are no longer being bothered by people’s accent, be it high-pitched HongKong accent, potato-rolling Russian accent, solemn British accent, chewing-his-own-tongue Texas accent, or black, Philippine, Singapore, Australia... You understand them with no trouble at all. Everyone has accent, who doesn’t?

Accent is trendy in Toronto, like one comedian put it: “What is Toronto? Toronto is a city of broken English.”

Accent is in fashion.

Then you realize that all these years, all you are doing is trying to get rid of one accent while acquiring another: CBC Radio accent!

Life is unfair!

本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛Before you ever notice, you have already transformed. You are reading not for the sake of learning English, you are enjoying fruits of human civilisation! You feel lucky that life is so beautiful. You read between lines, marvelling at writer’s originality and craftsmanship; you listen to songs, mulling over its meaning; you watch comedian shows, resonating with their jokes.

You start to getting bored at your regular social gatherings. You suddenly discover that all your friends are talking about is how much their house prices have appreciated over one year- on paper. Or how smartly they managed to send their kids to Gift Programs that are meant for weird kids who have special educational needs. You wonder how on earth people’s life could only come down to this. You couldn’t wait to get back to your books.

Pretty soon, in some eyes, you become a reclusive freak. But you feel you are truly free. All you want from your children is let them know a plain truth: life is short and you are lucky born in this world, start enjoying it.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net

You recently made an acquaintance of a German who speaks flawless English with European accent. He travels extensively and can speak four different languages. You are saddened by the fact that when he tells you lots of European people can speak several languages, you spent so many years hardly learning one. Then you decide maybe it is time to learn another language. You wonder what it would be like to read Le Rouge et le Noir in French. Maybe this time it would take less time as you are already, should we say, speak impeccable English.

With Sous le Ciel de Paris wafting through your earbuds, you are ready to start this journey all over again.