My first memorable encounter with the English language is from the time when my friends and I played with toy-soldiers in the large sandpit in my garden. I probably wasn't older than three or four, and my entire vocabulary consisted of sounds I had picked up from various English-speaking television shows and movies. It would go something like this "Murky burky! Aaaah! Fiah in de hool! A murky burky!"
When I later started elementary school, I would soon learn my very first real words, such as the basic colors, how to present myself, and to count. Luckily for my class, we had an English teacher with a grade from Oxford or something like that, so I was actually quite capable of at least holding a basic conversation going. On the other hand, I never really saw English as
that important until I experienced the magical world of MMORPG's (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games). Thanks to them I would converse in English several hours a day, and you would easily learn from your mistakes.
Simultaneously with playing a lot of games and watching English TV-shows I always had very dedicated and highly skilled and/or experienced teachers, who would always push me to work on my language. Furthermore, I also believe that I am a person who can easily pick up similarities between languages and easily translate it in my head.
In my first year of high school, I met the strictest and most expecting English teacher I have ever met. She was tough but fair and she really inspired me to work harder, and even take an extra class of Advanced English the year after. By then, I had already started to fantasize about studying abroad, and it also helped me to learn further. Unfortunately, in the Advanced English class I met a rather uninspiring teacher, and I basically didn't care about learning more. Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for her, she was out for six months with a back injury. In that time period, we had an American as a substitute teacher. He was quite the interesting fellow, and he did not speak a word of Norwegian. This helped me to start paying attention to class again.
Even though I had a pretty broad vocabulary before I came to university, I have yet again started to absorb new, more academic words. I like the flow they provide to the sentences while at the same time making them sound more intelligent.
If there was something I would like to further improve about my English it would be the comma-placement rules, as they are quite different from the Norwegian ones. In addition, I would like to work on when to use Do and Does when I speak informally. Sometimes I tend not to think too much about it, and I can make quite obvious mistakes.
My main advice to next year's first-year students would be to study hard, and do your coursework thoroughly.-S
