Yana / Barriers / ISS 2016

     Rolando Niella's story is familiar to all learners of English as a second language. And it doesn't matter if a reader can play tennis or not, he will just understand and feel every moment Niella said. Because we are really feel us sometimes confused, and frustrated. As for me sometimes I'm feeling myself like I'm a dumb truck, because sometimes I understand the meaning of jokes or some phrases too late to react properly to that, like in Niella's situation when one guy asked him to turn down his stereo. So in these cases I'm feeling myself very embarrassing.
      I liked the way Niella tells us his thoughts very detailed, without any embarrassing of being seemed not perfect in eyes of his readers. It was very real. Real stories affect on me much more and make me live together with the narrator every detail of his story.
      As he compared English with his favorite kind of sport, I thought to compare English with my favourite kind of sport - basketball. I'm playing this game for a quite long time. Basketball is a team kind of sport, therefore you're learning how to understand what they want or what they're thinking about, just seeing the expressions of people, also we're learning to communicate with each other with non-verbal way, so it helps me sometimes in speaking English. For example, to express the word I can't explain verbally. Also I think basketball also can be compared with learning of English, when conversation is too fluent, it's like if you're the slowest player in the court, you can enjoy to be a part of such an exciting game, but you just have no any skills to move faster and catch up to the other members. So you become a little bit disappointed. And being a fluent speaker is like to be the most resultative player.
      After reading the story of Niella I could see myself in Niella's behavior and understood that I shouldn't be shy and even if I do any mistakes in explaining my thoughts, I should make my best to get an experience and improving my daily English.