My housemate is a 20-something young Chinese fellow. He grew up in a poor third-tier city in Southern China. He told me that they were encouraged to work as early as possible they can. Therefore, the average of educated level of most people in his area is secondary school.
Because of the poverty of the city, there were not many opportunities in his village. Most people there went abroad to work as kitchen porters legally or illegally in Chinese restaurants all over the world. Put it in other words, they did the donkey work to bring the bread home.
My housemate is one of them as well. He arrived in Ireland in June and started from scratch to learn cooking and English. Despite of the fact that he has been studying English in a language school in Dublin for four months, he was still unable to speak out a complete sentence in English.
Nevertheless, he was a hardworking guy. He revised his homework most of the night after working. Sometimes I taught him some basis grammar like the difference between is and are, and some simple vocabulary such as open, close, go, eat, drink, etc.
However, he couldn’t remember them at all. He got a goldfish memory storage, which means he was only able to remember those English words for two seconds. Every time I taught him a new word, he forgot it at the next two second.
On the other hand, no matter how simple the word was, he couldn’t pronounce every single word such as “they” and “their” correctly. Besides, he always omitted the last sound of every word with more than two syllables.
For instance, he always pronounced “awful” with only “all” sound but no “full” sound. I told him every time that please pronounced the full sound! He said OK~OK~ but still remained unchanged afterwards.
I have met a lot of poor-English-speaking Chinese, but most of them were able to use some simple words to express themselves. I have never seen one whose English ability was worse than him, no matter in speaking or in learning.
In my observation, obviously, he just knew few English words. I assume there were less than 50 English words in his vocabulary bank. Besides, he might have never spoken out a single English word in his decades life time, which means he was short of practicing English speaking. Lack of practice made his tongue less nimble.
What’s more, despite claiming the graduation of secondary school, his learning process made me feel as if he had never learn English in his life before coming to Ireland. So, It makes sence that he was completely blank out in the English class when he was in China.
I thought it was the reason why he couldn’t catch on everything in class even he was in the lowest level in the language school in Dublin. He was literally starting from scratch.
The only thing I can say is God bless. What a long way for him…
Lighting House 