My Difficulties in English and Lessons I Learned from it

The day came when Arina and I have to coordinate an activity and in every activity there are instructions and explanations.

Giving Instructions:

Me: Now we have to make like the breast cancer symbol.

      (I did the symbol in an inverse way.)

Seniors: Ok! Like this? 

            (Some did it like exactly how the symbol look like.)

Me: You have to inverse it.
Seniors: How?  
Me: Like this!
Seniors:  Like this?
Me: You have to put the small part of strip outside the big strip.
Seniors: Ok!

             (Others were confuse and asking their seatmates.)

Me: Then, we have to put the small part of the strips inside the whole.
Seniors: Oh! We need to make a loop.
Me: Yes! And we need to do a knot.

What I would say in the future:

Me: Now the next step is to tie a knot in the end of the strip.

Seniors:  Ok! How we will going to do that?

Me:  First, we have to make a loop at one end of your strip.

Seniors: Alright! We have a loop, what now?

Me: The second step is to pass the short end through the loop.

Seniors: We are following…

Me: Third, we have to pull both ends of the strip carefully to close up the knot.

Explanation:

Senior: How come mine is not forming into a star? I did press in, the middle of each sides?

Me: Oh, because your paper is thin.

Senior: The paper is not thin.

What I would say in the future:

Senior: How come mine is not forming into star? I did press in, the middle of each sides?

Me: Let me take a look of that. Oh, it is because the amount of paper you wrap on the pentagon is not enough. You have to wrap more than that.
Senior: Oh, it is true to make it thicker.
Me: Yes! The reason is when your pentagon is thicker you will be able to push in each middle edges of the pentagon easily and then you will have the form of star.

My Ah-ha! Moment

On November 13 of the year, we had a small field trip in the green house located in West Mount. We took a bus to go there and it was about 15 minutes bus ride, while in the bus the seniors started a conversation and as indicated in my past blog I have difficulty interacting with them because of their topic but instead of just listening this time I asked couple of questions about their topic. Then, I ended up having a conversation with one of them about the trailer movies. We talked about shark movies and some horror movies as well. While the senior was expressing her thoughts about the movies that have been mentioned. She said the verb “creep up”. This word repeatedly ran in my mind. I was trying to understand it, but suddenly it came up in my mind the word careless in blog # 7 as a result, I realized that in French we don’t do this kind of verb like adding the word up or down. This made me figure out when I said “je vais monter en haut” and my French teacher said that there is no need to add up the phrase “en haut” because it is understandable that “je vais monter” is “I will go up”. Now it makes sense to me.

Writing these conversations that happened in my internship, made me realize that I answered and explained in a vague way. The look for patterns in a language will be a great strategy to apply in this kind of scenario so that I will be able to express myself comprehensively.