Leveling-Up Your English Proficiency

Lately, I've been doing a lot of reading in preparation for my final exam next semester. My final exam will be on issues of identity in early twentieth-century American literature. The philosophical questions of "who am I?" and "What is my place in society?" have always been fascinating to me; in fact, we have written a few posts addressing identity issues such as Tuesday's post which you can read here . Anyway, I've been reading a lot by F. Scott Fitzgerald and, while the writing itself doesn't seem to offer any direct lessons that would help you improve your proficiency, it has made me think about a point that we talked about several weeks ago: the importance of reading to improve your linguistic abilities.  Now, you might be thinking that the type of reading you'll need to do has to be education or language books that were written especially to help people learn, and yes, those type of books can be beneficial. But unfortunately, book...

As you have read in the last blogpost, Ryan, the founder of the Blog and I have been to the Iskcon in Boston together. I have to say, I have had a completely different experience than he did. While I did experience a degree of mysticism and awe as expressed in the previous post, there was a point that I began to focus on how I should see and present myself in that particular environment. As I have expressed before, I am an international student that has made the move from her home country-- India, if that's not explicitly obvious by now-- to the United States of America; with that move has come a lot of changes to my perception of myself and how I see my own roots. In fact, it has also come to the point where I become confused as to which side I should be on.  To explain my point better, I will reiterate the experience of walking in the Iskcon building, but with a different perspective. I am going to describe that very same evening using the two different mindsets that gov...

While it is important to understand that different situations will call for different intricacies, as I mentioned in Tuesday's post , it is also crucial to know that sometimes even the same situation will require you to use different intricacies or act differently. Recently, my friend and I stopped by the Iskcon temple located in downtown Boston . It was a really nice experience and very similar to my first experience in an Iskcon temple which I wrote about in my traveler's log . However, despite the most obvious similarities such as having to take your shoes off before entering, there was something strangely different about the temple in Boston.  First off, the architecture of the exterior of the building was oddly Western; in other words, it was pretty much the typical building you would see anywhere in a city. Even the interior felt more Western: instead of gold idols, there were many different portraits on the walls of the temple--I didn't have a chance to inspe...

I've been back now for a little over a week and I'm still trying to reacclimatize myself to being here. Aside from the obvious things that require time to get used to, like the nine and a half hour time zone difference, there have been other things that have required me to consciously reconsider. Being in one situation for a long amount of time always requires some adjustments when going into a new situation. This is because no two situations are exactly alike. So whether you are returning home after a long trip abroad or spending time with your family after a tiring day of work, different situations in life will always require a shift in personality.  Now you're probably wondering what do I mean by shifting your personality. Let me explain: being in India required me to act and even speak a certain way. I quickly realized that the way I typically communicate with people in the United States was not going to work in India. For example, I tend to speak quickly by not p...

Looking out the car window at the Boston cityscape, I was struck with a feeling of deja vu. One month ago today I looked out a car window at a similar cityscape in Bangalore. I remember thinking how similar it initially appeared to Boston. I saw the same possibility, the same familiarity, the same excitement as I did when I gazed upon Boston for the first time since early July. The only difference was that seeing Boston today marked the end of my experience and therefore, there was a sense of bittersweetness, whereas, Bangalore was the beginning of my experience and thus invoked a sense of excitement and eagerness.  While I may have put India behind me-- for now!-- the lessons I acquired while there will stay with me for years to come. The first, and without-a-doubt the most important, lesson I learned in India was that being an expert in one language does not mean you'll be able to communicate with anyone. The language barrier I encountered while abroad was defi...