When you learn a language, and I mean really learn it, a part of you is left changed forever. English did that for me, and I am a different person than

I would otherwise be because of it.

Growing up speaking Mandarin, before 8, I knew no more English than a “yes” and “no”. So if you popped the question, “Are you stupid?” there

was a 50-50 chance that I'd say yes. That all changed in 2nd grade. One year in a child's formative years could shape the rest of his life. That year did

that for me and left an indelible imprint on the rest of my life.

I spent that year in Dallas, Texas, a rising metropolis in the American southwest. Being in a foreign country where no one spoke my language was as hard as it gets,

but it pushed me to my utmost to fit in and accelerated my English learning by leaps and bounds. By the end of that year, my English was better than most 6th graders

in China, and by the time I graduated elementary school, I didn't have to worry about my English grades until high school.

I've never had to memorize hundreds or thousands of vocabularies like most of my peers, and learning English has always been a fun extra to my real hobby of reading.

It just so happens that all the audiobooks I listened to from the third grade onwards were in English, so after a decade, I'm now so good at English that my SAT score

is higher than 99% of test takers in America itself. This has been hugely beneficial for me in more ways than one. The saved time has allowed me to put more effort

into weaker subjects, and I've never had to review for an English exam at school. There's no way to run a controlled experiment to verify, maybe I'll still do as well

without my edge in English, but all in all, I'm glad for my grades' sake I'm good at English.

Learning a second language was certainly challenging, but I'm lucky because I did it at an age where I didn't have to worry about anything else. If you dropped me off

in an English-speaking country with minimal English knowledge today, I'd have way too much from other subjects to learn English. In my opinion, the timing for my

little excursion was perfect, and I'm ever grateful to my parents for taking me.

In August 2021, partly to learn English but mostly because I was bored and lonely, I went online in search of foreign pen friends. To date, I have exchanged over 8,000

messages on the website that provides the service and made some incredible friends. You are reading this as a resul