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When I first came to the States, I had...well I knew a bit of English because I had taken some courses in Peru, in South America, but it was just a basic grade.
Essentially all that you needed to say was "My name is Edgar. I'm a student." Just things like that.
in terms of barriers I had to overcome, of course language was a big barrier. When I first came to the States, what I decided was that I really, really needed to learn the language
and it's something that I have to do. I have no choice, at least I didn't give myself a choice about it.
What that means is that when you go to a high school, for instance, and you're there. First thing that you're going to do,
your first instinct is to look for people that also speak Spanish and try to hang out with them. They're going to be your friends.
And that's good, don't misunderstand, that's great to have those kinds of connections. But what I actually did is because I really wanted to learn English,
is that I actually tried to stay a little bit away from these people just because I wanted to learn the language, so I started to become friends
with people that came from Egypt, Asia, and Pakistan. Especially people from Asia, for me at least, they were the hardest people to understand at the time.
I became very good friends with them and that's really how I learned the language. Just by actually pushing myself to get in those kinds of situations
where I get to talk to somebody else. It was very difficult, extremely difficult for the first year, but that's how I managed to learn the language fairly quickly.