Several years ago I attended English courses here in Minsk. Our group was quite good at grammar but we were too shy to use our oral English skills in classroom. Then our teacher invented  a special system for us.

A person who said even a word in Russian without teacher’s permission got a Black card. It were just pieces of paper. One side was all black and from the other side she wrote different penalties.  Sometimes it was funny… but not for those who got them I think.

And the other part of those system was an exercise called “3 minutes of glory”. But we called it “3 minutes of shame”. Every lesson began with little lottery among students. Those one who “won” it must speak for 3 minutes in front of the audience. We didn’t have any specific topic for such appearances so every student set up  his own topic. We heard a lot of different stories: one student described his summer in Turkey, a girl was speaking about her plans for the future, other guy was trying to translate his favorite song from Russian…

At first, this exercise was so difficult for us. We had to overcome our fears and start speaking. After several months we found out that it is funny and we are not afraid any more. So we began to speak and sometimes we needed even more than those 3 minutes to finish our stories. Yes, we made lots of mistakes but it didn’t really matter for our teacher at those time. She wanted to make us feel more confident.

My English is not perfect still but due to those courses I’m not shy to use it any more.

Here I want to share my story with you. I had a penpal several years ago. It was a Turkish guy who studied in Vilnius, Lithuania. He’s name was Serhan. We’d been chatting for about two months when he said that he is going to visit Minsk. I was really surprised and excited.

He came together with his friends. One of them was from France and another from Germany. So the only way we could communicate was English. It was my very first time I spoke with someone in English not in a classroom but in real life… It took about an hour for me to get over my fear to speak… But my new friends were quite patient. From time to time they helped me to find the right word and I felt really comfortable in their company. We spent together almost two days and it was an amazing experience for me. I showed Minsk to them and they asked me so many question about everything they saw around. It was funny cuz sometimes we had to explain what we want to say with fingers )) We had really great time.

That was my only such experience so far. Hope next year I’ll see my friend from Canada. And have you ever met your friend from another country in real life?

From the left to right: Serhan, me, my friend Ira, David (from France).