
My mother bought our first CD player for the primary purpose of learning English. It was 1995 and she had decided we would start a new life in the United States. I was more interested in listening to music; the problem was we didn’t own any CDs. So I convinced her to take me to a record store in a mall in Caracas and fill a shopping basket with random albums that caught our eye, from Philip Glass to Maracaibo 15 to that famous American icon: Madonna. From then on, The Immaculate Collection, containing all her hits to date, became my own English course. I would play it from start to finish every day after school, dancing and singing along, not understanding any of the lyrics but certain I was at least mastering English pronunciation along with some dance moves.
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