Friday, 24 January 2014

My english learning journey

Throughout primary and secondary school, I did not enjoy studying English language. I admit that I felt the learning process was a torture for me. I found the language a bore as there were so many rules that I had to remember and follow. Those rules were complex and did not make sense to me! I could not fully grasp those concepts and failed to apply them while doing my English exercises such as writing essays and comprehensions. To make things worse, I did not cultivate a good reading habit. My English grades were always poor and I had to attend countless remedial lessons.

When I attended junior college, I felt that my English standard was inferior compared to others and I had this mentality throughout the two years. I was consistently failing my General Paper, and found it hard to cope with the rigor of the subject. It required me to have a great knowledge of current affairs, but I did not meet that expectation. Coupled with my poor writing skills, it was a great challenge for me to express my arguments or points succinctly in my essays. In the end, I attained a D grade for GP in the A level examinations.  Even though it was not satisfactory, I felt that it was a miracle for me to obtain such a grade as I had been consistently scoring S(sub pass) or U(ungraded) in the past.


I am really thankful to be studying in NUS right now but when it comes to English language, I know that there is a huge room for improvement. I consider ES1102 as a new phase of my English learning journey. I look forward to improve my writing skills and be more confident and effective in expressing myself.

(edited: 3 feb 2014)

4 comments:

  1. Hi Sili,

    I guess this is the thing about languages. You need a real interest in it in order to find it enjoyable.

    I can probably say the same about my mandarin; the learning process was a torture for me personally. But then again, instead of following the school curriculum of teaching mandarin, I watched Chinese dramas on Ch 8 which hopefully helped at least a little in improving my mandarin.

    In life, I believe we need to do things that make us happy. However, if we don't have a choice, then do the "unhappy" things in a way that makes us happy.

    Cheers
    Darren Chew

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  2. Hi, Sili,

    I like that you described your experience and feeling in this blog post.
    As I don't feel that I'm strong in grammar, I cannot really point out grammar mistakes haha.
    But then again, let's go through ES1102 for the following weeks together and hopefully we can learn a lot!
    Hopefully, you can be more interested in learning English too.

    Cheers,

    Adella Tiffany

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  3. Hi Sili!

    "I have been consistently scoring S(sub pass) or U(ungraded) in the past", the have can be replaced by had, a past tense (i make this mistake too. HAHAHA) :)





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  4. Thank you, Sili, for the detailed, honest post. You do a very good job of providing background on your prior English learning experience. While you wrote about many problems in your attitude and learning experience, as I read your post, I thought to myself that there were so many strengths in your fluency that you now can build upon. I look forward to working with you this term.

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