Hey! In this post I want to tell you my motivation to take English learning to a serious level and when that happened.
When I was in college, I saw a presentation about English in tech land, something like if you can't understand and can't be understood, you're late. Somehow something awakened inside my mind, since then I started to be more and more interested and I made it a personal goal. Later I heard about a course called My English Online, by Capes and National Geographic. It was a paid course, however, the Brazilian government was giving free logins to those who are in public universities. (My case, yay!) So I started there. It was 2013 I think, and I tried to study hard. I really tried, for six months, but I didn't go far.
The fact is that I couldn't because my willingness to do that was not so strong, and I wasn't taking it seriously. I thought it was going very well, but I was wrong. The effort and the energy required for me to learn something should be much stronger. I'm talking about a decision when you feel really interested and motivated to do something hard. But that willpower came only recently.
Then at the beginning of 2020 everything changed. In January I received a call offering me a job, and I've got really interested. At the interview, at some point, the interviewer asked me if I was able to speak English with him. Until that moment I was thinking that the position didn't require English speaking.
Well, inside my head I was able to speak yes. (But only inside my head LOL). So we tried to have a conversation, but that went terribly wrong. Really terrible.
After this talk, I realized my mistake. I knew English quite well, could understand most of a conversation, and could write a little bit, but my speaking skill was at level ZERO. I have never tried to have a conversation before. What I should have had were conversations, and practicing. I've learned a lot of English, I've made a lot of exercises and I felt that it was good enough, however, I wasn't able to speak.
This episode was very very frustrating for me, and because of that, on the same day, I decided to be fluent. Then I started to practice speaking, search for conversation skills, and pronouncing. And I started to practice every day.
This was my story, it seems to be pretty much like most of the stories. But I'm very interested in your case. If you feel like so, please, leave a comment.
Note: I want to write more about my practicing and studying. While I'm studying and learning, I want to keep records of items that can help others. Little tips that can make a huge difference.
That's it, folks. Till next time.
Originally posted at https://ricardocampos.blog/post/my-when-and-why/ on Jun 13, 2020, 10:43:35 PM
Latest comments (0)