Ron's ESL Blogs

Starting to learn English at the 5^th Grade, I cannot believe that I have learned English for more than thirteen years.  Thirteen years is a very long journey in learning something new.  If someone tells me that he has focused on a subject for such a long time, I would think that he must be an expert in this area.  For myself, I am not doing quite well in English.  That’s why I am still learning English now.

At the very beginning, English was all about memorizing some new words and simple sentences.  So I could always get good grade in it.  It became the reason that I like English at first.  Then, when I was a student in middle school, learning English was pretty easy for me.  I only did some review before the test and exam.  In other words, I didn’t spend a lot of time in learning English.
High school was the turning point.  I had to learn plenty of grammar, and there were too much new vocabulary of me.  Besides the class, there were many workbooks and material following.  I started to be tired of English, and my grade was lower.  At the second year of high school, students must choose a subject as major.  I chose English.  Even though I was not a top student in it, the passion in English is in my heart, let me do the decision.  Under teachers’ guide, I did a huge amount of practice for the exam including oral practice sometimes, but it turned out that it’s not enough and not suitable for real English using when I came to the United States.

When I am facing an English speaker, I become very scared and my brain is blank. Worse, I am always tongue-tied.  I really hate myself at that moment.  It seems I have never learned grammar before that I can’t finish a sentence.  These make me frustrated and upset.  It’s time to learn “real English”.  I am having Grammar in school.  After that, TV is a good way to learn daily English. From the TV shows, dramas, and movies, I know the way the Americans speak.  I think the most efficient way to learn a language is to make friends who speak that language.  But until now, I don’t have many American friends, and I notice that it’s my problem.  I need to push myself.

I know I am not a good learner that I am too lazy and not making many efforts.  But I will continue my way in English.  I will speak like a native American someday, I will.