Being a reporter in the local English-language media, English has become the main language of my work, but honestly, I am not good at English, which has even been classified as bad by my teachers. But why would I choose a job requiring me to write in English as my career? That is because I believe things can be improved by learning. In fact, I have been learning English since I was in secondary school.
I graduated from an “English language” secondary school, which required students to learn subjects in English. Up to here, you may think that I must be very good at English. However, the answer is no. In fact, English has been a nightmare for me.
In my six years in primary school, I learnt and studied Chinese, where I could get high marks in tests and examinations. However, things changed when I changed to an English-based school, where I got my first “zero” in mathematics classwork, which actually was a quiz for students, not because I was bad in mathematics – indeed I thought I was good at mathematics. But why would I get a zero mark for it? It was because I could not understand the instructions written in English on the test paper, I didn’t even know the words, such as “minimise”, “times” or “substitute” at that time, when I just changed to a new environment with everything around me in English, so there was no way for me to write a word on the test paper.
Have you tried to get a result lower than “zero”? I have, which was “unclassified”, indeed, I got a hundred “unclassifieds” during my secondary school life because I could not keep up with my teachers’ speaking speed when they read the passage for dictation. Honestly, I did not know which words were spoken.
Therefore, I was even classified as a “bad student” in my high school life due to my bad English, and this also made me hate learning English very much.
Until I met a teacher, who came from Spain, who taught me never to give up any chance to enhance my interest in learning. She was my English teacher in F5 and F6. Although I got many “unclassified” results from her, she never showed her disappointment in me even though I was the worst student she ever had. Instead, she always encouraged me to learn English in more fun ways. She would take me to a bookstore to choose an English novel that I was interested in. She would also play several English movies and watch them with me in our spare time. She did all this because she wanted me to improve my English by listening more, watching more and reading more. Because of her support and heart, I did not hate English anymore. Instead, I wanted to learn more English words, and thus change myself.
Even though my English did not improve so well, through watching English television shows and movies, at least I was not the person who could not read the instructions on tests anymore. Although I could not speak fluent English, I could use another way to present my thoughts in English.
The ways she taught me let me realise that learning is never a difficult task, but how to learn was in my hands. Until now, I can write stories in English, even though they may not be perfect. However, does this mean that I do not need to learn anymore? In fact, I have chosen another way to learn as much as I can because there is no “endpoint” for learning by immersing myself in an environment where I am surrounded by the English language on a daily basis.
In Chinese, we describe the situation in the adage that “one is never too old to learn”.
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