THIRD MONTH: JUST A BIT MORE CONFIDENT

I believe I’ve improved my English skills a lot but it doesn’t mean that I’m a good speaker yet. However, as I’m hardly exposed to the language I’ve felt that I’m better at guessing what customers, bosses and colleagues say and most of the time I am able to answer accurately. My listening Skills have improved but I still find it quite difficult to understand the details of many messages I receive daily. 

It’s still frustrating, however I try to manage it differently because unfortunately it’s a long process which I have to deal with and keep patience with. (patience is not my best).

In particular, this month was more relaxed because I comprehended that it wasn’t a good idea to put such a pressure on myself. It’s a better idea to try to enjoy the process a little bit more. By the way, I’m in one of the most amazing cities in the world, I must enjoy it. And I did.

I can’t say that I was super confident at my job but I felt I’ve been able to solve many work-related issues, I’ve given better customer service, I’ve sold so many bicycles and I’ve performed better in general. The foundational aspects of my job have now been overcome.

In contrast, it’s hard to say but I can’t follow the english level of my colleagues and it has been tough for me to participate in many conversations just because I just catch 40% to 50% of the messages. The other 50% is quite important information like jokes, details, arguments, and so forth and I find it complicated to be active in a conversation if I’m not sure what the conversation is about. 

At that moment my English language immersion was composed of three components.

  1. Working in customer service.
  2. Attending my English class. 
  3. Writing this blog entry. 

I felt the need to change my strategy (to validate the hypothesis about enhancing my English learning process through listening) and I started to watch some netflix documentaries such as David Beckham, Robbie Williams and Goerge Micheal instead of writing this blog. In entrepreneurship words I pivoted my strategy. Those documentaries were interesting and useful, of course. I watched David Beckham one 4 or 5 times because I felt comfortable with the accent, fully understood it and learned quite good expressions, words and pronunciation. Finally, I was able to understand the entire film without any captions or subtitles. That was a good one for me !

But something wasn’t quite right. I was never 100% sure about stopping writing… 

At the end of the third month I could evaluate the results and compare my process in contrast with the previous months and the conclusion was that the process of writing is far more useful for me than watching series. Why? because, in my personal opinion, writing is an active process in which I’m creating sentences, finding connectors, looking for expressions, thinking in grammatical structures and so on, in contrast with just listening in which I’m in a passive process trying to catch the ideas or details of the film. To sum up, I learn more from writing. That’s why at this moment I decided to write 30 min per day, once again. 

Feelings:

I acknowledge that I’ve improved nonetheless I feel I deal with 50% of the language, at most.

I would like to have the ability to improvise sentences grammatically correct.

I don’t know why people say to me that I speak good English, probably they are trying to be polite !

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