Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 0 to 12 years old (Born to Elementary school)
• 13 to 16 years old(Middle school to High school junior year)
• 17 years old(Highschool senior year)
• 18 to 19 (College freshman)
• 20 (College sophomore)
• 20 to 21(Gap Year)
• 21 to 22(College junior)
• 22 to 23(College senior)

Introduction

This is basically a summary of how I’ve been improving my English ability in my life.

0 to 12 years old (Born to Elementary school)

No exposure to the language at all.

13 to 16 years old(Middle school to High school junior year)

In middle school, English was one of the mandatory subjects. I hated it and naturally I sucked at it. I still remember the time I made my mom so shocked because I couldn’t spell the word ‘really’. Looking back on it now, I don’t know why I couldn’t spell the word . But for some reason, the word seemed incredibly complicated to me back then. My mother forced me to join a cram school after that.

17 years old(Highschool senior year)

In my country, college is a big deal. They say your whole life depends on it. I didn’t think so but I saw a chance of getting out of my nothing ever happens type of hometown. So I decided to study insanely hard to get into a good college as if my life had actually depended on it. English, of course, was one of the subjects in the examination. I still kind of had this preconception of me never being good at the subject when I first started studying it for the college exam. But regardless of how I felt about English, getting a very high score on English test was absolutely necessary to get into my, so called, dream college. Ironically, I got 196 out of 200 which was the highest score of all the subjects in the examination I took. The nearly perfect score I got on English helped me a lot to get into a very prestigious college that I didn’t even dream of getting into. Although devoting more than 10 hours into studying everyday for roughly a year was indescribably stressful, I was really happy to get into the college and I became a bit confident in my English ability. At this point, I think I liked English as a subject but not necessarily as a language.

18 to 19 (College freshman)

On the first day of college, we had an introduction about classes and stuff. And, to my surprise, taking an English test was scheduled right after the introduction. At that time, my brain was preoccupied with typical college stuff like which parties I’m going to that day and so on. So I decided to sleep through the whole test. Of course, I got a very very bad score. What I’m trying to say here is that I didn’t care about English at all at this point. I completely lost my interest in the language and I just wanted to have fun in college.

20 (College sophomore)

After I became a sophomore, I started thinking about things I want to do after college. The first thing popped up in my mind was becoming a government official. So I joined the specialized school for the exams and started doing an internship at a city councilor’s office. During the internship, I met another college kid who did backpacking in southeast Asia for about a year. At that time, I didn’t even know what backpacking was but his stories really intrigued me.

After studying for the exams for about a month, I realized that becoming a government official was not for me. category: Memorizing all the articles of the constitution and learning about legal stuff was just incredibly tedious and I also realized I didn’t ‘really’ want to become a government official. So I quit the specialized school. At this point, It’s safe to say I was pretty lost in my life. It was actually very hard for me to know what “I” want to do in my life. I think it’s because everything I had to do in my life up until college was very simple and clear. I just had to do what people told me to do like doing well at school, going to a cram school, playing baseball and stuff. I literally was not capable of figuring out what “I” want to do or what “I” want to become. I was just too used to walking on a rail that was set up for me.

I didn’t like the idea of not being able to think for myself at all and wanted to do something about it. I remember seriously pondering about my future for like a couple of weeks. I thought about becoming a lawyer, politician, accountant and so on. Those professions are very respected in our society and having one of those professions basically assures my financial stability and social status for the rest of my life. I think I tried to force myself to believe that “I” actually want to do one of those things. But It didn’t work. None of them actually excited me at all.

On the other hand, what seemed really exciting and interesting was doing backpacking just like the guy from the city councilor’s office did. At that time, I was still a sophomore and thought “yeah why the heck not?? I still got some time. I’d start worrying about my future after this trip!!:):):) gotta live my life a little!:)“. I believe it was February or March when I left my country for Thailand for backpacking for a month.

To put it simply, the trip was absolutely eye-opening and life-changing. Surviving in a foreign country and meeting many people from different countries taught me how important English is and how exciting and different my life would be like if I could speak English fluently. Experiencing different cultures made me realize how narrow-minded and ignorant I was. After the trip, I was determined to work on my English and decided to go to the Philippines for studying English.

20 to 21(Gap Year)

I took a year off from college to study English in the Philippines. I worked at a cram school in my country for about 4 months to make some money for the tuition fees. And I studied at a language school in the Philipines for approximately 7 months.

My typical day in the Philipines was like the following.

5:30am - Wake up
6:00am - Morning class
7:00am - Breakfast
7:30am ~ 12:00 - Classes
12:00 ~ 1:00pm - Lunch
1:00pm ~ 7:00pm - Classes + Self-Study
7:00pm ~ 7:30pm - Dinner
8:00pm ~ 9:00pm - Self-Study
9:00pm ~ 9:30pm - Vocabulary Test
9:30pm ~ 11:00pm - Self-Study
11:30pm - Go to sleep

As you can see above, it was pretty intense. On top of that, we could not leave the school on weekdays and we had a curfew on the weekends. And they also had some other very strict rules. The crazy thing was that if you break any of those rules, you could get expelled from the school. There actually were some students who got kicked out of the school due to the series of violations of the rules. In hindsight, it was more like a prison than a school.

Thanks to the intense curriculum and my resolute determination, I improved my English ability significantly after 7months. There were times I almost gave up because I could not feel any progress despite all the effort I was putting into studying the language. But I never did. I think it’s because of the friends who studied together and supported me. I could not tell them this then but I really want to thank them for supporting, inspiring and motivating me. I could not achieve what I accomplished without them.

21 to 22(College junior)

22 to 23(College senior)