My life in English

From childhood, English has not been my favorite subject. Even today it isn’t. I barely use it for conversations. When I do, then it is most likely mixed with broken Filipino or Fookien, which is spoken by people in the Chinese province of Fujian. My parents used to say that it was senseless to learn English at home because it is being taught in school, anyway. This made me realize how English can be useless to me.

In my early childhood, my English was terrible because of my limited vocabulary. I hardly read English books, so I had difficulty learning new words. Furthermore, my lack of social skills gave me a hard time in interpreting or deducing other people’s facial expressions through inference or through context. My comprehension skills were also low because of those factors.

The only time I began conversing in English was in Grade One. My teachers imposed an English-speaking campaign in which anyone who spoke a non-English word, phrase, or sentence in all subjects merited a deduction in their quarterly recitation grade, except for Filipino. This barely helped me. It just made me more fearful of speaking up in class.

The only time I improved my English was in late elementary school and high school. I found out that my deficiency in comprehension skills was affecting my other subjects, particularly science and social studies. I couldn’t understand the different reading materials.

I sought help from my speech pathologist, who told me to read books more often so I could learn more words. Unfortunately, I did not follow her advice.

In high school, I continued to seek tutorials from the speech pathologist. She discovered that I tended more to reading technical and informative books or articles, which was not okay with her. She found out that when I wrote, I sounded like I was writing an encyclopedia entry.

On the other hand, I became more conscious of my skills in English when I reached high school. I not only learned new words but also realized how written English resembled spoken English. This made me want to write more. I also got the hang of note-taking whenever there was a reading task, so that I could understand different selections easily.

The most intense part of my English life was the time when I was about to take college entrance exams at different universities. I was compelled to level up in my grammar and vocabulary. This wasn’t easy. When I took the University of the Philippines College Admission Test, I barely touched the English part of the exam. I didn’t even know how to arrange sentences to form a paragraph. This may be strange to some, but the truth was I never had the chance to practice that all my life, not even with my tutor. My difficulty there was due to my problem in conversing coherently, a problem I’ve had almost my entire life.

The only thing that I enjoyed doing in English during high school was the research paper. It may sound ridiculous to you, but that was the only thing that interested me. I had to follow strict rules when it came to correct note-taking, citing sources, making a detailed thesis and an outline.

When we had this activity during the last semester of high school, I was more eager to learn. I looked forward to the steps in producing a well-written paper even though many of my classmates hated the idea of it.

To me, literature looks broad and detailed at the same time. I often fail to comprehend the selections assigned to me. Instead, I read the summaries written in the internet, then forget them after I’ve submitted the task or project relevant to the assigned text. This was why I hated literature.

My goal now in college is to be able to write sensible essays, understand detailed texts, and express myself fearlessly through straight English. To do this, I need assistance from myself, my peers, my former and current instructors. If I do not achieve my goal, it will be just fine for me because my college course deals mostly with data, sampling and technical writing. I aim to become an actuarian or a statistician, not a writer.

Shaun Benedict A. Gan, 18, finished high school at the

Community of Learners. He is now a freshman at UP Diliman

majoring in statistics.