Do you speak English?

“English” has taken the world by storming. It has entitled as an “international language” and it has been recognized by many people from all over the world since early century. Learning English is an important and inevitable process in everyone’s life. Many people would have been learning something through books or simply ask their lecturers or parents but to learn English effectively can only be done through practicing.

I was originally from Singapore, which is a country where most of the people communicate to each other using English. However, all of my family members are chinese speakers, so mandarin had eventually become my dominant language. I only communicated in English in some circumstances such as when I was in kindergarden in Singapore.

Unfortunately, things were getting from bad to worse when my parents decided to migrate to Malaysia due to less stressful life, where even less people speak English. Hokkien, mandarin and malay are languages that often used to communicate to each other in this country. No longer, I found out that I was so afraid to speak English and I started to avoid communicating with people who speaks English. 

Fortunately, when I proceeded to the next stage of my education in Disted College in Penang, I met a lot of new friends with different cultural-backgrounds. Most of them were English educated so English was the mother tongue for them. My friends had greatly influenced me to communicate in English. They never criticized or boycotted me after they knew that I’m poor not only in writing skill, but speaking too. They often encouraged and corrected me when I misused some of the words. The efforts that they had put on me and those real-life practices had helped me to overcome my fear to English. Although I had overcome the fear of speaking loudly in English, I found out that there are huge spaces of improvement in some parts of my English such as in the field of vocabulary, grammars and etc.

Speaking skill is one of the most common and required skills for a pharmacist. So I chose English Composition Skills as one of my alternative modules in this semester. I’m looking forward to this ECS programme to improve my weakness in English especially the public speaking and debate. I hope that through this programme, it would be a huge turning point for my English. I believe that practice makes perfect, I need to pratice it every day to polish up my English.