Keep Going Is Very Important!

Hello there! How have you been so far?

It’s been a while since I posted my latest blog entry. I am sorry for the delay again. I had been in Italy to make my dreams come true! I will write about my studying abroad in Italy on my other blog later. Please check it out if you are interested in what I did.

Today I should say I want to show off what I did a bit because I have been writing journal entries in English almost every day for ten years! I started writing something in English on the 15th of November in 2008 on Lang-8 (It is a langauge site, mainly to improve our writing skills.). Since I was in Italy this month, I couldn’t check out the date.  Today I posted my 3138th journal entry!!! Woo Hoo!

Of course, it was not easy at all. First, I started learning conversational English to study abroad in the States to take many porcelain painting classes. I don’t count how many classes I had taken, but I had kept going back to the States every year for eight years. I sometimes stayed there for six months! ( I can’t stay there straightly for 6 months, so, I stayed there for two months, went back to Japan and stayed there for two months again, went back and stayed there for another two months.) I really do appraciate my husband and daughter who have supported me a lot to make my dreams come true! I also do appreciate my American friends who have supported me to let me stay at their houses or teach me English!! Thanks to them I have learned American culture which relates to their language a lot.

I think writing in another langauge helps our reading skills a lot. In ten years, I can come to read more advance books in English. I have read 310 books in English and am still reading 8 books now. I also think writing skills helps our thinking skills. While keeping to write something in English, I think I have improved to think something what I want to say in English. It really helped my conversational skills. I can respond English immediatly, write something in English immediatly and I don’t translate what I want to say or write in English from Japanses at all. I read books in English without translating Japanese as well. You know, conveasations are going through so fast and if you can’t catch up with them, you don’t understand what people are talking about. You have to understand the conversations right now in their langauge without translation. I think writing journal entries helped to improve my such skills a lot.

I know my written English is not perfect enough. So, I would love to keep writing something to improve them more in English! Even so, I am happy that I could achieve one of my goals that I have set up when I started learning conversational English.

Via learning conversational English, I feel like I have learned life lessons. We can’t build something one day. If we want to complete something, it will take a long time. So, every time I feel like I almost give something up that I really want to complete, I try to say this to myself. I could achieve some goals in English, so I can do anything I want to do!! I think English gave me lots of self-confidence.

Compared to ten years ago, my goals have changed. I need to learn Italian more than English. I want to make my body better ( I am involved in bulding muscle things. Well, don’t misunderstand me. I am not interested in being a bodybuilder at all, lol. ) . Learning Italian and training muscles are not easy for me at all, but I would love to try them out because I know my life is only once! I hope I will be able to keep writing something in English for another ten years and will post another journal entry about this ten years later!!

Thank you for reading! See you around again in two weeks!

-Yumix