english as first language.
Monday, November 27, 2006
do you feel it's difficult to communicate in English, especially for the people who just came directly from Indonesia especially from national school which implement Bahasa Indonesia as their primary language?
I do. When I first came to Singapore, my english was terrible (although it's still terrible till this time, LoL). I couldn't understand the lecture and couldn't make effective conversation with the Singaporeans at worse. moreover, the singlish accent added with some mandarin words language give me a confusion what they're trying to communicate with me.
Therefore, I tend to make a conversation with the Indonesians. But I realize it won't improve my english skill. I tried to make some friends with Hongkong, Phillippine, and Thailand people whose English skill is better than mine, assuming that I will develop my 'good' english by making friends with them. Some Indonesian people graduated from International school such as JIS (Jakarta International School) and SIS (Surabaya International School) have american accent English (it's nice to have an english with american accent while you are in Singapore). Their English skills are absolutely much better than mine.
However, I'm neither blaming my school nor my country for the inferiority of my english skill. Rather, I regret that I 'underestimated' the art of communicating with english. When I got 1800+ for my SAT, I thought that my English is 'good enough', but unfortunately, it is not. SAT is just a 'formality' test. You just need to a lot of exercises and you will be able to master it. Nevertheless, when I first took ELW (English language workshop), a workshop which is especially for foreigners whose native language is not english, the instructor told us not to write paper with SAT Composition style. Composition in SAT is only 25 minutes but university research paper takes more than that.
I remembered he said: "Don't write 'In conclusion', 'To conclude' or any other similar phrase to conclude your essay, the readers are smart enough to know that you are writing conclusion in the end of your essay". (since we usually write it in the conclusion paragraph of SAT essay)
The math section of SAT does help us to understand mathematics language in english. The spotting error part is only a matter of practising. The critical reading part? no comment.. I took 3 tests and the result for crit reading are 510, 500, 490 out of 800. Yeah, it's degrading, LOL!
I should have read more article in English and ultimately speak English with other people. But, could I? haha.. *dasar malas*
posted by edgar @ 11:26 PM,
1 Comments:
-
At 12:44 PM,
said...
-
ya gar.. banyaklah nonton film hollywood.. beneran ngaruh loh.. terus baca buku inggris.. yang ngepop aja deh.. reader's digest gitu.. ato baca comic strip.. dilbert..hehehehe..
