Lycanthropy
[cd=font-family:Special Elite;font-size:16px;color
- 11,037
- Posts
- 10
- Years
- Age 27
- Clan of Fools, Waterdeep
- Seen Aug 20, 2023
"D'aww. So you're just a baby."
That was dropped on me last week, but yes, it's true: here on PC I'm a junior, certainly among the people like the ones who I was in the conversation in which above quote was dropped, who all joined around 2005. I didn't start posting around any earlier than November last year. I grew up a bit old-fashioned, you may say, and didn't use computers much before schoolwork made me too. I found the forum when I heard about ROM hacks and wanted to try it myself too (I bet you've heard that history a lot) and didn't plan to post around much in the first place, but got interested in some sections after a long time of lurking, but that's another story. Aside that, I don't think I was able to join a much earlier or at least not in a state I could contribute anything.
As you might know, I'm not a native English speaker and to be honest I really suck at the language, or at least I used to for a really long time. It started on primary school, I was supposed to have English lessons for two years, but both teachers I had hated the language and I think I've had an immerse total of four or five classes of English in those two years. This got me behind a little already in high school, where English was an obligatory subject for all six years. The focus of the subject didn't please me at all, the vocabulary we had to learn consisted often of pretty useless words, like puffin and jacaranda tree. Those are so terribly specific and I can always look them up if I need to. Grammar was often focused too much on stupid things, like tag questions. Those were repeated continuously and they're not even hard to understand or used that frequently.
Another thing is I have never gamed much or been much on the internet, as I mentioned already, which resulted to only little contact to the language which didn't really motivate much to learn it. My interest mainly focused on the scientific subjects, I have never been the best at languages. I remember myself when I started posting here, just able to share a bit of my opinion in a few sentences not really coupled together. I can hardly imagine that was only eight months ago. I have the feeling my English has improved more in the last year than those other eight together, which gives a good indication how useful they were, considering I don't have had any active English classes in the last year.
The first reason is college, my college started a plan to attract more international students and we are the first year, as experiment, in which half of the subjects are given in English (the Master was in English already) and while I had to get used to it at first, it never provided a real problem to understand. The books are all in English anyway. Second reason, and I can't say which one is the most important, is PokéCommunity. Reading and posting around has improved my skills mainly in writing and thinking in English improved it a little every day.
As English is the language of science, my motivation to learn the language has got a nice boost and this is one of the reasons I'll try to stay active on PC too. In the current Get Together I made my first English call on Skype and although I was pretty nervous, it went fine. I might not be the most active chatter, but I'm neither in real life. Even in face-to-face conversations with friends, I tend to be a listener mainly, I don't know why, but it's my nature I guess and I don't have a problem with that.
So you see, it's possible to rebuild a created failure and transform it into a success. The main drive that is needed is motivation, without motivation you get nowhere. That doesn't just apply to situations like these, but in general. Without it I might not even have been around here and not at all able to write a blog entry of this length with a decent structure. And as I don't see my motivation leaking away any time soon, so you're probably stuck with me for a while.
That was dropped on me last week, but yes, it's true: here on PC I'm a junior, certainly among the people like the ones who I was in the conversation in which above quote was dropped, who all joined around 2005. I didn't start posting around any earlier than November last year. I grew up a bit old-fashioned, you may say, and didn't use computers much before schoolwork made me too. I found the forum when I heard about ROM hacks and wanted to try it myself too (I bet you've heard that history a lot) and didn't plan to post around much in the first place, but got interested in some sections after a long time of lurking, but that's another story. Aside that, I don't think I was able to join a much earlier or at least not in a state I could contribute anything.
As you might know, I'm not a native English speaker and to be honest I really suck at the language, or at least I used to for a really long time. It started on primary school, I was supposed to have English lessons for two years, but both teachers I had hated the language and I think I've had an immerse total of four or five classes of English in those two years. This got me behind a little already in high school, where English was an obligatory subject for all six years. The focus of the subject didn't please me at all, the vocabulary we had to learn consisted often of pretty useless words, like puffin and jacaranda tree. Those are so terribly specific and I can always look them up if I need to. Grammar was often focused too much on stupid things, like tag questions. Those were repeated continuously and they're not even hard to understand or used that frequently.
Another thing is I have never gamed much or been much on the internet, as I mentioned already, which resulted to only little contact to the language which didn't really motivate much to learn it. My interest mainly focused on the scientific subjects, I have never been the best at languages. I remember myself when I started posting here, just able to share a bit of my opinion in a few sentences not really coupled together. I can hardly imagine that was only eight months ago. I have the feeling my English has improved more in the last year than those other eight together, which gives a good indication how useful they were, considering I don't have had any active English classes in the last year.
The first reason is college, my college started a plan to attract more international students and we are the first year, as experiment, in which half of the subjects are given in English (the Master was in English already) and while I had to get used to it at first, it never provided a real problem to understand. The books are all in English anyway. Second reason, and I can't say which one is the most important, is PokéCommunity. Reading and posting around has improved my skills mainly in writing and thinking in English improved it a little every day.
As English is the language of science, my motivation to learn the language has got a nice boost and this is one of the reasons I'll try to stay active on PC too. In the current Get Together I made my first English call on Skype and although I was pretty nervous, it went fine. I might not be the most active chatter, but I'm neither in real life. Even in face-to-face conversations with friends, I tend to be a listener mainly, I don't know why, but it's my nature I guess and I don't have a problem with that.
So you see, it's possible to rebuild a created failure and transform it into a success. The main drive that is needed is motivation, without motivation you get nowhere. That doesn't just apply to situations like these, but in general. Without it I might not even have been around here and not at all able to write a blog entry of this length with a decent structure. And as I don't see my motivation leaking away any time soon, so you're probably stuck with me for a while.
