Here I am to my second post!

Once you already know what is my objective with this blog, I would like to introduce myself and let you know a little of my life story as an English student.

As a child I had been introduced to English as a subject only in the secondary school. Although I had never face problems with bad grades, the lessons on my firsts years as an English student was very low quality traditional lessons. Subsequent years continued in the same way. To be honest, in my first 7 years (until I finished High School ) English was only one more secundary subject in my schedule. Those years left me only some grammar rules, a small vocabulary and a bad pronunciation of these. I did attend a lot of English class in those years, but they wasn't really very effective. If I had to state something good about my proficiency level after High School, I would say I was prepared to understand some very basic written texts. When I was preparing this post I came across the ILR scale and I think by this scale I was positioned at ILR Level 0 – No proficiency.

Only after I went to College English Language had been around in my life as a professional need. Back then I was 18 years old already. I knew I was in debt, but I didn't do much about it. Through the following 3 to 4 years I only improved my vocabulary marginally on a on-demand basis. Obviously the pronunciation also have been improved a little. I was already capable of read and study from technical books with the minor help of a dictionary to look up some new words I usually came across. Fortunately I always was concerned about learning new words and terms.
At this time I was already very confortable with english written textbooks to my ordinary college courses.

After I graduate, I started worrying about my poor English skills. I knew I would never be a good enough IT professional if I didn't get fluent in English Language. Or at least a limited proficient in the four dimentions: Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking. At the same time, I also decided to apply for a Master's course. Although a Master's course demands more responsibility than a undergraduate course, it is usually less time consuming. Then, once I got a little more available time as I wasn't more enrolled in so much subjects, I finally got enrolled in an English Course and started to study in a hard way. It wasn't really so hard, but you understood me. It was in late 2009.

Now I am a 29-years-old, postgraduate professional with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Distributed Systems. I do believe I have improved my English skills a lot in the last five years, but I know I didn't do my best. Actually, I didn't study in a systematic way in the last 3 years, but I kept involved with the English language, trying to write some academic papers, reading English news and English web articles in a daily basis and watch and listening to a lot of English content. But it wasn't enough for me to get confident to express myself and even for having a natural conversation when it was needed.

It's time to put the excuses aside and do some efforts to get confident. I hope this blog helps me. Let's do it!

Hello everyone!

Have you ever thought why is english so hard to learn? Me neither. But I feel it.

Obviously I am not talking about the very basic of the language but about its subtleties in form and pronunciation. How is hard to get confident when we had to speak or write in a natural way.

This blog is my ultimate effort to learn english. At least to write and speak fluently before an immersive learning experience. What it will be? I don't know yet but I promise I will let you know as soon as I decide/discover/experience it.

So join me in this journey and feel free to correct/judge/swear me in the comments.