Saturday, November 13, 2010

19-July

I spent all day slobbing out in the lounge reading books. I've been reading a lot of psycho-thrillers and medical thrillers recently which I've come to get right into.
It's probably because my mother-in-law used to send me many books by Jonathan Kellerman and other best-selling authors (cos she knows how much I love to read).

By the way, the book I was reading today was 'Carriers' by Patrick Lynch.
Indeed I bought this book 14 years ago.
Back then I was only dreaming about going overseas sometime in the future. With that little hope, I kept studying English without much improvement.

I was just looking at corporate people on the train reading English newspapers with my mouth hung open, and I wished I could read in English like them.
One day I went to a foreign bookshop in Yokohama where I used to drop in every few days and picked up the book because the name of the author sounded familiar.
I took it back home and tackled the first page, couldn't understand a word without a dictionary.

On the first page I still see my old handwriting, showing the evidence of my futile effort to translate it. Just the first page. That means I gave up before turning the second page.

But somehow I held onto this book, took it with me to Australia and years later, I took it out of my bookcase and started reading it again.
My own handwriting shows clearly that even with a dictionary, I wasn't able to get the meaning right at that time. Even at my second attempt, I still struggled so much to read this book which I'm enjoying now, 14 years later.

I still don't think I can read English newspaper without a dictionary, or don't even bother trying unless I find something interesting in there.

That makes me wonder what my motive for learning English was/is.
It certainly isn't for business...it's because I believed that it'd initiate me to the new and exciting world. Maybe I should talk my husband into learning Japanese, which could open the door to whatever he might be missing out. (Just a food for thought.)

If my pursuit for learning English gives me a job, it'd be a nice bonus though...

No comments:

Post a Comment