Until now, I have insisted on English learning for about 98 days. During these days I’ve spent 190 hours in total, which means that I’ve learn at an average of two hours a day.  As a working mother who has a nine-year old boy and a husband who is always busy, I have to spend most of my time in work and family. These two hours are pretty much all I could have for myself.

So here’s the question I’ve been asked a lot lately: “Why do you want to learn English?” An interesting question. Honestly, I don’t have any strong motive for that. My job requires me to do some English writing once in a while, like reports, emails, or newsletters.  However English writing has never been my problem, and I could handle them with much ease.  Besides that I don’t have many opportunities to use English. See, no pressures here at all. Therefore for many years, I’ve accepted the fact that as an English major, my oral English sucks. Really sucks, I mean it. Whenever coming to speak English, I become tongue tied. Like there is a magic switch existed, my mind just shut down and went into a total blank.  But I comfort myself by saying: “You are just shy. You don’t even speak much in Chinese. So what’s the big deal?” We can always find an excuse if we want, aren't we. However, lie is just a lie, no matter how comforting it is. I am an insecurity freak. There is always an inner voice whispering: “You have only one life to live. As a human being, you have to have something you could be proud of, something you are really good at. But what do you have?”  English seems to be the only one left. But it’s not something that I could boast of. If someone says: “Oh, your English is good.” The only reply I could give is “But my oral English is terrible.” How desperately I want to change that. Then finally I decided to give it a try. I took a course from an English Learning APP.  I’ve surprised that I could have persevered for so long.

I guess here I must underline the importance of the team spirit. I joined in several WeChat groups and got to learn several incredible learning partners. They all have a busy life, fully occupied with work, family and social activities. However they all do their best to finish their daily learning—never stop for a single day.  G is like me, also a working mother. Her boy is two year old. We all know how demanding a two-year-old could be. So it’s pretty impossible for her to learn at night. To finish her learning, she gets up around 4 o’clock in the morning. And when she has some free time at work, she goes to the toilet to learn English. Can you imagine that? She averages more time at learning than I do and always stay at top 5 in class (out of 227 students). M is a working father who has a busy job. He usually stays late to learn and has also been remained at top 5. There is only once he failed to do his homework, precisely not failed, just two minutes late. That’s the day when his mother-in-law was ill and went into the hospital. C is a girl who loves travelling. Travelling is also the major purpose for her to learn English. Just like me, she is good at English in other ways except speaking. Once she and some friends went for an international trip, while her friends already used body languages and some broken sentences to express themselves clearly, she had still been struggling in mind to organize the words into sentence. After the trip, their friends said jokingly: “We’ve heard that your English was good!” Just imagine how she felt at that time! I fully understand, because I had been there--many times. To have enough learning for learning, she controls her shyness and study during her commute to work in the street---she walks to the office.  Anyway, with teammates like them, any excuse is just a lame excuse.

Now I have made some improvements. I’ll still try and see what I could achieve in the future.  Perhaps one day I could say it without any hesitation: “ Yes, I am good at English.”