Re: What Should I Do Next?

Hi, Mr./Ms. Red Diamond

It's said that there are four fundamental skills in English, reading, writing, speaking, and listening. In my opinion, each of these has fairy independent aspects in learning, even though they are connected one another as well as with your own English knowledge such as vocabularies, grammatical terms, common sayings and phrases, various sides of cultural fundamentals in English speaking area, etc. So, if what you've done to learn English is mainly extensive reading and you've had less time for speaking or listening, it's quite natural for me that you feel you can't speak or listen English well.

Also I always have to think that we Japanese lack the amount of input English. Although it's a quite familiar idea among most of extensive readers as well, but even now, I sometimes can't help thinking it. But, you've already read more than ten million words! Actually, that's about twice the number of my own. I'm sure that experience of yours has made the sense of live English put down roots deep inside yourself and you can step outside for further learning.

Speaking of taking some classes in English school according to fomer posts, I totally agree with you. Add to that, my suggestion is to take time for writing English in daily basis, not every day but at least twice or three times a week. You know, conversation is an affair in a very moment so that you have to think quickly. But writing on your own allows you to consider something in English at your preferable time basis. It would aid in disciplining for considering things in a way of English and become a great help for learning conversation. Hopefully, you'll be able to take corrections on your writing with native speakers. I hope you can ask the teachers in English school.

By the way, I've been voluntarily making corrections on English diaries which are written by other Japanese people for more than half a year. It's been a incredible help for my learning English, so I've kept making efforts to continue it. Through this experience, I often encounter strange expressions, which are considered that the writers must have written them with a way of Japanese language's thoughts. Sometimes it's hard to tell what they mean without Japanese translation. Even I myself still make this kind of mistake! Therefore, I have to say this problem has some deep roots.

My last suggestion is to do whatever you feel necessary to do for further learning like a little bit of this and a little bit of that, especially related to speaking and listening. In my opinion, learning English is really like ascending spiral curves and these things often seem to have complimentary effects to improve your English one another. The thing is, you can stop doing one thing if you don't like it, nor feel like it's important, and then move on to the others. If you feel great during doing something, you can keep doing it. But please note that to keep feeding live English to yourself is a key to fruitful learning since we're not native speakers. So if you feel something you're trying to do is bothering your extensive reading, you'd better stop it and re-consider.

Good luck!