Critical Reflections Draft 1

My English Journey

Hi blog enthusiast, before we embark on my personal recount on my English adventure, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Kenneth, I am a freshmen from National University of Singapore, currently majoring in Real Estate. I chose Real Estate largely due to 3 influences. Firstly I have a passion for buildings, I really love the different cityscape and how it enhances the skyline of the country, especially in the night. Next, i was largely influenced by my brother and my cousins who are pursuing a career in real estate related jobs. Lastly, I wish to one day be able to own a piece of real estate myself (just a dream). Moving on, I'll recount on my english journey.

When I was younger, I spent most of my time with my grandmother. We would usually converse in Hainanese, which I believe that it is a lost form of communication in today's Singapore. I am really grateful for her teaching, she had imparted lots of moral values that made me who I am as a person. Back then most of my friends would converse in chinese and the chinese television programmes were much more interesting back then, thus resulting in the lack of interaction with english.

When I was in secondary school, most of my friends were speaking in english and we started learning the art-based subjects. This was when I realised the importance of English. However I was at the age of procrastination, I chose to ignore it since it was one of my weaker subject, thus I focused on other subjects instead. I was not vocal back then and I could barely substantiate my answers, thus it became a vicious cycle and I began to lie low in class participation. I managed to break the cycle when I was in secondary 3, when I was told by the school that english is a compulsory subject for our result tabulation, however i was already lacking behind others by then. I managed to scrape my english paper with the help of my patient english teacher who stood back on many occasions just to ensure that I could keep up with the rest. I am really grateful for the time and effort he had spent on me.

When i was in Junior College, i tried to place more emphasis on it, however my efforts seemed to be in vain. My results were like the roller coaster trail, at times my results exceeded my expectation, but my scores barely scrape the passing requirement most of the time. I became very doubtful of english and brushed it off as a subjective subject. I started to develop the habit of throwing the dice when it comes to english examinations.

During my National Service, my closest buddy was an undergraduate majoring in law. He is a grammar nazi and scrutinized all our statements, word for word. At times he could be quite irritating, correcting our grammatical errors, but I humbly accepted his advice. I was intrigued, on many occasions, by how he was able to talk his way out of trouble, like how he avoided reprimanding from our superiors and how he claimed credit via talking. Apart from his negotiation skills, I noticed the amount of respect he received from our superiors due to his fluent english. Even though most of us are assigned similar tasks, he never fails to appear the best. Under his influence, I started to develop the habit of reading in order to brush up on my vocabulary, so as not to look too bad when he is around. 

In university, all of my friends speak fluent english and this motivate me to brush up on my english standard, thus I am here with the willingness to learn. Due to my weak english foundation, I often get confused by the grammatical errors so I hope I will be able to correct such errors.