Why a blog now?
“Say, V,” a Brazilian friend of mine said today, “why you chose to start an English blog now, instead of starting one when we were in Vancouver? I’d certainly would read it back then.” Well, it’s not easy to explain, but I’ll give my best shot.
As many native English-speakers will tell you, I’m not exactly the best writer. My grammar sucks, I have serious deficiencies using tenses, and my formal education can be summarized as “Total school time: four months.”
In fact, it’s not that I hadn’t had formal education. It’s just that the one I had was very deficient to begin with: three years in Secondary school (before high school) that were horrible, and what I learnt back then was enough to put me in English 2A. I learnt the language with the help of an old dictionary computer manuals and videogames. Fast forward fifteen years later, when I took a test that placed me in Advanced English, two more months in school where I didn’t learnt anything I didn’t already knew, and that’s it. For example, it wasn’t until I started to study in Vancouver that I learnt what a tense was. And to make things worse, my vocabulary isn’t even consistent. I mix and use Canadian American and British expressions and words without a defined pattern (although I try to use Canadian English as my dialect).
I really started to learn English when I was living in Canada. In fact, that was the first place when I learnt what a phrasal verb was and what was the difference between in, on and over. Also, I learnt that phrasal verbs ain’t exactly understood unless somebody has already told you what the fuck they are supposed to mean. Hell, I didn’t even know how to write a simple formal letter because nobody taught me that before.
Therefore, as I was living in Vancouver I was actually learning a lot of new stuff, and I knew I wasn’t able to write fluently in English. As a matter of fact, I started this blog to force me (me!) to learn how to properly write and express my ideas in English. I’ve learnt to read, now it’s time for me to write. And I started this conversation club to allow more and more people to learn how to communicate effectively in another language. If you know how to correct my mistakes, feel free to let me know. I’ll learn, and other people too.
Now, my friends, you know the truth. Kind of. See you this weekend.
Cheerio, partners.
V.
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Comments
I’ve had english classes since elementary school, i , however, did not understood a thing till about late Junior High when i met the internet, far from spending my days in latin-chat and looking for animated gifs, i actually did research on important topics such as, porn, manuals for home-made explosives, even one for a home-made Nuclear bomb, hacking e-zines, not only did i learn english with the late ones, but also C code, the regular conspiranoia thats everywhere on the web, and i’m proud that even at such a tender age i was able to tell apart the nonsense. all the cool stuff was in english, back then the spanish www was limited to just whatever terra networks was hosting, mediocre homepages exalting the virtues of whatever TV series was popular at the time, and some random entries about one’s life that were the ancestors of today’s blogs.
I have finally achieved a sufficient level to read kanjis and i’m starting to crawl in the japanese WWW, which is incredibly weird, and the layout of the websites is awful… for instance: http://www.2ch.net/ … this is the single most influential forum in Japan, every japanese who owns a computer has an account here, yet the page looks like it was made with yahoo pagebuilder or worst. frontpage…
“Crawl”? You need to lurk moar. Anyway, as any ni channeraa knows, 2channel is powered by a home-breed software very similar to that I use in lidercorp.org. Futaba Channel, I think it is, but not quite sure, released that software, aptly named Futaba, and then someone wrote Wakaba, the software I’m using, based on Futaba’s software. Anyway, right here and right now I lurk in the cespool of the internets, 4chan’s r9k. I spend most of my days chilling out, maxing, relaxing all cool and all shooting some b-ball outside of the school when a couple of guys said we’re up in no good, started making trouble in my neighbourhood. I got in one little fight and my mom got scared and said You’re moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air.” I whistled for a cab and when it came near the license plate said “fresh” and had a dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare but I thought “now forget it, yo, home to Bel-Air!” I pulled up to a house about seven or eight and I yelled to the cabby “Yo, home, smell you later!” Looked at my kingdom, I was finally there to settle my throne as the Prince of Bel-Air.