Re: How hard was it for you to learn english as a non english speaker.
Aside from school, the first person who actually taught me English was a 75 year old blind grandmother, who used to be a translator for Americans after world war 2, and was open for teaching at that time. At 7, I started learning. At 8, I was able to differ verbs and basic grammar which was far beyond people my age generally could do. At 9, after I understood comparative and superlative, her hearing suffered, her health deteriorated and she could no longer teach me. I relied on school for years after, but stood out as one of the skilled ones. The first English competition I entered was something about speech regarding my family, where I had to talk about what my parents do, who i lived with, you know, family stuff. I didn't get to be the actual competitor from my school, because there was someone better than me. But as a skilled blind who somehow stood out and actually did pretty good, I was to perform on stage before the provincial competition round. After that, I didn't have any English related event until I was 14.
I was a pretty tribe attached and i was influenced by some conservative people that I loved and held on to my tribal language and culture to the core, so I pretty much disregarded English in spite of being kinda good at it. In my middle to high school, there were two subjects students could take to further their interest. I usually took music or language because I felt I was good at it and I liked these things. At 14, there was an English class I took and there was a test that students needed to group and sing West Life's song, "My Love" in front of the class. Despite of me skipping the test and lost my marks that time, I still got A. That song made me feel more attached to English, but it still didn't completely catch my interest.
At 16, I selected English, Thai and social studies as my main focus for high school I was, no kidding, the only person in the class who could actually speak English. Whenever there were class events that involved English and meeting up with English people, teachers or exchange students or whoever, the class would push me to participate for them. Some teachers took special interest in me and tried to encourage me to better my English, something I still appreciate til today. I didn't even need effort to get good grades. It just came naturally for me. Events after events made me feel more comfortable using English. Then I started getting into games and muds. People who knew me back then knew I had skype but was too shy to do voice call and didn't feel like I could do well enough, so I lied about my microphone being broken and stuff. I broke my shyness when I accidentally called someone who ended up being in a relationship with and destroyed my innocence in love after.
I still don't consider myself any good now, never to be honest. Without support, I probably wouldn't get as far as this. I always need rooms for improvement, and try to be better at it as much as I can. I do translation work from time to time, each time feeling like I do crap work and I'm not supposed to do it because I suck. English isn't hard imo. It's just...complicated and has too many things to be confused about as a non-native speaker.
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