My new teacher divided English Skills in two main groups: Receptive Skills and Productive Skills. Nice clasification, I thought. Receptive Skills include activities such as Reading and Listening. You receive English trhough all your senses. Eventhough you have to make an effort to percive it and understand its meaning, they are not as mind demanding skills as the productive ones. Productive Skills are Writing and Speaking. Perhaps, the two most difficults activities to learn when you are learning a different language. By the way, for most people, writing and speaking are even the most difficult skills to learn in their own native language. Therefore, when you are learning a foreign language, you have to double you efforts. Anyway, writing and speaking are always difficult because these skills demand high concentrarion, coming up with ideas, organizing sentences, clarity in the message, etc.
No matter how hard you try, they will always be like a nightmare. However, keep practicing and do not give up.
Below, my practice:
What I like and What I dislike about English
Many people think that learning a new language is a difficult, even boring, task. Therefore, they usually give up as soon as they start. However, form my point of view, learning a new language is an amazing activity and, from my experience, English is the best language in the world to learn. I have been studying English since I was 8 years ols and I can tell you what it means to me: what I like about it and what I dislike about it.
I love English. What I like the most about English is that, from my point of view, it is an “easy to learn language”. Firstly, English has fewer verb tenses than Spanish. While in Spanish I need to learn more than eighteen different grammatical verb forms, in English I only have to focus on three: the past, the present and the future. It is much easier to remember them, as well. In addition to this, I believe English is easy to learn because it has some many words with Latin, French and German backgrounds that many English words are similar to Spanish words. Therefore, as they share the same roots, it is easy to recognize them.
However, not everything that shines is gold. There are two things that I do not like about English: its slang or idioms and the fact that it has a narrow range of vocabulary. I hate slang. I hate it because it is only used by native speakers in colloquial speacheesand you are always unable to undestand it. I do not like slang because as I use English as a second language, I prefer to keep formal structures to make communication easier and more understanding. The second fact that I do not like about English is that I believe that its range of vocabulary is not as wide as that of Spanish. For example, if I wnat to say “I love you” to someone, I have only one expression in English: “I love you” while in SpanishI can say it by two ways: “Te quiero” and “Te amo”. I strongly believe that Spanish gives you more synonys, alternative words and different phrases to express all your feelings, in all their variations.
To conclude, eventhough I do not like English slang and I cannot have a wide range of English vocabulary, I consider English the best language to learn. I know that not everyone will agree with me, but Englishi is an easy to learn language and this is the best of it.
PS, What I like and dislike about English Courses is that they make us write about this kind of topics.
