This is the day fifty six of my English journaling but this is the first time I write on Journaly. It feels a little different, not sure how different, I guess a mixed feeling of nervousness and excitement.

I basically did not a fan of writing, at least not writing in English, because I had terrible experience with English writing 4-5 years back. I didn't realize that all output skills were hard, and they required a much higher level of learning, which was applying and above (according to Bloom's Taxonomy). So I felt stuck every time and there were countless rules that I had to follow, I was working alone with my writing at the time and I thought English was my greatest enemy. I fought against it, I lost every time, and I surrendered. Then I quickly turned on one of my favorite show — Friends and watched it extensively, and I moved on with my life. I think there was no single book that taught beginners how to write, everything was about IELTS, about TOFFEL, or some other same shits. I was poor and I only made enough to get by, so anything that came with a fee, I couldn't afford.

But now I realized that I had not put in enough the hours for it and of course it would be bad. Later, I came across the idea that someone said that, "You not consumer enough to produce, " that can be the root problem. Was that the problem? I don't know. That was the past.

Now, I decided that I will become a fluent English speaker because I had it enough. I have had enough experiences with writing something or saying something but not sure it right or wrong, and I have stuck at intermediate level for so long. So I decided to pick up where I left off but I felt kind of lost a couple of months back. I basically didn't know where to start and I was about to do the same thing I used to do. But I felt it was not right, I still felt stuck somehow. I binged watch a ton of TV shows, stand-up comedies, Youtube videos, I understand just about 80% of them but I felt my speaking and writing have not improved a single bit. On the attempt to find solutions for my weaknesses, I came across a video of a guy on Youtube, he said something like, "You did not produce enough, if you want to improve your output you have to shift focus from consuming to producing". It hit me deeply, that dude was right, I have not produced a single piece of writing or practiced my speaking, how could I be good at those things. And let me quote a comment on Reddit, it should went like this "Can you play guitar just by watching someone play guitar? You can't right? Same with English, if you want to good at speaking, you need to speak more, and if you want to write better, you have to write more." That was brilliant but also common understanding. I did it with my swimming, I did the same thing with guitar playing, why I don't think of that or at least I forgot about it.

Right. I had the right mindset but how to do it? I did some research myself, well, not really, I asked chatGPT to do it (shame on me when I said "I did some research"). Turned out, they conducted studies about this, L1, L2 kinda things. The response from chatGPT was long but basically it supported the guy on YouTube, and the research from Swan or Swain stated that, "Comprehensible input is not enough to reach fluency, lack of output causes a lot of mistakes. Output focus will support for a better grammar and form noticing.." I just wrote what I remember. And it totally right, I consumed thousands of hours of English content if not millions, I listen to Friends as a podcast, I can say exactly at what scene who does what things, but my speaking was a disaster and my writing was a piece of mess.

So I haven't mentioned about the methods right? So, I just did what chatGPT recommended me, writing English journal, I did some drills on grammar entry (topic) or maybe just simply grammar that I felt fuzzy. I felt pretty good about this stuff, more confident and more accurate, of course it is far more from the level I expected but I have improved exponentially. I will get there someday. What about speaking? I have picked up a habit that I would speak after lunch for about 15-30 mins. I felt more confident about this. But at this point in time I have not done any correcting or analyzing just yet, neither for writing skills nor speaking skills. I wanted to build strong habits first, as I learned from the book "Atomic habits", I wanted to lay the foundation first then I will start to recording, analyzing, and correcting.

"Why did you post it up here?" one may ask. Well, I knew this site (I wonder if I can call it a platform) from the site refold.la, they recommended me can get feedback from other languages learners. Although I have not started correcting my writing yet but I planned to do it in the next few weeks or so (I recommend that if you have not heard about that site, you should check it out, they provide in deep instructions about how to learn a language). So I would very very much appreciate any help from you guy and I am very much to discuss more about topics that you and I both enjoy.

I know I have a long way ahead, but the hatred of being stuck at one level has beaten anything else. I want to be fluent once and forever. I will do more exercises in the future and I have done quite a few. I promised myself that I will shift my focus from consuming to producing, and I have done it.

Learning English is my lifelong endeavor.

I looking forward to hear more from you, thank you for reading.