Praticing english & being introvert

Posted: 3/2/2023

Praticing English

One of the best ways to learn a new language, is praticing, you can study all the concepts, grammatical rules and maybe even a wider vocabulary. You WILL need to pratice it, praticing is part of studying a new language, and with some regular pratice, even your brain can benefit from learning a new language. Ok… That’s nice, but how I can pratice it?

I’ve already took some local english courses when I was younger (and had more free time), and by far the best way to pratice was interacting with someone, and I confirmed for myself again working with international projects, as some months in my speaking skills was increased significantly compared when I was barely speaking anything, was far from perfect, it’s pretty obviously that I’m not a native speaker, but after some weeks people was understanding me better, and the best part is that I was improving listening aswell. Being in a meeting with people from different part of world, was a challenge at first, because when you studying, the audio usually is clean, the person is speaking slowly, or you’re talking with someone that are learning like you, but in real world people have bad connection that makes the audio quality not ideal, people have different accent, people have vocabulary and even expressions different from what you’re used to deal in a learning environment, and while we are processing all of this, we still have the meeting content to “digest”, in my case as a IT infrastructure enginner while I’m struggling to translate what people are saying in my head, at same time I need to think about solutions about a problem or even anwser back more information. It’s incredible how our brain can handle all of this mess, and the good part is: we still learning in all of this proccess. So like I previously said, I was improving a lot using english in a daily basis, and I started to think that praticing in real world “environments” are far better to learning a new language. But, unfortunely, I quitted the job and at my actual job, I’m dealing with my native language, so I’m not praticing english anymore, so, what about now?

Being a Introvert

When I back working in my country again, I cabe back my previously state as “barely” speaking english, I still consume media (both video and text) in english format, but I do not write or speak like I was forced to do in a daily basis because of work, while I’m very satisfied at my current work, and it’s cool to focus at my tasks and meetings without the mental effort to translate everything, I still want to keep improving my english because for me it’s one of the best ways to communicate with everyone from anywhere, is a necessary skill at my work, is a way to learn new cultures, and it’s one of the most spoken languages in world. Ok, now here comes my problem, how I can pratice being a introvert?

It’s kinda of weird, i’m usually labeled as someone that speaks a lot, but if I don’t know the person, or I’m at a environment with a lot of strangers, I can literally be found hours without speaking a word. And this apply to social medias aswell: Twitter is know as a toxic social media, but I admit that the tech bubble are nicer, I even make some real life friend there! But I still struggle to interact with random people, and I don’t even have made a friend from outside my country yet! Mastodon came with a cool idea of descentralized microblogging, and people there are nicer, but I still in a server from my country, so the posts that I see are from my language, I follow some people and hashtags that bring a nice ammount of english content, and even had some interactions, but I feel it’s not sufficent yet, and to be honest, I just accepted that I take some time to make some friends, and I’m okay-ish with it! But how I can pratice if I don’t interact with people? I’ve tried some discord guilds, even Duolingo, but nothing really worked for me, what I should do?

The solution

Now we are in the part that sucks of this post, I don’t have a solution yet, but I can bring what I’m trying to do:

• Posting at my social media in english, trusting that the algorithm can somehow give me some reward about it.
• Creating this website, with the blog feature, so I can force myself to write in english, and maybe meet some people with my content
• Creating content! The problem is: I don’t feel confident with creating content, I don’t feel about what I can say, this is my first attempt trying to create anything
• Trying to be more social as a person, but I admit, it’s kinda hard, when I interact with someone unknown, I just feel nervous, I don’t know why, but it’s how I work.

Now I ask you, dear reader, do you share same problems that I have? What you did about it? I would love to hear about you! As this blog don’t have a comment section, you can use any contact method I provide in this website menu!