Brief Introduction

Hi italki partners! My name is Iuri. This text is part of a plan to write about random subjects during 30 days. Before I begin, I have to tell you that this a conscious effort to improve my writing skills. While learning a language, writing is one of the most difficult tasks to do, at least for me. When reading or listening you have an instant feedback that can motivates you to move forward. While speaking too, if your teacher, for example, makes corrections you will know how is it going. With writing though, the process is different. You first write a whole text, so someone can help you with it. Of course, you have to wait until your teacher can read it and take notes, it’s not as instant as the others. To help with this problem, I am going to take advantage of the marvel of technology. That’s why I’m writing in the italki notebook, hoping you guys to can help me. Beyond the dynamic feedback due to this great community, there are other advantages when writing here. First, some mistakes not noticed by someone can get noticed by others, so the process is more accurate. Secondly, it makes me feel so excited that anyone can look at it and come up with great suggestions, so you learn as much as other people comment about the text and/or give you feedback. And thirdly, there are so many experts here from all over the world.
Since it’s just the beginning, I’m going to tell you a little bit about my background in languages. Three years ago, I could hardly say a word in English. Even though I had been studying English for 3 years. My method was not practical by any means. Too much focus in grammar, translation and reading. Listening seemed to be impossible. Not to mention speaking which I was afraid of making mistakes when talking to foreigners. As a result I was not able to communicate well and my abilities were very limited. Then I realized that I had to change how I approached my learning, to make my learning feel more real. I sought for information over the Internet and became more aware of how important listening and speaking were (believe it or not it took me 3 years to realize that). At that time I put my mind that it would be great to go abroad to learn a foreign language. This whole process was the tipping point to find a great way to learn a language. I’m not telling saying that to learn a language you must go to another country, not at all, I’m just telling saying that this event turned out to be a landmark in my studies. But that’s a story for the next text...