I struggled with English for several years. In middle school I studied French and in high school I hated my English teacher so much that I spent more time trying to rebel against her than studying the language. While I don’t regret rebelling against her bizarre teaching methods (I was quite good at that!)…I did regret not understanding how powerful English was earlier in my life.In the last two years of high school English finally decided to challenge me the right way: in that period I was building a site called P2PZone and 90% of our industry news were written in English. Ugh. I spent several hours with a dictionary trying to translate a few articles to Italian. I still hated all of that, but over time I started to appreciate English more as I spent less and less time memorizing words and expressions.
With Ilblog.it and HostingTalk I had to come back to it and do my best.
Today I speak and write in English every day. I run an American company and my colleagues are english native-speakers, our customers are English speakers and, well, everything I read is usually in English.
It took me some time to get here.
A few people really made the difference for me (thank you guys!), they helped me with continuous corrections, very candid feedback and ultimately being quite firm on how important all of this was for me. It’s not about English per se. English doesn’t have the beautiful sounds and grammar constructions of languages that come entirely from Latin, but it will open you the world’s doors, whatever you decide to do. You can just get and do more of everything.
I am very far from speaking perfect English, but I love learning new expressions and constantly improve my pronounciation.
Now, every time I leave the US and I spend more time in Italy, I do miss speaking English a bit.