Thought #1. Practice makes perfect.

Since last summer, my burning ambition is to become fluent in English. As many of you may know there is a famous English saying that goes "practice makes perfect". To achieve my ambition I know full well that I need considerable drive and determination.

After working very hard with Mrs Robertshaw, my extraordinary online English teacher, I managed to get very high marks on the "Cambridge English: First" exam I sat in December. Then, I decided to continue my English journey by attending Mr Palmer English classes. He is probably the funniest and most knowledgeable teacher I have ever had.

Classes apart, I'm constantly exposed to a miscellany of English resources such as podcasts, newspaper articles, TV shows and films, and literature. To improve my vocabulary, I keep a notebook (actually, it's not a proper notebook but a spreadsheet) where I regularly add all the new vocabulary or expressions that I found. Indeed, I can barely catch up with them all, so there is an increasing number of words, expressions, idioms and chunks of language on my waiting list.

A spin-off of my Notebook is the production of memorising materials in the form of flashcards (see my Quizlet profile) and categorised word lists (see my Memrise profile) which I constantly keep up-to-date. This is all very time-consuming but worth doing.

However, I always felt that there was something missing until today. I ‘skyped’ Mrs Robershaw on account of preparing the C2 Certification Exam that I'm going to take in June and she gave me a very useful piece of advice on putting the language in practice. "Why don't you write a blog?" she said. And this is my very first entry.