MISTAKES - Learning for Life

I don't even know where to start. I am really upset about myself. Probably the best thing to start with is to tell the story from the beginning on.

In my English class we had the pleasure to write a letter to Fiona (our English teacher) about everyone's individual type of learning a language. This letter was supposed to

help her to get a better understanding of our learning type. I thought I tried my best and wrote a nice letter. Well, as we got  our letters back I was totally upset about myself. Fiona didn't correct my whole homework because I had a bad spelling mistake. Such a mistake could be easily avoided by a spellcheck. I was so mad at myself because this is definitely not a mistake what should happen and it was my own fault. Therefore my work was graded as failed. Actually I think it is not bad if you fail because it means you need to improve your knowledge. In such a case the grade is not due to my writing skills it is because I am to stupid to spellcheck my own work again. The consequence right now is that I will read over every single piece of my work at least twice in order to guarantee that mistakes of this kind will never happen again. The only thing I can do for now is to let you guys have a look at the improved version of my letter.

Dear Fiona

I want to tell you more about me as a language learner. First of all it is important for you to know why I am so ambitious to learn languages. To know different languages it is important to understand and communicate with people across the world.  This is essential due to the fact that globalization has changed the demographics of society and made the world seem smaller than ever before. My motivation to learn English and Russian is to work in an international company once.

For me it is important that if I make mistakes, someone corrects my writing otherwise I will repeat the mistakes over and over again. These mistakes should be corrected by the language teacher to give the student the opportunity to develop one's language skills quickly. I had a bad experience in high school with my language teacher. My English teacher has never corrected a single piece of my work. I guess that is part of the reason I have difficulty expressing myself in the right way.

My goals for this term are on the one hand to know more vocabulary and on the other hand to improve my writing style. Both I need to develop myself in order to be able to express myself in a better way. To achieve this goal I read the BBC News or the New York Times everyday and try to kind of remember all the new vocabulary. Moreover I am going to order some English novels instead of reading German novels as usually. Beside that I definitely want to write or even skype more often with my friends abroad. I hope you got an idea about me as a language learner.

With best wishes