Happy Eid al-Adha

Eid Mubarak, everyone! May Allah bless you joy, happiness, peace and prosperity. I wish you have a very happy Eid with your family. I should have posted this yesterday but I was way too busy lazy.

I'm so grateful that I still have a chance to celebrate Eid al-Adha this year in such a great condition. Alhamdulillah. As we know that Eid al-Adha is an Islamic festival to commemorate the willingness of Ibrahim (also known as Abraham) to follow Allah's command to sacrifice his son. So, basically Muslims (people who follow Islam) will sacrifice an animal, usually a sheep or a goat (if they can afford/have one) on this day. The meat of the sacrificed animals then will be distributed to family, friends, and those who are in need. 

Talking about this reminds me of one of my students (fyi, I've been teaching English to 4-to-8-years-old kid). It was two weeks ago when we were talking about our favorite food as a topic of our lesson that day, I asked this kid what food she likes the most and she said that she likes to eat anything except food that has meat in it. She's the only one who doesn't like to eat meat when most of her friends are fond of fried chicken and meatball. I was wondering and asking why. 
I was completely mesmerized after hearing her answer, she told me that every time she eats meat she feels bad of the animals because they died. I'm 20 and never  think about that, even once in the past 20 years, do I sound so mean here? I like to eat meat, especially when it comes to fried chicken, rendang, sate, etc. and I never feel bad of those dead animals 😭 probably because I see it as a food, I mean it was already cooked, doesn't look like dead animal anymore. 

"English is not an art to be mastered"

I am in a long holiday from university right now and recently spending my almost-12-hours in watching tons of videos in English, watching English movies, listening to podcast in order to improve my listening skill. I'm glad that I can still do these things while laying down on my bed (read: rebahan T_T). I don't feel like I was spending time on studying tho because it's simply just like I'm watching my favorite TV series. Hell yes, learning language is supposed to be fun, right?. So, last week when I was scrolling YouTube trying to find some videos to watch I stumbled on this TED Talks video.

"English nowadays is not really being taught like it’s a tool to play with, it’s still 

being taught like it’s an art to be mastered (to master)"

I did nod a lot when I watched it as I realize that me myself consider English as an art to be mastered and not as a tool to communicate. Spending years on Junior and Senior high school has shaped my attitude toward English like it is today. I had been taught in school that my English is good when I am able to produce sentences gramatically correct and when I'm not capable to do that then my English is not good enough. That's why when it comes to speaking, I just focus on how to express myself perfectly instead of focusing on how to achieve the result. I was thinking on what tenses I should use, how to pronounce the words correctly, get confused if I should use active or passive voice and bla bla bla. I'm so afraid that people will notice my mistakes, I'm afraid of getting judged by them when it is totally okay to make mistakes as they are a part of learning languages. I even tried to talk fast to sound more like a native speaker but ended up the people I was talking to didn’t get the point of what I was saying lol

The second thing I couldn't agree more mentioned on that video is that I tend to listen to people so that I could respond them as they expected me to respond, not because I want to understand them. So here’s the thing, most of us consider listening as the way to get us to be able in giving the best response instead of understanding the content. I know that we do this as we want to be a good listener of theirs, if they’re telling us a sad story we will think how to show our empathy so that they feel we care about them, that we do know how it feels by saying good words to encourage them and otherwise.
When they’re talking about deep thoughts, I was thinking hard to choose my words to reply so I would sound like intellectual one haha. I did it rarely, yeah because I have a few friends to have such a deep conversation. I wish I had more tho. The point is right now I find it important to listen in order to understand people. They don’t need any response sometimes, they just need to be listened. I’d rather to have someone listening to me attentively and give no response than have one who would say words to make me feel good but in fact they don’t really pay attention of what I’m saying.

Well, of course this depends on your purpose in learning English, it will be so much different if your purpose is to pursue your dreams to get a scholarship from university or to get a perfect score on TOEFL/IELTS. Being able to write in perfect (gramatically correct) English is needed.

Hello again?

OMG OMG I was about to abandon this blog since I was so occupied making money haha lol no. I just have plenty of things to do recently and have no idea what to write -_-. 

Now I'm extremely happy that I am back. It has been nine months since my last post, which was on September 2019 and this time we're already in the middle of 2020 hoho time does fly fast, so let me say a late-happy-new-year to you all. I wish the rest of 2020 will bring you more happiness and joy, we've been going through a lot for the first seven months in this year, huh? massive floods in some districts, coronavirus desease a.k.a COVID-19 :(. I do miss the old days where I can hanging out with my friends or my loved ones, go to the movies, have dinner or lunch outside, do things I used to take them for granted without being worried of getting infected by this virus.

Well, I didn't use to do that kind of thing a lot, instead I'd rather to spend my free time watching movies, reading novels, scrolling down timeline, or just lying down in my bed all day long haha, but still this pandemic drives us crazy, some people even lost their jobs, some people get their salary decreased almost 50% than before the pandemic exist, and some even can't go to school or college including me. I'm not saying that I'm longing for having classes after going to work or that I'm longing for my classmates. Nah. Not at all.

I just hate this kind of online-teaching-and-learning thing when I still need to pay full of the tuition fee but I feel like I got nothing in this semester because we (the scholars) were only given the learning materials, we have to learn them by ourselves, which we always ended up grumbling since we don't understand about those whole thing and it's such a boring activity to read power point that has loads of slides, like "I pay for them just to get this thing I could easily find on the internet?'.

OK I'm done, this post is not supposed to be like this. Bye for now everyone, I'll try to keep writing from now on because actually I'm just too lazy to write hiks *tearsrolldownmyface. Wish me luck this time hehe :)