Reading ≠ Good English

*≠ means 'not equal to' ... I think*

Adults always say things like
"Must read more, then your English will be better!"
Or in an ironic way
"Boy ar, read more then English only will good mar."
Yea, I don't see you guys reading =/

Anyway,
Before I start,
I just want to say that I never said my English was very very good,
Even though some say that.
My English, in my humble and honest opinion,
Is just good,
Well,
I can't be a hypocrite and say it's terrible -.-
But it definitely has a lot of space to improve.

Back to the topic,
As I've mentioned,
Reading doesn't necessarily improve your English,
It all depends on HOW you read it.

I have this friend,
Let's call him Ian.
I'm not being mean or anything,
But it is true.
He almost read the whole library in my school,
Almost all the English books.
(Yes, it is possible, judging by the size of our library =/)
But the strange thing is,
His English doesn't seem to be good at all.
Of course I'm not saying his English is utmost terrible or what,
But he does a lot of mistakes that an avid reader should not make.

Then again,
I'm not saying I don't make any mistakes at all,
I'm trying so hard to show that my point here is not to show off =.=

Just now,
A thought just struck me,
It was the way he reads.
He reads very very fast,
And I mean very fast.
He can finish a whole Harry Potter book in 3 days while I'll take a few months,
Yes I'm a slow reader.
I noticed that he just reads through everything,
But for me,
I noticed the reason I read slow is because I read it out in my mind,
And I read back sentences that seem confusing to me.

Okay let me list it out,
1. When I read, I read slowly. Well, it's a story book to be digested slowly, not something that I need to rush through.

2. I read it out in my mind, not those speed reading that people are teaching these days. I think that this helps me in my grammar, for example when to use what articles (an, a, the) or plural and singular forms. It helps in a sense that after reading a sentence, it either sounds right or wrong, not really following the grammar rules accordingly.

3. I read some sentences again and again, either because it was the way of the sentence that confused me OR it was because I saw some word that I seldom see. Of course, I'm not THAT hard working to look up that word in the dictionary, but reading the sentence a few times help me to make a guess about what it's talking about.

I guess that sums it all.
Improving writing skills,
Well I do take tuition classes for English,
But the main point of it is like a place for me to test out new things.
I can also do that when I'm blogging,
But the down side of it is that there isn't anyone here to correct my mistakes.
In tuition,
I can write anything that I think it's correct and see what my teacher says about it.
Of course,
A good teacher is important too.
School,
I'll try to write my best instead of experimenting new ways or writing.

I still remember taking a loooooooooooooong time to finish a book,
One thing is that I don't read continuously for a long time,
Because I'll get sleepy =/

Even the girls in my class mock me for reading a Chinese novel for so long.
The same thing goes for that,
But my Chinese isn't as good as my English of course,
Because it doesn't really apply over there and I don't really read Chinese books.
Oh ya, a lot of girls are TERRIBLE,
They had to come by every 5 minutes just to laugh at how slow I read,
Amazing.
They even complain about my pencil colouring when it was obviously not THAT bad.
Sheesh, girls.
Well, most of them, not all :D

Thanks for reading till here,
I know not many people actually like reading long and boring posts,
But I just had to post.

-Kritz