My Psycholinguistic Task

“ Learning from Experiences”

English is my favourite subject since I was in elementary school. In my way to learn english more and more there are so much mistakes that I have made. Actually the more I learn, the more I feel I know nothing, Not only in pronunciation but also in spelling, grammar and some aspect in learning English. The mistakes are uncountable and unmentionable one by one. Here, only several examples that I still remember about those.

This experience happened when I was in elementary school at 5^th grade. If I remember this, it will make me smile! Have you ever heard word ‘angkel’? May be this is so familiar, but if you look for in the dictionary, you can’t find it. Exactly, the word is “uncle” but at that time I just knew how to say that without knew the spelling. So, when my teacher asked me to write it in the blackboard (there was no whiteboard in my school at that time), I just write like I said. It was really embarrassing. It is only one of some words that I just know how to say without know the written, well.

I think the event like above not only happened when I was a child, even until now. May be, because I often listen to the music and watching movies, I just hear and read the subtitle without look for the true way to write it.

Other mistake that I made some years ago is if I asked “Can you speak English?” I would answer “little little” it meant “sedikit-sedikit” in Bahasa Indonesia. But since I’ve studied in IAIN, I know that it is really false, actually I have to say “little bit”. In the same way, when I have to say thanks to someone before, I would say “thanks before”, and once again I made a mistake, the true phrase that I have to say is “thanks in advance”.

Overgeneralizing to say “G” with “J”, example when I say “I agree with you” sometimes I will say  “I ajree with you”, other example, word “program” sometimes I said “projreim”. I always consider like that before, but now I always try to find the true way to say it in the dictionary.

Saying ‘angel’ for side to take photos, the last, i said it like ‘angle’, ‘G’ become ‘J’. that was impact of my mistakes in over generalize to say anything.

Word “ I “ is my first word in English that I have known. I assumed that if I say “ I “, I always add “am for present and was for past tense” as the appropriate to be. The mistakes happen when I make sentence in conditional sentence type II using past tense, I used “ I was” but the right is “ I were”. Exceptional is the most often mistakes that I made because it is not usual to use. Other example that I made using ‘I’ is if I used ‘I’ always used ‘am’ after it, example in sentences, I said “ you and I am……..” the truly is “ you and I are……….”.

I learn English as foreign language, not as second language even lingua franca, so in my opinion it is not a big problem if I make mistakes in the way. Making mistakes, I think, a process of learning. I have sentences which I always remember “a good muslim will never fall in the same place for second chance”, so experience is the best teacher and the experience didn’t need us to face it, but we can learn from the other’s experiences!