I may be a late bloomer in the English language scene

One of my close friends said she is of the opinion that my Avatar 2 review (which I posted yesterday) shows I am improving "immensely" after losing touch with English language due to my 7-year hiatus from writing. She also said that I am reaching my previous level of "great" writing such as the movie reviews I wrote for Baiskoaf blog.

The truth is I am a late bloomer when it comes to the use of English language: I read my first book only after entering grade 8.

But once I took to reading, I devoted a lot of my free time to it, making fast transitions from Enid Blyton, Franklin W. Dixon, Carolyn Keene to Sidney Sheldon.

However, it was only during my grade 11 English literature class that I achieved a noteworthy jump to really coming to grips with writing (both prose and poetry) that could be defined as challenging.

As another close friend recently opined his view that we might need to be properly trained in order to understand and appreciate the classics, it was only in my Advanced Level English literature classes that I finally began to understand the "deep" stuff encased in classical literary works such as the prize winning books.

Another close friend yesterday asked me whether I still find any difficulty in expressing my thoughts in English language in exactly the way I want and the answer is "yes" even if I feel I am improving.

I say this because I faced some problems in expressing myself eloquently in my blogposts "Listening to Corallium's 'Vinavi' time after time" and "No. I don't think this is a work of art".

It was difficult to go through a physical dictionary, thesaurus or encyclopedia in my younger days. In contrast, now that we have smartphones and the Internet, not to mention Wikipedia, it is so easy to look up both words and phrases that we come across as new. I have to say that I made a great leap in understanding English language and English literature because Googling has made it so convenient to learn and self-educate.

Yet, I feel there's a lot of new vocabulary to learn, and I realized this when I recently started reading Russian author Leo Tolstoy's book "War and Peace". It contains more than half a million words (587,287 words to be exact) in 1,200 pages!

Therefore, I guess I would need more time and writing more stuff until I can return to my former form. In the meantime, I will allocate ample time to read - and write, including my thoughts, which I plan to regularly blog.