I realized I'm not good with words and until today I still do not know how to write a valid argumentative essay because I was only taught narrative essay in Secondary school and writing thesis paper in tertiary education. The last time in one of the mods I tried to study hard the "good example" the prof gave us, but the first feedback was "I don't understand a single word you write" and she asked me if I actually put in effort. Feeling kind of sad because I went to sourced out a few thesis papers, reading them line by line from start to end, in total taking 7 days to draft out my arguments and summarized the examples. Thankfully CS3216 doesn't particularly pick on English, so I just write what I think without adding on much to my workload. Especially Application Critique and Mutual Critique. No time for the 7 days thing again.
Technically my English have made great improvements since my Secondary school days. When I was packing my room and randomly reading essays that I have wrote, I realized I couldn't even understand myself. Back then I staggered even in normal conversations, so I kept quiet almost every day and my English teachers recommended I listen to BBC radio. I tried really hard to listen to it whenever I'm free, but it was very tiring and most of the time I could only catch the words "BBC World News". I read a book about listening, language frequency and learning and it inspired me to take up German in my polytechnic education (to try out the science theory even though I really wanted to learn Japanese to watch anime without subtitles). After a year of learning German, on a random day, I went to listen to BBC again and suddenly every word was crisp clear. I was so excited that day I jumped with excitement and told my family about it. It was also around that time I started to be able to converse in decent English. Of course this is a really strange way to relearn English, and I hope I could further improve my English, by learning Russian someday.