I had a very productive day on the other day. For lunch, I met a friend whom I hadn’t met for a while. She is in the exactly same position as I am in (i.e. finished master, switching to psw) so chatting with her is really fun and we can understand each other. She is also a very active woman and stepping forward one by one, so I can get really good affects from her. I’ve heard that “If you stay with negative people, you will feel like nothing works well and eventually nothing works actually. But if you stay with positive people, you can get possitive aura too.” She is exactly a positive person like that. I met a lot of these positive people since I came to London, I really appreciate it.
After the chat with her, I had a meeting with a developer regarding the project we are doing. I’m in charge of technical side. Although it’s still a stage of start-up, I still feel nervous whenever I need to talk to someone whom I meet at the first time. I remembered the conversation with my Japanese friend about the “quality of English”. I mean whether I can speak English in “proper” tone affects how other people react to me. Of course, conversation in English is always more friendly than Japanese which demands you to be very very polite and formal. But still in the U.K., I have an impression that how you behave changes what you get. Perhaps if the person stays nice while I’m talking like a child, it means I’m still just a “guest”.
I have had some meetings with business advisers or solicitors before but I could do nothing. But this time I had to talk about technical issues by myself. As for English skill, I think I need to improve much more. But in terms of a meeting, I could get all the information I needed to get, so I felt a little confidence about it.
Anyway, learning-English-road is long and winding.