As for me, my life - that is my language. Like to many of you, English is not my mother tongue. It is a foreign language to me. When I was a little girl, I was always amazed by kids in a film having a chit-chat in a language that I didn’t understand at all what they were talking about, and yet, I sometimes acted as if I was one of them. Probably, that feeling had driven me having excitement in learning English even though at that time I had no idea whether the film was in English or in another foreign language.
It was my late father who introduced me by chance to English words. He loved reading. For that, in his spare time he went downtown to buy some used-books from street vendors. Someday, my father came home and brought some used books where I found an English book of fairy tales among others. I couldn’t read even its title, for sure, since I was at second grade of my primary school, but I found some interesting pictures in it and some keywords on the outer column of each page. So, I chose a picture and asked my father to read the story about it. I sat down side by side with him and he began to read a full sentence in a deep voice and then gave me its translation. Once in a while he got stuck in the meaning of a word, and so he opened English – Indonesian dictionary in order to figure it out. That was my first English reading session as well as my first experience to know how to use dictionary. Ever since, reading English become our regular agenda whenever my father was at home.