can-do attitude

In ad***ion, if you have any relatives or friends living in native-speaking country for a long while, you should proactively speak in English with them whenever possible, such as on their vacations in Vietnam, via voice chat, etc. Most people who have this advantage simply ignore it. Some are shy to ask their friends to chitchat in English. Some lose confidence in front of people whose English level is higher than theirs and zip their mouths when the opportunity comes. But again, you need to be bold to form this first language habit. I believe your relatives and friends will be willing to help you if asked and sure enough youõ?Tll learn a lot, especially from folks at the same age as yours.
Proactiveness plays a crucial role in the process of forming language habits. This concept, however, is new to most of Vietnamese learners because we are used to being taught from primary school to higher education. We do not really learn a language (or any other subject at school) by ourselves. Then if we cannot master it, we tend to blame teachers for our failure. Of course, it couldõ?Tve been better if we had superb professors help us. But have you ever asked yourself for a change?
BE PROACTIVE - thatõ?Ts the only choice to get rid of the old passive way of learning. Do not follow the wrong track: do only what you are told to and try to digest whatever you are taught as long as itõ?Ts relating to English without judging itõ?Ts right or wrong, important or not, urgent right now or more approriate to learn later. Instead, consider carefully what to learn first among tons of things like speaking, writing, grammar, TOEFL,õ?Ưõ?Ư and particularly select the materials to study, places to hang out, and people to learn from. Same thing to habit number 1, be proactive to immerse yourself in a highly interactive speaking English environment.
Just do it and share with us your experience.
Talk to you later,
Sebastian - Everyday I learn

To Sebatian,
Thank you indeed for your contribution and supports. I''m glad that you joined me to promote can-do attitude, a topic
totally dedicated to giving the members the basic knowledge and motivation they need *****cceed in mastering spoken American English.
To Brit,
Thank you for promoting can-do attitude in your many topics. You are truly a great member and moderator of the boad. I recently read some posts on effective habits for learning English and I was quite impressed. Keep working hard, Brit!
To 101,
How are you doing? Long time no see! I''m sorry that I couldn''t inform you when NEO hosted a few parties a while ago. I hope you are doing fine and will see you soon at our next party, tentatively next week.
To admins, mods and members,
To be frank, the board is going down. I think we need to do something. I am busy but will try my best to help if you guys need support from me or NEO. I might be more available after the second week of October. In the meantime, I''ll probably join the board once a week. Let''s make English club a better place, folks!
Longarm
Have a nice day!

To Britneybritney:
I''m sorry if the content of my post does not fit to Can-do-attitute, so of course it is possible if you could move it to the right folder (you should do it fof the benefits of other members.)
To Mr.. longarm:
Thanks a lot for such interesting and helpful posts. As i''ve just joined EC recently and just now read through several of your posts in Can-do-attitude box, so i''m sure whether my question should be raised here or not. However, please give me a brief answer then either you or brit could move it to the right box. Thanks.
Here is my concern:
Actually, before coming to Japan i prefer British English (BE) to American English (AE) and used to listen to BBC most of the time. I loved BE (and still love it but only British English of those native speakers who graduated from Cambridge).
However, since the time i come to Japan and study at an international university where students are from all over the world and use a variety of English ( Chinese, African, Thai, Singaporean, Australian, Canadian, American English and a lot more), i found that i''m not speaking english with neither British accent nor American accent - my accent is just in between, this is what my international friends told me. How could we name it? Can we call it "Canadian accent??
Looking back on the process of learning english (mostly self-study), i realize that although i used to listen to BBC, i''ve watched quite a lot American movies and love to "imitate" spoken english phrases and sentences.
Now come back to the matter of accent, or simply "pronunciation", i''d love to ask how could one "balance" (control or adjust) his/ her english accent/ pronunciation when he/ she is studying at the same 2 or 3 languages. Is there any possible way to improve english accent while try to "master" the others, say, for instance Japanese?
As Japanese grammar structure is completely different from English. It is the other way around. For example, while in English we say "I go to school" , in Japanese people say "gakko ni iku " or simply " school to go I (often omitted). Besides, the way Japanese think just as same as, if not pretty much similar to, Asian way of thinking; whereas Bristish or American follow their own Western way of thinking. The reason i mention this is that once we could "feel" and grasp the way people think (here, meaning Japanese and American or British) and their culture, we could speak a good Japanese or English. Is it right? if not please correct me! ^-^
So to say, my problem now is that i (and many of my international and Vietnamese friends) sometimes find so hard to speak English (even easy words and sentences) right after speaking Japanese for a long time ( 2 hours, 1 week or after a vacation). We often "switch our brain" after speaking in either English or Japanese for a while. And this''s hard. As living in a bilingual environment where we have to use both English and Japanese at the same time, we often face this kind of problem. Even, in my case, i find it harder since i have experienced studying more than 3 languages: English, Japanese (i''m pretty good at these two), Spanish and French. Now it is quite difficult for me to control my accent, especially of English and Japanese.
Is there any useful advice for me? Thanks a lot for your kind help. I''d appreciate very much if you could tell me how.
Looking forward to your messages.
Best,
PS: I''m so sorry for such a long message.

Good topic though I think the example does not really fit. The BIG difference between practising to ride a bike and practising English is that you can do the former in the absence of other people (thus you can avoid being judged) but it seems you cannot do the same with the latter.