Попытка "творчески осмыслить" процесс изучения английского - вернее, само как-то получилось и само написалось. А потом еще и еще. Было интересно...

October 1988, Maple Leaf Academy

Sometimes I have been trying to picture my English. Is it strange for you?
Have you ever been trying to picture yours? I think you haven't.

Well. Actually I know a lot of separate words, mostly nouns, then verbs, prepositions an so on, as well as many grammar rules. But all of it is somewhere inside. It is like a landscape covered with mist, but not fog, actually. It's not anything dark. I am standing on a hill and looking a little down. I don't know exactly what is there, under the haze - a forest, a lake or something else.
The picture is still hidden.
But then the mist is beginning to lift and I can see some trees on the left, a lake in front of me, and a road on the right, but not a whole picture yet…
There are so many unseen things, but I need time to be able to see them…

Sometimes, I imagine my English like a kitchen with a great deal of shelves with many different boxes and jars on them. I don't even know exactly how many are there.
There are Simple Tenses on the shelf inside different boxes with labels "Present Simple", "Past Simple" and so on. The other boxes on the other shelves are named "Adjectives", "-ing", "enough", "-ed" and "too". But still there are a lot of unknown shelves and closed boxes. Sometimes I can't remember at once where a necessary thing is.
When cooking (speaking actually), I am always in a great hurry. I try to cook quickly and often grab wrong things from wrong shelves. I can often realize that I'm not right, but I can't correct it fast enough, and I can imagine how untasty my meal may be. I see, I need time to discover my board and maybe paste some new labels, and keep my cooking practice, of course.
I hope some day I will be a good cook. I'd like to be excellent, but…

And here is the next (and the last) picture of my English.
It's a puzzle game. There is a great number of small pieces around me, all apart. I'm trying to connect them with each other to get an interesting picture, but it is not always possible. Sometimes the necessary pieces (the words that mean the same) are too far from each other. Sometimes, the necessary pieces face down and I have to turn them over. I don't even know, how many parts of my picture there are, maybe 1,000 or 15,000, and what picture it will be, and how long I will construct my puzzle, but I hope I will be able to make a beautiful picture.

So, you see, I always hope I can do it!