Reflection

Hi, My name is Rivo Raikhan Maulana, and here’s my reflection after using the Medium
app for six weeks of using.
First of all, Medium is an Article-based app with a bunch of interesting topics that are
available for readers from around the world. I tried several apps before, like Duolingo or Cake
English app, They were great apps for learning vocabulary, but unfortunately, my teacher wants
us to improve our reading skills and understand the meaning of the context more. I eventually
chose Medium over those two apps.
In the first week, I still have problems with being consistent every day, but I try to keep
the routine as often as I can at least 5 minutes a day. During this period I still experimented with
which topic I liked the most, and which article that I found harder to read or understand. The
next week, I tried my hardest to be consistent and I also found many improvements of 10
minutes of reading a day rather than an hour of reading but only once in a while. I found that
article about politics was one of the subjects that I think was the hardest of all. Words like
‘minister’, ‘election’, or ‘amnesty’ are one of the new vocabularies that I memorize while using
the app. In the third and fourth weeks, I became better not just at reading, but my vocabulary
was also expanding more and more not just in everyday conversation but also in subjects like
science, math, business, or even philosophy. I found many words that I barely hear in everyday
conversation that I think may help me in the future if I can memorize them. I also started to feel
improvement in my reading speed after just a month of using the app. What I like about this
app is that I don’t just practice my English, but I also can read about something that I'm highly
interested in, so I don’t feel like I am being hard on myself. In the fifth week, I was getting more
and more interested in a subject like philosophy and psychology, although I considered them
quite easy to read I think, enjoying reading and being interested are much more important in
improving my skill than choosing the hardest topic and pushing myself too hard to memorize all
the word that I found in one day. finally the sixth week, at this phase, I already enjoyed reading
and accepting it to become my new routine, I also never counted how much time I spent but
I'm sure that I was spending more than 15 minutes a day. I read when I was bored, when I ate,
and also when I was not able to sleep. At this rate, I feel quite an impressive improvement in
many aspects, including reading speed, vocabulary, consistency, and my mind well-being, since
most of the article that I read was about self-improvement.
So, here’s my conclusion after using the app for at least 2 months. I think learning a
language is one of the best ways of expanding our knowledge of the world, after I got used to
reading an article in English, I found that many articles are written better in English, the
website, the reference that was used, and the credibility are overall better compared to the
website that is using Indonesian with their many annoying ads in every corner of the screen.
And I'm very grateful for the decision that I made 2 months ago when I decided to take the
reading in English more seriously.