My sisters and I are so excited to get My English Matters off the ground! Our first online class will be held on the 30th of October at 9am. Please sign up here to join and get the link sent to your email address.
I’ve been wanting to start something fun and interesting online for quite some time now, but I never really knew what to start with.
One evening, I asked my husband over dinner, “What skill or knowledge do I have that can be taught to others?” I was genuinely stumped. As my husband swallowed his food, he simply replied, “English.”
He continued, “A lot of Malaysians have trouble writing and communicating in English.” Okay, he said something along those lines.
And that was when a lightbulb lit up in my head. Yes! English! I never thought of that! It was something I took for granted, and it was never my forte. I’m not an English lecturer, like Azimah was. But I do have years of experience working in a corporate environment writing emails, letters and web content every day for literally thousands of customers.
As I was running this idea through my head, I just had to ask two of my sisters – Azimah, who has a passion for teaching but recently left her lecturing job to pursue her own translation and editing business, and Aisya, a creative soul with loads of ideas and talent but too modest to show them to the world. To my delight, they were just as excited about the project as I was! We agreed to host a free online class to see if people would be interested to join.
Our next step was to find out what the biggest problems Malaysians faced around English at the workplace. A Facebook post was the best way to find out. We were really glad to see people sharing their opinions on the post and eager to learn from us.
We chose the most popular topic, created a simple website (the one you’re browsing through right now) and decided that email subscription was the best way to communicate to those who wanted to join the class. [We’ll send reminders and a link for that class and updates on our future plans for My English Matters through email, so please subscribe if you haven’t yet!]
We hope to cultivate a culture of continuous learning and teaching in our society. We want to teach what we know and hope you’ll love the process as much as we do.
For us, it’s English.
