Speaking Part 2 後悔沒早點學的技能 Band 7+ 範答

Describe a skill you wish you had learned when you were younger.

You should say:

• what the skill is
• why you didn't learn it then
• what you've done about it since
• and explain why you wish you'd learned it earlier.

¹ A skill I genuinely wish I'd stuck with when I was younger is playing the piano. ² I started lessons at six, made it to about Grade 3 by the age of nine, and then quietly gave up because, frankly, the homework load at my elementary school in Hsinchu was already substantial and my parents didn't want to push me on something they themselves had never learned.

³ Looking back, I think the real problem was that nobody around me framed it as a skill that compounds. ⁴ It was treated as just another after-school activity — like a sport you might quit if you weren't winning competitions. ⁵ If anyone had told me at nine that I'd still be benefiting from those daily forty-minute sessions twenty years later, I'd have stuck with it. ⁶ But nobody did, and I didn't.

⁷ Two years ago, in my mid-twenties, I bought a second-hand digital piano and started teaching myself again with a mix of YouTube tutorials and a paid app. ⁸ I've made some progress — I can stumble through a simplified Chopin nocturne and a couple of jazz standards — but I'm acutely aware of the difference between learning something at twenty-six and learning it at six. ⁹ My fingers are slower to memorise patterns, my ear is less forgiving, and I get frustrated in a way I didn't as a child.

¹⁰ The reason I wish I'd kept going is that piano is exactly the kind of skill where the early years matter disproportionately. ¹¹ A child's brain absorbs music almost without effort, while an adult's brain has to analyse everything, which is much slower. ¹² I'm still glad I've come back to it — but if I could send a single message to my nine-year-old self, it would simply be: Don't stop. You'll thank yourself.

A skill I really wish I'd worked harder on when I was younger is Hokkien — the Taiwanese mother tongue my grandparents speak. I understood it perfectly as a small child, but stopped using it actively around the time I started elementary school, and now I can follow conversations but struggle to reply.

Honestly, the skill I wish I'd learned earlier is touch typing. It sounds trivial, but I spent the first twenty-three years of my life hunting and pecking at a keyboard with two fingers, and the cumulative time I lost is genuinely depressing to think about.

A skill I deeply wish I'd learned as a child is swimming. I grew up in a small town where the nearest pool was over an hour's drive away, and my parents weren't strong swimmers themselves. I finally taught myself in my late twenties.