English is Everywhere

When I was in junior middle school, I was the English monitor, who was supposed to be the best student in learning English. However, I still came across a lot of difficulties.

One day, when learning the word “spell? I had a hard time in pronouncing it correctly and coherently. I felt extremely frustrated. I owed my failure to the lack of English an speaking environment. It happened that my English teacher asked about my feelings of studying English that day and I told him the problem I was facing and my opinion.

When I finished, he said;?You’re wrong, English is everywhere. Though people don’t use it in their speech, we’re with English every minute. Have you ever noticed the English mane of 中国人民银行（People’s Bank of China) besides its huge Chinese name? When you read the instruction of your purchase, do you also cast a glance at its English version? Pay attention to the world around you. It is filled with English.?/p>

He is right , this way of learning English worked nicely for me. It’s more efficient to learn from real life than from textbooks.

 - Sabrina (Lu Suo Lu) -

An English Environment is Important

Many people may think we English majors can speak perfect English. In fact we do not.

I have always been  confused about the fact that we deal with English everyday but the progress is not so apparent. In order to improve my English, I tried to recite some vocabulary books, but it had little effect; I had also tried to listen to some English tapes, but later I found it also a useless way.

My problem was, I usually couldn't express myself in a simple and clear way. I had difficulty in the word selection. The Chinglish logic prevented me from selecting a proper way to express myself. I didn't find a good way until this summer when I worked with 50 American people.

Last summer, I worked as a translator and tour guide for 50 Americans in the International Wu Shu Exchange Meeting. During these 10 days, I had to speak English all the time. Also I found that my vocabulary needed to be updated, and from the Americans I learned a lot that I couldn't learn from the textbooks. 

Ten days later, when I came back I was excited to realize that I had a very good experience in English learning. From talking with them, I learned the way to make my expressions simple and clear.

To learn a foreign language, environment is important. We can benefit a lot from communicating with foreigners. Of course, we don't often have such chances, but reading those newspapers, magazines and articles on the Internet written by foreigners is also OK.

 - Sun Jing -