Lay Down & Listen

It happened several years ago. When I was a middle school student, I hated English listening class very much. I had tried to improve my listening, however, I found it really hard for me to memorize the words or understand the meaning of the sentences. While listening, I couldn't even  take down 50% of what I'd heard.

At first, I thought maybe all Chinese students could not do well in English listening because our brains all worked in a Chinese way. However, I was wrong.

One night, I was lying relaxed  in bed, with a pair of headphones listening to some western pop music. At that moment, everything was still and quiet and I began to find it easy to understand the lyrics of the songs. What's more, when I was totally involved in the song, I  even began to understand the WHOLE meaning!

Since then, I have formed the habit of listening to English songs while lying peacefully in bed. As a result, my English listening has improved a lot! :)

 - Adele-

Road to English

It never occurs to me that English can be learned in this way. However, three years ago, a friend of mine introduced the book to me, I tried it and then my English is greatly improved. That was it.

Frankly speaking, Zhong Daolong’s English approach is a very tedious and boring one. According to this approach, to learn English well, the learner should start with the practice of listening. He or she should listen to listening material again and again, and then write down the script word by word.

If it was not for my friend’s encouragement, I would have given up. From the first day of trying Zhong’s approach, my life was turned into a mass of noises made by the tape recorder and unknown English words. Especially when the listening material had no original script attached, I had to listen thousands of times to recognize a single obscure word.

Half a year later, I finished the second session of Zhong’s approach. Surprisingly, the outcome was: I began to learn English not just for exams. I have since become interested in English.

 - Arthur -

My Turning Point

The turning point in my way of English study was learning to acquire knowledge from English movies. It was when I was watching the movie “Titanic?that the thought came across: why couldn’t I appreciate it more carefully?  I can standardize my accent by following the speech of the actors. I can learn more original dialect from them. I can even  expand my vocabulary and improve my hearing skills .

Later this method had great effect and I dared to try more new ways of learning.

 - Tony -

Recite: Listen, then Recite

It was about seven years ago, soon after I had entered senior high school. We were required to memorize all the texts and recite them in the next class. As a student majoring in physics, I hated English class, although deep in my heart I liked the pretty English teacher.

At that time we had a large amount of homework and extra-exercises in physics and math. How could I afford to spare my limited time to remember texts? What was worse, I found it was so difficult for me to recite them until one day everything changed.

I can still remember it was the middle of the night. After several hours' hard work I could not fall asleep. I turned on the recorder and listened to the English texts. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour had passed, still I could not go asleep. But to my surprise, I could remember much of what had been on the recorder just then clearly. Then I decided to only listen to one text and make sure it was not a coincidence that I could remember so many.

The result made me so cheerful. I could recite the text  after I had only listened to it twice. Since then I didn't  worry about the disgusting texts and I began to enjoy the time with my English teacher.

 - Adeline -

Thanks to the Feeling of Accomplishment

For learning a language, I think interest plays the most important role. My enthusiasm in English makes me a good English learner. Then, how can someone master a language when they have no interest at all?

It's very natural for Chinese people to hate Japanese for historical reasons. If it's not for the importance of the language in modern trade companies, I would not try to learn it. But the problem is that however hard I tried, I couldn't remember so many difficult words and different forms of verbs. I almost began to give up when one thing happened in my life that changed my opinion.

My roommates love watching Japanese movies while I am not interested at all. One afternoon when many of them were watching a Japanese Movie, I was sitting aside preparing for my Japanese lessen. Once in a while, I heard some words that were familiar to me, but I could not distinguish them. Suddenly, a clear expression 'wait a minute' (in Japanese) came to me and I was so astonished by my discovery that I asked my roommates to replay the movie for me. They were very surprised to see the change in my attitude about Japanese and were willing to show the movie again for me. I was very proud to tell them what some of the easy expressions meant.

Later on, the feeling of accomplishment helped to put more energy in my Japanese study and to pay more attention to the movies and songs, which can help my Japanese skills. Thanks to it, I now can learn the language pretty well.

 - Kathy -