I’m a Chinese girl having very fluent spoken English and excellent written English ability. I’ve been to Shenzhen working for 7 years and doing foreign trade business in the factories for 5 year.

 

I came across hellochina very luckily because from this terrace, I can meet people and make friends from all over the world. That’s a quite happy matter to me. I’d like more and more foreign friends understand China no matter they coming to China for travelling, doing business, and etc and also I can learn more about abroad.

Now I’d like to write some titbit about my learning English to sharing together everyone.

 

How a Lazy guy Set About Mastering English

 

 

I studied Chinese literature as my first degree partly because I was very fond of Chinese literature.(I’m still very fond of Chinese literature.) and partly because my performance in English Language was very bad.

 

Because my major was Chinese Literature, I needed to take only two subjects in English, Year One English and Year Two English. But I failed in both subjects. Therefore, I had to retake the two subjects in Year 3 and year 4 respectively. They could not be taken concurrently but consecutively.

 

In the Summer vacation after year 2, I knew I must do something about it. As both subjects are compulsory, failure in them would mean I would not be able to graduate from the University.

 

I met a classmate in the same department and he faced the same problem. We were good classmates indeed. We lived in the same area. As his other family members had moved to their private housing and my home was too crowded, I moved to his home since year 2 in a hope that we could always exchanged our creative ideas.

 

We always acknowledged each other as smart guy. Some classmates jokingly nicknamed us as the "Two Endowed of the Era" (絕代雙驕).In fact, there is one thing which may justify this title in its negative sense. Both of us were very lazy. We played truant all the time and killed our time by chatting.

 

We were not without guilty feeling. I remember at one time, we felt we should not play truant any more and determined to attend the earliest lecture in the next morning. We set the alarm clock and went to bed earlier. The next morning, I was waken up by the alarm at the deepest of my dream. I was so reluctant to get up so I hoped my friend would not have been waken up by the alarm and I could carried on my good dream, pretending failed to hear the alarm. Stealthily, I opened one eye to watch him. To my amusement, I saw him watching me with a single eye too. We both burst into laughter. Turning our backs, we continued our sound sleep.

 

Great(lazy)minds think alike, so to speak. 

        

 

 

One day, after a thorough soul searching, we realized that we should waste no time on looking for any effective short cut and decided to go back to the basics, i.e. ,to increase our vocabulary by the seemingly stupid method---looking up the dictionary.

 

By a simple calculation, if we managed to memorised 30 words per day, we could increase our vocabulary to 3000 words in three months in addition to what we had already possessed. Generally speaking, when we were required to write an essay, the teacher would require us to write no more than 1000 words. We figured that 3000 new words on top of the old ones would have been enough to meet the teacher's requirement.

 

Another important decision was that we had to cease our "cohabitation" because we were too fond of chatting. As it was transpired from our past experience, we were all talks and no action, no matter how aspired we were to improve our English.     

 

This time, we did put our scheme into practice. I moved back to my home. We subscribed through the Students' Union the best English Newspaper. We forced ourselves to look up at least 30 new words that we happened to come across in the Newspaper. Not a big deal, isn't it?

 

I carried out the plan faithfully in the first week but began dating afterwards because I was the kind of people who could not keep his mouth shut. The dating were just fit into the vacuum left by my "separation" with my best friend.

 

Everyday I came back home from the University with a copy of the English paper. In order to put my conscience to rest (the price of the newspaper cost me a breakfast), I skimmed through one to two pages of the newspaper. marked a tick on the top of the new words and underlined some unfamiliar or useful phrases for looking up the dictionary later.

 

But more often than not, before I looked up the new words by the dictionary, a new copy of English newspaper was brought home.

 

Two months later, my friend visited me at my home. A copy of the Newspaper was spread out on my desk with the ticks and underlines in it. My friend took a look at those words and phrases highlighted by ticks and underlines. He showed an unbelieving expression and said," You don't know even these words!" and then, to my embarrassment, he explained them to me one by one.  

  

This was one of the major humiliation I had ever encountered. I gave up the dating and doubled or tripled my efforts to do what we had determined. In view of one defect of my friend---he understood the words he had learnt but he could not pronounce them correctly ( there was no electronic dictionary at that time). I began my study with learning the phonetic symbols by myself. It took me only two hours to get hold of them. I became obsessed by reading English newspaper and looking up dictionary.

 

Half years later, when I went home by bus with the English Newspaper at hand in an afternoon, I felt bored and began skimming the Newspaper. I was soon absorbed in its contents. When I got off the bus, I suddenly discovered the newspaper was in English.  

 

Of course, it is not the end of the story.