BYR Achieve · 镜像论坛

Economist magazine and books are far not enougth. The contents/topics are very limited. and they are not very close to your everyday life. To my experience, one effective way to learn English is that whenever you need to know something, instead of Baidu it in Chinese, always Google it in English and read it English. This can cover a lot of things that you are interested. And by doing this English is the way for you to obtain information, it will natually become part of your life. and reading by itself is not enough. You need to listen a lot as well. Movie/TV series/Video clips are especially helpful. They provide a very important aspect that reading and listening do not give you: by watching a video, you really connect what you heard in English to what you see, the real object, the real situation. you don't "think". This is more like how children learn language - they don't logically learn each words, they learn what people say at certain situation/occation, next time when you are in the same situation you will automatically know what you should say. (you still need practising :)) You don't have to have a large vocabulary before you can effectively communicate with people. You need to learn how people communicate, how people describe something. if you don't know a particular word, you can always describe it using simple wording and they will understand and let you know what the word is. Sometimes you feel that you can't find the exact words, it's actually because you are translating it from a Chinese word. You should get over it - you should read/listen/watch a lot in English and think in English. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You are very welcome. I am on vacation now so I have plenty of time. One more thing important - It's actually the last point in my previous post - you need to read and listen a lot to learn what people would say in certain situation and how they say it. When I read posts on this board, I found most of the wording/expression are very awkward, it is because when we learn English, we spent too much time on vocabulary and we read too little. And what we read on the text book are only for learning language, they are not that interesting and not that practical. I remember 5 years ago when I was applying to US-graduate schools even writing a simple email was hard for me, although I have passed CET4 and CET6 and GRE/Tofel without problem. I could translate whatever I wanted to say from Chinese to English but I was not sure if they were the polite/appropriate way to say it. Somehow I never learned those. Now I have been in the US for 5 years and I have been leanring English all time.I learn from the emails that I receive, from books/news papers/websites/conversations/radio/TV shows. The most important thing is to learn how the native speakers talk/write in certain situation, to express certain ideas. Then try to do the same, not to translate from Chinese to English based on the vocabulary you memorized.This requires a lot of reading/listening, and the most effective way is to read/listen to/watch something that you are really interested in. This way you will really connect the English wording to the meaning/content itself, not the Chinese translation. Otherwise when you read/watch something just to learn English, you tend to think about the Chinese translation all the time, not to get the real content through English. In my opinion, to get over this "translating step" is extremely important.

转两篇水木的朋友给我的建议，觉得很好，转来