Friday, January 23, 2015

My English Language Learning Journey

My English Language Learning Journey


Since I was in primary school, I started to study English, until now, 14 years passed. I completed my primary and secondary school education in China, and English is always regarded as one of the most important subjects in all Chinese schools. Unfortunately, due to the restriction of living environment, I almost did not speak, write and use English in my daily life. Additionally, I disliked to study English when I was in secondary school, as I always had an incorrect idea that English is a very boring subject, there is no need for me to care too much since it will not significantly affect my life. These led to a very poor English foundation for myself.

However, after I graduated from my secondary school, I decided to go abroad to continue my academic journey. With this aim in mind, I realized how important English is, especially in this globalized world and how hard-working I must be so as to catch up with and improve my English capability. Then, I re-started to study English from the beginning. I still remember, during that period of time, how diligent I was. I woke up at 6am and straightly started to practice my spoken English by following the audiotape and read the article loudly. I did write two short essays everyday as for practice and attended foreign tutors classes outside. I was pushing myself to communicate and interact with my foreign teachers proactively, as I understand studying foreign language is more difficult compared with learning mother tongue language, we need to create an environment for ourselves to use that language when we are not living in foreign country.

My journey to study English continues on and will never end. 

3 comments:

  1. Interesting insights provided by the author on how a foreign language can be mastered with diligence.

    I enjoyed the post but i thought it would be better if the author had paid a little more attention to the punctuations and sentence structure.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi ! I can understand from your post that learning English has always been hard for people that do not take it as a first language.
    Hope you could be optimistic when you learn English and pay a little bit more attention on your grammar and sentence structure.

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  3. Thank you, Xinzhu. This reflection shows just how diligent you have been in this latter part of your English learning journey. Your work is a solid testament to the values for hard work that have been instilled in you. Your commitment is so admirable. Now you are essentially a fluent English speak who simply needs to fine-tune aspects of her usage.

    To that end, let's look at these areas first:


    1) Run on sentences: Please the Purdue OWL website about run on sentences.

    -- Since I was in primary school, I started to study English, until now, 14 years passed.

    -- Additionally, I disliked to study English when I was in secondary school, as I always had an incorrect idea that English is a very boring subject, there is no need for me to care too much since it will not significantly affect my life.

    -- I was pushing myself to communicate and interact with my foreign teachers proactively, as I understand studying foreign language is more difficult compared with learning mother tongue language, we need to create an environment for ourselves to use that language when we are not living in foreign country.

    2) by following the audiotape and **read** the article loudly... > (lack of parallel structure)

    Can you make the corrections?

    I look forward to reading more of your work.

    ReplyDelete