Reflective Writing-First Try

Jan, 28, 2014

I have been learning English since I was in primary school. In fact, the time that I have used to learn English is almost as mush as that I have used to learn math, Chinese and other important courses in China.

However, I still cannot understand it well. To dig into the reasons, maybe the way that almost every Chinese student uses to learn English is not so effective for me—we just keep working on how to solve the problems, for instance, multiple choices, cloze tests, readings and so on. Finally, we all become good solvers of English problems , but not good users of English.

Now, maybe it is the time that I should start to become a true English user.

Needless to say, the first thing that I need to do is to strengthen my vocabulary base. Anybody cannot learn English well or write something fluently without a huge accumulation of vocabularies because they are the basis in English. Actually, something embarrassing happening last semester was that in a final exam, I failed in solving an important question just because I misunderstood a word in the question statements. So in this semester, I am going to accumulate as much as I can—maybe it will be easy and fun to start writing the unknown words in a small vocabulary notebook and revise them everyday.

Secondly, it is the grammars that I need to pay more attention to. Frankly speaking, I’ve learned almost all grammar rules in English but I cannot use them as accurately as I want. While I was doing multiple choices before, it was not so difficult because I could remember the features of every type of grammar questions and then made my choice. However, the key difficulty in using grammar in your own essays is that there are no features and you have to build all sentences word by word, which needs your fully understanding of grammars. Also, it is the only way for you to use it well. To handle this problem, what I want to do is following the courses of ES1102 and I believe at last I will have a clear mind about grammar.

Last but not least, thinking in English is necessary for me. When I am working on reports, essays, or even daily communications, I always find somewhere I cannot truly express my ideas in English. Then, what I usually do is: thinking in mandarin and translating or interpreting it into English. Actually this is not good for my English learning process because simple translation does not make my sentences fluent . Instead, simple translation just makes me waste plenty of time in writing and speaking. So in this semester, I am going to try my best not to use my old thinking pattern but to think as a native English user. By doing this, I expect to improve both my English writing skills and English speaking skills.

All in all, I believe that if I keep faithful to learning English, ready for whatever efforts it may demand to learn it well, then one day, I shall succeed.