12 HABITS BRINGING A PROMOTION TO YOUR ENGLISH
1. Set the system language as English
To learn a language well, you'd better make it applicable everywhere in your life. Make it your working language, and you will find that you learn it more efficiently when you have a purpose. The more chance you create to be with English, the longer you be with it, the more likely that you master it in no time.
*You could start it with something around, something you apply in a high frequency, like mobile, WECHAT and the mailbox.
*Choose to use foreign edition app, and get yourself exposed to operational instruction in English every time you click it open.
*Become a member of a community in certain field established abroad.
If you like photography, 500 px based in Canada will be a perfect choice.
2. Listen to English materials without a text
Do not let the text get in the way of language learning. Mind how it sounds more than what it means. Most of the time, we care about the meaning too much that we couldn't afford to miss a certain word or syllable, however, we don't have to catch every word to know the general meaning of a sentence. All we need is the key words, the noun and verb, to know who or what is involved, and what happens to he or it. But sometimes if we pay too much attention to the text, we will miss the pronunciation and any other phonetic details. Then maybe we get the meaning, but we are not getting it via voice but text, and we even fail to catch the main meaning of the sentence since we are too busy reading the title available. So be away from the text and lay adequate attention to how the word sounds and make yourself familiar with the sound enough to figure out the key words and main idea.
*Put on your headphone without any intention to put on the lyrics.
*Follow the English radio program without minding how many of words could be identified by you when they come to your ears. Just focus on the pronunciation and the way it is spoken, leaving out all the rest.
*Watch English language TV series without a script or title.
3. Record the way you speak English
To improve your spoken English, it is important to develope the feeling to your own voice, so you need to record for further review and study.
*Press record when there is a phone coming where you are required to speak English.
*Read an article or the poem you like and record it for later review.
*Shadow the passage with audio or video materials, then compare what you speak with the original one to find the gap between you and the excellent, and go fix it.
*Talk to yourself in English for one minute and record it.
4. Do the translation
If you are good at a certain language, you are good at translating it into your own language, and vice versa. So you need translation from English to Chinese and Chinese back to English to learn English well.
*Choose the oral English material like business English conversation. Read the short sentence in Chinese, then translate it into English, then compare what you have translated with the original text.
*Choose the bilingual reading material like newspaper. Translate it back and forth, English to Chinese then Chinese to English, and compare it with the text for wording more appropriate, expression more native and phrase more concise.
*Read English texts or books with translation. Compare the English part with the Chinese part to find the correspondence between both languages.
5. Follow several WECHAT official accounts in English topic
Check English official accounts in fixed time of a day. Check just two or three articles of an account, three accounts each day, then you get 6-9 articles accumulated each day.
Here are the official accounts I follow recommended.
6. Read English books for 30 min before sleep
Do not hurry for the meaning of the words unknown to you at the first sight, quite on the contrary, just mark them down, read along with guess, then come back again to look them up in the dictionary, two of them every page.
Use an English-English dictionary. It is nice to know the English meaning of the word since it may bring you closer to the English mode of thinking. More significantly, you apply English during the process of seeking the meaning of another English vocabulary.
7. Keep an English diary in more than five sentences
Write something in English. It will be hard at the very first, but you will enjoy it once you realize that you are making progress on it. Just stay patient enough to witness your improvement.
8. Set a 30 min stop timer for English listening, make sure you get two timers every day
Have it before sleep and after getting up.
If you are with no choice, here are two for your reference.
You may also have songs loop within 30 min and then come to an automatic shut down.
9. Mark the words you don't know along the way then look them up at a time after you finish reading
10. Retell what you hear in English in mind when you hear someone else speaks
11. Finish a TED video in five steps
You can do all the 5 practices with a TED speech.
*Listen without looking at the text.
*Listen with the text and check how many percent of it you have got just now.
*Shadow the article without the text, uttering what you have heard by focusing on voice only.
*Read it aloud to improve your pronunciation along the way
*Read the article carefully to spot the expression useful and appropriate.
12. Read ten titles of news
A good title is the concise sentence showing the main idea of an article. If you don't have the time to go over the whole article or report, title will be your wise choice.
