32-year-old summer school international student: It’s never too late to start language learning

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In today's era of globalization, learning English seems to have become a topic that everyone cannot avoid. Many people always feel that they have missed the best opportunity to study and want to drop out of school. But today, let us follow the footsteps of blogger Lin An and see how a 32-year-old who has been exposed to English for a long time after graduating from college and has no overseas experience improved his language skills in one year.

A chance to regain English

Lin An's English proficiency was at an above-average level in college, and he passed CET-4 and CET-6 in one fell swoop, but he was by no means a genius. After graduation, English was put on hold. Until last year, a month-long trip to Europe ignited her strong desire to improve her English. She hopes to have in-depth communication with local people while living or traveling, and also wants to create English content. In this way, she embarked on a journey of learning English.

English learning trilogy

A large amount of input awakens the sense of speech

In the first stage of learning, Lin An regained his sense of English through a lot of input. During the Chinese New Year, she regularly listened to English podcasts at home and watched pure English videos on YouTube. She also thoughtfully displayed a list of English bloggers and podcasts that she thought were good on the screen for your reference. At the same time, in order to put pressure on herself to study, she signed up in March to take the IELTS test in Chiang Mai in April.

Accurately overcome and make up for shortcomings

In the IELTS test in April, Lin An failed the listening part because she didn't sleep well the night before, and her results were not ideal. But this test made her clear her weaknesses-listening and speaking. In terms of listening, she found that although she knew many words, she could not use them and her reaction was slow when she heard them. In order to improve her listening skills, she adopted two key methods: first, listen sentence by sentence, especially English podcasts and American dramas without subtitles, especially the parts that she does not understand, and repeat them until she understands them; second, change her learning thinking , give up simple word search. Using a Chinese-English dictionary method, if you encounter a word you don’t understand, you must first look it up in an English-English dictionary and explain it in English. In addition, she also discovered the English listening course at Knowledge School, which is affordable and costs only 18 yuan for 20 days. The course material is rich, from radio dramas, movies, TV series, and news. First take a 3-minute online vocabulary test, and then match the appropriate listening materials based on the test results.

Apply what you learn and make it a habit

In the third stage, Lin An is committed to developing the habit of using English every day. While continuing to input, Lin An paid more attention to output. She borrowed teaching methods from her summer school teachers. For example, when teachers teach movie-related words, they use games, tests, group exercises, etc. to ask students to use the words to make sentences or give a one-minute impromptu speech. Lin An made a detailed plan for himself: conduct extensive listening in English for at least 30 minutes every day, spend 5-10 minutes reciting the content of extensive listening, compile it into an English draft and ask others to help revise it, so as to improve his expression ability.

The core of language learning

During the language learning process, Lin An deeply realized that it is crucial to clarify the underlying motivations behind language learning. After a month of summer school, she rediscovered the joy of learning languages. When you can use the words you have learned in life to express yourself more fluently, your confidence and enthusiasm will arise spontaneously, motivating yourself to invest more time and energy.

At the end of the video, Lin An shared a TED talk about the secrets of multilingual learners that the teacher mentioned in class. Interested friends may wish to explore on their own. I hope Lin An’s experience can inspire everyone. No matter when, as long as you are determined, it is never too late to learn a language. If you have unique experiences or insights in English learning, please share them in the comment area. Please also share this article with more people in need, so that we can go hand in hand on the road of language learning.

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