A problem has troubled me for a long time, that is, how and where can i improve my english. In my daily life, there’s few chances to use english. How can i learn and communicate with others in english like a native speaker?
Is chatting with others a good idea?Then i decided to chat online, so i connect to the Microsoft’s MIRC Server to find someone to chat with. But to my disappointed, the room is crazy for ‘hi’, ‘hello’, ‘nice to meet you’ and so on, and the most popular question i was asked is that “ur a/s/l pls” (please tell me your age, sex and location). It seems that sex is always the hotest topic which is not my cup of tea. . And when i speak to one whose native language is non-english, i am not sure whether the words and phrases he used is right or not. When i chat with a native speaker, his words sometimes make me blank, and i have to beg him explaining the meaning of what he said. Since he can not read or type Chinese, i sometimes have to guess the meaning by myself. What a shame!
Shall i use the translation software?There are a lot of Chinese-English translation software, it is convenient for me to get the meaning of the words. But after a while, i found i depend on them too much. Each time when i come accross new english words, i just use the software do the job and i only focus on the chinese meaning it gave me. More worse, whenever i am not sure about a word’s spelling, i type the chinese instead, it will give me the english words, all i do is to copy and paste.
Must i grasp the total meaning of a word before i use it?A net friend of mine who went to the US for quite a few years adviced me not to use the words before i could totally grasp the meaning of them. But i have a different opinion. I’d like to try the word in a sentence when i know a meaning of it for there are always lots of meaning of a word, how can i remember all of them at the same time. Or the most frequently used sentence should be “sorry, my english is poor”. I believe that practice makes perfect.
Till now, i have not found the best way to improve my english. Can you tell me if you were i, what will you do?
