Dear Pan,
You never cease to amaze me with your fortitude and determination in improving and mastering the English language. Someday in the future, if you ever have a chance to travel the world, your passion and effort which led to your unique forte
to communicate in this universal language, will certainly pay off a thousand folds and attract envy from thousands of others…mastery of a language requires years of immersion and endless bid by bid build-ups, for lack of a better expression, allow me to resort to this cliché, it’s more of your attitude, not your aptitude that determines your altitude, and you manifested just that!
My 13-year-old son is now in grade 8, and his language teacher makes all herstudents learn 10 English words each day. My son is required to search the dictionary and write down the definition of these 10 new words for the day
and also form a sentence using each new word. He’s also required to learn
the pronunciation of all 10 words, and the teacher would spend the first
five minutes each class randomly picking a student to stand up and read a
new word on the board and form a sentence from it. This little daily ritual
(I think it’s called quiz-city in my son’s class) keeps my son on his toesand forces him to habituate himself to learning new words each day and vastlyenlarges his vocabulary by the end of the semester. I really should send a bigThank-You card to my son’s language teacher for rendering such wonderful boon
to all grade 8 students. This also benefits me because I can learn new wordstogether with my son. This week I was able to learn words such as flabbergast, extricate, parlay, kafuffle and abominable from my son’s WOTD (words of the
day) lists. (****If you feel you have to slog your guts out and exert Hercules’
slabors to memorize by rote those endless English words, let me alleviate youremotional anguish by sharing this, if Canadian Junior High school kids whose mother tongue is English still have to labor so much effort to expand their vocabulary, what other options do Chinese learners have but to stick their
nose to the millstone?! ****) I bought a set of “The Children’s Illustrated Dictionary” from Costco for my kids but my son complained it took too long to look up words in paper-based dictionary. He likes the three CD dictionaries I bought better. Besides Kingsoft Powerword 2003 CD which has the American Heritage dictionary, he also uses the Oxford unabridged dictionary and the Collins Cobuild
dictionary that I installed in his desktop. The advantage of using any online dictionary is that it can read out the word nice and clear so that my son can pronounce it in class the next day. Collins is especially beneficial because the definition and example of usage are written in plain and simple English that kids can understand. My six-year-old girl in grade 1 loves the Children’s Illustrated
Dictionary because of the vivid colorful picture beside most of the words, and
she’s enthusiastic about learning to spell. The text only Wikipedia and Concise
Encyclopedia Britannica for Mdict are invaluable tools for my son’s research and science homework, especially on stormy or snowy nights when our Internet access is down. And if he needs images, our Microsoft Encarta 2003 on CDs can come to the rescue. He was studying about human cells and found a lot of information of Encarta to supplement his study. He even bought colored clays from the art shop and created a cell model for his project, which won an award and was put on display in his school exhibition. I’m proud that my son is doing well in school and becomes a first class honor-roll student.
My only regret is that while both my children absolutely love the English language, they seem to show very little interest in learning our ancestral hieroglyphical language. They still can’t understand how come there’s no alphabet in the
Chinese language? As an effort to wriggle himself out of having to learn Chinese
, my son always gives refutation like, nobody speaks Chinese here anyway, why do
I have to learn it? Does he have a point? I think not but...
Neil
