Dear junior schoolmates,

I'm Yinuo Deng, a former student of Miss Liu. Graduated in 2018, I'm currently a student at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, majoring in artificial intelligence. Having experienced high school English study, university English study and TOEFL, I guess I can share some first-handed experience with you that you may find helpful.

The first thing is to enlarge your reading. From magazines to novels, from wiki pages to papers, everything you can get helps. I'm sure many of you have already done a lot of English test papers during the last semester. You tried to understand every single word and all the background information, yet errors just keep emerging. Frustrated, right? Your Chinese teacher must have told you to read more. Actually, this applies to English study as well. When you've read a huge amount of materials, the words, expressions and logical relationships will be deeply engraved to your memory. I recall Miss Liu distributed simplified storybooks to us every week when I was her student, even during the third grade. Practically, this is a precious source considering you don't have much free time to select your own. In my impression, those stories are just so appealing. At that time, we don't have tablets nor mobile phones. Every day we coped with test papers endlessly so it was simply a source of pleasure to read those little orange books. Later, it surprised me that many expressions and idioms on test papers were so familiar! Naturally, you will do better in tests after accumulating these reading materials.

When you possess enough vocabulary and seem to understand the whole passage, do you still get errors when dealing with the meaning or logical relationship between paragraphs? Then you've got another highly important aspect to pay attention to. Unlike Chinese language and culture, English is particularly analytic in logic. When native speakers write or read a sentence, he or she will consider: what are the relationships between this one and the previous one? It's known to all that the usage of "and", "but", "however" or so is common in English. Nevertheless, many don't realize the importance of these words: they altogether build the framework of a passage. As readers, when encountering these words, we simply can underline them. By doing this, the framework can be more easily revealed with the aid of these words.

The third grade can be tough especially during the winter when you are in the middle of nowhere. But one method to fight this feeling is to change your perspective towards what you learn. When you enter universities, English can be unprecedentedly useful. You may love dramas from Netflix or make friends with foreign students. Moreover, most papers are in English. It’s a universal tool to communicate with researchers all over the world. And for boys, some of you may love global online video games like Dota 2 or CS: GO. When teaming up with foreigners, it’s wonderful that you can negotiate tragedies and laugh together despite you are not from one culture.

Never give up! Everything you accomplish right now will be reflected later. English is not that hard once you have a correct attitude toward it and a set of working learning methods. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. And finally, happy lunar new year! :P