Joke gre

I didn't go abroad until the third year of graduate school. I have been studying in China since primary school 18 years.

In other words, I have studied English for 18 years.

Among my peers, I started learning foreign languages earlier. When I graduated from primary school, I had learned the third book of new concepts, and I passed Grade 4 in junior high school, which was a leader at that time.

I graduated from one of the best English departments in China, with a bachelor's degree, TEM-8 and IELTS score of 8. I also participated in various English competitions in China on behalf of my school.

I love watching BBC, and I have read many academic papers and monographs. Before going abroad, I also attended a one-year certificate course in the Sino-American Center jointly organized by Nantah and Hopkins University. Half of the students in this program are Americans, and the teachers come from top American universities and have been learning English.

However, from the first day I landed at Heathrow Airport, my sense of linguistic superiority was shattered. Since then, my overseas life has been spent in the dilemma of language barrier.

I arrived at Oxford in the middle of a rainy night, and I found the house number on the wet and cold path. But I couldn't knock on the closed black lacquer wooden door until a sleepy English girl poked her head out of the second floor and explained it to me in English she didn't understand. Finally, I guessed the answer from her exaggerated gestures and went around to the entrance of the college on the edge of the small building to let the doorman let me in.

Later, I learned that the word that the girl shouted at me was porters' lodge.

The next morning, I went to the bank, and the service staff was very kind, but when the cashier counted the pounds in front of me, I could only guess the numbers from her mouth. I have translated "thousand" into "thousand" in college English textbooks since I was a child, but no teacher ever told me that the British would read "five thousand" from five thousand.

With the development of overseas life, my confusion is increasing day by day.

I don't know how to say pork belly in the butcher's shop in English, and I don't know how to gesture with the grocer, such as cotton swabs or toothpicks or nail clippers. I don't know how to explain it to the barber. I have two spins on my head, so don't cut too hard at first; Going out to play with friends, I want to book a standard room, and the standard room blurts out, which makes the young lady at the front desk look at nothing.

I didn't even know how to tell people white water, so I asked the waiter for boiled water. As a result, people say, Xiansen, the water here has never been burned.

Plug and socket, charger and jack, screw and screwdriver, these words are so strange, but they are so necessary here.

I can still cope with my English in specialized courses. At least I can read documents, write articles, and talk about political science, international relations and other complicated big words. I can hear you clearly and speak clearly.

These words, which only appear in printed matter, are not strange to me. Growing up is a common word in textbooks and a common test site in exams. The teacher told me that the deeper words are used and the more words are recited, the better English will be.

So, I chew vocabulary books and recite GRE. Excited at the sight of big words, despised at the sight of small words.

After learning so many big words, the words didn't convey the meaning and even made a joke.

I once chatted with a foreign classmate and talked about a new smart phone. I don't know if I was influenced by Chinese, but I blurted out my smartphone during the conversation. The circle around me suddenly quieted down, and it took foreign friends two or three seconds to realize that I was talking about a smart phone. Some foreign friends who don't know the truth think I did it on purpose. They patted me on the shoulder and appreciated my sense of humor.

In a foreign land, I suddenly felt frustrated with my English study for more than ten years.

After learning so many texts, memorizing so many words and passing so many exams, I found that preschool children who don't even know basic survival English and their expression level is even worse than that of others who speak their mother tongue. These children obviously can't spell Socrates and Plato in English, and they don't know what a young pioneer is, but they can clearly state how a mosquito bit a bag on his calf, or complain to their mother that their shoelaces are loose without thinking.

These should be the earliest English we learned and the most commonly used expressions in our lives, but they have become the blind spots for hundreds of millions of people in China to learn English.

This is an embarrassing collective memory. How many nights have we spent our youth and patience at no cost, survived from the sea of tricky vocabulary and grammar questions again and again, and even left a huge shadow in learning a foreign language, only to find that most of our efforts were in vain.

It's time to reflect on our English study.

After graduation, I traveled around and came to work in a bank in Hong Kong. The former colony naturally has a unique advantage in English, and it is not surprising that colleagues around it are fluent. But what is surprising is the waiter in the restaurant, the driller in the street, the cleaner in the office and the salesman in the supermarket. Their spoken English is so fluent, even though my English school may be older than their whole school experience.

Once, I chatted with the moving master. He can't speak Mandarin, and I can't speak Cantonese. We can only communicate in English. He said he dropped out of school right after primary school. I asked him why he spoke English so well. He said, no way, many customers who moved before are ghosts, just talking.

Just say it. Perhaps the essence of English learning should be here.

Go back to life, don't limit yourself to books, let English become your daily language and an interesting communication.

This is not innovation, we just need to return to the ontological function of language.

Speak human words.