English as Second Language

English is the most general language in this world; 4.152 billion people use English as the first language. So English is very important and useful because we communicate with each other. When we try to communicate with someone from another country we try to use English as our first attempt. But all language is art; everybody knows the hardest thing is to be an artist. So knowing how to be an artist of language is very important, especially for second language. I study English when I was seven years old; I touch with English 10 years. I have gotten a lot of trouble though those years.

Some of my Chinese friends who are studying in America, sometimes feel very unconfident because of their accents. They don't want people to laugh at them, so they choose to be silent. I think most of the foreigners have a accent problem, some of them can hide their accent but some of them can't. We can improve our accents to the point where it makes communication easy. I think the best way for us to improve our accents is by watching movies and mimic the actor's voice. I picked actors because most actors have accepted some kind of professional training. They have a good voice and clear accent. We can improve a lot by hearing them speak.

For my experience accent is not a big problem, the bid problem for me I think it is vocabulary, because if you want communicate you have to understand what they say or tell them what you want. Any communication based on sentences, these sentences are based on vocabulary. So the first step is to study the English vocabulary. I think studying vocabulary can be very boring (you can not image how boring it is) but I do not think it being boring is the main problem, but it is all the memorizing. So finding out a comfortable way to remember the vocabulary is very useful. Sometimes doing some adjustments is needed to make it feel better.

Vocabulary just like a muscle, it needs some attachments to work properly. Human muscle attaches to the bone to function properly, so English (muscle) connect with grammar (bone) to work properly. English grammar is not very hard, but you have to find the patterns. We do not need to study grammar in depth, because the basic grammar is good enough. In my country, the student usually study grammar as the primarily focus but neglect the vocabulary (I think that is wrong). The best way to study grammar is by finding a grammar book to read and practices everyday. Grammar is the backbone of language and it was created to help us create understandable utterance easily. We just need to remember it and use it correctly.

Right now we have good vocabulary, grammar, and an accent but you still need some kind of reading and writing skill. They are very important because when you study at a university, you have to read many text books and write a lot of papers. I think keeping a book, magazines, and/or a news paper is a good idea. Because reading them can help you improve your