House Building and English Learning

时间：2008-11-21 00:00:00  来源：杭州平和  作者：徐翠茵

简述：《“平和英语杯”我的英语学习之路普通组应征文》

 虽然征文比赛已经结束，但我们仍然收到了一大批英语爱好者的火热稿件，特此我们选出了其中较为优秀的作品，登载在平和首页上以资鼓励。

House Building and English Learning

徐翠茵

08-11-21

As it’s known to us all that, Rome isn’t built in a day, the learning of English is a long and hard process, which needs a lot of patience and efforts.

In my eyes, learning English , to some degree, is similar to building a house. First of all, a strong house which can survive the hardest storm, is a house that has a firm foundation. And learning English is just the same. Without a good command of grammar and a large, abundant vocabulary, it’s impossible to master a language. Take our mother tongue, Chinese, for example, we have to know the pronunciation, the spelling of the words, and make the words into sentences, then make sentences into paragraphs, at last make paragraphs into articles. That’s the basic process of learning a language. Therefore, a firm foundation is to a strong house as a knowlegde of grammar and vocabulary to English learning.

However, a beautiful house requires not only a firm foundation, but also a good design inside the house. As for learning a language, we are supposed to have a track of the culture background of the language. This understanding of culture background is very important. Take myself for instance. I have once read an article about the custom in some English-speaking countries. Altough I knew all the words, I just could not answer the questions following the passage correctly. That’s because there is a difference in the cultures , a gap in the ways of thinking. Sometimes when we are learning English, if we don’t pay attention to the difference in culture backgrounds, we may end up making some mistakes or misunderstandings. So in order to avoid such embarrassing situations, we ought to learn the language as well as the culture. What a konwledge of culture backgrounds to English learning is what a grand decoration to a house.

More importantly, a house cannot be called a home no matter how beautiful it is. The word “home ”involves not only a house to live in, but a family. That means some people should dwell in the house to meet the function of a house. So apply this theory to English learning, the function of a language is communication. Language is just a tool for us to communicate with each other. Therefore, what we learn should be functional English instead of dumb English. There are many slogans in those English Corner activities, such as“don’t be shy, have a try”, “speak it out loud”, all of which imply the great importance of practice. Practice makes perfect. Although this saying is very old, it does tell us the original purpose of learning a language, and I strongly believe that practice is the key to handling English well.

All in all, with the combination of a firm foundation, a good design and some people to live in, the building of a beautiful house is successfully done. As for English learning, a good command of grammar and vocabulary, a knowledge of culture backgrounds, and practice, with these three factors, learning  languages is not a prolem at all, not to mention English.

编辑：Rebecca