An introduction: to review the way of learning English
A) How do the young students in Taiwan learn English?
In an article entitled “Test-oriented learning suffocates creativity”, the author says: “Many of students become well trained test takers who don’t really enjoy the process of learning English, let alone appreciate the beauty of language itself.” The article continues to tell how they are trained. “(During) courses numerous test examples are provided, an- swering skills are cleverly taught, and the students are effectively trained.
The test results may be satisfactory, but the competence to master and use the language would be limited.” (The China Post Daily, August 9,
’07)
This is the large picture of English learning situation of Taiwan, which we are in. We can do nothing about it. What we should do is to follow a sound and effective way of learning.
B) How have we been learning English till now?
Maybe we are not well aware of how do we learn English, just as a Chinese poem goes: “ 不見廬山真面目, 只緣身在此山中”.
Test yourself with the following sentences, which are somehow complicated: and obscure.
“Anything that can go wrong will” Murphy’s Law
“It really is in your long-term interest to forego the short-term
escapes of TV or Web games and do your schoolwork or devote yourself to special-interesting hobbies, instead.”
Translate these two sentences, if you find difficult or make mistakes,
figure out why. Is it that you translate them by finding the meanings of
vocabulary only? If it is so, then you are in a habit to understand English
by words, similar to the way we do with Chinese. That’s why we are
criticized by the native speakers: when we write or speak English, we
first think in Chinese then translate it into English.
The rules of making sentences of those two languages are very
different. For example, we say in Chinese 這是我親的寵物. We don’t say in English “This is my father of the pet.” But “This is the pet of my father.”
The rule is: that a phrase used as an adjective should be placed after the noun, and “of my father” is a phrase, therefore we say “this is the pet of my father.” Only by following the English language structure, we can understand, speak and write the correct English.
C) What is the English language structure?
To know it we first break an English passage into its small units. An English piece is composed of 1) word, 2) phrase, 3) clause and 4) sentence
Vocabulary:
All words with some meaning belong to the vocabulary. Sun. tree, dog etc are vocabulary. Only most of the western languages’ words are
inflational. So there are eight parts of speeches.
Beauty n. beautiful adj.beautifully adv..beautify v.
Danger n. dangerous adj. dangerously adv. endanger v.
Rule 1: Use the proper word form and know its function or the role it plays.
Another trait of words ,like Chinese, they have many meanings.
Ear n 耳朵, 穗, 壶或茶杯的把手
Mess n. 混亂, (軍中)餐廳 Flag n.
旗, . v. 攔下 (一輛車)
You can recognize and find the exzct meaning of the word from the context.
Phrase:
A phrase is a group of words put together with a meaning but itself is not a sentence. For example:
1. to draw near 走近, 接近 Christmas is drawing near
2. the time of year 一年此時 The time of year I used to be away.
3. a piece of cake 輕而易舉 To fix a roof is a piece of cake for him 4. a cup of tea 喜歡的事 Cooking is his cup of tea
So a phrae
1. has an integral meaning,
2. is considered as a unit,
3. also an ingredient of a sentence,
4. plays a role in the sentence structure. For Example:
There is a mom-and-pop chicken place literally on every corner.
“A mom-and-pop chicken place” is a phrase
and plays a role of the subject of the verb “is”: and “on every corner” also is a phrase and plays a role of adverb modifying verb “is”.
Rule 2: after vocabulary always try to find the meaningful phrase in a sentence and see wht kind of role it plays.
Clause
