Helping yourself

 
a) Some recommendations in terms of books and materials. Here is another disclaimer! Just because I recommend or ignore something does not mean it is good or bad. There is a great deal of good, bad and “so-so” material out there. Use your own judgment. However, I do have my own opinions:
(i )  Reading –Shu Chong (Bookworm) series. Beowulf. The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway). The ancient Greek plays (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes). English translations of famous works by Chinese writers. Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt). Island of the Blue Dolphins (Scott O’Dell). The Odyssey (Homer). Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe). The Vicar of Wakefield (Oliver Goldsmith). Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte). Agnes Grey (Anne Bronte). Typee (Herman Melville). Of course, this is only a start… there is much more out there! Go look, and take what you like.
(ii) Writing – A Handbook Of Writing (ISBN-7-5600-0700-7). New College English Writing (ISBN-7-81026-970-4). The Old Man And The Sea (Ernest Hemingway). The Vicar Of Wakefield (Oliver Goldsmith). The Elements Of Style (Strunk & White) … and others.
(iii) Listening – The Listen To This series. China Radio International (C.R.I.). BBC World Service…and certain other countries’ English-language radio stations (Russia, Holland, Vietnam, and others). Finally—choose one film (if you have a VCD; if you don’t, it doesn’t matter). This film should be clean and wholesome, with spoken English and English subtitles! Dialogs must be simple, in clear English (not regional accent). The content should be interesting and useful to your education. You can listen to this film again, and again, and again….Anybody for Casablanca? 
(iv)  Speaking –Your “across” cell-partner. A quiet, undisturbed place with a large mirror on the wall, where you can watch yourself reciting words from a list – or Shakespeare. Your English-learning tape recorder (fu du ji). New Person To Person, Books 1 and 2. (ISBN-7-5600-1389-9).
b) Suggestions concerning internal and external motivation. Your internal and external motivations are important, because they are so powerful. However, they are often unseen. First: try to discover what they are; then, write them down on a piece of paper. Second: as long as they are not harmful or wrong, try to “harness” or direct the latent force of these motivations into the task of improving your English. For example, I like different kinds of food. If I want to learn the Chinese names of certain foods, I will take a student and go to one of the best supermarkets for western foods in Beijing—Yan Sha, near Dong Zhi Men. We will walk up and down the aisles together, exchanging the Chinese and English names of everything. Then, I will buy myself a loaf—or five loaves—of Yan Sha’s wonderful “German beer bread” and take it home to freeze for later. In this way, I will probably learn my Chinese vocabulary quite quickly. Everyone has their own way of motivating themselves to learn, and so do you …so use it.
c) “Doing what you like, and liking what you do.” Study English because you like to and want to. Do not allow outside people or factors to “drive” you. Interest in a language is half of the battle won.
d) Combining “business and pleasure”. Your business is learning English; your pleasure is whatever you like doing. You will learn better if you enjoy it. So, if you really hate reading famous writers like Shakespeare, don’t read Shakespeare! If you would really prefer to read easier, popular fiction—even pulp novels or “comic novels”—well, do so! It will make life easier and happier for you. Try to find a fun way to learn English, wherever you go.
e) “Not just a job, a way of life.” When something becomes a way of life, and you enjoy it, it is amazing how much you can learn. In a sense, this is why people such as recent religious converts learn so much, so quickly. If you make the study of English a way of life, then you may perhaps learn a lot, quickly. After all, isn’t that why people go overseas—to take their “classroom English” and forge it into a tool fit for everyday use, to make it a “way of life”?
f) Having “your way” and “the highway”. Within reasonable limits, try to have “your way” (doing what you want in terms of learning English), as well as “the highway” (being free to go where you want and do what you wish). This new generation will belong, not so much to the rich, or the powerful, or the “well-connected”, as to the creative, the imaginative, the diligent, the low profile, and those with a dream or a vision. At present, only the “Bo-Bo’s” and the (backpacking) “donkeys” have figured this out, but I hope this will change.
g) Tailoring your program to your needs, your desires, and your abilities … for each of the four “Language Arts” skills. Find out what you want/need, as well as what you are strong at/weak at, and build your study plan accordingly. Do it four times—for Reading, for Writing, for Listening, and for Speaking. If you want, do the same for Translating. This will give you a reasonable map to help you travel on your way.
h) Going it alone—pointers. Again, I say…go it alone, where possible; it makes life simpler and allows you more flexibility. For some of you, you can have a “public” English life (see Sections III and IV), as well as a “private” English life (see Sections V and VI). In this way, you don’t have to be a total hermit. You decide.
i) Being discreet—pointers. You can never be too discreet. The best defense against turkeys, jealousy, envy and the like is anonymity and being discreet.
j) On “being nice to yourself”, and a personal case study. I like living in China. However, on certain occasions, I become tired, lonely, depressed and think too much (it is part of my nature). So, what can I do? Sometimes (among other things), I need to “be nice to myself”. Each person has their own special thing—listening to Mozart, going out for a walk, going swimming, or calling a friend on the phone for a long talk. We all do different things, but I think the underlying reason for doing what we do is the same—to preserve our own sanity. “Sanity (like innocence) is such an important thing: lose it, and you will never get it back again.” The road to a good, working knowledge of English is long and hard. Without sustenance you will burn up or go crazy. Therefore, you need to be nice to yourself. It is not gluttony, but the selective application of restorative and preventative medicine.
k) On “tasting” and “sampling” English, not “learning” it. One day, one of my students complained to me, “How can I learn, study and memorize all this English? It is too much, and too hard!” Well, yes, it is! Imagine instead, you are in a large, “Guangdong Xiao Chi” (Dim Sung) restaurant with nine friends. The ten of you are seated at a big, round table. The serving staff with their brass, long-spout teapots are prowling between the tables, looking for an empty teacup. Other staff wheel their trolleys everywhere, offering you “Gungdong Xiao Chi” and marking your table receipt. The ten of you each order ten small dishes—a hundred in total! Then everyone samples a small piece, a mere fragment from each of the hundred dishes. In this way, you can glance over everything, and taste everything. Perhaps you only like five or six of all those dishes; well, next time you visit, you know where to look. You can treat your English-language studies in a similar way. Don’t try to memorize and master all the books in your school’s library—just know where the knowledge is, and how to access it. For me, “knowledge” is like a walnut, and “education” is like a nutcracker. If you know how to “open up” one nut (a book, article, or whatever), you should be able to open up most of the nuts in the nut-forest. After all, squirrels, which have less brain-power than us, can do this. Use such skills as browsing, skimming, scanning, noting book numbers (both ICBN and library call numbers), or noting internet addresses and web-sites. Save the burden of memorizing for your favorite poetry, or the TOEFL!