Learning Method: How to improve your English skills? (Reading)

Chapter 3: The Shortcuts for improving your reading skills

There are two kinds of reading: one for leisure purpose, one for work/test purpose.

For leisure purpose, what you should focus is the understanding of the story. Say, you are reading a novel, do take your time and re-read a paragraph, or a page, or even a chapter if you have missed out something. If you have words you do not know, always try to deduce the meanings from the context. Unlike in a test or exam, author usually do not offer tips and hints, but it is worth trying because you will remember better if you try guessing. If there are too many words you do not know, don't check dictionary for every word yet, only look them up if you see the same word appearing again and again. Of course, don't expect to read the book only once. You should expect to read the book three times to complete the entire process of learning and understanding. Re-reading shouldn't bother you if that is really a good book.

For work or test purpose, there are many types of approach because there are various aims or question types which you need to tackle. I have techniques on handling different types of questions but what I want to share is the general approach.

Say, you can forsee a busy month just around the corner and you soon need to work overtime for many days before the deadline, what you could do now is to train yourself to read faster. Now when I say "train", it means you have to practise continuously. I took about a month of practice almost every weekday whenever I read (eg. blogs, magazines, newspapers, food menus, etc.) to finally acquire considerable increase in my reading speed. There are so many benefits for reading fast:

1. You can get the key points much faster, thus avoid reading non-useful information.
2. You can use the same amount of time used in your normal reading and read twice with your increased reading speed.
3. You spend less time to complete all your formal reading tasks.

So what is my tip? Listen up.

You need to understand that your brain can actually function quite fast, and your eyes can move faster than you can understand, so my tip is to train your eyes to move faster than your mouth or your brain. How much faster? Just enough for you to maintain understanding, so it should be around 20% faster every two weeks for a month. So by the end of the month, if you have been practising well, you should be able to increase your reading speed by 44%.

Once you have acquired this skill, you can imagine your working performance to have a similar amount of increase.

Some people can even apply the same technique and expand it even more to reading lines of words at a time or a paragraph at a time. Well, I can't do that just yet so I am not sure if this is achievable, but I can definitely read much much faster than word for word now.

So, practise more! And enjoy working fast!

Next entry: Chapter 4: The Shortcuts for improving your writing skills

Learning Method: How to improve your English skills? (Speaking)

Chapter 2: The Shortcuts for improving your speaking skills

When it comes to speaking, many learners think that you must have a partner to speak to in order to practise and improve. My answer is, you should, but not a must. Having someone to speak to, like an English teacher, definitely would benefit you because you should receive feedback from them, and the feedback should be trustworthy. If you don't have an English teacher, get a friend who can speak English well, such as ABC, BBC, CBC, etc. and meet up once a week for lunch or dinner, and all you need is to offer them a treat. If you don't have friends like that, make one! (This is particularly beneficial to the single) However, no matter what, you can still apply the tips which I am going to share with you.

Tip 1: Sing! Sing! Sing!

Singing songs and you will learn to acquire accents, intonation, linking, assimilation and liaison skills. This is a great way to practise even if you have no one to speak to. (This answers the comment on the previous entry) My sister has never been to America, but she has a great American accent, because she sings, sings and sings American songs. You'll be surprised how native you can sound if you apply this method! And the best about this tip is, it is almost at $0. So this tip is always the top of my shortcut list.

Tip 2: Read out a story book loud!

Get a book that you are interested and read out loud! Why?

1. You will mostly be reading something authentic.
2. It helps to enhance your level of comprehension as you need to understand the mood and the atmosphere before reading out correctly.
3. It helps to expand your vocabulary pool.
4. You don't need a partner.
5. Even if you don't like reading books, you will gradually fall in love with this really good habit.

Tip 3: Read out a grammar book loud!

This tip has the benefits of Tip 2's point 1 and 4, and in addition to that,

1. it should be grammar proof (and this is usually not guaranteed for novels or story books).
2. It helps to improve your grammar while reading, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Tip 4: Speak to your self!

This tip is taken from IELTS preparation. Quoting from the website:

Remember that students can also practise speaking on their own. Even though there is no response or feedback, simply speaking gives the opportunity to try different ways of saying things, which can help to increase confidence. Describing what you see around you and what is happening in the street when you walk or drive somewhere, predicting the events of the day in the morning and then remembering them at night, even telling yourself what you need, and why, as you walk around the supermarket: all these give additional practice in expressing ideas in English and ‘loosening the tongue’.

Next entry: Chapter 3: The Shortcuts for improving your reading skills

Resources:
http://www.cambridgeesol.org/teach/ielts/speaking/aboutthepaper/develop_gen_speak_skills.htm

Learning Method: How to improve your English skills? (Listening)

Chapter 1: The Shortcuts for improving your listening skills

Tip 1: Know your listening materials.
Many learners are too eager to improve their listening skills, they grab whatever might look useful and spend hours and hours practising it. In the end, they took the long distance route. There are a few problems to this:

1. It might be too difficult.
2. It might be too easy.
3. It might be too boring.
4. It might be too stupid.
5. It might not be enriching, thus it doesn't benefit the learner.
6. It might offer strange accents (they often do).
7. It might not meet your personal needs.
   

There might be more problems to just the 7 listed above, which is why it is crucial to know your materials before you start.

Tip 2: Know your needs (strengths and weaknesses), choose the right stuff.

Simply, put it, if you don't know your problems, how do you know what materials will help?

Tip 3: Begin with a variety of topics, test your level while discovering your interest.

Once you know what your problems are, you can focus on choosing the right materials to use. However, very often I get "attitude" students, who tell me "I don't like this" or "This is not my cup of tea" before they even try. How do they know they what "tea" suits them if they don't try? Having a prejudice on the once "not-my-cup-of-tea" seriously limited the choice one has. How can one be so sure that they haven't improved their taste over the years? There are always surprises when you allow yourself to expose to more. Once you have found your new interests or new loves, you will improve two times better than you normally do.

Tip 4: Always pick listening materials a little harder than you can cope with.

There is no point you keep practising with CDs or sound clips that you can handle or that are too difficult. Too easy and you don't learn at all; too difficult and your confidence will be at risk. Think of it as challenging MJ's moonwalk before you can walk.


Tip 5: Listen to English songs, whenever you can.

It doesn't matter whether you are concentrating or not, just play the songs, for your leisure or for background music, or just to make your home less quiet. There are both conscious learning and unconscious learning, babies in wombs learn with the latter. You are not too late to do the same.



Tip 6: Listen to (if no time to watch) English drama series, movies, news reports, TV ads, anything.

Like Tip 5, you don't have to pay special attention to it, but always have the sounds around you. This allows you to familiarise with the SPA (Separation, Pace, Accents), these are the problems which can be solved by continuous exposure. If you want native speakers to speak to you, they are always hiding inside your TV screen. This may not be environmental friendly, but who knows, maybe you will understand or enjoy the programs very soon!


All these tips have been applied and shown that they work. Try them out today!

Next entry: Chapter 2: The Shortcuts for improving your speaking skills

Learning Method: How to improve your English skills? (Introduction)

Learning Method: How to improve your English skills? (Introduction)

Which kind of learner are you?
Let me give you 3 choices:

1. You are too busy to practise.
2. You are not so busy but you are too unmotivated to practise your English.
3. You are not so busy and you spend lots of time to practise, but with no success.

If you belong to group 1, you need to realise that you may still have free time, just that you don't realise. If you realise it, you will fall into group 2 or 3.

If you fall in group 2, you need to ask yourself why you are not motivated, and find a good reason to motivate yourself again. I learn Italian and Spanish simply because I want to watch the Italian Serie A (soccer) and Spanish La Liga (soccer) on TV in their native language, because the English commentary is often not original enough.


There could be many reasons why you belong to this group: maybe you belonged to group 3 in the past, but because you have no success in learning English, so you have almost given up; maybe you don't find learning English interesting; maybe there are others things more immediate and more urgent for you to learn, so learning English is in a lower position in your priority list.

If you fall into group 3, you must read on, this is an entry for you.

I believe that sometimes, there are short-cuts to learning, the question is, does anyone bother to spend time to think of one?

I love to think, observe, rethink, and put the methods into trial, if they work for someone, I will share them. They might not work for everybody, but it is worth a try.

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Practise, practise, practise. Every skill comes with continuous practise, from tying shoe laces to producing a piano, no exceptions. You want to win, you need to do homework, put in effort.

At the same time, you must understand that, very often, your gain is not proportional to your level of devotion. That's life! (Can you think of an example to support this?) So if you want to succeed, you must have the will to continue even if you keep failing, and have the mind to persevere even if you feel down and upset. This is never easy, but many people have succeeded, so there is no reason why you can't.

Once you have made your own promise, then you can go and apply the methods or shortcuts.

What are the shortcuts then? Stay connected to this blog (will be out soon)!

Websites: Hong Kong Observatory

Typhoon MOLAVE at 23:12 HKT 18 July 2009

This is one of my favourite websites. I must visit this website at least 3 times a day. Once in the morning, because I need to know if it will rain in the morning (to bring an umbrella, or not to bring); Once in the afternoon, to see if there will be typhoon heading Hong Kong (no need to work but get paid?); once before I leave the office / school, to check out the Air Pollution Index (Mongkok is a very polluted area).

But what I have done most with this website, of course, is learning.


Summer is here and you will need to equip yourself with some weather terms. So, what's there to learn?

1. learn to read Satellite images: Click me[1]

A number of satellites provide images of the movement of the clouds, so you can predict the likely weather of the next few days by YOURSELF!!! The images can be played in animation sequence and that button is a must press.

2. learn to read the lightning location information: Click me[2]

On this page, HKO combines the Google map and time colour dots to show you where the lightning hits, both cloud-to-ground and cloud-to-cloud (can be selected by yourself), thus you can have a better idea how far the storm / rain is from Hong Kong. Umbrella or Non-umbrella?

3. learn interesting phenomenon and their names: Click me[3]

Here you can see a series of satellite images of the past and get to learn some terms of some really special phenomenon while reading.

4. Get a feeling of how the wind blows in Hong Kong: Click me[4]

Want to see how wind blows in different regions in Hong Kong? This is a must go.

5. Get to see different severe weather information: Click me[5]

Here you will get to see the severe weather around the world, such as Tropical Cyclones, Heavy Rain/Snow and Thunderstorms.

6. Find out the regional temperature in Hong Kong: Click me[6]

Want to know what to wear in the morning? You will need to use this page to check the temperature of the places you are heading. By clicking on the name of the district, you can see the temperature plotted against time.

7. Learn to scale temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and other weather: Click me[7]

You will be surprised to see how many different terms to do with raining there are.

I'll leave it to you guys to go and check out.

Remember,

"You learn better if you find out your own answer." -- Locky

Resources:

http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/intersat/satpic_s.shtml?pv_mode=playback[1]http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/llis/gm_index.htm[2]http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/intersat/satellite_gallery/index_e.htm[3]http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/ts/wb_animation_e.htm[4]
http://severe.worldweather.org/[5]
http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/ts/index.htm[6]http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/currwx/flw_description/flw_e.htm [7]http://www.hko.gov.hk/school/main.shtml
http://www.hko.gov.hk/education/edue.htm http://www.hko.gov.hk/wxinfo/ts/explain_e.htm#wind

Vocabulary: Hairstyle Terminology

I remember that around a year ago, one of my students asked me some vocabulary on hairstyle, and I got her a website to read. What I really should have done, was to pick out the most popular ones and elaborate a big more on them, but I failed to do so. Now my blog is up and running, it’s about time to write an entry about it.

First of all, let’s go into the common hairstyles in Hong Kong.

Bangs (US/Canadian) /Fringe
the cutting of the front part of the hair up to or just above the eye brows level. The girl below has blunt cut bangs.

Image from FringeBangshairstyles

Crew-cut / Buzz Cut / Butch Cut

A close shave on the sides of the head with a short cut on the top.

Fauxhawk

Once very popular because of the guy you see from the picture. Similar to Mohawk but without the close shave at the sides and very long spikes on the top.

Finger wave

Doesn’t that look like hair twisted with your own fingers?

French braid

Three sections crossed above one another.

French Braid in the making, accompanied by a ponytail
Image from glamour.com

Japanese Hair Straightening / Rebonding (SE Asia)

Curly hair to straight hair that can poke through your paper!

Hime Cut

Long straight hair below the shoulders + a cut above the shoulders + bangs at eyebrow level.

Pigtails

Nina Wang Kung Yu Sum’s pigtails.

Pixie Cut

shorter hair on the back and sides of the head but longer on the top.

Image from fashionindie

Ponytail

One bunch of hair tied up at the back of the head.

Ringlet

Like Claire Bennet in Heroes the TV series? Isn’t this the style you see around you all the time? If not, check the nearest newsstand for any Japanese fashion magazine.

Stay curious and you’ll learn more vocabulary!

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_style

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Wang

http://getwonder.com/12/2009-hairstyles-trends.html