to Students: Things you are encourage to do

1. learn in advance. You are encouraged to learn the whole textbooks in the beginning of a term; if you haven’t, do it now.
2. read. You are encouraged to read English books as many as possible, books including those talking about learning strategies, grammars, other persons’ learning experiences, and English novels or plays.
3. sing English songs.
4. write English novels, essays, prose, poems, plays, songs, etc.
5. take roles in English plays. You can do this all by yourself, just imagine you were someone else, sometimes a prince or a king, sometimes a witch or a pirate. You can even imagine yourself as a dog or a baby. Just make fun with English.
6. try various ways to make English learning funny and delightful.
7. challenge your English teacher or friends from English major. You can just beat them, or even you can’t, you might be able in the near future. Just have the confidence.
8. translate an English writing into traditional Chinese or vice versa.
9. play English jokes on your friends. Use English you’ve learned in movies in your life.
10. make learning plans and follow them. Just remember, your plans need adjustment now and then.
11. learn extra things. I won’t say it’s just to make extra efforts. Try not to take learning as a burden, instead, it is always interesting and pleasing. Anyhow, it’s your choice whether to make it delightful or not. If you like, you may learn more specific knowledge of the language and find it very useful. Such knowledge may include etymology (word-building), phonetics (how to pronounce and read with expression), tranlation, linguistics, etc.
12. think in English. Whenever you speak or write in English, try not to translate it from Chinese, you’d better do it directly in English.
13. repeat two to three times whenever you speak out one unfamiliar sentence.
14. make friends with your English-classmates. You need to cooperate to improve your English.