How to Learn English Effectively

The composition below is the homework I was required to write for the first time in this semester. The title is “How to Learn English Effectively.” I wrote about listening and writing; the former is what I’m not good at, the latter otherwise.


In this paper, my personal opinions about how to learn English effectively will be presented from the two views of listening and writing. As for the listening skills, I think that it is the most significant that we try to make it a rule to listen to various kinds of English: news programs, foreign movies, model passages of some English tests like TOEFL, and so on. When studying other languages, no learner should be so optimistic that he overestimates his own English-listening skills with the hyper-positive notion that there will be no situation unmanageably going beyond his real ability. No matter how overconfident a learner one is, there is no denying that it can easily happen for example, that one who is really proficient in listening to foreign movies with perfect comprehension one day suddenly faces a ruthlessly discovered reality of his actually not being able to understand English news programs. I, rather getting used to hearing formal English, am extremely allergic to spoken casual English; spoken English can easily make itself sound so hardly understandable due to its obnoxious deviations from prescriptive grammars, as for there to have been a commonly held realization among English learners for a long time that sometimes the colloquialism particularly seen in everyday conversations goes too far for them to keep their confidence, and even interest in spoken English, at last to give up studying it. Listening to various kinds of English will give you a lot of opportunities for you to discern what kind of English is the most suitable for you, making it possible that your plan of listening studies becomes more concrete, and well scheduled.
About the writing skills, it seems very effective that you write down some expressions you personally thought were interesting and laudable in reading books, so that you can refer to them later when you are supposed to write something in English, both formal and informal. But what cannot be emphasized strongly enough is that we must always make sure that these expressions have to be turned into our own ones lest they should become suspicions about our committing on the most despicable measure of all － plagiarism. The elaborate phrases you chose will bring successful effects and punches to your writings, provided that you have transformed them so radically into unique “your-Esque” expressions with an ingenious mind, that no one can recognize or even guess what on earth the original source was.