想要学好英文，记得每天思考以下几个问题：
How important is it to you, and what are you willing to go through to achieve mastery?
How will this great effort serve you and others?
How will you feel about yourself when you do this?
那么，如何学好英文呢？答案很简单：有系统地学和练。
I Learned to Practice English Like a Master Violinist. I daily contemplate how I can improve my English ability.
The English language is essential to my career. But like muscles without exercise, language abilities decline without use.
The problem is this: nobody ever taught me in school , how to properly go about studying the language on a daily basis.
What are the best practices I should employ every day to master, not simply “maintain,” my English ability?
Deliberate Practice!
One place that I’ve looked for inspiration in my language study is music. I had heard that violin players have to practice many hours a day, but a few years ago I came across an exceptional article by a master violinist who combines his love of music with his research in psychology.
His post is aptly named How Many Hours a Day Should You Practice?
He claims that the number of hours spent practicing means nothing unless that practice is deliberate.
Taking this into consideration with the famous “10,000 hour rule” to achieve expert level in anything requires years of deliberate practice.
Deliberate, or mindful practice is a systematic and highly structured activity.
Instead of mindless trial and error, it is an active and thoughtful process of relentlessly seeking solutions to clearly defined problems.
And here is where I’ve been getting it all wrong. Actually, there are two very specific things I’ve been doing wrong in my language studies that need to be addressed:
1) I have been expecting too much in too little time.
Even after years of higher education, I am still unable to read English without a dictionary.
Disappointing? For my standards, yes. But I haven’t spent enough time.
2) Don’t just ‘get through it’
My practice times must be deliberate, focused, intentional, and planned out.
My daily English learning, for example, has not been any of these.
Usually, I sit down to read English, going through it as fast as I can, stopping to analyze a verb here or there, looking up words I don’t remember, and then “Whew!”, time for a break and I move on to something else.
But I’m hurting myself. I’m practicing a method that will not yield results in the long run, will leave me stuck in a pattern of mediocrity, and will ultimately keep me from achieving my goal.
I’ve been building habits that are counterproductive and inefficient. I need to spend time on the small details and, paradoxically,
I need to slow down to eventually speed up: Deliberate practice is often slow, and involves repetition of small and very specific sections.
For example, if you were a musician, you might work on just the opening note of a solo to make sure that it “speaks” exactly the way you want.
I recently joined Practice Paradise and I now practice speaking as a daily exercise. I’ve been consciously speaking English as if practicing violin.
Here are some tips I offer from my own experience for those of you wanting to gain a true mastery of English:
1) Set aside adequate time.
Set aside time each day for speaking practice.
In the summer I set aside two hours a day to practice. I take a short 5-10 minute break in between each hour.
Stick to the daily plan that you set for yourself.
2) Master speaking the basics
Yes, you have already learned all these English words before.
But a violin player doesn’t learn the scales once and then move on to Mozart. She practices them incessantly, always seeking to play them cleaner and in perfect pitch each time.
That takes work, hard work. Deliberate work.
Sometimes Boring? Dull? Difficult? Yes, yes, yes. But it’s necessary to achieve mastery.
And if violin players have to spend hours each day running through scales, true mastery of English is surely equally demanding.
3) Log and review mistakes.
Write down every unknown word while going through each lesson. Review the list once or twice more later in the day.
Index cards are your best friend; at every impulse to check your mobile, reach instead for a card.
So, the work stands before for you.
And the first question you must ask yourself is this:
How important is it to you, and what are you willing to go through to achieve mastery?
How will this great effort serve you and others?
How will you feel about yourself when you do this?
Life is short. Time is our most valuable commodity.
If you’re going to practice, you might as well do it right.
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