China232.com Blog

Hey guys.

Sorry for not writing a blog for so long. Until today we didn’t know anyone was reading it because we couldn’t see the comments until today. My little brother, Add, solved the problem, so now I feel confident that people are actually reading it. I can be quite a baby sometimes. It’s ironic that my not writing lately was directly related to my last post on being lazy. I had no motivation to write because I thought if no one would read it than I am just wasting my time writing. So I would procrastinate writing and watch TV instead. (Notice I’m using some of the new words from the podcasts to give you a clearer idea of how to use them). If I knew more people were reading the blog already, I would have certainly been writing. Anyway, now you know a little more about me. Ha ha. I get motivated by more comments and more users. So don’t be shy and I’ll start working harder.

Ok. Enough about that. I just want to give everyone an idea of our future plans for www.china232.com. Please understand that we are new at web design so new things sometimes take us some time to figure out how to do them. We’ve never learned anything at all about web design in school so we are trying to teach ourselves from books. Actually, Add does almost all the work on the website. I’m the older brother so I guess I can be a little bossy and get him to do too much work. (sorry Add).

Anyway, we are going to have a forum coming out soon so that we can all communicate with each other about many different topics. We’re going to be blogging more as well and share some funny stories about our personal lives. We’ll put some pictures up too. The users of this website are from all over the world and we’ve all had incredibly different lives. I hope that we can share our different experiences and ideas. One of the best ways to improve at a language is to practice debating. Explaining your opinion to someone else who at first disagrees with you is frustrating in another language. If you can do it well and get them to understand you clearly, then you know you are at a high level. We are thinking of starting to make some videos as well soon. We don’t have a video camera yet but we will hopefully be getting one soon. Let us know if you are interested in seeing videos of us.

Oh ya, and please tell us where you are from when you write in. I just want to thank everyone for using this website and writing to us. On our homepage there is a link to tell a friend about our website. It’s really easy to do and would help us so much. If you have a chance to comment about this website on any blogs, forums, or websites in your country, that would really help so much. We really love making this free website for you and we hope to continue to improve it. Please help us to get more people here and you will soon see it getting better faster. Thanks again everyone! I hope to hear from you.

Andrew

A lot of people tell me they that they really want to study English but they are too lazy. I don’t believe there is such a thing as laziness. Here’s why; suppose I told you that I would give you a million dollars if you studied English for 2 hours per day for a whole week. If you really believed me, would you do it? Absolutely you would! (If you wouldn’t then I suppose you really would be lazy). Now suppose you studied for the whole week and at the end of the week I told you that I lied and I was no longer going to give the million. Well, you’d be really pissed off at me for lying to you but you would have studied for the whole week; something you usually wouldn’t do. It’s interesting to think that you only studied because you thought you were getting some reward for it. Nothing else.

So why do some people study and some don’t? In other words, why are some people are what we call lazy, and others are not? The answer is just motivation. The people who do choose to study are people who are better at seeing the benefits of studying. Now you might tell me that you know the benefits, you know you’d probably get a better job, you know you could communicate with more people, you know you could travel around the world more easily. So if you know the benefits, why are you not studying. The reason is the benefits seem too far off and hard to achieve. Let’s be honest, if you study English really hard for one day, it’s not going to make a huge difference in your life. You might not even notice that you’ve improved at all. In some ways it feels like a waste of time because you don’t notice the improvement. Of course you are smart enough to know that you are probably improving, but the reward still doesn’t feel great enough. That’s why you don’t do it.

So what do you have to do then? Somehow you have to make your brain believe the benefits are worth all the effort. You need to reward yourself when you finish the task and punish yourself when you don’t. If your goal is to study an hour per day, you should think of some kind of reward you will give yourself when you finish. Maybe you will watch a great movie when you finish, maybe you will go and do something fun with your friends. Choose something that you would enjoy. If you don’t study, you must make sure that you don’t do this fun thing or anything else fun. In other words, don’t reward yourself for failure. You should also punish yourself for not doing it. Don’t let yourself watch TV, don’t let yourself talk on MSN, don’t let yourself talk with your friends. That is the hard part. If you can get in the habit of rewarding yourself when you do complete your study goal and punish yourself when you don’t, you will find that you spend a lot more time studying. Good luck.

Please write to me and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear from all of you.

Andrew

Hello everyone! We just wanted to welcome everyone to our blog. We hope to share some stories with you and hopefully learn a little about you as well. This should be a fun and interesting way to communicate with all of you.

Talk to you soon,

Andrew and Addison