China232.com Blog

In China, I often hear the words “open” and “open-minded” used incorrectly and I want to help clear this up.

First of all if you describe someone as being “open” it just means that the person shares a lot of their stories, true feelings, and ideas with other people. They don’t keep a lot of secrets about themselves. It doesn’t mean that this person has sex with many different people. It has nothing to do with that.

Also, being “open-minded” means that you are able to use your brain to consider all aspects of a situation. It means that you can consider new ideas and arguments. It also means you are not prejudiced. This term refers to thinking and not behavior. For example, being “open minded” doesn’t mean you would allow your child to smoke. It only means that you would be able to listen to your child’s opinion and ideas and try to understand why they might want to. If a father says to his son “You can’t smoke. It’s really bad. That’s it. You must listen me because I am your father and I am right. I don’t care about your ideas.” then he is not open-minded. A father who is open-minded might say something like, “Son, I really don’t want you to smoke. I know that a lot of people your age are smoking and I understand that there is a lot of pressure on you. I hope you feel free to talk to me about this. I really care about you and your health.”

Remember that being open-minded should always be used in a good way. It just means that you try your best to consider all possibilities and ideas before making your decision. It means to do your best to understand people and situations.

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Andy

Learning and Improving English

I want to share how we usually use the word “cool” because I’ve heard many non-native speakers use it differently.

First of all, “cool” is not a word you would use to describe yourself because it sounds too arrogant. For example, it really sounds like you are too proud of yourself to say, “I am a cool guy”. It’s not cool to say that.

We also don’t usually tell people directly that we think they are cool. For example, I wouldn’t tell my friend, “You are really cool”. If I’m talking to someone else about my friend I might say, “My friend Chris is a really cool guy”. But I wouldn’t tell Chris that. I’m not sure exactly why we do this but its almost always done this way.

We also don’t usually tell people that they look cool. If I thought someone was wearing really cool sunglasses, I might say, “Hey, those are really cool sunglasses. Where did you get those?” I wouldn’t say, “You look cool in those sunglasses”. Some other common sentences are, “That’s a really cool bar.” “This apartment is really cool”. “That was a really cool movie”.

Please share your thoughts and give me some topic ideas.

Thanks

Andrew

Grammar and Word Usage Learning and Improving English

I’ve met many people who want to learn English and they tell me that they are afraid to speak. I ask them, “what exactly are you afraid of?”. They tell me that they are afraid to make a mistake or afraid that their pronunciation isn’t standard. I’ve been learning Chinese for a few years and I remember that I had some of the same fears when I started. These fears are clearly natural but also clearly need to be resolved.

I want to share some ideas with you that I think will help you to overcome these fears. One thing you need to remember is that English is the world’s language. People from all over the world learn English and speak it with us. Because of this, native English speakers are very used to the accents, grammar mistakes, and unusual pronunciation from people from all over the world. We often don’t even notice if you are making any mistakes because we hear the same mistakes all the time. The mistakes almost sound natural. It’s the same story with pronunciation. This is just called an accent. We hear them all the time and it’s very easy for us to understand. If we don’t pay attention to these things you shouldn’t either. Sometimes we even find that the accents sound exotic or sexy. Don’t think of it as a bad thing.

If you want to improve your pronunciation its important to spend a lot of time listening. Think of how babies learn. They listen all the time and develop a native accent in any language. Reading isn’t necessary for pronunciation. Listen and try your best to sound the same. Over time you will improve. It’s harder for adults than children, but still possible to keep improving with practice.

Andrew

Learning and Improving English

When I ask people what they would do to increase their intelligence it surprises me how many people say, “go back to school”. So many people associate school with learning and have a hard time thinking of other ways to improve their minds. I believe that intelligence means a persons ability to handle new information and make good decisions with that information. I also believe that you can be intelligent in certain areas and a complete idiot in other areas. Some intelligence is “natural” but I think that most people focus too much on that part. I think that most people can become intelligent in areas that they are currently weak in.

The human brain is a special machine designed to take in information from the environment and make adjustments and improvements to how it will tell you to handle that information. It’s important to challenge your brain with many different kinds of new information. This information that I’m talking about is anything that you can see, hear, smell, touch, or feel. Basically anything at all that you can notice that is happening around you. If you are doing the same thing every day, your brain is taking in the same information all the time and it has no chance to grow or improve itself. People who interact with different people all the time increase their social intelligence. They are able to see how different kinds of people react to different things. Their brains can then use that information to make adjustments and give them a better plan for dealing with people. You learn from experience what kinds of things make people laugh, what kinds of things make people feel uncomfortable, what kind of things make people want to do business with you. If you only socialize with a small group of the same people all the time, you will know what to expect and you won’t learn anything. The key is to always be doing new things and challenging yourself. Any other area of intelligence is the same. If you want to be better at solving computer problems, the only way to do that is to always give your brain different kinds of computer problems to solve. You’ll get faster and better at doing it the more you do it. Your brain is always learning from the new experiences. Its not simply the amount of time. You could spend hours on the computer just writing emails and chatting with your friends and you’d learn almost nothing. You could also keep doing the same task over and over again. Again, you’d learn nothing. The key is to keep challenging yourself with new experiences. If you want to improve your English, you must learn new words and talk about new things that challenge you. Its easy to get stuck at one English level. Many people get to a level where they have no problem in daily communication but seem to never be able to talk about more advanced topics. It’s not because they aren’t smart enough, its just because they keep talking about the same things and doing the same things.

If you want to increase your intelligence in any area you must be constantly doing new things. Ask yourself how many new experiences have you had over the past month. If your life seems to be almost the same every day than you are probably learning very little. Make a point of reading something new, making a friend with a person unlike your other friends, eating a new kind of food, going to a new place for a vacation, playing a different sport. Make sure you aren’t doing the same thing day after day, watching the same TV shows all the time, and hanging out with the same kinds of people all the time. To start out, make sure that at least once a week you will do something that you’ve never done before. Even if its go to a new restaurant or read a new book. Start out small but make sure you are making more and bigger changes as you grow.
I’d love to hear your comments and experiences.
Andrew

Learning and Improving English Self Improvement

“Yet” can be used in a few different ways. I’ll go over a couple of the most common and most important uses.

1. “Up to this moment; now “

He’s not here yet. (He is not here now but he will be here.)

I haven’t been to Japan yet. (I have never been to Japan but I plan on going.)

Are we there yet? (Are we there?)

2. But still, nevertheless

What you said is strange yet very true.

3. In addition (emphasizes a slight surprise)

This website has yet another user.

You’ve made that same mistake several times in the past but now you are making it yet again.

“Whatsoever”

Whatsoever basically is used to emphasize, “not at all”

I have no idea whatsoever. (I have absolutely no idea.)

I can’t speak Korean whatsoever. (I can’t say anything at all in Korean.)

That has nothing whatsoever to do with me. (That has absolutely nothing to do with me.)

That makes no sense whatsoever. (That makes no sense at all.)

Learning and Improving English

A lot of students ask me how they can improve their English listening. Many people have a good English vocabulary but they can’t understand because the speaking is too fast for them to listen to. The funny thing is that they still keep trying to build their vocabulary, hoping this will improve their English listening.

You need to know that in order to improve your English listening ability you need to spend more time listening to English. Reading will improve your vocabulary but that’s often not the problem when it comes to improving listening. Think about it. It’s common that you could know all the words of a sentence if you read it, but if you only heard it in regular speed you won’t catch the meaning. Why is that? I hear a lot of people say that “the English speaking is too fast”. Unfortunately, people are not going to change the speed they speak English. You should instead look think of the problem is “your listening is too slow”.

When native speakers are listening to English spoken quickly as on CNN, they don’t listen to every word and think of the meaning of each word. That would take much too long and they also wouldn’t be able to understand. Their brains are good at listening to only the important words and getting a feel for the general meaning. It’s very hard to explain how to do that. If you are really good at a sport or a musical instrument, it’s hard to explain how you are doing it exactly, but one thing is for sure, you need to practice a lot before you will be good. It’s quite similar with improving English listening. Even though the progress seems slow, you are certainly improving your listening.

It’s important to listen to things that are challenging for you but not impossible. If you are listening to something too easy you won’t improve your listening. If you are listening to CNN and can almost understand nothing, you won’t improve your listening very quickly that way. If you have a chance, it’s a good idea to practice with TV shows like friend’s. Our podcasts are also designed to help you improve your English listening. It’s good to read the dialogue on the website as well as listen so that you know exactly what is being said. Keep practicing and don’t give up. You will certainly improve your English listening that way.

Andrew

Learning and Improving English

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

Learning and Improving English Self Improvement