At 2 o’clock p.m. April 9th, Dr. Chen Canpei, a Chinese-American, accompanied by Ren Qing, Curator of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Museum of Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Mausoleum, came to our School of Foreign Languages and delivered a lecture on “How to learn civilized English well--- ‘Better English, the Civilized Way’ ”.
In today’s society, more and more Chinese choose to further their studies or settle down abroad while specking Chinglish. Having been living in the United States for 40 years, Dr. Chen Canpei shared with us the misused words summarized by himself.
Dr. Chen not only gave some notes for vocabulary usage, but also provided some advice on learning. First of all, we should realize that learning is a process in which making mistakes and doing corrections are inevitable. Once we make a mistake, we should try to indentify the reason so as not to make the same mistake next time. As for improving English proficiency, Dr. Chen regraded watching English channels as a good choice. Before the last holiday he can only understand half of the lecture content, but after the holiday, he could easily understand the content of the class taught by professors. Listening to English broadcast is another effective method. It can be very helpful to improve English for it mainly depends on listening. It also helps a lot by reading magazines. We can read and take down some good sentences for later use.
Some words and phrases which are learnt by students at school are not commonly used in daily life. Dr. Chen suggested that we should remember more English expressions frequently used in everyday life, such as the names of dishes of restaurants. In addition, we should pay attention to other meanings of polysemy words which are also frequently used in daily life.
In view of the current situation that some Chinese students want to study in USA, Dr. Chen put forward many pertinent suggestions for us. According to him, it is a good choice to study abroad. He suggested that we apply for American top colleges on the premise of getting a bachelor’s degree, having a good mastery of basic knowledge and getting scholarship.
Finally, Dr. Chen mentioned “Don’t work hard, work smart”. We should study smartly and efficiently to gain more information easily and to adapt ourselves to the contemporary society.
