Hello, everyone. I'm George.
Let's talk about how I learned English.
Okay, as you may see, I am in my car right now.
Normally, I don't drive that much.
I'm driving to my work.
Because I don't live really far away from work,
and that is why I would usually ride a U-bike. But these days the weather is not really kind to me.
I have allergy problems,
and I didn't want to be cruel to myself.
So since it is really cold. It is a very good excuse for me to drive a little bit.
So you'd have to excuse me because I'm not looking at the camera all the time.
What we're going to talk about today is how I learn English.
Since in my previous Q&A video, I talked about I've never learned English in any other country.
So this draws more question about my background.
Whether I had any relatives that live in another country or not,
or whether I have any like foreign relatives.
I don't.
My family members are as normal as other people whoever is watching this video.
They're Taiwanese. I don't have any family members that are married to any Americans,
and they've never studied in another country,
and I've never stayed in other countries to study.
This is just to prove that if you want to be good in English,
you don't have to really have any special background.
The only thing you need to do is to try to pay attention to the English around you,
and this is also something that I've been advocating.
So what I'm gonna talk about today is how I learned English.
I started learning English when I was 8 in YMCA.
I was put in the same class as my sister by my parents,
because they didn't believe in having English tests.
They didn't care whether we were on the same level.
We were there and we were learning our listening and our speaking,
not really a lot from the reading and writing because that was a very lazy person.
I didn't want to memorize a lot of vocabulary.
And that is why there was even once the teacher asked me to read a word "mother,"
and I couldn't read it.
I didn't recognize that word and I even cried about it.
Yeah, laugh all you want.
So what I had was we would go to the classes.
We would listen to a lot of English and then we would use English with the teachers there.
And then when we go home, we would be watching TV shows in English.
At that time there were not that many English TV shows.
All the TV shows from America were dubbed in Chinese.
So that is why it was really rare at that time for us to listen to English.
But, thankfully, when I was in elementary school,
they started having this function of turning the channel into English.
so I started listening to the foreigners really speaking English, not Chinese anymore.
You can't imagine how weird it is for those blond hair blue eyes people
speaking Chinese with the mouth not even matching whatever they were saying.
So finally it matched.
And we were having so much fun listening to the English, enjoying the show.
And the most important thing is we didn't know that we were learning English.
What we knew was that we were watching the show,
and when our parents were asking what we were doing,
we would say that we were learning English, but actually we're just chilling. We were just hanging out.
So that had something to do with the English I have today.
And then all the way till when I was in junior high school,
I remember the first day that I was in junior high school,
the teacher asked us to write down A to Z, and I couldn't do it.
It bothered me for a long time.
I couldn't read from A to Z because the order was not logical.
And I didn't know how to memorize that order, so it took me months to be... finally be able to do that.
This also proves that, well, you know, you have to try to be able to speak and... and listen first.
Being able to memorize a lot of vocabulary does not really mean anything.
What I did was I worked hard memorizing the order of A to Z,
and then I got lazy again.
So I only got 20 out of 50 students in the class during junior high school time.
I was not really good.
When I was in senior high school,
I started realizing that English should be something that I focus on.
That is why I started spending time learning, perfecting my English willingly.
Well, I studied in a private school, and whenever the school had some kind of special event,
they would always invite foreign groups to perform at school.
So there was once there... they invited boy choirs from Vienna to visit our school,
and they needed escorts to translate for them,
one on one,
and I volunteered.
There was an audition and the teacher asked me a question.
The question was "How do you show your hospitality to the people that are visiting Taiwan?"
And I didn't understand the word "hospitality,"
so I had to be sneaky a little bit.
I just said it back that "I've never thought about that."
The teacher reacted to my response.
She said "How do you show your kindness to the people from another country?"
And that I got.
What I'm saying is if you don't understand anything,
you just pretend that you do.
And then people would try to continue the conversation.
Don't just give up right away.
Because most of the time when you give up right away,
people would either stop talking to you, or they would start using easier words,
and then you cannot pick up more difficult words.
So what I'm proposing is,
don't always underestimate yourself.
Try to pretend that you can speak a little bit of English, or you understand most of it,
and then the conversation can keep rolling.
It was also during senior high school years that I started reading English books.
The first book I was reading was Jurassic Park.
It was a really difficult book to read.
There were so many scientific terms, and
it was not exactly a teenager book.
I had to bring my electronic translator with me.
I went through the half... the first half of the book, and I realized that
even though I checked the Chinese meanings of the words in the book.
I still couldn't understand what it was.
Then it hit me.
I didn't have to check all the words that I didn't know.
The only thing I needed to do was to try to understand from the context.
And then I put down my electronic translator,
and started to really enjoy the book.
And that was my first book.
Since then I've been reading English books if it was possible,
which is not really a big deal for me.
Because you can put down the book if you don't like it, or if it is too complicated for you.
You can just go from one book to another.
You don't have to finish all the books that you're reading.
And that is what I told myself. And it turned out okay.
I read many books and then I had so much fun,
and I started building up my vocabulary,
which was great and then also the writing,
because the more books you're reading the better your writing might be.
and that is what I'm saying.
You don't have to keep telling yourself that you have to finish the book.
Or you have to learn English from a certain thing or to a certain level.
You just enjoy learning. And that's it.
And that is how I learned English.
so if you still have any questions for me,
you can leave comments below.
Ask me and maybe I'll just make one of these chatting while driving kind of video.
If you liked this video make sure you click the like button down below,
or you can subscribe to my channel.
I'll see you next time. Bye!