Read every day, first for a few months. How many books should I read every day? There are two strategies: timing or quantification.
Every once in a while, say five minutes a day.
Quantitative, such as daily 1 page.
The goal should be small enough, the pressure should be small and easy to achieve. Just play with your mobile phone for a while. But the goal is 5 minutes or 1 page. I don't have to read so much, but I overfulfilled it.
At the beginning, just reach the goal, and later, you can add more than ten pages of chapters a day, or half an hour. We might as well write down the number of pages we read every day and read them later, which will be very fulfilling.
The goal is small enough, but "persistence" is anti-human after all. If you want to persist with perseverance, it will not last long. Reading is not that important. We can't live without reading. Most of us are crazy about reading. The best way is to find pleasure in reading, that is-
If you like fitness or beauty, look for books on it. Those who like cooking can look at "shark's fin and pepper" and so on, and the menu will do. Like to play games, understand the companies that play games and the stories behind them; I like to follow the play to see if a play is adapted, what else the original author has written, and so on.
One of my college classmates, after throwing away English for 20 years, started again with the goal of enjoying watching American TV dramas. She likes Sidney Sheldon's novels. She spent about a year reading more than a dozen books. Her vocabulary has risen rapidly, and it will be much easier to practice listening after she has laid a good foundation. Because I like it, I can't stand it and I can't stick to it.
How can we understand and master it? Simple and rude, take a book and turn to two pages. Can you read on? Are there many new words? Does it affect the understanding of the general idea? If the book itself is attractive, there are no more new words. Did you have all the experiences of reading novels when you were a child? Some books don't know many words, which doesn't affect the understanding of the story, does it?
What if the vocabulary is too small and many books are too difficult? Then read and write books for teenagers, or read fairy tales and graded books. Even with children's picture books, we can learn things and always find interesting and understandable things.
Find out what to read, and then start to act. Here's a way to kill two birds with one stone-
Listening to books is becoming more and more popular now, but I find that reading while listening can make me concentrate, and the less attractive parts of the book are easier to read. If the performer has a good voice and vivid interpretation, the effect will be more obvious.
Later, I read the book Easy English. Author AJ Hoge is a teacher of Daniel, and he also recommended this method in his book. I am secretly pleased to learn that this law has been implemented for many years and proved to be effective.
I took several students to study in this way. A student said that while listening and reading, he couldn't keep up. The reason why he can't keep up is that readers process English information slower than readers. After all, this is not his mother tongue. She took my advice and reduced the audio to 0.75 times the speed, which was perfect.
The advantage of this method is that listening and reading are used at the same time, and both abilities are exercised at the same time. After a long time, the speed of reading and processing information will be accelerated, and the pronunciation problem of new words will be solved.
You can stop audio thinking when reading, but it is recommended not to look it up in the dictionary. If you don't understand, you can draw it first, and then look it up after reading it to ensure a smooth reading experience and improve your ability to guess the meaning of words in the context.
Is it okay to just listen to books? Of course, but listening to books will only focus on the theme and ignore the language. Moreover, most people's reading comprehension ability is better than listening, and they can understand better while listening.
When you meet a favorite book, you can listen to it while reading it, and then listen to it again and again. After listening to the last sentence, we can take the next sentence. What's the effect? Can English be bad?
In fact, reading according to these principles is already very good. But if you want to go up a flight of stairs, then-
How to output depends on the goal.
If you want to improve your oral English at the same time, you can choose a short paragraph to read along every day, retell the most interesting paragraph in your own language, summarize what you have read, or talk about your reading experience. If you have children at home, you can also tell them books and stories. Retelling, summarizing, feeling and so on can be done in English and Chinese, and you can come whenever you want.
If you want to improve your writing at the same time, you can sum up what you have read, write about your feelings about reading, and even find a favorite text to translate. Similarly, sum up your feelings in Chinese and English.
It makes sense not to read without pen and ink. When reading, there must be some ideas, which are fleeting. It is a pity not to record them. If you change your pen into your mouth and English into Chinese, the effect will be just as good.
Try to use the expressions and sentences learned in books when outputting, and the memory effect will be better.
What if our output is full of mistakes and no one gives feedback? It doesn't matter, others can't see or hear, so what are you afraid of? Listen back in a few days, and you will find your mistakes. This is progress. In particular, if you want to correct grammar mistakes, you can also use tools to find what you have written or the text converted from speech with software such as Grammarly.
With this step, listening, speaking, reading and writing can be taken into account, and over time, English will naturally improve.