Improving your English over the Summer
It’s summer again! A time for outdoor fun and relaxation, the summer holidays are a perfect time for busy school boys and girls to truly wind down after a year’s hard work. However, the holidays do not mean that learning comes to an abrupt stop. You are in fact presented with the golden opportunity to brush up your English the fun way.
(1) More than just leisure reading
You have probably heard this many times before – the summer holidays are a good time for you take a break from all the compulsory readings you get from school and engage in some leisure reading, through which you can be exposed to a wide range of vocabulary and writing styles; this will most certainly help you brush up your writing skills by bringing more diversity to your essays in terms of word use and sentence structure. You can also try to read aloud selected paragraphs, passages or chapters in your book and you may occasionally discover new or complex words that you don’t know how to or find it difficult to pronounce. Should this ever happen, consult an online dictionary to find out how they are pronounced, and take a mental note. Who knows?! They may come in handy one day. Besides, being able to spend a quiet afternoon with your favourite English book in one hand and a glass of refreshing ice tea in the other is definitely a blessing. Just the thought of that has me overflowing with joy!
(2) Museum fun
Like any tourist hotspot or cosmopolitan in the world, Hong Kong is home to many museums which not only serve citizens but also visitors from across the globe. Given the status of English as a global language, offering English captions and introductory texts alongside their Chinese counterparts on museum displays is the only sensible way to cater for the needs of foreigners visiting our city. However, many of these English captions and introductory texts can be quite cumbersome as the writer struggle to author a version that conforms to the meanings of and expressions used in their Chinese counterparts in the course of translation. A handful of them may be riddled with grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, poor sentence structure or even ‘Chinglish’, demonstrating poor English proficiency on part of the author or translator. As you visit museums and read these English captions and texts, try to spot errors and ask yourself how these sentences, phrases or words can be refined: can they be more concise? Can they perhaps be more ‘to-the-point’? Are there better ways to translate certain Chinese words and sentences? You can also engage in a mini translation exercise and come up with your own version of English captions and texts; you will then truly realize how different the Chinese and English languages are, and perhaps develop a new-found respect for translators, especially those who labour behind the scenes in the worlds of literature and state diplomacy.
(3) Time to binge-watch
With all the time in the world, the summer holidays are always a good time for you to binge-watch all the movies and TV series that you missed throughout the year. Watch the newer ones, like Darkest Hour and The Crown, and recap old classics, such as The King’s Speech and The Great Debaters, to learn more about the oral aspects of English and the difficulties faced by some of history’s greatest orators in the course of turning otherwise lifeless words on paper into captivating speeches. You are bound to be inspired by both their tenacity in the face of adversity and their outstanding English oratory skills. You may also want to go on YouTube for Rowan Atkinson’s stand-up comedies. Atkinson skillfully combines comedic monologues and dialogues with physical comedy, a style of comedy immortalized in the Mr. Bean series, through the use of body movements, hand gestures and facial expression, spreading joy to the audience and viewers alike. Watching Atkinson’s stand-up comedies is a great way for you to learn about presentation skills, such as intonation, body language and tone, which can in turn help you get your message across to an audience most likely dominated by people who do not write, speak or listen to English as often as you do. It is also an opportunity for you to appreciate subtle British humour as opposed to the nonsensical humour and vulgarity commonly found in local or Hollywood comedies. Meanwhile, I would further recommend watching the 1970s British sitcom Mind Your Language which focuses on the happenings in an ‘English as a Foreign Language’ class taught by a British teacher who had to deal with foreign students of different ethnicity. Watching the sitcom can help you understand different accents and hopefully help you prepare for future interactions with people of different ethnicity in school, at work and the wider community. You may even be able to pick up novel ways to learn English from the ‘teacher’!
