We’ve been making English learning a top priority for about 5 weeks now and we’ve really done a lot of systematic training in the last 4 weeks. So today we are just going to have a quick review of the techniques and progress.

I have to say that studying has really become a habit in my life and it is an essential part of my daily life now. If I have any free time I check my to-do list and do little bits of studying which is really good. It really takes a lot of building up to improve your language skills.

Firstly, in the pronunciation section, we completed almost all of the AI pronunciation courses and achieved very high scores. The average score for these 100+ short courses was over 95, but to be sure there is still quite a lot to improve, but we can say most of the sounds accurately. So for now we are simply repeating and reinforcing and if we keep doing it, we will make great progress, but there is still a long way to go to adapt to the new accent.

The imitation of (Aussie) English has extended into everyday life and I try to imitate people’s speech whenever I can. I believe we spend over an hour a day just imitating the tone and rhythm of other people’s speech, so it’s still important to keep going and make it perfect.

The English course (Liulishuo) is also doing well and we have completed 10 lessons, each of which is over an hour, with 65 more to go, so we are still going to spend months or even a whole year studying. The difficulty level will also increase, but my English will also get better, so just keep going and don’t rush.

I found I really wanted to catch up, but you have to realise that Rome wasn’t built in a day and our English isn’t going to be as good as those who have spoken and used the language longer than your whole life. We now have a vocabulary of about 6500, which covers over 90% of the words we use every day. And this word-remembering app will help us see about 15 new words a day, so you’ll double your dictionary in a year. Plus, you’ll learn more words by reading and even playing games, so don’t stress, your knowledge will grow at its own pace and we’ve seen how quickly you learn, so just keep going.

For more reading and writing we are still doing our weekly English High School lessons and last week’s assignment was to write a 250-300 word essay, this is only the second week of Year 7 English, but we did learn more and practise more. So still keep studying, you will soon learn about Shakespeare and all the famous pieces amongst history.

Well, what I want to say to myself is that you’ve made a lot of progress and I’m really proud of you, I know you’re working hard and trying to make it better but as you can see it’s getting better every day, your pronunciation is better and every day you’re learning some new expressions. So in the next month, in three months, there will be another huge difference, isn’t it exciting to imagine how much better you will be in a year? Please keep up the good work!

Now it’s time for bed, let’s read more, listen more and write more, well we’re always talking, aren’t we.

Tommy 14 Aug 2022 After Midnight