5-5 Something of a Breakthrough in Learning English

To my surprise, I feel I’ve had something of a breakthrough in learning English. I realized attempting to comprehend sentences word by word is largely ineffective. Instead, scanning the whole sentence to grasp the key words, which are usually nouns, is a more productive way. Certain conjunctions and fixed structures are also crucial, but I still yet have a sufficient grasp of them, because I didn’t have too much exposures to them through practice. This priciple extends to spoken English as well, just placing suitable pauses after key words and infusing them with appropriate emotion, will make the one’s delivery sounds more natural. Ultimately, the strategy should not be reading the sentence word by word, but rather to scan them and locate the key words, which will help me understand the sentence’s meaning rapidly.

I took Cambridge IELTS Past Papers 17, test 1 this afternoon. The result seems to be catastrophic. I merely got 4.5 in listening and 4 in reading comprehension, which is rather discouraging. I am not familiar with the structure of the exam, maybe in the next practice test I will get a alightly higher scores, but it would still be insufficient. So I did some intensive listening after the practice test。Understanding the material didn’t required too much effort from me, but it is really difficult for me to answer the questions while listening. I think the only way to solving (I highlight it because the used of gerund here, Gemini said that way to + gerund) this problem is to increase my daily exposure to English material.

While revising the diary above, I gained another insight that shifting components within a sentence can be an effective way to make writing more engaging.