I’ve done nothing this week but try out different methods in my English study.
At first, I was so confident that I could easily switch my workflow to English with ease, but I soon found that my English proficiency was nowhere near enough to handle tasks this hard. Since this was my first try, I decided to start with several English books that I could read easily in order to get used to reading in a foreign language.
I started with the short and easy book called Who Moved My Cheese, which was huge about 10 years ago. It took me about 6 hours to finish, whereas a native speaker would read it in under an hour. I then realized that my reading method was so slow and inefficient — I stopped to look up every single new word. So I decided that I would read my second book by skipping unfamiliar words as long as they did not affect my overall understanding.
That’s my current approach to English reading. But it’s kind of boring to me, which is the major problem for my English reading — I can’t find any books that are both useful for my studies and actually interesting, because my English proficiency is merely at the level of primary school children, and most books for this level are just kids’ stuff!
I once tried to find books that might work for me, for example, Tuesdays With Morrie, which seemed like a good fit. But then I hit on a better idea that might actually fix this — to read some English discussions or other people’s conversations that I am interested in.
I know this has downsides. For example, some of these resources on the Internet may have a number of mistakes in spelling and grammar, but then it hit me: do kids growing up in an English-speaking environment only encounter perfectly “clean”, error-free language in real life? Absolutely not. And despite these flaws, the upsides are way bigger — they cover various topics, there’s tons of content out there, and they can actually make me want to study English!
Then I started thinking about how native speakers learn their first language. I used to regard watching English videos or reading English articles as the method to simulate immersion. But once I tried chatting with AI in English and found out that’s a more interesting and efficient way to learn English for me. It made me think about my own journey of learning Chinese: before I learned to read and write, I spent years just talking to people, especially my parents and teachers. It seemed that I could already speak fluent Chinese long before I learned how to read and write.
This really clicked for me when I was scrolling through Chinese social media and saw that popular challenge: to ask primary school students to answer problems from college students and vice versa. The videos are hilarious and sometimes surprisingly deep. But what stuck with me wasn’t the challenge itself — it was seeing so many little kids using pinyin instead of characters, just like I used to do. That made me realize: I could already hold full conversations before I could write, right? Because how else would I use pinyin, which is based on pronunciation? The existence of illiteracy can also prove this point — the first step of learning any language is always talking to people, not memorizing words.
I’m so grateful to be alive in the age of AI. I can use it as a personal tutor or even an expert in any field so that I can ask it questions all day long about my problems in study, skill learning and reading, most importantly, in English! Then I can finally reach the goal of switching my whole workflow to English with a real tutor, instead of just relying on random English materials. Plus, asking someone questions is always way more efficient than searching for answers alone.
I think I’ve hit on an amazing method! It can help me not only in English study, but with all my studying! And best of all, it’s actually fun, which means I’ll actually stick with it.
I’m going to put this into practice next week. Fingers crossed it works!