对中国人来说，怎样才算英语好？

For Chinese Speakers, What Counts as Good English?

> By Li Xiaolai · 2009-10-30 · [Original (web archive)](https://web.archive.org/web/20111113115910/http://www.lixiaolai.com/archives/7637.html) (Chinese)
> Our translation from the Chinese original.

Almost everyone has had this kind of thought: "Once I've…, I'll……" Thoughts like this are indeed everywhere in life. For example, "Once I've got rich, I'll……", "Once I've made it, I'll……"; people learning English have pretty much all thought this way: "Once I've learned English well, I'll……"

Everyone has good wishes, but having what you wish for come true is not common.

There are many reasons why wishes are hard to achieve, and the most important one is probably "the wish is not defined clearly enough"; in other words, the goal is not clear. And if the goal is not clear, then the actions designed for it can hardly be accurate and resolute, so in the end most efforts go down the drain [Translator's note: the original writes 付诸于东水, literally "committed to east water," a garbling of the idiom 付诸东流, "committed to the eastward-flowing river," i.e. wasted; translated by the intended sense] and come to nothing.

Goals that can be achieved should usually have two attributes: **small and concrete**.

This is not to say that "lofty ideals" are useless; it is only to say that "a journey of a thousand li begins beneath one's feet." If small goals can keep being achieved, big goals naturally become possible; "if you can't sweep a single room, how can you sweep the whole world" actually speaks of the same principle.

From another angle, exactly contrary to what many people imagine, the misleading effect of "lofty ideals" may be much greater than their guiding effect.

I once asked on Twitter, "For Chinese students, what counts as having learned English well?" One of the answers was: "When the other side can only hear your voice, they can't sense that you're a foreigner."

Such an answer is not unacceptable, and as a wish or an ideal it isn't excessive either. But if you take it as [Translator's note: the original omits the verb here, reading literally "if it its own 'goal'"; 把它当作自己的目标 ("take it as one's own goal") is meant; translated by the intended sense] your own "goal," it appears too big, to the point that it can almost never be achieved. Dashan (大山) [Translator's note: the stage name of the Canadian Mark Rowswell, famous in China for his fluent Mandarin] can basically be counted as one of the outstanding "second language acquirers," but even he, today, after living in China for more than 20 years, is still someone we can tell at once is a foreigner.

Much of the time, even "a slightly smaller goal" is hard to achieve. For example, the following "slightly smaller so-called goals": being able to communicate fluently with foreigners; being able to leaf through technical documentation at will; being able to understand American TV series without subtitles…… These are obviously not unachievable, but for many learners, at least in the short term, they are still very hard to achieve.

Only when a goal is "very, very small" can it really be reached and achieved. For example, "in the next two hours I'm going to memorize 50 words," or "today I'm going to read intensively at least one article about 1000 words long," or else "over the next month, I'm going to do 1 hour of morning reading every day"……

If we can divide goals into "short-term," "medium-term" and "long-term," I suggest that from this moment on you stop thinking about any "long-term" goals, because the so-called "long term" is actually a whole lifetime—one has to keep learning as long as one lives. As for the so-called "medium term," my personal suggestion is "a year at most." Long teaching experience has told me that the upper limit of most people's planning ability is basically about a year (in fact, without training, reminders or supervision, many people find it hard to persist even for a quarter). And short-term goals can be for an hour, or for a day, a week at most. This is very realistic and practical advice, plain advice built on the real experience of tens of thousands of students.

Besides being small, an achievable goal also has to be concrete. Being concrete means that the person setting the goal can set concrete, clear and detailed action steps for achieving it. Compare the following two goals:

> I'm going to improve my writing ability!

> This afternoon I'm going to write a 350-word English essay (using a TOEFL essay prompt)
>
> Step one: analyze the prompt, and organize material in Chinese
> Step two: after the material is organized, I'll look things up in the dictionary, and get clear the words and concepts I don't know how to write in English
> Step three: express my thoughts in English
> Step four: after checking for grammar errors, polish it as much as possible, and then save it
> Step five: spend time consolidating the new words I looked up today
> Part six [Translator's note: the original writes 第六部, "part six," where 第六步, "step six," is meant; it reads either way and is translated as written]: this step should be done tomorrow—re-examine it from every angle, revise it and save it; then review it regularly……

The latter is obviously "much more troublesome" than the former, but the latter is obviously easier to carry out, because it already has detailed and concrete steps.

A person who takes the latter as their goal will not waste this afternoon; whatever happens, they will take another step in the direction of progress. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, a little progress every day—these so-called little bits, added up in the end, are the success everyone envies endlessly. Whereas a person who takes the former as their goal will most likely waste tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, in just the same way.

In fact, my own English has never been "good"—even though I have worked in the study-abroad test-prep industry for nearly ten years, with countless students in that time, among them many high scorers and even perfect scorers on study-abroad exams every year; every year I coach over a thousand high-school students on their study-abroad application essays; and in recent years I have also started going to the United States at least twice a year to talk with the AOs (equivalent to the directors of international student admissions offices at Chinese universities) of various colleges……

Although my English pronunciation keeps improving, it has never been standard, has never even been "good"; at most it is in a state of being "acceptable." My vocabulary has also never been [Translator's note: the original writes 从未没大到, a double negative, literally "never not been big enough"; 从未大到 ("never been big enough") is meant; translated by the intended sense] astonishingly big; never mind that my TOEFL and GRE scores are already quite "freakish" (that too was a level reached only after taking them countless times out of professional need), in everyday life, when reading English literature closely, I still often need the help of all kinds of electronic dictionaries and online search tools. When writing English articles, the energy spent on weighing words and reviewing is several times that of writing Chinese articles; before an occasion where I can only communicate in English, I must spend a great deal of time and energy doing my homework, and facts have shown that otherwise all sorts of mistakes are bound to happen.

But this state of "not good" has never become an obstacle or a burden to my using English. Using a foreign language badly is normal—it's so for anyone. But using it badly doesn't mean "you can't use it" or "you shouldn't use it." Put another way, it is precisely because you use it badly that you should use it more and use it often. Using it a little more means using it a little better than before—this is in fact a characteristic of all tools.

For quite a long period, my English was exactly the "mute English" (哑巴英语) that many people despise. Yet even this did not become an obstacle or burden to my using English. I don't think there's anything frightening or strange about mute English. When we learn any foreign language, all we hope is to master listening, speaking, reading and writing in it skillfully. However, for everyone who has struggled for a long time, advancing listening, speaking, reading and writing side by side is not as easy as first imagined—this has long been proven by one's own experience (and that of countless others).

To put it vividly: not being able to speak is like being mute, not being able to understand what you hear is like being deaf, not being able to understand what you read is like being blind; and not being able to write? —most cultures do not by default treat a person's inability to write as a disability. Leaving aside for now whether one can write, let's talk only about the mute, the deaf and the blind. If you had to become one of these three "disabled," which would you choose? I've thought about it seriously, and I would choose "deaf"—because not being blind or mute at least preserves channels of input and output. What I'd fear most is becoming "blind"—because that is the most important means of input, especially since textual input makes up the great majority of all effective input. In a certain sense, the greatest use [Translator's note: the original writes 公用, literally "public use"; 功用 ("use, function") is meant; translated by the intended sense] of learning a foreign language is nothing other than adding a different channel for obtaining information. From this point of view, the mute are much better off than the deaf and the blind, and of the latter two, the blind are far worse off than the deaf.

If we take ten thousand steps back while trying to stay as realistic as possible, we find that most people really don't have much chance to chat with foreigners, to discuss heatedly, to argue fiercely. More of the time, we only need "fluent reading." In a certain sense, we only need "basic eyesight"—equivalent to having a basic vocabulary and basic grammar knowledge—just as a severely nearsighted person with glasses is a thousand times better off than a blind person, anyone, just by equipping themselves with a dictionary and a grammar book, has the equivalent of normal eyesight.

Since you've learned it, the better you use it the happier you are; this is everyone's normal psychology. But so-called "good English" actually can hardly have a unified, clear and meaningful standard. That being so, don't care about it—good or not, so what? You have to use it anyway. Use it and use it and it gets better; never mind how good it gets, it's better than before anyway. Or, put from another angle, "**good enough is good**." Because once it's "good enough," you can start using it, and by using it constantly you have the chance and the possibility of improving constantly.

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