Chapter 8 Class C students won the first place in English for postgraduate entrance examination

In the first three years of college, I was filled with resentment, self-defeating and self-abandonment, and I refused to study hard at all.Although I can correct the teacher's mistakes in class and provide individual tutoring for the students before the exam, but that is just showing off a little cleverness. In fact, my professional grades have always been in the lower middle in the past three years. In the past three years, the only subject I have worked hard on is English. In the college entrance examination, my English score was only 40 points.But at that time, it had only been four years since the resumption of the college entrance examination, and the level of foreign language teaching in high schools across the country was generally low. Therefore, the Ministry of Education stipulated that foreign languages ​​were only calculated as 30% of the 100-point scale, and my total score was not greatly affected.The foreign language learning conditions of Beijing students are relatively superior, and the scores of the college entrance examination are generally above 70 to 80%.After entering the school, the freshmen were divided into three big classes, A, B, and C, according to their English proficiency, and I was assigned to class C.The students in class C with me are either because they are located in a remote province and there is no teacher to teach English, or they learned Russian in middle school and now they have to start learning from the English alphabet.This is another great shame for me.

When I was a freshman, my brother was already a fourth-year student at Zhejiang University.When I went home during the summer vacation, I saw him learning English every day.The summer in the south is very hot, he stays in the room alone, reading TOEFL textbooks with a big cattail fan.At that time, I only had to study English for two years in college, and I stopped taking English classes since my junior year.I was very surprised and asked him why he still read English. He told me that English is the only subject that is difficult to attack in a short period of time. If you want to learn well, you can only rely on accumulation.When doing research in my future work (at that time we only talked about research, and never thought about doing business in career choice), many of the latest papers were written in English.If you want to do better than others, you must be able to read the original text, and it will be too late to read it after the translation.When I was a sophomore, my brother graduated from Zhejiang University and was admitted to Tsinghua University to study as a graduate student.On weekends, I often ride to his graduate student dormitory, and he repeatedly emphasizes the importance of English to me.

My brother's words had a great impact on me.At that time, my wish was to become a teacher and do research after graduating from university.Therefore, English is a very important tool.Although my English score in the college entrance examination was very poor, I set a goal for myself that I must learn it well in four years of university. I didn't have the habit of taking a nap in college.After dinner at 12:30 noon, at 1 o'clock I went to the library to rent an English tape, put on headphones, and sat in front of the tape recorder in the library to listen to English.The content of the tape is usually extremely monotonous and boring. Sometimes I fell asleep while listening to it, and was awakened by a "click" at the end of the tape, and then went back to continue listening.

My English vocabulary is also very small.Every morning when I get up, I read English textbooks, memorizing words one by one.In the evening, I took a copy of "New Concept English" to attend self-study classes.I set a goal for myself that I must memorize an article every day, and I just memorized three volumes of "New Concept" one by one. start with something you don't like It is rare for a student to see a complex equation or a dense English vocabulary book with glowing eyes and excitement.This is human nature.Should you learn? Learn! Maybe that is not your interest, but you must force yourself, develop your perseverance and learning ability.

After stepping into the society, at least half of the people will find that their work is not the type you like.If you don’t like it, you don’t have to do it? Society is not that simple. Society is not what you imagine. Do it if you want to do it, and don’t do it if you don’t want to do it.A student who has just stepped out of school has no core competitiveness at all.so, Everyone should learn to do a good job in the position they don't like first, and then try to change the environment after they have their own core competitiveness. We have to gradually develop this habit from the university stage.To be honest, it was quite a painful process.But it has to be like this if it wants to survive and develop in a highly competitive environment.

From Negative Cycles to Positive Cycles: My Self-Motivation Method Although the process of learning English is boring, I have a strong belief in my heart, which is also a way to motivate myself.On the one hand, I want to get rid of myself who feel inferior because of my bad English.On the other hand, English can change my life and my future, so I have to force myself to learn it. This is the problem of the so-called negative cycle and positive cycle.If I enter a negative cycle, I feel that my English is not good anyway, and I will turn from low self-esteem to self-abandon, and I will never want to touch English again.If I enter a positive cycle, I force myself to learn English, and then find joy in learning, I will learn better and better.

When I was in my junior year, I saw a classmate reading an English newspaper with an unfamiliar word, so I told him the meaning of the word.After a few times, everyone looked at me with admiration.In this way, I gradually fell in love with English and became more motivated to learn it. The same is true for work, and you must not be perfunctory just because you don't like it.Tell yourself it's a great job, put your passion into it, you'll find joy in your work, you'll be affirmed by others, and you'll see that it's a really good job. The same is true in life, if you are caught in a reverse cycle, at some point you must stop it.Of course, this also requires appropriate skills.

When I was the general manager of Shanghai Microsoft, because the work of the technical center was all about providing technical support services to customers, the work was not so interesting, and the atmosphere in the company was rather dull.When we transitioned from the Greater China technical support center to the Asian technical center, the overall English level of the staff was not high enough to meet the requirements of serving customers in English-speaking countries.I think that human psychology always bursts with vitality in competition, so I specially set up a series of engineer grade standards of bronze, silver, gold, and platinum to encourage everyone to improve their English proficiency.If an employee reaches a certain level of English proficiency, I will raise the title standard for him.As a result, the staff's enthusiasm for English learning has become extremely high.

When I was studying English in college, I also set a lot of very clear rules for myself.For example, I have to memorize a volume of "New Concept English" within a year. Under this big goal, I set small goals, what is the monthly and weekly progress.After reading it, I will also do some test questions to test my level, so that I can continuously improve myself by completing small goals. After finishing the three volumes of "New Concept", I found that I still need to strengthen my oral practice.Many people think that the best way to practice oral English is to chat with foreigners, but this is not the case.When my classmates and I went to the Great Wall for the first time, we met a group of foreigners.At that time, due to the limited degree of openness of the country, there were very few foreigners who came to China, so everyone was very excited and chatted with them a lot.When I came back and thought about it carefully, the content of the chat with the foreigner at that time was actually just a few dozen words, and I went back and forth there.Where are you from, where are you from, how many times have you been to China, what do you like and why do you like it.Just a few words.

Therefore, I found that unless I can find a fixed partner for continuous and in-depth communication, no matter how much time I have for talking in general, it will not help to improve my oral English.So I stopped chatting with foreigners.I found a method that works for me.I tell myself stories in English, like writing a diary every day, telling the details of life in English, expressing my views on something and so on.When making sentences, I try to use longer sentences and as many words as possible.Practice repeatedly, and it really makes a lot of progress. In my senior year, I changed my major and applied for a postgraduate examination.When the results of the postgraduate entrance examination were announced, my classmates were very surprised to find that the "little bastard" named Tang Jun not only ranked first in the school's overall score, but also ranked first in the most difficult postgraduate exam, English.

Later, after I joined Microsoft, I heard that Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer often played poker when they were studying at Harvard University, and their spare time activities were rich and colorful.And I had almost no other hobbies in college except dancing occasionally, so I cultivated learning English as a hobby.I didn't expect that it was those days of hard study of English in the university that would fulfill my life in a certain sense in the future. The template method of learning English I also applied the English learning principles I learned in college to the language training for employees at Shanghai Microsoft.When providing technical services to customers, it is necessary to inform the other party of the completed technical solution by email.Therefore, one of the main tasks of technical center engineers is to write English emails.I created a more scientific method called template method. At the beginning, I found a module of 10 letters and asked the employees to memorize them, just like I did when I memorized "New Concept".Later, after improvement, I asked employees to make a tool to classify different types of problem handling into 20 modules. Our engineers only need to fill in the specific operation content into these modules.The text of these modules was carefully processed by language training experts from the United States in the technology center. Every letter is like a perfect work of art.Through this module, the effect of writing this letter will be better than that of authentic American employees, and the efficiency is high.At that time, those customers in Singapore and Malaysia were surprised to see the emails written by our employees. It was strange that a Chinese engineer could write such good English letters. To some extent, the template method can be said to be a summary of my experience in learning English.In my opinion, the learning mode of English is actually a process of continuous replication.because, The operation of all things, ranging from the universe to a flower and a fruit, actually follow some very simple rules.The same goes for language.As long as you master these rules, you can continue to copy and create complex content.