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Grade 11: Learning a New Language

March 23, 2021

On March 18th, juniors gathered in the Xianmian Annex Auditorium as usual for the Assembly. Different from previous speeches on experience or activity sharing, Gakuto from class 11(7) listed out several ways to learn a language.

Gakuto, previously a non-native English speaker, has come a long way since 8th grade. Used to scoring 30 on his TOEFL exam, he can now achieve a score of 110+. Sharing some of his tips, he categorized his tips into 4 main sections: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Starting with listening, Gakuto mentioned how watching movies, listening to songs, or watching anime with subtitles can greatly develop one’s language skills. These ways are all easily accessible for students nowadays as all have access to video-streaming platforms or music applications. In the case of reading, Gakuto believes that reading novels can help improve one’s vocabulary. However, he cautions to stay away from books related to politics and science for they can be rather confusing to understand in the beginning. As a fluent English speaker now, Gakuto proceeded to explain how speaking may be the most difficult of all since many people might have an accent when learning a new language. To combat this issue, he suggests to embrace the “fake-it-‘til-you-make-it” mindset and speak like you are a native. Lastly, he briefly referenced the need of grammar but encouraged students to not stress too much over it.

Hopefully during this Assembly, students learned from Gakuto’s inspiring story and his ways of learning a new language.

(Written by Anita Lo Picture by Hao Sun Edited and Supervised by Sijia He)