An English Essay about English

This essay is for applying for Rochester U. Here is the instruction:

English Essay

Applicants whose native language is not English are strongly encouraged to upload a one page essay written in English. Pursing an advanced degree takes enormous effort, particularly when the language and culture are not your own. We encourage you to share information about your experience with the English language, including formal study in English, time spent in an English-speaking environment, and your comfort level speaking and writing English.

In this verson, some prepositions have been corrected. Thanks Ray, My Captain, for checking these grammer issues with his Meh.cbook running like a space heater. And a more formal verson was sent to the school. Putting timeline as the thread, this essay is mainly about my English learning steps, nothing more.

The reason I post my essay on my blog is …, Ahhh, people always want to rationalize every fucking brain farts, isn’t it.

from high-school to college: background, change of viewpoints and new pass

Once upon a time when I was in high school, I did not take much effort in English. Instead, I was interested in mathematics and science courses. Back that time, my English always drag my average score. But when I go to college, something changed. Since I was in major of computer science, bleeding-edge resources are still in the discourse of English. When I was learning C language, I compared a textbook written by a Chinese author and Chinese Translation version of C primer plus; it turns out that the former one is just shallow and so outdated that some implementations are stale and were abandoned long ago. This is the time that I started to consider English is essential for me, as a tool to pursue my career.

After that, I put huge efforts into my English since I know clearly that my English is so poor and below average. One little step every day, one leap step for my English. In the third year of college, I’ve passed CET(College English Test)-4 and CET-6, and I had read through both C primer plus and the “dragon book” of Operating System(Operating System Concepts). For the first time, every paragraph seems hard for me; I had to look up 10-20 words for each page to understand what the content is. But after I went through the Introduction Chapter, it had started to become easier and easier. And when I meet the middle of the book, the only issue I have to take time is the contents itself, like some complex data structures and algorithms, not the language itself. 

One day when I was asking my professor for some questions, he says “By the way, your English is good enough, how about applying for master at the US, they have the latest techs which we cannot provide.”. This is also the same time that I just opened my GitHub account, and was building a small graphic project(Game of Life), and most documents are written in English. I was thinking for almost one week about the advice that my professor give. “Yeah, Americans always do cool things about computers, and look the Dutch guy who invented Python, he lives in California now.” I was thinking, and finally, I decided to make this decision. I made a draft about this plan: pass TOEFL, pass GRE, apply, and first, told my family.

TOELF & GRE / profession & career: getting “foot in the door” and madness

TOEFL is not easy; every Chinese tester knows it. My strength is English experiences at my profession: open source projects, courses on edx, and textbooks without Chinese Translations. But my weakness is obvious: I do not have basics and foundations which other students have built well in high school. That was a thorny issue since I have to be very patient for every single grammar error or typo. But in the beginning, I was green for everything about TOEFL. I cannot understand the reading passage, cannot understand the fast conversions, and cannot even build complete sentences, not to mention how to deliver them with my mouth. But at the same time, I started to replace every textbook, novels, TV shows, and films into English. I read through some classic textbooks like Computer Organization and Design, Discrete mathematics and its applications and partial Computer systems, a programmer’s perspective; I read some books like The Code Book and Turing written by B. Jack. Copeland and I watched TV shows like Friends and The Simpsons. This is not a waste of time at all, in my opinion. Instead, it is the key to nail it. Firstly since I have read a lot in real English(not English textbooks are written by Chinese), My reading skill surges up quickly, like a native reader since I read and comprehend the content directly without translating to Chinese or analyzing grammar first, as normal Chinese students do. Secondly, listening slangs and native use of words make my delivery different from “Chinglish,” the delivery that a Chinese reads undoubtedly but odd for native English speakers. But my TOEFL score is still not as I have expected. My Writing score is still below 20 due to my weakness in grammar and spell, I still cannot pinpoint every single word in a listening section, and I still feel nervous while speaking in English.

Before addressing problems, I had to find them out: grammar, spell, listening precisely, and being confident to speak English. For listening, I wrote down every single block of the listening part, and then check if I was wrong. The key point here is if I have not got what the speaker says, I never skim, and I listen to that block again and again until I started to recognize it, even it was wrong. For writing, I put the “preicse” as the first aim, which means sometime I would take a bunch of hours on writing just an essay, but guarantee every sentence and spell is without fault. Then I started to increase speed to match the TOEFL situation. And for speaking, the most annoying one, I recorded my speaking each time, listen to it, forget about the time limit, do better on my delivery and do it like Round Robbin. It took me about three months to prepare; my TOEFL score increased from 80 to 100. After I have checked the final score, I believe it is time to concentrate on GRE.

For a Chinese student, the hardcore about GRE is its Verbal, not Quantitative, but it is also tricky to get a “Grand Slam.” My reading ability is strong while I was not familiar with these topics, I have recited our famous GRE vocab book 3000 words for GRE for five times. I have beat about 67%, but I did not have a deep understanding of these words, which I would have done well on a vocab test but poor on a real GRE Verbal Section. As a result, my hard time was on “embed” the meaning of the word on a real sentence in GRE reading or sentence completion. It was hard work, I must have done it verbosely, or I would make no effort. Since I was a computer wiz, I built a Python script to collect statistics about my vocab like a customized Quizlet with a coarse interface, such as it stored the times I cannot recall, or I have got a word for how many days. Another thread is to comprehend the sentence or passage in GRE examples. In this scenario, I skipped concentrating on the fill or some odd use of word. Instead, I tried to understand the context as a whole. I was not fussy about quantitative because I have read several math books about computer science like matrix algebra and discrete mathematics, but daily practice is necessary. 

Finally, with a full Q and a 150+ V GRE score, for an engineer, it is enough to apply. 

Actually, words of GRE is useful while reading some articles and essays; for example, One Dimensional Man and Amuse Overselves to Death covers a lot of words recalled during preparing GRE. Anyway, for me, I do not think to prepare GRE only helped me nail GRE, side efforts took, too. 

As for my profession, computer science, and engineering, I have benefited a lot from English. All documents of my projects on GitHub were written in English to make the open-source community a better place, textbooks and online open courses(mainly on Stanford Lagunita) have made me more competitive on the job market. During an internship, when I was building a python webserver as my fresh start when facing issues and errors, I could easily look up on Stackoverflow, and I could quickly address them to be more efficient and gain more experience. These days I was watching a deep learning open course called FastAI; it turns out my English is proficient enough to attend a native course since I watched the first lesson with no gap and even tweak the speed to 1.25x since the introduction is a little verbose. 

Conclusion

The conclusion is, I used to take a long hard time learning English, but once the hard time passed, it benefits both my “foot in the door” for applying and my career. And I was confident about my English skills. 

Anyway, all I know is: A man had been working on his English tests like a dog during 2018; during that year of 2018, he never gave up; and finally, he made it, like the ending scene of Whiplash.

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Besides, I was into some TV shows like Breaking Bad and its side series Better Call Saul; it feels really neat to watch the show once it is released, not after the Chinese subtitles were feed.