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I love this wonderful idea, I have been abroad for some years since my graduation from college. (I was born in China.) Now I am working at a research institution doing research in US while I practice my Chinese at home. Try not to laugh at me since half of my day was at work and I hardly wrote any Chinese character beside some limited emails with my friends. I learned a lot from bbs.pinggu.org and want to share my experience of studying, living and working abroad. I glimpsed some of the messages from this topic, I definitely think I could talk a little about my opinion of English learning and as a tool to help you in many respects. First, the function of a language is to primarily convey ideas and recording important messages. Chinese students will do very good in the second function but not so successful in the second one in general, for example, most of Chinese students I met with are very good learning from books and writing good home works and articles, however, when it comes to ask questions and participate in group projects, they would stay back and give the chance to other students. Such precious opportunities slip away for practicing English by speaking out. I know it is hard at the very beginning, but it will never get better until you start the first step. Second, to learn a language is not only reading the books and following the grammar so that you could use it, it is much rich than that. In order to learn a language well, try to put yourself in the position of a explorer and want to take an adventure of the exotic and uncharted place, you are going to grab all the things you could obtain to make a living and studying new things you never see before, making friends you never dream before, learning how to embrace the nature and culture like your own. Third, language is a must skill to live abroad, the better language you spoke, the better outcomes it will bring. For instance, you are a interviewer for a company, you have two candidates in front of you, they both have 30 minutes to talk with you, assuming they have almost the same qualifications of experience, education and requests, one of them is very good at communication in English and could discuss during the interview, however the other one is very shy and only try to answer your questions with the minimal voices and hard to understand, who will you choose?
Hopefully, this will give you some ideas of what I encountered during the years, I am ready to answer your questions (to my best knowledge, US is big.) when you are ready!
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