Make Good Use of English But for the requirement of the exchange program, which is at least 6.5 points of IELTS test, it would have been a miracle if I spent so much time of my precious summer vacation learning English. Although my English level is far from excellent, I still used to have some mysterious confidence to muddle along. But what I just experienced today really gave a blow on me. I feel really lucky to get to know a website called Quora, where people can raise questions and answer freely. I have a Chinese version, "Zhi Hu", intalled in my phone, and I usually take it as a brilliant time killer, skimming countless useless answers, every now and then bursting into laughter. Seems that I found its English counterpart, and it's worth trying to read English anecdotes given that it's inevitable to get lazy anyway. Perhaps I will also pick up some interesting new words or phrases that are closer to daily life. After reading several of them, to my surprise, they are unexpectedly easy to understand, totally different from those nerv-killing academic articles in IELTS reading section. I quickly built a sense of achievement so I kept reading for hours delightfully. I've been always curious about how foreigners think of chinese language, so I jumped to the topic "Chinese". To my surprise, manderin is by far more popular than I imagined. I saw a great number of well-organised answers demonstrating an amazingly wild rang of knowledge and some creative thought-proviking perspectives. What's even more astounding, many of them are written by foreigners from all over the world. Despite strong admiration, as a chinese, I could only walk away in shame. Then came the turning point. It's not until I finally decided to answer a question, that I really realised how weak my English actually was. It asked the difference between two simple Chinese phrases, which was for me only a piece of cake. Before I confidently typed the first word, i got stuck. I searched rapidly in my mind and I just failed to find a proper word! It was so frustrating that I just paused for a while, staring at the screen, not knowing what to do. Finally, an answer that can't be simple enough, took me over 10 minutes to complete. What a shame! After that, I considered seriously why that kind of thing happened to me. I figured out in spite of reading and once in a while writing, I didn't have many opportunities to practically use Engilsh. (too many words...) In a nut shell, I decide to write an essay every day on italki!