To master a language one must be able to speak and understand the spoken language as well as to readand write. Lenin and his wife Krupskaya translated a long English book into Russian. But when theywent to England in 1902, English people couldn't understand what was said to them. These days more and more foreigners are coming to China and more Chinese are going out to foreign countries to work or study. So the spoken language is becoming more and more important.
Speaking, of course, can't go without listening. If you want to pronounce a word correctly, first you must hear it correctly. The sounds of the Chinese and English languages are not exactly the same. If you don't listen carefully, you'll find it difficult or even impossible to understand the native speakers.
Well, what about writing? Like speaking, it's to exchange ideas. People generally use shorter words and shorter sentences in their writing. The important thing is to make your idea clear in your head and then to write it in clear lively language.
Chinese students read far too slowly. If you read fast, you understand better. If you read too slowly, by the time you have reached the end of a page you have forgotten what the beginning is about. When you meet with new words, don't look them up in the dictionary. Guess the meaning from the context(上下文). You may not guess quite correctly the first time, but as new words come up again and again in different contexts, their meaning will become clearer and clearer. If you look up every word, you'll never finish a book.
Students of a foreign language need a particular knowledge, the knowledge of the life, history and geography of the people whose language they are studying. They should study these subjects in the
foreign language, not only in translation. In this way one can kill two birds with one stone: learn a foreign language and get some knowledge of the foreign country at the same time.
小题1: In the first paragraph, the writer told us _________.
A．how to speak English well
B．how to read and write English
C．why spoken English is very important
D．why English people couldn't understand Lenin小题2:In order to study a foreign language, the writer thinks the best way is ______.
A．to kill two birds with one stone
B．to learn two languages at a time
C．to study all the subjects in a foreign language
D．to get some knowledge of the foreign country as well as learn the language小题3: In the fourth paragraph the writer gave some advice on ____.
A．how to imporve reading faster
B．how to guess the meaning from the context
C．how to look up new words in the dictionary
D．how to grasp the general meaning of a passage小题4:"To kill two birds with one stone" means ____.
A．to get some particular knowledge
B．to get more than what one pays
C．the stone is too big
D．the birds are blind enough
