Jonathan's Presentation List:
#1. Apr. 28, '07, Enlish Speech with Topic "Twin Brother";
#2. July 21, '07, Conduct a Game "Six Magic Magnets"
#3, Oct. 28, '07, English Speech with Topic "My English Reading Experience"
20071027, Speaker--Jonathan Chiang
[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=n-kic3sVa_g[/youtube]
My English Reading Experience
Hello Everybody, I am Jonathan. Today I wanna talk about my reading experience.
Reading is fun. I always like reading stories. However, reading English story is very different. I had spent a lot of effort before I started enjoying the English reading.
The 1st obstacle to a beginner is not the vocabulary, but it's the patience. Most of the time, a simple story was easy to read, but the content was too simple to my age. On the other hand, interesting story was attractive, but it also needed stronger vocabulary basis. So at the start up stage, the process was boring because the story was simple. It needed to be patient, otherwise it was difficult to persist the practice. It took me about a year to go through this initial period. Now I can feel the joy of reading English novels. Although I am still at the entry level, but I am able to read something that fits my mental age.
Next, I'd like to introduce some good English stories. There are two series that I like them very much. One is the Penguin Novel Series, the other is the Jenny Dooley Stories. They contain many well-known stories such as
“Around the world in 80 days”
“Dragon Heart”
“Frankenstein”
“Journey to the Centre of the Earth”
“The Hunchback of Notre-Dame”
Those stories have been categorized into different vocabulary levels. The entry level is only 300 words and the highest level is 3000 words. Currently I am at 1500 ~ 2000 word level and have not finished all the books yet. I like those novels, they are good.
Unknown vocabulary is always annoying. There are often unknown vocabularies in the story, but I seldom check the dictionary because that would distract my attention. Those unknown vocabularies usually showed up several times at different places in the story, so most of the time I could guess the meaning of those words. As a matter of fact, reading has helped me to learn many half-known words. The more reading I've made, the more vocabularies I've learned.
The other good experience is that some of the stories have turned to be famous motion pictures. So I could see the movie which I've already read the story. Reading novel and watching movie are different feelings. Reading would render an imaginary image in my mind, but movie would provide direct visual & acoustic entertainment. I have some experiences of this kind, for example,
“Pirates of the Caribbean";
“Hulk";
“Babe, the Sheep-Pig";
“Brothers in Egypt";
“The Scorpion King";
It's fun to see both novel and movie, and compare one with the other. Sometimes, I noticed that the story was not the same in the movie. It was revised. Other times, I found the characters in the movie didn't look the same as what I thought earlier. Those experiences brought me a lot of fun, because I knew more details that other people didn't know.
English reading is still not easy for me. I have just started and still got lazy sometimes. But I've started to feel the fun of it and been making progress.
By the way, there is one thing I forgot to tell you. Every time when I finished one English novel, I would get some grant from my Dad. So, that's really the most critical incentive.
Thank you for your listening. I hope I can answer your questions.
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