A crazy method I used to improve my English skills
When I was in junior high and high school, English was my favorite and strongest subject. My English level perhaps owes to my background (I grew up in a multi-lingual environment), however, I distinctly remember studying extremely hard to improve it. This post is about an English studying method that I invented when I was a high school student and my friends called “crazy”.
In English exams in typical Japanese schools, most questions are about specific articles in the textbooks from which students are taught for several months. At my school, sometimes we were asked to arrange given words in the proper grammatical order, or to fill a blank in a given sentence. The most difficult type of question was to translate a whole Japanese sentence into English.
To complete all questions in time and get a high score, I figured that the most “straightforward” way was to memorize entire articles in the text book. Therefore, I started by repeatedly reading the textbook aloud until I was able to speak with fluency. Then, I erased several important words in the articles using correction tape and returned to reading out loud. Since some parts of the article were missing (erased by correction tape), it was not easy to read fluently at first. However, as I kept practicing, my brain learnt and it began to feel as if no words were missing. This is the sign that you can erase a few more words. I repeated this process until my textbook finally became totally blank. No words were written in the textbook anymore; they were written in my brain instead (at least on the day of the exam).
This method might sound like a makeshift solution for only specific types of school exam and not useful for the other exams where we encounter articles that we have never come across before. However, I believe that having hundreds of sentences ingrained in your brain through my method will help you instinctively find the answer. Furthermore, I would like to emphasize that this method was very helpful for me to develop my listening skill that I am very proud of. Do you still think I am crazy?
