If students think in Chinese, or we learn English in Chinese, then we'll naturally produce a lot of Chinglish expressions. Because there's a lot of English in Chinese translations that defy direct translation or literal translation if you will.
For example, in Chinese, we say, . . . but in English, they say " chances are high, " not " chances are big" . Though, if I wanna say like, . . . students tend to use disappear. Although people won't say that is ungrammatical, they tend to use " the drug effect wore off" . That sounds a lot more natural.
I think two most marked differences between Chinese and English are " number" and also " time" . So you really have to constantly pay attention to those two aspects. Ask yourself whether this word is countable or uncountable. Otherwise you'll constantly produce Chinglish.
For example, when you think of the word " feedback, " a lot of students use " thank you for your feedbacks" without realizing that the word feedback is not countable. That's because you're not paying attention to this word, how it is used in context. So I think this awareness is very important, the awareness of the gap between our mother tongue, Chinese, and English, the target language. But when you encounter a word, you have to ask yourself, " How do I use this word in context? " So I think English-English dictionaries are really good.
For example, if you look up the word " lessen, " and it will tell you what you can use it with. For example, " lessen some of the power this country has." You come up with an association between this word and the representation that it has. When you use " lessen, " it's a little bit different from " decrease, " because it's often used with more abstract words, and then naturally you acquire collocation knowledge.
Besides, you can also use COCA, that is a very well-known corpus. It's like a big data pool, so when you just type in the word, it will generate thousands of hundreds of sentences, And you can sort of try to deduce something from it. To illustrate, if you type in the word " splitting" into COCA, and then it will automatically generate, say, a thousand sentences for you.
Probably one has the sentence followed the word " splitting" by headache. So " splitting headache, " and you know that means . . . in English. So naturally that is a very strong collocation.
Of course I completely agree with the importance of motivation or personal interest in learning, but I think it's more about how to learn than about what to learn from. It's more about how you read a magazine, how you read an article, than about what magazines I should read. So a lot of people have said, you know, through watching movies, you can really improve your English, but actually in my opinion, if you don't know how to watch a movie, that will just become one of your entertainments. It wouldn't serve the purpose of improving your English if you don't know how to watch it. What leads to the most effective way of learning English, you may wonder. I think this question boils down to one word: observation, or attention. You really have to pay attention to things, for learning to occur, for learning to come about, because if you don't pay attention, no learning will happen.
I highly encourage those who want to improve their English to constantly pay attention to their environment, to their surroundings, to all the linguistic input in their environment. Especially to the gap. Why does this native speaker express it that way, but I would prefer it this way, then what's the difference? I think noticing this gap is very important, to constantly compare your own utterance, your production, with those of native speakers. Then you will start to build an awareness, and this awareness is key to learning English.
