BLOG 5

     “The perfect word isn’t always the prettiest or the most pretentious”, “you’ll learn what it means to be truly selective when it comes to choosing the right word to represent life as it is, or at least as you want it to be”. This sounds to be an ideal situation for most of the writers. By using the most correct words, both functionally and meaningfully, you are able to express the exact idea you’d like to present. Even to a native speaker, it is no easy task, not to mention how tough it could be to second language learners. Especially when the second language doesn't share the same linguistic features with the first language. I know lots of Chinese English learners, when they start to write articles in English, they first write it in Chinese then translate it into English. Problems are that 1) the word orders are different in composing a sentence. There is a word “Chinglish” to show the Chinese ways of using English. It is grammatically correct, but natives don’t speak that way; 2) it’s hardly to match each Chinese word with a corresponding English version, thus it would be more difficult to choose the right words. I agree that by receiving more native-like-expression-input could help to build awareness of using more “correct” language. Obviously, output is far more difficult than input, but when input accumulates to a certain degree, it would be much easier to output naturally.