First Speech in Toastmaster Meeting

Yesterday I delivered my first speech in an English club. Quite an interesting and exciting moment.

Below is my full speech content.


Road of Learning English

I began to learn English when I was in the middle school. A little too late, I think. Since then, learning English has always been a joy to me.

Like many Chinese students, it was a little hard and tough at the beginning. The most difficulty for me is to remember the spelling and pronunciation. “Open your mouth, clean the throat, roll up your tongue, and pronounce ‘a’”. The teacher instructed like this. However, the sound from my throat was always odd and different. Even now my pronunciation is poor. Frustrated. One interesting thing was that, after the first English class, a girl next to me even taught me to pronounce “thank you” as “三克油” – that is three grams of oil in Chinese.

Gradually, when knowing more words, understanding more grammars, and getting more high scores, I became more passionate with learning English. I studied hard, reciting the words that the teacher had not taught, doing extra exercises that had not been assigned. The result was notable – I often got highest score in the class and even won prize in the national English contest for middle school student. Good days!

The situation was a little different when I was in the university. Soon I found that many classmates got as high English score as I did, and someone did even far better that me. Thus I spent more time on other fields and my English degraded. However, at that time, I loved reading “New Concept English” and could recite many good articles. Till now I still remember some famous sentences, for example, “Beauty in terms of human meanings is meaningless”, “Knowledge is a two-edged weapon that could be used equally for good and evil”. These experience surely riches my writing materials.

The next stage of learning English should date back to the time when I was preparing GRE and TOEFL. Unlike many others, I was enthusiastic about or even crazy of it. More words, more words, it was what I wanted. And miraculously, one day I went through 30 lists in “Red Golden Book”. That was about 2,000 English words! Quite amazing! However, pity that I cannot remember even 30% of them now.
The next challenge was to write articles – typically issue and argument for GRE. The standard is 500 words within 45 minutes and 400 words within 30 minutes. I could never express the feelings when I began to practice the writing. Like a dumb, you have a thousand words to say but you can never put one.
Fortunately, I stayed up and got more or less satisfying scores within a short period. And most important of all, my English did improve. So I always kid others, “Hi, guys, take TOEFL and definitely your English will be improved.”

Recently I find an interesting phenomenon, that is, while I am getting more familiar, more skilled with programming language like C++, my English is getting worse and worse. Thus I come to the conclusion - “programming never equals writing though they both deal with the 26 English characters”. In my spare time, I take some famous books on English writing, such as “On Writing Well” by William Zinsser and “The Elements of Styles” by E.B White. Furthermore, I can take this good opportunity to practice my oral English!

Thank Xin and Bruce for pushing me to join this club, and thank others for listening to and evaluating my speech.

Thank you all!