Rachel Yiyi Ge
Kitty Nard
English 113 A
14 November 2012
Learn from Reading
There is a proverb: “One is never too old to learn”.
Learning is a thing that people can never stop for the whole life. It makes
people knowledgeable, brilliant and confident. Reading is one of the easiest
methods to earn knowledge. Reading requires courage, self-discipline,
creativity, and persistence to me. I was born in a literary family so reading
became a habit for me since I was very young. Personally, reading helps me a
lot in my life.
Reading enhanced my personality. I am the only
child of my family so my parents spoiled me. I used to be selfish: never share
food or toys with other kids, take things from my grandpa without saying
thanks, being rude to my parents when I was not satisfied. Things changed when I
got my first book from my mom on my 6- year-old birthday—“The Book of Virtues”, wrote by William J. Bennett. I have read
thousand of books in my childhood, this is not my favorite one but this is the
one that influence me the most. Everyone recognizes these traits as essentials
of good character: Responsibility, Courage, Compassion, Honesty, Friendship,
Persistence and Faith. This book has contained hundreds of stories to
instructing and inspiring anthology that will help me understand and develop
those characters. It also provides examples of good and bad, right and wrong so
that I develop such traits in great works of literature and exemplary stories
from history. It is my initiatory book, which I could get the sources of the
ideals by which I wish to live my life.
Reading letting me knows about myself and help me
figured out what kind of life I want to create. After I entered high school, I
felt like I could do everything like an adult but actually I was not mature
enough to be responsible for myself. Then I started to feel confused about the
definition of grow up. Meanwhile, I have read a poem named Growing Up,
which wrote by Cheng Gu, a famous Chinese poet in the 70s. In the poem, he
stated that the mark of growing up is neither entering high school nor writing
an essay in foreign language. The most remarkable milestone of growing up knows
your goal of your future. This really means a lot to me in my whole life. From
his poem, I noticed that life is short and limited, no one can make his or her
life longer, but can make his or her life wider by experience more different
cultures. I set up a goal of study abroad when I was 16. I was not born in a
rich family so it is not easy for my parents to support me to study abroad. But,
if I finished my college in 3 years, I can get a job in my mom’s company
easily. It seems that I can get a stabile job and live comfortably in the
future. But this is NOT what I want. I did many researches about study abroad
and start to improve my English. Firstly, I attended to a IELTS training
school. I have to provide my IELTS score to apply for entering CSUN and it requires
a limitation of 5.5 out of 9 for international students to be admitted without
engaged the international English program (IEP). To achieve my goal, I wrote
myself a diary as a reminder. Every time when I felt tired for catching on my
dream, I read that diary again and again and then put myself back to study. I
took my exam on 19th February 2012. It was just after the Chinese New
Year. All my families were gathering together to celebrate the big festival at
our hometown: Anqing. But I did not join them; I prefer to go back to Beijing
to study alone at school. I woke up at 7 o’clock in the morning and stay at the
library for the whole day until it closed at 9 o’clock in the night everyday. I
did thousands of exercises and read a lot of related books to get fully
prepared. After I took the exam, I feel released. I was fill of confidents
because I worked very hard on preparing the exam. The result came out at 29th
February 2012 and I was very happy: I
got 6 out of 9. I sent my transcript and all the files to the admission and
record office of CSUN and received my offer.
Reading also helps me on learning English
especially on my writing skills. English became the biggest challenge to me
after I made the decision of studying abroad. As the matter in fact, writing is
the most difficult part for all international students not only for me. I can
write very well in my native language—because I have read thousands of books in
Chinese and I can easily find arguments and evidences to support my
opinion. But it is really hard for me to
write in English. In order to enhance my writing skill, I began to read English
articles since I recognize my weakness in writing. I have to introduce about one
of the hardest writing experiences during my college: it is the first English
essay I had written when I was a freshman. It was an investment project and I
have sent thousands of emails to gathering useful data and it took me almost 3
moths to finish the project. There are difficulties everywhere: I had to
translate all my thoughts and knowledge into English and I had collected a lot
of data but I didn’t know how to start my essay and how to gather all the data
together. To carry out the project, I have read a lot of economic magazines and
newspapers and I even invented a writing process for myself. I made myself a
list to organize the contents of my project. It was a hard time. But I got the
highest score in my class due to my continuously hard working.
That was my
narrative of how reading changes my life and how it helped during my study life.
Reading really has a lot of advantages—Reading can make me smart and
wise: I have learnt so many things from reading. And reading helps me a lot
when I wrote: I can easily find arguments and evidences to support my opinion. Nevertheless, I am keep on reading more article and
gain knowledge to make myself more wisdom and become a spiritual warrior.
