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I am a life long ESL student myself, every day I am learning something new from the books, from the things around me and of course from my students. For the last few years, I've been teaching the English language here in China and this is the reason why I chose this topic. China is a great country with beautiful sceneries and very hard - working, enthusiastic and friendly people. Learning any language is not an easy job. It requires patience, practice and of course a desire. Chinese students are very fast at learning mathematics, science and they are very fast at mastering their native Chinese language, although it is considered as one of the most difficult languages of the world, but when it comes to learning the English language they get significantly slow and emotionally disappointed. Sometimes it is hard to see them trying so hard and still not getting good results. I was trying to find the reasons and answers by questioning the students about why it so difficult for them to learn the English language. The answers were very different but the most common ones I will try to share. The first reason was that the grammar of the English language is very complicated and difficult to understand, especially the "exceptions" when a certain word or sentence structure doesn't follow the common grammatical rules. The "tenses" are another big headache for the students. The Chinese language doesn't have tenses. It has the words that show the past, the present and the future but the structure of the sentence doesn't change because of that. The phrasal verbs and idioms are also very difficult to understand for Chinese students because they prefer the word to word translation. The other problem that the majority of Chinese students face is the pronunciation of the sounds. There are many sounds that the students have never used before in their native language. For example the sound "e" in the word "hello", the students usually pronounce it as "hallo" because they have the sound "ha" in their native language. For the same reason, the majority of the Chinese students feel hard to pronounce the "th- as in THIS" and "the- as in THINK" sounds. The one thing that Chinese students are good at is spelling the vocabulary, they have to memorize the words, this mostly because of their school's homework or college entrance examinations. All of these reasons are leading some students to disappointments and they quickly give up on learning. Yes! It is hard to learn a new language especially when that language has nothing in common with the native language. Chinese and English languages have nothing in common, which makes the learning process longer and full of hardships, but the students are trying their best to improve their language learning skills. Nothing is impossible for a willing heart. With proper help from a teacher who has the experience, anybody is able to learn anything. I think in Chinese schools the students and the teachers should pay a bit more attention to practicing to speak the language not only how to read and write the language. Giving the students the opportunity to speak the language at an early age will lead to amazing improvements.
