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Wei found the English spoken at Cambridge very sophisticated

The most difficult, but also the most interesting, experience since I have been here is the language. Most people, if not all, will be aware that language will be a big hurdle 障碍, but we're never quite prepared for it until we are faced with it 我们面对它.

Accents

I took the IELTS exam before I came to England for A-levels and I achieved 7.5 out of 9, with full marks in the listening part. Despite this, my first three months in Manchester were a struggle 挣扎. The Mancunian accent 曼彻斯特口音, although not as notorious as the Geordie accent, was certainly difficult to comprehend at first.

I have been in this country for over 6 years and am still learning   Wei Cope

The first three months at school were tense. I had to listen and concentrate very hard to try to understand what everyone was saying. I had to ask my friends to translate some sentences into 'proper English' for me.

However, before I knew it, I was speaking English with a Mancunian accent by the end of the first year! One of my friends noticed this one day when I said "but" in a typical Mancunian accent and they all burst out laughing 爆发出一阵大笑. They could not believe that the girl who always asked them to translate English in the Mancunian accent into 'proper English' would one day have a Mancunian accent!

Idioms

It took me slightly longer to become acquainted with slang and idioms and I am still learning new ones almost every week. In my opinion, slang is easier as you can generally work out 推断出 what they're trying to say from the context 上下文. Idioms are harder as they usually have a historical or cultural background that can be slightly dated 过时.

There are no secrets to learning English   Wei Cope

In my opinion, there are three types of idiom: the obvious ones, the fairly obvious ones that require some lateral thinking 从多方面考虑问题，横向思维, and the ones that are obscure 少见的，冷僻的 and no longer in common use, but would have been obvious if you have lived in, say, the Victorian times. Some examples include an obvious one 'it's all in your head', but 'Achilles' heel' would require some knowledge of Greek mythology, but 'have an axe to grind' was less apparent to me.

Some of the idioms have very similar counterparts in Chinese and I always wondered which came first. For example, 'carrots and sticks' 胡萝卜加大棒 stays the same in both languages. However, in English, 'an eye for an eye' is often used as short for 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth' but in the Chinese equivalent only the 'tooth' is mentioned.

Still learning

I have been in this country for over six years and am still learning. Being in Cambridge is a fantastic opportunity as people around me talk as they would write, and as a result I am constantly exposed to elegantly 高雅的 structured 结构 sentences and sophisticated 高深的 words. Being able to talk to patients gives me the opportunity to practise transforming jargon 专业术语 into 'day to day' English. There are no secrets to learning English, all you have to do is listen, ask and practise, and always ask others to correct you.

Warning!
There may be some grammatical mistakes in the Blog, but we have not corrected these as we prefer to let participants use their own words.

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文章中可能含有某些语法错误，这是因为这些撰稿者的母语不是英语。我们没有刻意纠正，因为我们希望采用作者的原话。