Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
In Lin Yao’s eyes, instead of passively waiting around for Lin Yun to come teach her, she would be better off taking the initiative herself and creating a self-improvement plan.
Her goal was clear: to become a qualified foreign trade salesperson!
If we used the analogy of building a house for doing foreign trade, then one’s level of English would be the base of the house.
Of course, you could build a house without a base. For simple houses such as board houses, you wouldn’t need a foundation, but constructing the base first before building the house would be the correct way to build a villa or a building!
Speaking English well didn’t guarantee that she would become a good foreign trade salesperson, but if her level of English was subpar, then she wouldn’t even have the opportunity to become a foreign trade salesperson at Lingyun Industry.
Lin Yao thought that if she wanted to improve her English, then her top priority would be to improve her vocabulary. But she hated memorizing words, and this was the reason she failed the CET-6 exam.
Now, she no longer had the right to be stubborn, so it was imperative that she memorized as many words as she could!
Lin Yao chose the book “Smart Associative Memory Method” for herself. Using the associative memory method to memorize vocabulary was more efficient and much less boring.
It was worth mentioning that business English vocabulary and the CET vocabulary were two distinct categories.
At least 70% of the vocabulary used in the CET was never used at work, and most of the vocabulary used in business English wouldn’t be encountered on the CET.
Although business English itself was more formalized, with essentially the same words appearing over and over again, Lin Yao could still tell that Jian Wen must have put in a lot of effort into her English before coming to work here. That was why her business English was so good.
Although Jian Wen spoke English with an accent, she was still fluent, and her wording was even more impeccable.
See, even experts were working hard, so what right did a rookie like Lin Yao have to slack off?
Lin Yao decided to use “Cambridge Business English,” which she had studied and had taken a test on in the past, for review purposes in her free time.
One’s level of English didn’t simply depend on the number of words they knew or the number of sentences one could construct. It also required listening, speaking, and writing skills… So Lin Yao formulated a rigorous plan to comprehensively improve her listening, speaking, reading and writing skills.
The third book she chose for herself was “VOA Comprehensive News Summary,” which aimed to strengthen listening skills by listening to BBC, VOA, and China Daily News. Only by immersing herself in an English language environment in her spare time could she improve her listening skills in the shortest amount of time.
These were the basic skills she had to practice!
Lin Yao felt that she not only needed to practice her basic skills, but she also needed to improve her expertise in her profession.
Fortunately, there were English-Chinese dictionaries in Lin Yun’s office related to machinery. These could be used as references since she needed to thoroughly understand Lingyun Industry’s products in the shortest amount of time, and in English as well.
As for study time, she was prepared to make full use of her spare time, such as the time she had before work, her lunch break and her time after work.
One had to work hard and play hard in order to persevere in the long term.
She made a rule to study for two hours a day, which was her personal limit!
After arranging her English study plan, Lin Yao set out to create a reward plan for herself.
She decided to give herself a small reward every time she reached a small benchmark, because this would make the learning process less tedious.
Of course the reward wasn’t anything materialistic, but rather an opportunity to relax.
As for the specific way of relaxing, Lin Yao already had an idea.
******
After these two plans were made, Lin Yao stretched, then decided to reward herself for the first time by visiting the Hang City Forum.
When Jiang Mingshu first forced Lin Yao to register on the forum and kept urging her to post, Lin Yao wasn’t that fond of the Hang City Forum, especially towards the “Hang City Forum’s most intriguing” single men and women’s section. All those young people thought about was what to eat, what to do, where to go out, and who to hang out with…
And their meaningless way of chatting made Lin Yao feel awkward and embarrassed when she thought of it.
How could this be interesting?
However, there was a reason that the Hang City Forum was so popular, and Lin Yao wanted to get to the bottom of it.
She didn’t go to a familiar section as Jiang Mingshu had instructed her, but instead quickly skimmed through the entire Hang City Forum.
The Hang City Forum was divided into ten major sections that consisted of nearly 100 subsections.
The forum’s total daily postings amounted to about 200, of which the livelihood section accounted for 33%, the events section accounted for 27%, and the love life section accounted for 20%. The rest were like the flea market, job searches and recruitments, real estate market, mother and child parenting, film and television drama reviews, carrot and stick, and photography in total only accounted for 20%.
The livelihood section was the most popular section on the Hang City Forum. Every day, angry youth and keyboard warriors there complained about which traffic lights were unreasonably designed, which roads caused the most inconvenience, and so on.
Although it seemed like they were merely making a fuss, their existence did play a certain role in bringing Hangzhou’s livelihood issues and municipal construction issues to light. They had a rather positive impact.
For ordinary netizens, as long as they went to the livelihood section of the Hang City Forum, they would be able to find out what had happened in Hangzhou these days without even leaving their homes.
For example, which neighborhood’s cable line was damaged, which road’s water pipe burst, which bus line was taking a temporary detour, where a petty thief was caught stealing underwear… and you could also participate in the discussion by giving your own opinions and suggestions.
The event section of the Hang City Forum was also very popular. The events they organized included mountain climbing, hot spring tours, self-driving tours, cross-country backpacking and even international backpacking.
Before they set out to travel, they not only could find travel routes shared by their predecessors, but they also had access to specific travel methods. The beautiful scenery and delicious food along the way were not to be overlooked.
Not only that, but they could also meet like-minded people at their destination and could also arrange to travel together.
The love life section of the Hang City Forum had more than just a section for single men and women. Although several of the other subsections were less active than the single men and women subsection, the vibe was more harmonious than the single men and women subsection.
Taking the love life cabin subsection as an example—young people who got dumped would talk about their bizarre ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends.
Married adults could also rant about their absurd relatives as well.
Men and women in the workplace could also tell strangers about the unfair treatment they were subject to in the workplace.
In the cases above, sympathetic netizens would try their best to help and come up with an explanation or give them guidance. But if the confessor wasn’t willing to reveal more, then no one would be able to get to the bottom of the matter.
The existence of the single men and women subsection wasn’t as meaningless as Lin Yao had originally thought. People could at liven up their mood after work, and it helped make young people who were alone in Hangzhou feel less lonely.
The top ten sections of the Hang City Forum basically covered all aspects of daily life, entertainment, and its overall vibe was very upbeat and optimistic.
Lin Yao began to think that the Hang City Forum was rather fascinating. She tried to follow some posts with her id and left her tracks in every section.