Is computer gaming generally good or bad？- Part III Q3 refers to activities that when doing it, you have unpleasant feeling and it actually does not have any long-term benefits on you. Sometimes, we do this out of anger. For example, quarreling with your girlfriend after she maxed out your credit card on Black Friday. Q4 refers to activities that makes you “high” when doing it but you may end up with nothing but regrets and guiltiness. We do a bunch of these things, like binge-watching TV shows, smoking, cheating on your wife, you name it. For most people, playing video games falls within the Q4 category. When doing it, you feel great pleasure and can’t stop playing it. Afterwards, you might very likely blame yourself on wasting so much time on it. (Don’t tell me you had never experienced that). If you’re an ambitious guy with a dream of becoming an “A-lister” in the future, you should try your best to avoid doing things in Q3 and focus on tasks in Q1 and Q2. And I would not suggest you get involved in too many activities in Q4 unless you’re an extremely disciplined person.

Is computer gaming generally good or bad？- Part I The horizontal axis represents the instant feeling you may feel when doing an activity. It goes from unpleasant to pleasant feeling. The vertical axis represents the long-term benefits you can get from that activity, and it goes from zero long-term benefits to great long-term benefits. We then have four quadrants in the diagram, i.e. Q1, Q2, Q3 and Q4.

Why doesn't China have superhero movie? I agree that we don't have superhero stuff in China. Culturally speaking, Chinese people are more of collectivism that individualism. We value the harmony of the society. When telling a story, we are more likely to focus on the relationship between people than the people themselves. This is the reason that you cannot find a superhero novel in China despite our long history. For example, the major four classic novels in China all deal with a group of people. The Journey to the West is about a story of 1 monk and 3 humanoid characters; A Dream in Red Mansion is about a man with a bunch of women; Water Margin is about 108 bandits; and Roman of the Three Kingdom is about numerous people. Ideologically speaking, the Chinese government and lots of Chinese people are believers of Marxism. Marxism contains the doctrine of historical materialism, holding that the history is mainly created by the ordinary people, rather than one or two heroes. In other words, it is the people behind the scene that makes the history, while hero is just the last straw which breaks camel's back. If it was not George Washington, it would be Peter Washington. But nothing would be achieved without efforts of the ordinary people. That being said, nowadays, western superhero stuff is getting more and more popular among young folks in China because it is really cool. Therefore, I believe as the Chinese society gets more and more diverse, talented young folks will make a superhero of Chinese style sooner or later.

Why It was a Bad Suggestion ? I wrote an entry yesterday, sharing some thoughts generated after a friend of mine gave me a wrong suggestion. After that, several italki friends left message, wondering what was the suggestion. This entry is written to answer the question and explain why. My friend suggested me to read textbook loudly to improve my spoken English. I think it a bad idea, because, while reading something alone, we can not get any feedback in terms of grammar and vocabulary, so we will repeatedly make the same mistakes. The better way is to read something after the sound of a native speaker, mimicking his/her pronunciation and tone. I tried this before, reading the lines of clips from an American TV series "Boston Legal" for 8 months. But even this "upgraded" approach, though helping me solve some problems regarding pronunciation and tone, is not very useful to make you a natural English speaker, because, daily conversation requires instant responses, which can only be improved by practicing with people; also, although we can learn some phrases from the text or lines, if we don't practice them in our writing or speaking, we will forget their usage sooner or later, which makes our efforts a waste of time. Thank you for all of the people who helps me correct my entry. Wish you have a nice day !

Why does he give a wrong suggestion ? Last week, I met a friend and sought advice from him regarding how to improve oral English. This friend, though being a Chinese having never been abroad, is a very good English speaker. However, he told me a practicing approach which I thought it a bad idea. I firmly believe so because, on one hand, it is an out-of-date approach which has been abandoned by most education institutions; on the other hand, I had tried this approach before and proved it was not efficient. I'm quite sure about the integrity of this friend, so he must truly believed in the effectiveness of this approach. Then comes the question: why does an advanced learner recommend a bad approach to other people? After I thought through this question, my view is that my friend doesn't what actually helped him improve his oral English. When we desperately want to achieve a goal, we usually try lots of different approaches at the same time. After we finally made it and looked back to evaluate the effectiveness of each approach, sometimes, we may attribute the success to an ineffective approach and firmly hold it the key factor thereafter, which results in the above situation. Thank you for all the people who help me point out the mistakes in this entry. Hope the above sharing is of help to you.

How to Achieve High Learning Efficiency Recently, I read a book named #Turning Learning Right Side Up: Putting Education Back on Track#, which was written by Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg. The main idea of this book is that the education system in America betrays the essence of education and needs a radical revolution. I was quite surprised when I first found this conclusion on the preface of this book. However, after I read through it, I hold this is very informative and instructional book, which provides lots of interesting and insightful points. I want to share one of them with you. According to the authors, the education policy makers confuse learning with teaching. Traditional education believes, for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, this is not the truth. Most of what we learnt are learnt without it being taught. For example, a child can learn how to walk or eat without being taught by its parents. Likewise, adults learn most of what they use at work by themselves. Therefore, education shall focus on learning rather than teaching. We can even have no people actually teaching at school and only let those "teachers" do some guidance work if the learner make some serious mistakes. Students' curiosity will find its ways to the answers. This is a very enlightening point which reminds me of my experience of learning geography. When I was a high school student, I considered geography was boring and never listened carefully to my geography teacher. However, in one summer vacation, I played a computer game named #Uncharted Water#, in which, as the captain of a ship, my task was to make money as much as I can by means of transporting goods from one place to another (for example, transport bananas from Manila to Stockholm). In order to achieve that goal, I needed to know the developed seaports all over the world and where they were located on the world map. Meanwhile, I also needed to know how ocean current worked so I could make the full use of it to facilitate my transportation. As a result, I became an expert in geography without any outside pressure from teacher or parents threatening they would beat me up if I failed to learn those knowledge. Meanwhile, all the knowledge was learnt by myself with an amazingly high efficiency. I believe this experience supports authors' argument. Thank you for all the people who help me point out the mistakes in this essay. Hope the above sharing is of help to you.

A Tip for Learning Foreign Language As a language learner, I'm always trying to improve and upgrade my learning approach. Recently, I find an important rule which may make my learning of English (or any other foreign language) more efficiently: strike a balance between INPUT and OUTPUT of the language you're learning. The INPUT of foreign language refers to the learning of any new words, phrases or sentences you read in books or hear in radio or TV programs. The OUTPUT means the practicing that you use the new words, phrases or sentences in your writing or speaking. Keeping a balance between INPUT and OUTPUT means you shall proportionally allocate your learning efforts and time to those two processes, otherwise, you won't achieve high learning efficiency. If you only focus on INPUT, you may know the meaning of those new words and phrases, but you're not able to internalize them as your expression; on the contrary, if you spend too much time on OUTPUT while making light of INPUT, your speaking and writing would not be genuine enough, or in other words, you're thinking in your native language and then translate it into the foreign language. Such translated responses, due to lack of natural expressions, may confuse the native speaker of that foreign language. After years of learning English, I have made many mistakes breaking the balance between INPUT and OUTPUT. So I want to share this tip with anyone who wishes to improve his/her approach of learning a foreign language and hope it would be of help to you. Suni GONG