Finished the CET-6 written exam yesterday. I was planning to write a blog post about it right away, but I had to prepare a PPT for a work presentation last night, so it didn’t happen. This morning was kind of a tough time. Maybe I really wasn’t working hard enough.
But I don’t want to talk about that — let’s talk about English instead. I saw on Weibo that the blogger “Devil Daddy” said English is the least recommended major. The main reason is that the current English curriculum is seriously out of touch with reality, and the English you actually need for work can totally be self-taught.
If you really love English and want to major in it, you should actually pick some easy major that doesn’t take up much time, then use all that free time to self-study English. An English major would eat up all your time and still not deliver the results you want — especially when it comes to speaking.
When I was doing the written portion of this exam, I actually felt pretty relaxed, because the written part used to be my weakest area. Listening has always been decent, nothing to worry about. The main difference this time was that I felt really confident doing the reading comprehension. My answers felt solid, with strong reasoning and evidence. So reading is something I don’t need to worry about this time.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading short science articles regularly for the past six months. Mostly on ScienceAlert. After each article I’d write a short summary of the main topic and content. Or maybe the reading topics this time just happened to be the kind of science stuff I enjoy, so it didn’t feel stressful.
Listening was actually where the problems showed up this time. And no, I’m not talking about the audio cutting out halfway through and having to replay it — though that was also a first. The real issue was that when it came to selecting answers, I wasn’t confident. Did I understand it? I’d say I got the general topic. But when the questions asked about specifics, my mind went blank and I didn’t know what to pick. So the problem is that I still don’t fully, completely understand everything. Actually, full comprehension could be my next English learning goal, and after that, it’d be speaking.
One more thing — when writing the essay and doing the translation section, I felt noticeably more at ease. Before the exam, I was even memorizing templates. Turns out I didn’t use a single one. They didn’t fit the prompts perfectly, so I just wrote my own. Vocabulary wasn’t an issue. If anything needs improvement, it’s sentence structure and composition. So that’s what I need to work on. Score-wise, I checked my answers — reading should be solid. It all comes down to listening.
So 500 points should be no problem, right? Actually, there was another unpleasant thing that happened today, but I really don’t want to bring it up.
That’s it. Bye~