Preface - An apology

In January, I promised to dedicate some time into writing posts every night. However, I broke it since I have stopped updating my blog from March.

At the very beginning, I want to say I am really sorry about my dishonesty. Please accept my sincere aplogy.

Besides that, I think it is also significant to figure out the reasons why I failed.

Reason One - Run out of energy

One of the reasons leading me to failure is that I was extremely exhausted. Going through my whole plan starting from 6.20 a.m. until 11.00 p.m. almost uses up all my energy. When it comes to my writing time at 23.00, I needed to fight with my sleeping eyes and hurting waist while forcing me to concentrate on typing. It is absolutely a mental and physical torture. Sometimes I nearly fell asleep in front of my laptop. Having persisted in carrying out the scheduled plan for one month, I gave up.

Reason Two - Being short of ideas

In addition, it takes me a little time to eventually understand that the lack of topics was discouraging me from maintaining this daily ritual. Without any inspiring ideas in mind, everytime opening the writing program I did not know what to say, but just watched the cursor remaining at the same position for a long period of time. The previous posts are mostly on the basis of real life around myself. Once staying inside home without exposing to outside world, I suddenly felt my brain turning empty. I could no longer experience those wonderful time different topics jumping into my mind and fighting with each other for further development. At that time, only the sky seemed to be the limit. Although pushing myself to keep writing no matter what the content is about, I still got stuck in halfway due to the unclear main ideas.

Reason Three - Go off the track

Of course, I have to admit that throughout the entire March, I lost myself in fiddling with new electronic gadgets, wandering on shopping websites, hanging out with friends and things like that. I do not mean to undervalue those things above since it is helpful to relieve my pressure coming from parents, classmates etc. Just like the sword has two blades, because of the distraction caused by these kinds of things, I eventually deviated from the schedule.

Reason Four - Trasfer input to output

On top of all that, there is an obstacle preventing me from aligning my articles with those witten by native speakers. It is the imbalance between inputs and outputs.

When trying to express my opinions in English, I inevitably need to transfer Chinese into English at first. Considering that, it is easier to fall into the typical trap of Chinglish.

In addition to it, having finished reviewing my previous articles, I notice I not only used too many similar sentence structures like “I find it adj. to do sth” and “it is so adj. that”, but also repeated a handful of phrases, such as “work hard”, “give it a try” etc. which makes the whole paragraph look dull. I have ever read these same meanings expressed in other ways, but unfortunately, it merely left me a vague impression, so I could not write it down on paper. It is just like something I am sure it stores somewhere, but there exists no access to bring it to the front.

Also, it happens all the time that although consulting dictionaries, I am not able to decide which words fit the whole context better. Sometimes I even wrote oral words in a formal academic situation. For instance, When I looked up “酒” for English translation, the dictionary listed a couple of search results including “alchol”, “wine”, “liquor”, “spirit” and “booze”. Except for the different spellings, these words seem similar in Chinese meaning. Nevertheless, in fact, every word is used in completely various contexts. Even if being aware of this problem and trying to find existing samples in English dictionaries, I am disappointed with the harsh reality that there are rarely examples for further reference. This means the picking of words may be inaccurate and my posts are likely to look strange in the eye of foreigners. That really lets me down because this gap is hard to be bridged.

Half-time

As I look back, I find these factors make me feel pain. The more frequently I experience, the more suffering I go through. Finally, I, as a normal person, cannot bear it anymore, which marks my failure.

Honestly speaking, I am not just going to finish with comlaints, since identifying the causes is aimed for finding out some more flexible, dependable and unshakable solutions. That is a new topic for ongoing series, so why not we have a half-time right here? See you soon.