A few days ago, while I was taking a liberal arts class related to English listening, I felt so embarrassed. On the first day of the class, the professor asked the students a question: Why are you taking this class? The students hesitated to raise their hand. After a while, I raised my hand and answered the question, “The reason why we take this class is because it can help us to communicate with foreigners well by developing our listening ability.” As soon as I finished my answer, I could hear some students giggling in the back of the class. The professor asked again, wanting a more realistic answer, “Is there any other answer?” At that moment, one student answered, “We take this class to get a good score on a test.” Some students nodded as a sign of agreement, and the professor also seemed satisfied with that. I could understand why the student gave an answer like that. Our ultimate goal of studying English, however, shouldn’t be getting a good score.
  As far as I am concerned, before starting to learn something, I try to research information by reading books written by experts and find the ways they approach the matter. However, since I started to learn English when I was so young, I hadn’t checked if I was doing it right until I joined the army, which means that I studied English the same way the other students did, such as memorizing vocabulary, studying English grammar and listening to English. However, no matter how hard I studied English, my English ability was at a standstill. Then one day, I came across a book titled ‘An English Vaccine from a New York Doctor’ by Go Soo-min, and this book had a huge impact on me. The author originally shared his methods of learning English with other people through his blog but later decided to publish a book based on the blog.
  After I read the book, I was flabbergasted because what the book said about how to learn English was totally different from what I thought. To put it in a nutshell, the book suggested that we read English aloud, start to keep a diary in English and try to use English expressions we learn in real life. I am not promoting the book but saying that the way we learn English needs to change.