I’ve always been fascinated by languages, but I’ve never been any good at learning them. I remember sitting in my French lessons, I never _________ what I was being taught. My teacher wasn’t _________.

But one of my A levels was English Language, and that was where my interest in _________ started. Over the last few years, I’ve started learning more languages than I can _________. They include Latin, Russian, Spanish, and probably several others. None of them stuck.

And then came lockdown. While I was _________ enough to still be able to work from home, on evenings and weekends, I found myself getting _________ and looking through video websites for something to watch. That’s how I _________ a Chinese fantasy drama filled with complex relationships.

But by the time I got about halfway through the show, I _________ that in some cases, the words being spoken in Chinese didn’t match the words being said in the English translations. _________, a character was being called shijie instead of by her name. I went online, did some __________ and met a difficulty.

Shijie, which I learned can be translated as “martial sister”, introduced me to the complexities of Chinese __________. So many different words for “aunt”, “uncle” and “grandfather”! Characters with more than one name!

I was __________ by the way the language is so connected with the culture, and how poetic and __________ it is. I wanted to be able to __________ the source material, even if it was going to take me a long while __________ I got to that point.

Very few of us become fluent in another language by studying it in high school.

I made a(n) _______ to maintain (保持) the little bit of French that I learned in school, but eventually realized that this was useless. I knew well that new languages are _______ learned when young, and that our abilities _______ with age. However, just before my 50th birthday, I _______ French classes.

After I was _______ to see which group I belonged to, I was put in almost the basic learning group. When I looked around in my first Saturday morning class, I was _______ by how many of the students learning French as a third, fourth, or _______ fifth language.

While I’d always considered myself as a quick _______, that was no longer the case. I absorbed new vocabulary very slowly. What I learned one week seemed to _______ as soon as I learned the next skill. I looked up the same ________ and phrases over and over again.

Now, a couple of years later, I can listen to the news in French and catch 90 percent of it on the first try, read a novel if the language is not too difficult, and hold on to the end of a conversation if it doesn’t go too ________. Who knows what I might still achieve? I’ve learned so much beyond grammar and vocabulary. I’ve met people from around the world who have the ________ to make a fool of themselves to learn something new. I have a ________ understanding of how something can look ________ different from another perspective (角度). I’ve learned that a language is not just a set of words, but a way of ________.

But most of all, I’ve learned that it really is never too late to learn something new.

When I first entered university, my aunt, who is an English professor, gave me a new English dictionary and advised me to use it. I was _______ to see that it was an English-English dictionary, also known as a monolingual (单语的) dictionary. Although it was a dictionary intended for non-native learners, none of my classmates had one and, to be honest, I found it extremely _______ to use at first. I would _______ words in the dictionary but still could not fully understand the meanings. I was used to the _______ English-Chinese dictionaries, in which the words are _______ both in English and Chinese. I really wondered why my aunt gave me such _______ to make things so difficult for me. Now, I understand that monolingual dictionaries are_______ in learning a foreign language.

As I _______, there is, in fact, often no perfect equivalent (对应物) between two _______ in two languages. My aunt even ________ that even a Chinese “equivalent” can never give you the ________ meaning of the word in English! Therefore, she insisted that I read the definition of a word in a monolingual dictionary when I wanted to get a better ________ of its meaning. Gradually, I have come to see what she ________.

Using a monolingual dictionary has helped me in another important way. This dictionary uses a(n) ________ number of words, around 2, 000, in its definitions. When I read these definitions, I am ________exposed to the basic words and learn how they are used to explain objects and ideas. Because of this, I can express myself more easily in English.