If you live in a place where most people speak the language you are learning, you may use the language for several hours each day. It may become part of your “inner speech.” In other words, you start thinking in that language. Your mind stops trying to translate things from your native language into the second language. But most of the English learners live in places where English is not the main language. This may be true for you. You may not have many chances to practice English. You may even be self-taught.

When you speak, your speech might be slower than you would like. This is because your mind is still translating from your first language, which can also sound unnatural. English, like every other language, has its own sentence structure.

The good news is that thinking in English can bring you a huge step closer to fluency (流利)! It is not very difficult, but it does need practice.

Most experts note that it’s best to start small. So, a good first step is to think in individual (单独的) words. Look around you. What do you see? In your head, try to name each object in your surroundings. Charles Thomas has taught English for over 10 years. He tells his students to name the things that they see around them, wherever they are. Start with nouns and then add in verbs, he suggests.

Another exercise that Thomas suggests is describing in your mind objects you don’t know the words for. For example, if you’re looking at your house and you see your garage, but you can’t think of the name in English. You can say, “The place inside where I put my car.” You can also use shorter phrases, such as “It’s similar to...” or “It’s the opposite of...” Thomas says doing this can help learners of any language. As a Spanish learner, he does it himself.

Next, you can move to exercises like thinking in simple sentences and in conversations. So, how much time should you spend on these exercises? Thomas says you do a little every day. “When you make things a habit, then it just appears suddenly into your mind without thinking and then, before you know it, really, you’re thinking in English.”

Parties are good ways to get families or friends together and have lots of fun. But holding parties is not an easy thing. You need to be well-prepared. Here are some tips for you.

Pick a right theme（主题）first. You should think about the age, gender, interests and hobbies of the guests. Then choose the best theme.

Plan ahead（提前）. Finish your guest list and your invitations at least 2 weeks before the party. This way, you’ll have an idea of how many people to expect and you can decide on the best place to hold the party.

Decorate（装饰）creatively. Balloons are fun, but they’re at every party! Get creative about the party.

Serve delicious food ahead of time. In that way, you can spend the hours having fun with your guests, rather than staying in the kitchen most of the time.

Prepare fun games and activities. Creative and interesting games and activities are necessary to a successful party.

With the above advice, you can surely have a wonderful party!

Nobody wants to lose, but we must accept that losing is a part of life. After all, we can’t win all the time. However, we can learn something valuable from every failure（失败）. This may help us succeed in the future. So we must know how to be a good loser.

We must not be afraid of losing. When we lose, just take it with a smile and look on the bright side of it. Failure can’t be avoided in our life. Edison failed 10,000 times before he invented the light bulb（灯泡）. When he was asked how he felt, he said that he hadn’t failed 10,000 times but had learned 10,000 things which didn’t work. We must know that history is full of examples of men and women who achieved success although they failed many times.

Losing is not very disgraceful. We must accept our failure and learn to take advantage of it. Remember that it can be helpful. Take action to walk out of it. When we lose, think about what we did and how we can improve. If someone else can help, we’ll be lucky enough. Maybe he or she has been through the same experience before. Many people enjoy helping others solve problems. This can save us a lot of time in learning how to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

We should face our failure when we lose. There is only one winner in every competition. Some win, while some lose. That is a usual way of life. If we offer our congratulations（祝贺）to the winners and share in their happiness, we won’t feel sorry for our failure.

In a word, being a good loser will help us to succeed in life. It might be painful at the beginning, but there are many advantages. Good losers set examples to us, and most importantly, they finally win.