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Learning English is a requirement in today’s globalized society. There is no debating that. It is the global language. Yet concomitant with this fact is the fact that English has become localized in countless ways. For example, the English spoken by Scottish, English, and Welsh people differs greatly, and they are all neighbors on a small island! Also, the English spoken in the United States of America is nowhere near uniform. People in Boston and people in San Francisco use a different set of vocabulary and speak very differently.
Globish is the name for globalized English. The word “Globish” itself reflects this fact: it is a portmanteau of the beginning of global, glob-, and the end of English, -ish. Globish is, in addition to being globalized English, also truncated English, and that may sound like a bad thing at first. But it isn’t. Globish is truncated in a beneficial way because it removes the slang, local vocabulary, and dialects that are parts of every localized version of English. What remains are the essentials. It is distilled English. Thus, Globish is what a student of English should study. After all, being proficient in the basics of English that are spoken and understood the world over is certainly more important than being proficient in the English that one group of people or one country in particular uses, right? What this book offers, then, is the bare essentials, the “backbone”, of the English language.
This book contains two thousand English words spread out across five chapters, with each chapter being further divided into four sections. Each word is defined in Chinese and has an example sentence that was written first in English and then translated into Chinese. The example sentences all have an internal logic to them whereby the reader should be able to understand the meaning and usage of a word based on how it is used in its
example sentence. For instance, take the word “busy”. The example sentence given for the word “busy” is “Katherine is so busy at work that she does not have time to eat lunch”. The sentence gives the reader a palpable and relatable example of how the vocabulary word is used. The idea is that the reader need not rely on the Chinese or English definitions to understand the words, but may instead rely on the sentences and actually see the words being used.
In addition to vocabulary words and example sentences, this book also has short conversational sentences for each of the twenty sections. The section on travelling, for example, has sentences where people talk about their past travelling experiences or their current travel plans. These short conversational sentences serve to reinforce the example sentences by providing another space to see the vocabulary words in use.
I hope this book proves useful and perhaps even enlightening!
在現今地球村的社會下，「英語學習」毫無異議是不可或缺的；英文是一個國際語言，但是卻會隨著地區性的差異而衍生出許多不同的變化及用法。舉例來說，蘇格蘭、英格蘭以及威爾斯這三個比鄰的國家雖然位於同一個島嶼，但是在英文的用法上卻有極大的不同。另外，美國人說的英文也並非完全相同，波士頓跟舊金山所使用的英文在字彙跟口說的部分就是天差地別。
「Globish」指的就是全球化英文（Globalized English），它是由Global以及English所組合出來的組合字、也可以被稱為精簡英文（truncated English），一般人乍聽之下可能會覺得把英文精簡後可能是一件壞事；但其實不然，全球化英文捨棄一些地區性的英文用法像是俚語、地方用字以及方言，剩下的部分就是精選英文重要的架構。現今的學生應該學習的就是全球化英文；畢竟、比起只在某些特定地區才通用的地區性英文、能夠流利的運用一般大眾所廣用的基本英文反而來得重要許多。這本書提供給讀者的就是英語學習的基本「骨架」。
本書內容包含了5個章節、每個章節又可細分為4個單元，內容包含了2,000個英語單字。每個英文單字除了有中文解釋之外，還有英文及中文例句。每個例句更以邏輯思考方式，讓讀者可以容易的瞭解單字的意義及用法。以英文單字Busy來做例子，其單字例句為Katherine工作忙到沒有時間吃午餐（Katherine is so busy at work that she does not have time to eat lunch），透過這個句子，讀者可以更清楚地瞭解如何使用該單字；這樣的做法就是希望讀者不要只依賴單字的中文或英文解釋，而是可以藉由例句的方式對單字用法有更清楚的認知。
除了單字及例句外，這本書的最後特別增加了一定要會的英文會話句，每大篇章共20個單元依不同的情境造出最實用的會話；譬如旅遊的部分，就有兩個人在討論要如何藉由過去的旅行經驗來規劃旅遊行程。此目的就是希望可以利用短篇會話的方式用來加強讀者對單字的瞭解與用法。
希望本書可以提供讀者有效的英語學習方式、甚至啟發讀者學習英文的興趣。
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