About the F word作文

When I first started to learn English in middle school, I didn't know there is F word in vocabulary. Until many years later, browsing through a book about American Slang in the college library, I spotted the F word in an expression about cursing. I looked it up in my dictionary, but found nothing. Back then, we didn’t have computers or Internet, which gives you access to any sort of information in the blink of an eye, nor did we have DVD or VCD. The only chance we could watch American movie was that during some weekday evening the American teachers played some movies brought from US on a VCR. The TV in our classroom was very small, and the sound was poor. And the room was always packed and had an awful smell of body odor, stale air, and lots of noises.

Honestly, I could understand disturbingly little of the movie, which had no subtitle and couldn’t be played back. All we studied was some stupid textbooks titled advanced English with passages written probably decades or even centuries ago by some famous writers or philosophers whatsoever.

Many years passed, we have more options of English learning, and my knowledge increases. I found that the f word is so widely used in English that no one could say his or her English is really good without solid knowledge of it.

To many beginners, teachers told them that the f word is a bad and crude word they should never learn or use. But I think this is terribly wrong. The f word, though often used as a verbal insult to other people as in “f you”, it is also frequently used to indicate anger, resentment, affection, or even care. Some good examples could be easily caught in the many popular American movies. “Where the f are you talking about?” “Where the f have you been” The speaker may be simply emphasizing an emotion of surprise, shock, or concern. The most interesting word incorporating the f word is “abso-f ing-lutely” in one episode of the TV show “Sex and the City”. If we don’t know how to use the f word, it is really hard to express a degree of certainty higher than the word “absolute”.

My point is that as language learners we should always keep in mind that sometimes what you see is not what you get. To learn a language better, it requires us so much more than hard work and practice. We need to expose ourselves to a more authentic language environment even it is very difficult for people like us living and working in China. The earlier we expose ourselves to cross-cultural problems, the more obstacles we come across in learning English, the deeper we would understand the language. So challenge yourself and you would become tougher and smarter.