雅思口语Part2物品类题库：曾经不喜欢的科目

Describe a subject you didn't like before but have interest in now.

You should say:

what it was

when you studied the subject

why you didn't like it before

and explain why you have interest in it now.

Let’s just say, I was far from an angel at school. I guess I wasn’t that bad, but no one would call me a model student. There were a few subjects I really didn’t care for, but mainly it was Chinese.

I’ve obviously studied Chinese throughout my school life, but it was particularly excruciating during senior high-school, so when I was around 11 to 17 years old.

Wow, where do I start? Firstly, our teacher was awful. His name was Mr Zhang and he was a real old fuddy-duddy who would only teach from the textbook and regularly bored us to death. We would have to commit countless things to memory, lots of ancient stuff like poems and chengyu, which are Chinese phrases made from between 3 to 16 characters, although the most common use 4. I couldn’t see a use for these things in modern life, they just didn’t seem practical.

As I got older and more mature, I started to respect Chinese more. I dug out some of my old textbooks and began flicking through them. Second time round they made more sense to me and I engaged with them a lot more.

Nowadays there is a greater interest in Chinese, with a variety of TV shows such as “Chengyu Yingxiong”, which means ‘Chengyu Hero’. These shows celebrate people’s knowledge of characters and in doing so celebrate our culture.