A letter to my younger sister

Dear Jingjing:
I know that your birthday is on Dec 12th, Lunar and there is still two months before that day, however, since I received your call last week, I find it necessary to mail you a letter, and meanwhile, give you this dictionary as a present.
To tell the truth, this book is not new, I have used it for a long time, untill I bought another glossary preparing for my GRE test next June, and the vocabulary for College Entrance Examination is so limited that maybe you will find this wordbook uesful in the college. In my opinion, unless you major in English, or prepare to go abroad, or have to read some scientific papers, this dictionary is adequate. So you may be confused that since you don't seem to need such a thing now, why do I send it to you?
Last month, I bought a magazine called Southern Character Weekly, its theme is about those pepole who changed their lives greatly after the implementation of Reform and Openingup in China from 1978, the journanists asked each of the ten persons ten same questions, and one of them is: what is the greatest change do you think in your life?
Of course, all the answers are different, and that is not what I want to tell you, the thing that concerns is, when I ask myself this question, no matter how hard I try to find out other things, the answer to it is always so firmed and so simple: the College Entrance Examination, which is the most vital change in my whole life.
It seems to be plain, for many people will give out this answer, but this thing is not so pure as it looks like, you can meditate this things in deep thought after your graduation from middile school, not now. By the way, this dictionary is bought by many people in the United Stated, some spelling and the pronunciation may differ from your textbook which is based on the Great Btitain English, so don't take such differences wrong. The reason why I give you this book is if you want to learn English well, you have to concentrate yourself in this language, and focus on nothing but the language itself. If you can do this, you will find out two things naturaly, one is there is no right or wrong strictly in language, the other is this is their language, not ours.
The second one may be more important, I guess. If English is in this case, the other subjects should be the same, which means: the whole world has its own rules, it doesn't care how we human beings invent some words to difine them, how we divide the nature into physics, chemistry, biology, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, astronomy, geology, psychology etc, it constructs itself, has its own approach to survive and to die, no matter what we denominate them or to anticipate every detail by the methods we know today or through computing.
Duing to such foregoing reasons, you are to be absorbed in the subjects themselves, to understand those knowledge thoroughly, not superficialy, not vaguly, not only by those symbols, but by themselves: here are the laws, how did they get that way? Why is it like that in the beginning? What was its origin like? What were the initial conditions? And imagine that you have a friend who is always togother with you, she knows all the knowledge anyone should conquer in order to learn senior middle school lessons, that is the level of junior middle school, but she doesn't know anything about the senoir subjects, hence she need you to teach her. So now it's your turn to prove how you handle the lore which is needed to pass the College Entrance Examination, you have to tell her everything you know, logically, vividly and clearly, and she will ask you questions whenever she find it dim, take her as a hypercritical person, she won't let you calm down unless she is contended. The more severe she is, the more defect you will find in your lessons, thus the less error you will make when you go into the battlefield of College Entrance Examination. That will do good to you inevitably.
At last, I want to cite some paragragh from a book, maybe it will help:
" I think many people see commitment as an event, something that is done in a moment. They say: 'I do' in a wedding ceremony. They shake hands to close a business deal. They buy a treadmill in order to exercise. But the commitment doesn't end with that decision; it's just getting started. And you better believe that any time you make a commitment to something, it will be tested. When things go wrong, when life gets rough, when the pain becomes great, will you be able to keep going? If you determine to make and keep proper commitments daily, you greatly improve your chances of being able to carry on. As Abraham Lincoln said, 'Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more impormant than any other things.'"
Thus I suppose that everything has a cost. There is no real failure except not trying. You are who you are, and can't be any other else. Maybe my viewpoint is not suitable to you, and my phraseology may be wrong, don't worry, it's just for reference, doing what you want to do is OK.
Cheer for your studies and wish you a good health.
Happy birthday. Hope you well, sincerely.
Xushuozhi
October 22, 2008