口译练习打卡 Day 2：falling asleep quicker

为了巩固我们北上广口译冬令营的集中学习成果、督促小伙伴继续学习并养成每天学习英语口译的习惯，我们推出英语口译打卡活动，每天学习的音频视频在现阶段限定在5分钟以内，小伙伴可以打卡完成以下任务清单（根据具体内容打卡会有变动）。

必做的标配打卡任务，可提高英语听力、提高翻译能力；

可选的高配打卡任务，可练习口译笔记、提高口译能力。

标配打卡任务清单：

1 集中注意力仔细听一遍英文音频，有意识地抓句子主干、概括大意；

2 对照英文字幕看视频；

3 再听一遍音频，边听边做口译笔记；

4 对照文本记下文中没听懂和没看懂的术语（通过在线搜索，积累专业术语储备）。

5 选一段你认为代表整个文本核心内容的句子进行笔译练习，以双语对照的形式贴在评论区。

高配打卡任务清单：

1 集中注意力仔细听一遍英文音频，基础好的可以直接边听边练习记笔记；

2 看视频对着英文字幕进行跟读影子练习；

3 再听一遍做口译笔记或补充之前的笔记，可根据具体情况适当停顿，希望比第一遍多抓住信息点；

4 打开音频或视频，对照文本进行实时视译，之后记下文中没听懂和没看懂的术语，通过在线搜索，积累专业术语储备。

5 选一段你认为代表整个文本核心内容的句子进行笔译练习，以双语对照的形式贴在评论区。想练习交传和同传的小伙伴可以自己录音，自己听后评估或找partner反馈，如果需要专业点评，由于涉及老师人力投入，小伙伴可以后台告知是否愿意付费请人点评以及预期分钟单价

如果完成打卡任务，请在评论区，朋友圈评论区或文字发布区写下完成清单数字并附上一段话的双语对照译文。

比如：标配打卡12345完成。After one year of regular exercise, your bones will be denser, which reduces your risk of osteoporosis. 坚持一年的定期锻炼, 你的骨骼会变得更致密，患骨质疏松症的风险也会降低。

欢迎小伙伴根据实际情况对上述打卡任务清单提出建议，我会不断优化迭代。

Five Tips for Falling Asleep Quicker

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=h0535bergot&width=500&height=375&auto=0

Matthew Walker: My name is Matthew Walker. I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and I am the author of the book, “Why We Sleep.”

What are things that we can all do tonight and in the future to start getting better sleep? Well, beyond carving out a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity, there are probably at least five things that we can do.

The first is that we have to try and maintain regularity. And if there’s one thing that you take away from this, it would be going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time, no matter whether it’s the weekday or the weekend. Even if you’ve had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time of day and reset.

The second thing is that we are a dark-deprived society in this modern era and we need darkness in the evening to allow the release of a hormone called melatonin. And melatonin helps the healthy timing of our sleep.

So try to dim down half the lights in your home in the hour before bed. Stay away from screens, especially those LED screens – they emit blue light that actually puts the breaks on melatonin. And those blue-light emitting devices fool your brain into thinking that it’s still daytime, even though it’s nighttime and you want to get to sleep.

The third key ingredient is to keep it cool. Many of us actually have a bedroom that’s too warm in terms of temperature.

So an optimal temperature is about 68 degrees Fahrenheit or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. And the reason is that your brain and your body need to drop their core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate good sleep. And that’s the reason why you’ll always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold than too hot. So having a cool room actually takes your brain and body in the right temperature direction to get good sleep.

The fourth critical factor is actually avoiding alcohol and caffeine. Unfortunately, this makes me deeply unpopular, but alcohol is perhaps the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. People think that it helps them fall asleep. That’s not actually true. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call, “the sedatives.” And what you’re doing is just knocking your brain out. You’re not putting it into natural sleep.

We also know that alcohol will fragment your sleep. So you’ll wake up many more times throughout the night. And alcohol is also a very potent chemical for blocking your dream sleep or your rapid eye-movement sleep.

Caffeine is also a problem. Many of us know that caffeine can keep us awake. It’s an alerting chemical, it’s a stimulant in terms of a class of drugs. But few people know that even if you can have a cup of coffee after dinner and you fall asleep fine and maybe you stay asleep, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when there is caffeine within your brain isn’t as deep as when you’ve abstained from that cup of coffee after dinner. So as a consequence, you wake up the next morning, you feel unrefreshed and you don’t remember waking up or having a difficult time falling asleep, but now you find yourself reaching for two or three cups of coffee in the morning and you develop this dependency, this addiction cycle.

The fifth and final tip for better sleep is to not stay in bed awake. So if you haven’t fallen asleep within 20 or so minutes or you’ve woken up and you’re finding it difficult to fall back asleep, don’t stay in bed awake. The reason is that your brain very quickly starts to learn the association between your bed being about the place that you’re awake rather than your bed being about sleep. So the advice is to get up, go to another room and in dim light, just read a book. No screens, no email checking, no food. And only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed and that way you can then actually re-learn the association between your bedroom being about the place of sleep rather than being awake.

I should also note that some people don’t like the idea of getting up and going out to a different room if it’s dark and they’re warm in bed.

An alternative is actually meditation. Meditation has been demonstrated in clinical trials to help people just relax the body, calm down the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system that can happen when we wake up in the middle of the night and we have that Rolodex of anxiety thoughts. And by meditating, you can start to quiet the mind as well as the body and that also helps you fall back asleep more easily.

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