You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so how are you at making a good first impression in English?

　　你永远也不会得到第二个机会来制造第一印象，所以如何能用英文流利的给对方留下良好印象呢?

　　Being able to make a FLUENT first impression doesn’t have to be as hard as you think. The beauty of first impressions is that we already know 3 things that are going to happen in the conversation, a greeting/hello, an introduction, and a goodbye/farewell. If you can memorize and even script these 3 situations, then you bound to make a fluent first impression every time.

　　给对方留下一个流利的第一印象并非像你想象的那么难。第一印象在对话中的魅力之处无非包含3件事情，这个已经广为人知。那就是问好，介绍和告别。如果你能记下甚至像写电影脚本一样写下这三个场景，那么你肯定每次都能给别人留下流利的印象。

　　For me, learning to speak Portuguese has been a difficult journey, and very intimidating when meeting new people. At the beginning I always worried about making a mistake during an introduction, offending someone, or making a bad first impression in general.About 4 months into my learning experience, I decided to learn and memorize every possible greeting, introduction and goodbye I could think of. Suddenly, I felt invincible and a lot more natural when meeting new people. My Portuguese didn’t sound so robotic, and surprisingly enough I was just saying the same words in the same situations over and over again. From my fluent first impressions, people were complimenting me on how natural my Portuguese was, even though I had only greeted them, introduced myself and used a few ice breaking techniques.

　　对于我个人而言，学说葡萄牙语曾经是件痛苦艰难的旅程，每当见到生人我就变得很胆怯。刚开始时，我老是担心我在做自我介绍时说错话，冒犯了别人或是给对方留下不好印象。经过4个月的学习过程，我决定学习并尽可能背下来我所能想到的所有问候，介绍和告别的方式。突然间，我感到再见到生人后自己无敌了而且放松自然多了。我的葡萄牙语听上去并不那么生硬，而且令人惊奇的是我几乎不停地在每个场合用同样的话来应酬。从我给人们留下流利的第一印象可以看出，虽然我只是用了几个简单的问好，自我介绍和打破尴尬气氛的技巧，人们还是恭维我，说我的葡萄牙语好。

　　Using these techniques of having a fluent first impression, made me feel more confident and relaxed when speaking and it pushed me to work harder on improving my fluency in all areas of the language.

　　使用这些让我拥有良好第一印象的技巧让我感到讲话时更自信放松，而且它促使我积极改进语言各个领域的流利度。

　　In this article you are going to learn how to make a FLUENT first impression in English based on these 3 most important aspects you’re going to be faced with every time, greetings/hellos, introductions/ ice breakers and goodbyes.

　　本文中你将学会如何用英文流利地给对方留下良好印象，我将介绍3个您每次都要面对的重要部分——问好;介绍、打破僵局;结束对话。

　　一. Greetings/ Hellos 问好篇

　　As most of you have probably learnt, the most commonly taught way to greet someone is

　　大部分人都知道问好的方式如下：

　　-“Hi, How are you?”

　　-“Fine thanks, and you?”

　　-“Good, thanks for asking.”

　　This phrase is 100% correct, and probably used 100% of the time by English learners. But doesn’t that get a little boring after a while? If you want to diversify your greetings a little bit, and make it sound more fluent, leave those text books in the classroom, there is another way. How does this sound.

　　这个对话确实百分百正确，而且可能已经被英语学习者百分百的用过了。但是，你不觉得用了这么久已经感到厌烦了吗?如果你想让自己的问候有特色些，听起来更流利些，请放弃使用那些课堂上教科书中的用法，我们有其它方法。您看下面这个听起来如何：

　　-“Hey buddy! What have you been UP TO?”

　　嘿，哥们儿!(朋友)最近忙啥呢?

　　-“Oh hey Dude! Not too much, just working and hanging out with my girlfriend.”

　　嗨，老兄!也没忙啥，就是上上班，跟好朋友逛逛街啥的。

　　-“Sweet.”

　　不错嘛。

　　That sounds a lot more natural right? So, what does UP TO mean?

　　这听起是不是自然多了?那么， UP TO是什么意思呢?

　　The expression up to is a synonym of do. We use this in spoken English because as it’s more of an informal expression. When I greet someone with the question “what have you been up to?” I am asking them what have they been DOING recently.

　　up to这个用法是do的同义词。我们在英文口语中使用它因为它是一个不正式的表达方法。当我用“what have you been up to?”这种方式来问候别人时，我实际是在问他们最近在忙什么呢。

　　The question is in the present perfect continuous so you will answer with the verb in the continuous. For example:

　　这个问题是用现在完成进行时来提问的，所以回答时也用进行时态的这个动词。例如：

　　 “Hey mate, what have you been up to?”

　　“Ah, the same old, studying, surfing, going out, having some drinks with friends.”

　　 “Have you been playing guitar?”

　　 “yeah I’ve been playing a few times a week.”

　　 “You been watching the football?”

　　 “Nah, I don’t really like watching football.”

　　You’ll notice that’s its very common for a native speaker to use the present perfect continuous like this when greeting a buddy. When a person greets me this way the conversation seems to flow a lot more, and it allows us to summarize all the recent news very quickly and concisely.

　　你会发现对于一个母语使用者，他们在问候兄弟时很喜欢用现在完成进行时。当有人用这种方式问好时，对话听起来更顺畅自然，会使我们简单迅速地罗列出最近发生的重要事项。