Source:The Third Ear
Have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it becomes part of how you think? Maybe
even part of who you are as a person? Well I’ve had a question in my mind for many, many years
and that is:
how can you speed up learning? Now, this is an interesting question because if you
speed up learning you can spend less time at school. And if you learn really fast, you probably
wouldn’t have to go to school at all. Now, when I was young, school
was sort of okay but I found
quite often that school got in the way of learning
,
so I had this question in mind: how do you learn
faster? And this began when I was very, very young, when I was about eleven years old I wrote a
letter to researchers in the
Soviet Union, asking about hypnopaedia, this is sleep learning, where
you get a tape recorder, you put it beside your bed and it turns on in the middle of the night when
you’re sleeping, and you’re supposed to be learning from this. A good idea, unfortunately it doesn’t
work. But, hypnopaedia did open the doors to research in other areas and we’ve had incredible
discoveries about learning that began with that first question.
I went on from there to become passionate about psychology and I have been involved in
psychology in many ways for the rest of my life up until this point. In 1981 I took myself to China
and I decided that I was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years. Now, you need to
understand that in 1981, everybody thought Chinese
was really, really difficult and that a westerner
could study for ten years or more and never really get very good at it. And I also went in with a
different idea which was: taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point
and applying them to the learning process. What was really cool was that
in six months I was fluent
in Mandarin Chinese and took a little bit longer to get up to native. But I looked around and I saw all
of these people from different countries struggling terribly with Chinese, I saw Chinese people
struggling terribly to learn English and other languages, and so my question got refined down to:
how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively? Now this a
really, really important question in today’s world. We have massive challenges with environment
we have massive challenges with social dislocation, with wars, all sorts of things going on and if we
can’t communicate we’re really going to have difficulty solving these problem
s. So we need to be
able to speak each other’s languages, this is really, really important. The question then is how do
you do that. Well, it’s actually really easy. You look around for people who can already do it, you
look for situations where it’s already working and then you identify the principles and apply them.
It’s called modelling and I’ve been looking at language learning and modelling language learning for
about fifteen to twenty years now. And my conclusion, my observation from this is that any adult
can learn a second language to fluency inside six months. Now when I say this, most people think
I’m crazy, this is not possible. So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, it’s all
about expanding our limits.
In 1950 everybody believed that running one mile in four minutes was impossible and then Roger
Bannister did it in 1956 and from there it’s got shorter and shorter. 100 years ago everybody
believed that heavy stuff doesn’t fly. Except it does and we all know this.
How does heavy stuff fly?
We reorganize the material
using principles that we have learned from observing nature, birds in
this case. And today we’ve gone ever further, so you can fly a car. You can buy one of these for a
couple hundred thousand US dollars. We now have cars in the world that can fly. And there’s a
different way to fly that we’ve learned from squirrels. So all you need to do is copy what a flying
squirrel does, build a suit called a wing suit and off you go, you can fly like a squirrel
. Now
, most
people, a lot of people, I wouldn’t say everybody but a lot of people think they can’t draw. However
there are some key principles, five principles that you can apply to
learning to draw and you can
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actually learn to draw
in five days. So, if you draw like this, you learn these principles for five days
and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this. Now I know this is true
because that was my first drawing and after five days of applying these principles that was what I
was able to do. And I looked at this and I went ‘wow,’ so that’s how I look like when I’m
concentrating so intensely that my brain is exploding.
So,
anybody can learn to draw in five days and in the same way, with the same logic, anybody can
learn a second language in six months. How? There are five principles and seven actions. There
may be a few more but these are absolutely core. And before I get into those I just want to talk
about two myths, dispel two myths. The first is that you need talent. Le
t me tell you about Zoe. Zoe
came from Australia, went to Holland, was trying to learn Dutch, struggling
extremely ...
a great deal
and finally people were saying: ‘you’re completely useless,’ ‘you’re not talented,’ ‘give up,’ ‘you’re a
waste of time’ and s
he was very, very depressed. And then she came across these five principles,
she moved to Brazil and she applied them and within six months she was fluent in Portuguese, so
talent doesn’t matter. People also think that immersion in a new country is the way to learn a
language. But look around Hong Kong, look at all the westerners who’ve been here for ten years,
who don’t speak a word of Chinese. Look at all the Chinese living in America, Britain, Australia,
Canada have been there ten, twenty year and they don’t speak any English. Immersion per se does
not work. Why? Because a drowning man cannot learn to swim. When you don’t speak a language
you’re like a baby and if you drop yourself into a context which is all adults talking about stuff over
your head, you won’t learn.
So, what are the
five principles that you need
to pay attention to? First:
four words, attention,
meaning, relevance and memory, and these interconnect in very important ways. Especially when
you’re talking about learning. Come with
me on a journey through a forest. You go on a walk
through a forest and you see something like this. Little marks on a tree, maybe you pay attention,
maybe you don’t. You go another fifty meters and you see this. You should be paying attention.
Another fifty meters, if you haven’t been paying attention, you see this. And at this point, you’re
paying attention. And you’ve just learned that this is important, it’s relevant because it means this,
and anything that is related, any information related to
your survival is stuff that you’re going to pay
attention to and therefore you’re going to remember it. If it’s related to your personal goals then
you’re going to pay attention to it, if it’s relevant you’re going to remember it.
So,
the first rule, the
first principle for learning a language is focus on language content that is
relevant to you. Which brings us to tools. We master tool
s
by using tools and we learn tools the
fastest when they are relevant to us. So let me share a story. A keyboard is a
tool. Typing Chinese a
certain way, there are methods for this. That’s a tool. I had a colleague many years ago who went to
night school; Tuesday night, Thursday night, two hours each night, practicing at home, she spent
nine months, and she did not learn to type Chinese. And one night we had a crisis. We had forty-eight hours to deliver a training manual in Chinese. And she got the job, and I can guarantee you in
forty-eight hours, she learned to type Chinese because i
t was relevant, it was meaningful, it was
important
, she was using a tool to create value.
So
the second tool for learning a language is to use
your language as a tool to communicate right from day one. As a kid does. When I first arrived in
China I didn’t speak a word of Chinese, and on my second week I got to take a train ride overnight. I
spent eight hours sitting in the dining care talking to one of the guards on the train, he took an
interest in me for some reason, and we just chatted all night in Chinese and he was drawing pictures
and making movements with his hands and facial expressions and piece by piece by piece I
understood more and more. But what was really cool, was two weeks later, when people were
talking Chinese around me, I was understanding some of this and I hadn’t even made any effort to
learn that. What had happened, I’d absorbed it that night on the train, which brings us to
the third
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principle. When you first understand the message, then you will acquire the language
unconsciously. And this is really, really
well documented now, it’s something called comprehensible
input and there’s twenty or thirty years of research on this, Stephen Krashen, a leader in the field
has published all sorts of these different studies and this is just from one of them. The purple bars
show the scores on different tests for language. The purple people were people who had learned by
grammar and formal study, the green ones are the ones who learned by comprehensible input. So,
comprehension works.
Comprehension is key and language learning is not about accumulating lots
of knowledge. In many, many ways it’s about physiological training. A woman I know from
Taiwan
did great at English at school, she got A grades all the way through, went through college, A grades,
went to the US
and found she couldn’t understand what people were saying. And people started
asking her: ‘Are you deaf?’ And she was. English deaf. Because we have filters in our brain that filter
in the sounds that we are familiar with and they filter out the sounds of languages we’re not. And
if
you can’t hear it, you won’t understand it and if you can’t understand it, you’re not going to learn it.
So you actually have to be able to hear these sounds. And there are ways to do that but it’s
physiological training.
Speaking takes muscle. You’ve got forty-three muscles in your face, you have
to coordinate those in a way that you make sounds that other people will understand. If you’ve ever
done a new sport for a couple of days, and you
know how your body feels? It
hurts.
If your face is
hurting you’re doing it right.
And
the final principle is state. Psycho-physiological state. If you’re
sad, angry, worried, upset,
you’re
not going to learn. Period. If you’re
happy, relaxed, in an Alpha brain state, curious, you’re
going to learn really quickly, and very specifically you need to be tolerant of ambiguity. If you’re one
of those people who needs to understand 100% every word you’re hearing, you will go nuts,
because you’ll be incredibly upset all the time, because you’re not perfect. If you’re comfortable
with getting some, not getting some, just paying attention to what you do understand, you’re going
to be fine, you’ll be relaxed and you’ll be learning quickly. So based on those five principles, what
are the
seven actions that you need to take?
Number one: listen a lot
. I call it Brain Soaking. You put yourself in a context where you’re hearing
tons and tons of a language and it doesn’t matter if you understand it or no
t. You’re listening to the
rhythms
, you’re listening to things that repeat, you’re listening to things that stand out. So, just soak
your brain in this.
The
second action: is that you get
the meaning first, even before you get the words. You go “Well
how do I
do that, I don’t know the words?
” Well, you understand what these different postures
mean. Human communication is body language in many, many ways, so much body language. From
body language you can understand a lot of communication, therefore, you’re understanding, you’re
acquiring through comprehensible input. And you can also use patterns that you already know. If
you’re a Chinese speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese and you go Vietnam, you will understand 60%
of what they say to you in daily
conversation, because Vietnamese is about 30% Mandarin, 30%
Cantonese.
The third action:
start mixing. You probably have never thought of this but if you’ve got ten verbs,
ten nouns and ten adjectives you can say one thousand different things. Language is a creative
process. What do babies do?
Okay:
Me. Bat(h). Now.
Okay, that’s how they communicate. So start
mixing, get creative, have fun with it, it doesn’t have to be perfect
,
it just has to work. And when
you’re doing this you focus on the core.
What does that mean? Well with every
language
there
is
high frequency content. In English
,
1000 words covers 85% of anything you’re ever going to say in
daily communication
. 3000 words gives you 98% of anything you’re going to say in daily
conversation. You got 3000 words, you’re speaking the language. The rest is icing on the cake.
And
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when you’re just beginning with a new language start with the tool box. Week number one in your
new language you say things like: ‘
how do you say that?’ ‘
I don’t understand,’ ‘
repeat that please,’
‘
what does that mean,’ all in your target language. You’re using it as a tool, making it useful to you,
it’s relevant to learn other things about the language. By week two that you should be saying things
like: ‘me,’ ‘this,’ ‘you,’ ‘that,’ ‘give,’ you know, ‘hot,’ simple pronouns, simple nouns, simple verbs,
simple adjectives, communicating like a baby. And by the third or fourth week, you’re getting into
what I call glue words. ‘Although,’ ‘but,’ ‘therefore,’ these are logical transformers that tie bits of a
language together, allowing you to make more complex meaning.
At that point you’re talking. And
when you’re doing that, you should get yourself a
language parent. If you look at how children and
parent
s
interact, you’ll understand what this means. When a child is speaking, it’ll be using simple
words, simple combinations, sometimes quite strange, sometimes very strange pronunciation and
other people from outside the family don’t understand it. But the parents do. And so the kid has a
safe environment, gets confidence. The parents talk to the children with body language
and with
simple language
they know the child understands. So we have a comprehensible input environment
that’s safe, we know it works otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue. So
you get
yourself a language parent, who’s somebody interested in you as a person who will communicate
with you essentially as an equal, but pay attention to help you understand the message. There are
four rules of a language parent. Spouses by the way are not very good at this, okay? But the four
rules
are,
first of all, they will work hard to understand what you mean even when you’re way off
beat.
Secondly, they will never correct your mistakes.
Thirdly they will feed
back their
understanding of what
you are saying so you can respond appropriately and get that feedback and
then they will use words that you know.
The
sixth thing you have to do, is
copy the face. You got to get the muscles working right, so you can
sound in a way that people will understand you. There’s a couple of things you do. One is that you
hear how it feels, and feel how it sounds which means you have a feedback loop operating in your
face, but ideally
,
if you can look at a native speaker and just observe how they use their face
, let your
unconscious mind absorb the rules, then you’re going to be able to pick it up. And if you can’t get a
native speaker to look at, you can use stuff like this: [slides].
And
the final idea here, the final action you need to take is something that I call “direct connect.”
What does this mean? Well most people learning a second language sort of take the mother tongue
words and take the target words and go over them again and again in their mind to try and
remember them. Really inefficient. What
you need to do is realize that everything you know is an
image inside your mind, it’s feelings, if you talk about fire you can smell the smoke you can hear the
crackling, you can see the flames
.
So what you do, is you go into that imagery and all of that
memory
and you come out with another pathway. So I call it ‘same box, different path.’ You come out of that
pathway, you build it over time you become more and more skilled at just connecting the new
sounds to those images that you already have, into that internal representation. And over time you
even become naturally good at that process, that becomes unconscious.
So, there are
five principles that you need to work with,
seven actions, if you do any of them, you’re
going to improve. And remember these
are things under your control as the learner. Do them all
and you’re going to be fluent in a second language in six months.
Thank you.
English + Chinese Translation
