简介：为什么有的人学了XX年的英语还是开不了口?而另一些人却能迅速掌握一门外语?上世纪80年代，语言学家chris lonsdale来到中国，仅用6个月的时间他就能说出流利的普通话。他是怎么做到的?一起来听听他的学习方法吧!
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 ive 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 wouldnt 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 youre sleeping, and youre supposed to be learning from this.
a good idea, unfortunately it doesnt work. but, hypnopaedia did open the doors to research in other areas and weve 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 todays 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 cant communicate were really going to have difficulty solving these problems. so we need to be able to speak each others languages, this is really, really important.
the question then is how do you do that. well, its actually really easy. you look around for people who can already do it, you look for situations where its already working and then you identify the principles and apply them. its called modelling and ive 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 im crazy, this is not possible. so let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, its 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 its got shorter and shorter. 100 years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesnt fly. except it does and we all know this. how does heavy stuff fly? we reorganise the materials using principles that we have learned from observing nature, birds in this case. and today weve 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 theres a different way to fly that weve 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.
no, most people, a lot of people, i wouldnt say everybody but a lot of people think they cant draw. however there are some key principles, five principles that you can apply to learning to draw and you can 2 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 thats how i look like when im 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. let me tell you about zoe. zoe came from australia, went to holland, was trying to learn dutch, struggling a great deal and finally people were saying: youre completely useless, youre not talented, give up, youre a waste of time and she 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 doesnt 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 whove been here for ten years, who dont speak a word of chinese. look at all the chinese living in america, britain, australia, canada have been there ten, twenty year and they dont speak any english. immersion per se doesnt not work, why? because a drowning man cannot learn to swim. when you dont speak a language youre like a baby and if you drop yourself into a context which is all adults talking about stuff over your head, you wont learn.
so, what are the five principles that you need to pay attention to; first: the four words, attention, meaning, relevance and memory, and these interconnect in very important ways. especially when youre 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 dont. you go another fifty metres and you see this. you should be paying attention. another fifty metres, if you havent been paying attention, you see this.
and at this point, youre paying attention. and youve just learned that this is important, its relevant because it means this, and anything that is related, any information related to your survival is stuff that youre going to pay attention to and therefore youre going to remember it. if its related to your personal goals then youre going to pay attention to it, if its relevant youre 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 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. thats 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 it was relevant, it was important, it was meaningful, 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 didnt 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 hadnt even made any effort to learn that.
what had happened, id absorbed it that night on the train, which brings us to the third principle. when you first understand the message, then you will acquire the language 3 unconsciously. and this is really, really well documented now, its something called comprehensible input and theres 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 its 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 couldnt 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 n the sounds that we are familiar with and they filter out the sounds of languages were not. and if you cant hear it, you wont understand it and if you cant understand it, youre not going to learn it. so you actually have to be able to hear these sounds. and there are ways to do that but its physiological training. speaking takes muscle. youve 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 youve ever done a new sport for a couple of days, and you know how your body feels? and it hurts? if your face is hurting youre doing it right. and the final principle is state. psycho-physiological state. if youre sad, angry, worried, upset, youre not going to learn. period. if youre happy, relaxed, in an alpha brain state, curious, youre going to learn really quickly, and very specifically you need to be tolerant of ambiguity. if youre one of those people who needs to understand 100% every word youre hearing, you will go nuts, because youll be incredibly upset all the time, because youre not perfect. if youre comfortable with getting some, not getting some, just paying attention to what you do understand, youre going to be fine, youll be relaxed and youll 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 youre hearing tons and tons of a language and it doesnt matter if you understand it or not. youre listening to patterns, youre listening to things that repeat, youre 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 dont 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, youre understanding, youre acquiring through comprehensible input. and you can also use patterns that you already know. if youre 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 youve 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, thats how they communicate. so start mixing, get creative, have fun with it, it doesnt have to be perfect it just has to work. and when youre doing this you focus on the core. what does that mean? well any language is high frequency content. in english 1000 words covers 85% of anything youre ever going to say in daily communication. 3000 words gives you 98% of anything youre going to say in daily conversation. you got 3000 words, youre speaking the language. the rest is icing on the cake. and when youre just begging with a new language start with the tool box. week number one in your new language 4 you say things like: how do you say that? i dont understand, repeat that please, what does that mean, all in your target language. youre using it as a tool, making it useful to you, its relevant to learn other things about the language. its 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, youre 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 youre talking.
and when youre doing that, you should get yourself a language parent. if you look at how children and parent interact, youll understand what this means. when a child is speaking, itll be using simple words, simple combinations, sometimes quite strange, sometimes very strange pronunciation and other people from outside the family dont 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 which they know the child understands. so we have a comprehensible input environment thats safe, we know it works otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue. so you get yourself a language parent, whos 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 youre 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. theres 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 youre going to be able to pick it up. and if you cant 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 realise that everything you know is an image inside your mind, its 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, youre going to improve. and remember these are things under your control as the learner. do them all and youre going to be fluent in a second language in six months. thank you.