Pay attention! Do stuff! (Lesson 490)

According to the third ear, I think “pay attention” means doing pattern recognition and absorprtion, and “do stuff” means practicing and applying the skill that include the language learning. “pay attention” and “do stuff”, Keep them simple with something like, “see” and “do”.

In fact, there is a chinese phrase of “pay attention, do tuff”. This name is“知行合一”. It’s a philosophical concept in ancient China. “知”means knowing the concep or truth. “行”means acting on the basis of above knowledge. “合一”literal meaning is going to the same place, and the extend meaning is unity. Then the whole Chinese phrase means uniting knowledge and action. I think that’s what “pay attention, do stuff”means.

In last pages the author gave me many examples, today I will said one example about this point. Actually, I didn’t study English well at the beginning either in college. In other words, my English has always been very average. But today I just want to talk about my roommates in college. Let’s call her C. She was a cute girl, and very liked the American drama, for example <friends>. So I used to see her watching the FRIENDS in the dorm. Now that I look back, the porcess is called “pay attention” for her. But unfortunately, we don’t know the concepts whether “pay attention, do stuff” or “知行合一”. She looked at all kinds of American drama. As the author says, pay attention doesn’t solve the whole problem. If you learn any skill, you must learn to feedback and practice. She didn’t make any practice from the American drama. She should had learned many daily dialogue from the FRIENDS, used them in real life and made them her own. But she didn’t do that. The result is her English exam result was always not very good, sometime not even as good as me.

This is a very profound example for me. I also thought that my English could not move forward before. Because C was looked so many American drama, but her English was still not good. Not to mention I haven’t read that much English yet. Now I afresh recognize the conception. Everything is ultimately about result. Obviously, only thinking hardly leads to the result. You must do something. You practise, and receive feedback whether good or bad, you can changing the action from the feedback, then doing over and over again, you can done it. This result is called real learning.