My Essay on The Third Ear Chapter 6

It’s a little theoretical for the third ear chapter 6. In this chapter, the author talked about many concepts. He listed some subheadings, which are “ment the audibols”, “map of a map of a map”, “words, audibols and meanings”, “same audibol, different mening”, “what it all means”. Obviously, “audibol” is the first and most important word, and the word was created by author in this book. First of all, what is audibol?

In fact, audibol is a new word in English. Its meaning are simple and simple, complex and complex. In a word, audibol means a sound symbol, it’s different from the visual symbol(ie,written word). Human beings always used our voice to create different sounds that stood for the different things that people talking about. Everyday, people would use the audibols consciously or unconsciously.

Generally speaking, a word include audibol, written symbol and meaning. It’s a very different but interconnected to spoken language and written language. Because there were two completely different concepts. Speaking of which, I would talk about a new concept from chapter6 – people’s internal map.

Like a real map, It have distances, building’s names, various places labeled. People’s internal map are made up of sounds, pictures, smells, tastes and feelings. As the author says, it’s a spider web of connections in everyone’s brain, and I think it’s different for everyone’s internal map. For example, like the above topic – the difference of spoken language and written language. Because I has already read the third ear, I would think what the example is the story that two Chinese people talked with each other to use both spoken language and written language in the train. But if you don’t read this book before, you will don’t know the author’s example. Then you maybe think about the other things about the topic of the difference. That’s completely normal.

Next, I would focus on to talk about the relationships between the information in the human brain, sound that people make when they speak, and the symbols that people write on the paper(written words). Actually, author taked away from the chapter a simple but subversive idea – for the most part, human language is about sound. I said it is simple because everyone almost is using the sound symple – you should talk to someone for exchanging the imformation or expressing the feeling ,and I said it subversive just because, the vast majority of people are learning a foreign language from the textbook. Maybe you would attend a course in a organization, Then you would get your textbook, and you read it, remember the words and phrases in the textbook. This process was general, but it big problem was you think you were learning words, you just learned the written words. You brain don’t had the connection about speaking and meaning.

The above situation is also common in Chinese eduation – a foreign language learning. I have written about some method about a second languge learning in China before essay. It’s a pretty common problem, people too focus on the printed text and learn to read or write too early a second language. Chinese people were learning a second language as a subject. Subjects need to be assessed, then how to assess it? Obviously, a simple and effective way was doing a exam paper. The exam paper was made up of the written words. The result was easy to know that every students would work hard to the written words and grammar of English and made sure to pass the exam. The students had no time and energy to the sound symples. They ignored the sound symbols. I think it’s a large part of the reason for dumb English. They looked at the word in the text, and thinked of they were knowing the sounds, but they couldn’t make that sound in real life.

The other problem is about Chinese accent. You know, Chinese marked with Roman phenetic alphabet. It’s also very much like English. Like the example of learning French in the book, it’s easy for Chinese to get stuck in learning English only through written words. Because they have little even no time to listen the correct English voice, then they don’t have idea about English sound. They pronunciated only by phonetics. There was no doubt about that they always used the incorrect pronunciation. As the author says, the wrong pronunciation further deepen the their misconceptions. That’s a double injure for the language learning. At that time, as the saying goes, the more harder, the more unfortunate.

Therefore, it’s more important to distinguish the order of learning a foreign language. First and foremost, pay attention to the connection between sounds and meaning. In the early days, we should start to learn a foreign language with native sound. At the very least, you have learned most of the standard pronunciation. Don’t worry, it won’t take too long.