Getting a Food Order Wrong
      In these two pages, the author shared with us his early food ordering experience in China. It’s not long after he came to China. One day, he and his friend went into a restaurant. They wanted to have a decent meal. That restaurant was like most restaurants in China that time. Some tables were strewn across the coarse concrete floor. It’s a rough-and-ready place. The author and his friend wanted to have dumplings with beer. They ordered beer first. Two bottles of beer. It was clear and easy. Then they needed to order dumplings. How much should they order? This was a question. They thought they needed at least one pound for each. They ordered. The waiter was surprised and made a faint effort to convince them otherwise. But they insisted. So the waiter did not insist. I guess the waiter rarely saw foreigners before. Maybe it was the first time that he had served foreigners. Therefore the waiter didn’t know much about foreigners. He might have thought foreigners had extremely huge appetizers. When plate after plate of dumplings were placed on the author’s table, each plate piled high and there were twenty plates in all, the author learned the lesson. The weight were referred to dry flour in China. It’s different from the author’s thinking that it’s the results of the cooked dumplings. You might think that this was not related to language learning. The author told us that this is part of language learning. Language does not only include words and grammar. If you only focus on words and grammar despite context and culture, you might make your language learning harder than it should be or you could not even communicate in the real world. The author has the opinion that learning language in the classroom is counter-productive. Because it often only focuses on small pieces of language rather than providing an ocean of language which your brain needs to really pick up the language. If you want to master a second language, you need to immerse yourself in the real society. You listen, speak, experience the reality, learn the language related to aspects of the society, then you can use the language to communicate and get the results you want, and then you can master the language at last.