My essay on The Third Ear chapter three

         In this chapter three, the writer discussed the barriers of learning language. He suggested that as readers we had better skip this chapter and go on reading the next chapter. Because about barriers, if you cannot think about them and face them correctly, they may become real barrier to you. To illustrate this point, he presented a game and a story. He first led us to a thinking game. He instructed us not to think of a purple elephant with yellow spots. Then he asked us how long the purple elephant with yellow spots remained in our mind’s eye. Actually, it remained in my mind’s eye for quite a few seconds. Although the writer asked us not to think the special image, we just disobeyed it. Then he told us a story about his teaching his friend to drive. One day, they drove along a windy hillside road with a drop of over one thousand feet off to the right. When they were approaching a tight yet manageable left-hand curve, his friend suddenly froze and screamed, ‘What do I do?’. The writer told her, ‘Turn the wheel’. But she couldn’t. The writer kept saying, ‘Turn the wheel’, and she just stared ahead at the approaching abyss as if she had the compulsion to go towards that terrible place. The writer told us what he had heard about why drivers hit trees. That’s because the driver stares at the tree. If you want to avoid it, the key element to salvation is to stare at where you want to go rather than where you want to avoid. Therefore the writer had a little worry about these barriers he explored may in case become barriers to our language learning when we stare at these barriers. But he also thought that if we could think about how to overcome these barriers, then we would be well on our way to learning a new language.
The writer explored three barriers. They are bad beliefs, school subject mistakes and cultural mythology mistakes.

1.Bad beliefs
       I also think that bad beliefs are the major barrier preventing us from language learning success. The writer demonstrated it by one of his friends Jonathan as an example. Jonathan was learning Chinese and he felt stumped. He felt Chinese was so difficult because Chinese is a tonal language and he believed that he was tone-deaf. So there was a reason or an excuse for him not to get Chinese. It made him feel a little relieved since there was a name for his failure. The writer pointed out that all languages use tones to express different meanings. You can say all languages are tonal languages at a different degree. English is not a tonal language in common sense though, voice flections appear in almost every sentence. An English speaker cannot be tone-deaf. It’s just a bad belief which must be busted.

2.School subject mistakes
           Many people go to school when they want to learn a new language. They think they can learn a new language the same way they study chemistry or mathematics. It’s a mistake. Because language is not a subject. It’s a tool. It’s a tool for communication. If you want to use it fluently ,you need not only to know how to use it, you need to practice it. You must hang out in the society, in the community, to listen, to speak, to communicate, then you can master this tool- the language. Language is a living entity. It’s continually morphing and changing. Only the real world can provide the real context of the language and the ocean of the language elements which is necessary for our brain to pick up the language. In contrast, school often only focuses on small pieces of language. And it often provides outdated language elements which are just political correct. So to learn a new language, school is not a good choice.

3.Cultural mythology mistakes
         Many people in the world believe that language is based on genetics and culture. So they think it will be very difficult to learn a language of another country. And when people from another country talk to them in the local language, they often think it’s impossible and ignore them. Is it true that people of one race will learn a language better than another race? Or in another word, is language learning related to genetics? You must have seen many people of one race were born in another country speaking the language of the new country perfectly. This can prove that learning a language does not rely on genetics. Therefore we must bust the cultural mythology mistake barrier. We can pick up a new language if we learn it in the way we learn our mother tongue.