Once the author of The Third Ear with his classmate headed over to a Chinese local restaurant, and make an order for dumplings, and yet the food that arrived was very different to what he thought he was ordering.Because they misunderstood the weight that actually referred to the dry measure of the flour, not the resulting cooked jiaozi,as plate after plate of jiaozi arrived,each piled high.

A classic lesson in just how important context can be.

When I was a little girl,I went to a western restaurant ordering a pizza.In my mind’s eye, pizza was a pie with some vegetables.But when came the food,I found out some fish and green Chinese onion on it which I wouldn’t like to try.It was so much more different than I imagined.What I want to stress here is that the imagined world is too different from reality.If you want to learn a language conceptually, you are far away from the real world and the real language that is created by the real world.

Any language is so much more than the words or the grammar.It involves different ways of perceiving the world,different ways of thinking and even different ways of interacting.When you learn all of these things then you are truly learning the language.If you try to learn just words and grammar without learning the thinking and the context you will make the learning process so much more difficult than it needs to be.And, if you try to learn a language conceptually, without a real world to connect to, you make it even harder still.

Why?Because that’s how you really learn. You speak and you listen and you run up against reality and discover that what you thought was true was not.You learn what sounds and what concepts are useful in which places and times, and you get a sense of rhythm and timing as well as meaning and flow.And, in all this, you are totally focused on communicating what you want, not on learning a languange.Because as you try to get around, your brain is busy remembering the important things at an unconscious level and putting them into just the right places for you to remember and use.

When you immerse yourself in a new language, your brain is processing the whole language, noticing the patterns that repeat.Which is why most classroom situations are counter-productive.In the classroom you tend to look at small pieces of the language.The classroom situation normally doesn’t provide the ‘ocean’ of information that the brain really needs.

Therefore,when you are learning a new language, you need the real world to connect to, which will make your learning easier than in a classroom.