My nephew is 16 years old, a 1st grade student in senior high school. Yesterday, he was very disappointed that though he got best scores on 4 subjects in the class but failed in English, and finally he felt out to be the No. 2. I thought I need to do some experiment then. In lunch, I asked him what he was looking at his cell phone in English, out of my expectation, he replied me in English as well naturally. We kept on talking, all in English, slowly and with patient, neither correction nor reminding for grammar, pronunciation or anything, just talking. He sometimes felt shy and asked my softly “do you understand what I say?”, I answered ” Yes, I can understand.”. He felt more confident, and continue saying more. I tried to ask his opinion about higher level questions about management, and he gave me good answers. Bright laugh shined on his face and he started to talk to other families in English, and say jokes. Finally, he announced to whole family proudly ” I can speak English! “. What a wonderful experiment!

After that day, I thought I should give myself a try, I announced to my family that I will speak English at home. They looked at me oddly but just say, “it is up to you…”. On first day, I even cannot open my mouth and was worried it may be too weird to speak English at home. Really, my family looked like that they don’t know how to answer me, use English or Mandarin or Taiwanese? Finally, they decided to reply me in Taiwanese or sometimes Mandarin. It was really strange, but I told myself, “keep on, just try it”. A week later, my families got used to listen to my English and I got used to speak in English, and another week later, I found myself not only speak in English but also think in English, and even wrote English mail more fluently.

Before this experiment, I tried to talk to myself in English, while, it didn’t help as much as talk to person really. I made many mistakes in grammar, but it didn’t impact peoples’ understanding of my meaning. I realized that a real communication, words are keys and grammar is the subsidy only.