I have finished reading the first chapter of “The Third Ear”. Great! In this chapter the author told us something about himself mainly his own experience of language learning, why he wrote this book, this book’s purpose and brief contents.
     The author was grew up in New Zealand. His mother tongue is English. From this book I know that in 1981 when he first came to China he was 22 years old, so he was born in 1959. When he was at high school, he was good at scientific subjects because they required abstract and conceptual thinking. He was not that good at English especially at written words comprehension. He even hated grammar lessons since he thought it was boring and did not have points. He was not good at French either. He even thought that he would never learn French well. He knows that he does not have talent at language at least not more than his peers. After graduating from high school he went to a university to continue to study psychology. One of his topics of interest was psycho-liguastics. After graduating from university, he mainly engaged in organizational consulting work. He mostly uses Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese as the interact medium.
     The author shared with us the experiences of how he learned French and Chinese. Neither his French nor Chinese have been learned well from school class. When the author was 15 years old, he participated in a student exchange project. A French speaking boy came from Tahiti (a French-speaking colony) to his home for several weeks. Some time later the author went to Tahiti to stay at the boy’s home for six weeks You can imagine during that time he was with the boy all the time, so he learned French natualy. He could talk to any person in French when necessary. Because he had gained the real ability of French, he sailed through to the end of high school French without having to do any more work on it to speak of. As for Chinese he had studied at school but he could not speak a word of Mandarin Chinese. He mastered Chinese after he came to China by exposing to Chinese people and society.
     In the nineteen eighties, China was just open to the outside world. There began to have many joint ventures. People from different countries, different cultures needed to come to work together. There were many poor communications including ghost conflicts. So the author realized that it was very important to speak other people’s language. He had met many Asians and Westeners who all seemed to be struggling at learning foreign languages. At that time there was a theory in vogue that only children could learn a foreign language really well. And there was a commonly accepted myth that a new anguage is really difficult to learn and those who could speak more than one language must have language talent which normal people did not. From his own language experience and other successful language learners he had talked to, the author thought he had to challenge that theory and that myth and he was able to challenge that theory and that myth. That is why he wrote this book.
      This book shared mental, emotional, physical and practical strategies used by language learners and specific tools and techniques for language learning. The author hoped to help us better use our language genius. He thought that if we have learned these strategies, tools and techniques, then these language talents could be injected into us, then we could learn any language we choose more easily and effectively than we ever imagined possible.
     In this chapter, I have learned a couple of new words. They are: seminar, subtlety,vogue, audacity, hypnosis, drone,diarrhoea,baffle,deteriorate, bulk,glean, anecdote, etc. And I also learned a couple of interesting expressions, I listed them below:to allow his posture to slump, backing down, a new spin to my life,to saile through, to scrape through, a slight but lithe and wiry young man.
     This chapter is useful and fun.