My Essay on “The Third Ear” Chapter 2

In this chapter, we get more understanding of language instinct from human beings. The evidence from many research paper refer to that people are hard wired to learn languages. Whatever the age we are, we can picked up the patterns for any languages at an unconscious level. This ideas really break the myths that we believed before. Most of the people believed that they can’t learn a language well when they grew up to be an adult. They agreed that myths the adults have lost the ability to learn a language well as the children do. To dig the truth for this myth deeper and deeper, we would discover that the truth is adults do not have pay enough efforts on the language learning. The adults have a lot of things to deal with every day. Learning a new language is always not the first priority in their life. As a result, they would not keep learning the language every day. Ultimately, they lose the motivations and momentum to learn the language.  In the other hand, the children are building their core of a new language in their daily life. They use the language as a tool to communicate with their friends. Language learning is the most important things in their life. They picked up the language in various level, and they feel the language give them power to do many things. This is the major difference on language learning process between adults and children.

After breaking the myths, we start to find some evidence why adults have more advantages than children for learning a new language. Actually, adults already learned a language well, that is their mother tongue. Adults have a lot of knowledge of the world. They also have got many concepts and patterns in the world, what they have to do is give these things a new label. That means adults could save a lot of time to master a new concept and pattern. In the opposite, the children are still try to get many concepts in their mind, such as times, emotions, many physical things, etc., so they need more time to build the image and pattern first. Adults also have many tricks and skills to help them to accelerate the learning process.

How can we make sure adults still keep the ability to learn a new language? Essentially, our brain are processing language every day. We hear sounds and discerning the words. Mapping the words and phrases with the meaning in our mind. This already proved that our brains are designed to process the language, at least one. This is hard wired in human beings when we were born. Just like the pigeons are programmed to find their way home. Adults still have keep the ability to learn a new language. What we have to do is removing the rust, and re-wired circuits in our brain.

   How can we apply it?

From observing the language process of my children, I found they only speak English in school. Or they sing the English songs when watching TV. They use English as a communication tool with their friend and having fun by sing the songs. Their learning process is relaxing, interesting and naturally. I think re-wired the circuits here meant we need to find these factors for our language learning.

   Firstly, we do brain soaking to train our ears can hear the English words clearly.

   Secondly, we repeated any words we heard. Just like to train you muscle, and you will find your tongue and lips would get more and more flexible.

   Thirdly, write something every day. Anything you heard and saw, just write it down.

   Fourthly, find English parents and talk with them frequently. This could help us to make more outputs for our learning. Language parents will also have some feedbacks for you. We need the feedback to get power and feel our advance.

   Finally, and this is most importantly I thought, don’t stop learning if you felt frustrated. During the learning process, we would suffer many difficult situations. No matter what, we still keep our pace toward our goal. Enjoy the process and feel our improvement of the language learning. I believe that is SUCCESS!