My Essay on The Third Ear Chapter 7

In the chapter7, there are three subheadings, “perceive patterns, practise details”, “brain soaking” & “pay attention! do stuff!”. Obviously, from the subheadings, this chapter was mainly about how to use the emotional states to support the learning process. I think these three titles also provided a good illustration of the basic steps of a language learning from the third ear. The first of all was mental, that is, perceive patterns and practise details. Next was actions, well, there were action 1: brain soaking and action 2: pay attention! do stuff!

In fact, I have said the power of the emotion in my before essay. At the beginning of this chapter, the author again stressed the concept, human being’s brain is pattern recognising machine. And he taked many examples to said that in order a normal life, everyone’s brain have to recognise pattern all the time. Fortunately, people’s language skill be in the brain. So we can use the brain’s characteristic to learning a language simply and effectively! Next, let me talk about the specific actions.

The action 1, Brain Soaking. Like the name suggest, you should put you brain to soak the whole language environment. Compare to the learning method of in class, brain soaking is more gentle and comprehenseive. Why is this? The reason is simple. Brain soaking is a way of making the most of your brain unconsiously. Like I said before, any action of comtacting a language would help you learning. The best way was directly entering into the real the new language environment obviously. But maybe you are not going abroad now, or just you are not in the new language for whatever reason. Of course, this is a not a question. like the author’s suggest, you can get many other methods, include listening to tapes, going over the foreign language books, or like my college roommates – C, because she liked the America drama, she looked at them all the time at that time.

But today, I would like to talk about the new way – live video communication on the internet. In fact, I used this above method to communicate with my English parent in Kungfu English Lessons. The steps are also very simple. You should just used the one live communicate app, then you could live video communicate each other in the app, like wechat, skype. Audio communication is also possible. But I prefer to like the way of face to face. It’s more vivid, and sometimes even through I don’t understand the meaning what the one’s talking about, I could guess it from his/her expression. This is a real communication. Now there was more than that. Many other apps were provided this paid function. You can talk about any particular language with the someone like a real situation on internet. It’s amazing. I like it.

Next, I would talk about the most action – do it. Like Nike’s AD, “just do it”. Think of yourself, you always think out of many ideas in your brain, then what is the result? The ideas just were some ideas, they didn’t make any changes to your life, because you always don’t do anything. Some people would like to do one thing when they were ready for everything, there’s no denying it’s a good habit. But this habit has a big problem, that is you would too delay timing to not do it. Then in the end, you probaly had nothing to do, just you were thinking about more much at first.

Back to the language learning. Compare to the above habit in life, this trend of perfection in language learning process is fatal. English is a skill, not a subject. What are the steps required to learn a skill? Let’s think about some sport skills, like baseball or swimming, whatever you are ever learned or heared. Because I had been learned swimming in the first two years. Today, let me talk about the learning of swimming skill. At that time, I learned the standard actions from a nice coach, I rememberd the every technique of the freestyle swimming. Then could I say I can swim? Of course not, if I said I can swim for this reason, you must think about I’m insane. Obviously, the real learned was I can siwm in the water. Theoretical knowledge is far from enough, learn any skill all need practical actions.

This is ture in language learning. At first, most people would just speak a little, oh man, be relax, you are not the president, don’t be so stressed. And if you make a mistake in everyday conversation, the earth would not explode. We do language. A language like a agency, people exchange the information each other in a language. So let’s make some new friends to talk about something in a foreign language. Have a nice day.