The Third Ear- Chapter 3 Barrier Busting – re-examining “common sense”

In this chapter, it talked about 3 major barriers that commonly emerge in our language learning process. The author listed them here and discussed why people can’t learn language well by those barriers. Those are:

1. The bad belief
2. The school subject mistake
3. The cultural mythology mistake

   The most important mistake here I think is “The bad belief”. The bad belief is coming from our mindset. Only we can change it but no one did. The bad belief may stop us proceeding in any goals we set. It prevent us from succeeding anything. When we try to do something, we always think what kind of difficulties we may suffer. Then we evaluate if we have enough ability to overcome these difficulties. But have we ever thought about those difficulties are truly existed? Or that may not as difficult as we thought? If we thought deeper and deeper, then we would find that what stop us are not those so called difficulties, but ourselves. People are good at finding excuses as a belief in our mind, and make it reasonable for us. Then we feel better if we couldn’t do something because of those reasons. But if we explore these things in the world, we still can find many people have already done it well. Didn’t they suffer the similar difficulties when they try to do it?

   To use myself as an example, I always think only going abroad could make my English fluent in the past time. Yet…, many people go abroad to learn English and got fluency in English truly, but what we didn’t see are still some people who didn’t pick up even the basics in English. There are some people they spoke English well when they stay abroad, but they retrograded when they back to their country. As the result, this is not a naturally result. You still have to pay efforts on it and practice continually, then you could keep it all the time.

   The bad belief let me stop learning English for several years, because I don’t want to waste time to learn it. “This is impossible! I can’t learn English well except I go abroad!” The voice always emerge in my head when I try to start to learn English till I contact Kungfung English.

   The 2^nd myth is also the barrier of my English learning process. I also tried to learn English in the outside class when graduating from school. I want to learn English well, but still adapt the same methods in school. I prefer writing to speaking with others. I pay more attentions on grammar instead of communicating through truly talks. I recite words and structures of sentences but ignore to connect with real world. These are all base on my past experience in school. If I kept learning English by my past experience, I think I would never truly learn it. Learning a new language as a school subject is not work, it was also proved on me. Thanks for today’s technology, that bring us the effectively way to learn the language. We can connect to any corner of the world in the real time. We can get the information rapidly and learn anything at any time. The technology accelerate the learning process in a limited time, and we don’t need to pay a lot of time to pick up a new language. The difficulties in the past were not excuses any more now. What we have to do it spend more time on learning English when we use our mobile phone. Let the 2^nd language come into our life naturally instead of learning it as a school subject.

   The 3^rd myth is cultural mythology mistake. On my view point, I think this is the biggest myth for not learning a 2^nd language. I have met a lot of people from different cultures of countries who can speak with their 2nd language fluently. People can speak a particular language is driven by genetics is a big lie. Maybe we are used to speak our native language, and have difficulties speaking another particular language with different muscle of tongue. But that doesn’t mean we can’t overcome it.

    I remember I have ever read a paragraph from a book that talked about “Reset ourselves on learning anything”. This is an attitude when we want to learn something new. Humans tend to learn new thing or make some decisions that follow their past experience. However, the world are changing continually and rapidly. If we kept using past experience to learn or make decisions, we may lose a lot of opportunities for success. As we can see, more and more things have been considered as impossible are become possible now. There are still a lot things that we don’t know all over the world. So we have to reset ourselves to be zero, as a machine to do so. That can let us face the world with a new vision every day. And we would not stop ourselves any more by any bad belief we owned.