The author suggests there are three major type of ideas that prevent people from learning. If we want to avoid some mistake, the best way is just turn the head and look where we want to go, not what we want to avoid. So, we might choose to jump to the next chapter to ‘How do they do that?’ Or we can explore these key barriers, decide whether we have these barriers and think how to do about them.

Firstly, ‘Bad belief barrier.’ When we are difficult in learning a language, we often find a reason to support difficulty rather than find a way to solve it. The reason seems logical and valid, in fact, it’ll decrease our confidence and keen to learn the language, and make us give up. How we think is really important, it may determine our success or failure. That’s why author suggest us question the myth and don’t accept them as an excuse for not learning.

    Secondly, ‘The school subject mistake.’ The author told a story and compare two learning process, one person only learned from class where the grammar and logical structure had been taught, another person who immersed himself in society, and absorb the language from peers and environment. And the result really surprised me. The person who had learned from class can’t communicate with locals effectively. So I wonder what we are learning in the class? Is the skill that has been taught in class really useless? Or, the author told this story to indicate one thing-context is incredibly important for a language learner. If we learn the language conceptually without a reality to connect to. We can’t use the language properly and accurately. Because language involve cultural experience and habits that often don’t conveyed by the language class. And without real people in the real world to connect to, our brain cannot make use of the information to remember and use them in the right places and times. Think about our language learning process, does only logical connection and grammar lesson really help, or, we need to pick up some key elements from the local people and environment that can better support our learning? I think both are helpful, and learning through context is more powerful and impressive for me.

    Thirdly, ‘The cultural mythology mistake.’ Is this a pervasive way of thinking? I don’t think so, at least, on conscious. Have you had the experience that going to a foreign country and using the local language to communicate, but you were ignored by the locals? I don’t have the experience like this, every time I go to a foreign country, I was surrounded by the people who speak Chinese. The author refers to the situation like this. Maybe the locals think this language cannot mastered by the person from another race. Because of genetics or cultural background or whatever. But we might have seen or heard someone coming from another culture who unexpectedly speaks a language perfectly, this is a good evidence to bust the mythology. I think the author’s intent is don’t let any kinds of reason stop our learning pace. So he listed three main ideas and discovered whether they were true or not. The stories in this chapter are interesting and classic. Follow this chapter, we can consider these beliefs with chill brain, and analyze it in more depth. When we approach the truth, the learning barriers may collapse, and we can learning a language more easily and effectively.