The cultural mythology mistake

    I remembered for my first time seeing Mr. Lonsdale who talked on TED with almost accentless Chinese, I was surprised and realized from that moment on the truth for a foreigner to get Chinese totally fluent. It also let me have a compulsion on finding the reason behind the truth. After that I decided to join Kungfu English and give myself one more opportunity to achieve my dream – Be fluent in English.

    From that day on, I found more and more people from different cultures, races, and countries speak fluent Chinese effortless. They really broke the cultural mythology and provide me evidence that I can learn English well as if they did in Chinese. Recall a social event several years ago, there was a mix-raced boy from Taiwan and Brazil. He lived in Taiwan in his childhood and learned how to speak Chinese and Taiwanese fluently (Dialect language in Taiwan). He went back to Brazil when he was 8 year-old. After living in Brazil for 10 years, he went back to Taiwan to visit his relatives. He almost forgot how to speak Chinese and Taiwanese, and even need an interpreter to talk with her families in Taiwan. This is a good examples for me to explore the reason what happened on this guy now. He was born with both genes from Taiwan and Brazil but that’s not the reason why he can speak fluent Chinese in his Childhood and Portuguese in his teenager. Oppositely, it provide us evidences that the language ability is not genetics. If you doesn’t used it for a long time, you still would lose it just like the boy here. Genes would not help a person to get learning a language well, but the environment does. People believe that the cultures and races would separate different people from different languages is a myth. From now on, we don’t need to trust it. What we need to believe is whatever how difficult a language is, we always could find a way to pick it up. This doesn’t matter to genes, what you need is to use it!

Reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3478415.stm