The author often traveled around asia. He had seen everywhere that the westerners were struggling to learn asian languages and in the meanwhile asians were strugglng to learn western languages. Although there were a few seccessful languages learners, most felt it was really difficult to learn a foreign language, some even gave up before they have started. Because they accepted the myth that those successful language learners were natural gifted at languages. And they believed that adults can’t learn a foreign language easily. And they considered they were tone deaf. All these were used by them as excuses for not trying to learn a new language. They are like the young english man on the ferry. He had already learned to speak an element of cantonese correctly, but he felt shy. He allowed his posture to slump and threw away the first win. What a let down. Actually, as long as he could get over that first hurdle of embarrasement, he was already on the path of seccessful learning a new language.
Reading the story of the young english man on the ferry, I recalled one time I ordered food on a ship. that was after a week business trip. During that seven days of business, I always took noodles as my meal. So on the ship to go home, when it was time for dinner, there were two choices. one was noodles, the other one was rice. but rice was far more expensive than noodles. After having eaten noodles so many days, I felt I couldn’t  bear one more meal of noodles. I ordered the rice. It tasted so delicious. This was the only time that I was loning for a bowl of rice.