如何在六个月内学会任何一门外语（ted转述）

/仅作学习和参考，勿作他用/

a question : how can you speed up learning?

学得快，减少在学校时间

结果去研究心理学惹

spend less time at school.
if you learn really fast , you donot need to go to school at all.
school got in the way of learning,so I had a question in mind hwo do you learn faster?
I wrote a letter to research in the Soviet Union asking about hypnopedia /催眠百科全书/ . sleep learning.
you take a tape recorder beside your bed and it turns on in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping and you’re supposed to be learning from this —didnot work
results in being compassionate about psychology and being involved in psychology

took myself to China in 1981

中文好难学QAQ

I decided that I was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years
difficult really
Wersten people could spend 10 years or more and never really get very good at it .

apply conclusions from psychological to learning process
I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese /官话/ in 6 months
and it took a little bit longer to get up to native
struggling terribly to learn English and other languages

my question got refined 细化

down to how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly easily and effectively
we have massive challenges with social dislocation
need communication
how do you do that ?
identify the principle and apply that
it’s called modeling and I’ve been looking at language learning
reault is

any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside 6 months

the history of human progress is all about expanding limits 突破极限

飞机哪里来的，模仿鸟

100 years ago , everybody believed that heavy stuff dosen’t fly
how it fly ?
We reorganize the material using principles that we have learned from observing nature birds from this case .
we’ve gone even further so you can fly a car
you can buy one of these for a couple hundred thousand US dollars
we now have cars in the world that fly
a lot of people think they can’t draw however there are some key principles five principles that you can apply for learning to draw and you can actually learn to draw
actually can learn to draw in five days

anybody can learn to draw in five days

how ?
5 principles and 7 actions
there may be a few more but these are absolutely core

2 myths/误区/

i want to dispel /消除/ two myths

first , talent

Zoe , went to Holland was trying to learn Dutch /荷兰语/
struggling extremely
and she use the principle and use them and in six months she was fluent in Portuguese /葡萄牙语/

second ，immersion per se /呆在一个新国家/

why ?because a drowing man cannot learn to swim /溺水的人学不会游泳/
when you don’t speak language you’re like a baby

drop yourself into a context which is all adults talking about stuff over your head you won’t learn

5 Principles

First , the forwards attention meaning relevance and memory and these internection in very very important ways . 在很多方面是互相连接的。

walk through forest
see somthing
those marks on a tree , maybe you pay attention maybe you don’t

go another 50 meters and you see this

you should pay attention

another 50 meters if you haven’t been payig attention you see this

at this point you’re paying attention

another 50 meters if you haven’t been paying attention

it’s relevent because it(tree) means this.(bear)
and anything that is related ,any information related to your survival

is stuff that you’re going to pay attention to, and remember it.

related to your personal goals

then you’re going to pay attention to it

it’s relavant , you’re going to remember it

so first rule , first principle

which brings us to tools

we master tools by using tools

and we learn tools the fastest when they’re relevant to us

a story :
a keyboard is a tool

let me share a story
use keyboard to type Chinese , we use 9 months and cannot learn it
but a crisis /急事/：48 hours deliver a training manual in Chinese
and she got the job and I can guarantee you in 48 hours , she learned to type Chinese.
Because it was relevant , it was meaningful , it was important
she was using a tool to create value

so the second ,

as a kid does

when I first arrived in China , I didn’t speak a word of Chinese and
on my second week I got to take a train ride overnight
I spent 8 hours sitting in the dining car talking to one of the guards on the train
he took an interest in me for some reason
and we just chat all night in Chinese
and he was drawing pictures and making movements with his hands and facial expressions
and piece by piece I understood more and more but what was really cool was two weeks later
when people were talking Chinese around me
I was understanding some of this and I hadn’t even made any effort to learn that
what had happened ? I’d absorbed it that night on the train which bring us to the third principle

the third

and this is really really well documented now.It’s something called comprehensible input /可明白输入/

and this is just from one of them

the purple bars show the scores on different tests for language

language learning is not about accumulating lots of knowledge

in many many ways it’s about physiological training /生理训练/

because we have filters /过滤器/ in our brain

the filter in the sounds that we are familiar with

and they filter out the sounds of the languages that we’re not

you cannot hear it you’re not going to learn it

so actually have to be able to hear these sounds

speaking takes muscle

coordinate those in the way that you make sounds that other people will understand

if you ever done a new sport for couple of days and you know your body feels hurts

if your face is hurting you’re doing it right and final principle is state
psychophuysiological state /心理生理状况/

if you’re sad , angry , worried , upset ,you’re not going to learn .Period

If you’re happy , relaxed ,in an Alpha brain state ,curious ,you’re going to learn really quickly
and very specifically , you need to be tolerant of ambiguity/忍受歧义/

if you’re one of those people who needs to understand 100 percent every word you’re hearing
you will go nuts because you will be incredibly upset all the time, because you’re not perfect.

if you’re comfortable with getting some ,getting some, just pay attention to what you do understand, you’re going to be fine , you’ll be relaxed and you’ll be learning quickly

7 actions

no1 listen a lot

I call it brain soaking . you put yourself in a context where you’re hearing tons and tons of the language
and it doesn’t matter if you understand it or not
you’re listening to the rhythms .

you’re listening to patterns that repeat

you’re listening things that stand out

so just soak your brain in this

no2 Focus on getting the meaning First

you understand what these different postures mean

human communication is body language in many many ways

so much body language

from body language you can understand a lot of communication
therefore,
your understanding acquiring through comprehensible input

and you can also use patterns /模式/ that you already know

if you’re Chinese speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese /粤语/ and you go to Vietnam /越南/

you will understand 60 percent of what they say to you in daily conversation

no3 start mixing

you’re probably have never thought of this

if you’ve got 10 verbs,10 nouns and 10 adjectives
you can say 1000 different things

language is a creative process

what do babies do ?
ok
me ,ba(th), now

okay , that’s how they communicate

so start mixing get creative have fun with it
not perfect just work

no4

when you’re dong this you focus on the core

with every language is high frequency content

in English 1000 words covers

85 percent of everything you’re ever gonna say in daily communication

rest is 啥啥 on the cake
a new language ,just start with your toolbox

Week no1,
in your new language you say things like how do you say that I don’t understand

repeat that please , what does that mean?

all in your target language /目标语言/

you’re using it as a tool making it useful to you

it’s relevant to learn other things about the language

you should be saying things like ‘me’ ‘this’ ‘you’ ‘that’ ‘give’ 'you know ’ ‘hot’

simple pronouns/代词/ simple nouns/名词/，simple verbs , simple addjectives, communicating like a baby
by the third or fourth week , you’re getting into what I call glue words

although but therefore

these logical transformers that tie bits of a language together allowing you to make more complex meaning

at that point you’re talking

when you’re doing that , you should get yourself a language parent

if you look at how children and parents interact

you understand what this means

when a child is speaking ,it will be using simple words simple combinations ,sometimes quite strange ,sometimes very strange pronunciation

and other people from outside the family don’t understand it . But the parents do.
and so the kids has a safe environment gets confidence

The parents talk to the children with body language and with simple language which they know the child understand . So you have a comprehensible input environment
that’s safe we know it works
otherwise non of you would speak your mother tongue who is somebody interested in you as a person who will communicate with you essentally as an equal but pay attention to help you understand the message .

there are 4 rules of a language parent

spouses /配偶/ by the way are not very good at this

they will work hard to understand what you mean even when you’re way off beat /脱离节拍/

thirdly they will feed back their understanding of what you’re saying

so that you can respond appropriately and get that feedback

and then they will use words that you know

you got to get the muscles working right

so you can sound in a way that people will understand you
there’s a couple of things you do

one is you hear how it feels ,and feel how it sounds,

feedback loop operation in your face

but ideally if you can look at a native speaker and just observe how they use their face

let your unconcious mind obsorb the rules,then you’re going to be able to pick it up
and you cannot get a native speaker to look at

you can use stuff like this

realize that everything you know is an image inside your mind , its feelings

if you talk about fire you can smell the smoke

hear teh crackling see the flames

so what you do is you go into that imagery and all of that memory and you come out with another pathway

so I call it one same box different path ‘殊途同归’

you come out that pathway and you build it over time you become more and more skilled

and just connecting the new sounds to those images that you already have and to that interval representation

over time you even become naturally good at that process

do them all , 6 months