1、Unit 1. How to Be a Successful Language LearnerText A Learning to Think Over AgainGraham E. Fuller1.When you were a child, you didnt know what a tree was at first. Somebody had to tell you. Probably your parents took you outside, pointed to a tree and said, “Tree! “tree“ .You had to learn to associa
2、te the sound of the word with the big green leafy thing you saw in front of you.2. Thats what you must learn to do again when you are learning a foreign language. You need to learn to associate sounds with objects, and to think in a new way. Only this time, since you are grown up, you will be able t
3、o understand what needs to be done much faster. Youll know why somebody is pointing to a tree and saying a strange word. But youll still have to learn the new word. You may even have to relearn it many times before you finally actually learn it.3. There is an important idea here. In America our name
4、 for that big green leafy thing is “tree, but in Germany the name for that thing is “B aum “. In Arab countries the name is “shajra“. And in China they say “shu“. These various words are not themselves “trees“. They are just some of the many hundreds of different sounds used in the world to represen
5、t that great big green leafy thing.4. To learn a foreign language you must get away from the idea of translating words. Translating takes too much time and mental energy. You will never learn to really speak and understand a foreign language if you have to translate everything. Instead, learn to ass
6、ociate the new sound directly with the image in your mind. So when we hear the sound “Baum“ or “shajra“ or “shu“, we dont want to think, “Hmmmm. Baum means tree, which means that great big green leafy thing.“5. Dont think that the challenge of new thinking will be limited only to the area of new wor
7、ds; it is going to go much deeper than that. Lets use an analogy: you can build a house using materials of very different sizes and shapes. English uses one set of building blocks, but other languages will usedifferent-shaped building blocks that take some creativity to put together at first. Where
8、we use two blocks, they may use three smaller ones-or maybe one large one.6. Heres an example of an English sentence: We have to buy a few books before going home. When translating into almost any foreign language, you will not take each English word and substitute a foreign word for it. You will in
9、stead be substituting groups of words or ideas from one language to the other. How each language will choose to group the ideas depends on the language. In French or Spanish, for example, “we have to buy” is broken down into three words: we/have to/buy. In Turkish, however, the Turks are able to red
10、uce all these four words to only one.7. So learn to start thinking in terms of bundles of concepts or ideas that will be converted to new language and not single words. Try to think in a foreign language. This isnt all that hard. You learn to think in the language simply by using the language over a
11、nd over again, asking and answering simple questions until you feel comfortable with the process. Then you add some new words, and a few more new situations, and practice using them together with all the words you learned in previous lessons. Bit by bit you build up skill.8. Once you really get into
12、 the language, youll understand all this a good deal better. Somebody will be saying something quite fast and youll suddenly realize that you understood it all! Its a great moment. Really satisfying. You probably wouldnt be able to repeat the words, or even know how it was that you understood it all. But its a sign that the language is starting to sink into your mind. Youre beginning to understand without translating.
