Vanney Daily English-Vol.11 How to learn a second language in six month P3 Chris Lonsdale

[Transcript] How to learn a second language in six months Chris Lonsdale PART 3 So based on those 5 principles, what are the 7 actions that you take? Number 1: listen a lot. I call it Brain Soaking. You put yourself in a context where you’re hearing tons and tons of a language and it doesn’t matter if you understand it or not. You’re listening to the rhythms, you’re listening to things that repeat, you’re listening to things that stand out. So, just soak your brain in this. The second action: is that you get the meaning first, even before you get the words. You go, ‘well how do I do that, I don’t know the words?’ Well, 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, you’re understanding, you’re acquiring through comprehensible input. And you can also use patterns that you already know. If you’re a Chinese speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese and you go Vietnam, you will understand 60% of what they say to you in daily conversation, because Vietnamese is about 30% Mandarin, 30% Cantonese. The third action: start mixing. You probably have never thought of this but 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? Okay: Me. Bath. Now. That’s how they communicate. So start mixing, get creative, have fun with it, it doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to work. And when you’re doing this you focus on the core. What does that mean? Well with every language there is high frequency content. In English, 1000 words cover 85% of anything you’re ever going to say in daily communication. 3000 words give you 98% of anything you’re going to say in daily conversation. You got 3000 words, you’re speaking the language. The rest is icing on the cake. And when you’re just beginning with a new language, start with the tool box. Week number one 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. You’re using it as a tool, making it useful to you, it’s relevant to learn other things about the language. By week 2 that you should be saying things like ‘me, this, you, that, give, you know, hot’, simple pronouns, simple nouns, simple verbs, simple adjectives, communicating like a baby. And by the third or forth week, you’re getting into I call glue words. ‘although, but, therefore,’ these are logical transformers that tie bits of language together, allowing you to make more complex meaning. At that point you’re talking. And when you’re doing that, you should get yourself a language parent. If you look at how children and parents interact, you’ll understand what this means. When a child is speaking, it’ll be using simple words, simple combinations, sometimes quite strange, sometimes very strange pronounciation and other people from outside the family don’t understand it. But the parents do. And so the kid has a safe envionment, gets comfidence. The parents talk to the children with body language and with simple language they know the child understands. So we have a comprehensible input environment that’s safe, we know it works otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue. So you get yourself a language parent, who’s somebody interested in you as a person who will communicate with you essentially as an equal, but pay attention to help you understand the message. There are 4 rules of a language parent. Spouses by the way are not very good at this, okay? But the 4 rules are, first of all, they will work hard to understand what you mean even when you’re way off beat. Secondly, they will never correct your mistakes. Thirdly, they will feedback their understanding of what you are saying so you can respond appropriately and get that feedback and then they will use words that you know. The sixth thing you have to do, is copy the face. 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 that you hear how it feels, and feel how it sounds which means you have a feedback loop operating in your face, but ideally, if you can look at a native speaker and just observe how they use their face, let your unconscious mind absorb the rules, then you’re going to be able to pick it up. And if you can’t get a native speaker to look at, you can use stuff like this:. And the final idea here, the final action you need to take is something that I call ‘direct connect’. What does this mean? Well most people learning a second language sort of take the mother tongue words and take the target words and go over them again and again in their mind to try and remember them. Really inefficient. What you need to do is realise that everthing you know is an image inside your mind, its feelings, if you talk about fire you can smell the smoke you can hear the crackling, you can 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 ‘ same box, different path.’ You come out of that pathway, you build it over time you become more and more skilled at just connecting the new sounds to those images that you already have, into that internal representation. And over time you even become naturally good at that process, that becomes unconscious. So, there are 5 principles that you need to work with, 7 actions, if you do any of them, you’re going to improve. And remember these are things under your control as the learner. Do them all and you’ll going to be fluent in a second language in 6 months. Thank you.