Mistakes and methods in English Learning (2): the main cause of "dumb English"

Series of articles Directory Index :《 Mistakes and methods in English Learning"

The main cause of "dumb English"

What is "dumb English "? People without basic English skills are not called dumb English. Dumb English refers to the situation where I have been studying English for more than a few years and have a certain degree of reading ability, but my listening and speaking skills are poor or not at all. Especially for students who have already passed level 4 and Level 6. You have been learning English for more than 10 years, about 6 hours a week, a total of 3000 hours of English learning, there is still no minimum communication. (But it should be declared that "a certain degree of reading ability" is not high. For example, if you pick up an English novel, you will find that you cannot even read a page without using other tools .)

How is "dumb English" caused? The answer is varied. For example, it is generally caused by "exam-oriented education. I can take the test, so I don't understand it. This clearly does not focus on the causal relationship. Some people will say: it is a small number of words or words can not be used, so it is necessary to memorize more words; there is a poor syntax, the organization of sentences is not skilled, and Chinglish is a syntax problem. Therefore, we need to study more about English grammar. Of course, the most important problem is that we have no chance to communicate in English. If we have an English environment and communication opportunity, we will try to find out, many people stop chatting with foreigners on the street. These are all misunderstandings about how to learn a foreign language. Why?

Let's first create an experiment. Let me speak a foreign language carefully. Ready: "six five senven three six eight nine four ". What do you hear?

A: There are six numbers, which may be phone numbers.

What is it?

"Six five seven... What is Thu ." This is the answer of the average student.

Why not? Is it about the number of words? No. Is it a syntax problem? No. Is it a pronunciation problem? No. What is that?

A: you spoke too fast.

But I am using a normal speed? Do foreigners tell people their phone numbers at this speed? Where can I use it one by one? Why can't you understand the normal speed?

Someone replied: it is not skillful.

Ten years ago, I was not familiar with it. Besides, even if you are not familiar with it, which word cannot be understood?

A: I seem to understand, but how can I feel that I cannot respond? My teacher is slow.

Come on, you are a normal person, and the response is quite normal. But I have to ask: what are you doing there?

At this moment, some people finally realized that I was there to reflect Chinese characters. When I was listening to English, I sat down there and quickly converted them into Chinese, so that I could just turn them into half.

The cause is found. Everyone was there to translate it silently. But none of them are here. Why?

The normal speech speed is about 120 to 180 words per minute, and the English and Chinese characters are almost the same. Generally, a sentence ends in two seconds, and a sentence is connected. For a sentence that lasts for two seconds, even if all words are used and the pronunciation syntax is correct, but it takes a long time to translate all English words into Chinese (not to mention the analysis syntax? At least four or five seconds. At this moment, we didn't hear the second sentence, and the third sentence was half done. I can't hear it. How can I understand it? Obstacles have emerged. How are you? Where are you from? Or something. When there are more than four words, they cannot keep up. Scientists have done experiments: If you hear that a foreign language must be translated in the brain, the normal speed of the language can only be translated to the third word, so that the average person can not keep up with the four, almost no one can exceed four. A large number of sentences contain more than four words. Therefore, many of our students are always there to repeat simple English and fail to improve. Then I am very familiar with it. Can I express it? The answer is: Never.

But why can't you translate it in your mind? When you hear English, you actually have no concept in your mind, but you have learned Chinese explanations for every English text. Just think about Chinese explanations and you will understand it. So they all try to "Switch" and cannot. Can I understand it directly when I hear English? What is the status? The answer is simple: you can think in English. To put it bluntly, you can think in English. This concept is new more than a decade ago, and more people know it now: "The premise of fluent communication in any language is that you must use this language to think about it. Otherwise, you will never be able to communicate normally ." This is the conclusion. Without English thinking, you can never understand the normal speed of English, and you can never hear long sentences. The conclusion that English thinking is the prerequisite for normal English communication is that it is clear and accepted by people, and there is a lot of evidence, so we do not need to debate it here. But why do we have no English thinking for more than ten years? As you can see, if every word is learned by interpreting it in Chinese, you will have a problem. There is another reason: Everyone may have tried to speak a few English sentences. What is the process of speaking English? Before you start, I want to speak Chinese: I want to say this. (STOP! You cannot do this in Chinese. When we speak Chinese, we say half a sentence, and we cannot know all the words in the last half of the sentence in advance. So it's no longer right here .) Find all the English words in the sentence. Can I do it now? As you can't say, you have to organize sentences. Think about the syntax! What tense is used? Past tense? When? Now? Ongoing? Coming soon? Singular and plural? Do you want to add s? Male, female, her? Wait until you finish thinking about this. 20 seconds have passed and the other party has left. So we found that even students who graduated from the Foreign Language Institute used the same tactic when speaking foreign languages: "They don't want to use grammar. It's hard to find a few words and jump out quickly ." Therefore, it is Chinese English. Are they not familiar with syntax? None. Because it is not urgent. A large number of experiments tell us that there is no relationship between the number of grammar knowledge and the degree of fluency in communication. The grammar book is like a back-to-back, still unable to communicate, or make a syntax error. The reason is very simple. In terms of the thinking mechanism of speech, when talking, the brain prohibits thinking about grammar rules. Once you want rules, you cannot talk. Think about how fluent we are in Chinese. can we think about grammar rules? The subject uses this, the predicate uses that, And the adverbial is put here... No! The same is true for English. Therefore, grammar knowledge not only does not help to form an English thinking, but is in disorder.

Therefore, we have discovered that "translation" and "syntax" not only do not help improve the communication ability, but impede the English thinking. However, we are very familiar with translation and grammar because we have learned English for so many years. For more than a decade, no matter whether you are in class or self-taught, the method used is called "syntax-translation", and the English name is "Translation-grammar method. This method is a foreign language learning method established by the British when learning Greek and Latin a few hundred years ago. By studying the syntax structure of the target language, and translate words in your own language to learn this language. For example, when you learned this sentence:

This is a cat.

This is a cat.

Number of subject predicates object

The pronoun is not a definite noun.

This sentence is usually the current time

Statement

Third-person singular

System Table Structure

.... Voice

(I am dizzy. When I was a child, I thought my mom didn't teach me how to speak Chinese. Foreign children are really pitiful. Later, I found that foreign children could not learn English in this way, but Chinese children could only learn English in this way, which is poor for us .)

Later, I learned that this methodology is widely used all over the world. The results are similar: I can master a certain degree of foreign language knowledge and will not communicate with each other. After a long time, everyone will continue to learn the previous knowledge. It feels better to know that the class and brother of other countries are also affected.

Therefore, the syntax-translation method is obviously quite problematic, and many countries have already abandoned it. However, some countries, mainly China and the UK, still have defenders of the "syntax-translation law. In the future, I will analyze its deep problems based on other scientific bases. Now I will take a look at it first.

Some people think that it is because their English is out of date and there is no need to debate it. The English in textbooks is not outdated, and the changes in any Mandarin language over the past few decades have influenced the level of ignorance.