配合中文版视频，希望我们精心录制的英文版视频对你学会英语有帮助。
Hi. Last time we were talking about the importance of daily English as a foundation for understanding any form of English, including business English. But this is an important question: why is it, that even though you can understand all of the individual words in the daily English, you can’t understand the full sentence, so you’ve got things like: ‘dampened hopes for June’s report,’ or a ‘fresh snapshot of the nation’s employment picture.’ You know what picture is, you know what fresh is, you know what nation is, but what does this whole thing mean? And this is a challenge that a lot of Chinese people have when speaking English.
Well, the secret is, that business English very frequently makes use of common English metaphors, and not just one or two, but there’s a lot. Now let’s go back to the article that we used last week, so I want you to remember this point. You’ve got to look for, specifically look for, search for, the metaphors in the language that you’re reading, that’ll help you to understand. So, as I said let’s go back and look at this article that we started looking at last week, and remember to pull out all of the red technical words, just completely delete them, so what we’re left with is the black words and the blue words. The blue words, remember, are the names of people, companies, places, the white spaces are those technical words, and everything else is the daily English. Now it gets really interesting because as you go through and analyse the daily English, you see now that all of these red places are metaphors. Every single one of those is a daily English, normal metaphor. If I pull them all out, and put them on the page this way and then we look at them, there’s about ten to fifteen percent of the article is these metaphors. Now what’s very important about these metaphors is that they don’t just take up more space in the communication than the technical words do, they’re actually much more important for communicating what the author wants to communicate. Okay, they tell you the feeling, they tell you really what the meaning of this particular article is. So if we look at this one, we have: ‘mired in a slump.’ Okay, so your body’s slumped down, you’re stuck, it’s like you’re in a swamp, you’re just really, really uncomfortable. You have ‘turbulence ahead.’ Turbulence is used for air that’s not very stable, like in an aeroplane, so there’s a metaphor like you would hear in an aeroplane, you know ‘there’s turbulence ahead, put on your seatbelt’ that’s being used in business English. ‘Hoping for a bounce,’ well a ball bounces, so this again is a metaphor for the economy going down and then maybe coming up again, like a ball bouncing. So you get the feeling for what the author is communicating from the metaphors, and they’re much more important for that than all of the technical words.
So if we take the article we see all of these technical English words in red and now in orange we have all of the metaphors, we can see how much of this language is taken up by the metaphor and the daily normal English. So, it’s back to that same point; you’ve got the daily English words and the daily English metaphor and they cover almost everything that you need to understand inside this article. This is why when we created Kung-Fu English we put together metaphor exercises to help you really begin to look for and be able to find metaphors, and then use your right brain to get a feel for what those metaphors are really about, because they’re critical to understanding the intent, the deep meaning, of the communication.
Okay, so if we look at this article, it’s all black, you go through it, you look for the metaphors, and this really helps you to get the flavour of the communication in the English. So remember metaphors give you the flavour of the communication in English.
