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. This week I want to talk about a very interesting problem of listening comprehension. I’m sure you’re aware that many people in China have studied English for many, many years, but still they can’t understand what they’re hearing in English. Sometimes it feels like the sounds in English are just very unclear; the word in Chinese is 模糊.
Now, to help you understand why this happens, let me share a story with you. I have a friend who grew up in Taiwan, and she studied English in Taiwan for ten years. She was quite good at English, she did English exams, she did very well in those exams, so you would say that her English was very good. And then she decided to immigrate to America. And when she got to America she found that she actually couldn’t speak and be understood. She was an English mute. What’s more interesting is that many people asked her if she had a hearing problem. They literally thought that she was deaf. Now, her ears had no problem, she was not deaf in any meaningful sense, but she as deaf to English, and this is an important concept. Literally, her brain was not hearing English in the way that you need to hear a language to be able to understand it. There’s a physiological reason for this. Our language learning centre in our brain has a very specific function; it filters the sound of the language, so every single phoneme, that’s the sound of language, in English, or in Mandarin, has a special location on the brain. There’s a little place on the brain that just listens for that sound. So we have filters for all the sounds in a language. When you’re learning a new language, you don’t have the filters for some of those sounds, so as a Chinese person when you hear English, there are sounds in English that you’ve never heard before, so you brain does not have a filter for those sounds.
Now, you’re probably asking, ‘well, if you’ve spent years learning English, but you can’t understand it, you can’t hear it properly, but you can hear the sounds of your mother tongue, what’s different?’ Well the main reason is, if you’ve been learning English just from books, you’ve never heard enough English to build your filters. You actually have to hear a lot of English, high volumes of English, in order to build the English filters in your brain so you can hear the sounds of English. That’s why when we built Kung-Fu English we actually put in a whole lot of exercises for listening, and we call these brain soaking exercises. You don’t actually have to understand the content, but you have the opportunity to listen to lots of the language and build the filters in your brain. Once you get further in you actually have really interesting content so you’re listening to the interesting content and you’re continuing to train the filters in your brain so you’re building your brain’s ability to hear those sounds in English.
Now, this whole idea of listening to the language so you can build your filters, is built in to Western culture, because parents often read stories to their children, and this process of reading out loud helps the children hear lots of the language and build vocab and understanding meaning at the same time. So, if you’re going to be able to develop your English to the point where you can hear it, and hear it clearly and understand it, you must build your English filters. You’ve got to train your brain so that you can actually hear the sounds of English in a way that allows you to understand it. This is absolutely critical. To work from books is not enough; you must listen to large volumes. So find a tool that gives you lots and lots of English that you can listen to, preferably where you can also understand what it means, and that is going to really help you significantly with your English language listening skills.
