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 everybody.
A lot of people believe that if you’re going to learn English well, then you have to learn lots and lots of English words. Now, by today’s count there’s something like a million words in the English language. And many people think that unless you learn most of those words, then you’re never going to be able to speak English well. It’s actually not true. If you master the three thousand high frequency words in English, then you’ve actually got a really good foundation to speak English very, very well. And I’ve talked about that in other podcasts.
Today I want to go a little bit deeper. An important idea that you need to understand is that when you’re learning English, you’re actually building a neural network in your brain, that’s a neural network of nerve connections inside your brain. It’s the same with any language. A great metaphor that I like to use is a carpet. English is like making a carpet; learning English is like making a carpet. And if all you’re doing is learning lots and lots of individual words it’s like taking a whole bunch of threads and sort of throwing them together and hoping that you can make something out of it. If you make a carpet you take all of those threads, and you start from a very small point or a line, and then you add the threads together and you tie them together in different ways. And it starts very, very small, but over time as you go backwards and forwards and you make the carpet, making it line by line, layer by layer, and it’s getting bigger and bigger and stronger and stronger until you can put it on the floor or hang it on the wall. You can walk on it, you can pull it; it’s very strong and very beautiful.
So, the key to learning English is the same as making a carpet, you need to begin with the core, and you work from there, and you add to it as you go. The key is that you just say what you know and ignore the rest, and I have a very interesting story. When I was first beginning to learn Chinese I was in class and after about three weeks our teacher asked us to write a story. Everybody else was thinking about their story in English, and then they were finding words in English and the translation in Chinese and trying to make that into a story. Now around that time I had about 200 words of Chinese, and I just decided to use the words that i already had, and to make up a story with those words, and that’s what I did. And it was about, I guess half an hour, maybe an hour, and at the end of that I had a story, and everyone else had pretty much nothing. Now, my story was similar to something that would be written by a child, but at least I had a story. So I learned at the at time that it wasn’t having lots of words that mattered, what mattered was using the words that you had and putting them together into different combinations.
Now many people today, say I use Chinese very, very well and I have a secret I want to share with you. Most Chinese people have a very large vocab, and my vocab is, I think, smaller than most Chinese people. My secret is that because I have a small vocab, I just have to use the words I already know and use them very, very well. So that gives the feeling, the impression, that I use words very, very well, and it’s coming from the fact that I don’t have that many words.
So there, the secret is really simple; use what you have, use it really well, start with the core and build out from the core and your English will become very good in a very short period of time.
