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 there. Today I want to share a story with you.
A few weeks ago I got a call from a learner of Kung-Fu English and she shared with me a very, very interesting phenomenon which was that she’d discovered that when she was learning English if she couldn’t remember, if she couldn’t hear the sounds of the English in her head, then she really couldn’t use the English, she couldn’t say it, she couldn’t remember it. So the key was actually hearing those sounds in her head, and this actually points to a very, very important concept; which is that our memory is made up of several different components. Now clearly there’s a memory for facts. Like the sort of facts that you’ll get in a text book. But more importantly is something that I call ‘base memory,’ which is the memory that we have in our visual system, our auditory system, our kinaesthetic system, we have memory at that level.
Now I just want you to do a little experiment, I want you to, for a moment, close your eyes and remember your room. And as you’re doing that I bet you can remember the furniture, the door, maybe the window, the curtains, the layout of your room. And now, for a moment, just remember one of your favourite songs. And you’ll be able to hear the melody, the rhythm, the notes. You’ll hear the sound of the singer’s voice. So how is this possible? How are you able to just close your eyes and it’s almost like you’re hearing it over again? And the reason is that inside our nervous system, inside our brain, we have a trace of these different senses. It’s a shadow of the things that we have perceived through our eyes, through our ears, through our skin. All of our memory is based on building up these traces inside the nervous system. So when you’re learning English, you’ve got to build up this trace in your nervous system of the sounds of English. And if you don’t do that then it’s very, very difficult for you to remember the English. So an important principle here is that our language centre, the auditory centre in our brain, is very, very good at remembering these sounds at a basic level, and so the ‘base level’ of memory. It’s like having a tape recorder in our head. Now, there is a difference with a tape recorder because with a tape recorder it hears something once, it records it on the tape, and all of the sound it’s there. With our brains it’s a little different. We hear it the first time and there’s a little bit of a trace that’s laid down and then we hear it again and the trace gets a little deeper, a little richer, and we hear it a third time and it gets even more. So over time, we’re slowly building up this trace until it gets deeper and deeper inside our nervous system so we have a pathway in our brain.
Now, when you understand this concept it’s going to really, really help you learn English in a very, very successful way. In fact, I could say that this is a key to successfully learning English. Now, remember, a very, very important thing; our ability with language, to learn language, is based on sound, and language is in fact, an auditory phenomenon. For millions and millions of years human beings have used sound to communicate meaning. Well you might say there’s also the written language and that is true, but the written language has been around for a few thousand years, and if you really look at it, most people never used written language to communicate. It’s only in the last fifty, one hundred years, that the majority of people have started using written language to communicate. For most of history, humans have only used sounds to communicate.
And, the result of that is, within our brains this ability to remember sounds is very, very well developed. Much, much better developed than the ability to remember text from a page. And so in order to learn English and to learn it easily and quickly, then it really makes sense to make use of this basic fundamental ability that we all have inside us. And when you use sounds to learn English you’ll find that you learn it very, very quickly. If you only use written text and a book then you learn much, much more slowly. Now, you might theoretically think this is good, but that practically, personally, you’re not very good at remembering sounds. It’s true that some people remember sounds very, very quickly after just one time, but most people need to hear them quite a lot of times before those sounds become something that’s actually inside their head. Myself included, I need to hear sounds maybe five, ten, maybe twenty times before I really can hear them inside my own head. So that’s why when we created Kung-Fu English we created 374 songs that allow learners to go over the same sounds in English many, many times until those sounds become a very strong trace inside the brain.
So the thing I’d like you to take away from today’s talk is that if you want to learn English really, really well, and really quickly, then you have to find as many opportunities as possible to build the trace of the English sounds inside your mind, you’re literally remembering those sounds inside your brain, as a physical trace for those sounds. Remember that as a key idea that will help you be very successful with your learning.
