英语文化

王綦学习辅导

admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 09:40:11 +0000

王綦学习辅导 admin 周四, 08/30/2012 - 17:40

今天我们要看王綦的情况。王綦已经 49 岁了，他觉得学英语的挑战比较大，但是一定要想办法解决英语的学习问题。经过英语顾问辅导电话，他把他的英语学习目标最后定为总目标和阶段性目标。我们看看吧。

一总目标：在未来二年的时间里，能流利的对话，看原版英文电影，听广播，看电视，听教堂传道等；同时能阅读英文书籍；能完全无障碍听懂脱口秀，并能感觉其精髓，就像中国的相声和小品。

二阶段性目标：
1，半年时间，能学通功夫英语，能听懂看懂《THE THIRD EAR》。
2，半年时间，找老外学习，争取对话无障碍。
3，一年时间，争取在一个纯英文的环境生活、学习和打工，厚脸皮广交结友，完全融入英文文化和生活。

王綦不是零基础，同时他眼前不能完全听懂基本英语的沟通，原因有几个。他没有把英语最高频的词组或说法练熟，所以听到的时候不能自然反应。英语的胶水词儿和万能钥匙也没有变成自己的工具了，所以听基本英语的时候他比较吃力。

王綦已经进入第三阶段了，很认真在听词组歌，有时候听四、五次或者更多，这个是很好。为了提高学习效果，在听词组歌的时候，王綦最好下多一点功夫听中文部分的时候尽量在脑子里做含义的画面和感觉，然后听英语词组的时候，把脑子里的画面和感觉直接“贴”在英语上，做到一个听英语有感觉的结果。这样做不需要分析英语的架构，第一步是产生条件反射，听一个词组在肚子里知道大概是什么意思。

还有，听The Third Ear英文音响书之前一定要先看中文The Third Ear对应的内容，完全明白之后去听英文，在这个基础上听第三个阶段的词组歌会很有帮助，因为听了几次之后可以又听The Third Ear的英语音响内容，并且发现能听懂多了。

还有，因为万能钥匙和胶水词儿有非常大的杠杆儿作用，我们建议王綦虽然在学第三个阶段，他最好用一点时间在第二个阶段里复习这方面的内容，这个会有助于听懂第三阶段的内容。

当然功夫英语是一个自学工具，它的设计支持学习者选择对他眼前最合适的内容和学习路线，所以王綦完全可以学习他认为最合适的内容，我们的意见共他参考而已。

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学员体验

功夫英语学习法

英语文化

真实学员辅导电话：沉淀

admin — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 16:06:01 +0000

真实学员辅导电话：沉淀 admin 周二, 08/28/2012 - 00:06

在这个电话里，我和隋晓雨谈谈几个核心的学习问题，包括 ...

1，如何理解英文比喻
2，语言家长和反馈的重要角色
3，反馈和反馈圈
4，如何听懂不同的英语口音

20120606_XIE_KunLan

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听力

学员体验

英语文化

语感 (英文视频博客）

admin — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:20:02 +0000

语感 (英文视频博客） admin 周一, 01/09/2012 - 03:20

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. Today I want to talk about language feel.

A lot of people talk about the feel for a language, and naturally having a gut feel for how to use the language being an important stage in learning that language. But most people don’t really know how this comes about. Now what’s very interesting is that the part of our brain responsible for language, one of the things it does is that it filters for the sounds of the language. So, if you’re listening to a new language and you don’t have the filters, it will sound very unclear, it will sound mushy.

Importantly, this part of our brain does something else. It calculates statistics, and very sophisticated statistics. It can begin to calculate that when it hears a sound, the probability that the next sound will be a, or b, or c. So as you’re listening to language, the bran is processing ahead, and deciding what is most likely to happen next. Now I just said ‘next’ after a pause, and your brain would have already been processing that and have determined that there was a likelihood of the word ‘next’ coming up. So the brain is doing statistics at the level of phonemes, but it’s also doing statistics at the level of words and phrases. So you get to a point in learning a language that you know what’s coming at an unconscious level, because the brain has done the statistics. Now, this begs an important point, because you cannot do the statistics in the brain by swatting individual items of vocabulary. You actually have to hear lots of the target language in natural conditions for the brain to do its job and calculate the statistics of usage of the language. So the key to building the feel for a language is to hear lots of it, process lots of it and allow the brain to develop its own unconscious understanding of what the rules of the language are, and the likelihood of various different things happening as language is being spoken.

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英语文化

英语学习方法

比喻（英文视频博客）

admin — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 17:17:17 +0000

比喻（英文视频博客） admin 周五, 06/17/2011 - 01:17

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。

Today I want to talk about metaphor, and when you’re learning English, or any language, you really have to pay a lot of attention to metaphor. Metaphor is actually overlooked, but it’s a very, very significant part.

Why do you want to use metaphor? Well first of all, it helps you avoid that tedious grammar analysis to try and understand things, and I can tell you in many cases, grammar doesn’t help you understand. The second thing is, it really helps you with your memory, and I’ll come back to why that is, in a minute.

Primarily you have to understand that metaphor is fundamental to all languages; its core to how languages are made up, so you really do have to pay attention to it. There are three types. First of all you’ve got what is commonly used metaphors, so for instance in Chinese you have “杨柳细腰”. We have something very, very similar in English. For instance, we say that somebody has a ‘waspy waist.’ That means, if you think about it, that their waist sort of looks like a wasp. She’s fat at the top, she’s fat at the bottom and she’s very, very thin in the middle. So this is a commonly used metaphor, many people use it; when someone uses it they know it’s a metaphor. We have others. For example, in English, ‘keep me posted’ is a metaphor, and it means ‘give me regular reports, give me regular updates.’ And this comes about from trade in the old days when people were travelling around the world in wooden ships, and they had to tell headquarters what was going on, and the only way to do that was to send a letter. So going to the post office, going to a post box, sending the letter, sending a report back, was a way of keeping people updated. So ‘keeping me posted’ means ‘sending me letters on a regular basis, so I know what’s going on.’ And it’s become a metaphor.

A ‘one-way street’ is another metaphor in English, and it means that there’s no going back when you go down this road, then you must keep going this way. We have one-way streets, you can see by the arrows here, physically of course you could come back, but the metaphor means that you cannot go the wrong way down a one-way street. If you take this path, it’s one way, no turning back.

So that’s a commonly used metaphor, people use it. We also have newly created metaphors and frozen metaphors. So, for instance and example of a newly created metaphor is this one. Meihan received an email the other day and it said, you know, ‘we want to talk about the blanket agreement.’ Well, we don’t do blankets, so what is this agreement about blankets? Well of course, the person had created a new metaphor. They were saying that there’s, you know, a whole lot of things that we need to cover, and we’re going to have one agreement that will cover everything, like a blanket. So, blanket in this case was used to mean something that was covering absolutely everything. The interesting thing about new metaphors is that people make them up all the time, but you might discover that one that gets made up isn’t very useful, people don’t like it, they don’t use it, they don’t pass it on, so it disappears. If lots of people like it and start using it then it becomes a commonly used metaphor. So metaphors commonly get created, then they move into being commonly used, and then, over time they become frozen.

So a frozen metaphor, if you think about it, ‘frozen’ is icy, solid, doesn’t move, this is using the freezing metaphor to explain this idea, but a frozen metaphor is one that is so fixed that people forget that it’s even a metaphor.

To give you an example from Chinese, we have “宽容” And if you look at “宽容” it’s made up of two characters. You have 宽大 and 容器. And this is used to express an idea of someone who is big hearted. They’re a big vessel, they can take a lot, they can be very forgiving. There’s a word in English which is known as magnanimous, so 宽容 means magnanimous, but it means a very big vessel that can take a lot.

You’ve also got 留神 in Chinese, where 神 is something physical, is your spirit, and to leave your spirit inside you actually means to pay attention. So, it’s another example of how you have a physical idea that is used as an abstract idea to explain a concept like attention.

In English we have a lot of these very frozen metaphors as well. A very, very common one that you probably don’t know, is breakfast. It’s actually made up of two different parts: ‘break,’ and fast.’ In English, ‘fasting’ is when you don’t eat for a period of time. Some people fast for days, even weeks. Some religious people can even go months without eating any food, and that is called a fast. So when you break your fast is when you stop fasting and you begin eating. So we’ve used this idea of breaking a fast to talk about breakfast. You’ve had a night, you haven’t had any food overnight because you’ve been sleeping, and in the morning you’re going to break your fast and have a nice big breakfast. So ‘breakfast’ is actually ‘breaking a fast,’ it’s a frozen metaphor. ‘Far too’ in English is also a metaphor, frozen. ‘Far’ is a word that talks about distance, ‘too’ in Chinese means 太. What’s interesting is that ‘Far too’ actually means 远远太. So it’s using distance, a long distance, to make 太 even bigger. So make ‘too’ even bigger. So, how doo we use this? We use this very, very commonly in lots of different English phrases. You have ‘hot,’ ‘far too hot,’ ‘远远太热了’ . You’ve got ‘expensive,’ it’s very, very expensive, it’s far too expensive, it’s over-the-top. And then you have ‘late,’ it’s far too late. So, ‘far too’ is a frozen metaphor using far, we forget that it’s a metaphor and we just use it normally in language every day.

Now the important thing for you as a learner is that you really should pay attention, you should look for the metaphors because this will help you learn. Look for the common ones, the commonly used ones. Look for the frozen ones, especially. Because by being attentive to these, being sensitised to these, it’s really going to help you learn a lot more quickly.

Why is that? Well first of all there are so many things that you cannot analyse with grammar. If you try to use grammar to analyse ‘far too,’ you just can’t do it. If you try to use grammar to analyse ‘keep me posted,’ you can’t do it. You really do need to understand what the metaphor is speaking about in order to understand what’s being said. So it gets rid of a whole lot of useless grammatical analysis. Beyond that, it actually helps you to remember. And this is because our brain needs to see pictures of things, have concrete, very specific things that you can touch, that you can hear, you can see. And a metaphor almost always goes back to a physical thing of some sort. And because you can see that physical thing, hear that physical thing, then it helps you really understand what it means, and that helps your memory. So you remember things much, much more quickly when you understand what the underlying metaphor actually is. So, helping with your memory, helping with your grammar is a very important reason to work with metaphor as much as you possibly can.

Enjoy.

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英语文化

比喻（中文视频博客）

admin — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 01:55:46 +0000

比喻（中文视频博客） admin 周一, 06/13/2011 - 09:55

用比喻学外语是我原创的快速外语学习法之一。比喻是跨文化的捷径。我给你解说3种比喻的类型，帮你快速融入英语文化，地道用英语沟通。

在这个视频中，将会回答您如下问题：
1、什么是英语比喻？
2、为什么要学习英语比喻？
3、学习英语比喻有什么用呢？
4、英语比喻有哪些？
5、比喻在生活中是怎么用的呢？
6、如何解决跨文化的障碍；
7、没法解释的英语语法问题，有什么办法可以解决并让我掌握？
8、我怎样才能说出地道的英语？

学英语的时候一定要注意比喻。比喻在任何语言里占领非常重要的位置，并且经常被人忽视了。

在学外语的时候，可以用比喻解决两个问题。首先，比喻能解决复杂的语法分析也分析不清楚的问题，其次，从比喻出发可以帮助你记得更深更快。

在任何语言里，可以说比喻是重要的核心部分。比喻有三个不同类型：一类是常用比喻，大家都认识的，比如 “杨柳细腰”。这种比喻大家都会认识为比喻，而且很多人都会用。英语里边有 “one-way street”, “keep me posted”, 等常用比喻。 “One Way Street” 是单向道，用来比喻“没有的回头路——你要想清楚了，再做决定”。 “Keep me posted” 是说，“请持续的把消息传递给我”。

另外两种比喻是：新创的和冻结的比喻。

先说新创的。最近我的同事陈美含开始谈起一个 “blanket agreement” ... 毛毯协议。这是美含的一位欧洲的客户创造的比喻，他用毛毯比喻协议的框架，和覆盖框架的重要点。这个比喻创的很恰当，所以，我们内部都开始用类似的话开始沟通。实际上所有的比喻来自新创比喻，如果是好的，那么越来越多人会用，因此变成常用比喻。

如果常用比喻用的时间更久，可以导致我们忘记原来这个话原来就是比喻。这种通常就是冻结的比喻。举个例子：宽容。表面上你可能很难想像到它是比喻，但如果你回到它原本的意思“宽大的容器”——就会明白，它是用宽大的容器比喻人的心胸宽广。

中文有很多这种比喻。 “走神儿”也是个好例子。神是什么？古人认为神就是一个人的灵魂，是一个很抽象的东西，而且如果你的神儿走了，这个等于肉体在魂不在。反过来，“留神”用来形容集中注意力。“走神儿”和“留神”都是冻结的比喻。

英语冻结的比喻非常多。比如：Breakfast 是很普遍的例子，我相信你知道breakfast是早餐的意思。现在让我来为你解释一下里面的内涵和它为什么是冻结的比喻。breakfast 由2个词组成，一个是Break ，意思是：打断。另外一个Fast意思是：绝食。因此，Break Fast 就是停止绝食，来比喻停止整个晚上的绝食，现在开始吃东西。就是：早餐。

总结一下: 比喻有三种形式，新创的，常用的和冻结的。你学英语的时候，最好提高自己对比喻的敏感度，这样可以大大提高你掌握英语的速度。

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英语文化