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, I’m Chris Lonsdale, author of The Third Ear, co-founder of Third Ear Publishing, which is the company that produces the rhythmic language series, and also the Kung-Fu English series in China, which is one of the top grossing apps in Apple’s App Store in China.

This Third Ear podcast series is designed to help you resolve all of the challenges and issues that you might be facing as you’re learning a second language. The ideas and techniques that I’m going to share with you in this series will help you resolve a lot of problems, help you learn a second language very quickly on your own, to the point that you might even be fluent in as little as six months.

Hi, today I want to talk about an interesting little perceptual mistake that a lot of people make when they’re trying to learn their second language. Just to give an example, I met a guy in China a couple of years ago, he’s from the UK, and he’d been coming to China backwards and forwards for a few years, but he still couldn’t speak Mandarin. And it turned out he was essentially making this fundamental mistake. He believed that he had to learn Mandarin first, before he could start using it. In fact, learning Mandarin, learning any second language, you need to be using it as you learn. So, you learn a little bit, you start to use it, you learn some more, as you’re using it you get feedback from the world. So on this particular day, this friend and I had a conversation, and he suddenly went “wow, I’d been trying to get everything before I even started.” And of course you can never learn Mandarin completely, in the same way that you can never learn you mother tongue completely. There’s always something new to learn, you’re getting deeper, richer, broader all the time. So, the trick really is action learning. You use the language, and in the process of using the language you get feedback, you hear how it’s used, you stumble a few times, and you keep going. You’re probably wondering ‘well, how do I even get started?’ Well, there are two things you need to do, the first is you need to listen to a lot of your target language, so if you’re learning Mandarin you need to listen to a lot of it, and your brain will organise it for you. And the other thing you do is you pick a few things that you can work with, that you can communicate with, and then you start to say those in order to make things happen. So my friend in China, after he had this insight, he got in a taxi, he started to communicate with the taxi driver, he started to pay attention when he was listening to people in conversation, and in just a few weeks, two or three weeks, he could actually understand a great deal and he could make himself understood a great deal. So just that one change in how you think, from learning the language completely and then starting to use it, to a very, very different state, which is beginning to use it almost immediately in order to continue learning it. That is a fundamental shift that will make a tremendous difference to how quickly and easily you learn your second language.