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。

When you’re learning English you’ve really go two different pathways that you can choose from. You can go the left brain route where you work really hard with piles of books and you try and stuff new content into your head, and as you know, that takes years and years of really hard work and the end result may not be what you’re looking for. The alternative pathway is to use your own inner intuition, your natural unconscious capacity for naturally acquiring a language.

Now you’re probably wondering ‘how do you do that?’ Well, first of all, let’s consider what happens to people who go overseas to a second country to learn a new language and live in that country. As you know, many people can spend three years, five years, and still not really speak the language. Many Chinese people go to America, and they’re there for a long time and they don’t speak very good English. You must have met Westerners who come to China, and they’ve been in China for five years, maybe ten in some cases, and they still don’t speak Mandarin. So this idea of going to a second country and being able to learn a language is actually wrong. So why is that? What’s going on? Well it’s really quite simple. If you don’t understand what you’re hearing, then you don’t understand what you’re hearing. And it’s just a closed loop. And if you can’t understand what you’re hearing, then you can’t remember it, and if you can’t remember it, then you can’t learn it. So by not being able to understand what you’re hearing, means, you will not be able to remember it, you will not learn it.

Now, compare that with a child. You’ve got a young child learning their mother tongue, and they learn it quite quickly. Now what is it that they’re doing? Is it that their brain is different to the brain of an adult so that they can learn and an adult can’t? Well the research shows us that’s not the case. Rather, the situation is that the child is getting access to information about the language to which adults get access to that information about the language. So the real big difference is how the information comes to you. Now, let’s look a child. The child’s maybe one, two years old, at home, with his mother, and it’s dinner time. And the mother is saying ‘let’s have dinner,’ ‘let’s eat.’ So the whole situation communicates putting food into your mouth, the whole situation communicates eating. You’ve got the smell of the food, the sight of the food, the mother doing this movement, saying ‘let’s eat.’ And so the child hears ‘let’s eat’ and associates that with this whole thing, of the smell and the movement and the chewing and the food in front and the mother hands and the bowl. All of that is about eating food. So that whole context communicates the meaning, and the language piece is on top, so it becomes easy to remember. As the child gets a little older, maybe they start reading comic books or watching cartoons on TV, and you’ll notice when they’re doing that, that they don’t understand every word. There are words in a cartoon, or a comic book that the child does not understand, it’s a new word. But because they can understand the pictures and they understand the story and they get most of it, then they can start beginning to guess, or get a sense of what these new words mean. And then they meet these new words time and time again, in different situations on different pages, and so over a period of time, maybe a few days, a few weeks, they actually learn these new words, and this happens naturally. Now this way of learning where you understand the content, and you remember it because you understand it, is called comprehensible input, and that means that you comprehend; you understand, what is being inputted into your head. And it means that if you’re working with new material, if you understand more than 95 percent of it, preferably 98 percent, then the bits you don’t know, that you’ve not met yet, your brain will be able to guess because of the context, because you understand everything else.

Now, if you go the other route, which a lot of people make the mistake of doing, and you’re working with material where you understand less than 95 percent, it’s very, very difficult. For instance, some people have these learning systems where they have just English that they don’t understand. Well I can garuntee you that if you don’t understand it you won’t learn it. Or they have English and Chinese, and they hear the English first, and they’re really busy trying to guess what that English means, and then they hear the Chinese, that is a very inefficient way to learn the language. Other people take big books, and they try to understand what these books mean, but they have so little of the English that they really don’t understand that because they don’t understand, they can’t remember it.

Okay, the way to go is to find a book where you understand more than 95 percent and then your brain goes ‘okay, I think that this word, this new word, means this, because of the context.’ And that is comprehensible input, and if you work with comprehensible input then you’re going to learn much, much more quickly.

There’s a couple of ways that you can actually set up a situation where you learn with comprehensible input. Firstly, you can create a physical environment where the communication is very obvious, and so when you hear the new language on top, then you understand and remember what it is. I was very lucky when I first came to China; I taught Taekwondo to Chinese people. So every night we would train for one or two hours, and we would have movements, you know, ‘stand in the horse’ stance, ‘punch,’ ‘kick,’ and we would be able to demonstrate movements and talk about it at the same time. And because we could see the movements, we could feel the movements, we understood what was being said, then the words that we were hearing were memorable, we could remember them. So that’s one way to do it, you create a situation, like with a language parent, that can help you and you understand the situation, so you understand what’s being communicated and you remember it.

The alternative is you can use a mapping technique where you hear Chinese first, and then English. So you understand what’s coming, and then you hear the language that you’re learning, and because you already understand it, you’re going to be much more likely to remember it.

Now, I’m going to read to you. I’m going to read to you from The Third Ear, a little section from The Third Ear, and I’m going to first of all read it to you in English, just so you can get a sense of ‘how much do you understand?’ Maybe you will understand 50 percent, maybe 80 percent, I don’t know. It will be different for different people. And then we’re going to give you the same content in Chinese, so you will hear it in Chinese so you can understand it, and then I will read it again in English. And you can notice how much of the English you understand, because you already understand the meaning. And this is important.

Now I just want to say a little bit about book culture in the west. Very often when authors write a new book, they go to bookstores, and they sign the books for their fans, but they will also read a section of the book out loud for their fans. Also, parents will read to their children. So every night when the parents come home, the children are there, they will sit down with a book, and the parent will read the book out loud to the children. So this is actually a very important part of book culture in the Western world. So let me just read you a few paragraphs from The Third Ear just to give you a sense of how this is.

Layers of meaning

Michelle looked at me with that mischievous, almost wicked glint in her eye, and said: ‘Take it here... now.’ I was holding her yellow bunny which, as you might imagine, was not appreciated. For a short instant I didn’t move, choosing to misunderstand the command. She looked me in the eye, the intensity of her gaze increasing moment by moment.

I decided to teach her a new distinction. ‘Bring it here,’ I corrected. Michelle clearly didn’t care for my input, at least not at that very moment. ‘Bring’... ‘take’... she really didn’t care. It was the bunny she was after. And, in her mind, she had already communicated enough for me to get the message. A simple message, really. Physically transport one bunny from there to here.

‘It’s mine! I want it! ’ she said urgently, followed, very shortly, by the faint hint of tears that threatened crying could soon follow. I handed over the bunny. That Michelle had confused ‘give’ and ‘take’ really didn’t matter. In just a few months she had first understood the difference between ‘give’ and ‘take’ and, with a little more time, she was already in the habit of using the two words appropriately.

Okay, so now let’s hear it in Chinese so you will fully understand what the meaning is, and then I’ll read it to you again in English.

(Text in Chinese)

Okay, now you’ve heard the Chinese, you know what that’s all about, you understand the meaning, so listen one more time in English, and just get a sense of how much you understand the second time.

Layers of meaning

Michelle looked at me with that mischievous, almost wicked glint in her eye, and said: ‘Take it here... now.’ I was holding her yellow bunny which, as you might imagine, was not appreciated. For a short instant I didn’t move, choosing to misunderstand the command. She looked me in the eye, the intensity of her gaze increasing moment by moment.

I decided to teach her a new distinction. ‘Bring it here,’ I corrected. Michelle clearly didn’t care for my input, at least not at that very moment. ‘Bring’... ‘take’... she really didn’t care. It was the bunny she was after. And, in her mind, she had already communicated enough for me to get the message. A simple message, really. Physically transport one bunny from there to here.

‘It’s mine! I want it! ’ she said urgently, followed, very shortly, by the faint hint of tears that threatened crying could soon follow. I handed over the bunny. That Michelle had confused ‘give’ and ‘take’ really didn’t matter. In just a few months she had first understood the difference between ‘give’ and ‘take’ and, with a little more time, she was already in the habit of using the two words appropriately.

So, you’ll have a good sense now of how first of all understanding the meaning helped you to understand so much more of the English. Are there going to be words that you didn’t get? Of course, but the basic idea is that once you understand then you’re going to get much more and remember much more, much more quickly. So, because of this, with the 龙飞虎讲功夫英语 podcast, what we’re going to do is give you, every week, a Chinese version of the podcast and then the second week we will give you and English version of the same podcast. So, week one you will get to listen to the podcast, watch the podcast in Chinese, and you get all of the ideas, and then the next week you watch it, you listen to it again, but this time in English. And your attention can be focused on understanding how you use English to communicate the same message. Now with the 功夫英语 program we’ve done exactly the same thing. We have comprehensible input as a key way in which we have designed the content. So, we have lexical unit songs where you hear the Chinese and then you hear the English and it’s all put to music. You have a chance to read sections of The Third Ear in Chinese, and then you hear it in English, read by the author in the same way that I just read to you now. So on the basis of understanding the meaning already, you’re listening to the content in English, so your brain is able to much more easily grab hold of it, remember it, and make it part of your own English language vocabulary and the structure of English that you’re using.

So, remember, comprehensible input is extremely important to helping you learn English quickly, easily and effectively, so I hope you find lots of opportunities to use the approach to help with your learning.