I never thought about that learning English would cost all my time one day. But now it does. These days, I am studying English from day to night, remember vocabulary, write in English, think in English, read in English, surf English sites, everything is about English. I am very happy. Usually I feel difficult to express myself, because I am so accustomed to think in English that I don't know how to speak in Chinese, and I cannot speaking English either for nobody understand and my oral English is still very poor. Many educators criticize that it is dumb English. Perhaps, but I really don't think so.
Some would like to give an example that a 5-year-old English native child can express himself clearly. Why? Because they listen and speak in English all the time. As a consequence, we should listen and speak in English the more the better when we are learning English, then we can keep away from dumb English, no matter remember vocabulary or not. It sounds right, but in my opinion it is absurd. Let's think about how a baby learn its mother tongue. From the day a mother bore a baby on, the parents speak to the baby day by day. Cite a Chinese baby for an instance, when it is 7~8 months, it can pronounce Papa or Mama, and begin to say some single charators such as "灯" when it is one year old. A baby can only say some single charators while its parents speak to it all the time. We can find that a 3-year-old child usually make some mistakes in word usage, a 5-year-old child can not write. Even if they can not write, all these years,all these communications are processes remembering vocabulary which we usually ignore.
In China, English education begins from the 3rd grade while children are about 10 years old without any English words accumulation. A student is required to have 800 words in hand in 9th grade, 3000 words before university, and 4000 words when graduate from a university. I am very curious how can a graduated person expresses himself with 4000 words, and these 4000 words are all independent. I can imagine that a 10-year-old English native child to express himself clearly must have at least 3000 words in hand though he can not read and write them, he really know them and know how to use them. It seems that we can use the words we know to express what we can express. But quickly you can find how absurd it is to express what we can express. Can a graduated student speak like a pupil? Would they have the same interests as a pupil?
Once I red a composition written by an primary school's English teacher of which the title is WE CAN NEVER LEARN THE REAL ENGLISH. It mentions that we can not offer the children an English environment that they can listen and speak enough, because not all parents can speak English. It sounds that if the parents can speak English, the children can learn real English. What is real English? Being able to speak and listen? Being able only to read and write in English is not real English? I can consider that the teacher doesn't know English at all. No matter what we learn, we must accumulate many fundamental knowledge, and then the theory, finally we can use it smoothly. Before we know enough words and grammar, we can not speak and write clearly.
On the limit of the rainbow slept iridescent treasures.
3.19.2009
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