Did Li immigrate?

"Sending children abroad, with a language environment, children can naturally master English." Some irresponsible intermediaries say this, in fact, this is a fluke. Angelababy, a professor of cognitive imaging research in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States (@ Rouge Well of Longtu), shared the following frontier achievements in brain science research in the "Brain Development Course for Children's Lifelong Benefit". I will share my observations.

The behavior of a child before he speaks is the basis of his speaking. From 18 to 24 months, children begin to master languages. They can speak about 200 words and express many meanings. They start to gossip, are curious about all kinds of things that adults say, and even start asking about other people's things.

Babies use probability statistics to segment language vocabulary, that is, to find the law of sound from the outside. The so-called "sense of language" is actually the law of a language summed up from many samples of a language that you often hear. From this point of view, many times our school education system does not conform to the learning rules of the human brain, because children learn by summing up the intuition of statistical laws, while school education children learn by algebraic symbol system.

For this series of problems, the current scientific hypothesis is that people "assemble" social functions at birth. Babies can communicate with others, make people laugh and even flirt with others. Suppose you are holding a 3-month-old baby, and when you say "ah", he will also make an "ah" sound; When you "hahaha" at him, he will imitate you and make a "hahaha" sound. This rhythmic interaction is no different from teasing (or flirting) between adults. When adult men and women flirt, girls shake their hair and boys laugh; The girl leans forward to talk to the boy, and the boy listens carefully ... these movements are rhythmic. Psychologists have found that the more synchronized people are, the deeper their affection for each other.

Learning a mother tongue and learning a second language are two completely different processes, because the hardware used by the brain is different because of the age difference. Babies are "world citizens" and have the ability to learn any language. But in the process of learning their mother tongue, they will gradually lose the ability to distinguish certain sounds, because these sounds do not exist in their mother tongue. For example, there is no need to distinguish between "R" and "L" in Japanese, so the Japanese can't hear the difference between these two sounds, and they will encounter difficulties in learning English.

Children under 8 years old, especially infants under 1 year old, do not have this difficulty in learning a language. They can hear any subtle differences in pronunciation. When adults teach them a language at this stage, they can retain the ability to distinguish the pronunciation of any language. Super listening can ensure that they speak a foreign language without any accent. Many old immigrants around me went abroad to study in middle schools when they were teenagers, and their parents thought that they would naturally learn English when they went to school. As a result, they have taught foreigners for half their lives and can only speak a few words of Piqin (Pidgin foreign language).

When learning a language in infancy, the brain area responsible for thinking and the brain area responsible for language are not separated, so native English speakers are used to adverbial postposition (saying time and place at the end of a sentence), while native Chinese speakers are used to adverbial preposition (saying time and place at the beginning of a sentence). Therefore, children who learn English late, although they can learn it well, will habitually put adverbials in front when speaking and writing, and their thinking habits are different from those of native English speakers.

I have met many foreign students who are fluent in spoken English in my life, and I like to say "suspended structure", such as "it takes a lot of practice to write well" (it takes a lot of practice to write well. Chinese is indeed fluent, but the infinitive phrase of this sentence in English can't be modified as "practice", and the real subject must be "person", so the correct statement is that it takes a lot of practice to write well. To write well, people need a lot of practice. )

In my opinion, going abroad only gives you a better language communication environment. Without systematic language learning, you still can't reach the "usable" category that can accurately convey your intentions, which largely determines the quality of your life in other places. For example, my former boss opened a shop where he could have tea with repeat customers, but the topic always revolved around decoration, because when the guests said "I like watching Li's videos very much", the boss couldn't even tell the words in the words were actually Chinese.

So is it necessary not to study English abroad? The more languages a child has, the more concepts he has. Some concepts exist only in a specific language. If you master a language, you can have some unique thinking tools. Therefore, it is not only of practical significance for children to learn a foreign language, but also conducive to the shaping of thinking ability. For example, there is a word called "pellucid" in English, which means to let the brightest light shine somewhere, but there is no word with this meaning in Chinese.

Some people say that translation machines are so developed now that all materials can be translated. I think sometimes the problem is not how to read the document in front of you, but how to find more information. In life and work, if you want to get more comprehensive and accurate information, you need to search for it yourself. If you entrust the task of finding information to others, you may be misled and restricted to some extent.