【TED演讲】想学会一个语言？就像玩电子游戏般地去说出来 | Marianna Pascal | TEDxPenangRoad

so for the past 20 years i've been helping malaysians and other southeast asians to speak better english and through training thousands of southeast asians i've discovered a very surprising truth i've discovered that how well somebody communicates in english actually has very little to do with their english level it has a lot to do with their attitude towards english there are people out there who have a very very low level of english and they can communicate very very well one of them that i remember was a student a participant of mine named faisal he was a factory supervisor english level very very low but this guy could just sit and listen to anybody very calmly clearly and then he could respond absolutely express his thoughts beautifully at a very low level of english so today i want to share with you what is so different about people like faisal how do they do it and second of all why is this so important not only to you but to your children to your community and to the future of malaysia and third of all what's one thing you can do starting today if you want to speak with that calm clear confidence that people like faisal has so first of all what is so different how do people like faisal do it so to answer that question i'm going to take you back about 10 years okay so i was training staff at that time and my daughter at that time was taking piano lessons and i started to notice two really strong similarities between my daughter's attitude or thinking towards playing the piano and a lot of malaysians thinking or attitude towards english now first of all i should tell you my daughter absolutely hated piano hated the lessons hated practicing this is my daughter practicing piano okay this is as good as it got this is the real thing and she dreaded going to piano lessons because to my daughter going to piano lessons she was filled with this sort of dread because it was all about not screwing up right because like for a lot of piano students to both my daughter and her teacher her success in piano was measured by how few mistakes she made now at the same time i noticed that a lot of malaysians went into english conversations with the same sort of feeling of dread this sort of feeling that they were going to be judged by how many mistakes they were going to make and whether or not they were going to screw up now the second similarity that i noticed was to do a self-image you see my daughter she knew what good piano sounded like right because we've all heard good piano and she knew what her level was and she knew how long she'd have to play for to speak to play like that and a lot of malaysians i noticed had this idea of what good proper english is supposed to sound like and what their i see a lot of you nodding and what their english sounded like and how far they'd have to go to get there and they also felt like they were like my daughter just bad bad piano player bad english speaker right my english is not so good like sorry i cannot so i could see these similarities but i still couldn't figure out okay what is it about these people like faisal that are so different that can just do it smoothly calmly with confidence and one day i discovered that answer and i discovered it quite by chance it was a day when my computer broke down and i had to go to a cyber cafe now okay it was my first time and i discovered cyber cafes are disgusting places okay they're really gross they're smelly and they're filled with boys and they're all playing noisy violent games they're just disgusting places but i had to go there so i sit down and i start noticing this guy beside me and i become very very interested in this guy next to me now this guy is playing this game that is basically it's like shooting people until they die and that's it right that's the game right and and i'm noticing that this guy is not very good he's like in fact terrible right because i'm looking and i'm seeing like a lot of shooting and and and not much dying right but what really interested me was behind this lousy player were three of his friends sort of standing there watching him play and what i really noticed was even though this guy was terrible even though his friends were watching him there was no embarrassment there was no feeling of being judged there was no shyness in fact quite the opposite this guy's like totally focused on the bad guys smile on his face all he can think about is is is killing these guys right and i'm watching him and i suddenly realized this is it this is the same attitude attitude that people like faisal have when they speak english just like this guy when faisal goes into an english conversation he doesn't feel judged he's entirely focused on the person that he's speaking to and the result he wants to get he's got no self-awareness no thoughts about his own mistakes now i want to share with you a real true example to paint a picture of somebody who speaks english like they're playing piano and someone who speaks english like they're playing a computer game and this is a true story happened to me um a while ago i was in a pharmacy i had to buy omega my doctor said i should get omega and i go to the shelf there's tons of omega there's omega that's high in dha omega that's high in epa and i don't know which one to buy now the sales rep happened to be there and i saw she was like this well-dressed professional woman i walk over to her and i see this look as she sees me this sort of it's a look i recognize very well her eyes go all wide it's sort of that panic oh my god i gotta speak to a native speaker and she's going to judge me and notice my mistakes i go up to her and i explain my situation which which omega do i get and she starts explaining to me everything about dha an epa you could possibly imagine she speaks very quickly goes all around in circles and when she finishes no idea what to buy so i turned to the girl behind the counter now the girl behind the counter i heard her before her english level is very low but when i walk over to her this girl there's no fear in fact she's just looking at me you know that look like yeah okay so how right yeah i've been in malaysia a long time so i go up to her and i explain the problem epa dha she looks at me she says okay uh epa for heart dha for brain your heart okay or not i said yeah yeah i said my heart is really it's i think it's pretty good she says your brain okay or not i said yeah no no my brain is not as good as it used to be she looked she said okay omega dha can problem solve right so we've got two different kinds of communicators we've got the one who's got a high level but totally focused on herself and getting it right and therefore very ineffective we've got another one low level totally focused on the person she's talking to and getting a result effective and therein lies the difference now why is this distinction so important not just to you to your children but to the future of malaysia and countries like malaysia and to answer that let's take a look at who actually is speaking english in the world today okay so if we looked at all of the english conversations in the whole world taking place right now on planet earth we would see that for every native speaker like me there are five non-native speakers and if we listen to every conversation in english on planet earth right now we would notice that 96 of those conversations involved non-native english speakers only four percent of those conversations are native speaker to native speaker this is not my language anymore this language belongs to you it's not an art to be mastered it's just a tool to use to get a result and i want to give you a real life example of what english is today in the world real english today this is another true story i was at a barbecue a little while ago this was a barbecue for engineers engineers from all over the world and uh they were making hot dogs now some of the hot dogs were regular hot dogs and some were these these cheese hot dogs you know with the cheese in the middle french engineer is cooking the hot dogs and he turns to this korean engineer and he says would you like a hot dog and the korean guy says yes please he says do you want the cheese and the korean guy looks around at the table he says uh i i know see cheese french guy says hot dog is contains cheese korean guy doesn't understand him right so the french engineer tries again the hot dog is is making from uh with the cheese korean guy still doesn't understand he tries again he says the hot dog is coming uh is um coming from no the cheese is coming from the hot dog korean guy cannot understand now there's japanese engineer who's been listening to this conversation turns to the korean engineer and he says he understands okay everybody understands so this is what english is today it's just a tool to play around with to get a result like a computer game now the challenge is that we know in schools all around the world right english is not really being taught like it's a tool to play with it's still being taught like it's an art to master and students are judged more on correctness than on clarity some of you might remember the old comprehension exam in school does anybody remember in school when you would you would get a question about a text that you read you'd have to read through some text right and then answer a question to show that you understood the text and this may have happened to you that you showed that you understood the text but you got a big x because you made a little grammar mistake like this student now this student clearly understood paragraph four but no not correct because he left the letter n off the word environment but in the real world what would matter in the real world what would matter is did you understand the email or did you understand your customer so that you can go ahead and take action now the problem that i see here over and over is that people take the attitude they developed about english in school and they bring it into their adult life and into their work and if you're in a stressful situation and you're having a conversation and you're trying to give a result to someone and say it correctly your brain multitasks it cannot do two things at once and what i see is the brain just shutting down and you may recognize these three symptoms of the brain shutting down the first one is that your listening goes someone's talking to you and you're so busy thinking about how you're going to respond and and express yourself correctly you don't actually hear what the other person said and i can see a lot of nodding in the audience the second thing to go is you're speaking your mind sort of shuts down and that vocabulary you do know just disappears and you the words don't come out the third thing to go is your confidence and the worst thing about this is you may only be confident because you cannot express yourself clearly but to the person talking to you they may misunderstand this as a lack of confidence in your ability to do the job to perform so if you want to speak english like faisal with that great confidence here's the one thing that you can do when you speak don't focus on yourself focus on the other person and the result you want to achieve imagine a next generation of malaysians all with that wonderful confidence in communication that faisal has at any level of english because let's remember that english today it's not an art to be mastered it's just a tool to use to get a result and that tool belongs to you thank you [Music]

Channel: 新山赵子龙

Views: 2,920,980

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Id: mwpdffpixBY

Length: 15min 7sec (907 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 12 2019