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Do you remember the first time your drooling, goo-goo, ga-ga child
first saw a dog? Perhaps you had the baby in a stroller in the park. He
was at that age where he could sit up and point at things he saw. Then,
suddenly there it was, his very first dog!
Predictably, he began
making all manner of sounds indicating his joyous emotional reaction.
He maybe pointed, reached, made loud squealing sounds, and made lots
and lots of drool. You in turn, hoping he wouldn't soil his diapers
from the excitement, joined in the fun and said something along the
line,
"That's a dog, Bobby. That's a big dog. Dog's go bow-wow. Can you say, bow-wow?"
What
was happening in your kid's mind was, among other things, the
association of the image of the dog, coupled with his excitement, and
his hearing you join in the excitement (double reinforcement), and
hearing the word dog from Mom or Dad. This is how language becomes
acquired.
1. The need to see the image over and over again.
2. The need to imprint the image.
3. The need to hear the word.
4. The need to make the associations.
What
little stroller-bound Bobby went through were the four steps, and
probably a few hundred, if not thousands times of repeating this
experience, to learn the word, "dog." This is how Speech Centers are
developed in our brains.
To develop fluency in a second language you must develop a SPEECH CENTER in your brain for the new language.
A
study, done by two major research centers in the United States, was
reported in the 1997 issue of Nature scientific magazine. In a study
entitled, Distinct Cortial Areas Associated with Native and Second
Languages, a major discovery was made in the understanding of memory
and speech acquisition. This study and its results have been replicated
in Germany as reported by Nature in 2002.
The study revealed the
amazing fact that autonomous speech centers, located in different
points in the brain, exist. If someone spoke French, English, and
Spanish, there would be a SPEECH CENTER for each language. When you
speak in English, there is an English Speech Center that fires in your
brain. If you are bilingual and speak in both English and Spanish, then
you have a SPEECH CENTER for each of those languages. If you speak in
Spanish, your Spanish Speech Center fires off. These points, or Speech
Centers, are distinct and separate for each language and are not
connected. But here is the most amazing this study revealed.
Not
only is each Speech Center for each language you know separate and
distinct, THESE SPEECH CENTERS HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONNECTION TO MEMORY.
Shocking? That's not the half of it.
What
this is saying is when we speak in our native tongue there is a point
or center for that language that fires off. This enables us to speak
without defining words or wondering about grammar. When you
acquired—REALLY ACQUIRE—a foreign language, your brain has developed a
separate and distinct point or center for that language. When you speak
in that new language you are speaking from that speech center and NOT
from your memory.
What traditional language-learning methods do
is try to program the short-term memory in hopes that it will land
somewhere in the long-term memory and “stick.” What is needed is to
resort to something as closely related as possible to how you learned
your native language. You must develop a speech center.
You need a method that approximates, as closely as possible, the same method that produced your native speech center.
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