Transcriber: Patricia Álvarez Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
You've been hearing a lot in these sessions
about brain and language, and also some references to China.
I'm going to try to pull those all together
into a good news story,
which is about how you can use your very powerful adult brain
to learn something that is pretty difficult and also amazing,
a foreign language, and especially Chinese.
I am a linguist by passion and by training.
So when I moved with my husband to China for a three-year stay
it was part of the bargain that I would learn some Chinese.
I knew that this was going to be a pretty difficult undertaking as an adult,
because we know that adult brains can be forgetful, get distracted,
and have trouble with recall.
And there is also a special problem with accent,
that it is really hard for adults to pick up a good foreign accent.
A good native accent, you can't never quite be there.
But I thought, if Henry Kissinger doesn't have to worry about this,
we don't have to worry about this either.
(Laughter)
There is also a lot of good news about brains.
We used to think that once you were older than a kid,
you couldn't learn a foreign language anymore,
but neurologists and linguists have pretty much dismissed this
and said that your brain doesn't become static or solidify,
rendering useful to learn a foreign language.
The mature brain can actually do lots of things,
and many of them apply directly to our sense of language
and how language works.
We have the power to absorb much higher level of processing
that is available to us.
If kids just seem to absorb languages, like sponges,
adults can actively engage in the process of foreign language learning.
For example, when you look at signs like these,
you can tell that this is a warning, but by looking at them carefully,
it takes it out of the case of being a warning
and it is actually inviting us to some kind of disaster or such.
Since we know a lot about languages,
the patterns of languages of nouns and verbs,
you think, well, smoking is one and why not photoing?
We know that with verbs you got do and undo, tie and untie,
why not recycle and unrecycle?
Or enterness? It should be a noun, just like entry or entrance.
Moving into the world of semantics, you kind of know what evil rubbish means,
and you can look at this and laugh,
but the reason that you know
is that you know that evil has some characteristics
that usually point to bad moral character,
while rubbish doesn't have any bad moral character.
Same thing with vegetables, you've got vegetables
but they are not going into the realm of private.
Or stampede. Stampede is a good word
but you think of lots of legs running as fast as they can,
not just one pair, leaping up to squat on the toilet.
(Laughter)
So, the mature brain can also make use of your lifetime
of wealth and experience
to help you process language in more than a literal way.
We can put language in bigger contexts or recognize reference and metaphor,
and we know propaganda when we see it.
We can pick up the tone of the messages.
In China, in the run up to the Olympics when we were there,
there was a campaign called "Let's get civilized",
where they were trying to encourage the people
to behave in a much more civilized manner to show their country in a good light.
There was a lot of bathroom Chinglish going on during this campaign,
although some of the vocabulary choice has worked against it.
(Laughter)
With our mature brains, we can also grasp metaphor.
Chinese is a really blunt language but they can also beat around the bush
to deliver a message very softly.
A nice way to say: Keep off the grass.
And sometimes their sense of language
just tells us that there is too much nonsense going on.
We should just look at the pictures and then move on from there.
(Laughter)
Now the tough part. Now, it's time for your first Chinese lesson.
How can you apply some of this strength of your very powerful brain
towards learning Chinese? I have two lessons for you today.
One is speed learning Chinese vocabulary, and the other is about
some really confusing prepositions in Chinese.
First, the vocabulary.
One of the ways that language can add a lot of new vocabulary
when it needs to create a word for a new concept or a new idea,
is to put two small words together.
And often they will put two opposites together.
You create a new whole with these opposites.
Just like the sense of ying and yang.
Another way to create new words is to latch on to one word,
in this case "dian", which means electric,
and put together a whole group of words around it.
The thing this does for you as a language learner
is to take things out of the realm of arbitrary
and make them a lot more sensible.
If you are lucky, you can remember all this
and you can even make up some new words and sometimes you are likely to be right.
Your second language lesson. (Laughter)
These are two really confounding words in Chinese:
"Shang" and "xia", which are opposites.
First one is pretty easy. "Shang" has a reference to time,
it means in the past. "Xia", in the future.
OK. No problem. Straightforward. But now here comes trouble.
"Shang" and "xia" also refer to place,
where you have "shang" meaning on top of and "xia" meaning below.
So, for the new language learners this is nothing short of confusing
because it is not in my world of English and how the world works
that you should have a pair of words that has both these references,
to time and to place.
But the good news is that you can use your powerful adult brain
to create some kind of mnemonic device
or visual aid to help you keep on learning things like these.
This was my grid.
You've got time and place.
In the southeast corner it's "xia".
Whenever I say it, I can go to that visual aid.
In the northwest corner you have "shang",
meaning above in space and behind in time.
Whenever I wanted to learn these words,
I could come to my very good visual aid and do it.
So, what have we learnt here?
We've learnt that as adults you've got a powerful, quite supple brain,
where you can engage your higher word order processing
and your accumulated experience in the world
and send to the language, to help learning a foreign language,
even Chinese.
So, today, this is your first step, and, as Edie said, time moves really fast
so by next week you will be fluent.
Thank you. (Applause)