>>Deb Fallows: Okay. So now it's time for your first lesson in Chinese, in mandarin
Chinese. My name is Deb Fallows and I'm here for talk
to you today about how to use your adult brain to learn foreign languages.
I'm a linguist by training and by passion, and most recently have spent the last four
or five years studying Chinese. My husband Jim and I moved to Shanghai about
four years ago. He was writing for the "Atlantic Monthly" magazine. I was working for the Pew
Internet Project and also spending lots of my time learning Chinese because we knew that
every time we went out of our door in Shanghai, we would run into our neighbors who were basically
people who look like this who spoke very little English, and it was going to be my job to
take this on. I was intimidated because Chinese is a very
difficult language, and we all understand that kids -- or think that kids learn it and
by the time you're an adult, it's all over, you can't learn it anymore.
But recently, in the last 10 or 15 years, neurologists have said that you would be wrong.
That's not the case. It's all about that your language -- that your brain really doesn't
solidify as an adult and you can still have a lot of suppleness to learn new languages.
But we're in some bad habits. As adults, we approach a new language and think, "I can't
do this, I'm embarrassed, I feel awkward, everybody else is doing better than I can,
and how can I possibly deal with this?" But there's also a lot of good news. Your
mature brain can handle a lot of higher language processing.
We know about semantic associations and generalizations. We know about grammatical structures. And
we have a whole lifetime of real-world context and life experiences to apply to this.
So for example, when you see a Chinglish sign like this in Beijing, you know that something
is wrong with the grammar. You know that something is missing. You know that eliminating footprints
isn't quite right, but with your great powers of semantic association, you can say the grass
is wrong, don't step on the grass. Similarly, when you look at a sign like this,
you think, okay, you know what it means but something's all wrong here. It actually means
the opposite of what it's saying. And furthermore, you're not going to say "carefully," you actually
mean "be careful." [Laughter]
Okay. Now you're on your own but you can put this together. My best advice for something
like this is that you do not want to order the fried crap with royal style sauce, particularly
because it doesn't look very good and it costs four times as much as the crispy pigeon.
Okay. Now you've got your powerful brain. How do you apply this to learning Chinese?
Here are your two lessons. The first one is about vocabulary.
The way language is developed is when you want to expand your lexicon, if you have a
new idea or a new concept or a new thing that you have to name, you can either go to borrowing,
which English did a lot of, or you can do what Chinese does all the time, which is to
make compound words. You take two very simple little words that
you know, if you've studied a little bit of Chinese, slap them together, and you come
up with your new concept. A lot of these are opposites. Dongxi, east-west,
means stuff or things. My own personal favorite is diannao, electric
brain, which means computer. So what's the point here?
The point is that you can use your higher brain processing and learn some language patterns
with vocabulary you can -- it takes it out of the realm of being arbitrary, rote learning,
and into the realm of something you can manage more quickly.
Now, here's another problem with Chinese. [Laughter]
It's how to make sense of the completely nonsensical. There are two very powerful small words in
Chinese, xia and shang. Xia has a reference to time. It means in the future. Xia zhou
jian, next week. Its opposite is shang. It means in the past.
This is all fine and this is all good and it makes a lot of sense and it seems easy
until your teacher introduces, on the same day, that these two words also have a reference
to place. Xia means underneath, shang means on top.
So you can work on this logically, but trust me, when you're trying to put these two things
together in a single day, you have to do several double back flips to come up with the right
word because you're trying to adjust time and space.
So use your powerful brain and get some kind of mnemonic device or visual aid.
I created my own to this solution. A/B is the time line; C and D is all about place.
So I knew xia went in the southeast quadrant, shang went in the northwest quadrant.
Okay. To sum this up, what do we know? We know that you have a very powerful brain
which is still quite supple and it's no excuse that you can't learn a foreign language. You
can do it. And you can rely on your very powerful brain processes of what you know about language
to help you learn in the process of learning language better and more easily.
So like just about half the people in this room, I have a new book out. It was published
last week. It's called "Dreaming in Chinese" and it's all about my efforts to learn the
language and what that taught me, more importantly, was about the Chinese people and the Chinese
culture. Thank you.