Episode 127 - Reframing the idea of the need to speak

I was thinking about this originally because I remember a famous interview with a Chinese chess grandmaster, just when the Chinese grandmasters burst onto the scene.

And one of the things he said was that Chinese grandmasters had a particular style, probably because of Taoism.

He said, Westerners are always trying to do things, and they're not very good at being.

And it's true, when you play chess, you're constantly thinking of attacks you can do and threats you can make.

And he was saying sometimes you don't need to do anything.

You just need to be until it's the right time to do.

So in our modern culture, and especially in the kind of business world, we're obsessed with doing things.

We think that if we aren't actively producing, speaking or writing, we aren't learning.

We treat English like a sport where you have to be running at 100% speed all the time.

But this creates a massive problem.

Most learners spend all their energy trying to express themselves before they've actually absorbed the language properly.

They're trying to build a house when they haven't really put together the wood and the bricks yet.

And there's the danger.

If you try to build a sentence before you actually know how that sentence should be made, you'll end up using your own language as a reference.

Of course, you have nothing else.

I see this all the time, and it's perfectly natural.

When you're going into unfamiliar territory, you reach for the only map you own, and that map is your native language.

But for normal everyday sentences, you shouldn't need to translate.

You should be using English patterns that you've already encountered or seen and absorbed.