39 years old, still a foreign language age? The 5,000-year history of civilization is entrenched in a palm-sized brain, how can English be squeezed into it? !
It's a bit embarrassing for someone in their 40s to learn English. But, after all, someone was in the car and followed the car.
There are also those who have learned very well, such as Wang Yanning. Her experience of learning English tells you: English, it's hard work, polished and polished, it can really become a good object.
English, this Lao Shizi... You
shouldn't ask a woman's age, but this story starts from age and cannot be avoided, so I have to "violate the rules".
Wang Yanning started learning English at the age of 39, and from A, B, C, D... that was 17 years ago.
In 1991, Wang Yanning came to Canada. She was alone and didn't understand English. She sat on the plane and looked around, feeling uneasy. She finally landed and walked out ignorantly. The people in the hall who picked up the plane called here and waved over there, but no one paid her any attention. I called two friends, one was not found, and the other was picked up by a woman from a friend's house. The woman said, "Why should I pick you up?"
What should I do? Where can I go? She dragged her luggage and walked dazedly in the crowd, when she suddenly passed a mirror, and a figure flashed in it, a white suit jacket and a tie-dyed long skirt that gradually changed from green to black. A very elegant outfit, but wrapped in a thin body, carrying a pale face due to anemia and hypotension. That figure turned out to be herself, she said, "that day, I really looked like a little devil."
Suddenly, she saw several Chinese characters "University of Toronto". It was like a dark cloud split and a ray of sunshine was shed, and she went straight to the sunshine. A U of T classmate gave her the address of a hotel near Chinatown, and a black taxi driver drove her around. It was after twelve o'clock in the middle of the night, the sky was dark, the people in the dark walked through the dark streets from time to time, and her heart was also dark. They went around and around, but couldn't find the hotel. Black people are very talkative, as if they are always suggesting something, and she can only "NO", everything is "NO", and the solution is exhausted. In the end, the black person seemed to say, "Go may home." In panic, she shouted in both Chinese and English: "No! No! NO! NO!" She
finally saw it where she saw the Chinese characters again. My compatriot, is a student-like person. She tapped on the window, jumped out of the car, and ran over. The student politely said: "May I help you (can I help you)?" She said loudly: "Can you speak Chinese? Stop speaking that unfortunate English, will you speak our words?" It was solved. That night, she stayed at the hotel.
After renting a house, it's time to live. She doesn't know English, so Wang Yanning has no choice but to choose jobs that don't require a "mouth": do housework for others, scrub the bathtub, the massive bleeding caused by uterine fibroids flows down her legs, the bathtub is stained red, sucks the ground, and the wires are all over the place. After entering the vacuum cleaner, the host said to her helplessly and politely: "We'll give you money, I'll give you money, I'm sorry, let's go." As a worker in a factory, the rumbling sound made her dizzy and couldn't stand; in a restaurant When she was serving the plate, before the guests were seated, she sat down and was sweating profusely; she was doing public relations in an association, and a friend told her that it was okay to not speak English, as long as her feelings kept up, the only thing she could do was "smirk" "; Doing business as a partnership, before I even got a clue, I lost 600 yuan first...
Wang Yanning, who has been pampered for decades, and has a nanny to take care of her daily life, asked herself: Why am I so stupid! What can I do! ? A kind old man said to her: "Go learn English." She said: "I have no more than 600 yuan." The old man said: "If you don't stop, you will lose another 6,000 yuan."
English, If you don't speak English, what country did you come from? ! But since he came out, because he didn't have a "mouth" and went back "dumbly", wouldn't it be more futile to go abroad? ! Today, I have to bite the bullet and move forward.
In fact , in the first week of arriving in Toronto, Wang Yanning began to take English tuition classes. During the day, it was a bilingual class in Chinatown, and at night it was a pure English class, but the results were not great. That's right, it took half a lifetime to write that square character and say that "whatever" is derived from it, but now it's really embarrassing for her to have to roll up her tongue.
The British philosopher Bacon said: "All knowledge is memory." The key to learning a language is memory, and memory must have several prerequisites, the most important of which are: age, 0-6 years old; brain "clean". Experts say that young children can learn languages without a teacher; the brain records too much information, like trees and forests, and the bigger the forest, the harder it is to find a single tree. Wang Yanning did not have the advantage, so she studied very hard. She said: "My bet is only here. I don't know who I'm competing with. I always choose a class with a higher level than me, so it's more difficult. The teacher is very polite, but it can be seen that she is in her heart. I’m very upset. Four months later, I was always asking my classmates, but later, my classmates started asking me, and I’m very proud.”
A year later, she chose a regular adult school, starting from Level one, and has been learning General grade 12. It took her 4 years to achieve high school graduation. During this time, she worked in a coffee shop with the help of simple English. Work and study take up almost all of her time, and she only sleeps four or five hours a day.
Wang Yanning, who was already very thin, collapsed. Due to bleeding from uterine fibroids, her hemoglobin was only half that of normal people. "If she fainted a few times, she might not be able to come back," she said. I came out, probably because I was afraid I would die there." Wang Yanning was transferred to a specialist. Blood loss requires blood transfusion, she refuses, for fear of contracting AIDS. The doctor smiled and said, "If you are like this, you will die on the road at any time. You can't wait to get AIDS." She had to have an operation right away, but she refused again. There was only one reason: "No, I have to go to class. I haven't asked for leave yet." The doctor had nothing to do with this stubborn patient, and said to her: "Hurry up and get treatment, I will arrange an operation for you at any time." It was September. With the illness, it dragged on for more than three months. On December 23, after finishing the last class of that semester in the afternoon, Wang Yanning was admitted to the ward.
Medical terminology, let alone English, even in Chinese, what is "evoked potential", what is "aortic arch", what is "Australasia syndrome"... Who knows how much? ! How to communicate the surgical plan? Had no choice but to learn first, hoping to see immediate results. Wang Yanning flipped through the dictionary, copied the words, and wrote two densely packed pages. The doctor pointed out English, and she pointed out Chinese, and used the "equal sign" method to draw up the method of "cutting": where does the incision go, what to cut, and what to keep . She has no relatives in Toronto, and she signed the order herself.
In the postoperative coma, she kept shouting two words: "Cold (cold)!", "Pain (pain)!" You know, she speaks English! It's actually English! ! English can walk out in an unconscious state, is it a bit of mastery? Losing a part of the body, but getting what you can get, it's worth it!
When Wang Yanning returned to the class, her language talent gradually showed. "During that time, English really improved by leaps and bounds. I wanted to speak and write every day." In the homework assigned by the teacher, she described the first half of her life in English. In "Jennign's Tale" (Wang Yanning's story), he wrote: "Because my parents insisted on the traditional Chinese educational idea - learn mathematics, physics and chemistry well, and travel the world without fear, I lost three excellent opportunities to enter the literary and art group. The talent in this area has been stifled. Now, I am trying to protect and discover my son's artistic talent. She is very artistic, and her paintings at the age of seven or eight have begun to be favored by art lovers in Taiwan, Japan, Germany, etc. Collected, performed in theaters and TV stations in her teens, organized her own rock band at 13, she is guitarist and vocalist..."
She wrote in another article "Changing" (changing): "In my life I have experienced 3 major changes, and the only one is my own choice, which is going abroad. From the inside to the outside, from the depths of the soul to the external life, the complete change of language is the process of re-understanding myself. I realize that I am not only a person, but also a woman. Women's values are not only 'women can hold up half the sky', 'what men can do, women can do', women's values are not only jobs and honors, Career and fame, the value of a woman is far more precious and fulfilling than that, being the human half (man's half is a woman), a mote (a particle of the universe), a part of that 'big self'... "
The deeply emotional essay moved the teacher, and she choked and shed tears several times. The teacher of the student's good composition had to read it aloud in the class, but Wang Yanning's was the only one that the teacher couldn't read.
English is more or less comfortable. Wang Yanning is full of ideas and passion. Sometimes, when she sits in the cafe of the school, she is suddenly inspired, and a small English poem will appear. She wrote it on the waste paper: "I am a drop in the sea, I am a grain of sand in the desert...Oh, I am me. An atom of the universe, a grain of the globe, I breathe with the cosmos, immense, vast, huge and forever.” ( I am a drop of water in the sea, I am a grain of sand in the desert, ah, I am me. I am an atom in the universe, I am a particle on the earth, and I breathe with the universe and feel that wonderful, infinitely vast eternity ). The teacher scrutinized the line of poems and praised: "You have a good feeling for literature, you are still a poet." Wang Yanning did not dare to call herself a poet. What she enjoyed was the joy of regaining her "freedom".
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