Travel thoughts on language

Understanding your brain can help you learn English.

Here is the podcast.

The last three days I was in Northern Alberta for the annual directors' meeting and Christmas Party of the sawmill in which I am a Director and shareholder, Manning Diversified Forest Products Ltd. of Manning Alberta.

It takes nine hours to get there. I fly out of Vancouver, and then have to transfer either in Calgary or Edmonton and then fly north to Grande Prairie.

Grande Prairie is quite far north. When my colleague and Igot to Grande Prairie it was 30 below zero. From Grande Prairie we had to drive 3 hours through vast wide open country of fields, forest and snow. We also have to be careful not to run into deer or moose on the road.

I will be posting some pictures of the area and of the mill Christmas Party in a few days.

I managed to read three books on this trip. Flying is great for catching up on reading. I read "A User's Guide to the Brain" by John Ratey, "The Language Instinct" by Steven Pinker and "Le Francais, historie d'un combat " by Claude Hagege. I read quickly and skip areas that are of little interest to me.

Pinker subscribes to the Chomsky view that we have an instinctive language grammar inside us. Most of his examples were from English and I felt they were unpersuasive. "A User's Guide to the Brain" is a sort of neuroscience book for amateurs. Certain observations really stuck with me.

One was the idea of neural Darwinism or Darwinism of the brain. Neurons travel freely in the brain, especially in the early stages of development. Our brain remains plastic or flexible through life, changing to cope with the environment we find ourselves in. We can learn new things. We can recover lost functions after brain injury. Neurons compete for space in the brain. The more we train certain functions the better established those connections become.

If a person has a weak eye and a strong eye, the treatment is to close the strong eye to give the weak eye a chance to catch up, or it will not catch up. The connections for neurons in the brain that control the strong eye are too strong to allow new neural connections for the weak eye.

To me this has application for language learning. We not only have to practice the new language we are learning, ( the weak eye) and strengthen those connections in the brain, we also have to try to suppress the neural connections that control our native language,(the strong eye)  at least a little bit.

I want to look into the idea of doing overdose days as a technique for achieving a big step forward in language learning. If you want to make a big jump in your Engilsh, plan on spending one whole day where you will not use your native language at all! Listen, read, review words, watch movies, practice pronunciation, listen to songs, talk to yourself, but do it all in English. No native language at all!! Do it for 8-10 hours. Do it again th next day if you can. Do this from time to time.

The objective is not only to practice English and strengthen those neural connections, it also to suppress the connections for your native language in your brain. In the Darwinian brain, your native language connections are too strong and holding back your English neural connections.