【老外说】是一档以“采访”老外为主的节目，帮助大家更好的了解中西文化差异，一窥英国人、美国人日常生活。 每周一更新。本栏目适合精听/泛听。可做听写练习。
说起学英语，很多人第一反应就是“背单词”，翻开单词书第一页abandon, abandon, abandon... 然后就没有然后了。那单词应该要怎么背呢？我们来听听今天这位外国老师的看法吧！
I don't really like grammar. I don't th原由网ink anybody does. And I majored in media communications (媒体传媒) when I was in graduate school. So I think I can write and speak fairly well. And I never really became enmeshed in (和…纠缠在一起) grammar. I remember in grade school (小学), we had to diagram sentences (图解句子) and all that stuff. But that just seems such a pain.
When you are speaking, your grammar is not as rigid (死板的)as when you're writing. So if you're doing a PhD thesis (博士论文), that's one thing. If you're talking about fashion or restaurants or something else that's rather different. And most of the time, people talk about fashion and restaurants and miscellaneous (各种各样的)life stuff. I just want people to be able to share ideas.
Gwen
Do you think grammar plays a very important role in daily speaking?
There was an English teacher online, he's like one of the Top English teachers. I think his name is El Hoge. And he said that native speakers make a hundred mistakes a day in their grammar when they're speaking. So I'm not too convinced that it’s essential. It depends on the situation and the audience and a few other things. But basically, English is perhaps a little unique in that you can really mess it up and still be understood. And you can listen to someb原由网ody who messes it up and still understand what they're saying. I think that's a great feature.
Gwen
I heard tons of people speak like “there's many people” “there's a lot of...” in a plural way. But actually in grammar book, the strict grammar tells people you have to say “there is” plus singular.
Yeah. There are things like contractions (缩约)mess up a lot of people, then they confuse people with peoples and stuff like that, or I want to go to German. //www.58yuanyou.comNo, you want to meet German people. You want to speak German. You want to eat German food. But you wanna do it in Germany. So there's a lot of mistakes like that running around loose. And a lot of languages like, was it Portuguese? I think it might be Portuguese doesn't have a structure like that at all. You take something like Spanish and it has genders for things.
Gwen
And French.
And French does, too. And I'm sitting here at my la mesa, my female table. And I'm wondering what in the world is so female about this table? It makes no sense at all. So I kind of prefer to step back.
And it's so easy to get hung up on words. And my students at the Chinese university had to have the perfect word. And they had these textbooks, 10000 English words. It was crazy. I looked at their CET6 and there were some words I never saw before. But it's like, OK, so when are you going to use this word assuming you learn it in the first place? So my approach nDFhRheVuUis, say what is the idea that you're trying to convey? And what is an easy, understandable way of sharing that idea?
Gwen
The easier the better?
Yeah, that's kind of the whole point of language, as far as I can tell. Sharing ideas and people get all hung up on words. There are few people that are able to handle big, professional words. So you hand your document to somebody or you say this speech with these big words. And people either are not going to understand you or they think that you're trying to show off (炫耀).And it misses the whole point, I think.
Gwen
So where do you recommend English learners to learn words?
Reading, like novels. Depending on their level, I promote Alice In Wonderland, for instance, or Harry Potter, big one. I encourage them to watch Friends. Of course, everybody watches Friends. And listen to TED talks.
It depends on the level of how good they are now, what their intention is. But I think it's important to see it as kind of a road that ideas travel on. And it could be a bumpy (崎岖不平的)road. Or you could have an old car, or it could be a superhighway and you might have a fancy car. But you're still gonna get from point A to point B. That's a mission accomplished in my book.
And also I think people are not aware of how much communication is nonverbal (非语言的). Beyond the words, something like, I’ve heard estimates between 40% and 60% of communication is without words. It's how you gesture, how you look at somebody, the intonation of your voice, all that stuff carries a great deal of meaning and weight. So that's something that I think needs more emphasis. You can play a game where you pantomime (哑剧)everything. And how can you communicate I want a piece of bread without using words? You can do that.
As far as learning words goes, I majored in science in college. And so I'm still kind of a science guy. And so I look at learning methods. And the brain is programmed to memorize things that are very unusual, and very emotional. So basically pictures and feelings. So you can think back to something that happened to you or make up stories. And all of that is going to help you learn new words.
I remember walking into a classroom in Chongqing, there are a lot of students. I think they were probably getting ready for a test. But they were repeating these words over and over and over. And I walked up to one o原由网f them and I said, I see you're looking at this book, and what word are you learning? And he told me the word, I don't recall what it was. And I said, great, what does it mean? And he told me the definition that he memorized. I said, good. Can you use it in a sentence? Nothing. em… I forgot. So it's like, OK, you have a brick sitting on the street. What good is it doing? Not a lot. If you want it to be useful, you have to put it with other bricks and build a wall.
孤立地背单词，最后却不能应用到实际表达中，可谓事倍功半。希望大家能从这一期的老外说中能得到一些启发哦！
大家还想听“老外”说些什么？欢迎留言哦
-等你很久啦！-
