Hi Ben,
I hope you are well. I thought you might enjoy this excerpt that one of my students sent me below. I talked to my students a few weeks ago about how learning a language can feel like going down a hill on your bike very fast in order to get up a hill on the other side without too much effort. In order to get up the second hill, you have to go down the first hill pretty fast – almost to the point of letting go and possibly losing control. If you do, you reap the benefits of getting up the hill and it feels good.
So, my student sent me this:
Here’s the excerpt from a book I read that reminded me of you and your speech about “letting go” in order to immerse yourself in learning a language. From Monkey Bridge by Lan Cao, as a Vietnamese war refugee reflects on teaching her mother English when they both fled to America: “My superior English meant that, unlike my mother and Mrs. Bay, I knew the difference between ‘cough’ and ‘enough,’ ‘bought’ and ‘through,’ ‘trough and ‘thorough,’ ‘dough’ and ‘fought.’ Once I made it past the fourth or fifth week in Connecticut, the new language Uncle Michael and Aunt Mary were teaching me began gathering momentum, like tumbleweed in a storm. This was my realization: we have only to let one thing go–the language we think in, or the composition of our dream, the grass roots clinging underneath its rocks–and all at once everything goes. It had astonished me, the ease with which continents shift and planets change course, the casual way in which the earth goes about shedding the laborious folds of its memories. Suddenly, out of that difficult space between here and there, English revealed itself to me with the ease of thread unspooled. I began to understand the levity and weight of its sentences. First base, second base, home run. New terminologies were not difficult to master, and gradually the possibility of perfection began edging its way into my life.”
I’m so happy that a sophomore in high school is getting this idea. I’m so happy I have learned about CI.
Emeka