Learning a language? Speak it like you’re playing a video game | Marianna Pascal | TEDxPenangRoad5/11/2019 A French engineer is cooking the hot dogs, and he turns to this Korean engineer, and he says, "Would you like a hot dog https://brick-knight.com/south-africa-legalizing-online-gambling/?"
And the Korean guy says, "Yes, please!" He says, "Do you want the cheese?" And the Korean guy looks around at the table, he says, "I no see cheese." The French guy says, "The hot dog is contains the cheese." (Laughter) The Korean guy doesn't understand him, right? So the French engineer tries again. "The hot dog is ... making from ... with the cheese." Korean guy still doesn't understand. He tries again, he says, "The hotdog is coming from - No, the cheese is coming from the hot dog." (Laughter) Korean guy cannot understand. Now there's a Japanese engineer who's been listening to this conversation, turns to the Korean engineer and he says, "Ah! Cheese ... integrator!" (Laughter) He understands, okay. (Laughter) Everybody understands. So, this is what English is today. It's just a tool to play around with to get a result, like a computer game. Now, the challenge is that we know in schools all around the world, English is not really being taught like it's a tool to play with. It's still being taught like it's an art to master. And students are judged more on correctness than on clarity. Some of you might remember the old comprehension exam in school. Does everybody remember in school when you'd get a question about a text that you read, you'd have to read through some text, right? And then answer a question to show that you understood the text? And this may have happened to you that you showed you understood the text, but you got a big X because you made a little grammar mistake. Like this student. This student clearly understood paragraph four. But no, not correct! Because he left the letter N off the word "environment." But in the real world, what would matter? In the real world, what would matter is did you understand the email, or did you understand your customer so that you can go ahead and take action? Now, the problem that I see here, over and over, is that people take the attitude they developed about English in school, and they bring it into their adult life and into their work. And if you're in a stressful situation, and you're having a conversation, and you're trying to give a result to someone and say it correctly, your brain multi-tasks, it cannot do two things at once. And what I see is the brain just shutting down. And you may recognize these three symptoms of the brain shutting down. The first one is that your listening goes. Someone is talking to you, and you're so busy thinking about how you're going to respond and express yourself correctly, you don't actually hear what the other person said. And I can see a lot of nodding in the audience. The second thing to go is your speaking. Your mind sort of shuts down, and that vocabulary you do know just disappears, and the words don't come out. The third thing to go is your confidence. The worst thing about this is you may only be [un]confident because you cannot express yourself clearly, but to the person talking to you, they may misunderstand this as a lack of confidence in your ability to do the job, to perform. So if you want to speak English like Faizal with that great confidence, here's the one thing that you can do. When you speak, don't focus on yourself. Focus on the other person and the result you want to achieve. Imagine a next generation of Malaysians, all with that wonderful confidence in communication that Faizal has, at any level of English. Because let's remember that English today is not an art to be mastered, it's just a tool to use to get a result. And that tool belongs to you. Thank you.
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