
Be a thinking learner. Find strategies suitable for yourself. Constantly reflect on your study and sum up your experience. Improve your strategies. Now from the story that we have heard, that we have related, we can see that good language learners often think a lot while they are learning. They try out different strategies and then they try to find out if it works for them or not. Which one works for them, and which one doesn’t. And then they decide on the one that works best.
Be a good guesser. Guessing, in a way, is learning. Why do you guess? Because you are curious. And curiosity, is very important for learning new things. If you are not curious about anything, then probably you can't really learn. So guessing is learning. And curiosity is one of the probably motivating forces for learning. You may make a wrong guess, but you learn in the process. It doesn’t matter if you make a wrong guess. But you don't make wild guesses. You use your previous knowledge to make an intelligent guess.
Now here I'd like to tell you a story about someone whose name is very familiar to you, He Zhenliang. I think this name is familiar to all Chinese now. Because he was ..er..instrumental, he was a great help in getting Beijing win the bid for 2008 Olympics. He used to be a member of the International Olympic Committee, IOC. Later he became vice-president of IOC, next to Mr. Samaranch. In 1976, there was a table tennis championship held in Pyongyang, North Korea, he was one of the leaders of Chinese delegation. And I was a young interpreter working for the World Table-tennis Conference. None of us knew any Korean. The interpreters were provided by North Korea. So when we went anywhere, we would have the North Korea interpreters translate things for us. After the conference, we went sightseeing, we went to金钢山,板门店,and we also went to see various parts of Pyongyang. When it was half way though the trip, one day, Mr. He Zhenliang called the North Korean interpreter to his side and pointed to the Korean characters. He said, “Does this character pronounce something like this?” And then he said one sound, and the interpreter said yes. “Does this sound like this?” And the interpreter said yes even more surprised. “And what about this, does it sound like this?” He said, “Yes, so you know Korean! I didn’t know you could speak Korean.” Mr. He said, “No, I do not know a word of Korean. But from what you read, I guessed Korean language is an alphabetical language. There’re some consonants and some vowels. So I guessed these are the consonants, these are the vowels. So I made them up and pronounced them. All of us were amazed. Because all of us were with the group all the time and I was a young interpreter and a teacher. But I paid no attention to what the Korean were reading, while they were reading Korean characters. But Mr. He Zhenliang worked out the phonetic system nearly after about ten days. So of course Mr. He Zhenliang was both good at English and French. His first foreign language is French, second foreign language is English. But his ability, his curiosity and also his ability to guess intelligently really astonished us. So no wonder he became vice-president of IOC. I think he has a lot of qualities that we are not aware of. So from this example I really admired him even more. At that time, he wasn't on the IOC. He was only one of the leaders of the Chinese Sports Commission.
Don't be shy. Now this I've learned from LiYang. I used to go to I used to take walks along the little river behind our university. And every morning I would hear a young man shouting something. I couldn’t hear clear at first, so I went closer and I listened hard. And I found that he was shouting, “Don't be shy! Just try! Don't be shy! Just try...” I thought why did he shout like that. I didn’t know this came from LiYang’s class. Is that right? That’s right, later I found in CCTV program that LiYang told people, “Don't be shy! Just try!” So here I’ve learned from LiYang, don’t be shy. Take the initiative to communicate with people. Don’t worry about your “face”, and learn to speak in public.
胡文仲简介
胡文仲,1935年生于天津,祖籍江苏。北京外国语大学教授,博导,《外国文学》主编。曾任北京外国语大学副校长,高校外语专业教材编审委员会副主任、主任;高校外语专业教学指导委员会主任;欧美同学会副会长;国务院学位委员会外文学科组成员。现任:中国英语教学研究会会长;中国跨文化交际研究会会长;中国高校英语口语协会会长。
长期从事英语教学和研究、跨文化交际研究和澳大利亚文学研究,共出版专著6部,教材4部,编著10部,译著5部,在国内外发表论文数十篇。
专著包括
《英语的教与学》(外研社,1989年)
Encountering the Chinese (与Neal Grove 合著,美国Intercultural Press,1991年)
《澳大利亚文学论集》(外研社,1994年)
《外语教学与文化》(与高一虹合著,湖南教育出版社,1997年)
《跨文化交际学概论》(外研社,1999年)
《超越文化的屏障》(外研社,2002年)
《超越文化的屏障(修订版)》(外研社,2004年)等
主编著作包括
《中国英语教学(三)》
《大众英语》
《公务员英语》
《文化与交际》
《跨文化交际面面观》
《英美文化辞典》
《跨文化交际与英语学习》
《跨文化交际学选读》
《澳大利亚研究论文集(一)》等
曾任教
在澳大利亚悉尼大学、墨尔本大学、美国宾州州立大学、威斯康星大学、日本青山学院大学任客座教授
在英国兰卡斯特大学、澳大利亚国家图书馆任客座研究员
主要荣誉
1987年被评为国家级有突出贡献的中青年专家
1990年被授予悉尼大学名誉文学博士学位(Hon. D.Litt.)
2004年被授予墨尔本大学名誉教授级研究员(Hon. Professorial Fellow)。

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