Today, I want to talk about mindset, the mindset for success and language learning.
Now you may be aware of the book, The Growth Mindset, but I'm going to get
into something more than just a growth mindset, and I'm going to refer to the
Taoist or Taoist philosophy of Zhuangzi.
And now the reason I got into this whole discussion is I was sitting in my car.
Of course, now we have podcasts.
So in my car, when I'm driving anywhere, I'm listening.
So I was listening to that.
Persian language podcast, which I'm following, which is very interesting.
And I will be providing links to it.
If you're learning Persian, Parseh, and he has this series on the roots of
morals or morality in Persian, of course.
So my understanding comprehension is not a hundred percent.
But it's still fascinating.
And he of course talks about the evolutionary origins of our morality
and the morals of the behavior of, uh, animals, chimpanzees.
And so I'm learning all these things.
And one of the great joys of language learning is that you can
learn about things of interest to you while learning the language,
which is what I'm doing with Parse.
And when I'm in the car listening to podcasts, I go to Spotify
where I originally found Parse.
Okay.
And I find this podcast discussion between Jordan Peterson and Mark
Andreessen, who is one of these tech guys, very wealthy person from California.
And they're appalled at the woke mobs, which in many ways I sympathize with.
And of course they exaggerate what they're saying, but Jordan Peterson goes on about
how we should be guided in our behavior by the, uh, And he refers primarily
to, uh, English language authors, like I can't remember who, Shakespeare,
Chaucer, maybe John Stuart Mill, or Jungian psychology or, uh, Dostoevsky.
And, you know, one of the concepts that I, and my sense that I've always held to be
very important in language learning is a certain degree of cultural weightlessness.
So if you want to speak like a Frenchman, or if you want to speak like
a Chinese person, you have to somehow get out of the fact that you are.
It's in my case, in English speaking Canadian, that you actually want to
get into that culture, get into that other set of, you know, behavior and,
and, and the language, of course.
So if we, uh, take this attitude of cultural weightlessness, then we say,
why is Jordan Peterson so fixated on Western thought and Western religion?
Uh, if we look at the world, say, and I'm going to refer to Zhuangzi, the great
Taoist philosopher, who's whom I don't fully understand, but I find interesting.
He lived about 300 BC at that time, 300, 500 BC, the bulk
of the population, the world.
Lived in Asia, China, in India, even in Central Asia.
I mean, the Persian empire at that time, uh, was, uh, 30 to 50 million people.
I mean, even in Central America, there were 10, 15 million people, apparently.
I don't know.
I wasn't there to count them, but it's important to take a step back
from your own culture when analyzing human behavior, because human behavior
is not just a matter of your little tribe somewhere or cultural in group.
And of course, when I follow Parsha's.
Um, and he talks about the extent to which, you know, empathy and moral rules
have existed in the animal kingdom to some extent, even birds can sympathize
with each other when we consider that the Neanderthals are our cousins, not
our ancestors, but our cousins, and that they wandered the world for 250, 000
years before, uh, Homo sapiens, uh, you know, So we have to have a certain amount
of humility in making statements about what is moral behavior to suggest as
Dostoevsky does, that if we don't believe in God, therefore there is no morality.
Well, all the people who came before the Bible was written.
Those people had morals too.
They had some kind of moral conduct, uh, rules of behavior that worked
for whatever society they were in.
So we need to have that kind of detachment.
And with that, I said, let's look at Zhuangzi's teaching
and how that influences us.
When it comes to language learning, and of course Zhuangzi represents this Wu
Wei, like in other words, effortless, effortless approach to achieving a lot.
And in particular, I'd like to refer to four of his very famous parables.
And any of these things that I refer to, you can check up on ChatGPT, which
is a wonderful tool for getting sort of a shortcut to at least a superficial
knowledge of a variety of things.
And I've mentioned before that ChatGPT works a bit like language learning.
In other words, it's this sort of massive input of information, uh,
some degree of predicting what's gonna come, sort of iterative error
correction, whereby gradually we get a sense of the relationship between
facts or the relationship in the case of language between words and
structures and how a language works.
So it's a bit of a parable itself with language acquisition, but let's
get back to drawing as parables.
The first parable that I would like to refer to is the parable of the
crooked tree, which I used in my book, The Linguist on Language.
I even had a crooked tree on the cover.
And the gist of it is that if you follow your interests, if you respect
your personality as an individual, then you may be a crooked tree, which
for the carpenter in Drung's parable, the crooked tree is not very good for
making furniture or for building homes, but it follows its own personality.
And.
And maybe because it's crooked, you know, the wood chopper won't chop down that
crooked tree because it doesn't want it.
But it's important to follow your natural instincts and follow your personality.
So that was the parable of the crooked tree, which I took as a
metaphor for language learning.
You got to follow your interests and not be guided too much by rigid rules
of grammar, for example, or tests or other things that people submit you to.
Just follow your own interests.
And you will acquire the language.
So in the sense of relax and joy and, and accept the crooked tree is the
first parable that I'd like to refer to.
The second parable that I also referred to in a book is Zhuangzi's parable
of the fish trap, where he says, you know, we need fish traps to catch fish
once we have the fish, we don't need the fish trap, we need, uh, you know,
words for meaning, once we have the meaning, we no longer need the words.
What he's saying is, and this applies to language learning,
the main thing is the meaning.
So if you're working your way through a text, as I do on LingQ, and I look up
words and I find a dictionary definition, which I forget, like Zhuangzi throws
away the fish trap, it doesn't matter.
I am delving into and getting into the meaning of the text as I do in my
Persian podcast, which I read and look up words, talking about the, the roots
of morality and so forth and so on.
I'm totally immersed in the meaning.
And I'm oblivious to the fact that I'm looking at words and forgetting words.
It doesn't matter.
Gradually my.
The ability in the language is improving because I am relaxed.
I'm enjoying it.
I'm engrossed in the meaning of what I am reading or listening to.
The next parable, which I again would encourage you to look up is Drunkard's
Parable of the Butcher, who is effortless in the way he butchers the meat and
he knows exactly where the joints are.
And he's done it so often that it's just one fluid, effortless motion.
And that's the.
State that you want to achieve in your language learning.
You aren't trying to refer to rules of grammar, trying to remember,
you've just heard it so often.
You've read it so often.
You've used it so often that gradually these things become second nature.
And so you are in fact, learning and growing in the
language in an effortless way.
And of course it is a process of, as with chat GPT, iterative error correction.
So I'm sure the odd time the butcher hits, uh, you know, a sinew and
therefore then gradually the more he continues doing it, he has a natural
sense of the best where to place his cuts when he's butchering the meat.
And finally, the fourth of Zhuangzi's parables is the parable of the
butterfly, where Zhuangzi had a dream that he was a butterfly.
And then when he woke up, he no longer knew whether he was a butterfly who
thought he was Zhuangzi or Zhuangzi who thought he was a butterfly,
who had thought he was a butterfly.
So here again, it gets back to this idea of cultural weightlessness.
When I am with speakers of another language, I try to have the feeling
that I don't know if I am an English speaking Canadian, if I am a, Persian
speaker, if I am, and I can get myself immersed into their culture.
And, uh, I can also flutter above so I don't have to be anchored
in the Western canon or into any particular cultural, uh, process.
Tradition, I am out there fluttering about enjoying whatever language I
want, whatever cultural tradition I want, placing equal weight, let's say
on Omar Hayyam or Zhuangzi or, uh, the great philosophers of Central Asia.
Uh, again, I would, if I would use chat GPT to look up the list of the amazing
philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, Muslim scientists of Central Asia between,
I don't know, the year 800 and the year.
1200 or, or, or whatever.
So this butterfly image of, of cultural weightlessness is
also one that, that I enjoy.
So we end up with these sort of four elements of a mindset,
which is relax, enjoy yourself.
Don't worry about how well you're doing.
Take tests.
Don't, uh, you know, allow people to criticize you.
Don't criticize yourself.
Just relax.
That's the R.
The E is enjoy.
I enjoy my Persian podcasts about, from Parsay.
And I keep looking for content that I'm going to enjoy.
It's very important to, to me that I, in order that I can continue with my language
learning, I have to enjoy what I'm doing.
So E is enjoy, A is accept.
Accept the mistakes, accept when you forget, accept the sense very
often that we aren't progressing.
Believe that you are progressing.
I accept that I'm progressing.
I just spoke with my Persian tutor.
I don't think I'm doing well.
She said, you've really improved.
Accept that you're improving as long as you're enjoying what you're doing.
And then finally be determined to succeed.
In other words, persevere.
You have to stay with it.
You have to believe that you're going to get there.
Sometimes that's difficult to do because the progress is not obvious,
but if you have that mindset that you're determined to succeed and
you have the other three elements of relax, enjoy, accept, and you're
determined to succeed, you will succeed.
So that's my little diatribe today on mindset for success.
And, uh, in my next videos, I'm planning them out now.
I'm going to be talking about the importance of reading.
I'm going to be talking about revisiting a language, like say Persian, which
I left for six months while I focused in, uh, focused in on Turkish and
what I do when I come back, uh, but I'm also open to suggestions.
So if you would like to hear me talk about some other subject, please let me know.
All right.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.
