LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter Two

       ‘Language is the immediate gift of God.’

      Noah Webster

      In this chapter I will introduce you to the best language learner the world has ever known – that master of Verbal Intelligence, the human baby!

      I will show you the ‘secret’ formulas that babies use to achieve their astounding results. As a consequence, you will discover new approaches to: ‘cheating’/copying; play as a learning tool; the making of mistakes and ‘failure’; creating success from ‘disaster’; general attitudes to learning; and the incredible ‘genius power’ of Persistence.

      You will come to realize that, as a baby, you used all the right tools to develop your Verbal Intelligence. As your life progressed, you discarded them, and as a result the development of your Verbal Intelligence came to a grinding halt.

      However, all you have to do now is pick these tools up again and continue with your verbal growth. This time around, you’ll not only have the tools you once used to learn and remember thousands of new words – you will have the additional tools from The Power of Verbal Intelligence, which will enable you to use the ‘baby skills’ as a launching pad for your own accelerated development!

      You will end up as an even better vocabulary and language learner than the baby.

      Let’s start with the fascinating story of a Japanese musician, Suzuki, who made some amazing discoveries about your incredible Verbal Intelligence potential.

       Suzuki’s Story

      Suzuki was a Japanese teacher, musician and instrument maker. He had two special paradigm-shifts in his awareness that changed his life forever, and which are at this very moment changing the lives of millions and the way the world thinks about all babies and their Verbal and Creative Intelligences.

      Suzuki’s first revelation came when he was visiting a giant incubarium for Japanese larks.

      The Japanese breeders of these songbirds take literally thousands of eggs and incubate them in giant, warm, silent halls that act as a gigantic nest. Silent, that is, with the exception of one sound – that of a lark Master Singer, a veritable song-bird Beethoven!

      Suzuki noticed to his amazement that every little chick that hatched, automatically began to copy the master singer. After a few days he observed that each chick, having started out by purely copying songs, began to develop its own variations on the original Master Song. The breeders waited until the chick musicians had developed their own styles, and then selected from them the next Master Singer, and so the process developed.

      ‘Astounding!’ thought Suzuki. ‘If a bird’s tiny, tiny brain can learn so perfectly, then surely the human brain, with its vastly superior abilities, should be able to do the same and better!’

      This line of reasoning led Suzuki to his next revelation, which, when he announced it, made many of his friends think that he had lost a large number of his own brain cells.

      Suzuki, in a delirium of enthusiasm for what he had realized, rushed around telling everyone he knew of his remarkable discovery: that every Japanese child learns to speak Japanese!

      His friends and colleagues patted him on the shoulder, informing him rather firmly they were actually already aware of that. ‘But No! No!’ declared Suzuki, ‘they really do, and it’s amazing!’

      Suzuki was correct. Like Newton before him, he had discovered something that was so obvious no one could see it – that any baby, born in any country, automatically learns, within two years, the language of that country.

      This means that every normal baby’s brain is capable of learning millions of potential languages.

      If you, dear reader, had been born in and lived for the first few years of your life in a totally different country from that you are familiar with now, your own baby brain would have absorbed that language as rapidly and fluently as you now speak your own main tongue.

      If you, for example, were a Caucasian baby and had been born in Beijing, you would not have looked up with your little baby eyes and thought ‘Oh, Chinese. Far too complex for me! Think I’ll stay silent for the rest of my life!’

      Not only would you have learned the language of that country, you would have learned the specific language sounds of the special area of that country in which you had been born – your accent.

      What Suzuki had discovered was that the voice/ear/brain system was a virtually perfect copying machine, with an almost infinite capacity to learn the music (words and rhythms) of an infinite number of languages.

      What’s more, it didn’t matter whether the language was Chinese, Portuguese, Music-ese, Maths-ese, Art-ese, Burmese, or Japanese. So long as a baby was given the right learning environment and proper encouragement, it could learn anything!

      mimicking

      What Suzuki had discovered was the Brain Principle of Mimicking. This principle states that your brain is designed to learn by copying the best of what it sees around it. If it is allowed to do this, it will be capable of ongoing learning at an accelerated rate.

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