A Story about a Pottery Teacher
Hi Good morning, Julian here today. I'm going to try and answer a question that you've all been asking me again and again and again for the last couple of years now actually how to be a native speaker .
So first of all I should say that my answer to this question is probably not quite what you're hoping for. However I'm going to tell you a story so I want you to watch this video right to the end because I think the lesson that you'll get from this story will be one of the most important things that I talk about so yeah how to be a native speaker.Well first of all the definition of the word native . It's actually impossible to be a native speaker if you are a second language learner simply because native means to have been born into something. So if you are a native English speaker it means you have been born as an English speaker but yeah this is kind of obvious I know but there's a very important point that I want to make. We think of native speakers as being perfect speakers the ultimate goal we want to become like native speakers
But actually within the word native there is nothing that means perfect, there is nothing that means doesn't make mistakes, there is nothing that means fluent in English rather a native speaker is just somebody who was born into it. So you don't really need to be a native speaker. It's the process that's important.
It's only when you forget about this end result becoming like a native speaker, when you forget about the end result you get that end result. It's kind of ironic but kind of true.
So I want to tell you a story. This is not my original story and you know I actually don't remember where I heard this story ... but whatever this is a story about a pottery teacher. Of course pottery is making pots. A pottery teacher conducted a kind of experiment and what he did is he had a class a pottery class. In fact he had a class and he split his students up into two groups. He had group one and he had group two.
Lust going to get everything you produce, all the stuff you make and I'm going to put it on some kitchen scales and the more you've produced the higher your grade. If your pots come to this weight you'll get an A and if they come to this weight you'll get a B and so on and so on.
So we've got the quality group they have to make a perfect
pot and the quantity group it doesn't matter what they make they just have to make a lot.
So both groups all people go away and they start making their pots and then after a while everything's finished and it comes time to do the grades and the teacher grades everything and what he does is he lines all the pots up on the table and he calls some people from outside now these people have no idea about this experiment , these two groups they don't know who was in what group of anything like that .All they can see is pots lined up and
the pottery teacher says to all these people from outside which pots do you think are the best and which pots do you think they thought were the best , the pots from the quality group or the pots from the quantity group. Now you'd think it's be the pots from the quality group because their job was to make a perfect pot, the best pot quality pot they possibly can.
However it wasn't almost every single person from outside chose a pot from the quantity group. Why is that? the people in the quality group had so much pressure they had been told they had to produce a perfect pot so they're concentrating all their energy onto one pot trying to make this one pot perfect the best that they possibly can whereas this group it doesn't matter how good the pot is so they don't care they just have to produce a lot so they don't focus too much on one pot they don't think too much about they just produce pots again and again and again they more and more and more pots and what happens is the process of making pot after pot after pot makes that person a really great pot maker whereas these person who were concentrating on quality haven't gone through this process of trying to just make pots again and again and again they're concentrating everything onto one pot so they don't improve that much now this is a story about pottery .
However it is exactly the same for learning English. If you concentrate on the final product you'll find your progress to be very very slow whereas if you concentrate just on the process and forget about being a fluent English speaker, forget about being like a native speaker and just concentrate on the process,you’ll find you get to the place you want to be much much faster .
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A Story about a Pottery Teacher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NBHC1Drjd0
