Towards a speculation beyond learning controlled by our conscious.
Some experiences in the last years radically changed my perception concerning what I can learn and how I can do it. It is neither a new learning theory nor a breakthrough discovery. It is just something that was always there, but I never noticed =)
I will tell the story backwards. In the last year I was talking with a colleague from France about coffee. He told me that drastically started to drink coffee without sugar and, in a couple of weeks, began to like it. Until then I just know people who always drank coffee without sugar, or the opposite. I was curious and I decided to try.
The first days were terrible. My organism was trying to figure out why was I drinking such horrible thing. Then a strange adaptation got underway. Our organism is built to adapt; and adapt often means learning. In some weeks my taste for coffee changed. In the absence of the monophonic sugar, I refined my perception for the polyphonic coffee.
For most people learning is always a conscious activity, in which we are in control of the process, reading, memorizing and organizing ideas. But how we learned to talk, to walk and to taste?
Many people will argue that the taste is not something we learn. It seems one of those unavoidable characteristics that we born with. However, if we do not learn at least part of our taste, how to explain common tastes shared by cultures and communities?
Our brain is a malleable and huge network, connected to each part of our body, constantly adapting, constantly learning. Most of this process is not driven by our conscious control. Nevertheless, we can channel its action in our benefit.
Besides the coffee case, there was another interesting experience of English learning. Years ago I started to listen English interviews as a tentative to evolve my English listening skills. In that epoch, I was a good English reader and a median writer, but I could understand almost nothing when I listen someone talking in English.
Now, think about how you learned to talk. Your brain was submerged in an ocean strange sounds, trying to figure out what was happening. Gradually, our plastic network of neurons started to recognize sounds, then more elaborate structures. The learning process includes experimentation. For this reason, we started to make sounds, then to try words and so on. An impressive process, which have been addressed by researchers all over the world.
My approach to learn English listening was inspired in this process. I started to listen interviews in English. In the beginning I cannot even devise the words (do you agree with me that this seems the coffee experience?). I listened again the same interviews many times and, progressively, my brain started to recognize words, then phrases, then complete interviews. It was a slow process. It took, say, six months so I could understand something; a year and a half or more to feel confident. But it is an endless refinement. I developed the habit of stay listening almost every day, mixing things. The Web is plenty of free resources: audiobooks, interviews, radios, music etc. It is a new and satisfying experience to download books in the LibriVox, for example, and to listen completely by audio The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Origin of Species. You will now consider new values, as the ability of the audiobook reader -- by the way, I recommend Dorian Gray read by John Gonzalez.
These experiences will vary due to many factors. I am trying now the same approach to learn French, but it is much more difficult, since I trying to learn listening before reading =) It is also difficult to learn drinking tea without sugar; its flavor is not that strong as coffee and the quality of water matters much more.
Anyway, I am now paying attention to this learning process intertwined with my daily life. It is always good to have new things to learn, which make us happier and more fulfilled.
