To reach the level of mother tongue, you must first understand what "mother tongue" means, and secondly, understand what "learning English" means. Moreover, it is only when you become an adult that you learn English to your mother tongue level.
1. The mother tongue is acquired.
Too many people think that the mother tongue is as innate, unique, and genetic, or that it is the mother tongue that is first exposed to after birth. Wrong. Mother tongue is acquired, like nationality, and can be bilingual or multi-native. Or in order of proficiency, they are the first mother tongue, the second mother tongue, and the third mother tongue.
As long as the language can be understood accurately and used freely, it is a mother tongue. If you can understand part of it accurately and apply it smoothly, you can only use it as a foreign language.
Most Chinese have a dialect as their first mother tongue and Mandarin as their second or third mother tongue. But then Mandarin was used more, and thus rose to the first mother tongue, and the dialect was reduced to the second or third mother tongue.
If you learn English well, you can also become a native language. It is possible to become a fourth mother tongue, or rise to the first mother tongue.
2. Chinese adults can automatically learn English.
To truly know English, the core judgment criterion is "understanding", and it must meet 5 requirements at the same time to truly understand: direct understanding of English sounds, understanding once, understanding immediately, accurate understanding, and understanding all the time after understanding.
Human beings can automatically learn any normal language, and it is consistent with the general idea of children learning their mother tongue, they all listen to the sounds in the context more, and they will automatically understand some simple sentences, and then accumulate more and more. This is how Chinese learn English.
However, due to the long-term habit of Chinese, Chinese have all kinds of unsuitable rejection reactions to all aspects of conflicting English, such as inaudible pronunciation, grammar confusion, meaning comprehension, abstract words are not used to it, etc., forming a native language firewall, so that learning English is very difficult, and can not solve the phonetic, grammar, meaning of these barriers, can only learn half-hung level.
3. Chinese adults can learn the level of their mother tongue after solving the barrier.
The mother tongue is learned, and the difficulty for Chinese to learn English lies in the native language firewall. As long as you learn real English and break through the firewall of your mother tongue in the right way, you can turn English into your mother tongue.
As long as you learn these specialties well, you can completely hear the pronunciation, pronunciation standards, acquire the ability to correspond to the sound and shape, and understand the grammar rules and grammar ability, and understand English directly and accurately, then English is the same as the mother tongue.
I learned real English by myself, I didn't have much time to learn it, and I didn't study it seriously, sitting at home and watching British and American dramas, and in just a few years, I reached the level of my native language. Can fully understand British and American dramas, and understand them accurately. Every time I watch an episode, I can retell the lines and dialogues in a large paragraph, and I remember the new words after listening to them a few times, and I never need to memorize them, and I rarely look up the dictionary. Able to think about problems in English, speak correct and authentic English sentences, and speak long sentences as well.
If you have learned English since childhood, because there is no conflict between Chinese and English thinking, you can't understand the difficulty of Chinese people learning English, and their experience is not helpful to the majority of Chinese. Just as the experience of Chinese learning Chinese is not helpful for learning English.
4. At present, Chinese generally have zero English proficiency.
Too many people think that they have studied English classes for more than ten years, can cope with exams, get certificates, can chew books, can talk to foreigners on the surface, or can study abroad, so they think that their English level is very good. In fact, the vast majority of people can only decipher Chinese in their brains and pretend to understand, and basically do not understand anything about English itself. Only a little fake level, in fact do not know English.
But everyone doesn't know that they only have a false level, and they think that Chinese only have this effect when they learn English. Because that's how I learned it in school for a long time.
Chinese people learn fake English in school, but they decrypt English into Chinese and fake it, and then squeeze it out and write hypothetically. If you memorize it, you will have a little, and if you forget it, you will not forget it. International students also generally go abroad after practicing fake listening and fake speaking, and they have to continue to cramming to maintain that fake level. But because I don't know that there is only a fake level, I will only continue to memorize more, practice decryption more, talk more, and gnaw more books, and go black on the road of fake English. Of course, you will never reach the level of a native English speaker.
Everyone sees with their own eyes that international students who have lived abroad for decades cannot reach the level of their mother tongue, and they think that this is a characteristic of Chinese, but they do not know that it is just a characteristic of learning fake English.
Chinese treat English as garbled characters, memorize, decrypt or transcode, and cannot even "learn" English, let alone "become their mother tongue".
English is just an ordinary normal language, and everyone can learn it if you learn it with the right ideas. After solving the native language firewall, everyone can reach the native language level. Not God at all.
* Self-colorful English.
Original author: liston