Getting Started Overview
Welcome to Chapter 2! So far, we've mostly talked about the high-level ideas of The English Tea Break Method, but now we're going to get started learning English.
If you've already been learning English for a while, don't worry, a lot of this information will still be new to you. We're going to be talking about how to start learning English in the ETB Method way.
In other roadmap lessons, we talked about how you learned your first language. You did that by listening and mimicking the people around you. And it took a long time! Now that we're adults, we can use techniques that will make the language-learning process much faster. You won't have to learn like a baby again!
We can speed up the beginner levels of learning English by just familiarizing ourselves with a few aspects of the language. Before we get started on that, let me explain the idea of your brain as a file cabinet.
The File Cabinet Analogy — Schema Theory
Your brain is like a file cabinet. It stores files in folders and then relates those files and folders to other files and folders to form connections.
Here's what I mean.
Think of everything that you know related to the idea of a dog. They're animals. Some people keep them as pets. They're hairy and have four legs. The idea of a dog is like a "folder". Each piece of information related to dogs is like a "file" that is inside your dog folder. And the dog folder itself might be part of a large "animal" folder.
When we're learning new concepts, it's a great practice to create "empty folders" before learning anything about that topic. In the Key Principles lesson, I gave you an overview of the main ideas of The ETB Method, including the idea of the file cabinet.
I didn't tell you much about the file cabinet idea, just that it exists. That created an empty folder in your brain. No information or files, you were just given the awareness of a concept's existence.
Doing this helps your brain to form connections between topics without being slowed down by the details of those topics; the details come later. By learning things this way, you can reduce your "cognitive load", or the amount of work that your brain has to do to learn something.
Here's what you learned about the File Cabinet analogy in the Key Principles lesson:
- There's an idea called the file cabinet analogy. It exists.
- It's related to cognitive science and learning somehow
- It's an important point of the ETB method
Now, we're filling in the details, we're adding files to that folder by explaining things more thoroughly. The file cabinet analogy is often used when referring to the "Schema Theory" in psychology.
We're going to use the file cabinet analogy and create some empty folders to help you get started learning English faster!
Empty Folders for Starting English
Creating empty folders is just about becoming aware of new concepts. Your brain will naturally start filling in the folders with the relevant pieces of information over time. That's the goal of Chapter 2 of the roadmap. Getting Started with English is just about organizing the main concepts of the language into the right area, the right folders.
What we DON'T want to do is become completionists in any one area. Not yet. We don't need to know 100% of the English grammar concepts, we don't need to learn every sound that exists in the English language or all of the vocabulary.
If you have a goal to master English grammar or to be an English singer or author, you might need to master these areas of English eventually, and that's cool! But don't try to completely fill any of those folders yet, it will slow you down.
Let's create a couple of empty folders, so you can see what I mean.
- Noun - A person, place, or thing.
Examples: dog, house - Verb - An action word.
Examples: run, sleep
That’s it. You now have empty folders in your brain for nouns and verbs. The folders aren't completely empty, we've already added a tiny bit of information to each one. When I say to create empty folders, I just mean to become aware that ideas exist, that's all. You don’t need to worry about special cases, exceptions, or memorizing lists.
In the following lessons of Chapter 2, we're going to be creating empty folders for English topics. Your goal is simply to familiarize yourself with them, not to memorize everything perfectly.
The reason creating empty folders works so well with the English Tea Break Method is that we're mostly learning from immersion. It's the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a language. But starting immersion sounds like random noise; we can't make sense of anything. But by being aware of these things, by having the empty folders already created, your brain will automatically begin the process of placing bits of information into the correct folders.
Instead of experiencing noise during immersion, you'll already have an idea of basic grammar, sounds, alphabet, and some vocabulary. While immersing, your brain will say, "This new thing is like that other thing that I saw or heard before!", which helps you learn much faster than your brain saying, "I've never experienced anything like this".
Our brains learn by tying new information to old information. So by creating empty folders, it's like we're building the outer frame of a jigsaw puzzle first. Then, when you begin immersing, your brain will fill in the center of that puzzle much easier because the frame—the structure—already exists.
Chapter 2 Plan
Now that you understand the purpose of this chapter, what are we going to be doing?
In the next lesson, we'll talk about creating a goal. As I mentioned before, learning a language is a hard thing tied to an awesome thing. Learning a language is hard, but we do it so we can do awesome things like travel, get a job, or meet new people. We lose motivation when we study for months and forget to think about the awesome thing that we want from the English language. That's why we want to have a strong idea of why we're studying English in the first place.
After building a goal, we're going to learn a bit of grammar to start filling in that grammar folder in our brains. Then, we'll start collecting the tools and resources required for The English Tea Break Method, followed by some starter content to use for immersion.
We'll conclude the chapter with an Action Plan. Every chapter from now on is going to have an Action Plan that gives you a clear idea of what needs to be done at that point in your learning journey. It will tell you how to study, where to spend your time, what to use, and give you some clear expectations of what results to expect.