2026-07-10
7 分钟Hi.
Today I want to talk about the fifth language skill.
Now we've all heard of and are aware of reading, writing, speaking, listening as being the four key language skills.
Well, I'm going to tell you today that there is a fifth language skill and it's called forgetting.
Natural, relaxed forgetting.
It's a very important part of language acquisition and I'm going to explain why.
I'm sure all of us have had the experience that if we try to remember a name,
a name that we know of a person, of a famous person or someone, a friend,
and all of a sudden we can't remember that name,
the harder we try to remember, the less likely we are to remember.
As soon as we let go, there's a greater likelihood that we are going to remember.
Now, we know through the work of Jeffrey Hinton and others
that every exposure with the language is, in effect, not an effort to retrieve something specific, but rather
part of a process of regenerating a network of connections in our brain weighted slightly differently each time.
So that we need to have, and I've said this before,
many exposures to the language in a relaxed way so that the brain can accumulate these networks of connections.
That form our control of the language.
The more relaxed we are, the more often we expose ourselves, the more willingly we accept
the fact that we're going to forget things and not deliberately trying to remember them or retrieve them,
the sooner we're going to build up this mass of competence in the language.