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Lydia Lui
Dear KJ,
I hope you don't mind me calling you KJ(電影《音樂人生》的男主角名字)instead of your full name. Calling you KJ reminds me that I should not think I know Ka Jeng personally. It is KJ in the 90-minute film that I met. When director Cheung reminded us that KJ, your documentary, is after all a documentary, a film, the young musician we see through the camera is never the whole person that he is. The director's purpose of the film is to give inspirations(n.啟迪). Audience in different positions may see a different person in you. It doesn't matter. Hopefully, with what they see, they will have a point of departure to reflect on their own life. For me, I am most impressed by your reflection on your relationship with music and realize how similar this is to mine on my relationship with(English)language. Let me share one scene.
There is this scene where young KJ talks about his missing practice after arriving Czech for recording. The father questions his son's not practising piano for a long time. KJ thinks there is no need to practise all the time. He knows the musical piece and now just needs to "think about" it. His father is shocked by his son's answer. Some of the audience was also shocked. I overheard them saying, "Mischievous!"(adj.淘氣的)I didn't feel the same way. I thought he really means it. When you achieve a certain level of techniques, practice is not so important, comparing to have your own ideas─your interpretation. Interpretation involves understanding the musical piece, music itself and perhaps yourself.
I recall what students said to me, "You don't need your brain in learning English." They said so as if learning language does not involve thinking, or even the less thinking the better. Many schools are doing more and more immersion programmes, discouraging Chinese and technical terms in class. They do this as if learning English does not involve thinking, but feeling it or just being there. A tutorial centre boss said, "Drilling(n.鑽研)is all I do." He said this as if learning English does not involve thinking, but is all mechanical......In my head, these words are just too much noise. What is language learning? Is it to feel, practise or to think? Or to just blank out?
The words of Ms Loo, KJ's piano teacher, popped up, "Internalize(v.使內在化)......Let music be part of you......"I thought about her words a lot. And I am now starting to sense that maybe language is the same. Maybe you have mechanical drillings in the beginning like you practise the techniques for a musical instrument. But that is only the start. As you move on, you have to internalize the language and let it be part of you. So when you achieve this, you don't feel that you are paying effort in using the language. But to achieve this, keeping on doing grammar exercises won't help. It is how you think about language and language learning that matters. Conceptualizing language as a tool to success, one may focus on examination skills. Conceptualizing language as a communication strategy, one may focus on functional, conversational interactions. Conceptualizing language as a reflection of our background, one may focus history and culture of the language. When you approach language differently, language is a different thing to you. When you are surrounded by English speakers, you don't automatically absorb what they say and therefore learn English through "immersion". Because I believe students, no matter how young they are, they think.(As early as seven, they think about life and death like KJ. At least I did when I was seven.)They can easily shut their ears at will if they conceptualize English as "a world that they don't belong".
See how interesting the mind flows and relates things! With all the confusions, there is one thing that I am quite sure─you are not that bad at expressing yourself, KJ! This letter tells you why.
Best wishes,
Lydia Lui ■lydialuieng@gmail.com
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