To: Kelly Parker
The librarian Mrs. Swe Swe Myint of Cornell University Library commented on my book, saying, “Your book will be of great and long-term value to scholarship in multiple disciplines.” Contact telephone number for Mrs. Myint is 607-255-9488
My book was published in December 2010 with the initial retail price of US $79.99 . Now, it is selling over $135. I am not quite sure what my publisher (LAP) is smoking but am sure that they believed that they have lost money by selling too cheap at the beginning.
In the Introduction to The Common Sense, Paine wrote, "Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason." (page 3)
But, I think that reason can still prevail. I will discuss my view on the language acquisition to prove this point.
The current paradigm of linguistics has three unstated premises:
Premise 1 -- The mother tongue is acquired naturally, as a living habit. Even those with mental handicaps can often acquire a mother tongue to some proficiency.
Premise 2 -- A second language is always more difficult to acquire than the first language.
Premise 3 -- The first language is kind of a learning obstacle for learning a second language. Thus, many classrooms of ESL have a sign "English Only."
With this paradigm, the immersion teaching (Language immersion) and the 5 C's (Communication, Culture, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities) become the central pillar for the ways of second language acquisition.
But, the followings are two important facts.
a. It takes about 5 years for a person to acquire the verbal part of his mother tongue at home and another 5 years in school to master the written part of the language.
b. In general, it takes about 5 years or less for a 10 year old kid to acquire a second language.
On the surface, people learn the mother tongue with immersion. But, down deep, there is another important mechanism, the anchoring. One learned verbal as the anchor, and with that anchor to learn the written.
Thus, with the mother tongue as the anchor, learning the second language “should be” much easier than learning the mother tongue.
The memory of a person at any given day is a “finite” number. Using that finite asset to spread over the 5 C’s is a very inefficient way of using that limited resource. The best way is to identify some anchors for the second language and to master those anchors one at the time.
Chinese language was viewed as one of the most difficult language to learn. Yet, by using the anchor-methodology, it can be mastered in 90 days. The details of this anchor-methodology are available at
http://www.chinese-word-roots.org/nparadi.htm .
Today, the new paradigm for second language acquisition is having two parts.
i. Finding the anchors of the second language.
ii. Memory management on learning those anchors.