درسنامه اصلی

Play – Main Lesson

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to our VIP topic for this month, Play, a very serious topic this month, so you better be serious about it.

How do you become more successful and enjoy life more?

When I think about work and play, I think of adults and children. The adult world is all about work, being serious, getting things done, results. Children, it’s all about play. They just have fun. They’re out there running around going crazy.

And yet, especially when we talk about language learning, who do we admire? Who do we all want to be like? The children. This is one of the most common comments I get from members all the time. Oh, children learn English so easily.

If a family moves to the United States from Japan, let’s imagine the family, of course, we have the parents, the adults, the serious people. Then they have two young children and they’re all going to try to learn English. When they come to the United States what happens?

The parents sweat and toil and suffer studying vocabulary, studying grammar, working, working very hard. And what do the kids do? Oh, they find American friends, they run around and they play.

For many months they don’t speak any English at all. They’re totally oblivious. They talk to their American friends in Japanese and their American friends don’t understand anything they’re saying. They don’t care either, they talk to the Japanese kids in English and this just goes on and on for months.

They play, run around and have fun. They watch television. They watch cartoons. What happens a few years later? A few years later the kids are speaking English with a perfect American accent, fluently, effortlessly.

And typically, what about the adults? Still suffering with a strong Japanese accent, usually speaking with a great amount of hesitation and translating in their head and then making grammar mistakes and when they make a grammar mistake, getting really upset about it and worrying, “Oh my God! My English isn’t good enough.” Then they work and toil some more.

So let’s talk about play, because play is actually a sort of magical ability, magical method for increasing learning and getting better results, as we see with the children. So what is play?

What is the difference between a child playing and an adult working?

1. When children play or when you play, you’re doing something simply for the enjoyment of it, simply to do it. You don’t have a lot of heavy serious goals about it.

That child does not decide, “I must learn 1000 vocabulary words this year.” They’re just playing with the kids, having a good time, communicating as best they can. It’s just for fun. They’re just having fun with other kids, that’s it.

1. Another thing, when children play, when people play, they’re just in the moment.

They’re right here and now. They’re not worrying about the past and all their past mistakes and problems.. They aren’t focused on the future, worrying and fretting about will they make it? Will they be successful? They’re right here, right now, having a good time.

1. Another element of play is that it’s flexible.

There’s not a bunch of rigid rules. If there are rules in some kind of game, they’re very loose. If an enjoyable, flexible, loose process, that’s play. Why is play better?

First of all, play is better for learning. It’s a better process. It’s a faster process. By better I mean more effective. It means you develop skill in a faster and more effective way when you’re in that spirit of play than when you’re seriously working and toiling.

We’ve already seen this with the example of children and adults learning English. It’s also true of sports. I recently read a book called The Talent Code and this book looks at how people learn different talents, different skills.

And, one of the key things they studied was soccer, what we call soccer and everyone else calls football. They looked at different countries and why certain countries seem to produce a lot of really great soccer players. Of course, the most famous of all would be Brazil.

And what they noticed was that in Brazil, children learn their best skills, the fundamental skills of soccer through play, not through rigid lessons, not through rigid techniques and rigid coaching, but rather, they play this free form game in the streets and gymnasiums.

It’s play-play-play-play- play and that’s where they develop those key lightning fast abilities to control the ball, to move, it’s through play.

When they become adults and professionals later, of course, they do focus on some techniques, but they develop those fundamental skills through play.

1. Another great thing about play is its more productive. You actually get more done when you’re playing than when you’re seriously working all the time.

I think the main reason for this is that when you’re enjoying something, when you’re in the moment you’re doing it for fun. It’s easy to keep going, you want to keep going. You’ll end up doing it more, for a longer period of time, with better concentration than when you’re forcing yourself to work.

This whole idea of a work / play dichotomy is a very adult way of thinking. A dichotomy is a split between two things. So it’s two things: work and play. If we split that, it means work and play are two different things, this is a dichotomy.

This is how adults typically think, there’s work and you do that very seriously and you work, work, work and that’s how you make money and get things done.

Then there’s play and that’s what you do after work to relax and recover from working so much. So as adults we think they are these separate things, these separate processes.

Children don’t think of these things as different. They are one. Children tend to combine these things. While they’re playing, they’re also learning. While they’re playing, they’re getting things done. They’re playing and working at the same time. It’s much more effective and much more fun.

They learn best, children learn best, while they’re exploring and playing. Children learn things much more effectively through games, playing and exploration than by sitting in a classroom trying to memorize things from a book.

I’ll give you one of my favorite stories about this, which is my little nephew Masanori. Masanori is an amazing kid. He’s only three years old and yet, at the age of three, this little boy knows more about mushrooms than anyone I’ve ever met. He’s a little mushroom expert, it’s astounding.

Why mushrooms? I have no idea. For some reason, this kid is crazy about mushrooms.. He reads books about mushrooms.. Truthfully, his mom reads books to him about mushrooms.

When he’s outside, that’s all he talks about. He’s always searching around on the ground looking for mushrooms.. He loves to go picking mushrooms with his mom in the forest.

They gather up all these mushrooms and they come home and Masanori wants to go through all the mushroom books that his mom has gotten from the library and then he identifies them.

He wants to learn their names and he always wants to know, can you eat this one? Can you not eat this one? Is this one poisoned? He thinks they’re cute and fascinating.

This kid knows the names of countless mushrooms, I can’t even tell you how many. All I know is that every time I visit him, the first thing he says is kinoko, which in Japanese means mushroom. Then he always wants me to get on the Internet and show him pictures of mushrooms.

So is Masanori working? No, he’s not working. He’s having fun. For some reason he thinks mushrooms are interesting. He thinks they’re cute. He likes to look at the pictures. He likes learning the names. He gets them and cuts them up with scissors and he plays with them.

He likes to hold them and he searches around for them in the forest, all of these things is just play to him. It’s fascinating and fun to him for some reason.

And yet, by doing all this, this play, this exploring with no real goal, he’s learned more about mushrooms as a three-year old than most adults know at all.

In preschool, he’s recently gone to preschool, and the teachers were laughing because he was teaching the teachers in the class all about mushrooms.. He’s giving little classes to the other kids, little lessons about mushrooms and telling them, “Oh this mushroom is this. You can eat this one.” And he knows all the names, it’s amazing.

So Masanori has learned to master this area of mushrooms.. He’s become a little mini mushroom expert at the age of three, simply through playing.

How would we go about it? If I was going to learn mushrooms as an adult, typically what would I do? What would you do? We’d go get mushroom books and try to memorize and study.

If we were in school, they’d make us take tests and give us grades on our mushroom knowledge. It would be a horrible nightmare and we’d probably forget most of it after the test and yet he’s become a little master through play, just as the little children in my example, the Japanese children who come to America and completely master English.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be Japanese, people from any country, the kids come to America they’re going to learn to speak English perfectly and the younger they are, the more easily they’ll do that. I think it’s because the more open they are to just playing and relaxing, the less they’re focused on working and serious study.

Let’s talk about how to do this. It seems a little strange to me to be giving you a lesson on how to play and yet, sadly, as adults, we kind of forget.

I know many people that just forget how to relax and enjoy and play and learn things in a playful natural way. We tend, as we get older, to forget this more and more. So as strange as it may sound, I’ll give you a lesson on how to play.

Here we go, step one – stop doing things because you should.

We do so many things in our life because we feel we should. I should do this. I must do this. I should study English. That’s just a terrible reason to do something. You should, out of some obligation.

I mean why, why should you study English? There’s really no compelling reason that you must. You’re not going to die if you don’t master English.

So should is a heavy, uncomfortable, kind of school feeling to doing something. I should do it. It’s an obligation and we tend to not enjoy obligations so much.

So, maybe in your life stop doing some of those things. Maybe there are things in your life you’re doing because you feel you should do them, that someone at some time has told you that or you’ve decided at some point in your life that you must do something, but maybe you really don’t need to.

So cut out some of those things. Cut out some of that unnecessary work and relax a little bit.

And fill that extra time by doing more of what is just fun and interesting, fun and interesting, that’s all. Not to get more money. Not to achieve a higher test score. Not to build your career. Not for any of these very practical logical reasons, but rather just because it’s fun and interesting.

I know it seems a little radical sometimes for adults to just relax and have fun and do something simply because it’s interesting, even if it has no other benefit, yet that’s what play is.

And, as part of that, you forget goals for a while. This is a theme that we’ve discussed in several of our recent VIP lessons, which is, having a goal but then sort of forgetting it, pushing it to the side, focusing on full enjoyment, just on enjoying things.

One of the things I’ve noticed in our VIP program among our members is that the ones who are the most successful, meaning, the ones who speak the most fluently, that communicate the most powerfully and most effectively with English, tend to be the ones who seem to just enjoy it.

They’re just having fun they like the topics. They love traveling. The love reading books, whether they’re novels or non-fiction. They love chatting with people from different countries using English.

They’re having a great time. They aren’t obsessed about vocabulary words. They aren’t obsessed about grammar. They aren’t obsessed about their level or their performance, they’re playing. They have a very playful attitude.

I’ve noticed the same thing recently with my own study of Spanish. Probably like you, I started my first language learning in school, in my case, Spanish.

And, probably like you, I had a work mindset about Spanish, because I learned in school so immediately, they’re giving tests and grades, so it was work. I didn’t really want to learn Spanish at the time, back in high school and college, but I had to. I had to pick a language and Spanish seemed good. I picked that one.

And then it was just work. All I was doing was preparing for the test. That’s all I cared about.

I would memorize the vocabulary for that week or that month or that lesson, and then I would take a test and then I would forget most of it. I’d memorize the grammar. None of it was fun. None of it was enjoyable.

I didn’t care about the content because it was boring, it was all from a textbook, fake dialogues and things like that. And because I only had a work mindset about Spanish, I never really explored the culture of Spanish-speaking countries. And so I made very little progress with Spanish. I got A’s in my classes but couldn’t communicate at all.

Recently, I’ve very much changed that. Turned it on its head, meaning, I’ve taken an opposite approach and now I’ve relaxed about Spanish. I’ve decided that I don’t care how good my Spanish is. I don’t care how many words I know.

I don’t care if I make mistakes. I don’t care if I sound like a two-year old child when I speak. It doesn’t matter. I’m just going to have fun and enjoy Spanish.

I’m going to travel to Spain next year and do my best, try to talk to people and I’m doing this whole trip of the Camino de Santiago, which is this month long hike through Spain with my friend Joe. It’s all about fun, that’s all I care about.

I’m just going to find things that are interesting to me to listen to. I’m going to listen to some audiobooks and some stupid funny stories and I’m not going to study grammar at all. It’s just going to be fun.

If I don’t feel like doing it one day, I’m not going to do it. That’s my attitude and what I’ve been doing. And lo and behold, guess what? I’m making faster progress. For the first time in my life, I’m actually able to communicate a little bit in Spanish.

Not much, I speak in about two word sentences right now, but I have a friend in Spain that I chat with on Skype, usually once or twice a week. And even though I’m talking like a little baby, he can kind of understand what I’m saying.

He speaks simply to me so I can kind of understand what he’s saying. I’m communicating in Spanish and it’s really exciting and fun for me. I’m listening to things that I enjoy.

And now I’m super excited about going to Spain. I’m fascinated by Spanish culture. I’ve been reading about it, listening to podcasts about it, it’s totally transformed my experience of Spanish.

And now for the first time I feel like I can do it. I may not be perfect but I can learn to communicate in Spanish and it’s all because I’m just playing with Spanish now, I’m not working at it.

So, my first task for you this month, which again seems strange to give you a task to play but here it goes. Play with English.

Please, at least for a month, stop focusing on grammar, vocabulary and your level and mistakes and when will I get to this level. Just forget all that and just play, have fun with English. That’s your only focus this month, just enjoy it. Enjoyment, play, that’s it.

And then your second thing to do this month is simply to do the same exact thing in some other area of your life.

Choose something else in your life, maybe it’s your work life, personal life, it doesn’t matter, just choose another area of your life which has lost its interest, lost its fun and decide for at least a month you’re just going to have fun with it.

You’re just going to play and explore with no goals, nothing practical to accomplish at all. Do that and share your experiences and tell us what it was like on our forums.

I look forward to reading about your experiences. Until then, have a great day, have a great month. Bye for now.