"English Self-Study Method"
Writer Profile
Mutsumi Imai
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies ProfessorMutsumi Imai
Faculty of Environment and Information Studies Professor
2021/03/26
I have had a long relationship with English. I write emails and papers in English, and I speak with friends and collaborators over Zoom. Not a day goes by that I don't use English. However, I don't feel like I have "mastered" English. English (or rather, all languages, including my native Japanese) is profound; the more I learn, the more I marvel at its complexity, precision, and richness, and the more I feel my own inadequacy. I love it, but it's difficult. I want to know more. There must be better ways to express things. I spend every day thinking this. There is no end to learning English (or Japanese).
Yet, everywhere you look, there are books and advertisements claiming you can "master English quickly." If it were that easy, why would the Japanese people struggle so much? What does it even mean to "be able to speak English" or "master English" in the first place?
My broad field of expertise is cognitive science, and I research native language acquisition, conceptual development, and the formation of language and thought. From a cognitive science perspective, there is always a reason for a learning setback. My weaknesses are articles, countable and uncountable nouns, prepositions, and tenses. Why are these so difficult when native English-speaking children use them effortlessly? However, I couldn't find any English learning books among the many available that answered that question. Most books explain how English should be—the norms of the language—and point out that Japanese people make certain mistakes. But I couldn't find anything written about why Japanese people make those mistakes.
As a learner myself, I want to answer this question. I want to use insights from cognitive science to write about why so many people find English difficult and struggle with it, and how they can overcome those difficulties through learning. I actually first thought of this right after publishing "Language and Thought" in 2010. For ten years, I had various pieces I wanted to write, but I didn't know how to fit them into a single picture, so I couldn't start writing. In the meantime, I published a book on native language acquisition ("Solving the Mystery of Language Development") and a book on the cognitive processes of learning ("What is Learning?"). English learning lies at the intersection of the themes of these three books, so I couldn't depict the overlapping part until I had drawn the three outer circles.
*Affiliations and titles are as of the time of publication.