Thursday, April 20, 2017

May 26, 2016



May 26, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader,

Spoken communication occurs in patterns. If you look for these patterns you will not find them, but if you listen for them, a new understanding will be possible. Different languages are such different patterns. 

The best way to learn a new language is to be immersed in it. When you are surrounded by the people who speak it, you are conditioned by the contingency that causes it. You are more likely to understand this new language if you speak it. As long as you don’t speak it, you don’t learn it. 

Hearing someone else speak it is not the same as speaking it yourself and listening to yourself while you speak. It helps to hear someone else speak it, but, ultimately, you will only learn it when you speak it. Moreover, when you speak it, others will reinforce it and that reinforcement makes learning possible. 

You will need to sound right (speak French) in order to be able to listen, that is, in order to be reinforced by others. Your listening, like your speaking, can only be as good as you were reinforced by others. 

You already know how to speak and listen in the pattern that you are familiar with and grew up with, but other languages remain unfamiliar as long as you make it seem as if your pattern is the only pattern. Every human being grows up in an environment which conditions him or her to speak in a particular way. 

In different environments we speak different languages. If we can’t do that, we are not listened to or understood. When we cannot make ourselves understood, we cannot speak, but we also cannot listen. When we cannot talk, we cannot listen. 

We must talk to be able to listen. Unless we talk, there is nothing to listen to. There is a different way of talking in the language that we already know. We are reinforced in Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) only by those who know how to listen to themselves while they speak. In SVB we will all listen to ourselves while we speak.

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