Curiosity won't kill the cat

"You can't visit your parents' home on the first day of the Lunar New Year, and you just have to eat rice dumplings during the Dragon Boat Festival." No questions asked!

This is a household conversation heard very often in Taiwan.

But when it comes to these traditional customs, is there really no "why"?

Throughout my teaching career, the students who later successfully started businesses or took on higher-level positions were mostly those with an abundance of curiosity. Curiosity allows students to pick up a language with ease and helps them discover countless possibilities along their life's journey.

Learning a foreign language with curiosity is equivalent to exploring "another system of thinking." This makes it easier for us to adopt a "new way of thinking" that is completely different from what we are familiar with, and in doing so, changes our perspective on the world.

Many parents say that their children have no interest in this topic or that kind of reading, but could it actually be that you just don't know them well enough yet?

—

In the movie La La Land, the male lead tells the female lead, "You don't like jazz because you don't understand jazz yet."

In today's era of smartphones and the internet, big data continuously pushes topics we are interested in, which subtly keeps us from having the chance to explore possibilities in other fields—not to mention exploring, even catching an introductory glimpse becomes difficult.

Returning to the two customs mentioned at the beginning, what parents can actually do when their children are young—commonly known as the "why stage"—is accompany them to find the true reasons behind every answer and join them in asking questions once again. "Satisfying curiosity, nurturing curiosity, and unleashing curiosity"—these three stages are an indispensable part of language learning, as well as developing interests and career exploration.