Twenty years of experience in language education have led me to an interesting comparison: learning a language is a little like practising qigong.

Qigong is centred around breathing — inhaling and exhaling. Language learning has its own kind of breathing too: input and output. Input is reading and listening; output is writing and expression. Like breathing in qigong, these two elements form a continuous cycle. They influence one another, and both are equally important.

Children always need a great deal of input before they are able to produce output. A newborn baby spends more than a year listening to family members speaking before beginning to talk. Even children who can already recognise words still need to read many books before they are able to write meaningful sentences of their own.

There is an old saying: “Memorise three hundred Tang poems, and even if you cannot compose poetry yourself, you will still know how to imitate it.” I remember during one year’s football World Cup, a child who had clearly watched many matches with commentary suddenly kicked a crumpled paper ball into the bin while shouting, “A long cross into the box!” The phrase matched the moment perfectly. That was output born from a large amount of prior input.

Some parents are always eager for their children to become articulate as quickly as possible. But without sufficient input, output naturally becomes limited. When some children first begin writing, they often produce a very interesting kind of sentence:

“Today was very fun. I was very happy. I liked it very much.”

Each sentence appears correct on its own, yet together they feel like a well with no water — complete on the surface, but lacking real substance. This is not the child’s fault. It simply means they have not yet accumulated enough language internally. Language is like a spring: without a steady source of water, rich expression cannot flow naturally.

I also discovered something I had not expected at first: output can, in turn, influence input. Once children begin expressing themselves, they become far more aware of how other people speak. Some children, after hearing enough stories, will suddenly one day say:

“And from that day on, they lived happily ever after.”

Of course, they did not invent this phrase themselves. It is language absorbed naturally from the countless stories they have heard before.

And naturally, children create many amusing moments this way too. One day, a child suddenly turned to a friend during playtime and said, “I think we need to discuss this properly.” His tone and expression were exactly like those of an adult. Clearly, this was a phrase he had absorbed from overhearing countless conversations among grown-ups. I could almost picture him years later, sitting in meetings with colleagues.

Once children begin writing, they also start paying closer attention to how other people write. One child wanted to describe the sky in a story but did not know how. Later, he came across the phrase 湛藍的天空 (“a deep blue sky”) in a book, remembered it, and naturally used it in his own writing the next time.

Seen this way, output actually creates a feedback loop: through the process of expression, we begin refining the quality and content of what we take in, which in turn strengthens our ability to express ourselves further.

The input and output involved in language learning are very much like breathing. Input is like inhaling — allowing language to enter. Output is like exhaling — allowing language to be expressed. Without inhaling, exhaling cannot begin.

And within this endless cycle, language ability slowly grows.

Perhaps one day, the “Ren” and “Du” meridians of literacy will finally open as well.