◎ “Xiang Ru Yi Mo" is a widely known Chinese idiom used to describe a deep emotional bond where people stick together and support each other through difficult times, particularly referring to a husband and wife sharing the same mind and spirit.
◎ Origin and Allusion
This idiom originates from The Great and Venerable Teacher in Zhuangzi:
“When the springs dry up, the fish are stranded together on land. They breathe on each other to keep damp and moisten one another with their spit. But it would be far better for them to forget each other in the rivers and lakes."
◎ The Story Behind the Allusion:
The spring water had dried up, leaving several fish stranded on the dry ground. To survive, they huddled together, breathing out moisture onto one another and using their own saliva (spit) to keep each other’s bodies damp, struggling desperately to keep one another alive.
☆ Modern Implication:
Today, it is mostly used to describe couples, partners, relatives, or friends who, when facing hardships, share joys and sorrows alike, doing everything in their power to help each other with whatever meager resources they have.
◇ Zhuangzi’s Original Intent:
It is worth noting that Zhuangzi wrote in the latter half of the sentence, “it would be far better for them to forget each other in the rivers and lakes." Zhuangzi believed that rather than painfully depending on one another and barely scraping by when disaster strikes, it is better for everyone to live freely and comfortably in a vast spiritual world (the rivers and lakes), to the point of even forgetting each other’s existence. This reflects Zhuangzi’s philosophical thoughts of pursuing absolute freedom and conforming to nature.
Instruction often relies on Chinese to explain English, guiding students to translate “word-for-word." As a result, when expressing themselves, students habitually draft sentences in Chinese first and then apply grammar formulas to translate them, leading to highly unnatural “Chinglish."
Traditional teaching tends to break vocabulary and phrases into fragments for memorization, ignoring collocations and idioms in real-world contexts. Consequently, while students memorize many advanced words, they struggle to combine them into natural, fluent sentences.
Instruction and assessment heavily favor reading, listening, and multiple-choice grammar questions, while systematically lacking training and evaluation for writing and speaking. This “teach-to-the-test" ecology directly results in “mute English."
Exams often pursue black-and-white standard answers and obsess over trivial grammatical details (such as tricky preposition questions), which stifles the flexibility and creativity of language as a tool for communication.
## 3. 缺乏「真實語境」與任務導向應用
Lack of “Authentic Context" and Task-Oriented Application
→教材去語境化 (Decontextualized Materials)：
課本中的對話或課文常為了塞入特定文法句型而刻意編寫，顯得生硬且不合時宜。
Textbooks dialogues and passages are often artificially manufactured to force-feed specific grammatical patterns, making them sound stiff and unnatural.
Teaching is primarily a one-way teacher lecture. There is a lack of “task-based" or “project-based" practice, leaving students with no genuine motivation to use English to communicate or solve problems in class.
## 4. 容錯率低，導致學生開口自信心不足
Low Tolerance for Errors, Leading to Low Speaking Confidence
→糾錯過度 (Over-Correction)：
傳統教學與評價機制對「錯誤」的容忍度極低。學生一開口或一動筆，教師常立即糾正發音、時態或文法細節。
Traditional teaching and evaluation methods have an extremely low tolerance for mistakes. The moment students speak or write, teachers often immediately correct their pronunciation, tenses, or grammatical details.
This fear-of-mistakes and face-saving classroom climate raises students’ anxiety levels. They ultimately choose silence, missing out on opportunities to internalize the language through trial and error.
## 5. 雙語政策推動下的配套不足與「拼貼化」
Insufficient Support and “Fragmented" Implementation under Bilingual Policies
→學科與語言雙輸風險 (Risk of Double Loss in Subject and Language)：
Under the recently promoted bilingual education policy, with teacher training and subject-material adaptation still maturing, English is often used just for the sake of using it. This not only risks hindering subject-matter comprehension but also fails to foster a natural English-thinking environment.
→外師與本師協同流於表面 (Superficial Collaboration between Foreign and Local Teachers)：
Foreign teachers are sometimes introduced without deep collaborative lesson planning. This results in English classes turning into simple recreational games, or local and foreign teachers working in silos, making it difficult to systematically elevate students’ language literacy.
The core issue of Taiwanese English education lies in treating the language as an academic “subject" to be analyzed, memorized, and tested, rather than as a “skill" or a “communication tool" to be practiced, experienced, and lived.
When it comes to Stephen Chow’s movies, their greatest brilliance lies in those seemingly nonsensical lines, which often conceal a profound insight and a sense of helplessness toward the fates of ordinary people. These lines have accompanied countless people as they grew up, and they remain timeless classics to this day.
「做人如果沒有夢想，那跟鹹魚有什麼分別？」 ——周星馳《少林足球》
“If a man has no dreams, what’s the difference between him and a salted fish?"
暌違二十幾年了 十分期待周星馳的功夫女足
It’s been over twenty years! I’m beyond excited for Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Women’s Football.
Perfectionism, in psychology, is a broad personality trait characterized by a person’s concern with striving for flawlessness and perfection and is accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations.
It is best conceptualized as a multidimensional and multilayered personality characteristic, and initially some psychologists thought that there were many positive and negative aspects.
Maladaptive perfectionism drives people to be concerned with achieving unattainable ideals or unrealistic goals that often lead to many forms of adjustment problems such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, OCD, OCPD and low self-esteem. These adjustment problems often lead to suicidal thoughts and tendencies and influence or invite other psychological, physical, social, and further achievement problems in children, adolescents, and adults.
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