English Bilingual Project Exploring the Pedagogical Function of Mentalese

Today, English is the global lingua franca and competent English communication skills should be one of the rights of all educated individuals irrespective of any socio-cultural limits.  By introducing a new method, this book focuses on helping any learner to get sufficient communication skills in English as much as in the native language. This method helps one to avoid translating from mother tongue to English. And by using the method of thinking in English, one could acquire the required English bilingual skills naturally. The method is founded on the philosophical idea of mentalese—mind language as the base language of thinking available for humans for constructing thoughts. The proposed English Bilingual Project (EBP) helps one to transfer thoughts from a structureless mentalese to the grammatical structure of any language English/Japanese/Chinese. The method described in this book works in two ways: one it helps one to intuitively understand the working of mentalese; the other is by practicing think in English with the mentalese, one could generate the bilingual brain. The main procedure for transferring thoughts from the mentalese to English is through writing one’s thoughts. This helps one to think effectively in English like one’s own mother tongue. This method works as a prime requirement model for one to generate multilingual skills.  The book resourced the idea of mentalese from the classical philosophy, reflects it with the modern generative theories, links it with the studies in neuro-linguistic studies on bilingualism and the bilingual brain.

Mathew Varghese is a textual scholar who works on textual interpretations of classical Buddhist texts. He uses philosophical hermeneutics for to interpret Sanskrit Buddhist texts into English. He also works on bilingual communication. Here, the pedagogical function of mentalese is used for interpreting thought in more than two languages. He has published four books and several papers including works on bilingual communication, and also edits a newsletter, BilingualValue Bulletin since 2006.  He teaches bilingual communication classes at Aoyama Gakuin University, Sophia University, Kanagawa University and Wako University in Tokyo, and also a research fellow at the Hajime Nakamura Eastern Institute, Tokyo.