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Language can bridge time as well as space.

Ideas can go from mind to mind across the language bridge,and they can come from the past to the present.

We can read what people before us wrote and keep their books for others to read in the future.

Here are some of the great books of all time.

Books are the most important records we have of people's thoughts and feelings, their ideas and desires.

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All people have more in common with all others on earth than most of them know.

What do the words "in common" mean?

What is their meaning?

What do the people in this family have in common?

They have their family name in common.

They are the Smiths, or the Wangs.

They have a house in common; it is their home.

The husband and wife have their children in common.

In some parts of the world a man may have a number of wives.

In other parts a woman may have a number of husbands.

In these countries the wives have their husband in common or the husbands have their wife in common.

People of the same country have that country in common.

It is their country.

Every country has a flag.

What is the flag of your country?

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People who talk the same language have their language in common.

It is their language,the language of each and all of them.

They have the ideas and feelings about things which that language carries.

People who do not talk a language do not know what those who use it are saying.

They do not know What its words can mean.

The have less in common with those who talk it than those people have with one another.

Sometimes,as in India,in one country under one flag people talk many languages.

They have their country and their flag in common,

but some of them have to learn the language of others if they are to have a language in common.

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Talking with someone is saying things to him,

hearing what he says and taking in his meaning.

People can talk together only when they have a language in common.

When you are very young your parents talked to you and after a time you saw what they meant and learned to talk to them.

A baby's first words are commonly names for its parents.

Some children learn to talk earlier than others.

We go on learning our language all our lives.

Some people talk more than they think, and some people think more than they talk.

Most of our thinking is done through language.

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There are more than six billion people on the earth and about 2500 languages.

Of these languages only about twelve used by more than 50 million people.

Here are the names of some languages which have very wide use:

Chinese(Mandarin and Cantonese) ,English,French,German, Hindi,

Japanese,Russian,Spanish,Portuguese, Arabic and Bengali.

All these languages have more people talking them today than ever before.

Two hundred years ago there were only about twenty million people who talked english,for example.

Now there are more than five hundred million, and there may be many,many more.

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More people will learn more languages as better ways of teaching them are worked out.

This book, English Through pictures 3, is itself part of an attempt to teach english better.

We need better books to learn from and better recordings of good voices to teach us how to listen to the sentences of a language and say them.

Recordings of sounds are made on CDs,disks and on tapes.

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We need good pictures to teach us meanings in the new language

and good motion pictures to help many more people to learn languages quickly and well.

The learners will then be able to work in groups with the help of teachers or by themselves,

using books,records,radio,CDs, sound motion pictures and television.

A teacher can help learner to learn.

Reding and writing can help us to think.

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Writing is a very much newer invention than talking.

Nobody knows when people first began to talk, but they did not begin to write,

so far as we know, until seven or eight thousand years ago.

In Egypt, Mesopotamia,and China,and later in Palestine and Greece,

people began to make marks and pictures with sticks and sharp stones from which others,

or they themselves, later, could see what they had thought.

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These early records were the beginning of writing.

The first writing was picture writing.

Here are some early chinese picture words.

Can you see what they represent?

Later Chinese writing is less like pictures than the earlier writing was

but we can see the pictures in some of its words.

For example:

Here are some Egyptian words in picture writing.

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In picture writing, each picture represents a word;

you need a different picture or mark for each word.

In present-day Chinese writing most of the marks are not pictures of anything,

and the reader has to learn how the Chinese write about two thousand of these words before being able to read a newspaper.

With some of these marks you may be able to see what the idea is.

For example:

The sun and moon.

Its meaning is: bright and open.

A man and two marks.

Ono of the meanings is humanity.

Learning to read Chinese is much harder than learning to read English.

But in word-writing like Chinese the same marks can be read as having the same meaning in different languages;

for example, in Mandarin, in Cantonese and in Japanese.