How to Learn Any Language 17
How to Learn Any Language 17
And right they’d be, if that were all you were doing. But you are now accumulating flash cards with vocabulary and moving through lesson seven or eight of the grammar, so don’t feel you have to apologise for learning how to parrot a few handy phrases.
Your ability to bandy some useful phrases is a motivator. There you are, speaking the language! Isn’t that what you started all this for? Admittedly you’re not debating the economic consequences of his government’s latest reversal on tariff agreements, but you are asking someone if he’s too cold and telling him you hope to meet him again.
More magic happens when you’re at that peak motivation. You find yourself acquiring more material, more conversational gems gleaned from his end of the conversation. Remember, you’re a confessed beginner. When you don’t understand something, you’re excused for asking him to repeat it, spell it, write it down on one of your blank flash cards. (Always carry some.)
It’s gratifying, in fact, enthralling, to enter your next conversation with your powers to converse enhanced by the previous encounter.
A note of caution, however. Eventually you may find yourself about to small talk so fluently you’ll mistake that ability for having arrived. Back to the newspaper and the grammar with you before such thoughts corrupt!
Add Cassettes
For most of the history of the world, there was no way the self taught language student could hear the language spoken. He had to rely on printed rules, grossly inadequate, to guide him in pronunciation of his target language.
Then came the phonograph record, which seemed like ideal deliverance from darkness, until the tape recorder came along, followed quickly by the portable cassette tape recorder, which allowed language learners to pick up ear phones and listen to a wide variety of foreign language fare as they jogged, shopped, ran errands, or walked to work.
As is the case with many technological breakthroughs, disappointment followed. The closets of many fine, otherwise strong willed people are littered with the wreckage of once beautifully packaged foreign language cassette courses. They thought technology had replaced study. They thought all you had to do was pop a cassette into the machine, press a button, and take in the language like a car takes in gasoline.
Remove that inflated expectation, resolve to do your part, and the invention of the portable cassette tape player will indeed fulfill its promise to the language lover endeavouring to become a language learner.
Are you presently armed with the right cassette course?
Unless your cassette was mislabelled and carries lessons in a language other than the one you’d like to learn, it’s a good learning aid. It may not be the best. It may be far behind the best, but so what? It will offer you words and phrases in your target language with native accuracy in pronunciation.
You no more want to limit your hearing of the language to one cassette course than you’d want to confine your tennis playing to one partner. The ideal cassette library is one in which the student can pull down a cassette for review in rotation and not quite remember how the dialogue goes or what’s coming next. A little mystery, rather than rote familiarity, aids the student ear in its difficult mission of paying attention.
Within certain obvious limits, you can buy literally every course in your target language that’s commercially available and still describe your adventure with the language as “inexpensive.”
In your beginning stages you should insist on cassettes that come with a written transcript of everything recorded. (The Pimsleur courses are an exception. Their integration of written word exercises and their back and forth interaction between teacher and student more than excuse the absence of word for word transcription.)
It’s a good idea to follow the text visually as you listen to the cassette the first few times. As you get a little bit familiar with the target material, divorce the two. Take the cassette and the tape player with you. Listen even when you can’t follow the written text. Read the text even when you can’t listen. You’ll find the two excellent reinforcers for each other.
If your cassette course is flat single rep or flat double rep, keep listening over and over and try to capture as many words and phrases as you can.
When you’re ready – actually, long before you’re ready – challenge the cassette to a duel. Start at the beginning and see how many words and phrases you know. After the English, stop the cassette recorder with the pause button and ask yourself, “Do I know it in the target language? Do I almost know it? Do I know any part of it – how the word or phrase begins, how it ends, what major sound characterises it? Do I know enough to give myself credit for at least partial conquest?”
Don’t be in a rush to release the pause button and see how well you did. Make a teasing game of it. Make yourself wait for the fulfillment of hearing the term in the target language. That will make a stronger hit into your memory. Drop a weighty object from a higher tower than previously and it will sink deeper into the mud.
Then move on to the next term. It’s a little like playing solitaire; no matter how you write your own rules, it still retains the arresting power of a game. Maybe you’ll ask yourself if you can score one out of five correct; later, one out of four. It’s hard to imagine it in the early going, but you will eventually play the game by seeing if you can get every term on the cassette correct from beginning to end. But that’s not quite total victory. Total victory is seeing if you can do it without stopping to think.
And then, if your machine has the mechanism, try it at accelerated speed!