How to Learn Any Language 41
Last Words Before the Wedding
It is my hope that this volume will help those who’ve never yet dared to make the commitment, march to the altar, and “marry” another language. If you’ve already studied other languages, perhaps tried for years with disappointing results, let’s look at your next effort as a second marriage, fortified, this time, with the foregoing advice.
Best men and bridesmaids traditionally utter inanities to grooms and brides before they march down the aisle. As your avuncular advisor, who at this writing has studied foreign languages as a hobby for forty-six years, let me use this precious final opportunity to hammer home some points – some repeats and some leftovers – that will ensure your success and ensure that you enjoy yourself as you succeed.
Plunge In
When an interviewer asked the famed bank robber Willy Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied, “Because that’s where the money is.” Using the language is where the real learning is. There’s a direct analogy to sports and war. Ask any ball player to give his views on the difference between watching the coach diagramme plays on a blackboard and facing the opponents in a real game. Ask any soldier the difference between basic training and actual combat.
The same difference exists between language study and language use. Try recalling the words and phrases you’ve learned most recently the next time you meet by surprise a speaker of the language. Your mind is likely to be a frustrating blank. Once you’ve used your knowledge in real life, however, your chances of recall are much greater.
Go out, then, and “pick” conversations in the language you’re learning, like a belligerent drunk picks fights.
Certain words, phrases, idioms, and grammatical constructions will remain unmeltable lumps. They will defeat your best efforts to learn them. Many students accept such unscalable heights as proof that “I don’t have an ear for languages!” (That, by the way, is the most pernicious myth of all. If you have the motivation and discipline to
proceed through the system, it doesn’t matter what kind of “ear” you have, so long as it can hear.)
Once you score your first victory over one of those “unconquerable” fortresses, an emotional momentum is released that will carry you forward. Grab hold of the nearest holdout word and beat the hell out of it. Bite at it one syllable at a time or even one letter at a time. Throw fits of irrational energy against it until it’s yours.
There is something truly serene about encountering a word that used to be a hideous holdout – and is now as familiar to you as your middle name!
Point of sale is to good a term to be limited to disposable razors and other sundries arrayed near the cash register at convenience stores. Let’s apply it to getting ahead in a foreign language.
The quickest and easiest time I ever had learning a phrase in a foreign language was Molim za ples, which is Serbo-Croatian for “May I have this dance?” I was a college student visiting Yugoslavia. An unforgivably attractive young woman smiled at me across the gym floor at a student dance. I asked Darko, my interpreter companion, how to say, “May I have this dance?”
“Molim za ples,” he replied.
I had no idea whether the mo or the lim or the za or the ples meant “May” or “I” or “have” or “this” or “dance.” Nor did I waste time worrying about it. I simply strode across the floor, said “Molim za ples,” and enjoyed my first dance in Yugoslavia!
Darko was giving me point of sale instruction.
Use it! When you know you’re going to a restaurant the day after tomorrow where the waiters speak the language you’re trying to learn, don’t use your hidden moments in the meantime on general vocabulary. Sit down and compile a restaurant vocabulary of food items and utensils and let that be your focus from that moment until you leave the restaurant after the meal.
Are you headed for a party over the weekend where you’re fairly sure at least one guest speaks your target language? Start carrying your phrase book as well as your flash cards and review the “getting to know you” phrases, such as “Where are you from?” “How long do you intend to stay in America?” etc.
Whenever you see an impending opportunity to speak the language, get a head start by sizing up the news of the day and going into your dictionary for the terms you’ll need that you don’t yet know. (“Election,” “proposal,” “tariff,” “amend,” “hostage,” “coup,” etc.) Focus your learning effort opportunistically to make the best possible showing when you reach the point of sale – the conversation you can anticipate.
The “show,” by the way, is not to impress others. It’s to impress that part of you that, when you hear yourself doing so well, will inspire you to proceed with your broad front general advance through the language.
A policeman is a policeman twenty-four hours a day. So is a fireman, a spy, a marine, and a language learner. Learn to catch yourself several times a day, indoors or outdoors, and look around. What are the first five things you see that you don’t know how to say in your target language? Write the English down on a blank flash card and fill in the target language words when you get home to your dictionary.
At least once a day pretend you’re a United Nations interpreter simultaneously interpreting what somebody is saying to you in your target language. When he gets to the fifth word that you wouldn’t know how to say in your target language, abandon the
exercise and write those words down, again, on a blank flash card. Fill in the foreign side of the flash card as soon as you get back to your dictionary.
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