How to Learn Any Language 7
P A R T T W O
The System
Do as I Now Say,
Not as I Then Did
A wise man once said, “I wish I had all the time I’ve ever wasted, so I could waste it all over again.” Others may look at me and see someone who can, indeed, carry on a creditable conversation in about eighteen languages. I’m the only one who knows how much of my language learning time has been wasted, how little I’ve got to show for all those years of study, considering the huge hunks of time I’ve put into it. In fact, I feel like one of those hardened convicts who’s occasionally let out of jail under armed guard to lecture the sophomore class on the importance of going straight.
If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t do it at all the way I did then. I’d do it the way I’m doing it now, the way I will detail in this book. It’s the way I’ve finally grown into and the way I hope you will proceed in order to get the absolute most out of your language learning dollar and your language learning minute.
Here are some of the myths I held dear in the years when I thought I knew how to study languages, myths I now want to trample before you get the slightest bit seduced by them.
I’ll put on my language cassettes while I work around the house and learn the language as easily as I learn the lyrics to popular songs.
Great image. It just doesn’t work. You can’t just push a button and let the language you want to learn roll over you. Expecting to learn a language by laid back listening is like expecting to build a magnificent body by going to the gym, sitting in the steam room, chugging a glass of carrot juice, and then bragging about your “workout!”
You’re going to have to study the material on that cassette, capture every word, learn it, review it, master it, and then check challenge yourself after every piece of English. (We’ll consider a “piece” to be whatever the speaker on the cassette says in English before you hear the target language. It may be a word, a phrase, a whole sentence.)
Abandon all images of language learning that resemble lying on a tropical beach and letting the warm surf splash over you. Pretend, instead, as you listen to your cassette,
that you’re a contestant on a TV game show. After each piece of English, ask yourself, “For one thousand dollars now, quick, how do I say that in the language I’m trying to learn?”
Since I’m not in school anymore, time isn’t important. I’ll take my time, skip a day, skip two days; the language will still be there when I get back to it.
Spoken like a true linguaphony. A language has a lot in common with a military foe. Don’t let it rest. Don’t let it regroup and devise fresh ways to foil your attack. Keep up the rhythm of your offensive. Keep your momentum going. (This is only an illustration of tactics, of course; no language is an enemy.) A programme that features disciplined effort will convince you that you’re serious and generate fresh inspiration and energy.
The chapter I’m studying now is hard and probably not too important. I’ll skip it and get back to it later on.
That’s a giant killer. The declension of the numbers in Russian. The subjunctive in the Romance languages. The double infinitive in German. The enclitics in Serbo-Croatian. The noun cases in Finnish. Almost every language has formidable mountains to climb. Don’t walk around them. Climb them! Take one step at a time. Just be careful never to surrender to the temptation to beg off the hard stuff and learn only those parts of the language you find congenial.
It will seem masochistic, but I want you to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet in your target language and the grammatical terms too, so that when you ask a native how a certain word is spelled, you can bandy the letters back and forth in the language. When you ask a native for the past tense of this verb or the negative plural of that noun, do your asking in the target language.
I’m never going to pose as a native speaker of their language, and I’d never be able to pull it off even if I tried, so why bother to develop the right accent?
Nobody is arrested for indecent exposure just because he dresses poorly. On the other hand, a person unconcerned about dress will never impress us with his appearance. It’s the same with the proper accent. As long as you’re going to go to the trouble of learning a language, why not try – at very little extra cost – to mimic the genuine accent.
A poor accent will still get you what you want. A good accent will get you much more.
If you can put on a foreign accent to tell ethnic jokes, you can put one on when you speak another language. If you think you can’t, try! A lot of Americans believe they’re unable to capture a foreign accent when subconsciously they’re merely reluctant to try. We’re all taught that it’s rude to make fun of foreigners. That childhood etiquette is hereby countermanded. “Make fun” of the foreigner’s accent as effectively as you can as you learn his language.
Your “infancy” in a foreign language is spent learning to grope with incomplete phrases made up of incorrect words to mash your meaning across. “Babyhood” comes when some of the phrases are complete and more of the words are correct.
“Childhood” arrives when you can deal rather fluently with concepts involving bread, bed, buttons, and buses, even though you can’t yet discuss glassblowing in Renaissance Estonia.
“Adulthood” is being able to discuss absolutely anything, but with a pronounced American accent. With “maturity” you acquire a creditable accent in the language. You’ll know you’ve achieved maturity when you become annoyed at other Americans you hear plodding through the language with no effort to “foreignise” their accent to approximate the correct one.
Be content with partial victories. I rejoiced the moment I learned I could speak Swedish well enough to convince a Norwegian I was a Finn. I celebrated when I realised I could speak Serbo-Croatian well enough to convince an Italian I was a Czech!
There will come a moment when I will cross a border and earn the right to say, “Yes, I speak your language”!
There’s no such border. Learning a language is a process of encroachment into the unknown. When can you say you “speak a language”? The famous ophthalmologist Dr. Peter Halberg of New York refuses to consider that he speaks a language unless and until he can conduct a medical lecture in the language and then take hostile questioning from his peers. By his standards, he only speaks five languages!
My standards are less exacting. I’ll confess to “speaking a language” if, after engaging in deep conversation with a charming woman from a country whose language I’m studying, I have difficulty the next morning recalling which language it was we were speaking.
The Language Club, about which I will say more later, has a valuable guideline. When anybody asks a Language Clubber, “How many languages do you speak?” he gives the only safe answer, “One. I speak my native language.” He lets a breath go by to let that “one” sink in, after which he may then add, “However, I am a student of…” and mentions as many languages as he likes.
To the question, “Do you speak such and such a language?” the all class response is a James Bond smile and three words: “Yes, a little.” It’s much better to let people gradually realise that your “little” is really quite a bit than to have them realise that your “Yes, I speak such and such” is a fraud.
Say you’ve been studying Indonesian, far from a commonplace language, and to your amazement (and delight) one of the other guests for dinner is from Indonesia. Repress the instinct to yelp at your good fortune. Act at first as though you know nothing of Indonesian. Don’t even say “Pleased to meet you” in Indonesian. There will be time. At the right point, much later in the proceedings, you’ll have the opening to remark, “That’s what the merchants of Djakarta would call…” and then let go your best burst of wit – in Indonesian.
For you to actually speak Indonesian and allow so much time to elapse before claiming your applause is downright noble. Beware flying socks when you lean over to your new Indonesian friend and, lowering your voice so as not to appear to be calling attention to yourself, finally unleash your evening’s first volley of Indonesian.
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