How to Learn Any Language 12
CASSETTE COURSES
There are many cassette courses in many foreign languages. They range from “travel” cassettes, really simple tourist phrase books set to sound and costing between ten and twenty dollars, clear up to multicassette study courses that carry the student into advanced levels and cost between one and two hundred dollars, or more.
Don’t dismiss the least expensive ones as “superficial little travel cassettes.” If you master every word, every phrase, every pronunciation, and every grammatical point contained in even the simplest of those cassettes, you can consider yourself advanced.
There are basically four kinds of cassettes for the study of foreign languages. We’ll call them flat single rep, flat double rep, formatted, and cultural.
The flat single rep cassettes, usually the least expensive, give you the English word or phrase followed by the foreign equivalent uttered only one time.
The flat double rep cassettes are the same, except the foreign phrase is repeated twice. (When you begin making your own study cassettes, you’ll repeat the foreign piece three times.)
The formatted cassette puts theories of instruction into practice and follows systems that some highly successful language teachers have found effective. For example the Pimsleur method, named after the late Dr. Paul Pimsleur, takes the student by the ear and guides him through the language as though it were a Disneyland exhibit. Unfortunately Dr. Pimsleur died before he could personally develop courses in a large variety of languages to advanced levels. His techniques, however, are being applied to more courses in more languages by Dr. Charles A. S. Heinle of the Cassette Learning Centre in Concord, Massachusetts.
The Pimsleur method provides the best minute by minute “learning through listening,” thanks to several strokes of Dr. Pimsleur’s innovative genius.
First of all, you become a participant. Pimsleur doesn’t let you merely listen in hopes your lazy mind will help itself to some of the new words being offered on the smorgasbord. After five minutes with any Pimsleur course you will always harbour a certain disdain for all cassette courses that merely give you a voice saying something in English followed by the equivalent in the target language. Pimsleur pricks your wandering mind to attention by asking, for example, “Do you remember the Greek word for ‘wine’?”
Theoretically, that little trick shouldn’t make a spectacular difference. After all, you bought the course. You want to learn the language. Why should the teacher on cassette have to find ways to constantly recover your attention? The unfortunate truth is that the average mind plays hooky whenever possible. The difference between Pimsleur asking, “Do you remember the Greek word for ‘wine’?” and a voice simply saying “wine” is, as Mark Twain once put it, “the difference between lightning and the lightning bug!”
Nor does Pimsleur always settle for the simple verbal prompt. A typical Pimsleur tactic is to demand, “You accidentally bump into a man getting on the bus. What do you say?” That ingrains the foreign phrases for “excuse me” far more than a rote recitation of the words themselves.
Pimsleur’s “graduated interval recall” achieves what I call the “pinball effect.” When the steel ball in the pinball machine nears the bottom, you can manipulate the
flippers to catch the ball and send it all the way back to the top again. Likewise, at the very instant when your mind is about to let a new word or phrase “fall to the bottom”, Pimsleur zings it in again, sending it back to the top of your awareness. This time it doesn’t sink so fast. When it does, Pimsleur hits it again.
Pimsleur gives you a pause on the cassette after each question he asks you. In the early going there’s a temptation to stop the machine while you flounder for the answer. Don’t! Learn to try to come up with the answer during the pause provided. That will more than teach you the word. It will train you to have that word ready for action at all times. It’s marvellous to feel your growth as you relisten to your Pimsleur lessons, succeeding more and more each time at delivering the required word before the teacher’s voice rolls over you with the next question.
Berlitz is the most famous name in language instruction, and except for the Berlitz Travel Cassettes, which are flat single rep, all their cassette courses are formatted. The Berlitz Basic Courses, available in French, Spanish, German, and Italian, feature ingenious conversations between teacher and students, and their top of the line Berlitz Comprehensive Courses are really dazzling soap opera-like sagas filled with romance, treachery, suspense, and drama. Both the basic and the comprehensive courses sneak massive payloads of grammar and vocabulary into the student’s repertoire.
Cultural cassettes aren’t really language learning cassettes at all, but many people suppose they are and buy and sell them as such. Songs, plays, readings, stories, and poems in foreign languages are indeed helpful, but shouldn’t be mistaken for the “high protein” intake needed to build command of a foreign language. They’re great relaxers, tests of how far you’ve come, adjunctive exercises, and ways of letting the foreigner know that you view his language as more than just a briar patch of irregular verbs.
The cultural cassettes are the condiments. The others are the entrées.
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