How to Learn Any Language 18
Hidden Moments
They taught us in the fable of the tortoise and the hare so early, most of us dismissed it as a children’s tale and ignored the powerful lesson it contains: Others may be brighter. Others may learn quicker and retain more. Yet whosoever keeps on plodding relentlessly toward the goal of mastering another language, though his gifts be dim, stands a better chance than the unmotivated genius whose dazzle ignited so much envy in high school Spanish class.
Harnessing your hidden moments, those otherwise meaningless scraps of time you’d normally never think of putting to any practical use, and using them for language study – even if it’s no more than fifteen, ten, or five seconds at a time – can turn you into a triumphant tortoise.
By now you’re slogging your way through the grammar and enjoying it more (or suffering it less) than you did in college because you no longer feel obliged to dwell upon a knotty point until you understand it before moving forward. You will not fail a test or risk a bad grade if you abandon some grammatical black hole that tries to swallow you, and move on ahead.
You’re battling your way through the foreign language newspaper, your slow progress mitigated by the awareness that this is the real world and the daily language won’t get any tougher than that text.
You’re cherry picking through your phrase book, learning how to say practical things in your target language and rehearsing all those precious phrases as though they were your part in a play.
Your cassettes are beginning to bore you without teaching you a great deal (yet).
You’re amassing a flash card collection.
By now you’ve probably met someone from the country whose language you’re learning and, like a rookie cop about to make his first collar, you risked your ego by attempting a greeting. He laughed appreciatively – and answered you in English.
Hidden moments will heal your deficiencies soon enough, but first let’s talk about the unhidden moments, the study time you’ve arranged to commit to your endeavour. This book is written for those who can’t or don’t want to expend the time or money required to attend formal classes. Successful self teaching is our objective. If you can
take a whole hour every day and devote it to your studies, you’re in excellent position to make satisfying, even dramatic, progress. If you can devote a half hour a day, you’re still poised for success.
If you can’t commit a regular block of time, if the best you can do is an hour here, a half hour there, and maybe a three hour block of time over the weekend, that’s satisfactory, provided you keep it up and maintain momentum.
Gardens unattained go to weed. Apples bitten into and abandoned turn brown. Likewise, your collection of language data – words, phrases, rules, and idioms – will dissolve into a useless mass if not kept up.
Apportion as much time as you reasonably can and as regularly as you can, and then enjoy the magic as the hidden moments kick in.
A professional financial advisor on radio once urged people to take careful inventory of their financial assets, promising that overlooked and forgotten riches were to be revealed at every hand. Her credibility disappeared for me at that moment. I honestly think I’ve never been at a point in my economic life where I was likely to underestimate my holdings by as much as seventy-five cents!
When it comes to time, however, that’s a much more lucrative matter!
You can learn a language in twelve months using only those moments you didn’t realise you had.
We’ve already mentioned a few corners in which hidden moments lurk awaiting liberation. Let’s review them and add some more.
Moments we instinctively bid goodbyes to include those spent waiting for and riding in elevators, waiting for the person you’re dialing to answer, waiting while he puts you on hold, waiting for a long outgoing message from someone’s answering machine to reach its conclusion. There are those moments when you’re helplessly trapped – when someone who’s too good a friend to hang up on delivers an unending narrative requiring no verbal participation on your part beyond an occasional grunt, groan, “dear me,” “gee whiz,” or other appropriate interjection to let him know you’re still there. It’s usually safe to divert some of your attention from your friend to your flash cards.
There’s a major payload of hidden moments right there, and we haven’t even gone beyond the elevator and the telephone! We can take time back from our days just like the Dutch took land back from the sea and put it to work.
What do you normally do when you’re waiting in line at the bank, the post office, the airline counter, the bus or train station, or the supermarket checkout counter?
What do you do while you brush your teeth? You could be listening to a language cassette. What plans have you made for the time you’re going to spend waiting behind your steering wheel at the gas pump? Or waiting for the rinse cycle? Waiting for the school bus?
You get the point. An honest, thorough scrutiny of your normal week will yield dozens, even hundreds, of minutes that can be put to work learning your target language. And don’t forget, a scrap of time need be no longer than five seconds to advance you closer to your goal.
Arrange your life so you will never be caught without something to study in your target language. If you carry a briefcase or a pocketbook, your grammar book or newspaper, even your dictionary, can be your companion. Phrase books are usually so thin they easily fit into a coat pocket. There’s nothing holy about your foreign language
newspaper. Cut off a page and fold it up and carry it with you, along with your highlighter.
Certainly we can all agree there’s no excuse ever to get caught without flash cards. The instant you get stymied – in line at the cash machine, waiting for a store clerk, etc. – pull out your deck of flash cards and get to work.
If your hidden moment only lasts five seconds, giving you time for only one flash card, give that flash card five seconds of the right kind of effort. Look at the English. Suppose it says “shoe.” Say to yourself something like, “What a great moment in my life. I presently do not know the word for ‘shoe’ in my target language. Within seconds that infirmity will be erased! I will get a look at the word and, though it may not lodge in my memory after one single flash, that word will eventually be mine.” Make a big deal out of it. Indeed, it is a big deal when you expand your vocabulary. Now flip the card. If your target language is Spanish, the other side of the card will reveal the word for shoe as zapato. Once we hand you the ultimate vocabulary memory weapon, the one developed by Harry Lorayne, you will put that word through a mental process that will make it easier to retrieve. Right now, just try to remember it any way you can, even by rote.
Proceed to the next card, or the next word on that card. You should have enough cards with you so the same word doesn’t pop up so quickly that you haven’t really tested your retention, but not so many cards that you don’t meet the same word for another two or three days.
The fun comes when you meet the word again. Imagine the word is your opponent in a duel. Is it going to be you or he? Look only at the English. Try to remember. Don’t flip the card until you’re certain you’re defeated and cannot possibly come up with the word.
Even grizzled multilingual veterans who’ve used this system successfully will find themselves letting their guard down and moving from the English word on the flash card to the foreign word too quickly. No challenge, no effort, no gain.
There’s no memory glue better than standing there, in the line at a bank or wherever, looking at the English side of a flash card, not knowing the word immediately, trying hard to bring it back, fearing you can’t, and refusing to give up. Suddenly you think you have it. You flip the card over and see that you were, indeed, correct!
That word has no more chance of escaping you than your middle name.
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