How to Learn Any Language 27
Put it in Writing
We don’t know if a peacock is impressed when he sees himself in full display in a mirror. We do know that you and I are impressed with ourselves when we behold something we’ve written in a foreign language.
Try it. If you do nothing more than copy an exercise from your grammar book onto a piece of paper in your own handwriting, you’ll enjoy looking at it. You become like a kindergarten child so enraptured with his paint smearings that he can’t wait to take them home to Mommy and Daddy.
That’s strange, childish, egotistic – and supremely helpful when you’re learning another language. Go ahead and write. If you can write letters and cards to someone who speaks that language, so much the better. If you can write your dinner preferences for the waiter in an ethnic restaurant, do so. As soon as you feel sufficiently advanced, write a note to the editor of the foreign publication you’re learning to read and tell him how helpful it is. Write a letter to the ambassador of a country that speaks your target language and congratulate him on representing a culture sufficiently appealing to make you want to learn his language.
Carry a special little notebook with you at all times so you can jot down your new verbal acquisitions if you happen to meet native speakers of your target language.
As a student of Chinese I used to experience a high energy lift by writing the Chinese characters I’d learned on a blank piece of paper, preferably in red ink. I still get a kick doodling Chinese characters, randomly or in coherent sentences, on the margins of the newspaper I’m carrying or in the blank spaces on the display ads.
Write! Conquer and consolidate by writing. The ability to understand a word when it’s spoken or written, to use that word correctly with good pronunciation, and to write it correctly makes you the battlefield commander of that word.
Knowing
Jack Benny was one comic who remained beloved, even by his peers, despite his well known inability to come up with original material.
Once at a Hollywood roast when another comic laced into him with a devastating salvo that demanded a retort in kind, Benny won the moment by pausing and then saying, “You’d never get away with that if my writers were here.”
Cute for Jack Benny at a roast, but not really anything we can borrow. When you’re in language action and you stumble and lapse into uhs and ahs while the native speaker is patiently hoping you’ll come through, it doesn’t do to say, “I’d never be in this fix if I had my dictionary and phrase book with me.”
Everybody who’s ever tried to master a foreign language knows the frustration of needing the right word or phrase, knowing that you know it, but being utterly unable to come up with it at the moment. Just as golfers sometimes break their clubs in frustration, at some point you’ll want to smash your cassette player and throw your books into a shredder. You’ve mastered a neat set of phrases; they flow glibly off your tongue; you
sing them in the shower, repeat them as you dress, review them as you put on your coat – and suddenly all recollection vanishes in a poof when you run into a friend five minutes later who happens to be with a native speaker of the language you’re learning and you try to remember how to say “Pleased to meet you.”
Having the revolver is one thing. Drawing it quickly is quite another. To take set piece knowledge you’ve acquired and have it pop up automatically as instinct under real game conditions calls for a whole separate discipline.
Coaches stage scrimmages that simulate real game conditions as closely as possible. Pilots can now train in complex simulators that use some elements of computer games to achieve the effect of genuine flight. You, the language learner, can play little discipline games that will make your knowledge more readily retrievable in live language action.
First of all, why wait for the real life foreign language encounter to spring into retrieval practice? As you go through the motions of daily life, ask yourself, “What would I be saying here in the language I’m studying?” How would you greet the person headed toward you? What would you say to the friend she introduces you to? How would you thank her? How would you tell her “You’re welcome” or not to bother or would she please hand you the fork? It’s fun and helpful to dub everyday situations in the language you’re learning.
If you come up short in your practice with words and phrases you’ve already learned, jot them down on a pad and look them up when you get back to your books.
As you review your cassettes, try to come up with the foreign word during the pause before the next piece of English. Put artificial pressure on yourself: “Can I come up with the expression before I hear the next word on the cassette?” Or if you’re listening as you’re walking, “Can I come up with it before I get to that sign, that lamppost, the corner, the curb?” Victory is being able to take an entire cassette of what were recently nonsense syllables to you and throw back the foreign equivalents without hesitation.
You’ll be glad you didn’t smash your tools when your friend approaches you by surprise to introduce you to her friend from a country that speaks the language you’re learning and you respond with a crisp, correct “Pleased to meet you” in that language!
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2007/3/23 18:23:00
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