Reward-and-Denial Games
There is a clever way to speed learning. Impose little discipline games on yourself geared to bringing you back to the language often throughout the day for short periods that can’t possibly get in your way. Don’t let yourself have the first cup of coffee until you review ten of the words you learned yesterday. Permit yourself dessert if you can go through ten whole flash cards without a mistake. Say yes to the extra glass of wine if you can name any five objects in the room in the foreign language while you hold your breath. Let yourself take off and go see the movie once you’re able to beat the speaker on the cassette to the foreign word or phrase for a solid minute. Or, as you advance, two or three minutes.
Roll your own rules. It’s painless. It’s fun. It’s character building. And it rushes you forward to quicker results.
Profanity and Vulgarity
Forget it. Whoever uses foul language even in English among people he doesn’t know well loses standing. When you go out of your way to use bad language in a foreign language, it’s much worse.
One night in a blockhouse on the Austrian side of the Hungarian border waiting for refugees to come across, our all male crowd represented three languages: English, German, and Hungarian. A brisk discussion in comparative obscenity broke out and a fascinating pattern emerged. Whatever we had three or four dirty words for in English, German always had sixteen or seventeen and Hungarian never less than thirty-five!
Sure, the other guy’s garbage is fun to know, but it’s tacky, so leave it alone. It’s all right to get command of their unacceptable terms for defensive purposes only – so you’ll know what not to say and be able to exercise caution when using words dangerously similar to the no-no words.
It’s a good idea to follow Maimonides on this one: “What is lofty may be said in any language. What is mean should be said in none.”
Your Second Foreign Language, Your Third, and So On
It’s said that once you master one foreign language, all others come much more easily. That’s not a myth. Your first foreign language, in a major way, is the first olive dislodged from the bottle. The rest flow obligingly forth.
Moreover, your second foreign language need have no connection to your first. Chinese will be easier if you’ve first mastered Italian. Greek will be easier if you’ve mastered Japanese. You pick up the principles of how language works with your first conquest. I once asked a man who commanded easily a dozen languages how he did it.
“I started out studying languages when I was young,” he said, “and I was just too lazy to quit!
He was kidding, of course, but a lot of true words are spoken through exaggerations.
The Right Word
Don’t settle for being merely understood. Some of the least intelligent and most unspectacular people on earth can be understood in languages other than their own. Keep pressing forward toward perfection. “He think he’s a big shot” gets the notion across, but that shouldn’t satisfy the learner of English searching for the word “megalomaniac”.
It’s a marvellous feeling of unfolding and growth when you learn more and more words that take you closer and closer to the bull’s eye of what you want to express.
Saying It Right
One of the most maddening things about language learning – you’ll encounter it time and time again – is having the face of the native you’re speaking with suddenly go blank. You’ve used a word he doesn’t understand. He asks you to repeat it. You do. He still doesn’t understand. You repeat it again. Slower. Louder. Finally, in frustration, desperation, and humiliation, you write the word down or show it to him in your book.
Then he gets it. “Ahh,” the native speaker says, the black night of your spoken error suddenly pierced by the flashbulb of print. And then – here’s the payoff – he proceeds to repeat exactly what you’ve been saying to him a dozen or so times without his comprehending!
That syndrome is particularly prevalent in Chinese, though you risk it in every language. Be a sport. Eat crow. And even though you’re far from the mood at that moment, try to catch something in what he says that’s at least slightly different from what you’ve been saying. If the next native speaker understands your revised pronunciation without an argument, then that crow you were forced to eat will retroactively taste like pheasant!
Every language student has good days and bad days with the language for no apparent reason. On bad days you can’t seem to unleash a simple greeting without monumental phumphering. On good days you actually feel supernaturally propelled. A rising tide lifts all boats. Keep working. The bad days as well as the good days will both be better.

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