How to Learn a Foreign Language (3 page)

W
e've talked about using your mouth in a new way. We've also described how you're likely to encounter familiar letters of the alphabet used in quite new ways. Now we're going to talk about
thinking
in a new way. This process is almost like going back to childhood once again; learning to
associate sounds with objects
the way you did when you were very young.

When you were a child, you didn't know what a tree was at first. Somebody had to tell you. Chances are your parents took you outside, pointed to a tree and said, “Tree!” I doubt that you even learned this word right away. Your parents probably had to repeat the word to you on several different occasions before you finally got the hang of it. You had to learn to associate the sound of the word “tree” with the big green leafy thing you saw in front of you.

That's what you must learn to do again. Only this time, since you're grown up, you will be able to get
the hang of it much faster. You'll know why somebody is pointing to a tree, or to a picture of a tree, and saying a strange word. But you'll still have to
learn
the new word. You may even have to relearn it many times before you finally actually learn it.

There's an important idea here. Everybody in the world knows what that big green leafy thing is. We've all seen them hundreds and thousands of times. In America our name for that thing is “tree.” But in Germany the name for that thing is
“Baum.”
In Arab countries the name is
“shajra.”
And in China they say
“shu.”
These various words are not themselves “trees”. They are just some of the many hundreds of different sounds used in the world to
represent
that great big green leafy thing.

To learn a foreign language you must get away from the idea of
translating words.
Translating takes too much time and mental energy. You will never learn to really speak and understand a foreign language if you have to translate everything.

Instead, learn to
associate
the new sound directly with the image in your mind. When we hear the sound “tree” in English, we immediately associate it with that big green leafy thing. So when we hear the sound
“Baum”
or
“shajra”
or
“shu”,
we don't want to think, “Hmmmm.
Baum
means tree, which means that great big green leafy thing.” Doing that is translating. We want to learn to hear the sounds
“Baum”
or
“shajra”
or
“shu”
and immediately think, “Hmmm. That sound means that big green leafy thing.”

You need to
establish new thought patterns by linking over and over again
a series of sounds with a mental image or an idea of an action—just as the Frenchman, Nigerian or Korean does when he hears a sound in his language which represents an object or an action. After a while the once meaningless sound becomes the new reality and image in your mind.

Don't think that the challenge of new thinking will be limited merely to the area of
new words;
it is going to go much deeper than that. You will be learning
new
paths
through the woods of the mind. You can pretty well say in any other language anything that you might want to say in English. It's just that
the way of putting it
will be different—depending on the language.

Let's use a different analogy: you can build a house using materials of very different sizes and shapes. English uses one set of building blocks, but other languages will use different-shaped building blocks that take some creativity to put together at first. Where we use two blocks, they may use three smaller ones—or maybe one large one.

Here's an example of an English sentence:
We have to buy a few books before going home.
When translating into almost any foreign language you will not take
each
English word and substitute a foreign word for it. You will instead be substituting
groups of words
or
ideas
from one language to the other. How each language will choose to group the ideas depends on the language.

In French or Spanish, for example,
we have to buy
is broken down into three words:
we/have to/buy.
Why? Because
have to
is another English form of saying
must.
So we shouldn't translate each word
have
and
to
but rather the
idea of having to,
which in a large number of languages is expressed in one word—like
must.

In Turkish, however, the Turks are able to telescope all these four words into one word, as a peculiarity of Turkish grammar. So in Turkish you would be sensitive to packaging all of those particular words into one form. We'll talk more about grammar in later chapters. To continue with our example:

This may seem confusing at the moment. After all, how am I to know how the other language expresses these ideas? Well, you won't know until you start to study your particular language. Each has its own time-honored peculiar way of putting things that has been worked out independently over hundreds of years or longer. Your own language course will alert you to those particular features.

Some of this may sound like philosophy or a complicated way to say simple things. But it really isn't. What you're trying to do is
to think
in a foreign language. Not to translate. If you don't learn to think in the foreign language, the chances are that you'll never really be very good at it.

Learning to think in a foreign language isn't all that hard. You learn to think in the language simply by using the language over and over again, asking and answering simple questions
at even the simplest level
until you feel comfortable with the process. Then you add some new words, and a few more new situations, and practice using them together with all the words you learned in previous lessons. Bit by bit you build up skill.

I don't want to suggest that you should
never
translate. There will be many times in class when the teacher will call upon you to translate a sentence that you hear
or read. The point of this is to make sure that you really understand what the sentence means and that the grammar is clear to you. Sometimes when you meet an especially complicated sentence you may want to translate it to yourself, just to work it all out. But in the end you will want to go back and ensure that you can understand what it means
simply by hearing it.

Once you really get into the language, you'll understand all this a good deal better. Somebody will be saying something quite fast and you'll suddenly realize that you understood it all! It's a great moment. Really satisfying. You probably wouldn't be able to repeat the words, or even know how it was that you understood it all. But it's a sign that the language is starting to sink into your mind.
You're beginning to understand without translating.

In fact, serious professional translating is a very different art from speaking or understanding a language. Some people are very good at speaking, but have trouble translating well for someone else. Don't worry about this. You're trying to learn the language, not to become a translator—at least at this stage.

1. You can never really learn to speak a foreign language, or understand it when it is spoken, unless you can learn to think in the language. You can actually start to think in the language from virtually the first day.

2. Learning to think in a new language means learning to associate an initially meaningless new sound with the idea or image of what it means. You practice to the point where the new sound takes on meaning for you.

3. Avoid translating, that is, mentally putting into English everything that you read or hear. Your goal is to understand without translating.

T
he first thing you will probably hear when you proudly announce to your friends and family that you have decided to learn Spanish, Czech, Persian, Korean, or whatever, is that the language you have chosen is “easy” or “hard.” In fact, no comment about which language is easy or hard is entirely accurate.

The most important factor determining whether a language is easy or hard for you is not so much the language itself as the matter of “where you are coming from.” Arabic is not very hard if you happen to speak Hebrew. Icelandic is pretty easy if you speak Danish. Russian is a cinch if you are Bulgarian.

Languages that are
close to our own
tend to be easier and more familiar, both the grammar as well as the vocabulary. But what does “close” mean? What we are actually talking about here is the matter of
language families
—an important part of understanding what languages are all about.

So let's spend a little time exploring some of the main language families of the world—and what they mean to you, in terms of learning words and grammar. You're going to end up learning lots of words in whatever new language you take up. A little understanding of language families and word associations will go a long way toward making this an easier process. It may even tell you some things about your own language, English.

All languages in the world are related to some other language or languages. And they can all be divided up into large groupings or families. Most European languages derive from a common heritage—from a very large language group or family called
Indo-European.
You may have heard of the oldest known existing written member of that language family—called Sanskrit—which was written many thousands of years ago in India.

Why does this matter to you? There's a good chance you will be learning a language from the Indo- European language family. And like all families, this one is divided into several distinct branches—like the Smiths and the Joneses who both trace their family line back to a common great-great-grandparent.

Indo-European languages subdivide into these main sub-families: Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Indic, Iranian, Celtic, and a few others such as Greek and Albanian. Let's take a slightly closer look at a few of these sub-families. Here's where you'll probably spot one of the languages that you will be studying:

Romance:
(This name doesn't have anything to do with love or romantic interests, by the way. The name comes from the word Roman, simply because these languages all developed from Latin, the language of the ancient Roman Empire.) The main modern languages in this group are:

These languages developed when the Latin speakers of the Roman Empire became isolated in their own areas after the Empire began to fall apart. Their Latin gradually corrupted—or you could say evolved—into these various modern forms of Latin. In other words, people once speaking a common language gradually grew apart over hundreds of years until their languages began to be rather distinct one from another.

I'm giving you all this history because I want to make it clear
why
there are close relationships among all these languages. If you already know one of these Romance languages then you will find it relatively easy to learn another one of the group. The grammars are not very different and a high proportion of words will be recognizable to speakers in each of these languages. This means that with minimal work, a speaker of one can fairly quickly and comfortably learn to read another language in the same group—and with a little more work, to speak it.

You may ask, how does that help me? English isn't a Romance language. No, it isn't. It's on the next list we'll look at: the Germanic languages. I'll tell you in a moment why we English speakers can still make connections to the Romance languages.

Germanic:
These languages all derived from a common Germanic ancestor, branching off from the early Indo-European prototype. The main languages in this group today are:

As with the Romance languages, if you know one of the Germanic languages it makes it a lot easier to learn the others. There will be big similarities in grammar and vocabulary. Some will be closer to each other than others. Languages in the same family, located geographically
near one another, will generally resemble one another more than languages geographically further away. Norwegian and Swedish, for example, are much closer than are German and English.

Slavic:
The oldest known written form of this family of languages is called Old Church Slavonic, a dead language now used only in the services of the Russian Orthodox Church. The main modern languages in this group today are:

Of these Slavic languages the one you're most likely to study is Russian.

I won't go into any detail about the other three large Indo-European sub-families because you're less likely to study any of them—at least as your first foreign language. The Indic languages are a large group of languages in the area of India and Pakistan. Iranian languages mainly cover Iran and Afghanistan. Celtic languages chiefly refer to Irish, Scots Gaelic and Welsh.

I promised to talk about how English fits into all of this. Well, English is actually something of an unusual language. As we've just seen, it belongs to the Germanic language family. So English
grammar
is unmistakeably Germanic in character. But the
vocabulary
of English has a lot of Romance-language words in it. When the Normans from France invaded and occupied England in 1066, they imposed thousands of French words upon the very Germanic English of that day. Even more, they imposed the basically
French system of creating new words
—the more intellectual, philosophic, cultural, scientific, and abstract words—from
Latin and Greek roots.

As a result, our English language, starting in about the 14th century, began to reflect not only the old Germanic vocabulary but also heavy new elements of
French—which, as we saw, derived from Latin. The basically Germanic grammar of English had also grown vastly simpler. So now, the English language has a huge vocabulary—definitely more than other languages—with words from both Romance and Germanic sources. You should feel lucky that you don't have to learn English!

One advantage of having English as your native language is that you have a head start in learning either a Germanic or a Romance language. You will recognize a lot of the basic Germanic vocabulary and feel somewhat comfortable with the grammar of Germanic languages. And you'll recognize the roots of thousands of words in the Romance languages as well.

We've talked a lot of theory here. Let's now look at some concrete examples—and what these similarities mean in practice.

When you start to learn words in one of these two language families you are looking for ways to help yourself
memorize new words.
So you need to be on the look-out for words that bear some resemblance to words that are already familiar from our Romance-Germanic heritage. You can't expect to recognize every word by any means, but you should be able—with some thought and practice—to recognize many. This is a skill you want to develop.

Let's start with French. You will already know—whether you are aware of it or not—thousands of French words that are identical, or virtually identical, to English. I won't list many because they are so obviously the same, even though they might be pronounced slightly differently:
confort, assistance, question, tragédie, action, gouvernement,
etc.

There are many more French words that you would quickly recognize—at least when someone pointed out the meaning to you:
gloire, ville
,
heure, fleur, étrange, entière, bleu, grand, jardin, ennemi, journal
(glory, city, hour, flower, strange, entire, blue, big, garden, enemy, newspaper).

There are even more French words for which you'll need a little more imagination to relate to, or to guess. Many of these words will remind you of English words—often fancy English words from Latin roots—but the meaning will be slightly different. That's all right. You're just
looking for anything that can help you in some way to remember these words.
Try them. If you can't guess the words right off, there's nothing to worry about. What I want you to
notice is how a related English word will help you link the French word with the real English meaning in your mind.
Even if you're not going to study French you should still look at these examples to get some idea of the process of looking for related words—to serve as a memory jog in any language.

I've given you quite a number of these because it's one of the most important points of all in learning a new vocabulary. You need to think about
how to relate the words you're learning to words you already know,
even if they're not exactly the same. You're looking for
handles
—memory devices—to make your memory task easier.

Now let's look at German. You remember I said the higher level terms in English come mainly from French and Latin. It's just the opposite with German. Our most basic daily words—the heart of the language—come from the Germanic origins of our language. Look at the similarity between these everyday German and English words:
Mann
, man;
Wasser
, water;
hundert
, hundred;
Haus
, house;
Apfel
, apple;
Blut
, blood.

Now look at this list for some less obvious similarities:

Some of the words on this German list are less like English than others. But I hope that in each case, at least after you saw the related English word—you were struck by its connection to German.

By the way, did you notice one thing? In lots of German words an “ss” comes out in English as “t” in words like
Strasse, vergessen, Wasser.
This is one of the linguistic “laws” of relationships between German and English words.

There are many such linguistic laws about how
predictable changes
come about in the way languages develop. You don't actually have to learn these laws, but some you can probably figure out for yourself, as you may have noticed in the German case above. Many of these linguistic laws are rather complex, especially when you get to languages in families more distant from English. The point is, though, that you
always need to keep your eyes open
for such connections. They may well be there. They will make your task easier.