How to Learn a Foreign Language (4 page)

Let's go back to the Romance languages for just one more exercise in word-association. This time let's try Spanish. Remember that Spanish, like French, comes from Latin. So the associated words that come to mind in English will also be originally from Latin—again like the French example.

How did you do on this group of words? Are you getting the hang of it? Actually, I deliberately didn't choose many of the words that are almost exactly like English. I wanted to give you slightly harder ones to make you stretch a bit.

Did you notice a few other things? A lot of the words were similar to words we had listed in French—not surprisingly—since the languages are closely related:
arbre-árbol; penser-pensar; fumer-fumar; ami-amigo; soleil-sol; neuf-nuevo; rouge-rojo.
A lot of Spanish words began with the letter “e” that were just like an English word beginning with “s” plus consonant:
escuela, estado, estudiar.
This is another “linguistic law” in relationships between many Spanish and English words.

When you can't find obvious—or even not so obvious—connections,
look for any kind of connection. Even make one up.
We've been talking about real linguistic connections so far. But remember, you're not primarily interested in linguistic laws. You're just looking for ways to remember words. If you can develop some crazy association in your mind with a given word—that's fine.

I need to be honest with you. You'll only be able to make easy connections between English and the Romance or Germanic languages. When we look at words from other sub-families of the Indo-European group the process of making connections gets much harder. It takes a lot more knowledge of linguistic rules to spot
any
connections if you are studying Russian, any other Slavic language, or one of the Indian languages. That's one reason why those languages are considered harder for us than Romance or Germanic languages.

So the more remote the language you're learning is from English, the more you'll need to use your imagination to make connections. Otherwise it will be very
difficult to memorize and use thousands of words that you can't get a “memory handle” on.

The whole point of imagination is that you
have to make the connections in your own mind
if your memory tricks are going to work. This is true even if the connections are totally phony, or even wild. Let me give you a few more examples of how I, at least, might go about trying to remember a number of Russian words that have no obvious connections with their English equivalents—by making “phony connections.”

Look, I know I'm really stretching a point here. Some of these word associations I made up are almost absurd. But they do serve to give me a way, however tortured, to remember the word the first few times I see it in a word list. A word that was meaningless and looked like gibberish suddenly takes on personality and character. That's what remembering a word is all about.
You can throw away the word association crutch once the word has become real to you
and begun to sink into your memory. So go ahead and dream up your own “connections” to help you remember. What works is right for you.

Of course, the more languages you learn the easier this process becomes. First of all, you just get more experienced at making up your own memory devices day after day. Second, the more languages you know, the more words you know that remind you of something else. You get much faster at “spotting handles.”

Non-Indo-European languages:

Many of you will be studying languages that are not part of the Indo-European family. These languages will present even greater difficulty since there is no reason whatsoever for words in these languages to have any connection with English. Still, even here you'll find many words borrowed in more recent times from English.

All is not hopeless however, especially if you are going to be learning more than one language from a given area. In the Middle East, for example, there are also a number of language families. Should you ever become serious about studying more than one language of this region, your job will be relatively easy if your second language belongs to the same family as your first.

Most of these Arabic loan words were adopted to express new Islamic terms relating to cultural, literary, scientific or philosophical concepts in the fields of history, law, literature, religion, and economics. These Arabic terms are generally identical in languages unrelated to Arabic—languages like Turkish, Persian, Urdu (Pakistan), Hindustani, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Swahili (in much of Africa)—wherever Islam spread. So here again, just as Latin is the basis of much
of the educated concepts of Western languages, Arabic plays the same role in the Muslim world.

Turkish is related to a very large family of Turkic languages that are spoken across a huge geographic belt from Turkey east through northern Iran, Soviet Central Asia and Western China. They may be exotic languages you're not too likely to learn—Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Azerbaijani, Uighur, etc., but once you learn Turkish you've taken a huge step forward towards learning the virtual
lingua franca
or common language of an area covering several thousand miles, from the borders of Greece to the borders of Mongolia.

East Asian languages are even more elusive to the English speaker. Japanese and Chinese words seem to lack the separate and distinctive sounds of English or other Western languages. From some points of view they might be considered harder to learn. Chinese (Thai and Vietnamese, too) uses tones to distinguish among different words. So a word in Mandarin Chinese like “
yan
” could mean either tobacco, color, eye, or test, (or more) depending on the tone (high, rising, falling, low) that the particular word has. That complicates learning vocabulary if you don't happen to have a good ear and memory for tones. The only consolation is that Chinese grammar is very easy.

Now you have some sense of what experts are talking about when they say that this or that language is related. When the language you are learning is related to one you already know, your task is easier. You can also begin to understand why people who have already learned a number of languages generally find it reasonably easy to go on and learn several more. It always involves work. But it becomes easier when you have experience and “friends” among several different language “families.”

1. All languages belong to language families. If the language you are studying comes from a nearby family
such as the Romance or Germanic language group, look for similarities. They are there.

2. Even if you can't always spot similarities (they're not always there), use your imagination to try to make up connections in your own mind to help you remember the word. Later you can drop the memory device.

3. In languages distant from or totally unrelated to English, you will have to rely even more on your imagination and memory tricks to remember many thousands of words that have no relationship to English.

4. The more languages you learn, the better you get at spotting real, or inventing artificial, connections in your mind to help you remember.

5. Anything that helps you remember a word is fair game.

W
e spent a good bit of time in the last chapter talking about language families and the kinds of similarities to look for among them. We also talked about the use of imagination to help you make connections between English words and their foreign counterparts.

In this chapter I want to show you another fundamental fact about languages that will greatly simplify your memory task. It is this: every language builds its
complex
words from the simple basic word roots of that language. This means the difficulty of learning strange and unrelated words will come mainly at the
beginning,
when everything is new to you. But as you begin to get hundreds, or even a thousand, words under your belt you will start noticing that an increasing proportion of the subsequent new words you learn are based on the roots of the basic words you have already learned.

When you think about it, this makes sense. Primitive human beings painstakingly and gradually created new sounds, new words, as the need arose. They needed
clearly distinguishable words for every new object—basic things like “fire, water, wood, food,” and so forth. But as people needed to expand their language and create more sophisticated concepts they drew on many of the existing roots of the language as their basis for creating new words. Every language does this. As these new words were created, each language developed certain rough
patterns
for the creation of new vocabulary. In other words, each language has its own distinctive characteristics for generating new words.

Your job is to figure out how the language you're studying actually works, and how it generates its new words.
You won't have to analyze the pattern on your own—your teacher and your text can help you to do that. You need only be aware that there
is
a system and pattern your language uses to “invent” new words. It's an irregular and not fully predictable pattern—but it's a pattern.

To help you get the idea, let's take a look at how we do it in English. In English we can sometimes make up new words from basic Germanic roots largely by putting simple endings on them.

Get the pattern? You can see that English has a system—they never teach it in school—that let's you make verbs out of
some
words by adding “-en”. So if you were an Indonesian learning English you might have to struggle to learn the word “bright” the first time you saw it. But you would be very quick to learn the verb “brighten” once you had learned “bright.” On the other hand, the pattern doesn't always work. We
can't say “smallen” from “small” or “greenen” from “green”, even if we can say “redden” from “red”. Languages develop from human social usage, not from computers or mathematicians or professors.

We also have thousands of words that are combinations of root words: book-bag, doorknob, icebreaker, fishburger, windbreaker, eyewash, dogfood, candlestick. Or words extending from simpler roots such as life: lively, living, liven, live, lifeless.

These are simple examples of word-building which English has retained from the old Germanic system. But most of our word building comes from using the
French/Latin
system. For example, we use the old Anglo-Saxon “write” in our every day language about writing: write, writer, re-write, writings, etc. But when we want to create more complex, abstract words related to the idea of “writing” we turn to the Latin root “scribe”—which is just the everyday Latin root for “write.” And we add
Latin
prefixes. So we end up with a whole series of different words for more complex concepts that come from the simple idea of writing:

In German, or Russian, or most other languages, this process is less mystifying, because it's more self-contained. They use their
own
everyday word for “write” and add on their
own
prefixes to create roughly the same abstract words like “subscribe, transcribe, prescribe” etc., unlike our use of
foreign
roots and
foreign
prefixes.

By the way, did you happen to notice the similarity between “scribe” in Latin and “
schreiben
” in German? It's not by accident. Both are Indo-European languages and happen to share this root word.

Now you can see how words are built up. Once you learn the basic word, you can spot how the more complex words are created from it. Of course, you still have
to study the word to learn it. No system is fully predictable and each has lots of irregularities. But the learning process becomes much easier when you have something to hang your memory on. And most Indo-European languages employ this system of
combining basic roots and prefixes
to create more complex concepts.

Let's remember that English is a living language. The meanings of a lot of our words have evolved over time. So they don't all have quite the same literal meaning that they started out with. A word like “manufacture” literally means “hand-made”:
manu
—hand and,
facture
—made; because in the old days when you manufactured something you made it by hand. But you can see that the basic principle of the word is still there. And a knowledge of how to dissect these words will help you learn them—especially if you were starting to learn English as a foreign language.

The point is that words are not just a
complicated set of meaningless syllables
that have a certain arbitrary meaning attached to them. A language
grows,
organically, like a tree. So it's natural for words to be related to one other and built from each other. We don't make up some meaningless new sound and give it a meaning. We almost always work from existing words to create new ones.

If an American or British scientist invents some kind of new machine, you can bet that he won't decide to call it a
gropsmaflupyim.
Why? Because that's not English, nor does it even look like English. Just because he invented it doesn't really give him the right to make up a name out of the blue. Why not? He's breaking the rule that you make up new words out of existing roots of the language. Furthermore, nobody would ever remember the name. It would hardly be on the road to commercial success. But if he called it a
transtactomorpholator,
you'd immediately accept it as English, even though I just made the word up out of Latin and Greek roots used in English.

Remember: every language will have some sort of word-building system. Look for it. After all, if there weren't some kind of a system, kids wouldn't be able to learn their own language either.

1. Every language builds the complex words from the simple basic root words of that language.

2. After you learn several hundred words or more you will start noticing familiar roots creeping back into your vocabulary lists in new forms.

3. Eventually, the vast proportion of new vocabulary in your new language will be based on roots you already know.