How to Learn a Foreign Language (5 page)

T
here are only two things that you really need to learn when you study a foreign language: words, and how to put them together. (All right, so all you need to build the Eiffel Tower is some bolts and girders and a lot of space! Fair enough.) You just can't learn a language without learning words—lots of them. Memorizing vocabulary lists—and grammar rules, which determine how you use these words—can be the real drudgery of language study. I want to show you how to make learning vocabulary as easy and painless as possible.

How many words do you have to learn when you study a language? Well, that depends on what you want to say—and understand. To get around a country and meet your very basic needs, a couple of hundred words might do. To carry on a simple conversation on general topics you'll need about two thousand words. To hold a fairly serious conversation with people and to read a newspaper you'll need a minimum of five thousand words. Don't worry about the numbers now. At any
stage the most important thing is to
use all the words you know.

The traditional way to study vocabulary is to use a word list, with the foreign words listed down one side and the corresponding English words down the other. You cover up one side of the page and go down the other while practicing and testing yourself until you think you know them all pretty well.

The main problem with a list is that you can cheat a little bit. You sometimes remember what a word on a list means, not because you actually remember the word, but because you remembered which word came after which on the list. Or you remember which word it was that came near the top of the list. Put the word in a different place on the list and suddenly you don't remember what it means any more.

Instead of lists, I recommend you use
word cards
to learn vocabulary. Word cards are a variation on the idea of word lists but they don't have the drawbacks of lists. In fact, word cards have many extra advantages.

First let me describe word cards. They are little cards—the thickness of index cards—about 1? × 3? with the foreign word written on one side and the English on the back. Don't buy the ready-made ones with the preprinted vocabulary on them—they're expensive and half the time they don't have the words on them that you want, or the way you want them. Buy blank cards and write your own. When you make your cards, write the word upside down on the second side, so that you have only to flip the card upside down to see the meaning. If you can't find boxes of blank word cards for sale, make your own by cutting up index cards.

The advantages of word cards as a technique for collecting and drilling vocabulary are:

Find memory handles.
Just as with anything else, there are techniques to memorizing words that can make the process easier. We spent a lot of time in previous chapters talking about how to make word associations. You may notice a similarity with an English word—just as we discussed in our chapter on language families. You may notice a similarity with some word you have already learned in your new language—as we talked about in our chapter on word roots. Or the word may remind you of something—possibly unrelated—which helps let the word stick in your mind. However you do it, get a handle on the word.

Say the words out loud.
As you go through your word cards always say each word out loud, or at least
whisper it to yourself. Remember, you are training several parts of your head at once: your
mind
(by thinking about the whole process), your
eye
(by seeing and recognizing the word), your
mouth
(by saying the word as you study it), and your
ear
(by hearing what you are saying to yourself). Saying the word and hearing it are as important as seeing it. And use your best hammed-up foreign pronounciation. You may feel self-conscious at first about talking to yourself, but you'll soon get over that. Language study can pretty quickly hammer the shyness out of you.

Go for speed.
Go over the word list or the pile of word cards until you can run through them fast. It isn't really good enough if you have to puzzle over each word before you remember the meaning. Remember that you are trying to reach the stage where you
don't have to think
—you want to get to the point where you can almost go
automatically
from the foreign word to English. This is not an intellectual exercise. You are learning to
build automatic language reflexes
through repetition.

Always start with the foreign language side of the word card face up first. This is actually the easier part of the learning process. All you have to do is to remember what the foreign word means. Here's where your memory tricks are most important. They help you recognize the foreign word and learn its meaning. You don't really need the memory trick any more after you start recognizing the word. You want to get where you don't have to think about it any more.

After you have the foreign words down fairly cold, turn the cards over and start going from the English word
back
to the foreign word. This is usually harder. Now you have to remember
precisely
what the foreign word is. But at least you'd already seen it and said it several times when you were looking at it earlier and trying to remember the English.

Always do the cards
both ways,
first the foreign language to English and then English to the foreign language. Just going one way is not good enough. For some reason the mind sees these as different processes. Doing it one way is no guarantee that you can do it the other. Going from the foreign language to English is passive: you just want to see how fast the meaning can sink into your mind. Going from English to the foreign language is an
active
process where you are training your mind to think in a foreign language.

Don't use the cards exclusively for single words. You should also make up cards with phrases or expressions that you especially want to learn. And by all means put additional information on the card about words that you need to remember, such as special forms or irregularities or whatever.

As you learn the words, it really helps to try to make up sentences out of the new words. This makes the new words more real. And, at the same time, you'll be able to use other words that you've already learned. You will be reinforcing sentence structures as well.

Every so often, go back and review the words you learned earlier. You may find you have forgotten some of the ones you haven't used very often. You may also find you can flip through those old cards a lot faster than you ever were able to do before. That's a sure sign that you're making progress—even when you thought you weren't.

Remember, making these word cards and studying them is all part of the process of repetition—an essential part of the language process. You're trying to implant a whole new language into your mind. Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither were Paris or Madrid or Tokyo or Moscow either.

1. Home-made word cards are an excellent technique for memorizing vocabulary.

2. Use those memory handles to fix the meaning of the new vocabulary in your mind.

3. Learn words first from the foreign language to English, and then the other way. Learning them one way does not mean you know them well the other way.

4. Always say the foreign word out loud as you see it—don't just read it. You want to involve your mouth and your ears as well as your eyes.

5. Don't be passive. Make up little sentences to yourself using the new word. Do the maximum with the new vocabulary, not the minimum.

F
or the first few lessons your text may not dwell much at all on grammar. These days dialogues are a popular way to start to learn a language. You learn a simple dialogue—usually representing an American (you) talking to a real live foreigner just after you have arrived in his country. But when you memorize these dialogues you
are
learning grammar without being aware of it. The foreign grammar patterns are being unconsciously imprinted in your mind.

Once you have some of these “canned sentences” memorized so that you can say them in your sleep, you can easily substitute some of the other new vocabulary to make new sentences. “Where is the
station?”
(airport, bus stop, hotel, taxi stand).

The dialogues at this early stage should be useful and simple—the kinds of conversations you are likely to get into often. Don't be disappointed by the things that you will be talking about at this stage of your lessons. It's going to be limited mostly to talking about your name, how you are, where you're from and how
to get to the airport. You'll have to wait till later to get into conversations about philosophical topics, whether the governmental coalition is beginning to crumble, or how the trade imbalance is likely to affect the national inflation. First things first…

At this early stage of your language study you should also be ready to learn lots of polite phrases. Foreigners like polite phrases. They generally use them more than we do in English. Better than that, these kinds of polite phrases are great “fillers” which you can throw in whenever you can't think of anything else to say. Or you can stick them into your conversations and sound like you know more than you do.

Remember, at the beginning you won't likely be making up too many of your own sentences. This is the small talk stage: welcome, how are you, I am fine, how is your family, how do you like Japan, are you an American, how long have you been in Paris, have you been to a bullfight, how much do the egg rolls cost, and so on.

This material will be very important to you. It is the first stage of your becoming the actor I told you about. You should take to repeating these dialogues as if your Academy Award depended upon it. It can actually be fun trying to play the foreigner in the way that I talked about earlier. You want to try to exaggerate all the new sounds and take on your new foreign personality.
But the real point of this drill is to drive these dialogues into your memory until they have become second nature. You want to be able to repeat these patterns of conversation without even having to think.

After you have repeated these sentence patterns many times—most usefully with another person—you will already have begun to think in the language. OK, you won't be thinking profound thoughts. Don't rush off to the Presidential Palace or the University to try out your new skills yet. That will come later. But you are asking questions and giving appropriate answers in a foreign language.
You are already starting to think in the language.

63

How well do you have to know a language to start dreaming in it? One year, two years, almost a lifetime? Wrong. You can actually start dreaming in a language in a few weeks. Whether you do or not partly depends on you and your tape recorder, or the amount of hours you spend each day on language study. If you really listen a lot, and repeat and repeat your sentences, you'll soon find them swimming around in your head. When you go to sleep at night you'll find yourself repeating them over and over—even in your sleep. That's a great sign. It's a sign the language is really getting to you—and into you.

You don't have to know a lot of the language to start using it. To some extent this is going to depend on the textbook you are using and your teacher's own method of teaching. The main thing is that whatever sentences you find in the first few lessons of your book, you and your teacher should be able to form conversational questions from them. If your book has a dialogue about “where is the airport”, you can start asking—and answering—where the airport is. Never mind that this is just a “canned dialogue” straight out of the book. The point is that you are
hearing
a question in the language,
understanding
it, and
answering
it. That is what thinking in the language is all about.

You want to “exercise” the material as often as you can. That is, you want to practice the new words by using them in sentence patterns you already know. Here are some examples of what we mean by “exercising”:

This may seem simple-minded. It isn't. You are
already
speaking a foreign languge. With each chapter you will learn new words which you can exercise and mix back into the old sentences. You're getting more comfortable with the whole process of hearing, understanding and now
generating
your own sentences.

Now I'm going to bring up the old business about the tape recorder again. Get hold of a tape recorder and some tapes. You need to listen, and listen, and listen to the material.

Here's how to use your tapes. First, listen to the lesson several times until you think you can generally follow what it says.

Next, listen to each sentence and then put the recorder on “pause” and repeat out loud the sentence you just heard (Some tapes already have pauses built into the recording, giving you enough time to repeat the sentence). If you have trouble saying it all, then listen to the same sentence again and try repeating it again.

Go through the tape out loud several times until you are really pretty comfortable at doing this. I know you may feel self-conscious, or view it as something more suited to a ten-year-old. But believe me, it works. The reason it works is that when you listen to the tape you are training your ear. Your mind is beginning to understand
the foreign words without taking out time to translate them.

I just can't emphasize enough how important it is to listen and repeat with a tape recorder. No other technique can get you to understand and speak the language as fast as this one.

If you can't get any tape recordings at all then try to find somebody who can record your lessons or dialogues for you on a blank tape. At the absolute worst, you can record the material yourself. That won't do much for your accent—since your accent is likely to be rather American at the start—but it is still much better than nothing. At least you will be listening, understanding and repeating/speaking—the most important exercises of all.

1. You can start using the language right away by learning and using the dialogues in your book.

2. Use a tape recorder to listen to the dialogues or the sentences and repeat them, until you can do so comfortably. This process is one of the most valuable things you can do to learn a foreign language.

3. Memorizing whole sentences helps teach you the patterns of the language and imprints them on your mind.