How to Learn Any Language 21WAIT A MINUTE!
An enemy, a skeptic, even a queasy ally at this point could say, “Wait a minute. I’m trying to learn a language. I’m not sure I want to walk around with a headful of images of wives who keep moles, chickens that play polo, angry people emitting cold air, and VA hospitals you can knock over with a hoe!”
You won’t! One beauty of the system is, the association that helps you capture the word falls away and disintegrates. Once you’ve learned the words, the “crutch” obligingly disappears.
A common form of the verb “to speak” in Hebrew is medaber, pronounced meda-BEAR. There it is: you were walking through the newly planted forests of Israel and suddenly you “med” a bear who could speak!
In Indonesian, “movie screen” is lajar, pronounced almost exactly like “liar” (LI-ar). Easy. The man is rapidly winning the woman’s heart in the movie, but you don’t wish him well because he’s such a lajar!
“Horse” in Russian, transliterated into English script, is lo-shod, pronounced almost exactly like LAW-shod. You try to bring your own horse with you into the Soviet Union, but at the border the Soviet customs officer tells you Sorry, he’d like to accommodate you, but your horse doesn’t have horseshoes and, according to Soviet law, all horses must be shod.
“Horse” equals LAW-shod.
The Greek word for “grape” in English transliteration is stafilya, pronounced sta-FEEL-ya.
You’re in a Greek vineyard in the mountains near Albania. You see the most luscious grape you’ve ever laid eyes on. As you reach for it, the air is split with a squeaky voice screaming “Don’t touch me!”
“I’m sorry,” you sputter, retreating in shock and shame. “I wasn’t going to eat you. It was just to FEEL you (jus’ sta-FEEL-ya).”
Grape equals sta-FEEL-ya.
The Serbo-Croatian word for “lunch” is ru􀀦ak, pronounced almost exactly like RUE-chuck. You’re having lunch in a restaurant in Yugoslavia. The waiter overhears you making a political remark he doesn’t appreciate, so he throws you out bodily. Never one to go quietly, you pick yourself up out of the gutter, dust yourself off, and, just before you head for the American Embassy to protest, you shake your first at the waiter through the window and vow he’ll rue the day he chucked you out while you were having lunch.
“Lunch” equals RUE-chuck.
“Plate” in Indonesian is piring, pronounced exactly like the English “peering” (PEER-ing).
Your Indonesian restaurant experience is a bit more pleasant than the one in Yugoslavia. You walk in and find yourself suddenly becalmed by the serenity of the dining room. All the Indonesians seem to have their heads bowed in prayer. You ask the headwaiter if you’ve interrupted some sort of religious service.
“Not at all,” he assures you. “They’re not praying. We just got our new plates with mirrored surfaces and they’re all peering at themselves to see how they look!”
“Plate” equals PEER-ing.
The Farsi word for “cheaper” transliterated into English is arzontar, pronounced our-zone-TAR.
The hotel in Tehran is filled, but the clerk tells you it’s a warm night and he’d be happy to rent you sleeping space on the roof. You’re delighted to learn you’re paying only half what the other roof sleepers are paying, until you get to your designated spot on the roof, at which point you exclaim to your spouse, “Now I see why our spot is cheaper. All the other tourists are sleeping on those nice ceramic tiles. Our zone, the spot assigned to us, however, is tar!”
“Cheaper” equals our-zone-TAR.
“Potato” in German is kartoffel, pronounced exactly like cart-AW-ful.
You buy potatoes from a cart and they turn out to be awful. “Potato” equals cart-AW-ful.
Stop right here! Do you remember the Spanish word for “old?” Or the French word for “anger,” the Italian word for “wife,” the Serbo-Croatian word for “lunch,” or the Indonesian word for “movie screen?”
When we display this system of word capturing at seminars for the Learning Annex, there’s a collective gasp when, after spelling out an association to capture the tenth word, we suddenly stop and ask how many can recall word number one, four, and so on. At no point did we suggest that the students try to recall the words used as examples as we laid out the system. When they see that almost everybody recalls every single one of them anyhow, the students realise this system contrasts well with the kind of rote learning they’d tried earlier. One grateful participant exclaimed, “This system teaches you words you’re not even trying to learn. The old way doesn’t teach you no matter how hard you try!”
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How to Learn Any Language 22The Almosters
The skeptic has one shot left before he’s wiped out by the power of the method. He can, at this point, say, “Hold it! Every word you’ve used to demonstrate the system so far falls much too neatly into our lap – liar, mole-yay. It’s a setup. It’s not real. Very few words will cooperate with the system once you tackle the real world!”
And he’s right! The words we’ve been subjecting to the memory system so far are automatics. They fall right into your lap with self suggesting images. Only a small percentage of words will fall into the system as facilely as the automatics. More, many more than you imagine, will fit automatically into the system, but far from enough to conquer another language. Never mind! Behind the words that fit neatly into the system are many times that number of words that, while fitting nowhere nearly as neatly, can nonetheless take you so close to the target word that true memory can easily complete the job. We call those words almosters. Of our four groups – automatics, almosters, toughies, and impossibles – the almosters make up by far the single biggest category.
Let’s demonstrate.
The Chinese word for “lobster” is transliterated as low-shah, pronounced very much like LOAN-shark. If you imagine that lobster is so expensive you need a loan shark to negotiate a lobster lunch, true memory will easily putt you from loan-shark to low-shah.
Shrimp in Indonesian is gambiri, pronounced gam to rhyme with “Tom” followed by “beery” (gam-BI-ri). You complain to your waiter in Indonesia that the chewing gum he served you tastes awfully beery. He advises you it’s not chewing gum, it’s shrimp. Your putt will take you from GUM-beery to GAM-beery.
The Serbo-Croatian word for “spoon” is kasika, pronounced KASH (to rhyme with “gosh”)-ee-kah.
You want to get a spoon in Belgrade. They send you outside the hotel to a cash-and-carry to get a spoon if you want one.
Or if you’re familiar with the Eastern grain called kasha (buckwheat groats), you can imagine dipping you spoon into a bowl of kasha in the back seat of your car. True memory will carry you from kasha-car to KASH-ee-ka.
“Spoon,” then, equals KASH-ee-ka.
The Italian word for “day” is giorno, pronounced JUR (as in “jury”)-no. You’re eagerly awaiting the outcome of a legal action, but the jury has been tied up all day with no verdict. Even stronger would be the notion of eagerly awaiting the outcome of the trial and learning that the whole day went by without the jury even showing up! All day and jury no.
“Day” equals JUR-no.
“Humid” in Farsi is martoob, pronounced mar (as in “marshal”)-TOOB (as in “tube”). It’s so dry in Central Iran that in order to provide comfortable humidity in your room, the maritime authorities arranged to bring water in through a tube.
True memory will easily let you lop off all but the first syllable of “maritime” and change the vowel from the a as in “maritime” to a as in “marshal” so that humidity equals mar-TOOB.
“Banana” in Indonesian is pisang, pronounced PEA-song, the second syllable rhyming with the cong in “conga”. You’d long heard of jungle magic in the outer islands of Indonesia, but you never really believed it until you went to the local grocer looking
for bananas. You don’t see bananas anywhere. You ask if he has any bananas. Sure, he says, plenty. “Excuse me,” you say, “I don’t see any.” Be patient, he begs you, until he finishes with a customer.
When it’s your turn he asks you how many bananas you want. You reply, half a dozen. He then takes six peas and sings them a mysterious little song. Before your bewildered eyes, they turn into bananas! The peas that were sung to became bananas.
Your only putt is to make the final vowel sound like the o in “conga.”
So “banana” equals PEA-song.
The Spanish word for “to iron” is planchar, pronounced plan (to rhyme with “Don”)-CHAR (as in “charcoal”). The hotel in Madrid has an excellent reputation, with only a single and rather bizarre lapse. Apparently a maid with too much seniority to be fired has a habit of leaving the iron on the backside of the trousers so long it leaves burn marks the size of the iron itself smack across both buttocks.
You have no choice. Your pants need ironing and you’ve got to take your chances. To improve your odds you gingerly approach the concierge and say, “ Excuse me, sir. Could you please find out if the maid plans to iron these pants correctly or if she plans to char them?” Your putt is to carry the plan sound from one rhyming with “tan” over to one rhyming with “Don.”
“To iron” equals plan-CHAR.
The Indonesian word for “donkey” is keledai, pronounced almost exactly like “call it a day” without the it. That’s what donkeys in hot climates are reputed to want to do after carrying their loads, and that’s what we’ll do now with this particular series of examples.
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How to Learn Any Language 23
Un-American Sounds
So far we’ve shied away from words containing sounds that don’t exist in English. The real world won’t be so protective.
“Un-American” sounds are exaggerated as an obstacle to progress in most languages. I say that not because it’s unimportant to master the sounds correctly, but because most of them will enter your repertoire automatically with practice. The trilled r in Spanish, the French r that sounds as though it issues from inside the pituitary gland, the half-sh half-guttural in German, the double consonant in Finnish, the many umlauted u’s and a’s and o’s in the various European languages will all be explained in your grammars, and better than explained on your cassettes: they’ll be pronounced.
Many languages carry so many markings and so many different kinds of markings over and under certain of their letters you may be intimidated. Almost all of them are empty threats; despite their sinister looking foreignness, they don’t convey any sounds we don’t have in English.
The two dots over certain a’s in Swedish simply tell you that particular letter is pronounced as the first a in “accurate.” Without the dots, it’s the a in “father.” There’s no need to run from the Norwegian o with a line slicing diagonally down through it: the first e sound in “Gertrude” is close enough. Languages with the double consonant spend far too much time warning us Americans that this is something strange to us. It is not strange. We have double consonants too, maybe not inside the same word, but definitely inside the same phrase.
We pronounce the last sound of the first word and the first sound of the last word in “late train.” We don’t say “lay train.” So much for the frightening double consonant.
We’ll make no attempt here to teach you the “click” sounds of some of the languages in South Africa or the larynx twisting sounds of the Georgian language spoken in Soviet Georgia that actually sounds like paper ripping inside the speaker’s throat. Those sounds are unrepeatable for most Americans and the languages in which they appear are mercifully obscure.
There is really only one sound that doesn’t exist in English that we’re obliged to learn well, and that’s the guttural common in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, and several other languages.
Most textbooks are notoriously weak in conveying that sound. They know they’re committing consumer fraud when, as they frequently do, they merely advise the American student to “approximate the ch sound in the German name ‘Bach’ or the final sound in the Scottish word ‘Loch.’”
However, “Bach” is not pronounced bak. “Loch” is not pronounced lock. “Chanukah” is not pronounced Ha-na-ka. The trick is to learn how to make the real sound.
The best method, though perhaps inelegant, is to imagine that you’re about to say the plain old h sound, and suddenly you feel a terrible tickle in the middle of your throat. The original h sound then becomes lost in all the other powerful things you now do. Clear your throat violently to eject the irritant causing that tickle. You will then have the “Chanukah” sound, the “Bach” sound, the “Loch” sound, the “chutzpah” sound.
That sound has no natural parents in the English language. It’s up for adoption. Stop and think what image comes easily to your mind that can make you hear that sound. Don’t be afraid to exaggerate it. Then tone it down. Dry it out. It will soon be as serviceable and comfortable as the sounds you grew up with.
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How to Learn Any Language 24Gender
The Harry Lorayne method of remembering the gender of nouns in foreign languages makes you feel downright foolish for not having thought of it yourself!
In some languages you have to remember the gender of nouns in order to adjust the articles or the endings of the adjectives that go with them. All the Romance languages – Spanish, French, Italian, Protugese, Romanian, etc. – have masculine and feminine gender. Usually, but far from always, you can figure which is which by the word’s ending: o for masculine, a for feminine. French, however, conceals gender clues with noun endings as unrevealing as battlefield camouflage. German and Russian have masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The Scandinavian languages call their two noun genders “common” and “neuter,” as does Dutch. Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Finnish, like English, have no noun genders.
How do we remember whether the French noun for “train,” also spelled train, is le train (masculine) or la train (feminine)? It happens to be masculine, le train. Imagine not merely a train that has no women passengers, but a train that doesn’t allow women passengers! The men prefer it that way. In hot weather, when the air conditioning fails, they sit around in their underwear. Feminists are outraged, but the Supreme court keeps postponing the case. Men’s magazines litter the aisles. There are twice as many men’s
rooms as necessary because there are no ladies’ rooms. Once the train screeched to a halt between stations and an alarm sounded. It seems a band of militant women tried to board the train and hijack it. They were eventually beaten back, before the men in the club car even had to put their pants back on.
Le train; masculine.
The French word for “café” is le café; masculine. You could either confect another all male scenario for a café similar to the one you did for the train. Or imagine a masculine name emblazoned over the entrance – something like the Macho Café or the Rambo Café.
Le café; masculine.
“Hour” in French is l’heure; feminine. Occasionally you get a gift like this one. Heure is pronounced very much like her without the h.
L’heure; feminine.
“Nose” in French is le nez; masculine.
The members of which sex break their noses playing football and hockey, boxing, wrestling, and fighting with wise guys who insult their dates?
Le nez; masculine.
“Night” in French is la nuit; feminine.
Who ever heard of a “man of the night?”
La nuit; feminine.
“Ticket” in French is le billet; masculine.
Always look for opportunities to incorporate a memory hook for the gender as you capture the word itself. Billet is pronounced bee-yay, almost exactly like the letters B.A. as in Bachelor of Arts. If “bachelor” doesn’t have a sufficiently strong male connotation to you, imagine a giant male bumble bee buzzing around.
Le billet; masculine.
“Train station” in French is la gare; feminine.
Shall we imagine women waiting for their homebound commuting husbands at the train station? Not a good idea. You may forget whether the waiting women or the expected husbands are the star of the association. How about hundreds of women waiting for one man, pouncing upon him and fighting over him as he unsuspectingly steps off the train?
La gare; feminine.
“Church” in French is l’eglise; feminine.
Imagine an angry mob of French women storming a church in France, demanding that women be allowed into the Catholic priesthood.
L’eglise; feminine.
Let this one be a lesson to you. “Mustache” in French is la moustache; feminine!
Imagine the circus lady with a mustache, or a new French wine that causes women to grow mustaches, or a little girl asking her mother if she can ever have a mustache.
La moustache; feminine.
Some languages have neuter gender too. Try to come up with associations that suggest icy impersonality.
“House” in German is das Haus; neuter.
Imagine a house so cold and unappealing it couldn’t have possibly been graced by man or woman for years. No one lives there or would ever conceivably want to.
Das Haus; neuter.
“Pen” in Russian is pero, pronounced pee-RAW. What could be more sexless than a pea that’s raw?
Pero; neuter.
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How to Learn Any Language 25
Reinforcement

You now have a brand new “closet,” a foreign language vocabulary memory system that lets you hang up new words as if they were new clothes. The system just presented will work even better for you if you keep a few tips in mind.
Every example given above is clean in word, deed, and thought. Every one could have been presented from the stage in Yadkinville, North Carolina, YMCA during Foreign Language Week. I refuse to do any dirty writing, so you have to do some dirty thinking (if you will) to get maximum benefit from the system.
The more vivid, in fact, the more vulgar, your associations are, the more readily they will probably come to mind. Feel free, in your mental imagery, to take clothes off. Get people naked. Get everybody into bed, in the tub, swinging from vines, or making nominating speeches immersed in bubbling Romanian mud. Get them wherever you need them so that the association you want is readily retrievable. X-rated images come readily to mind, even to the minds of nice people. Make your associative images lurid and unforgettable.
We’ve refrained in our model examples from using names and places to buttress our associations. In a book or a class, we can’t. Except for famous figures and places we all know in common, names and places don’t mean the same things to everybody. As individuals, however, we can haul off and use any and every proper name we know, whether from our personal lives or from stage, screen, radio, video, song, literature, and legend.
Does the foreign word demand the sound – or any part of the sound – of a Harry, an Edna, a Philip, an Art, a Harold, a Doreen, a Billy, a Lance? If that name belongs to someone you actually know, your associations will come to you more rapidly and last longer.
Did you grow up around a Reidsville, a Colfax, a Burlington, a Charlotte, a Haw River, or a Mt. Pisgah? Your associations with the foreign words can be enriched by place names that sounds like or almost like your target words. You don’t actually have to have those places in your biography, so long as you know them and can visualise them and use them as lassos to haul in and hog tie similar sounding words. I’ve never been to Nantucket, but when attacking the Indonesian word for “tired” (NAN-tuk), I imagine getting so tired on my initial visit to Nantucket that I collapse into bed exhausted shortly after lunch.
Yet another asset to you is the body of words you already know in another foreign language, or even in the language you’re learning. Those who know many languages may conquer a four syllable word by bringing in sounds from four different languages. This is a classic case of the rich getting richer. Every new word you learn is one more potential hook for grabbing still newer words.
Don’t fight to forge a winning association. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then give up! Not all words can be forced into the system, and you’re better off
not wasting good language learning time trying to mash an ill fitting shoe onto Cinderella’s sister’s foot. Over ninety percent will fit, automatically, neatly, or after some effort. The others, the holdouts, will have to be learned by old familiar rote learning.
Don’t forget: make your associations vivid, even if that means making them vulgar.
You’ll find that so many truly comical cartoons will dance through your head as you craft your associative images, you’ll find yourself constantly having to explain “What’s so funny?” to native speakers who wonder what’s so hilarious about those ordinary words they’re teaching you in their language!
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How to Learn Any Language 26The Plunge
Americans feel, with justification, that we’re handicapped when it come to learning other languages. Smaller countries with lots of borders and lots of strange languages on the other side offer more opportunities to absorb other languages than a gigantic United States bounded by the world’s two largest oceans and only two land neighbours, the larger one speaking, for the most part, the same language we do.
Admittedly, it’s hard to find a Dutchman who doesn’t speak four or five languages, a Swiss who doesn’t speak at least three, or a Finn, a Belgian, or a Hong Kong Chinese who doesn’t speak at least two. Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes subject us to the humiliation of speaking fluent English ot each other just to be polite when Americans are present.
Those peoples are not kissed by tongues of flame that render them more intelligent than Americans. They’re simply positioned better by geography and history when it comes to acquiring more than one language.
Americans, however, hold one high card that too frequently goes unplayed. We’re gregarious. We’re extroverts. Some say it contemptuously. Some say it admiringly. But those who know us best agree that we Americans are the only people in the world who enjoy speaking another language badly!
The typical European would sooner invite you to inspect his bedroom fifty seconds after waking up than speak a language he doesn’t speak well. Most people in the world are shy, embarrassed, even paralysed when it comes to letting themselves be heard in languages they speak less than fluently. An American may master a foreign language to the point where he considers himself fluent. A European, however, who speaks a language equally well and no better will often deny he speaks it at all!
Give an American a word in another language and he’s in action. Give him a phrase and he’s in deeper action. Give him five phrases and he’s dangerous. Take that American trait and exemplify it.
Talk. Go ahead and talk!
Head into your target language like a moth to the flame, like a politician to the vote. Is the gentleman you’ve just been introduced to from France? And is French the language you happen to be studying? Then attack.
Don’t you dare offer a lame chuckle as you explain in English that you’re trying to learn French but you’re sorry, you’re not very good at it yet. That’s like giggling and telling the mugger who ambushes you in an alley that you’re learning karate but sorry, you’re not very good at it yet.
It’s okay to tell him you’re just a beginner, but tell him in French. Learn enough utility phrases in whatever language you’re studying to profit from every encounter. Comb through your phrase book (the Berlitz For Travellers series is excellent) and make it your priority to learn phrases such as “I don’t speak your language well,” “Do you understand me?”, “Please speak more slowly,” “Please repeat,” “How do you say that in your language?”, “Sorry, I don’t understand,” and others that together can serve as your cornerstone and launching pad.
Most phrase books offer too few of these “crutch” phrases. When you meet your first encounter, pull out pen and pad and fatten your crutch collection. Learn how to say things such as, “I’m only a beginner in your language but I’m determined to become fluent,” “Do you have enough patience to talk with a foreigner who’s trying to learn your language?” “I wonder if I’ll ever be as fluent in your language as you are in English,” “I wish your language were as easy as your people are polite,” and “Where in your country do you think your language is spoken the best?” Roll your own alternatives. You’ll soon find yourself developing what comedians call a “routine,” a pattern of conversation that actually gives you a feeling of fluency along with the inspiration to nurture that feeling into fruition.
Hauling off and speaking the language you’re studying versus merely sitting there knowing it makes the difference between being a business administration professor and a multimillionaire entrepreneur.
It’s time to apply the parable of the Parrot.
A man looking for an anniversary present for his wife after fourteen years of marriage found himself in front of a pet shop. In the window was a parrot, not particularly distinguished in size or plumage, but the price tag on that parrot was a whopping seven thousand dollars because that parrot spoke, unbelieveably, fourteen different languages.
That was more than the man intended to spend but he figured, “Fourteen years, fourteen languages!” So he bought it.
He went home, mounted the parrot’s perch in the kitchen, and then realised he’d forgotten the birdseed. He ran back to the pet shop, bought the birdseed, and then ran back home, hoping to have everything in readiness before his wife got home.
Alas, she’d already returned, and when he appeared she flung herself upon him in sizzling affection, shouting, “Darling! What a marvellous anniversary present! You remembered how much I love pheasant. I’ve got him plucked. I’ve got him slit. I’ve got him stuffed. He’s in the oven and he’ll be ready in about fifty minutes.”
“You’ve got him what?” cried he. “You’ve got him where? That was no pheasant,” stormed the husband. “That was a parrot, and that parrot cost seven thousand dollars because that parrot spoke fourteen languages!”
“So,” replied his wife, “why didn’t he say something?”
And indeed, why don’t you?
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How to Learn Any Language 27Put 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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How to Learn Any Language 28Commit Language Larceny
There are interesting lessons coiled up inside ordinary greetings in different languages.
The Estonian greeting Kuidas (käsi käib) literally means “How does your hand walk?” An old Chinese greeting is Chr bao le, mei lo? which means, “Have you had food yet?” – no small achievement in the China of some periods. A charming greeting in Yiddish is “Zug mir a shtikel Toireh,” which means “Teach me a piece of Torah,” the Torah being the five books of Moses and the holiest document in the Jewish religion.
Language learners can use the spirit of that last one to good advantage.
When you encounter a native speaker of your target language, and when you start a conversation in that language, three things are certain. You will be stuck for words you need but don’t know. He will use words you don’t understand. And you will make mistakes. Get into the habit of exploiting those moments to the hilt!
When you don’t know a word, ask him for it. When you don’t understand a word he uses, ask him what it means. Ask him to do you the favour of correcting your mistakes. You may not have much luck with that latter request; he may be too polite or too
impressed that you’re making an effort in his language to criticise you. If you feel he’s letting your mistakes slide by, pick a fairly long sentence and ask him to help you hammer out your mistakes in just that one sentence. Write that sentence down on one of your blank flash cards. Ask him to check it again. Milk the moment. As the Latin goes, Carpe diem!
Don’t ever enter into anything as precious as a conversation in your target language with a native speaker and leave knowing no more than when you started. You’ve got a repertoire in that language. He has a larger one. Reach in and help yourself.
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How to Learn Any Language 29At No Extra Cost
You may think you have a good idea precisely how your life will improve once you’ve mastered your target language. You’re wrong. It will be much better than you think.
Unexpected good things happen to you when you learn even a little of the other guy’s language. A chapter detailing some of those things may seem like preaching to the choir, when you consider that anybody likely to be reading this has already decided he wants to learn. So what? Who more than the members of the choir deserve the inspiration?
All the case histories that follow were culled and corroborated by members of the Language Club who were asked to be alert to all the nice little extras that come your way when you speak another language. Many of them happened to me personally and continue to happen almost daily.
In New York and some other major cities a huge percentage of the cab drivers are from Haiti. Try this, just to get a taste of the power of another language. If your driver is Haitian, lean forward and say (phonetically), “Sa (rhymes with “ma”) pass (“pasta” without the “ta”) SAY (as in the English “say”), pa-PA (“papa,” but accented on the last syllable). Sort those sounds out and try it. “Sa paSAY paPA?” It means something like the French Comment ça va? (“How are you?”), but it’s not French. It’s his native Haitian Creole slang and he may never before have heard that utterance from the lips of a non-Haitian.
That one line is guaranteed to get you reactions ranging from a long, slow smile to a cheery “Where did you learn that?” to loud and joyous laughter to the exclamation, “You must know Haiti well!”
Don’t get the idea that Haitians are the only ones susceptible to the charm of hearing a few words of their language. They just may be more demonstrative than most in showing it. Romanian cab drivers have turned off the metre and given me a free ride in return for my “Good morning” in Romanian. A Soviet Georgian cab driver refused to take my money and invited me to Sunday dinner at his home, one of the tastiest treats and most interesting evenings I’ve ever enjoyed. An Indonesian cab driver screamed – that’s all, just screamed – upon hearing “Thank you” in his language.
I’ve long suspected there’s a memo posted in the kitchen of every Chinese restaurant in America instructing all personnel not to let any American who exhibits any knowledge of Chinese go unrewarded. Try this experience, just to taste the power.
The Chinese term for “chopsticks” is kwai dze. The first word is pronounced like the Asian river the American war prisoners built the bridge over. The second word sounds like the ds in “suds.”
The next time you’re in a Chinese restaurant, smile at the waiter and say “Kwai dze.” When he brings the chopsticks, smile again and say, “Shieh, shieh” (“Thank you”). Pronounce that as you should “she expects,” making sure you never get as far as the x and accentuating the “she”. The immediate payoffs on this one can range from a free plum brandy cocktail at the end of the meal clear over to a stubborn refusal to let you pay. The more subtle, and satisfying, payoff is that they will assume you know not only the rest of the Chinese language but the Chinese cuisine as well, and they’ll probably give you no less than the absolute finest the house can produce every time they see you come in.
Your rewards for knowing even a paltry few words of a language vary in inverse proportion to the likelihood that you’ll know any at all. A German baker isn’t likely to endorse his whole day’s profit on strudel over to your favourite charity merely because you enter his shop with a big “Guten Tag” (“Good day”), but an Albanian baker might if you enter with “Tungjatjeta.” You won’t knock French socks off with a “Comment allez-vous?” (“How are you?”), but you may set winter gloves flying in Helsinki with a correctly pronounced “(Hyvää Päivää” (“Good morning”).
Don’t overdo it. I’ve known cab drivers from obscure countries almost drive off the road when they’re surprised with a burst of their native tongue from an American passenger, and once I had a Chinese waitress in a Jewish delicatessen (honest!) get so rattled when I ordered for our party in Chinese that she messed up our order beyond redemption.
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How to Learn Any Language 30I have many times ignited what looked like spontaneous street festivals by hailing groups of people on the sidewalk in the language I heard them speaking. They frequently stop, return the greeting, and then start hobnobbing with the people in my group, leading to laughs, the exchange of addresses, dates for later on, and, I suspect, even more! I’ve never understood the joy of bagging a bird or a deer and watching it fall to the ground. My joy is bagging strangers from other countries with the right greeting in the right language and watching them come to a halt and become old friends at once.
The material payoffs of learning foreign languages are many and predictable, though perhaps a bit surprising in their scope. In early 1990 a friend told me he was looking to fill a job paying $650,000 a year; qualifications: attorney, knowledge of Russian, and willingness to relocate to Moscow. I prefer the psychological payoffs of studying foreign languages – pleasures so keep you could almost call them spiritual.
They joy of a true mathematician escalates as he moves from algebra to trigonometry to calculus. Likewise, the joy of the true language lover escalates as he advances from what I call “Foreign 1” to “Foreign 2.” Foreign 1 is interpreting or translating (interpreters speak, translators write) from your native language to a foreign one. Foreign 2 is doing it from one language that’s foreign to you to another one that’s foreign to you.
You are permitted to feel like Superman when you pull off such a feat. You are not permitted to act like Superman, nor are you permitted to let on that you feel like Superman. You mien should approximate that of a bored New York commuter telling a stranger how many stops there are between Grand Central Station and New Rochelle.
The best Foreign 2 feeling I ever had was interpreting for Finns trying to communicate with Hungarians. Finnish and Hungarian are widely hailed as the most difficult languages in the world. They’re related to each other, but not in any way that’s
helpful or even apparent. There aren’t five words remotely similar in the two languages, and a Hungarian and a Finn can no more understand each other than can a Japanese and a Pole.
I long nurtured a dream of house lights coming up in the theatre. The theatre manager comes to centre stage and says, “Is there a Finnish-Hungarian interpreter in the house?” I wait until he repeats his request louder so that everyone in the theatre will get a load of those qualifications. I then, in the fantasy, grudgingly make my presence and, by implication, my suitability for the assignment known. I rise and approach whatever emergency it is that requires my linguistic talents, while those hundreds of theatre goers gasp at their relative inadequacies.
Something like that actually did light up my life for an evening and then some. I was invited by a well known woman broadcaster to join another couple who had invited her and a guest to a Madison Square Garden horse show. I’d never dated her before. I felt outclassed in the glamour department, and I was uncomfortable as we four wound our way through that upper crust crowd looking for our places.
Suddenly I was spotted by Anna Sosenko, lyricist, writer, theatre producer, and dealer in the memorabilia of show business worldwide and down through the ages. Anna wrote, among other biggies, the song “Darling, Je Vous Aime Beaucoup.”
“Hey, Barry,” Anna yelled out over the crowd from about twenty rows away. “Can you come by my studio next week? I need you to translate some Ibsen!”
Remember what that sudden spinach infusion did for Popeye’s biceps in the animated cartoons? That’s exactly what happened to my standing in the foursome after Anna’s outcry. My date and her friends turned to me. “Ibsen? You translate Ibsen? Where did you learn to translate Ibsen?”
They may very well not have known what language Henrik Ibsen wrote in. Never mind! You don’t have to be absolutely sure which country a prince is a prince of in order to show respect, as long as you’re sure he’s a real prince. Likewise, with Anna Sosenko doing the yelling, everybody was convinced I could bring Ibsen to life in English.
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How to Learn Any Language 31Motivations
The ads for self study language courses stress the business, travel, cultural, and literary advantages of acquiring another language. But what about meeting girls? Or women? Or boys? Or men? Why let an old fashioned propriety quash that thoroughly proper, in fact praiseworthy, reason to learn another language, namely to enlarge your range of social opportunities, to meet people?
Learning another language to enlarge your opportunity for making new connections is fun and rewarding. Financial and professional success have helped people live their dreams. So has learning another language!
There are blonde languages, by the way, and brunette languages. Why be bashful? Those partial to blondes are advised to learn Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, German, Dutch, and Hungarian. A good brunette list would include Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, and Arabic.
This advice is not offered flippantly. I find the social motive to learn other languages as valid as the commercial, the cultural, or any other. If your motives for learning another language are social, I would steer you to the language of a people you find maximally attractive with every bit as straight a face as I’d advise those interested in importing from Asia to learn Japanese and opera lovers to learn Italian. I would steer you to the language of a people you find maximally attractive with every bit as straight a face as I’d advise those interested in importing from Asia to learn Japanese and opera lovers to learn Italian.
You are not guaranteed love forevermore, but you are guaranteed novelty status. You’ll attract attention in your target community as “the one who went to the trouble of learning our language.” You’ll be invited, introduced around, and questioned thoroughly as to your reasons for studying their particular language. The less popular the language, the greater a celebrity you’ll be among its speakers. French is very popular, so you won’t have Paris at your feet, we’ve already agreed, even after your best rendered “Comment allez-vous?”, but Norwegians will want to burn arctic moss at your altar when after a meal you say “Takk for maten.” That means “Thanks for the food,” which non-Norwegians not only generally don’t know how to say, but also don’t realise it’s traditionally said as you leave the table of your host in Norway.
Native English speakers have more to gain from studying other languages than anybody else. Honour, love, cooperation, respect, advantage – they all shower down upon people in inverse proportion to their need to learn a language.
English is the most prominent language in the world. The Dutch, as one example, all seem to know four or five languages well upon graduation from high school, but (I am not trying to diminish their achievement) they have to learn other languages, beginning with English, to make their way in the commercial world. You can’t play that game with Dutch alone. Languages find their fair rate of exchange as currencies do. We who speak English get a lot more credit from the Dutch if we learn Dutch than they get from us just because they learned English. And so on around the world.
Learn that other language now, while there’s still time to enjoy the honours due those who don’t have to learn the other guy’s language but choose to do so anyhow. That time is rapidly running out. For the very first time in our history Americans are learning other languages not out of courtesy but out of necessity. That fact of life is so new that it’s not yet apparent to America or the world, so we still have a little more time to bask in the admiration of those who had to learn our language and who still believe we simply chose to learn theirs.
Something ennobling happens when you learn to communicate in more than one language. And it’s fun to watch the magic flash as you touch your word wand to the ears of those who’d never suspect you speak their language. It’s one more way of making friends. In big cities you’ll have many chances to find people who speak foreign languages.
But you can’t sally in and ambush strangers in their language even if their accent and appearance make it a sure bet. They’re probably proud of their accent free (or nearly accent free) English. The best way to avoid insulting them – so they can concentrate on loving you when you speak their language – is to say, before you venture one word of their language, “Your accent is beautiful. Are you from England?”
They will then proudly say, “No, I’m from Poland” (or wherever), and they will thereupon welcome your overtures.
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How to Learn Any Language 32Get to Know the Family
Languages have their own happy surprises. For example, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian overlap. Learn either one, and at no extra cost you get seventy percent of the other. You may want to select a language to learn according to how much bounce it has beyond its borders. Languages come in families, and it pays to know which relations might work for you.
Let’s pursue the Serbo-Croatian-Bulgarian connection. They’re related in diminishing degrees to all the Slavic languages, which include Russian, Byelorussian, Polish, Ukranian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Macedonian, and Ruthenian. They’re not all seventy percent overlapping, but so what? What if they’re only forty, thirty, twenty percent overlapping? That’s still like having the shopkeeper hand you extra cloth on a second bolt when you thought you’d only bought one bolt of cloth.
You learn so much Italian when you learn Spanish that it’s a shame not to switch over and pursue Italian once your Spanish is adequate. Portugese isn’t far behind, and even French, the Romance language least like any of the others, has enough similar
grammatical features and vocabulary to help you conquer all of the other Romance languages.
Hindi and Urdu, the principal languages of India and Pakistan, are virtually the same spoken language.
Dutch is far more than the language of a tiny nation between Germany and the English Channel. It’s almost identical to Flemish, which along with French is one of the two principal languages of Belgium. Dutch is the foundation of Afrikaans, which along with English is a major language of South Africa. And you’ll have no trouble finding Dutch speakers all over Indonesia, the old “Spice Islands” ruled by Holland for four hundred years.
Get to know the family of the language you’re learning – where it fits in, what other languages it will make easier for you to learn later. What doors in what industries will it open (for example, Flemish and Yiddish for diamonds, Arabic for oil, Swedish for crystal, Italian for fashion)? Over how wide an area is your target language spoken (more Chinese speak Chinese outside China than Frenchmen speak French in France)? Knowing where your language fits into the world mosaic will offer you countless advantages and rewards, and almost certainly the motivation to learn more.
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How to Learn Any Language 33Language Power   to the People
The many who crave language knowledge in America have risen in rebellion against the many who have failed (we could even say refused) to give it.
Language teaching used to be in the control of “the faculty,” a Prussian guard of grammarians who taught that after all the conjugations, declensions, irregularities, and exceptions were mastered, surely fluency would follow. What followed instead was a parade of hapless Americans who, after eight years of good grades, could not go to the desk clerk at a hotel in a country whose language they’d studied and ask if they had any messages!
“The faculty” taught rigidly by the book, the grammar book, and all our desire to learn to say useful things and converse were dashed.
Today foreign languages are no longer “electives.” Those suddenly faced with their first need to command another language are besieging Berlitz and other commercial language schools and buying the Pimsleur cassettes and other self study courses. We, the laymen, are picking up our tools – language workbooks, cassette courses, phrase books, flash cards – to try to make up for our failure to learn, while all those incredible Europeans were learning English in their public schools!
Two, four, six, eight years of high school and college study in a foreign language, and still our American graduates can’t tell whether the man on the radio speaking the language they “learned” is declaring war or recommending a restaurant!
Has one single American graduate ever stepped into a job that called for a foreign language with nothing more than the language he learned in high school or college? It’s not a cruel question. Most Americans can get by on the reading they learned in school. And the math. And the history. Why is that when it come to foreign languages our graduates have to rush into expensive private instruction to start all over again?
One hero of language learning in the United States is Dr. Henry Urbanski, professor of Russian, former chairman of the department of Foreign Languages of the State University of New York at New Paltz, and now director of the Language Immersion Institute. Once upon a time Dr. Urbanski’s “immersion” heresy would probably have
resulted in his getting banned from university life. Today Urbanski is showered with praise and honour.
His immersion programme defies the language teaching tradition of rote regimentation and grammar worship. There are no charts to learn, no homework, no drudgery, and no tests. It’s all fun, it emphasises real conversation between teacher and students, and it all takes place over a weekend. If Henry Urbanski could have thought of any more rules to break, he would have.
Urbanski’s immersion programme is open to everybody. Those with no educational background in languages whatever join with people with graduate degrees in languages and men and women of all levels of qualification in between. The programme begins at seven P.M. on a Friday for an hour of introduction and orientation. The students then break up into small groups in separate rooms and jump into the foreign language under the command of dynamic, enthusiastic instructors who keep a high energy Ping-Pong of basic conversation going back and forth with all students participating. At ten P.M. Friday the classes break and the wise ones go straight to bed without food, wine, or small talk, knowing that the routine resumes early Saturday morning.
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How to Learn Any Language 34
Even when classes break for lunch Saturday afternoon there’s no break in the language. The groups have lunch together in the language they’re learning. Then they return to class and keep on going.
On Saturday at dusk some of the students begin to report phenomena resembling out of body experiences. Urbanski jokes, “Only when this constant bombardment collapses your resistance can the new language come surging in like an angry sea through a broken dike.”
Even the students who were suggesting wine and talk the night before hasten to bed in order to meet the dawn on Sunday, the final day. Sessions continue clear up to a late lunch, after which there’s a “graduation” exercise, whereupon everybody vows to return at the next opportunity for immersion in the next highest level of their language.
Dr. Urbanski wants his immersion students to have fun. Walk down the corridors during teaching hours (or follow a group on a “language hike” through the mountains around New Paltz) and you’ll hear laughter, clapping, singing, and what sound like pep rallies in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, and the other languages of the weekend.
“Why make students suffer unnecessarily?” Urbanski asks. “Learning a language doesn’t have to bring pain and suffering. We believe in providing a nonthreatening environment in which students are rewarded for their progress but not punished for their errors.” An immersion graduate added, “The festival spirit wakes us up, keeps us sharp, lubricates the flow of new words, and anesthetises us against the pain of grammar.”
Urbanski never promises you can go straight from a weekend of foreign language immersion to a booth at the United Nations and simultaneously interpret a foreign minister’s address. What immersion promises is a more than elementary introduction to the language, a good grounding in its words and melodies, the ability to “defend” yourself in that language without help, and a solid base from which you can grow, either through self study or more courses. No claim is made that students will be fluent by the end of one immersion weekend. “We teach linguistic survival,” says Urbanski. “After a few immersion weekends our students can manage in the language.”
The New Paltz Language Immersion Institute has grown from immersion weekends on campus to weekends at the nearby Mohonk Mountain House resort and in Manhattan. A programme is now under way in Washington, D.C. Anyone desiring information – no qualifications necessary – may call the New Paltz Language Immersion Institute at 1-800-LANGUAGE.
Tuition for the weekend ranges from $175 to $250, depending on location. The two week summer programme at the New Paltz campus costs $400.
In the words of one satisfied institute graduate, “I learned enough to continue to learn more!”
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How to Learn Any Language 35Back to Basics
“Send the manager to this table immediately,” demanded the diner in the restaurant. When the manager appeared, the diner railed, “This is the worst vanilla ice cream I’ve ever had.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” said the manager. “That’s not vanilla ice cream. That’s butter pecan.”
“Oh,” said the customer, suddenly placated. “For butter pecan, it’s okay.”
This chapter on the basics of grammar should be read in that spirit.
“French verb changes are inaudible through the singular of the present tense.”
“The Spanish auxiliary verb ‘to have’ is completely different from the verb ‘to have’ implying possession.”
“The Scandinavian languages, Romanian, and Albanian are among the languages that place the definitive article after the noun.”
“Chinese has no case endings or verb inflections, and adjectives do not have to agree with nouns.”
Do you understand all of the above, or most of it? If so, you don’t need this chapter, though some of it may come as a welcome refresher. This chapter is offered as catch-up for all of you who didn’t pay attention in English class. Now you want to learn another language and you realise suddenly that your teacher was right, you were wrong, and here you are unable to understand the English you need to take command of another language.
I, like you, sat smugly through grade school English convinced that ignorance of all those silly terms that went zipping by me would never interfere with any of my future endeavours. Nothing reforms the student who’s apathetic towards English like a sudden desire to learn other languages. I could have learned foreign languages more easily from the outset had I sat down to learn just these bare bones I serve you now.
What follows is a rundown of some of the terms you’ll need to know to advance easily through another language. The synopsis may be misprioritised and incomplete, but on the other hand it is friendly, nonjudgmental, brief, blunt, and, I hope, helpful.
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