Untitled — 5 months ago
Basic tools:
BASIC TEXTBOOK/ DICTIONARY/ PHRASE BOOK/ NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINESTUDENT READER/ mp3 player / BLANK FLASH CARDS
Start with grammar first.
Make it fun.
THE MULTIPLE TRACK ATTACK: Go to the language department of any bookstore and you’ll see language books, grammars, hardcover and paperback workbooks, readers, dictionaries, flash cards, and handsomely bound courses on cassette. Each one of those products sits there on the shelf and says,
•HIDDEN MOMENTS: while you’re waiting for an elevator, standing in line at the bank, waiting for the person you’re calling to answer the phone, holding the line, getting gas, waiting to be ushered from the waiting room into somebody’s office, waiting for your date to arrive, waiting for anything at any time? You will learn to mobilise these precious scraps of time you’ve never even been aware you’ve been wasting. Some of your most valuable study time will come in mini lessons of fifteen, ten, and even five seconds throughout your normal (though now usually fruitful) day.
•HARRY LORAYNE’S MAGIC MEMORY AID: An ingenious memory system developed by memory master Harry Lorayne will help you glue a word to your recollection the instant you encounter it. What would you do right now if I gave you a hundred English words along with their foreign equivalents and told you to learn them? Chances are you would look at the first English word, then look at the foreign word, repeat it several times, then close your eyes and keep on repeating it, then cover up the foreign word, look only at the English and see if you could remember how to say it in the language you’re learning, then go on to the next word, then the next, and the next, and then go back to the first to see if you remembered it, and so on through the list. Harry Lorayne’s simple memory trick based on sound and association will make that rote attempt laughable. The words will take their place in your memory like
ornaments securely hung on a Christmas tree, one right after the other all the way up to many times those hundred words.
•THE PLUNGE: You will escape the textbook incubator early and leap straightaway, with almost no knowledge of the language, into that language’s “real world”. A textbook in your target language, no matter how advanced, is not the real world. On the other hand, an advertisement in a foreign language magazine, no matter how elementary and easy to read, is the real world. Everything about you, conscious and subconscious, prefers real world to student world contact with the language. An actor knows the difference between rehearsal and opening night; the football player, between practice scrimmages and the kickoff in a crowded stadium. And you will know the difference between your lessons in the target language and the real world newspapers, magazines, novels, movies, radio, TV, and anything else you can find to throw yourself into at a stage your high school French teacher would have considered horrifyingly early!
