PHRASE BOOK 

Buy a phrase book for travellers. Berlitz publishes a series in eighteen languages, and others keep popping up in bookstores and the racks of airport newsstands. They're inexpensive and easy to use. These books, smaller than a piece of toast, offer little or no grammar, but they bristle with practical words and phrases, listing the English followed by the foreign language and then a transliteration that guides the rankest beginner to an understandable, usually a creditable, pronunciation.

Don't be put off by the naivete, inexpensiveness, superficiality, and comparative weightlessness of these travellers' phrase books when laid alongside your impressive dictionary and your complex grammar book. Good zoos need hummingbirds as well as elephants.

NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINE 

Find a newspaper or magazine in your target language. Most big cities have newsstands where you can buy publications in a dazzling variety of different languages. Otherwise, call the nearest consulate or embassy of the country whose language you're out to learn. Usually they're proud and pleased to help you. If you have a choice, go for a publication from that country itself, rather than one published by immigrants from that country in America. Certainly no foreign language publication printed in America is likely to contain language more authentic than publications printed in the home country, and it may very well be less authentic.

A friend of mine who set out to learn French immediately bought a subscription to Le Monde, a popular Paris daily. That's overkill. If he were to learn every word in any one issue of Le Monde, it would be "mission accomplished." One issue of one publication in your target language at this point is all you need.

STUDENT READER 

It may be difficult, but if possible see if you can locate a schoolbook or some reading material from the country at about a sixth grade level. Such books are obviously excellent bridges from the rudiments to the real world. If you can't find one, never mind. Your newspaper or magazine will seem elementary to you soon enough. 

PORTABLE TAPE PLAYER 

The invention of the handy portable cassette tape player catapults language learners from the ox cart to the supersonic jet. You can now inhale a foreign language through your ears. "You can't expect me to do two things at once!" is a bygone complaint. Listening to foreign language cassettes as you go about your daily deeds is a high form of doing two things at once.

The Walkman (or any such tape player) is an electronic can opener for whatever language you're learning. Formerly we had to chew through the tin.

CASSETTE COURSES

There are many cassette courses in many foreign languages. They range from "travel" cassettes, really simple tourist phrase books set to sound and costing between ten and twenty dollars, clear up to multicassette study courses that carry the student into advanced levels and cost between one and two hundred dollars, or more.

Don't dismiss the least expensive ones as "superficial little travel cassettes." If you master every word, every phrase, every pronunciation, and every grammatical point contained in even the simplest of those cassettes, you can consider yourself advanced.

There are basically four kinds of cassettes for the study of foreign languages. We'll call them flat single rep, flat double rep, formatted, and cultural.

The flat single rep cassettes, usually the least expensive, give you the English word or phrase followed by the foreign equivalent uttered only one time.

The flat double rep cassettes are the same, except the foreign phrase is repeated twice. (When you begin making your own study cassettes, you'll repeat the foreign piece three times.)

The formatted cassette puts theories of instruction into practice and follows systems that some highly successful language teachers have found effective. For example the Pimsleur method, named after the late Dr. Paul Pimsleur, takes the student by the ear and guides him through the language as though it were a Disneyland exhibit. Unfortunately Dr. Pimsleur died before he could personally develop courses in a large variety of languages to advanced levels. His techniques, however, are being applied to more courses in more languages by Dr. Charles A. S. Heinle of the Cassette Learning Centre in Concord, Massachusetts.

The Pimsleur method provides the best minute by minute "learning through listening," thanks to several strokes of Dr. Pimsleur's innovative genius.

First of all, you become a participant. Pimsleur doesn't let you merely listen in hopes your lazy mind will help itself to some of the new words being offered on the smorgasbord. After five minutes with any Pimsleur course you will always harbour a certain disdain for all cassette courses that merely give you a voice saying something in English followed by the equivalent in the target language. Pimsleur pricks your wandering mind to attention by asking, for example, "Do you remember the Greek word for `wine'?"

Theoretically, that little trick shouldn't make a spectacular difference. After all, you bought the course. You want to learn the language. Why should the teacher on cassette have to find ways to constantly recover your attention? The unfortunate truth is that the average mind plays hooky whenever possible. The difference between Pimsleur asking, "Do you remember the Greek word for `wine'?" and a voice simply saying "wine" is, as Mark Twain once put it, "the difference between lightning and the lightning bug!"

Nor does Pimsleur always settle for the simple verbal prompt. A typical Pimsleur tactic is to demand, "You accidentally bump into a man getting on the bus. What do you say?" That ingrains the foreign phrases for "excuse me" far more than a rote recitation of the words themselves.

Pimsleur's "graduated interval recall" achieves what I call the "pinball effect." When the steel ball in the pinball machine nears the bottom, you can manipulate the

flippers to catch the ball and send it all the way back to the top again. Likewise, at the very instant when your mind is about to let a new word or phrase "fall to the bottom", Pimsleur zings it in again, sending it back to the top of your awareness. This time it doesn't sink so fast. When it does, Pimsleur hits it again.

Pimsleur gives you a pause on the cassette after each question he asks you. In the early going there's a temptation to stop the machine while you flounder for the answer. Don't! Learn to try to come up with the answer during the pause provided. That will more than teach you the word. It will train you to have that word ready for action at all times. It's marvellous to feel your growth as you relisten to your Pimsleur lessons, succeeding more and more each time at delivering the required word before the teacher's voice rolls over you with the next question.

Berlitz is the most famous name in language instruction, and except for the Berlitz Travel Cassettes, which are flat single rep, all their cassette courses are formatted. The Berlitz Basic Courses, available in French, Spanish, German, and Italian, feature ingenious conversations between teacher and students, and their top of the line Berlitz Comprehensive Courses are really dazzling soap opera-like sagas filled with romance, treachery, suspense, and drama. Both the basic and the comprehensive courses sneak massive payloads of grammar and vocabulary into the student's repertoire.

Cultural cassettes aren't really language learning cassettes at all, but many people suppose they are and buy and sell them as such. Songs, plays, readings, stories, and poems in foreign languages are indeed helpful, but shouldn't be mistaken for the "high protein" intake needed to build command of a foreign language. They're great relaxers, tests of how far you've come, adjunctive exercises, and ways of letting the foreigner know that you view his language as more than just a briar patch of irregular verbs.

The cultural cassettes are the condiments. The others are the entrees.

BLANK CASSETTES

We have do it yourself gasoline pumps. We do not have do it yourself eye surgery. It may seem strange to some (and wildly objectionable to others) to recommend do it yourself language cassettes starring you in the language you are trying to learn. Orthodox language teachers are likely to consider that something akin to doing your own eye surgery.

I've found it extremely helpful. At some point you will have gotten the hang of pronunciation sufficiently to push the record button of your cassette player and recite your own words and phrases onto a blank cassette. Your pronunciation will not be good. It may be bad. But the value of being able to listen to a cassette with the words you need and want at the moment – rather than a cassette prepared by somebody with no knowledge of you, your desires, or your needs – much more than outweighs the disadvantage of your imperfections.

So, get blank cassettes – the shortest possible – so you can start building a cassette library of the words and phrases you want to know to supplement those the educators who produced all the standard cassettes decided to teach you first.

It's better to know the word – its meaning, its spelling, its use in sentences – even if you have to listen to it in your unskilled accent, than not to know the word at all.

FLASH CARDS 

Printed flash cards are available in the major languages. They're about the size of business cards and usually provide a vocabulary of a thousand words. Flash cards are the most underrated language learning tool of all. They've been around for decades and go widely unused, even by those who own them.

Flash cards commonly list the English word (plus related words) on one side of the card and their foreign equivalents on the other. Some sets of flash cards give you a little grammar at no extra cost, adding to the word itself the forms of that word a student of the language should know.

The language student should reach for a fresh stack of flash cards before he leaves home in the morning as instinctively as a policeman reaches for his badge. The flash cards, more than any other tool, can help the student take advantage of the day's "hidden moments," the secret weapon upon which the promise and the premise of this method is based.

Learn how to keep your flash cards handy. Whip them out and flash test yourself the instant you find yourself with the time. (The person you're walking with stops to look at a shop window. You've read the menu, finished the newspaper, and the waiter hasn't come yet. The clerk has to validate your credit card. There's a line at the bank or at the ticket counter. The elevator seems to be stopping at all floors.) Learn how to draw those cards out and start flashing even if all you'll have is five seconds. If the person you're telephoning doesn't answer until the fifth ring, he's given you time to go through two or three entries. Learn to be quick. I've learned how to master a whole new Chinese character between the time I dial the last digit and the time my party says hello.

BLANK FLASH CARDS 

Whether you can locate prepared flash cards in your target language or not, go to your nearest stationery store and get a hefty supply of blanks. As you travel through the language you'll constantly come across new words, modern slang, special phrases you'd like to know, cute sayings a native speaker teaches you at a party, and the like. Capture them immediately on your blank flash cards and carry a stack with you at all times. In later chapters when we learn how all these tools interrelate, you'll realise the importance of your own homemade flash cards. Purists may quarrel about recording your own foreign language vocabulary building cassettes. Nobody can quarrel with you preparing your own flash cards.

STURDIKLEERS 

Sturdikleers are the handy celluloid or plastic packets that protect passports, driver's licenses, etc. Find the size that best accommodates a stack of flash cards and pick up as many as you need, or more. 

FELT HIGHLIGHTER PEN