Last Words Before
the Wedding

It is my hope that this volume will help those who've never yet dared to make the commitment, march to the altar, and "marry" another language. If you've already studied other languages, perhaps tried for years with disappointing results, let's look at your next effort as a second marriage, fortified, this time, with the foregoing advice.

Best men and bridesmaids traditionally utter inanities to grooms and brides before they march down the aisle. As your avuncular advisor, who at this writing has studied foreign languages as a hobby for forty-six years, let me use this precious final opportunity to hammer home some points – some repeats and some leftovers – that will ensure your success and ensure that you enjoy yourself as you succeed.

Plunge In

When an interviewer asked the famed bank robber Willy Sutton why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is." Using the language is where the real learning is. There's a direct analogy to sports and war. Ask any ball player to give his views on the difference between watching the coach diagramme plays on a blackboard and facing the opponents in a real game. Ask any soldier the difference between basic training and actual combat.

The same difference exists between language study and language use. Try recalling the words and phrases you've learned most recently the next time you meet by surprise a speaker of the language. Your mind is likely to be a frustrating blank. Once you've used your knowledge in real life, however, your chances of recall are much greater.

Go out, then, and "pick" conversations in the language you're learning, like a belligerent drunk picks fights.

Certain words, phrases, idioms, and grammatical constructions will remain unmeltable lumps. They will defeat your best efforts to learn them. Many students accept such unscalable heights as proof that "I don't have an ear for languages!" (That, by the way, is the most pernicious myth of all. If you have the motivation and discipline to proceed through the system, it doesn't matter what kind of "ear" you have, so long as it can hear.)

Once you score your first victory over one of those "unconquerable" fortresses, an emotional momentum is released that will carry you forward. Grab hold of the nearest holdout word and beat the hell out of it. Bite at it one syllable at a time or even one letter at a time. Throw fits of irrational energy against it until it's yours.

There is something truly serene about encountering a word that used to be a hideous holdout – and is now as familiar to you as your middle name!

Point of sale is to good a term to be limited to disposable razors and other sundries arrayed near the cash register at convenience stores. Let's apply it to getting ahead in a foreign language.

The quickest and easiest time I ever had learning a phrase in a foreign language was Molim za ples, which is Serbo-Croatian for "May I have this dance?" I was a college student visiting Yugoslavia. An unforgivably attractive young woman smiled at me across the gym floor at a student daance. I asked Darko, my interpreter companion, how to say, "May I have this dance?"

"Molim za ples, " he replied.

I had no idea whether the mo or the< lim or the za or the ples meant "May" or "I" or "have" or "this" or "dance." Nor did I waste time worrying about it. I simply strode across the floor, said "Molim za ples, " and enjoyed my first dance in Yugoslavia!

Darko was giving me point of sale instruction.

Use it! When you know you're going to a restaurant the day after tomorrow where the waiters speak the language you're trying to learn, don't use your hidden moments in the meantime on general vocabulary. Sit down and compile a restaurant vocabulary of food items and utensils and let that be your focus from that moment until you leave the restaurant after the meal.

Are you headed for a party over the weekend where you're fairly sure at least one guest speaks your target language? Start carrying your phrase book as well as your flash cards and review the "getting to know you" phrases, such as "Where are you from?" "How long do you intend to stay in America?" etc.

Whenever you see an impending opportunity to speak the language, get a head start by sizing up the news of the day and going into your dictionary for the terms you'll need that you don't yet know. ("Election," "proposal," "tariff," "amend," "hostage," "coup," etc.) Focus your learning effort opportunistically to make the best possible showing when you reach the point of sale – the conversation you can anticipate.

The "show," by the way, is not to impress others. It's to impress that part of you that, when you hear yourself doing so well, will inspire you to proceed with your broad front general advance through the language.

A policeman is a policeman twenty-four hours a day. So is a fireman, a spy, a marine, and a language learner. Learn to catch yourself several times a day, indoors or outdoors, and look around. What are the first five things you see that you don't know how to say in your target language? Write the English down on a blank flash card and fill in the target language words when you get home to your dictionary.

At least once a day pretend you're a United Nations interpreter simultaneously interpreting what somebody is saying to you in your target language. When he gets to the fifth word that you wouldn't know how to say in your target language, abandon the

exercise and write those words down, again, on a blank flash card. Fill in the foreign side of the flash card as soon as you get back to your dictionary.

Reward-and-Denial Games

There is a clever way to speed learning. Impose little discipline games on yourself geared to bringing you back to the language often throughout the day for short periods that can't possibly get in your way. Don't let yourself have the first cup of coffee until you review ten of the words you learned yesterday. Permit yourself dessert if you can go through ten whole flash cards without a mistake. Say yes to the extra glass of wine if you can name any five objects in the room in the foreign language while you hold your breath. Let yourself take off and go see the movie once you're able to beat the speaker on the cassette to the foreign word or phrase for a solid minute. Or, as you advance, two or three minutes.

Roll your own rules. It's painless. It's fun. It's character building. And it rushes you forward to quicker results.

 

Profanity and Vulgarity

Forget it. Whoever uses foul language even in English among people he doesn't know well loses standing. When you go out of your way to use bad language in a foreign language, it's much worse.

One night in a blockhouse on the Austrian side of the Hungarian border waiting for refugees to come across, our all male crowd represented three languages: English, German, and Hungarian. A brisk discussion in comparative obscenity broke out and a fascinating pattern emerged. Whatever we had three or four dirty words for in English, German always had sixteen or seventeen and Hungarian never less than thirty-five!

Sure, the other guy's garbage is fun to know, but it's tacky, so leave it alone. It's all right to get command of their unacceptable terms for defensive purposes only — so you'll know what not to say and be able to exercise caution when using words dangerously similar to the no-no words.

It's a good idea to follow Maimonides on this one: "What is lofty may be said in any language. What is mean should be said in none."

 

Your Second Foreign Language, Your Third, and So On

It's said that once you master one foreign language, all others come much more easily. That's not a myth. Your first foreign language, in a major way, is the first olive dislodged from the bottle. The rest flow obligingly forth.

Moreover, your second foreign language need have no connection to your first. Chinese will be easier if you've first mastered Italian. Greek will be easier if you've mastered Japanese. You pick up the principles of how language works with your first conquest. I once asked a man who commanded easily a dozen languages how he did it.

"I started out studying languages when I was young," he said, "and I was just too lazy to quit!

He was kidding, of course, but a lot of true words are spoken through exaggerations.

 

The Right Word

Don't settle for being merely understood. Some of the least intelligent and most unspectacular people on earth can be understood in languages other than their own. Keep pressing forward toward perfection. "He think he's a big shot" gets the notion across, but that shouldn't satisfy the learner of English searching for the word "megalomaniac".

It's a marvellous feeling of unfolding and growth when you learn more and more words that take you closer and closer to the bull's eye of what you want to express.

 

Saying It Right

One of the most maddening things about language learning — you'll encounter it time and time again — is having the face of the native you're speaking with suddenly go blank. You've used a word he doesn't understand. He asks you to repeat it. You do. He still doesn't understand. You repeat it again. Slower. Louder. Finally, in frustration, desperation, and humiliation, you write the word down or show it to him in your book.

Then he gets it. "Ahh," the native speaker says, the black night of your spoken error suddenly pierced by the flashbulb of print. And then — here's the payoff — he proceeds to repeat exactly what you've been saying to him a dozen or so times without his comprehending!

That syndrome is particularly prevalent in Chinese, though you risk it in every language. Be a sport. Eat crow. And even though you're far from the mood at that moment, try to catch something in what he says that's at least slightly different from what you've been saying. If the next native speaker understands your revised pronunciation without an argument, then that crow you were forced to eat will retroactively taste like pheasant!

Every language student has good days and bad days with the language for no apparent reason. On bad days you can't seem to unleash a simple greeting without monumental phumphering. On good days you actually feel supernaturally propelled. A rising tide lifts all boats. Keep working. The bad days as well as the good days will both be better.

 

To Speak or Not to Speak

Be neither too boorish nor too reticent with your new knowledge. Don't go barrelling in with scant command of a language if doing so causes ungainly delays in a busy restaurant. Neither should you let shyness deny you a good opportunity to send a few volleys of conversation across the net.

Don't be like the beginner who took his party into a French restaurant in New York and insisted on trying to order for everybody in French. The waiter, himself French, quickly abandoning any hope of understanding the poor wretch, pulled a diplomatic coup worthy of a medal and a kiss on both cheeks.