It may be hard to explain why the multiple track attack works, but it's easy to prove that it does. It's somehow related to the excitement of running into someone from your hometown on the other side of the world. You might have ignored him back home or dismissed him with a "howdy," but you'll be flung into each other's arms by the power of meeting unexpectedly far from home.

The rub off effect kicks in nicely almost from the beginning of your effort as words you learned from a flash card or cassette pop up in your workbook or newspaper. Sure, you will eventually conquer the word even if it occurs only in your grammar book or your phrase book or on your cassette, but that learning involves repeated frontal assault on a highly resistant unknown. Let that same word come at you, however, in a real life newspaper article and your mind embraces it as an old friend.

Attempting to master a language with a grammar book alone is too boring; with phrase books alone, too superficial; with cassettes alone, too fruitless (except with Pimsleur!); and with dictionary and newspaper alone, impossible. The multiple track attack makes your work pay off.

 

Getting Started

 

Open your grammar to the first lesson. Do you understand the first paragraph? If so, proceed to paragraph two. If not, reread paragraph one. Can you determine precisely what it is that's blocking you from comprehension? If so, take a pencil (not pen) and underline the word or words that are tripping you up. Run a wavy pencil line down the left hand margin of whatever confuses you. That paragraph will never change. The grammatical point that the confusing paragraph seeks to make will remain as immutable as Gibraltar until your mind decides to open up to it. Comprehension frequently clicks on like a light switch. No rush.

Try to summarise what you don't understand. Pretend you're writing a letter to your aunt complaining about this ridiculous new language you're trying to learn and, using as few words as possible, encapsulate your confusion in writing. Take that note and put it in a Sturdikleer holder and carry it with you in your pocket or bag. Get into the habit of writing down everything that confuses with you and carrying it with you. You will try to find informants or mentors — either native speakers or others who've learned your target language well enough to answer your questions. Befriend the Korean grocer, the Italian waiter, the Albanian at the pizzaria, your dentist's Romanian secretary. You don't need such people, but they're extremely helpful and easier to locate than you might think, and getting easier all the time as America becomes an international mixture of peoples. Your informants will usually love being asked to help you learn their language.

Let's suppose you've stubbed your venturesome toe on paragraph one or two or three or whichever, and no comprehension clicks on. At this point you must consciously overturn the rules of misdirected American language teaching and do something radical. You must wave goodbye to your unsolved puzzle and keep moving ahead.

If you don't understand it, skip it for the time being. Chances are excellent your confusion will clear itself up as you progress through more and more concepts that you do understand. You will have the pleasure of looking back on earlier lesssons in the grammar, seeing your wavy pencil lines beside a now clear paragraph, and saying to yourself, "How could I have ever been derailed by this? " It's fun erasing those wavy lines!

Continue through five lessons of the grammar before you so much as glance at any of your other tools. Leave the cassettes wrapped in their packaging. Don't be tempted to look at the newspaper or magazine in your target language. The more of a language lover you are, the tougher it will be. Plodding through grammar while friendly cassettes and real life newspapers await will make you feel like a child who has to finish his homework before he runs out and plays baseball. And that's exactly the point. You are a child in that new language, and like all children, you have to learn to put first things first. Grammar comes first. Build a little character by slogging through five chapters of it. You will build up a head of steam that will send you charging headlong into more pleasant terrain.

Cassettes, newspapers, flash cards, and phrase books will cut the boredom out of waiting for buses and replace it with growth in another language; these will be your reward after you make an honest beginning in the grammar. Sustain your spirit during the grammar study by reminding yourself how soon you're going to be allowed to go out and

^«play.^,,

Into the Real World

 

When you've served out your sentence of five lessons of grammar, spread out all your other tools (you should regard them as "toys") and prepare to use them all simultaneously.

Take the newspaper or magazine. Go to the upper left hand corner of page one. (In languages like Arabic and Hebrew, that will be the upper right hand corner of the "back" page, which is their front.) That article is your assignment. It will easily be the toughest newspaper article you've ever read. And it will just as certainly do you more good than any other.

Take your highlighter and highlight all the words you don't know in the first paragraph. You may very well end up with a coloured line through every single word in that paragraph. After all, this is no schoolhouse text that dips to your beginner's level. This is as real life and real world as an exercise can get. And all you've had so far is five lessons of elementary grammar. Never mind. Play the game and dutifully mark through every word you don't know, even if it be every last word in that first paragraph!

Then reach for your dictionary and your blank flash cards. Go to the first word and look it up. One of four things will happen: (1) You'll find the word exactly as it appears in the newspaper. (2) You'll find a word that starts out the same but seems to go haywire halfway through or at the end. (3) The word will not be in your dictionary (even though you gave that dictionary a "sophistication" test before you bought it.) (4) You will think that word is not in the dictionary because the word has done crazy things with itself. It's altogether possible, owing to rules of that language you haven't learned yet, that the role of the word as it appears in the newspaper demands it be written differently from the base form, which is the one listed in the dictionary. (The word vaya in Spanish, for example, won't be in the dictionary. It's the singular imperative form of the verb it meaning "to go.

In case 1, the word is in the dictionary spelled exactly the way it is in your newspaper (from now on we'll say "text" — it could be a magazine or even a book). Take a blank flash card and write the English on one side; then flip it over and write the foreign word on the other. Write in block letters so your flash cards will always be easy to read. I hesitate to labour the procedure for making your own flash cards. There is a preferred procedure, however, and I herewith present it in case you don't already know it.

Single words and entire phrases are best handled differently. When you write individual words on your flash card, you only need a "short runway," so treat the card in its "tall" (vertical) form rather than its "fat" (horizontal) form and enter your words one under the other down the length of the card. Write the English word across the "forehead" of the card, then flip it, not sideways, but head over heels, and write the foreign word across the opposite forehead.

Then turn the card back over to the English side and write your next word directly underneath, turn it over and write in the foreign word, and keep repeating until the card is filled. That head over heels lengthwise flip makes the card easier to manipulate in a crowded bus or elevator and less likely to fall out of your hand.

When you graduate to writing entire phrases on your blank flash cards, it's obviously better to treat the card in its fat form. Continue to flip head over heels.

Now, case 2: You find a word in the dictionary that seems as though it's trying to be the word in your text but it falls off track: the ending changes spelling. You've probably found your base word, all right, but the word in the text, for reasons you don't yet comprehend, has taken another form. Is it a verb? Then the dictionary will give you the infinitive form (to be, to do, etc.), whereas the form in your text could be one of many variations, depending on person, number, tense, or, in some languages, aspect.

If that riff of grammatical terms makes you feel like I felt on my fifth day of Latin class, fear not. Language teachers would prefer to assume that such grammatical jargon is familiar to every graduate of an American high school English class. Alas, that assumption is grossly misguided. But help is here. The "Back to Basics" chapter later in this book will explain all necessary grammatical terms in friendly, nonthreatening language that requires no prior understanding of grammar.

Write the base form — the dictionary form, that is — on your flash card and try to decipher the meaning of the text with that base form as a clue.

If the meaning is clear, don't worry yet about why the word in the text differs from the base form. Part of the fun of this process is having that knowledge surrender itself to you as you proceed through your grammar book. If the meaning is not clear, make a "question card," spelling the confusing word the way it appears in the text. Keep your Sturdikleer with question cards with you at all times. When you meet your informant, or anybody who can explain your confusion away, pull out the question card and your miasma of confusion will become windshield wiper clear.

List no more than six unknown words per flash card. Don't clutter the card. It's a good idea to draw a line under both the English and the foreign word, giving each entry its own "cubicle" on the card. Also, check carefully to make sure you don't omit either the English or the foreign word, giving you a situation in which English word number three on the card fails to correspond to foreign word number three. (I once went around for almost a year thinking the Russian word for "prince" meant "raspberry jam"!)

In cases 3 and 4, either the word's not in the dictionary or it's not there in any form recognisable to you. Enter the word on a question card.

You may have four or five complete cards, eighteen or twenty words defined and ready to be learned, from the first paragraph in your text alone. Put those cards in clear plastic and carry them with you at all times. Don't mix them up with the question cards. Keep them separate. The cards with the dictionary forms of the foreign words from the text you didn't know, with their English equivalents on the reverse side, are the beginning of your collection of linguistic growth protein.

 

Advance!

 

Now you're ready for paragraph two. Between paragraphs one and two, you've been glancing at those flash cards duringg your hidden moments — waiting in line, on elevators, etc. With highlighter poised like a sword, you now sally forth into the second paragraph.

The going will probably be noticeably easier, because paragraph two will likely be dealing with much the same subject matter as paragraph one and many of the words will be repeats. Step back and note how many fewer coloured lines marking unknown words there are in paragraph two. Never mind that those are repeat words. If you knew them

from flashing your cards in the interval between tackling paragraph one and tackling paragraph two, then it's clean conquest. Bask in it, and move on to paragraph three.

No cheating! Don't let your possible lack of interest in the subject matter of the text tempt you into junking it and jumping across the page to another article that looks like it's about something that interests you more. No soldier fighting in the arctic would dare ask his commanding officer if he might be excused to go fight in the tropics. Advance! Charge! Slog through it one step — one word — at a time.

By the time you reach the end of page one, if it's a newspaper, you will note with glee that the coloured markings indicating words you didn't know, almost solid in the early paragraphs, will have diminished precipitously by the end of the page. That page is a progress chart.

And you'll have what seems like a ton of flash cards loaded with words in varying degrees of surrender to you. Carry as many flash cards with you as possible, and rotate them regularly so your attention is evenly parcelled out among them.

 

Tradition bound teachers would have problems with that kind of "ice plunge," a naked leap into a foreign language newspaper after only five lessons of grammar with nothing for help but a dictionary, which in many cases can't help because you won't know the various disguises (changing forms) of many of the words. What's the point?

There are several. America is a nation of people who make straight A's in intermediate French and then get to Paris and realise they don't speak intermediate French! The knowledge that the text — newspaper, book, magazine, whatever — is a real world document that does not condescend to a student's level is a tremendous confidence builder and energiser for your assault upon your target language. The awareness that you're making progress, albeit slowly, through typical text, genuine text, the kind the natives buy off their newsstands and read in their coffee shops, gives even the rank beginner something of the pride of a battle toughened marine.

Memorise Your Part

 

You are now, let's say, beginning chapter six of your grammar book and fighting your way valiantly down the first column of your text. Keep going on both these fronts, and pick up another tool.

Open your phrase book and read the introduction carefully, paying particularly close attention to the rules of transliteration. All such books will have three columns: the English word or phrase, the foreign language translation, and then the transliteration, which is your guide to proper pronunciation using the English alphabet.

When you get the hang of the language, you won't need the transliteration crutch. Until you do, you need it totally. But note that there is no recognised standard system of transliteration. The International Phonetic Alphabet is supposed to be, but nobody uses it because learning it is almost as hard as learning another language itself.

There are at least half a dozen ways to transliterate the capital of China. The Chinese communists prefer Beijing. The Chinese nationalists prefer Peking. If that were the only word you wanted to learn and there were no need for you to learn transliteration systems, we could write it Bay jing, adding that the Bay is pronounced like the English word for the body of water and the jing like the first syllable of "jingle."

Your phrase book will take mercifully little space to tell you how to pronounce the words according to their chosen system of transliteration. Usually in less than a page you'll be told to pronounce ai like the y in "sky"; ei like the eigh in "weigh" and so on through all the needed sounds. Some phrase books indicate which syllable gets the stress by placing an accent mark on top of it, others by capitalising every letter in the syllable. Don't be impatient because you suddenly feel you're called upon to learn another written language which is neither English nor the language you're trying to learn. Look upon the transliteration guide as your opportunity to learn the combination to a safe that will let you help yourself to the correct pronunciation of every word in that book!

Advance now to the first page of phrases in the phrase book. Your newspaper didn't teach you how to say "How are you?" and it's a good bet the first five lessons of your grammar didn't either. Here it comes! This is your first chance to learn how to actually say things.

"Yes." "No." "Please." "Thank you." "You're welcome." "Good morning." "Good afternoon." "Good evening." "I'm very pleased to meet you." "How are you?" "Very well, thanks; and you?" "Fine."

You'll master these precious nuggets of real life communication quickly. But don't stop with merely mastering them. Use that phrase book and plot a conversational pattern, a routine you go into when you meet someone who speaks your target language. Treat it as though you're memorising your part in a play.

"How do you do?" "My name is                     " "What's your name?" "Where are you from?" "How long have you been here?" "I don't speak your language well." "How do you say that in your language?" "May I get you something to drink?" "I don't understand." "Would you please repeat?"

Here again, traditionalists would frown. "That's not learning a language," they'd protest. "That's just learning how to parrot a few phrases!"

And right they'd be, if that were all you were doing. But you are now accumulating flash cards with vocabulary and moving through lesson seven or eight of the grammar, so don't feel you have to apologise for learning how to parrot a few handy phrases.

Your ability to bandy some useful phrases is a motivator. There you are, speaking the language! Isn't that what you started all this for? Admittedly you're not debating the economic consequences of his government's latest reversal on tariff agreements, but you are asking someone if he's too cold and telling him you hope to meet him again.

More magic happens when you're at that peak motivation. You find yourself acquiring more material, more conversational gems gleaned from his end of the conversation. Remember, you're a confessed beginner. When you don't understand something, you're excused for asking him to repeat it, spell it, write it down on one of your blank flash cards. (Always carry some.)

It's gratifying, in fact, enthralling, to enter your next conversation with your powers to converse enhanced by the previous encounter.

A note of caution, however. Eventually you may find yourself about to small talk so fluently you'll mistake that ability for having arrived. Back to the newspaper and the grammar with you before such thoughts corrupt!

 

Add Cassettes

 

For most of the history of the world, there was no way the self taught language student could hear the language spoken. He had to rely on printed rules, grossly inadequate, to guide him in pronunciation of his target language.

Then came the phonograph record, which seemed like ideal deliverance from darkness, until the tape recorder came along, followed quickly by the portable cassette tape recorder, which allowed language learners to pick up ear phones and listen to a wide variety of foreign language fare as they jogged, shopped, ran errands, or walked to work.

As is the case with many technological breakthroughs, disappointment followed. The closets of many fine, otherwise strong willed people are littered with the wreckage of once beautifully packaged foreign language cassette courses. They thought technology had replaced study. They thought all you had to do was pop a cassette into the machine, press a button, and take in the language like a car takes in gasoline.

Remove that inflated expectation, resolve to do your part, and the invention of the portable cassette tape player will indeed fulfill its promise to the language lover endeavouring to become a language learner.

Are you presently armed with the right cassette course?

Unless your cassette was mislabelled and carries lessons in a language other than the one you'd like to learn, it's a good learning aid. It may not be the best. It may be far behind the best, but so what? It will offer you words and phrases in your target language with native accuracy in pronunciation.

You no more want to limit your hearing of the language to one cassette course than you'd want to confine your tennis playing to one partner. The ideal cassette library is one in which the student can pull down a cassette for review in rotation and not quite remember how the dialogue goes or what's coming next. A little mystery, rather than rote familiarity, aids the student ear in its difficult mission of paying attention.