The Word Brain
The Word Brain
The Word Brain
the
Flying Publisher
word
the
word
brain
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
Flying Publisher
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
The Word Brain
To
Charlotte, Carmen, Elisa, Daniela, Chiara, Carlotta, Cristina, Lena,
Caterina, Margherita, Clara, Hannah, Irene, Marie, Romy,
Jeanne, Katharina, Franziska, Jenny, Alexandra, Johanna,
Colin, Oscar, Félix, Jasper, Robert, Michele, Antoine, Anton, Arnaud,
Manar, Ghassan, Lorenzo, Mezian, Giovanni, Albertino,
Martin, Noah, Ben, Tomaso, Elian, Julian, and Thomas.
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
Flying Publisher
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
is the Director of the International Amedeo Literature Service
and the founder of Flying Publisher. He edited and published
Influenza Report 2006 and Hepatology 2009.
Between 2005 and 2007, BSK published Free Medical
Information: Doctor=Publisher, launched the Amedeo Textbook
Awards, and created the Amedeo Prize.
www.bsk1.com
Goals 7
1. Words 13
2. Listening 19
3. Reading 29
4. Teachers 37
5. Speaking 45
6. Memory 51
7. Nailing 65
Epilogue 71
Introduction
Goals
7
The Word Brain
8
Goals
9
The Word Brain
I have condensed The Word Brain as much as possible so that you can
read it in a couple of hours. If you have learned other languages before,
you will recognise some of your experiences and find explanations for
your successes, failures or frustrations. If you have to learn another
language in the future, you might find some useful hints about how to
10
Goals
streamline your project and save time. Young teachers will read the
following chapters with particular attention. Although it is not a treaty
on neuroscience, The Word Brain introduces basic concepts of
processing and storage of information in our word brain. Suggestions on
how to use modern communication technologies to facilitate language
teaching indicate avenues for future activities.
The first chapter will show you how language learning can partly be
quantified, thus enabling you to plan your future effort over time. In the
subsequent chapters, you will hear such curious advice as ‘Start
listening, go on listening, continue listening – but please don’t speak
too early!’; you will discover some of your extraordinary reading
abilities; learn how differently your brain processes spoken words and
written words; see the need of sequencing speech in small slices;
discover the extraordinary accomplishments of your memory; and,
finally, conceive a strategic plan to crack your next language as quickly
and as reliably as possible.
Reading newspapers, understanding TV – the bar is high. Let’s start
with the number of new words you have to feed into your brain. Be
prepared for the worst.
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The Word Brain
12
1
Words
Words are the fuel of language. The number of words you are familiar
with determines your language abilities. The more words you know, the
better you are. Put in numbers, this statement reads as follows:
15,000 > 10,000 > 5,000 > 2,000 > 1,000 > 500
Between 2 and 18 years, you learned 10 new words every day. Later, at
work or at university, you enriched your brain vocabulary with
thousands of technical words. Now, after decades, you know more than
50,000 words of your native language. Words are the hard stuff of
language; in comparison, learning grammar is a finger exercise for pre-
school children.
To be comfortable in another language you need roughly half of the
words you possess in your native language – 25,000. As about 40
percent are variants of other words and can be easily inferred, a good
estimate of truly unique words you need to start with is 15,000 words.
This is a huge number and double what you are expected to learn in
8 years at school. Fortunately, you do not always have to learn them all.
Take the word evolution. In Spanish, Italian, and French, the word
translates into evolución, evoluzione and évolution. As you can see,
many words are almost identical between some languages and come
with just slight differences in packaging. Once you understand the rules
that govern these differences, you have immediate access to thousands
of words.
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The Word Brain
In order to understand how many truly new words are waiting on the
learning table in front of you – words you have never seen before and
which you cannot deduce from other languages you know – we need a
short history of your linguistic abilities:
• What is your native language?
• Have you learned other languages before?
• Which level did you achieve in these languages?
• Which language do you want to learn?
14
Words
exposure, which partly explains the prodigious rate at which they learn
new words. As an adult, however, you will take the long road, repeating
new words over and over again. Some words are easy, others are not.
Among the easy words are the words of everyday life, such as man,
woman, child, water, air, big, small, go, come, do. They are usually
short and their meaning is unambiguous. Other words are longer and
will need more frequent rounds of rehearsal: Gerichtsvollzieher,
jeopardy, abracadabrantesque, zanahoria, sgabuzzino, orçamentário,
Bundesverfassungsgericht. Still other words resist memorising because
their very concept, or the difference between one word and another,
remains vague and confusing even in your native language: haughty,
valiant, valorous, courageous, intrepid, contemptuous. And finally,
how could you easily learn Semmelknödel without ever seeing it, sugo
without smelling it, or tartiflette without eating it?
The Memory chapter shows in more detail that word learning is a result
of repeated exposures over weeks and months, a succession of stations,
a Via Dolorosa. You will not be nailed to a cross, but don’t be amazed
that the stations of a typical Via Dolorosa may not suffice to nail new
words permanently into your brain. Learning is a biological process that
requires new connections between brain cells, and these connections are
being produced from a huge number of biochemical substances. Give
them time to grow.
At a conservative estimate of 10 words per hour, it will take you 500
hours to learn 5,000 words (French/Spanish) and 1,500 hours to learn
15,000 words (European/Arabic). Based on the number of hours you are
prepared to invest on a daily basis, your total study time can be
predicted with fairly good accuracy. Take your daily study time from
the left column in Table 1.1 and pick from the appropriate column on
the right side (easy language: 5,000 words; difficult language, 15,000
words) the number of months you need to complete your word training.
As you can see, a quota of 5,000 or 15,000 words makes a huge
difference. For highly related languages that require a basic vocabulary
of 5,000 words, one hour per day is sufficient to be ready after two
years. With difficult languages and a word count of 15,000, a single
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The Word Brain
daily study hour would put you on a frustratingly extended study course
of 6 years.
16
Words
mother, a new father, new brothers and sisters, to be raised with love
until the age of 6 and be sent to school for another 10 years.
Unfortunately – or fortunately? – there is no way of simulating being a
new child in a different childhood environment.
So, who is eligible to embark on a full-scale attack on another language
in the sense we defined in the introduction, that is, being fluent in
reading newspapers and understanding TV documentaries and day-to-
day conversation? It all depends on time. If you have little or no time –
think of busy physicians – or prefer to dedicate your time to geology,
neuroscience, or evolutionary biology, new languages are out of reach.
Apart from these two cases, however, anyone who demonstrated the
ability to learn the language of their parents are entitled to learn their
next language.
The figures presented above are excellent news. Language learning is
not a bottomless pit, but is as predictable and quantifiable as climbing a
mountain in excellent weather conditions. You are planning the final
ascent to the 4,808 m summit of Mont Blanc, starting at the Gouter Hut
at 3,800 m? As you know that it takes you 30 minutes to climb 100
meters, you can expect to reach the summit in about five hours. Some of
your friends may get to the summit in 4 hours, others in 6 hours, but
nobody will do it in 30 minutes.
There is another piece of good news. As you will see in the coming
chapters, importing 5,000 to 15,000 new words into your brain in 500 to
1,500 hours turns out to be THE major battlefield in language learning,
representing 60 to 80 percent of your total effort. In comparison, other
aspects of language learning – grammar, pronunciation, etc. – are minor
construction sites. If you are motivated and still willing to follow me,
my first prescription would be that you start learning words on a daily
basis, at least five days a week, and that you start now. In Chapter 7,
you will find a number of strategies to cope with hundreds of words
every month. You will discover that you have powerful allies. One such
ally is your computer, which will turn out to be a fabulous assistant to
keep track of your progress, shortcomings, and successes.
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The Word Brain
18
2
Listening
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The Word Brain
conclude that we are inept at learning other languages and never try
again.
The apparent easiness with which humans learn their native language
during the first years of life, is intriguing. Not only do young children
readily soak up any of the thousands of possible human languages, but
they also learn to understand a huge variety of radically different
pronunciations – mum and dad, the neighbours, the fisherman at the
street corner, people speaking other dialects, stuttering infants, and
toothless grandparents. To date, there is no machine capable of this
level of speech recognition.
How do young children outperform the most sophisticated machines?
How do they structure linguistic input into meaningful units so rapidly?
To answer these questions, look at how you spent the first 6 months of
your life. As a physiological preterm primate, your interactions with the
world were pretty limited – eating, digesting, looking, and listening.
With such a limited repertoire of actions, every single action necessarily
received an immense share of your attention. Once digestion was
settled, you mutated into an ear-and-eye monster, capturing shapes and
movements around you and soaking in every single sound you heard.
You didn’t lose a minute setting about the most important task of your
life: putting structure into the sound produced by the people who
inhabited your life. The first hurdle was determining the word
boundaries within the language of your ancestors. Where do single
words begin; where do they end?
As you see from Figure 2.1, the sound wave per se does not confer
information about the boundaries between single words. To show the
magnitude of the task you face in a new language, try to delimit the
word boundaries:
20
Listening
Figure 2.1: Sound wave pattern of ‘ Putting structure into the porridge of sound produced
by the people who inhabited your life.’
Delimitingwordboundariesinaspeechstreamisnoeasierthantryingtodeter
minetheminthepreviousparagraphsohowdoyounginfantscrackthesoundc
odetheyperformfrequencyanalysestakeforexamplethesoundsequencewha
taprettybabyyouarethroughcontinuousexposuretohumanlanguagebabblin
ghumansproduce10000wordsandmoreinasinglehourinfantsprogressively
understandthatsyllableswhicharepartofthesamewordtendtofollowoneano
therpredictablyprettybabywhereassyllablesthatfollowoneanotherlessfreq
uentlyarewordboundariesaprettyba.
Delimiting word boundaries in a speech stream is no easier than trying
to determine them in the previous paragraph. So how do young infants
crack the sound code? They perform frequency analyses. Take for
example the sound sequence What a pretty baby you are. Through
continuous exposure to human language – babbling humans produce
10,000 words and more in a single hour ! – infants progressively
understand that syllables which are part of the same word tend to follow
one another predictably (pret-ty, ba-by), whereas syllables that follow
one another less frequently are word boundaries (a#pret, ty#ba).1
This type of frequency analysis is dependent on a well-functioning
memory that accumulates an ever-growing number of words and, of
course, extensive training. The problem is speed. As human speech can
produce three and more words per second, there is little time for either
childish astonishment or for adult considerations such as ‘What does
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The Word Brain
that word exactly mean?’, ‘Is the verb in the present or past tense?’,
‘What the hell is that grammatical structure?’, etc. At full speed, speech
is unpardonable – a single instant of indecision makes you stumble and
after getting onto your feet again, the sentence is gone. Speech
comprehension is therefore a triple challenge: slicing human speech into
digestible units, endowing them with meaning by matching the
segments with thousands of existing words stored in your brain
dictionary, and, finally, doing all this without giving it a second
thought. Fortunately, our word brain is genetically programmed to do
these mental acrobatics, and as you have already done it once – when
you learned your native language – you can do it again with other
languages as often as you want. To see what it looks like when your
auditory brain cortex works at full-speed, put your brain into a PET
scanner (Figure 2.2).2
Figure 2.2 Listening to words: High activity in the auditory brain cortex. Adapted from
Raichle, 1988.3 Used with permission.
22
Listening
So, if private and public schools are not in a position to provide us with
sufficient exposure to human speech, where can we go to get it? The
best school, of course, is life. Emigrate, either definitely or for just one
study year, and take a linguistic bath in a new language environment.
The younger you are, the more flexible your brain, and the easier it will
be to find yourself in groups of people who never stop talking. Add an
intense love affair, and your daily listening quota of 8, 10, or even 12
hours will soon be a reality. Within a year, you are a perfect speech
segmenter.
If you choose to stay at home, you will need speech surrogates. With a
workload of 500 to 1,500 hours from the previous chapter, you may
find it demanding to accommodate another 1,500 hours of training in
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The Word Brain
your time schedule. You are lucky. As listening can easily be done in
parallel to other activities – commuting, doing sport, cooking, etc. – you
will manage to dissolve the bulk of your speech recognition programme
in daily life (like a murderer who dissolves a corpse in an acid bath!).
Thereafter, you just have to change your TV habits (more about that
below), and the true extra study time can be reduced to around 100
hours. Just remember these two important pieces of advice: 1) During
the first year of your training, never read a text without hearing the
sound. 2) Only listen to audio sources if you have the corresponding
text at hand.
The immediate consequence is that it is imperative that your first
language manual comes with a CD-ROM (CD). During the 100 hours
of extra study just mentioned, listen to the CD. As expected, even with
the text in front of your eyes, comprehension of the audio files is not
always immediate. In these cases, take single sentences or even single
words, put them in an audio loop and listen to them 5, 10, or 15 times.
Some audio devices come with a convenient button to define the
beginning and the end of the loop. Using this sledgehammer method
cracks every sentence within minutes. More importantly, don’t feel
uncomfortable if you listen to a language CD for the 54th time. This is
all but dishonouring, and after all, you did exactly that with your
favourite music when you were young.
Insomnia, too, is an excellent moment for donning your earphones.
Some people will discover that the incomprehensible sounds will lull
them into sleep. Finally, don’t be afraid of unconventional behaviour. If
you are used to having a siesta, put your earphones on and activate the
loop mode. It is certainly impossible to learn words during sleep, but
the sound and music of the new language will certainly enter your brain.
Once you have digested your first (and maybe second) language
manual, you will discover that the Internet offers extraordinary tools for
second-language acquisition: audio files plus transcripts! (see
example at http://hiv.net/link.php?id=11). Some examples:
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Listening
The final surrogate for speech in real life is TV. Apart from high-quality
documentaries, which are rare, TV is a poor source of content, and most
of us would prefer reading books or scientific journals. TV is also
mostly irrelevant. Suicide attacks in remote countries; minor
earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcanic eruptions; old, helpless people
murdered by drug-intoxicated gangs of youths; drug-intoxicated gangs
of youths slain by paramilitary troops; paramilitary groups killed in an
ambush by guerrilleros, etc. – all this has little or no impact on your
personal and professional life, and watching TV is basically tantamount
to killing precious life time. Imperfect though it may be, some
broadcasts, for example TV news programmes, have nonetheless the
composition of outstanding speech trainers. The journalists talk
25
The Word Brain
Let us summarise:
• Human speech is a continuous sound stream. To understand the
meaning, your built-in speech-recognition system cuts human
speech into single words, matches them with your vast brain
dictionary, and does all this more or less unconsciously at a rate of
three words per second.
• To ensure extensive exposure to human speech, emigrate or find
surrogates for real life: 1) Language manuals + CD’s; 2) Internet
audio sources + transcripts; 3) TV.
• If you cannot emigrate, dissolve your training into your daily life by
listening to audio files during cooking, commuting, doing sport, etc.
Change your TV habits and watch TV exclusively in your new
language. Use earphones for enhanced comprehension.
26
Listening
Week after week, the sound pattern of words will flow into your brain.
Again, your brain will be acting as a huge sponge, as cracking the code
to a human language is not a reserved hunting ground for infants and
young children. With time, as comprehension sets in, British porridge
slowly mutates into French Cuisine. So far, so good, you might think,
but you have noticed something rather curious. You have been told to
learn 5,000 to 15,000 words and complete a 1,500-hour speech
recognition course, but nobody has asked you to say a single word.
Legitimately, you wonder if you will one day be authorised to
pronounce some of the words you have learned and to communicate
your precious thoughts to other people.
There are good reasons to restrain your desire to communicate. As you
are a virgin – linguistically speaking – you might prefer to stay that way
for a while. If you accept patience, my favourite prescription is a
monastic ‘3-month silence’. Remember: you are not at school, there are
no exams on the horizon, and you may therefore take a comfortable
route when starting your new language. Concentrate on absorbing
words, sounds and sentences, and, day after day, let the sound of the
new language slowly sink in. Of course, you are too old for an exclusive
baby approach to language learning, but for now, listen passively as
young children do. Good pronunciation comes as a bonus of patient and
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The Word Brain
attentive listening. So before you open your mouth, see in the next
chapter what your eyes can do.
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3
Reading
Ocne uopn a tmie trhee lived in a cietarn vlagile a lttile cnortuy gril, the
prettseit crteuare who was eevr seen. Her mhteor was ecsisxevely fnod
of her; and her ghrodmentar doted on her slitl mroe. Tihs good waomn
had a ltilte red riidng hood.
If you are a native English speaker, you will have recognised the initial
sentences of Little Red Hood. If you are not, understanding the previous
paragraph is more challenging, because your deciphering skill depends
on the number of years you have been reading English. The original
version:
‘Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl,
the prettiest creature who was ever seen. Her mother was excessively
fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good
woman had a little red riding hood.’ The words have been modified
only slightly, with the first and the last letter still in place and the others
shuffled at random.
How can you read so heavily distorted prose? The answer is ‘image
matching’. Over decades of reading practise, your word brain has
accumulated mental word-images of tens of thousands of words. When
you read a text, you don’t spell the words, you see them. Each word is a
pictogram like a toilet sign in airports, and slight variations of the
pictogram are irrelevant for comprehension. That is why our ‘cnortuy
gril’ immediately evokes the correct image – and why proof-reading is
so subtle.
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The Word Brain
What does that mean for language learning? Well, if reading is like
seeing a movie, you certainly must absorb a huge number of new word-
images, and as with listening, some segmenting is needed. Take the
word parachlorophenylalanine. For scientists with a basic knowledge in
chemistry, the meaning and pronunciation of the word is as evident as
the meaning and pronunciation of love and peace. Meanwhile, non-
scientists will return to first-grade spelling techniques and ask
themselves where the syllables start and where they end. Every
language has thousands of these complicated words. Remember the
examples from the Words chapter (abracadabrantesque et al.) or take a
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Reading
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The Word Brain
Let’s get back to your reading abilities and define the learning material
you will use. I recommend that you start studying classical language
manuals. Among the dozens of existing manuals, only a few are
outstanding, and selecting good manuals is like crossing a minefield.
Ask your teacher for help. In particular, make sure that the manual has
word lists and comes with a CD-ROM. Personally, I prefer books
without pictures and drawings because words are all you need (check
www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations.php). Neither the
Bible nor the Torah nor the Koran comes with pictures.
As with audio files, be prepared for repetitive learning cycles. Read the
chapters of your manual 5, 10, or 15 times, until you feel comfortable
with every sentence and every word. You will soon find out that reading
is easier than listening, because it does not require high-speed
processing of several words per second. Instead, while deciphering a
text, you can take all the time you need until you understand everything
– lingering on single words, going back and forth through a sentence,
leaping between paragraphs. Remember that in educated people, most
words enter the brain via the eyes; they are not the result of babbling,
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Reading
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The Word Brain
Whatever source you start with – science, novels, or comic strips – you
will need a good dictionary to look up new words. A good dictionary is
a heavy book that weighs at least one kilogram and has a minimum of
1000 pages. Over the years, you will see that it is the single most
important book of your language project. Buy it soon and mark the
pages that correspond to the individual letters (see Figure 3.1). This
simple manipulation will save you precious time; after just days of
training, you will find single words in less than 10 seconds.
Now take a text of your choice, underline the new words, search for
them in your dictionary, write them down in a neat, hand-written list or
in a computer document, and learn them. Don’t forget to mark the
words you have looked up (Figure 3.2). Even if you are not going to
learn a whole dictionary by heart, you may decide one day to repeat the
words that you are supposed to know.
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Reading
Now read, read, and read. But... don’t neglect the daily listening
training prescribed in the previous chapter! Be careful: over several
years, steady reading practise can lead to a strange syndrome that is
highly prevalent among academics. These people are fluent at reading
the scientific literature about medicine, philosophy, music, or philology,
but don’t understand a person talking about the very same topics and
using the very same words. Their eyes work, but their ears don’t.
The diagnosis? Eye-ear dissociation. The cause? Inappropriate training
of the auditory brain cortex (see the previous Listening chapter). People
can be perfect readers, but, at the same time, poor listeners. (The
contrary – the ears understand, but the eyes cannot read – exists too:
illiteracy.) To neuroscientists, this is not surprising; eyes and ears are
different entry ports for distinct elaboration and storage sites in the
brain. Training the visual brain areas at the back of the head (see Figure
3.3) has little influence on the performance of the auditory brain areas.
Surprise: what seemed to be a single task – learning a new language –
turns out to be a multi-task project for your word brain. In the Speaking
chapter below, you will find yet another construction site.
Figure 3.3: Reading words: High activity in the visual brain cortex.
Adapted from Raichle, 1988. Used with permission.
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The Word Brain
Let’s summarise:
• After decades of exercise, you have developed amazing reading
skills. At full speed, reading compares 5 and more words per
second with a huge library of word-images stored in our brain.
• These skills are of no use for languages with different writing
systems such as Arabic or Chinese.
• After finishing your first language manuals, start reading articles or
books that you would normally read in your native language.
• Over the years, your dictionary will become your single most
important language book.
• Beware of eye-ear dissociation.
The last three chapters – Words, Listening, Reading – may suggest that
language learning can be done without teachers. As a matter of fact, for
the most time-intensive tasks, such as word learning and speech
recognition, teachers are of little help. However, words alone don’t
make up human language. You need rules to arrange them in sentences,
and, in the process, some words will be modified. Grammar is the
collection of these rules. Fortunately, the number of grammar rules is
limited, and if you have some experience with grammar, you could also
decide to go on your own. If you haven’t, you need good language
teachers. Finding them can be a nightmare.
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4
Teachers
Everyone agrees that there are good physicians and bad physicians. To
make that difference can be vital – your health is at stake, and
sometimes your life. With languages, the stakes are evidently more
humble, but still considerable. Learning languages is time-consuming,
and we are reluctant to put our precious time and motivation into the
hands of bad teachers.
It is beyond the purpose of this short introduction to shed an
unfavourable light on deficient language teachers, but let me
nonetheless warn you about two types you might wish to avoid. The
first group comprises teachers who do not really know what they do, as
language teaching is one of the rare professional activities where people
are allowed to teach a process which they haven’t experienced
themselves. When a surgeon teaches a colleague how to perform a
cardiac bypass operation, he has done this type of operation hundreds of
times. See one, do one, teach one – this rule is sacrosanct in most
disciplines, but not in language teaching. If you book a vacation to
attend English classes in private schools in London or French classes in
Paris or Spanish classes in Seville, the odds are substantial that your
teachers will have a perfect knowledge of one, but only one language –
their own – and will themselves never have been through the
cumbersome process of mastering another language. The risk of
encountering such ‘monoglot’ teachers is particularly high in English-
speaking countries. Spontaneously, a series of questions come to mind:
Do these teachers know what it means to absorb 5,000 to 15,000 words?
Can they imagine how it feels to nail 20 to 50 new words into your
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The Word Brain
brain every day? Do they have the faintest idea of how demanding it is
to penetrate the dense thicket of high-speed human speech? Do they
simply presage the thrill of discovering a new language? In summary,
do they have an appropriate comprehension of the complications and
implications of language learning? They probably don’t. So if your
language classes in Paris, London, Berlin, or Seville, are meant to be
more than meeting and mingling opportunities with people from all
over the world, make sure that your teachers are polyglots. You
wouldn’t want to learn sex with nuns and priests.
The second group of teachers you should avoid are those who do their
job because they didn’t get the job they wanted. Their first choice was
perhaps to be a musician, a philosopher, or a writer. But life is
unpredictable, dreams don’t always materialise, and in order to make a
living, some people accept the role of a language teacher. After a short
period of frustration, most of these ‘against-their-will’ teachers will
settle into their new life and excel in their profession. However, a
minority do not, and will lack the essential skills for teaching a
language: energy and enthusiasm. While in other professionals, for
example real estate agent, woodcutter, or mortician, a lack of
enthusiasm may be irrelevant; in teaching it is not. Don’t agree to
content yourself with anything less than passionate and wholehearted
teachers. You have decided to become fluent in another language, you
are ready to invest years, and your desire is to achieve the top.
Frustrated teachers are infectious individuals who could contaminate
what is one of your most valuable resources: motivation. Protect it.
In order to get a clearer picture of language teaching and, consequently,
of how to avoid bored and boring teachers, let’s address a list of the
services teachers should provide. Traditionally, language teachers
trained and checked six core competences: vocabulary, understanding
of speech, production of speech, reading, writing, and grammar. As we
have seen in the Words chapter, vocabulary training is inherently a
lonely job because nobody except yourself can transfer thousands of
words into your brain. In what is the most important single task of
language learning, teachers can do nothing for you.
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Teachers
39
The Word Brain
we want vogliamo
you want volete
they want vogliono
And this is only the beginning. Dig deeper into volere, and you rapidly
discover a whole nest of descendants: volevo, volevi, voleva, volevamo,
volevate, volevano, volli, volesti, volle, volemmo, voleste, vollero, vorrò,
vorrai, vorra, vorremo, vorrete, vorranno, vorrei, vorresti, vorrebbe,
vorremmo, vorreste, vorrebbero, voglia, vogliano, volessi, volesse,
volessimo, voleste, volessero. Surprise: verbs are icebergs, and what you
see in dictionaries, for example ‘baciare – to kiss’, ‘volere – to want’,
‘fare’ – to do’, ‘andare – to go’, are just the tips. Fortunately, there are
strict rules which govern verbs (a discipline which grammarians call
‘conjugation’); and with the exception of some irregular verbs, all
variations of a verb can be easily deduced. Unfortunately, easily does
not mean fast, and lack of speed is disastrous for fluent understanding
and fluent speaking. The solution? The same repetitive training as in
word training: repeated exposure, and heavy nailing. With an additional
‘word load’ of generally below 1,000, this will not demand more than
50 hours of extra training. Search the Internet for free software. Free
verb training for German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French is
available at http://poliglottus.com/verbs.htm.
Now that you have outsourced the study of verb forms to autonomous
learning, grammar per se shrinks to a set of about 30 problems to settle.
If you followed my prescriptions in the first chapters – 1) Learn 20 or
more new words per day; 2) Listen to human speech for at least one
hour per day – all I would ask you at this point is to rapidly assemble
the knowledge that is needed to recognise the most frequent
40
Teachers
41
The Word Brain
42
Teachers
Let us summarise:
1. Avoid bored and boring teachers.
2. Insist on an initial quick grammar overview. Grammar is not a
black hole. The number of problems you need to resolve is finite.
3. Opt for the coach model and limit the number of lessons. First
month: 10-20 lessons; second and third month: 4 lessons; fourth
month and later: 1 to 2 lessons.
4. Make sure that your coach explains the grammar in your native
language.
After leaving behind the complex topic of language teachers, you will
cautiously approach your next step: producing intelligible sounds in
your new language. Learning, listening, reading – hundreds of hours,
thousands of words. If you followed my advice to study in silence, time
has passed. Now the day has come where you want to express yourself.
Speaking is fundamental to humans. Do it.
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44
5
Speaking
The day you utter your first words in a new language is not always a
happy day. Most languages have unfamiliar sounds, and to reproduce
them faithfully takes time, sometimes years. If you have more than one
new sound in a single word, the probability to get it right approaches
zero. Take the one-second sequence – ﺻ ﺒﺎح اﻟﺨ ﻴﺮgood morning
(pronounce SabaH el-khair). In a single second, you are supposed to
produce three sounds that are totally unfamiliar to most people from
Western Europe. The odds are against you.
Let’s return to your childhood again. How did you circumnavigate the
obstacles that visibly impede fluent speech in adults? From what we
saw in the Listening chapter, part of the solution was to postpone
speech, and to just listen to the sounds of the world. It took
approximately 5 to 7 months before you started to babble and utter
meaningless sounds such as ‘ba-ba-ba-ba-ba’, ‘ka-bu-ba-da-mi’; and
only when you reached the age of 12 months were you ready to
experiment with real words and two-word sentences, generally in order
to express desire: ‘More juice’, ‘Want cookie’. You took your time
before wrapping your baby thoughts in chunks of language.
Anatomy and physiology conspired. They made it easier to let sounds
come into your brain than to let them out. To let human speech in, all
you need is an eardrum, three tiny bones in your middle ear, and the so-
called cochlea. These structures amplify the sounds, and transduce them
to electrical signals for the brain where speech segmentation and
interpretation immediately ensue. This is a straightforward process, and
45
The Word Brain
apart from your ears and your brain, nothing else is involved. In
comparison, speaking requires sophisticated mechanics. To proclaim
the resolutions of your brain to the world, you have to co-ordinate
dozens of muscles in your larynx, pharynx, neck, cheeks, mouth, and
tongue. Putting all these pieces into the perfect position in a minimum
amount of time is a remarkable acrobatic performance, and even
children need years of exercise. In fact, only at around the age of ten do
they start speaking like adults (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1: Pronouncing words: High activity in the precentral motor cortex.
Adapted from Raichle, 1988. Used with permission.
From the very beginning, comprehension has a head start over speech
production – when you stutter your first barely intelligible sounds, you
already possess a vast passive repertoire of hundreds of words. The
disparity between good language comprehension and poor language
production usually persists throughout a lifetime. Many people may one
day read Thomas Mann, Hemingway, or Voltaire, but only a few will
develop their writing skills.
Speaking skills have another disturbing characteristic: they are subject
to heavy erosion. Stop speaking a second language for a decade or
more, and even simple words such as ‘Goodbye’ are suddenly
irretrievable. At the same time, listening and reading skills are hardly
impaired. It seems as if once you acquire the ability to understand with
native-like proficiency, you have acquired it for life, like riding a
46
Speaking
47
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48
Speaking
49
The Word Brain
50
6
Memory
51
The Word Brain
To manage word webs – and other tasks, of course – your brain relies
on complex and compact machinery. First, it contains between 10–100
(1011) billion neurones, which are the main information-processing
52
Memory
Figure 6.2. A single neurone, its dendrites and its multiple synapses (orange dots).
Yet the most surprising detail is still to come: synapses are not carved in
stone. They come and go as their support, dendritic spines, appear and
disappear. These spines are tiny protrusions from a neurone’s dendrite.
If you teach a mouse to reach out with its forelimb to a single seed (see
movie at http://hiv.net/link.php?id=20), dendritic spines form as rapidly
53
The Word Brain
as within one hour.4 Most of these new spines will regress again, but
some are preserved and, when stabilised during subsequent training,
leave minute but permanent marks on cortical connections.5 The
resulting change in circuitry is most likely the anatomical substrate for
long-term memory storage. The resulting plasticity of the brain can
even be observed macroscopically, for example in London taxi drivers
from pre-GPS times, who developed a hypertrophy of the brain region
that is involved in spatial orientation6, or in violin players who have an
enlargement of the left hand representation in the sensorimotor cortex.7
The rate of spine erosion is astonishing. In one study, 96–98 percent of
newly formed spines vanished within days, and less than 1 percent
persisted for months.8 Using 20 percent of all the oxygen you breathe,
your brain is constantly sorting out newly received information,
enforcing what is important and discarding what is irrelevant.9 The
extent of the deconstruction going on in your brain was nicely shown by
19th century experiments that measured the time of learning – and
subsequent forgetting – of chains of 2,300 nonsense consonant-vowel-
consonant syllables such as KOJ, BOK, and YAT. The results were
sobering. After 24 hours, 70 percent was gone (Figure 6.3). Happily,
you will learn meaningful word pairs rather than nonsense syllables, for
example, agua–eau, vino–vin, queso–fromage, and should therefore
obtain better results after 24 hours. However, at Day 31, you might not
perform much better than the memory pioneers more than 100 years
ago. Brain physiology isn’t prone to instant word learning. In word
jungles, progress is slow.
In order to protect young spines from erosion, schedule multiple
training sessions. You will note that, before getting fixed into lifelong
memory, words pass subsequent degrees of knowing. At the weakest
stage, you don’t even remember that you have seen a word; however,
you would recognise it when presented in a list of words. Later, you
would say that you once knew a word, but cannot remember it. At a
subsequent stage, a word would be on the tip of your tongue, yet decline
to come out. Finally, you remember it, first after seconds and then
milliseconds.
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Memory
Figure 6.3. Forgetting curve. Adapted from Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: a contribution
to experimental psychology, 1885/1913.
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The Word Brain
Figure 6.4. Learning curve (red), constructed from truncated forgetting curves.
Dark blue: Initial decline in memory performance.
Light blue: Long-term result without further repetition.
Green: Repetition putting the retention rate back to 100 percent.
in your word brain in a fairly definitive way. You must etch new words
and carve and pound and burn and nail them. The alternative for
learning should express that a word will stay in your brain for decades:
it may corrode and slowly become weaker, but it will nonetheless resist
and surrender only to arteriosclerosis. Let’s abandon learning, which is
too cushy, and adopt something more physical. Let’s say nailing. The
definition of nailing includes the three steps of learning, repeating and
controlling.
How to nail words is an individual affair. If speed is critical, rely on the
tens of thousands of webs that are already firmly anchored in your word
brain (Figure 6.1). All you need to do is to add two pieces of
information to an existing word web: first, how you write a new word
and, second, how to pronounce it. Everything else – knowledge and
memories – is already in place. In practise, you will have to dress a two-
column list, putting your new and your native language face to face (see
an example in Table 6.1). Word lists are not perfect – German Brot is
different from French pain, it looks different, it smells different, and it
tastes better – but with 5,000 to 15,000 words to nail, you cannot afford
to lose time with subtleties. The pre-existing webs of your word brain
are a unique support for nailing new words. Use them. If your teacher
tells you that you can do without word lists, fire him.
Table 6.1 Example of a word list for Germans wanting to nail Italian words
Italian German
amare lieben
la pace der Frieden
odiare hassen
la corruzione die Korruption
la morte der Tod
il cavaliere der Reiter
la gioia die Freude
la gente die Leute
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***
58
Memory
Later in life, job and family reduce available study time. Stupidly,
memory performance declines too, first imperceptibly, and after 50,
undeniably. Now, words need more frequent repetitions to crawl into
lifelong memory. In addition, multitasking abilities decrease, leaving
little space for silent rehearsing of new words while simultaneously
following an ongoing conversation. At some moment in life, memory
impairment is such that the goals we defined earlier – reading essays or
newspapers, understanding TV documentaries, and following day-to-
day conversation – are beyond reach.
You will avoid drugs and alcohol at high dosage. Building up valuable
spines during sweaty days just to blow them out of your brain during
vaporous nights is not what you would want to do. Acute alcohol
intoxication (‘black-out’) is fatal for memory, not to speak of chronic
abuse (‘alcohol dementia’). Even episodes of heavy drinking such as a
bottle of wine impair memory performance during the hangover
period.12
Alcohol, though, is a minor problem compared to a more widespread
abuse: distraction. If you repeatedly subtract a single-digit number from
a larger number directly after one of your nailing sessions, you will see
that your memory is impaired for the 3 to 5 most recently nailed words.
Certain episodes of life are therefore inherently incompatible with
robust learning: death of relatives and friends, illness or hypochondrial
fears, separation or divorce, job loss or financial disaster. Yet even
more dangerous, because it occurs more frequently, is seemingly
innocuous distraction, for example extended surfing tours on the
Internet. Opening social network accounts, reading incoherent
information from disparate sources, writing short messages,
participating in nonsense quizzes, listening simultaneously to music,
downloading videos or doing whatever else you can imagine – such
acrobatic multitasking is heavy stuff for delicate infant spines. Is
excessive networking inappropriate for the gentle formation of lasting
memory traces? Do precious bits of memory get lost in the cold spaces
of the endlessly anonymous Internet? Future studies might show that
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60
Memory
61
The Word Brain
Let us return to the initial question. Why does it take adults so much
longer than young children to learn new words? We will never be able
to answer this question because stating that ‘children learn languages
faster than adults’ is wrong. If 18-year old young adults know 30,000 to
50,000 words, where did they get them from? Walking in the open air,
listening to birds and enjoying the dance of butterflies? No, they did so
at school, from early in the morning until the afternoon, 9 months a
year, 12 years in a row. Even if education at school and university is
about facts and concepts, word learning is a huge burden of formal
education. Remember those failed oral examinations because the words
were on the tip of your tongue but wouldn’t proceed any further. Part of
your failure? Insufficient word training. You would not become a
physician, a philosopher, or an engineer without acquiring thousands of
new words. How many words did I learn at medical school? Anatomy,
physiology, and biochemistry alone were good for a few thousands, and
the total word count may well have been in excess of 10,000. Word
brains fashion our career.
Young children are language machines because they have time. Italian
is exhilaratingly concise when it translates this idea into ‘Non hanno un
cazzo da fare!!’, saying, in essence, that children have pretty few things
to care about except listening and talking. If we, adults, add time to our
language-learning recipe, children immediately lose their head start.
Adults possess vast brain webs of meanings, fact, and events. What’s
more, we are capable of focused working for 4, 6, or 8 hours a day and
are terrifyingly effective when we do so. In comparison, young children
stand no chance of competing. In other words: start a four-year
language training course today, and in four years, I expect you to have
language skills that are clearly superior to those of a 6-year-old child.
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Memory
Let’s summarise.
1. Motivated adults learn languages faster than young children.
2. Exploit the word webs in your brain and nail words with bilingual
lists. Learn new words on day 0 and repeat them on day 1, 3, 6, 10,
17, and 31.
3. After your nailing sessions, relax and don’t engage in multitasking
activities.
4. Avoid excessive drinking or taking drugs.
5. Avoid brain doping.
6. Teach your children and grandchildren the following motto, by Eric
Kandel, Nobel Laureate: ‘Studying well is, without a doubt, the best
cognitive enhancer for those capable of learning’.17
You are now ready to proceed to the last chapter. Nailing is about
strategies to cope with the huge number of words you have to burn into
your brain. You are at the beginning of your private Via Dolorosa.
Hoping for a miracle, a golden avenue, or a royal highway? I am sorry,
but you won’t find any of these. However, some pieces of advice will
make the route less thorny and painful. Let’s go for it!
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64
7
Nailing
You are now ready for take off. Depending on the language you are
going to learn, 5,000 to 15,000 words are waiting to be nailed into your
brain. The sheer volume of this task – 500 to 1,500 hours – may
surprise those who had a naïve or romantic perception of speaking other
people’s tongues. Realistic minds find it encouraging that the time
frame of language learning is predictable.
If you are learning ‘just for fun’ and want to limit daily learning to one
hour a day, avoid languages with heavy ‘word loads’. For people from
Western Europe these are, for example, Russian, Turkish, Arabic,
Chinese, or other African and Asian languages. Instead, choose
languages with a more familiar vocabulary. Please don’t consider
anything less than daily work; alternatively, you could try ‘pulse
treatments’ of three hours twice a week.
If you learn languages at university and, a fortiori, if you contemplate
becoming a language teacher, things are different. Every language is
within your reach because your daily work schedule includes 3 hours of
word nailing plus hours of listening to audio sources. Don’t even
envisage a more modest approach. Nobody wants language teachers
who are not in command of what they teach, and anything less than 5
hours of daily study is unacceptable. Those not willing to fulfil these
requirements should reconsider their professional choices.
Let’s get to work! First, find out how many new words you can nail
every day. In extraordinary circumstances – you are abroad, start at
7 o’clock in the morning, and continue until noon before spending the
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The Word Brain
rest of the day with native speakers – you can nail 50 or even more
words every day. (I happened once to be in such a situation. It was my
first trip to Sardinia, and every night I clearly felt the progress I had
made during the day.) However, in everyday life, and in particular over
periods of months, nailing 50 words per day is a terrific challenge. For a
start, we will consider 20 truly new words a feasible and respectable
long-term goal. ‘New’ means that you cannot guess the meaning of the
word. For English native speakers, words such as
Sicherungsverwahrung, Grundsatzurteil and Bundesgerichtshof are
new, whereas evolución, democracia and economia are not.
At 400 new words per month, progress is evident week after week.
Rapid word accumulation is paramount for two reasons. First, you need
to recognise the words that your auditory brain cortex will soon be able
to ‘cut out’ from spoken language (see chapter Listening). Second, word
nailing accelerates your transition from an illiterate to a literate person
and brings you closer to the most pressing short-term objective:
reading! As soon as possible, you must move into territory where you
are able to read everything... because reading is the best conceivable
language training! At first, the process is slow, like deciphering
hieroglyphics, but if you persist, your reading abilities will soon speed
up. Reading is total immersion par excellence and will soon trigger
quantum leaps in understanding. In one hour, it exposes you to as much
as 20,000 words. For word brains, reading is paradise.
Just to make sure that we understand each other: I don’t find word
nailing thrilling and I can immediately name a hundred activities I
would prefer to do. However, in the early stages of language learning,
there isn’t any alternative for people who like it fast and efficient.
Remember chapter 1: The number of words you are familiar with
determines your language abilities. The more words you know, the
better you are.
Nailing can be divided into three distinct activities: learning words,
repeating words, and controlling words. Beginners need two-column
lists that put new and native words face to face. At first, read the words
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Nailing
attentively one after the other. Check the spelling, imagine the sound of
the word and make a guess at the resistance a word is likely to oppose:
easy to learn or not? Four-syllable words such as perseverance will
demand more time than monosyllabics such as and, or, and but. Go
through the list a second and third time, either line by line or leaping at
random from word to word. Push the words around in your mind,
squeeze them, press them, and stretch them. Finally, test yourself by
covering first the right column and then the left column. 100 percent
correct answers is a good score.
As brilliant as 100 percent results are, the first learning session is only
the starting point for a weeklong consolidation process. Remember the
forgetting curve of the Memory chapter. After one day, the percentage
of correct answers is dramatically down, and after one month, recall
may be 20 percent or less. As learning is nothing and recalling is
everything, the second pillar of word nailing is repetition. Find out
which strategy fits you best, either daily repetitions or repetitions on
day 1, 3, 6, 10, 17, and 31, or any other regime. You will soon notice
that after every re-exposure, memory traces are easier to reactivate.
The third pillar of nailing is control. Determine that every single word
has safely arrived in lifelong memory. Very young children ask their
family for help, and a grandmother might interrogate her grandson,
‘Young boy, please tell me what açúcar means.’ But what is practical at
an artisan level is impractical for the mass digestion of 5,000 to 15,000
words, and you wouldn’t want to bother your grandmother, mother,
wife, daughter or granddaughter for months or years on end. To check
progress, develop your own system. Revisiting the word lists frequently
and marking ‘difficult’ words for further revision is one such system.
Alternatively, you can use index cards or word trainers on electrical
devices. For an overview on this topic, please see
www.TheWordBrain.com/NailingSystems.php.
Soon, you will face two problems. The first is saturation. At a rate of
20, 30, or 40 new words a day, the time will come when you will feel
like a force-fed French goose. The diagnosis: an acute attack of
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indigestion. The prevention: nail words five days a week and stop
nailing at weekends. If saturation develops nonetheless, pause for an
entire week.
The second problem is more severe: lack of words. Good language
manuals usually present around 2,000 words – that is far short of your
final word score of 5–15,000. This is a miserable situation, because you
are too good to continue working with manuals, but not good enough
for reading essays, newspapers or novels. At this early stage, not even
dictionaries are helpful – deciphering a text where half of the words are
unknown is achingly slow.
There is one acceptable solution: nailing carefully selected word
compilations that are grouped by topic and divided into basic and
advanced vocabulary. Good compilations present around 7,000 words
and offer free pronunciation audio files (see
www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations.php). Define the
number of pages you will nail every day and start ploughing your way
through them. People who have never used these books sometimes
observe that learning hundreds of pages of words out of context is not
an exciting perspective. I agree, but I wonder if the alternative –
searching 10,000 words in a dictionary – is more sexy. Anticipate at
least two rounds and possibly another round after 6 to 12 months.
While pioneering the world of words, you will one day have the
curiosity to open a 200-page grammar book. To your satisfaction, you
will realise that daily listening to your audio sources (remember the
manual CDs, TV programmes and audio books of the Listening chapter)
has paved the way to understanding grammar. In fact, humans have an
innate ability to grasp grammar, and this ability doesn’t disappear with
adult age. Don’t be afraid of the technical terms of grammar, the nouns,
pronouns, adverbs, tenses, modes, etc. Their number is limited. Think
of the parts that you know from your car – gear box, headlights, battery,
brakes, suspension, chassis, radiator, dipstick, cylinder, driveshaft,
exhaust pipe, jack, lug nuts, spark plug, hubcap, etc. In comparison,
becoming familiar with a handful of grammar terms is a bagatelle.
68
Nailing
Final Workload
Allow for an additional 150 hours to explore your dictionary in more
detail. Your final workload is between
1,000 and 2,000 hours
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70
Epilogue
We have reached the end of our journey. After visiting your colossal
lifelong memory, your breathtaking speech segmentation skills, your
frantic reading speed, and your pronunciation acrobatics – all unique on
Earth – let’s sit down for a moment.
Two hours of reading have changed the way you see languages and
language learning. Not all languages are equal because, depending on
who you are and which languages you speak, some languages are easier
than others. However, all languages are equally beautiful. The Germans
will appreciate that Turkish is as beautiful as German; the French will
be delighted that Arabic is as expressive and gentle as French; and the
Italians will be pleased to discover that Albanian is as subtle and
amusing as Italian. Even more importantly, we have seen that languages
are within the reach of everybody. Please pass this knowledge on to
your children, grandchildren, and friends.
Although language learning is predictable, there are no miracles.
Success is determined by the number of hours people are ready to
invest. Fortunately, there are potent catalysts, for example life and love.
Just imagine yourself in an intense love affair, spending weeks and
months in close symbiosis, exposed to a single linguistic ‘source’,
discussing the world from dusk to dawn, and all this submerged in
memory-stimulating emotions, supplemented with memory-boosting
physical activity. The progress people make in these conditions is
remarkable – sometimes dangerously remarkable. I once unmasked a
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cheating husband. While talking about Italy and Italian, I noticed that
his language skills were quite honourable, so I asked him,
– How long have you been studying Italian?
– Oh, not that long. Three years, during my summer seminaries.
– And how long did those seminaries last?
– Two weeks each.
– Oh, really? I didn’t know that you had a girlfriend in Italy.
– Who told you?
Nobody told me. The gentleman was simply too erudite. You don’t
acquire certain words and a certain ease with language in 6 weeks of
canonical summer-school teaching. Cherchez la femme...
I have already recommended extensive travel for those who are in their
late teens or early twenties. Youth, high levels of sex hormones, and the
desire to find mates, are mighty communication catalysers. However,
love and sex are not always practical. Later in life, you wouldn’t want
to get divorced just because you needed extra-marital language courses.
For more composed people, there are entertaining alternatives, such as
organised travel tours. I once went to Brazil and booked a 12-day tour
in a local tourist agency. All other travellers being Brazilian, the
5,000 km bus trip (yes, Brazil is a vast country) turned out to be second
among the most intensive languages courses I have ever had.
(Number 1 was the French teenager, of course.)
You will have noticed that I have a special relationship with languages.
In fact, they have shaped my life through an uninterrupted chain of
40 years that links my early Latin experiments to The Word Brain. An
A grade in Latin helped me enter medical school. After medical school,
I worked in a department of infectious diseases and started writing a
textbook on HIV (www.hiv.net/aids1991.jpg) that was to be published
into the 16th edition. The textbook triggered the construction of
www.Amedeo.com which, in turn, would provide the funding for a 24-
72
month Arabic sabbatical. And struggling with Arabic taught me
fundamental lessons for writing this guide.
I am well aware that some of my advice is demanding and that I have
set the bar high. However, the bar is no higher than we can all reach.
The most satisfying insight of the last two hours is that language
learning is a mere variable of time: you may decide that you have no
time, but never again will you have to say that you have no talent for it.
If, instead, you find the time to learn a new language, I wish you the
very best. Languages are formidable windows to the beauties and
mysteries of the human odyssey. Pushing them wide open is among the
most gratifying moments in life.
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74
Index
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The Word Brain
Odyssey 73 segmentation 23
Overmedication 42 stream 21
Overteaching 43 Spines 53
Perseverance 7 erosion 54
Pharynx 46 Sport 24
Pigalle 51 Statins 42
Plasticity 54 Study time 16
Podcasts 25 Studying
Poliglottus 40 daily learning 16
Predictability 17 do-it-yourself job 16
Progress 71 focused effort 16
Propanolol 60 Synapses 53
Reading 29, 66 Teachers 37, 65
Segmenting 30 tasks 38
Repetition 55 Tongue 46
spaced 56 Travel tours 72
Saturation 67 TV 24, 25, 39, 68
Sex hormones 72 Verbs 39
Siesta 24 Virgin 27
Sleep 58 Word compilations 68
Social networks 59 Words 13
Sound wave 21 lack of 68
Spaghetti bolognese 49 number of 13
Speaking 45 study time 15
definition 10 web 52
Speech 19
76
After reading The Word Brain,
you may decide that you have no
time to learn a new language - but
never again will you say that you
have no talent for it.
the
Flying Publisher
word
the
word
brain
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
Flying Publisher