How to Learn Any Language on Scribd
March 29th, 2007 by MarkAs my motivation for language learning surges, I find myself practically stumbling over more useful tools. I’ve recently found an absolutely fantastic essay about language learning on Scribd. It’s both inspirational and full of useful advice.
I’m guessing that the sorts of people who read my blog are already acquainted with Scribd, but here’s a brief explanation for those of you living under a rock- Scribd is the YouTube of documents. You can browse or upload pictures, documents, flash files. Documents can be downloaded as .txt, .pdf, .doc, or even .mp3 voice files. Scribd is packed with everything from pictures of cute animals hugging to sheet music to this slightly less than legal version of O’Reilly’s Learning Python. Like Reddit, Scribd is one of Paul Graham’s Y Combinator start-ups.
The particular document I read was called How to Learn Any Language. The author, Barry Farber details how he went from knowing being a monolingual English speaker who nearly failed his high school Latin course, to being tested and qualified for work in fourteen different languages by the time he joined the army eight years later, in 1952. He talks both about how he did learn them, and about how he would go about learning them if he had to start over from the beginning. The basics of his approach were:
- The Multiple Track Attack
- Hidden Moments
- Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Aid
If you want to get in shape, do you pay attention to your nutrition, do cardio-vascular exercise, do strength training, stretching or get quality sleep? No. You do them all. Similarly, language students shouldn’t settle for a single pronged attack.
All throughout the day, we have minutes here and during which we are waiting for something. Use that time.
This is actually a very old memory association trick that goes back to at least Roman times in one form or another.
Barry Farber: How to Learn Any Language Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and On Your Own
It was a long read, but it was worth it.
Update: Sebastian has already put some ideas from the article into use.
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March 31st, 2007 at 10:54 pm
14 languages in 8 years!
Wow!
That’s pretty cool. I actually hadn’t taken the time to check out Scribd, but I will.
April 1st, 2007 at 9:05 pm
i skimmed the article, so maybe i missed where he made a distinction between learning a language in the country where that language is spoken as opposed to outside of it. if you are learning outside of it, then memory tricks of course are much more important. within the country, you really don’t need them. i learned mandarin by coming to taiwan, learning zhu yin fu hao with a cassette and book, going to the guo yu re bao school for about two weeks, quitting when the accent of the teachers did nothing to help me with understanding people in taiwan, and then self-studying with grammar books, dictionary, and bilingual friends. i spent a lot of time on the bus, so i would eavesdrop and write down in zhu yin phrases my ear was able to pick out because i would hear them over and over. then i would use the zhu yin to pronounce the phrase for my blingual friend and he would tell me what it meant. later as my zhu yin got better and i could tell how the taiwanese accent interfered with standard mandarin, i could use my dictionary more and my bilingual friend as dictionary less. i learned only those words and phrases that my brain was ready for, so i learned painlessly. for a tin-eared person like me, learning the tones was like teaching a near- deaf person to speak. i really had to concentrate. that’s why mandarin is easier for a musician like poagao, among other factors. how did other posters approach learning mandarin? now i’m in the US as an ESL teacher and have Spanish, Haitian-Creole, French, Russian and Urdu speakers in my class. I’m picking up some basic listening ability in all the languages (except urdu) because i keep my ears open and ask students how to say common phrases.
April 1st, 2007 at 11:47 pm
V, that comment could have been an entire blog post!
Unlike you, I’m still completely capable of forgetting Chinese words, even living here. I need every memory tool I can get. Actually, I’ve started to put some of Barry Farber’s suggestions into practice and I’ll be posting updates if it goes well.
April 2nd, 2007 at 2:32 am
i think you are probably more ambitious in learning chinese than i am- i get the impression that you are trying to learn a lot of vocab at once. like i said, i learned phrases and words that commonly went with them as i naturally was able to pick them out of garbling streams of chinese. so my mind didn’t have that much trouble remembering them. then, once you reach a critical mass of building block chinese words, you can learn new vocab made up of those building blocks easily- many words you can guess in context. so if you already know an quan (safe) and mao (hat), then it’s easy to learn ‘an chuan mao’ (helmet). also, i’m sure you would agree that it’s easier to learn a language when you are immersed in it, and so have more ‘review’ by hearing the word you are learning more often than if you were learning that word in a language class in your home country. that ‘review’ means you don’t need to spend as much time on memory tricks. i’m surprised farber didn’t mention that point. or else he is assuming he’s taking to non-immersion students. if you think my previous post was long, you haven’t seen my novels on forumosa.
April 2nd, 2007 at 10:14 pm
interesting. I googled Farber and while I found anecdotes by him about all the languages he’s studied, and the same from others writing about him, I couldn’t find anything about his language ability by a native speaker of one of his languages. Nothing on You Tube either.
This causes me to wonder how well he actually knows these languages. For example, I noticed that his descriptions of certain Chinese sounds in his book are not very accurate.
His methodology looks interesting as well. I’m curious to see how it works for you. I guess I’m one of those skeptics he writes about when describing “Harry Lorayne’s Magic Memory Aid”. It is based on mnemonics, and I just wonder if it is really a good use of time to create ‘vivid associations’ around each vocabulary word rahter than spend that time on teh word itself. Let us know what you find.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:07 pm
It is really hard to say how much “being qualified for work in 14 languages” according to the military means. You would probably have a better idea than I do. You could try searching Baidu for him, but I don’t know that it would be very successful, considering he did his Chinese learning in the 1940’s. Maybe Range or Patrick could search in French and see if anything comes up about him.
April 2nd, 2007 at 11:57 pm
I’m really starting to harbor serious doubts about his credibility. He says that when he was inducted in the Army in 1952, he “was tested and qualified for work in 14 languages”. I have no idea what that means. Honestly, I find it hard to believe the Army would have done that for a draftee during the Korean War (I can see them testing him in maybe two or three languages, but fourteen?).
He is also conveniently vague about what he did in the Army. He says he ‘covered’ the Helsinki Olympics in summer of 1952, and in 1956 the US Air Force invited him to Hungary as a journalist.
Has anyone actually heard him speak all these languages? I don’t doubt that he may have learned basic phrasebook conversation, but until I see more evidence, I will withhold judgment. Based on his limited sections on Chinese in his book, though, I’m not all that convinced he is very proficient.
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:27 am
He must think he was the original Brain Man. Check out Daniel Tammet. According to Wikipedia he knows 10 languages. He could probably learn more if he wanted.
Tammet was featured on 60 Minutes when he rose to meet the challenge of learning Icelandic in a week. He did it and proved it by speaking Icelandic with TV reporters as a test. Here is a video: http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/news?ch=334515&cl=1986447〈=en
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:21 am
Shaun,
I hate you. I was all set to turn in at a decent hour last night until I saw your link for Tammet. Suffice to say, I didn’t get to sleep until early this am. Absolutely fascinating.
April 3rd, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I’m sure it was worth a little lost sleep. The most amazing thing about Tammet is that he has incredible mental abilities yet he can still function socially.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:07 pm
PR, I’m curious about your reservations about the memory method. Did you read p.54-55? I kind of had one of those “oh, it’s another one of these pieces of advice” reactions until I suddenly realized that I could recall the meanings of a dozen different words from as many languages after just one minute of reading. For me, at least, it was surprisingly more effective than brute force methods.
Mnemonic devices are nothing new. Roman orators used them to great effect, memorizing speeches of thousands of words, and some of the same techniques are still used in the World Memory Championships, today.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:32 pm
[...] been studying from. It’s a technique integrated with flashcards that I got from the How to Learn Any Language document on Scribd. It was a surprisingly quick ride, maybe only 20 minutes to get to the end of [...]
April 4th, 2007 at 11:43 am
the more I think about it, the more I realize there must actually be something to this technique. Tammet says that he ’sees’ numbers as colored, textured shapes, and when he does a calculation the numbers bring up a new shape which he ‘recognizes’ as the answer.
It still doesn’t make sense to me on a certain level, but maybe for my next assignment I’ll try it if they send me to study a foreign language.
July 9th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
[...] a bit slower than others I finished reading How to Learn Any Language by Barry Farber. If you are interested in [...]