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The System.
The language-learning system detailed in this book is the result of
my own continuous, laborious trial and error beginning in 1944. That
which worked was kept, that which failed was dropped, that which was
kept was improved. Technology undreamed of when I started studying
languages, such as the audiocassette and the tape player small enough
to carry while walking or jogging, was instantly and eagerly
incorporated.
The system combines:
THE MULTIPLE TRACK ATTACK: Go to the language department of any
bookstore and you'll see language books, grammars, hard-cover and
paperback workbooks, readers, dictionaries, flash cards, and
handsomely bound courses on cassette. Each one of those products sits
there on the shelf and says, "Hey, Bud. You want to learn this
language? Here I am. Buy me!" I say, buy them all, or at least
one of each! You may feel like you're taking four or five different
courses in the same language simultaneously. That's good. A
marvellous synergistic energy sets you soaring when all those tools
are set together in symphony.
HIDDEN MOMENTS: Dean Martin once chided a chorus girl, who was
apathetically sipping her cocktail, by saying, "I spill more
than you drink!" All of us "spill" enough minutes
every day to learn a whole new language a year! just as the Dutch
steal land from the sea, you will learn to steal language-learning
time, even from a life that seems completely filled or overflowing.
What do you do, for example, while you're waiting for an elevator,
standing in line at the bank, waiting for the person you're calling
to answer the phone, holding the line, getting gas, waiting to be
ushered from the waiting room into somebody's office, waiting for
your date to arrive, waiting for anything at any time? You will learn
to mobilize these precious scraps of time you've never even been
aware you've been wasting. Some of your most valuable study time will
come in mini-lessons of fifteen, ten, and even five seconds
throughout your normal (though now usually fruitful) day.
HARRY LORAYNE'S MAGIC MEMORY AID: An ingenious memory system
developed by memory master Harry Lorayne will help you glue a word to
your recollection the instant you encounter it. What would you do
right now if I gave you a hundred English words along with their
foreign equivalents and told you to learn them? Chances are you would
look at the first English word, then look at the foreign word, repeat
it several times, then close your eyes and keep on repeating it, then
cover up the foreign word, look only at the English and see if you
could remember how to say it in the language you're learning, then go
on to the next word, then the next, and the next, and then go back to
the first to see if you remembered it, and so on through the list.
Harry Lorayne's simple memory trick based on sound and association
will make that rote attempt laughable. The words will take their
place in your memory like ornaments securely hung on a Christmas
tree, one right after the other all the way up to many times those
hundred words.
THE PLUNGE: You will escape the textbook incubator early and leap
straightaway, with almost no knowledge of the language, into that
language's "real world." A textbook in your target
language, no matter how advanced, is not the real world. On the other
hand, an advertisement in a foreign-language magazine, no matter how
elementary and easy to read, is the real world. Everything about you,
conscious and subconscious, prefers real-world to student-world
contact with the language.
An actor knows the difference between rehearsal and opening night;
the football player, between practice scrimmages and the kick off in
a crowded stadium. And you will know the difference between your
lessons in the target language and the real-world newspapers,
magazines, novels, movies, radio, TV, and anything else you can find
to throw yourself into at a stage your high-school French teacher
would have considered horrifyingly early!
There you have it: The Multiple-Track Attack, Hidden Moments, Harry
Lorayne's Magic Memory Aid, The Plunge. Visualize the target language
as a huge piece of thin, dry paper. This system will strike a match
underneath the middle of that paper, and your knowledge, like the
flame, will eat its way unevenly but unerringly outward to the very
ends.
Just as food manufacturers like to label their products "natural
and organic" whenever they can get away with it, many language
courses like to promise that you will learn "the way a child
learns."
Why bother? Why should you learn another language the way a child
learned his first one? Why not learn as what you are an adult with at
least one language in hand, eager to use that advantage to learn the
next language in less time than it took to learn the first? (Source;
Introduction pp. 6-8)
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