How to Learn Any Language QuicklyEasilyInexpensivelyEnjoyably and On Your Own

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Add Cassettesfficeffice" />

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.

Within certain obvious limits, you can buy literally every course in your target

language that’s commercially available and still describe your adventure with the

language as “inexpensive.”

In your beginning stages you should insist on cassettes that come with a written

transcript of everything recorded. (The Pimsleur courses are an exception. Their

integration of written word exercises and their back and forth interaction between teacher

and student more than excuse the absence of word for word transcription.)

It’s a good idea to follow the text visually as you listen to the cassette the first few

times. As you get a little bit familiar with the target material, divorce the two. Take the

cassette and the tape player with you. Listen even when you can’t follow the written text.

Read the text even when you can’t listen. You’ll find the two excellent reinforcers for

each other.

If your cassette course is flat single rep or flat double rep, keep listening over and

over and try to capture as many words and phrases as you can.

When you’re ready – actually, long before you’re ready – challenge the cassette to a

duel. Start at the beginning and see how many words and phrases you know. After the

English, stop the cassette recorder with the pause button and ask yourself, “Do I know it

in the target language? Do I almost know it? Do I know any part of it – how the word or

phrase begins, how it ends, what major sound characterises it? Do I know enough to give

myself credit for at least partial conquest?”

Don’t be in a rush to release the pause button and see how well you did. Make a

teasing game of it. Make yourself wait for the fulfillment of hearing the term in the target

language. That will make a stronger hit into your memory. Drop a weighty object from a

higher tower than previously and it will sink deeper into the mud.

Then move on to the next term. It’s a little like playing solitaire; no matter how you

write your own rules, it still retains the arresting power of a game. Maybe you’ll ask

yourself if you can score one out of five correct; later, one out of four. It’s hard to

imagine it in the early going, but you will eventually play the game by seeing if you can

get every term on the cassette correct from beginning to end. But that’s not quite total

victory. Total victory is seeing if you can do it without stopping to think.

And then, if your machine has the mechanism, try it at accelerated speed!

帅哥

Hidden Momentsfficeffice" />

They taught us in the fable of the tortoise and the hare so early, most of us dismissed it as

a children’s tale and ignored the powerful lesson it contains: Others may be brighter.

Others may learn quicker and retain more. Yet whosoever keeps on plodding relentlessly

toward the goal of mastering another language, though his gifts be dim, stands a better

chance than the unmotivated genius whose dazzle ignited so much envy in high school

Spanish class.

Harnessing your hidden moments, those otherwise meaningless scraps of time

you’d normally never think of putting to any practical use, and using them for language

study – even if it’s no more than fifteen, ten, or five seconds at a time – can turn you into

a triumphant tortoise.

By now you’re slogging your way through the grammar and enjoying it more (or

suffering it less) than you did in college because you no longer feel obliged to dwell upon

a knotty point until you understand it before moving forward. You will not fail a test or

risk a bad grade if you abandon some grammatical black hole that tries to swallow you,

and move on ahead.

You’re battling your way through the foreign language newspaper, your slow

progress mitigated by the awareness that this is the real world and the daily language

won’t get any tougher than that text.

You’re cherry picking through your phrase book, learning how to say practical

things in your target language and rehearsing all those precious phrases as though they

were your part in a play.

Your cassettes are beginning to bore you without teaching you a great deal (yet).

You’re amassing a flash card collection.

By now you’ve probably met someone from the country whose language you’re

learning and, like a rookie cop about to make his first collar, you risked your ego by

attempting a greeting. He laughed appreciatively – and answered you in English.

Hidden moments will heal your deficiencies soon enough, but first let’s talk about

the unhidden moments, the study time you’ve arranged to commit to your endeavour.

This book is written for those who can’t or don’t want to expend the time or money

required to attend formal classes. Successful self teaching is our objective. If you can

take a whole hour every day and devote it to your studies, you’re in excellent position to

make satisfying, even dramatic, progress. If you can devote a half hour a day, you’re still

poised for success.

If you can’t commit a regular block of time, if the best you can do is an hour here, a

half hour there, and maybe a three hour block of time over the weekend, that’s

satisfactory, provided you keep it up and maintain momentum.

Gardens unattained go to weed. Apples bitten into and abandoned turn brown.

Likewise, your collection of language data – words, phrases, rules, and idioms – will

dissolve into a useless mass if not kept up.

Apportion as much time as you reasonably can and as regularly as you can, and

then enjoy the magic as the hidden moments kick in.

A professional financial advisor on radio once urged people to take careful

inventory of their financial assets, promising that overlooked and forgotten riches were to

be revealed at every hand. Her credibility disappeared for me at that moment. I honestly

think I’ve never been at a point in my economic life where I was likely to underestimate

my holdings by as much as seventy-five cents!

When it comes to time, however, that’s a much more lucrative matter!

You can learn a language in twelve months using only those moments you didn’t

realise you had.

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We’ve already mentioned a few corners in which hidden moments lurk awaitingfficeffice" />

liberation. Let’s review them and add some more.

Moments we instinctively bid goodbyes to include those spent waiting for and

riding in elevators, waiting for the person you’re dialing to answer, waiting while he puts

you on hold, waiting for a long outgoing message from someone’s answering machine to

reach its conclusion. There are those moments when you’re helplessly trapped – when

someone who’s too good a friend to hang up on delivers an unending narrative requiring

no verbal participation on your part beyond an occasional grunt, groan, “dear me,” “gee

whiz,” or other appropriate interjection to let him know you’re still there. It’s usually safe

to divert some of your attention from your friend to your flash cards.

There’s a major payload of hidden moments right there, and we haven’t even gone

beyond the elevator and the telephone! We can take time back from our days just like the

Dutch took land back from the sea and put it to work.

What do you normally do when you’re waiting in line at the bank, the post office,

the airline counter, the bus or train station, or the supermarket checkout counter?

What do you do while you brush your teeth? You could be listening to a language

cassette. What plans have you made for the time you’re going to spend waiting behind

your steering wheel at the gas pump? Or waiting for the rinse cycle? Waiting for the

school bus?

You get the point. An honest, thorough scrutiny of your normal week will yield

dozens, even hundreds, of minutes that can be put to work learning your target language.

And don’t forget, a scrap of time need be no longer than five seconds to advance you

closer to your goal.

Arrange your life so you will never be caught without something to study in your

target language. If you carry a briefcase or a pocketbook, your grammar book or

newspaper, even your dictionary, can be your companion. Phrase books are usually so

thin they easily fit into a coat pocket. There’s nothing holy about your foreign language

newspaper. Cut off a page and fold it up and carry it with you, along with your

highlighter.

Certainly we can all agree there’s no excuse ever to get caught without flash cards.

The instant you get stymied – in line at the cash machine, waiting for a store clerk, etc. –

pull out your deck of flash cards and get to work.

If your hidden moment only lasts five seconds, giving you time for only one flash

card, give that flash card five seconds of the right kind of effort. Look at the English.

Suppose it says “shoe.” Say to yourself something like, “What a great moment in my life.

I presently do not know the word for ‘shoe’ in my target language. Within seconds that

infirmity will be erased! I will get a look at the word and, though it may not lodge in my

memory after one single flash, that word will eventually be mine.” Make a big deal out of

it. Indeed, it is a big deal when you expand your vocabulary. Now flip the card. If your

target language is Spanish, the other side of the card will reveal the word for shoe as

zapato. Once we hand you the ultimate vocabulary memory weapon, the one developed

by Harry Lorayne, you will put that word through a mental process that will make it

easier to retrieve. Right now, just try to remember it any way you can, even by rote.

Proceed to the next card, or the next word on that card. You should have enough

cards with you so the same word doesn’t pop up so quickly that you haven’t really tested

your retention, but not so many cards that you don’t meet the same word for another two

or three days.

The fun comes when you meet the word again. Imagine the word is your opponent

in a duel. Is it going to be you or he? Look only at the English. Try to remember. Don’t

flip the card until you’re certain you’re defeated and cannot possibly come up with the

word.

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Even grizzled multilingual veterans who’ve used this system successfully will findfficeffice" />

themselves letting their guard down and moving from the English word on the flash card

to the foreign word too quickly. No challenge, no effort, no gain.

There’s no memory glue better than standing there, in the line at a bank or

wherever, looking at the English side of a flash card, not knowing the word immediately,

trying hard to bring it back, fearing you can’t, and refusing to give up. Suddenly you

think you have it. You flip the card over and see that you were, indeed, correct!

That word has no more chance of escaping you than your middle name.

Eye-Ear and Ear Only Moments

So far your hidden moments have been those that could be utilised either for reading

(flash cards) or listening (cassettes). Let’s call them eye-ear moments. When you’re

walking through town or through the park, jogging, riding in a bus or train too crowded

for reading, or driving or riding in a car at night, obviously you can’t play with flash

cards. These are, however, also hidden moments that offer exquisite opportunities for

foreign language infusion.

Let’s call them ear only moments.

A good rule is to use eye-ear moments for eye functions (flash cards, grammar

book, newspaper) leaving ear functions (cassette listening) for those moments when you

couldn’t be reading anyhow. More simply, when you can listen or read, read. Save your

listening for when you can only listen.

Cassettes En Route

When I dramatize this system of language learning at seminars for the Learning Annex in

New York and other educational organisations, displeasure clouds the brows of the

students when I urge them to “wrap the university around their heads” (put on their

headphones) and study their cassettes as they walk, run, amble, or do errands around the

neighbourhood. There’s an attitude of “Enough, already. I’ve done my language workout

for the day. Let me enjoy my walk or my run and take in nature and the landscape.”

This claim may sound inflated until you test it, but leisurely strolls and nature

walks, far from being dampened, are actually enhanced by cassette learning en route.

You can invent little listening games that make it fun. I, for instance, may start the

cassette and listen until I reach the first word in the target language I don’t already know.

I’ll then stop the cassette player and concentrate on capturing that word for the remainder

of the city block. When I reach the curb of the next block, I’ll start the tape until I reach

another word I don’t know and repeat the process.

There’s a happy kind of synergy when you realise you’re exercising and you’re

learning; you’re enjoying the beauty of the surroundings and you’re growing. You can

slow down. You can settle for “collecting a few new words” as you might collect a few

blossoms a few seashells. You can turn off the tape for a while and throw the headphones

back over your neck and inhale and enjoy. Don’t separate your life into “fun” and

“study.” Harmonise language study with your activities.

Get your cassettes into action when you wake up, stretch, make the bed, fix

breakfast, brush teeth, dry off after a bath or shower, wash dishes, and so on through all

the moments when those less ambitious turn on the radio or TV. Don’t forget, passive

listening is better than nothing, but not by much! Engage the English mentally and try to

beat the voice on the cassette to the foreign word.

“Harnessing hidden moments” is a three word course in language learning all by

itself. It offers a side benefit that has nothing to do with learning languages but has a lot

to do with enjoying life.

Look at those other people, those unfortunates who, unlike you, have no intention

of harnessing their hidden moments to learn languages or anything else. Look how they

wait like zombies in line, their faces masks of boredom and pain. Your boredom and pain

will vanish the instant you get into line and whip out your flash cards.

Learning languages can become incidental to daily life. It’s often fulfilling enough

just having something useful to do! Remember what Dean Martin said to the slowly

sipping starlet: “I spill more than you drink!” Just by using the minutes you’d otherwise

spill, you can learn another language.

帅哥

Harry Lorayne’sfficeffice" />

Magic Memory Aid

How does a farmhand feel the day the tractor arrives, after he’s plowed by hand for

thirty-one years? Undoubtedly the way I felt when, after decades of memorising foreign

vocabulary the old way, I suddenly discovered Harry Lorayne and his methods.

Harry Lorayne became well known some years ago as the world’s leading “memory

magician.” His feats of memory for names and faces, complex numbers, and hundreds of

objects he could repeat forward, backward, or in scrambled order enlivened many a late

night TV show.

Harry Lorayne was to be a guest on my WOR radio show one night to talk about his

book on improving memory. It was his seventeenth or eighteenth book on memory and,

as I was looking it over, I saw a short, almost hidden chapter entitled “Memorising

Foreign Language Vocabulary.”

I sped to that chapter and my language learning life changed completely from that

moment forward. I think I actually cried in rage at all the time I’d wasted attempting rote

memory of foreign words during the thirty-one years I had studied languages before I met

Harry Lorayne!

Let me invite you now to pay one last visit to the old way of learning foreign

language vocabulary before we wave it an untearful goodbye. Imagine facing a page

containing a hundred words in a foreign language. You only know eight or nine of them,

you have a test tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, and your roommate is playing the

radio too loud.

You sit there with your palms pressed over your ears repeating those unrelenting

syllables over and over, hoping enough of them will stick by dawn to give you a passing

grade.

Did you enjoy that kind of learning? Are you nostalgic for it? If so, enjoy the

recollection now. After the following pages you will never tackle new vocabulary that

way again.

In the fourth or fifth grade, when Miss Hobbs was teaching us the rudiments of

music, my class accomplished an amazing feat of memory in one flash (many of you

probably had the same experience). The notes on the five line music staff, E, G, B, D, and

F, could easily be remembered with the help of a simple phrase, “Every Good Boy Does

Fine.” What’s more, we learned that the notes in the spaces between the lines were F, A,

C, and E, or, as we ten year olds guessed, the word “face.” Who could ask for anything

more?

Harry Lorayne teaches us we can ask for everything more! He teaches a system of

association – called mnemonics – that allows you to almost always bring forth any word

in conversation whenever you want it.

The way to capture and retain a new word in a foreign language is to sling a vivid

association around the word that makes it impossible to forget. Lasso the unfamiliar with

a lariat woven from the familiar.

We’ll now take a random assortment of words in various languages and

demonstrate how it works.

The Spanish word for “old” is viejo, pronounced vee-A-ho, the middle syllable

rhyming with “hay.” Imagine a Veterans Administration hospital – a VA hospital – that’s

so old and decrepit they have to tear it down and build a new one. Before they lay the

dynamite the crew foreman calls the contractor and tells him, “We don’t have to waste

dynamite on this VA hospital. It’s so old we can knock it over with a hoe!”

Got it? A VA hospital so old you can knock it over with a hoe. And that gives us

viejo. (Viejo is stressed on the next to last syllable: vi-E-jo; in our code, v-A-hoe.)

Readers of much skepticism and little faith will worry that spinning such an

involved yarn to capture one word is less productive than spending that same amount of

time simply repeating the word to yourself over and over again. Wrong. The yarn, like a

dream, takes much longer to tell or read than it does to imagine. And you’ll quickly see

for yourself how helpful the yarn is when it comes time to retrieve the word and use it.

As you continue now through further demonstrations of this technique, try to

challenge the examples. See if you can think of better ones. A “better” one is simply one

that works better for you.

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We’re going to swing headlong now into dozens of sample “lassos,” associationsfficeffice" />

designed to rope your target word and bring it obediently to your feet, never again to part.

Ignore the fact that many of the examples that follow teach words in languages you’re not

trying to learn. Never mind, I tell you, never mind! Learn the system and you will use it

happily and effectively ever after in the language of your choice.

The French word for “anger” is colère, pronounced cole-AIR.

Strange, we associate anger with heat. We say “in the heat of anger”, but when

someone is angry at us, we say he’s “cold,” “chilly,” “giving us the cold shoulder.” It’s

not too much of a leap to imagine an angry person radiating his anger, spilling it off in all

directions, in the form of cold air. You hope he’s not angry, but when you enter his

office, you know your hopes were in vain because you can feel the colère, the “col’ air”

(cole’-AIR).

The Russian word for “house” is dom, pronounced dome. Imagine your amazement

upon landing in Moscow and seeing all the houses with dome type roofs. Or imagine

marveling at how domestic the Russian men are.

The Italian word for “chicken” is pollo, pronounced exactly like the English “polo”

(PO-lo). Imagine your Italian host urging you to join him for an unbelievable spectacle.

An Italian impresario with a gift for animal training has staged the world’s first polo

match between teams of chickens! You’re thrilled that you’re going to be able to go back

to Gaffney, South Carolina, and tell your friends you saw chickens playing polo!

The Italian word for “wife” is moglie, pronounced MOLE-yay. Imagine you’re a man

about to get married and you get a friendly tip from an indiscreet clergyman that your

bride to be is known to have a strange animal as a pet and fully intends to bring that

animal into your home after the nuptials.

You’re torn! It’s too late to call off the marriage. All the relatives have been invited

and the paperwork is all in. Besides, you love her. You decide to barrel forward and hope

for the best.

As the organ plays and the preacher intones the vows, all you can think of is, “What

kind of animal is it? Is it a lion? Is it a tiger? Is it a slick and sneaky snake? A giraffe?”

When the two of you arrive at your threshold after the honeymoon, the suspense

ends. She brings forth a pleasant little cage containing a cute, furry little creature.

“This is my pet mole,” she says. “He’s going to live with us.”

You cry forth your relief. “Hooray!” you shout. “It’s only a mole. It’s only a mole!”

you cheer, “Yay!”

It’s only a mole-yay. Your wife’s secret animal is nothing more than a mole,

therefore, “Yay!” “Wife” equals MOLE-yay.

WAIT A MINUTE!

An enemy, a skeptic, even a queasy ally at this point could say, “Wait a minute. I’m

trying to learn a language. I’m not sure I want to walk around with a headful of images of

wives who keep moles, chickens that play polo, angry people emitting cold air, and VA

hospitals you can knock over with a hoe!”

You won’t! One beauty of the system is, the association that helps you capture the

word falls away and disintegrates. Once you’ve learned the words, the “crutch”

obligingly disappears.

A common form of the verb “to speak” in Hebrew is medaber, pronounced meda-

BEAR. There it is: you were walking through the newly planted forests of Israel and

suddenly you “med” a bear who could speak!

In Indonesian, “movie screen” is lajar, pronounced almost exactly like “liar” (LIar). Easy. The man is rapidly winning the woman’s heart in the movie, but you don’t

wish him well because he’s such a lajar!

“Horse” in Russian, transliterated into English script, is lo-shod, pronounced almost

exactly like LAW-shod. You try to bring your own horse with you into the Soviet Union,

but at the border the Soviet customs officer tells you Sorry, he’d like to accommodate

you, but your horse doesn’t have horseshoes and, according to Soviet law, all horses must

be shod.

“Horse” equals LAW-shod.

The Greek word for “grape” in English transliteration is stafilya, pronounced sta-

FEEL-ya.

You’re in a Greek vineyard in the mountains near Albania. You see the most

luscious grape you’ve ever laid eyes on. As you reach for it, the air is split with a squeaky

voice screaming “Don’t touch me!”

“I’m sorry,” you sputter, retreating in shock and shame. “I wasn’t going to eat you.

It was just to FEEL you (jus’ sta-FEEL-ya).”

Grape equals sta-FEEL-ya.

The Serbo-Croatian word for “lunch” is ru􀀦ak, pronounced almost exactly like RUE-

chuck. You’re having lunch in a restaurant in Yugoslavia. The waiter overhears you

making a political remark he doesn’t appreciate, so he throws you out bodily. Never one

to go quietly, you pick yourself up out of the gutter, dust yourself off, and, just before

you head for the American Embassy to protest, you shake your first at the waiter through

the window and vow he’ll rue the day he chucked you out while you were having lunch.

“Lunch” equals RUE-chuck.

“Plate” in Indonesian is piring, pronounced exactly like the English “peering”

(PEER-ing).

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Your Indonesian restaurant experience is a bit more pleasant than the one infficeffice" />

Yugoslavia. You walk in and find yourself suddenly becalmed by the serenity of the

dining room. All the Indonesians seem to have their heads bowed in prayer. You ask the

headwaiter if you’ve interrupted some sort of religious service.

“Not at all,” he assures you. “They’re not praying. We just got our new plates with

mirrored surfaces and they’re all peering at themselves to see how they look!”

“Plate” equals PEER-ing.

The Farsi word for “cheaper” transliterated into English is arzontar, pronounced

our-zone-TAR.

The hotel in Tehran is filled, but the clerk tells you it’s a warm night and he’d be

happy to rent you sleeping space on the roof. You’re delighted to learn you’re paying

only half what the other roof sleepers are paying, until you get to your designated spot on

the roof, at which point you exclaim to your spouse, “Now I see why our spot is cheaper.

All the other tourists are sleeping on those nice ceramic tiles. Our zone, the spot assigned

to us, however, is tar!”

“Cheaper” equals our-zone-TAR.

“Potato” in German is kartoffel, pronounced exactly like cart-AW-ful.

You buy potatoes from a cart and they turn out to be awful. “Potato” equals cart-

AW-ful.

Stop right here! Do you remember the Spanish word for “old?” Or the French word

for “anger,” the Italian word for “wife,” the Serbo-Croatian word for “lunch,” or the

Indonesian word for “movie screen?”

When we display this system of word capturing at seminars for the Learning

Annex, there’s a collective gasp when, after spelling out an association to capture the

tenth word, we suddenly stop and ask how many can recall word number one, four, and

so on. At no point did we suggest that the students try to recall the words used as

examples as we laid out the system. When they see that almost everybody recalls every

single one of them anyhow, the students realise this system contrasts well with the kind

of rote learning they’d tried earlier. One grateful participant exclaimed, “This system

teaches you words you’re not even trying to learn. The old way doesn’t teach you no

matter how hard you try!”

The Almosters

The skeptic has one shot left before he’s wiped out by the power of the method. He can,

at this point, say, “Hold it! Every word you’ve used to demonstrate the system so far falls

much too neatly into our lap – liar, mole-yay. It’s a setup. It’s not real. Very few words

will cooperate with the system once you tackle the real world!”

And he’s right! The words we’ve been subjecting to the memory system so far are

automatics. They fall right into your lap with self suggesting images. Only a small

percentage of words will fall into the system as facilely as the automatics. More, many

more than you imagine, will fit automatically into the system, but far from enough to

conquer another language. Never mind! Behind the words that fit neatly into the system

are many times that number of words that, while fitting nowhere nearly as neatly, can

nonetheless take you so close to the target word that true memory can easily complete the

job. We call those words almosters. Of our four groups – automatics, almosters,

toughies, and impossibles – the almosters make up by far the single biggest category.

Let’s demonstrate.

The Chinese word for “lobster” is transliterated as low-shah, pronounced very

much like LOAN-shark. If you imagine that lobster is so expensive you need a loan shark

to negotiate a lobster lunch, true memory will easily putt you from loan-shark to lowshah.

Shrimp in Indonesian is gambiri, pronounced gam to rhyme with “Tom” followed

by “beery” (gam-BI-ri). You complain to your waiter in Indonesia that the chewing gum

he served you tastes awfully beery. He advises you it’s not chewing gum, it’s shrimp.

Your putt will take you from GUM-beery to GAM-beery.

The Serbo-Croatian word for “spoon” is kasika, pronounced KASH (to rhyme with

“gosh”)-ee-kah.

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You want to get a spoon in Belgrade. They send you outside the hotel to a cashand-carry to get a spoon if you want one.fficeffice" />

Or if you’re familiar with the Eastern grain called kasha (buckwheat groats), you

can imagine dipping you spoon into a bowl of kasha in the back seat of your car. True

memory will carry you from kasha-car to KASH-ee-ka.

“Spoon,” then, equals KASH-ee-ka.

The Italian word for “day” is giorno, pronounced JUR (as in “jury”)-no. You’re

eagerly awaiting the outcome of a legal action, but the jury has been tied up all day with

no verdict. Even stronger would be the notion of eagerly awaiting the outcome of the trial

and learning that the whole day went by without the jury even showing up! All day and

jury no.

“Day” equals JUR-no.

“Humid” in Farsi is martoob, pronounced mar (as in “marshal”)-TOOB (as in

“tube”). It’s so dry in Central Iran that in order to provide comfortable humidity in your

room, the maritime authorities arranged to bring water in through a tube.

True memory will easily let you lop off all but the first syllable of “maritime” and

change the vowel from the a as in “maritime” to a as in “marshal” so that humidity equals

mar-TOOB.

“Banana” in Indonesian is pisang, pronounced PEA-song, the second syllable

rhyming with the cong in “conga”. You’d long heard of jungle magic in the outer islands

of Indonesia, but you never really believed it until you went to the local grocer looking

for bananas. You don’t see bananas anywhere. You ask if he has any bananas. Sure, he

says, plenty. “Excuse me,” you say, “I don’t see any.” Be patient, he begs you, until he

finishes with a customer.

When it’s your turn he asks you how many bananas you want. You reply, half a

dozen. He then takes six peas and sings them a mysterious little song. Before your

bewildered eyes, they turn into bananas! The peas that were sung to became bananas.

Your only putt is to make the final vowel sound like the o in “conga.”

So “banana” equals PEA-song.

The Spanish word for “to iron” is planchar, pronounced plan (to rhyme with

“Don”)-CHAR (as in “charcoal”). The hotel in Madrid has an excellent reputation, with

only a single and rather bizarre lapse. Apparently a maid with too much seniority to be

fired has a habit of leaving the iron on the backside of the trousers so long it leaves burn

marks the size of the iron itself smack across both buttocks.

You have no choice. Your pants need ironing and you’ve got to take your chances.

To improve your odds you gingerly approach the concierge and say, “ Excuse me, sir.

Could you please find out if the maid plans to iron these pants correctly or if she plans to

char them?” Your putt is to carry the plan sound from one rhyming with “tan” over to

one rhyming with “Don.”

“To iron” equals plan-CHAR.

The Indonesian word for “donkey” is keledai, pronounced almost exactly like “call

it a day” without the it. That’s what donkeys in hot climates are reputed to want to do

after carrying their loads, and that’s what we’ll do now with this particular series of

examples.

Un-American Sounds

So far we’ve shied away from words containing sounds that don’t exist in English. The

real world won’t be so protective.

“Un-American” sounds are exaggerated as an obstacle to progress in most

languages. I say that not because it’s unimportant to master the sounds correctly, but

because most of them will enter your repertoire automatically with practice. The trilled r

in Spanish, the French r that sounds as though it issues from inside the pituitary gland,

the half-sh half-guttural in German, the double consonant in Finnish, the many umlauted

u’s and a’s and o’s in the various European languages will all be explained in your

grammars, and better than explained on your cassettes: they’ll be pronounced.

Many languages carry so many markings and so many different kinds of markings

over and under certain of their letters you may be intimidated. Almost all of them are

empty threats; despite their sinister looking foreignness, they don’t convey any sounds

we don’t have in English.

The two dots over certain a’s in Swedish simply tell you that particular letter is

pronounced as the first a in “accurate.” Without the dots, it’s the a in “father.” There’s no

need to run from the Norwegian o with a line slicing diagonally down through it: the first

e sound in “Gertrude” is close enough. Languages with the double consonant spend far

too much time warning us Americans that this is something strange to us. It is not

strange. We have double consonants too, maybe not inside the same word, but definitely

inside the same phrase.

We pronounce the last sound of the first word and the first sound of the last word in

“late train.” We don’t say “lay train.” So much for the frightening double consonant.

We’ll make no attempt here to teach you the “click” sounds of some of the

languages in South Africa or the larynx twisting sounds of the Georgian language spoken

in Soviet Georgia that actually sounds like paper ripping inside the speaker’s throat.

Those sounds are unrepeatable for most Americans and the languages in which they

appear are mercifully obscure.

There is really only one sound that doesn’t exist in English that we’re obliged to

learn well, and that’s the guttural common in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Dutch, and

several other languages.

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Most textbooks are notoriously weak in conveying that sound. They know they’refficeffice" />

committing consumer fraud when, as they frequently do, they merely advise the

American student to “approximate the ch sound in the German name ‘Bach’ or the final

sound in the Scottish word ‘Loch.’”

However, “Bach” is not pronounced bak. “Loch” is not pronounced lock.

“Chanukah” is not pronounced Ha-na-ka. The trick is to learn how to make the real

sound.

The best method, though perhaps inelegant, is to imagine that you’re about to say

the plain old h sound, and suddenly you feel a terrible tickle in the middle of your throat.

The original h sound then becomes lost in all the other powerful things you now do.

Clear your throat violently to eject the irritant causing that tickle. You will then have the

“Chanukah” sound, the “Bach” sound, the “Loch” sound, the “chutzpah” sound.

That sound has no natural parents in the English language. It’s up for adoption.

Stop and think what image comes easily to your mind that can make you hear that sound.

Don’t be afraid to exaggerate it. Then tone it down. Dry it out. It will soon be as

serviceable and comfortable as the sounds you grew up with.

Gender

The Harry Lorayne method of remembering the gender of nouns in foreign languages

makes you feel downright foolish for not having thought of it yourself!

In some languages you have to remember the gender of nouns in order to adjust the

articles or the endings of the adjectives that go with them. All the Romance languages –

Spanish, French, Italian, Protugese, Romanian, etc. – have masculine and feminine

gender. Usually, but far from always, you can figure which is which by the word’s

ending: o for masculine, a for feminine. French, however, conceals gender clues with

noun endings as unrevealing as battlefield camouflage. German and Russian have

masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns. The Scandinavian languages call their two noun

genders “common” and “neuter,” as does Dutch. Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian,

Hungarian, and Finnish, like English, have no noun genders.

How do we remember whether the French noun for “train,” also spelled train, is le

train (masculine) or la train (feminine)? It happens to be masculine, le train. Imagine not

merely a train that has no women passengers, but a train that doesn’t allow women

passengers! The men prefer it that way. In hot weather, when the air conditioning fails,

they sit around in their underwear. Feminists are outraged, but the Supreme court keeps

postponing the case. Men’s magazines litter the aisles. There are twice as many men’s

rooms as necessary because there are no ladies’ rooms. Once the train screeched to a halt

between stations and an alarm sounded. It seems a band of militant women tried to board

the train and hijack it. They were eventually beaten back, before the men in the club car

even had to put their pants back on.

Le train; masculine.

The French word for “café” is le café; masculine. You could either confect another

all male scenario for a café similar to the one you did for the train. Or imagine a

masculine name emblazoned over the entrance – something like the Macho Café or the

Rambo Café.

Le café; masculine.

“Hour” in French is l’heure; feminine. Occasionally you get a gift like this one.

Heure is pronounced very much like her without the h.

L’heure; feminine.

“Nose” in French is le nez; masculine.

The members of which sex break their noses playing football and hockey, boxing,

wrestling, and fighting with wise guys who insult their dates?

Le nez; masculine.

“Night” in French is la nuit; feminine.

Who ever heard of a “man of the night?”

La nuit; feminine.

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“Ticket” in French is le billet; masculine.fficeffice" />

Always look for opportunities to incorporate a memory hook for the gender as you

capture the word itself. Billet is pronounced bee-yay, almost exactly like the letters B.A.

as in Bachelor of Arts. If “bachelor” doesn’t have a sufficiently strong male connotation

to you, imagine a giant male bumble bee buzzing around.

Le billet; masculine.

“Train station” in French is la gare; feminine.

Shall we imagine women waiting for their homebound commuting husbands at the

train station? Not a good idea. You may forget whether the waiting women or the

expected husbands are the star of the association. How about hundreds of women waiting

for one man, pouncing upon him and fighting over him as he unsuspectingly steps off the

train?

La gare; feminine.

“Church” in French is l’eglise; feminine.

Imagine an angry mob of French women storming a church in France, demanding

that women be allowed into the Catholic priesthood.

L’eglise; feminine.

Let this one be a lesson to you. “Mustache” in French is la moustache; feminine!

Imagine the circus lady with a mustache, or a new French wine that causes women

to grow mustaches, or a little girl asking her mother if she can ever have a mustache.

La moustache; feminine.

Some languages have neuter gender too. Try to come up with associations that

suggest icy impersonality.

“House” in German is das Haus; neuter.

Imagine a house so cold and unappealing it couldn’t have possibly been graced by

man or woman for years. No one lives there or would ever conceivably want to.

Das Haus; neuter.

“Pen” in Russian is pero, pronounced pee-RAW. What could be more sexless than a

pea that’s raw?

Pero; neuter.

Reinforcement

You now have a brand new “closet,” a foreign language vocabulary memory system that

lets you hang up new words as if they were new clothes. The system just presented will

work even better for you if you keep a few tips in mind.

Every example given above is clean in word, deed, and thought. Every one could

have been presented from the stage in Yadkinville, North Carolina, YMCA during

Foreign Language Week. I refuse to do any dirty writing, so you have to do some dirty

thinking (if you will) to get maximum benefit from the system.

The more vivid, in fact, the more vulgar, your associations are, the more readily

they will probably come to mind. Feel free, in your mental imagery, to take clothes off.

Get people naked. Get everybody into bed, in the tub, swinging from vines, or making

nominating speeches immersed in bubbling Romanian mud. Get them wherever you need

them so that the association you want is readily retrievable. X-rated images come readily

to mind, even to the minds of nice people. Make your associative images lurid and

unforgettable.

We’ve refrained in our model examples from using names and places to buttress our

associations. In a book or a class, we can’t. Except for famous figures and places we all

know in common, names and places don’t mean the same things to everybody. As

individuals, however, we can haul off and use any and every proper name we know,

whether from our personal lives or from stage, screen, radio, video, song, literature, and

legend.

Does the foreign word demand the sound – or any part of the sound – of a Harry, an

Edna, a Philip, an Art, a Harold, a Doreen, a Billy, a Lance? If that name belongs to

someone you actually know, your associations will come to you more rapidly and last

longer.

Did you grow up around a Reidsville, a Colfax, a Burlington, a Charlotte, a Haw

River, or a Mt. Pisgah? Your associations with the foreign words can be enriched by

place names that sounds like or almost like your target words. You don’t actually have to

have those places in your biography, so long as you know them and can visualise them

and use them as lassos to haul in and hog tie similar sounding words. I’ve never been to

Nantucket, but when attacking the Indonesian word for “tired” (NAN-tuk), I imagine

getting so tired on my initial visit to Nantucket that I collapse into bed exhausted shortly

after lunch.

Yet another asset to you is the body of words you already know in another foreign

language, or even in the language you’re learning. Those who know many languages may

conquer a four syllable word by bringing in sounds from four different languages. This is

a classic case of the rich getting richer. Every new word you learn is one more potential

hook for grabbing still newer words.

Don’t fight to forge a winning association. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try

again. Then give up! Not all words can be forced into the system, and you’re better off

not wasting good language learning time trying to mash an ill fitting shoe onto

Cinderella’s sister’s foot. Over ninety percent will fit, automatically, neatly, or after some

effort. The others, the holdouts, will have to be learned by old familiar rote learning.

Don’t forget: make your associations vivid, even if that means making them vulgar.

You’ll find that so many truly comical cartoons will dance through your head as

you craft your associative images, you’ll find yourself constantly having to explain

“What’s so funny?” to native speakers who wonder what’s so hilarious about those

ordinary words they’re teaching you in their language!