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This book would not exist if I had not cheated on a French test. I'm not proud of it, but there it is. First, some background. The Middlebury Language Schools offer five levels of classes: absolute beginner,“false”beginner (people who have forgotten what they've learned), intermediate, advanced, and near fluent. At the time of the test, I was an absolute beginner in French, but I had already learned a Romance language, and I wanted to be with the“false”beginners. So, for my third stint at Middlebury, I cheated on the online placement test, using Google Translate and some grammar websites. Don't tell Middlebury.
A month later, I received my regrettable results.“Welcome and congratulations!”it began.“You have been placed in the intermediate level!”Shit. I had three months to learn a year's worth of French or look like an idiot at the entrance interview. These interviews are serious business. You sit in a room with a real, live French person, you chat for fifteen minutes about life, and you leave with a final class placement. You can't cheat; you can either speak French or make sad faces and wave your hands around like a second-rate Parisian mime.
As I was in the middle of completing master's degrees in opera and art song, the only free time I had was an hour on the subway every day and all day on Sundays. I frantically turned to the Internet to figure out how to learn a language faster. What I found was surprising: there are a number of incredibly powerful language-learning tools out there, but no single program put all of the new methods together.
I encountered three basic keys to language learning:
The first key, learn pronunciation first, came out of my music conservatory training (and is widely used by the military and the missionaries of the Mormon church). Singers learn the pronunciation of languages first because we need to sing in these languages long before we have the time to learn them. In the course of mastering the sounds of a language, our ears become attuned to those sounds, making vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and speaking come much more quickly. While we're at it, we pick up a snazzy, accurate accent.
The second key, don't translate, was hidden within my experiences at the Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont. Not only can a beginning student skip translating, but it was an essential step in learning how to think in a foreign language. It made language learning possible . This was the fatal flaw in my earlier attempts to learn Hebrew and Russian: I was practicing translation instead of speaking. By throwing away English, I could spend my time building fluency instead of decoding sentences word by word.
The third key, use spaced repetition systems (SRSs), came from language blogs and software developers. SRSs are flash cards on steroids. Based upon your input, they create a custom study plan that drives information deep into your long-term memory. They supercharge memorization, and they have yet to reach mainstream use.
A growing number of language learners on the Internet were taking advantage of SRSs, but they were using them to memorize translations. Conversely, no-translation proponents like Middlebury and Berlitz were using comparatively antiquated study methods, failing to take advantage of the new computerized learning tools. Meanwhile, nobody but the classical singers and the Mormons seemed to care much about pronunciation.
I decided to use all of these methods at once. I used memorization software on my smartphone to get the French into my head, and I made sure that none of my flash cards had a word of English on them. I began making flash cards for the pronunciation rules, added a bunch of pictures for the nouns and some verbs, learned the verb conjugations, and then built up to simple French definitions of more abstract concepts. By June, in my hour a day on the subway, I had learned three thousand words and grammar concepts. When I arrived at Middlebury, I waited in a room for my entrance interview in French. This interview was meant to ensure that I hadn't done anything stupid, like cheat on my online placement test. It was the first time I had ever spoken French in my life. The teacher sat down and said,“ Bonjour, ”and I responded right back with the very first word that came into my brain:“ Bonjour .”So far, so good. As our conversation evolved, I was amazed to find that I knew all the words she was saying, and I knew all the words I needed to respond. I could think in French! It was halting, but it was French. I was stunned. Middlebury bumped me into the advanced class. In those seven weeks, I read ten books, wrote seventy pages’ worth of essays, and my vocabulary grew to forty-five hundred words. By the beginning of August, I was fluent in French.