Listening
Have you recently listened to people speaking unfamiliar
languages? If you haven’t, turn on your smartphone or TV set,
select a station from another country, and within minutes you
will hit a broadcast with loquacious individuals talking all the
time. Alternatively, if you live in a metropolis, go down onto the
streets and spot groups of animated people speaking foreign
languages. Listen attentively. You will soon notice that humans
produce continuous streams of uninterrupted speech. The
overall impression? Phonological porridge, polenta, bouillie. For
the non-initiated listener, it is hard to grasp that there is much
structure to such seemingly random proliferation of sound. The
reality is different, of course. Any single language you come
across on Earth is as differentiated, distinguished, beautiful, and
funny as your native language. Impenetrable as foreign
languages appear to be, on the scale of a human lifetime, they
are just around the corner – give them two or three years, and
any of them is yours. It is a refreshing thought that all humans
are brothers and sisters in language.
A porridge-like sense of unintelligibility prevails even after
years of language classes at school. You are able to decipher a
restaurant menu and order a dish of spaghetti, but
comprehension vanishes as soon as the waiter starts talking. The same happens with bakers, taxi drivers, and hotel employees –
again polenta and pea soup. It seems as if years of classes
studying grammar and learning long lists of vocabulary produce
little or no effect. You can read Goethe, Shakespeare, Sartre,
Cervantes, or Dante, and yet you don’t understand their
descendants. Many of us 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:
Figure 2.1: Sound wave pattern of ‘ Putting structure into the porridge of sound
produced by the people who inhabited your life.’
Delimitingwordboundariesinaspeechstreamisnoeasierthantryin
gtodeterminetheminthepreviousparagraphsohowdoyounginfant
scrackthesoundcodetheyperformfrequencyanalysestakeforexam
plethesoundsequencewhataprettybabyyouarethroughcontinuous
exposuretohumanlanguagebabblinghumansproduce10000wordsa
ndmoreinasinglehourinfantsprogressivelyunderstandthatsyllabl
eswhicharepartofthesamewordtendtofollowoneanotherpredicta
blyprettybabywhereassyllablesthatfollowoneanotherlessfrequen
tlyarewordboundariesaprettyba.
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).
This type of frequency analysis is dependent on a wellfunctioning
memory that accumulates an ever-growing number
of words and, of course, extensive training. And it depends on
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 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).
Thorough training is the key to success. In my experience, it
took around 1,500 to 2,000 hours of intense listening to achieve
‘semi-perfect sequencing abilities’, both in French and Italian.
Amazingly, the results were similar for Arabic, a language so
totally different from everything I had learned before. This
seems counterintuitive because in Arabic, I needed to learn at
least three times as many words as in Italian. It immediately
raises a couple of questions: Could the time of exposure that is
needed to achieve full sequencing abilities – 1,500 hours would
translate into 6, 4, and 2 hours per day over a period of 9, 12, and
24 months, respectively) – be a human constant? Should our
speech recognition abilities be independent of the type of
language we learn? Perhaps even relatively immune to the effect of ageing? And are young children truly superior to adults in
word segmenting or do they simply dedicate more time to
listening than adults? Some of these questions will be answered
by future research, but I am inclined to accept that there is a
physiological threshold for human brains to get wired to the
ability of dissecting the sounds of new languages. You would
need a minimum of time to perform this task, but you wouldn’t
need much longer than that.
Figure 2.2 Listening to words: High activity in the auditory brain cortex. Adapted
from Petersen SE, Fox PT, Posner MI, Mintun M, Raichle ME. Positron emission
tomographic studies of the cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature
1988;331:585-9; PDF: www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=8 + Posner MI and Raichle ME
1994. Images of mind. New York: Scientific American Library. Used with
permission.
You are now able to solve the close-to-zero-understandingafter-
years-of-school problem that we exposed at the beginning
of this chapter. If teenagers are frustrated when they put their
school knowledge into practise, it is because school teaching is
insufficient to get you anywhere near the 1,500-hour exposure
minimum. Even if your teachers teach exclusively in the foreign
language, you will rarely total more than 500 hours of attentive
listening in a typical 5-year course. Thus, you discover that your
teachers were innocent – they simply did not have enough time
to get you through your speech segmentation task. 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 daily listening quotas 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 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 this important piece of advice: During the
first year of your training, never read a text without hearing the
sound!
The immediate consequence is that it is imperative that your
first language manual comes with an audio source (MP3, either
as CD or via Internet streaming). During the 100 hours of extra
study just mentioned, listen to your audio sources. As expected,
even with the text in front of your eyes, comprehension of the
audio sources 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 your audio sources 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. Scientists will appreciate the excellent podcast
transcripts of the journal Nature (those published before July
2014; www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=1), the WHO
(www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=3) and the Centers for Disease
Control (www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=2) which offer top-quality
audio files about progress in science and medicine. The podcasts
range in duration from 10 to 30 minutes. Listen to them while
reading the transcripts.
Check www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=4 for more websites with
audio transcripts.
The final surrogate for speech in real life is TV. Apart from highquality
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, can nonetheless be outstanding speech
trainers. The journalists talk continuously, there is no
background music to spoil the sound of the speech, the language
is standardised with only a few slang words, and the images
provide you with important clues for understanding what’s
going on. In addition, TV news provides all the ingredients of a
classical soap opera: the players (politicians) and the content
(political crises) are well known, and often you already know
half of the story. My advice: Stop watching TV in your native
language and start watching TV in your future language. The TV
genres that serve your purpose most are the news and
documentaries if you wish to become familiar with the language
of the media and the language of science; and soap operas if you
are interested in more colloquial language. Listen to your new
TV programme for 15 to 60 minutes every day, starting on the
very first day that you begin studying another language. Persist,
even if you don't understand a single word. Remember: it is all
about word boundaries and speech sequencing, so try and
discover your first words. As you will see later, identifying words
inside the ‘speech soup’ is partly independent of knowing the
meaning of the words.
To 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 + MP3s;
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.
• Unless you emigrate, speech recognition training is as lonely
a task as word learning. No one can do the job for you.
Again, teachers are of almost no help (see also the Teachers
chapter below).
• During the first year of your training, never read a text
without hearing the sound.
• If you are an insomniac, plug your earphones in and listen to
your audio material.
• Allow 15 to 60 minutes for speech recognition every day.
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 of 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 attentive listening. So before you open your mouth,
see in the next chapter what your eyes can do.
Workload after Chapter 1–2
Speech-recognition training, typically 1,500 hours and more, can
mostly be integrated into daily activities. Only about 100 hours
of extra study time are needed as you become familiar with one
or two language manuals. Adding these 100 hours to the initial
workload defined in Chapter 1 (500 to 1,500 hours for importing
5,000 to 15,000 words into your word brain;
TheWordBrain2015
Have you recently listened to people speaking unfamiliar
languages? If you haven’t, turn on your smartphone or TV set,
select a station from another country, and within minutes you
will hit a broadcast with loquacious individuals talking all the
time. Alternatively, if you live in a metropolis, go down onto the
streets and spot groups of animated people speaking foreign
languages. Listen attentively. You will soon notice that humans
produce continuous streams of uninterrupted speech. The
overall impression? Phonological porridge, polenta, bouillie. For
the non-initiated listener, it is hard to grasp that there is much
structure to such seemingly random proliferation of sound. The
reality is different, of course. Any single language you come
across on Earth is as differentiated, distinguished, beautiful, and
funny as your native language. Impenetrable as foreign
languages appear to be, on the scale of a human lifetime, they
are just around the corner – give them two or three years, and
any of them is yours. It is a refreshing thought that all humans
are brothers and sisters in language.
A porridge-like sense of unintelligibility prevails even after
years of language classes at school. You are able to decipher a
restaurant menu and order a dish of spaghetti, but
comprehension vanishes as soon as the waiter starts talking. The same happens with bakers, taxi drivers, and hotel employees –
again polenta and pea soup. It seems as if years of classes
studying grammar and learning long lists of vocabulary produce
little or no effect. You can read Goethe, Shakespeare, Sartre,
Cervantes, or Dante, and yet you don’t understand their
descendants. Many of us 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:
Figure 2.1: Sound wave pattern of ‘ Putting structure into the porridge of sound
produced by the people who inhabited your life.’
Delimitingwordboundariesinaspeechstreamisnoeasierthantryin
gtodeterminetheminthepreviousparagraphsohowdoyounginfant
scrackthesoundcodetheyperformfrequencyanalysestakeforexam
plethesoundsequencewhataprettybabyyouarethroughcontinuous
exposuretohumanlanguagebabblinghumansproduce10000wordsa
ndmoreinasinglehourinfantsprogressivelyunderstandthatsyllabl
eswhicharepartofthesamewordtendtofollowoneanotherpredicta
blyprettybabywhereassyllablesthatfollowoneanotherlessfrequen
tlyarewordboundariesaprettyba.
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).
This type of frequency analysis is dependent on a wellfunctioning
memory that accumulates an ever-growing number
of words and, of course, extensive training. And it depends on
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 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).
Thorough training is the key to success. In my experience, it
took around 1,500 to 2,000 hours of intense listening to achieve
‘semi-perfect sequencing abilities’, both in French and Italian.
Amazingly, the results were similar for Arabic, a language so
totally different from everything I had learned before. This
seems counterintuitive because in Arabic, I needed to learn at
least three times as many words as in Italian. It immediately
raises a couple of questions: Could the time of exposure that is
needed to achieve full sequencing abilities – 1,500 hours would
translate into 6, 4, and 2 hours per day over a period of 9, 12, and
24 months, respectively) – be a human constant? Should our
speech recognition abilities be independent of the type of
language we learn? Perhaps even relatively immune to the effect of ageing? And are young children truly superior to adults in
word segmenting or do they simply dedicate more time to
listening than adults? Some of these questions will be answered
by future research, but I am inclined to accept that there is a
physiological threshold for human brains to get wired to the
ability of dissecting the sounds of new languages. You would
need a minimum of time to perform this task, but you wouldn’t
need much longer than that.
Figure 2.2 Listening to words: High activity in the auditory brain cortex. Adapted
from Petersen SE, Fox PT, Posner MI, Mintun M, Raichle ME. Positron emission
tomographic studies of the cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature
1988;331:585-9; PDF: www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=8 + Posner MI and Raichle ME
1994. Images of mind. New York: Scientific American Library. Used with
permission.
You are now able to solve the close-to-zero-understandingafter-
years-of-school problem that we exposed at the beginning
of this chapter. If teenagers are frustrated when they put their
school knowledge into practise, it is because school teaching is
insufficient to get you anywhere near the 1,500-hour exposure
minimum. Even if your teachers teach exclusively in the foreign
language, you will rarely total more than 500 hours of attentive
listening in a typical 5-year course. Thus, you discover that your
teachers were innocent – they simply did not have enough time
to get you through your speech segmentation task. 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 daily listening quotas 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 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 this important piece of advice: During the
first year of your training, never read a text without hearing the
sound!
The immediate consequence is that it is imperative that your
first language manual comes with an audio source (MP3, either
as CD or via Internet streaming). During the 100 hours of extra
study just mentioned, listen to your audio sources. As expected,
even with the text in front of your eyes, comprehension of the
audio sources 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 your audio sources 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. Scientists will appreciate the excellent podcast
transcripts of the journal Nature (those published before July
2014; www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=1), the WHO
(www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=3) and the Centers for Disease
Control (www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=2) which offer top-quality
audio files about progress in science and medicine. The podcasts
range in duration from 10 to 30 minutes. Listen to them while
reading the transcripts.
Check www.Amedeo.net/s.php?s=4 for more websites with
audio transcripts.
The final surrogate for speech in real life is TV. Apart from highquality
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, can nonetheless be outstanding speech
trainers. The journalists talk continuously, there is no
background music to spoil the sound of the speech, the language
is standardised with only a few slang words, and the images
provide you with important clues for understanding what’s
going on. In addition, TV news provides all the ingredients of a
classical soap opera: the players (politicians) and the content
(political crises) are well known, and often you already know
half of the story. My advice: Stop watching TV in your native
language and start watching TV in your future language. The TV
genres that serve your purpose most are the news and
documentaries if you wish to become familiar with the language
of the media and the language of science; and soap operas if you
are interested in more colloquial language. Listen to your new
TV programme for 15 to 60 minutes every day, starting on the
very first day that you begin studying another language. Persist,
even if you don't understand a single word. Remember: it is all
about word boundaries and speech sequencing, so try and
discover your first words. As you will see later, identifying words
inside the ‘speech soup’ is partly independent of knowing the
meaning of the words.
To 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 + MP3s;
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.
• Unless you emigrate, speech recognition training is as lonely
a task as word learning. No one can do the job for you.
Again, teachers are of almost no help (see also the Teachers
chapter below).
• During the first year of your training, never read a text
without hearing the sound.
• If you are an insomniac, plug your earphones in and listen to
your audio material.
• Allow 15 to 60 minutes for speech recognition every day.
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 of 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 attentive listening. So before you open your mouth,
see in the next chapter what your eyes can do.
Workload after Chapter 1–2
Speech-recognition training, typically 1,500 hours and more, can
mostly be integrated into daily activities. Only about 100 hours
of extra study time are needed as you become familiar with one
or two language manuals. Adding these 100 hours to the initial
workload defined in Chapter 1 (500 to 1,500 hours for importing
5,000 to 15,000 words into your word brain;
TheWordBrain2015
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