Nailing
You are now ready for take off. Depending on the language you
are going to learn, 5,000 to 15,000 words are waiting to be nailed
into your brain (see Chapter 1). The sheer volume of this task –
500 to 1,500 hours – may surprise those who had a naรฏve or
romantic perception of speaking other people’s tongues.
Realistic minds find it encouraging that the time frame of
language learning is predictable.
If you are learning ‘just for fun’ and want to limit daily learning
to one hour a day, avoid languages with heavy ‘word loads’. For
people from Western Europe these are, for example, Russian,
Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, or other African and Asian languages.
Instead, choose languages with a more familiar vocabulary.
Please don’t consider anything less often than daily;
alternatively, you could try ‘pulse treatments’ of three hours
twice a week.
If you learn languages at university and, a fortiori, if you
contemplate becoming a language teacher, things are different.
Every language is within your reach because your daily work
schedule includes 3 hours of word nailing and intense reading
plus hours of listening to audio sources. Don’t even envisage a
more modest approach. Nobody wants language teachers who
are not in command of what they teach, and anything less than 5
hours of daily study is unacceptable. Those not willing to fulfil
these requirements should reconsider their professional choices.
Let’s get to work! First, find out how many new words you can
nail every day. In extraordinary circumstances – you are abroad,
start at 7 o’clock in the morning, and continue until noon before
spending the rest of the day with native speakers – you can nail
50 or even more words every day. (I happened once to be in such
a situation. It was my first trip to Sardinia, and every night I
clearly felt the progress I had made during the day.) However, in
everyday life, and in particular over periods of months, nailing
50 words per day is a terrific challenge. For a start, we will
consider 20 truly new words a feasible and respectable long-term
goal. ‘New’ means that you cannot guess the meaning of the
word. For English native speakers, words such as
Sicherungsverwahrung, Grundsatzurteil and Bundesgerichtshof are
new, whereas evoluciรณn, democracia and economia are not.
At 600 new words per month, progress is evident week after
week. Rapid word accumulation is paramount for two reasons.
First, you need to recognise the words that your auditory brain
cortex will soon be able to ‘cut out’ from spoken language (see
Chapter 2, Listening). Second, word nailing accelerates your
transition from an illiterate to a literate person and brings you
closer to the most pressing short-term objective: reading! As
soon as possible, you must move into territory where you are
able to read everything... because reading is the best conceivable
language training! At first, the process is slow, like deciphering
hieroglyphics, but if you persist, your reading abilities will soon
speed up. Reading is total immersion par excellence. Intense
reading will trigger quantum leaps in understanding. In one
hour, reading exposes you to as much as 20,000 words. For word
brains, reading is paradise.
Just to make sure that we understand each other: I don’t find
word nailing thrilling and I can immediately name dozens of
activities I would prefer to do. However, in the early stages of
language learning, there isn’t any alternative for people who like
it fast and efficient. Remember Chapter 1: The number of words
you are familiar with determines your language abilities. The
more words you know, the better you are.
Nailing can be divided into three distinct activities: learning
words, repeating words, and controlling words. Beginners need
two-column lists that put new and native words face to face.
(Remember: use the words of your native language as solid
anchors for the words of the new language!) At first, read the
words attentively one after the other. Check the spelling,
imagine the sound of the word and make a guess at the
resistance a word is likely to oppose: easy to learn or not? Foursyllable
words such as perseverance will demand more time than
monosyllabics such as and, or, and but. Go through the list a
second and third time, either line by line or leaping at random
from word to word. Push the words around in your mind,
squeeze them, press them, and stretch them. Finally, test
yourself by covering first the right column and then the left
column. 100 percent correct answers is a perfect score.
As thrilling as 100 percent results are, the first learning session
is only the starting point for a weeklong consolidation process.
Remember the forgetting curve of the Memory chapter. After one
day, the percentage of correct answers is dramatically down, and
after one month, recall may be 20 percent or less. As learning is
nothing and recalling is everything, the second pillar of word
nailing is repetition. Find out which strategy fits you best, either
daily repetitions or repetitions on day 1, 3, 6, 10, 17, and 31, or
any other regime. You will soon notice that after every reexposure,
memory traces are easier to reactivate.
The third pillar of nailing is control. Determine that every
single word has safely arrived in lifelong memory. Very young
children ask their family for help, and a grandmother might
interrogate her grandson, ‘Young boy, please tell me what aรงรบcar
means.’ But what is practical at an artisan level is impractical for the mass digestion of 5,000 to 15,000 words, and you wouldn’t
want to bother your grandmother, mother, wife, daughter or
granddaughter for months or years on end. To check progress,
develop your own system. Revisiting the word lists frequently
and marking ‘difficult’ words for further revision is one such
system. Alternatively, you can use index cards or word trainers
on electrical devices. For an overview on this topic, please see
www.TheWordBrain.com/NailingSystems.
Soon, you will face two problems. The first is saturation. At a
rate of 20, 30, or 40 new words a day, the time will come when
you will feel like a force-fed French goose. The diagnosis: acute
indigestion. The prevention: nail words five days a week and
stop nailing at weekends. If saturation develops nonetheless,
pause for an entire week.
The second problem is more severe: lack of words. Good
language manuals usually present around 2,000 words – that is
far short of your final word score of 5–15,000. This is a miserable
situation, because you are too good to continue working with
manuals, but not good enough for reading essays, newspapers or
novels. At this early stage, not even dictionaries are helpful –
deciphering a text where half of the words are unknown is
achingly slow.
There is one acceptable solution: nailing carefully selected
word compilations that are grouped by topic and divided into
basic and advanced vocabulary. Good compilations present
around 7,000 words and offer free pronunciation audio files (see
www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations). Define the
number of pages you will nail every day and start ploughing
your way through them. People who have never used these
books sometimes observe that learning hundreds of pages of
words out of context is not an exciting perspective. I agree, but
the alternative – looking up 10,000 words in a dictionary – is not
sexier. Anticipate at least two rounds and possibly another
round after 6 to 12 months.
While pioneering the world of words, you will one day have the
curiosity to open a 200-page grammar book. To your satisfaction,
you will realise that daily listening to your audio sources
(remember the manual CDs, TV programmes and audio books of
the Listening chapter) has paved the way to understanding
grammar. In fact, humans have an innate ability to grasp
grammar, and this ability doesn’t disappear with adult age. Don’t
be afraid of the technical terms of grammar, the nouns, pronouns,
adverbs, tenses, modes, etc. Their number is limited. Think of the
parts that you know from your car – gearbox, headlights,
battery, brakes, suspension, chassis, radiator, dipstick, cylinder,
driveshaft, exhaust pipe, jack, lug nuts, spark plug, hubcap, etc.
In comparison, becoming familiar with a handful of grammar
terms is a bagatelle.
Working through compilations of frequent words is like
working on an assembly line. To break the boring rhythm, try
and read real-world texts from time to time. As your word
repertoire increases and the number of missing words
diminishes, you will one day discover how exciting it is to work
on essays, newspapers or novels. Underline new words, search
for them in the dictionary, and write them down in a notebook.
At this point, you can even slow down your nailing rhythm, but
only on one condition: that you extract from your reading
sources double the number of words that is on your nailing
schedule. For example, if you nailed 20 words every day, look up
at least 40 words in the dictionary. At this double-strength
dosage, searching the words and writing them down will suffice
and dispense you of nailing them in sensu strictu.
TheWordBrain2015
You are now ready for take off. Depending on the language you
are going to learn, 5,000 to 15,000 words are waiting to be nailed
into your brain (see Chapter 1). The sheer volume of this task –
500 to 1,500 hours – may surprise those who had a naรฏve or
romantic perception of speaking other people’s tongues.
Realistic minds find it encouraging that the time frame of
language learning is predictable.
If you are learning ‘just for fun’ and want to limit daily learning
to one hour a day, avoid languages with heavy ‘word loads’. For
people from Western Europe these are, for example, Russian,
Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, or other African and Asian languages.
Instead, choose languages with a more familiar vocabulary.
Please don’t consider anything less often than daily;
alternatively, you could try ‘pulse treatments’ of three hours
twice a week.
If you learn languages at university and, a fortiori, if you
contemplate becoming a language teacher, things are different.
Every language is within your reach because your daily work
schedule includes 3 hours of word nailing and intense reading
plus hours of listening to audio sources. Don’t even envisage a
more modest approach. Nobody wants language teachers who
are not in command of what they teach, and anything less than 5
hours of daily study is unacceptable. Those not willing to fulfil
these requirements should reconsider their professional choices.
Let’s get to work! First, find out how many new words you can
nail every day. In extraordinary circumstances – you are abroad,
start at 7 o’clock in the morning, and continue until noon before
spending the rest of the day with native speakers – you can nail
50 or even more words every day. (I happened once to be in such
a situation. It was my first trip to Sardinia, and every night I
clearly felt the progress I had made during the day.) However, in
everyday life, and in particular over periods of months, nailing
50 words per day is a terrific challenge. For a start, we will
consider 20 truly new words a feasible and respectable long-term
goal. ‘New’ means that you cannot guess the meaning of the
word. For English native speakers, words such as
Sicherungsverwahrung, Grundsatzurteil and Bundesgerichtshof are
new, whereas evoluciรณn, democracia and economia are not.
At 600 new words per month, progress is evident week after
week. Rapid word accumulation is paramount for two reasons.
First, you need to recognise the words that your auditory brain
cortex will soon be able to ‘cut out’ from spoken language (see
Chapter 2, Listening). Second, word nailing accelerates your
transition from an illiterate to a literate person and brings you
closer to the most pressing short-term objective: reading! As
soon as possible, you must move into territory where you are
able to read everything... because reading is the best conceivable
language training! At first, the process is slow, like deciphering
hieroglyphics, but if you persist, your reading abilities will soon
speed up. Reading is total immersion par excellence. Intense
reading will trigger quantum leaps in understanding. In one
hour, reading exposes you to as much as 20,000 words. For word
brains, reading is paradise.
Just to make sure that we understand each other: I don’t find
word nailing thrilling and I can immediately name dozens of
activities I would prefer to do. However, in the early stages of
language learning, there isn’t any alternative for people who like
it fast and efficient. Remember Chapter 1: The number of words
you are familiar with determines your language abilities. The
more words you know, the better you are.
Nailing can be divided into three distinct activities: learning
words, repeating words, and controlling words. Beginners need
two-column lists that put new and native words face to face.
(Remember: use the words of your native language as solid
anchors for the words of the new language!) At first, read the
words attentively one after the other. Check the spelling,
imagine the sound of the word and make a guess at the
resistance a word is likely to oppose: easy to learn or not? Foursyllable
words such as perseverance will demand more time than
monosyllabics such as and, or, and but. Go through the list a
second and third time, either line by line or leaping at random
from word to word. Push the words around in your mind,
squeeze them, press them, and stretch them. Finally, test
yourself by covering first the right column and then the left
column. 100 percent correct answers is a perfect score.
As thrilling as 100 percent results are, the first learning session
is only the starting point for a weeklong consolidation process.
Remember the forgetting curve of the Memory chapter. After one
day, the percentage of correct answers is dramatically down, and
after one month, recall may be 20 percent or less. As learning is
nothing and recalling is everything, the second pillar of word
nailing is repetition. Find out which strategy fits you best, either
daily repetitions or repetitions on day 1, 3, 6, 10, 17, and 31, or
any other regime. You will soon notice that after every reexposure,
memory traces are easier to reactivate.
The third pillar of nailing is control. Determine that every
single word has safely arrived in lifelong memory. Very young
children ask their family for help, and a grandmother might
interrogate her grandson, ‘Young boy, please tell me what aรงรบcar
means.’ But what is practical at an artisan level is impractical for the mass digestion of 5,000 to 15,000 words, and you wouldn’t
want to bother your grandmother, mother, wife, daughter or
granddaughter for months or years on end. To check progress,
develop your own system. Revisiting the word lists frequently
and marking ‘difficult’ words for further revision is one such
system. Alternatively, you can use index cards or word trainers
on electrical devices. For an overview on this topic, please see
www.TheWordBrain.com/NailingSystems.
Soon, you will face two problems. The first is saturation. At a
rate of 20, 30, or 40 new words a day, the time will come when
you will feel like a force-fed French goose. The diagnosis: acute
indigestion. The prevention: nail words five days a week and
stop nailing at weekends. If saturation develops nonetheless,
pause for an entire week.
The second problem is more severe: lack of words. Good
language manuals usually present around 2,000 words – that is
far short of your final word score of 5–15,000. This is a miserable
situation, because you are too good to continue working with
manuals, but not good enough for reading essays, newspapers or
novels. At this early stage, not even dictionaries are helpful –
deciphering a text where half of the words are unknown is
achingly slow.
There is one acceptable solution: nailing carefully selected
word compilations that are grouped by topic and divided into
basic and advanced vocabulary. Good compilations present
around 7,000 words and offer free pronunciation audio files (see
www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations). Define the
number of pages you will nail every day and start ploughing
your way through them. People who have never used these
books sometimes observe that learning hundreds of pages of
words out of context is not an exciting perspective. I agree, but
the alternative – looking up 10,000 words in a dictionary – is not
sexier. Anticipate at least two rounds and possibly another
round after 6 to 12 months.
While pioneering the world of words, you will one day have the
curiosity to open a 200-page grammar book. To your satisfaction,
you will realise that daily listening to your audio sources
(remember the manual CDs, TV programmes and audio books of
the Listening chapter) has paved the way to understanding
grammar. In fact, humans have an innate ability to grasp
grammar, and this ability doesn’t disappear with adult age. Don’t
be afraid of the technical terms of grammar, the nouns, pronouns,
adverbs, tenses, modes, etc. Their number is limited. Think of the
parts that you know from your car – gearbox, headlights,
battery, brakes, suspension, chassis, radiator, dipstick, cylinder,
driveshaft, exhaust pipe, jack, lug nuts, spark plug, hubcap, etc.
In comparison, becoming familiar with a handful of grammar
terms is a bagatelle.
Working through compilations of frequent words is like
working on an assembly line. To break the boring rhythm, try
and read real-world texts from time to time. As your word
repertoire increases and the number of missing words
diminishes, you will one day discover how exciting it is to work
on essays, newspapers or novels. Underline new words, search
for them in the dictionary, and write them down in a notebook.
At this point, you can even slow down your nailing rhythm, but
only on one condition: that you extract from your reading
sources double the number of words that is on your nailing
schedule. For example, if you nailed 20 words every day, look up
at least 40 words in the dictionary. At this double-strength
dosage, searching the words and writing them down will suffice
and dispense you of nailing them in sensu strictu.
TheWordBrain2015
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