My Results

After 3 weeks of casual (30 minutes a day, 5 days a week) Spanish preparation, I felt comfortable expressing most simple ideas and sentences before I even left for Spain.  I was capable of navigating cities, booking a hostel, etc. without ever breaking into English.  I did something similar for Chinese years ago, but I’ve long since refined the process.

Everyone agrees that language immersion is, hands down, the best way to learn – but nobody seems to talk much about what to do before you immerse yourself.  It does no good to walk into the situation deaf blind and dumb.  If you’re leaving for China and cannot pick out a few basic words you’ll never get past the initial difficulty.

Step 1 (3+ weeks before departure): wrap  your head around the language

Deconstructing Russian; credit: Tim Ferriss

First things first: you need to deconstruct the language.  This is an absolutely critical step that a lot of learners skip; without it you’re setting yourself up to be a “memorizing drone” instead of someone who comprehends the language.

A friend who speaks about a dozen languages once pointed out something very interesting to me: verbs are far more important than nouns. If you learn the top 100 words in a language you already know all the grammatical connectors (a, and, but, then) and the key pronouns (he, she, it). By adding the top 25 most used verbs, you can actually express a surprising amount by pointing at an object and using a pronoun + verb.

Step 2 (2+ weeks before departure): become comfortable with the sounds of a language

Even if you conceptually understand how a language is constructed, if the sounds are all foreign you’re going to have a hard time.  One great idea is to listen to music in your target language.  I also like the Rosetta Stone language learning software at this stage.  While I don’t believe the software is quite as perfect of a prep tool as the creators would have us believe (for reasons I’ll get into another time), it is very useful at this point.  It forces you to listen to and speak the language frequently, and you start to pick up on the essential vocabulary quite quickly.  At this point in time it is less about comprehension than about comfort.

This is the right time to be learning to create the sounds of the language.  I spent years thinking I’d never be able to roll my Rs – my Spanish/Mexican friends tried to teach me and I always failed.  Then I read this WikiHow article and spent 30 minutes practicing.  Combined with the speaking section of the Rosetta Stone, I was able to use the sound well within my speech almost unconsciously within just a couple of days.

Step 3 (1+ week before departure): Flashcards and Phrasebooks

Again, I believe there is a time and place for each tool.  Now is the time for flashcards and phrasebooks.  If you’ve followed the previous 2 steps, you should be able to pick up a phrasebook and feel comfortable leafing through the pages.  Alternatively, you could study the top most-used words and most-used verbs (just google “top spanish verbs” for example). Once you have a list of words and phrases that you think will be useful, Spaced Repetition Software is a great way to go about  memorizing it.

As Benny points out in the linked article, memorizing vocabulary is not an end-all-be-all.  However, by doing this memorization you are “priming” your brain.  When you get to the foreign country you might hear a word and get the nagging feeling that you know it already – even if you cannot remember exactly what it means.  This is a very very good thing!  It means your brain is making connections between sounds and words and is already striving to put the meanings to them.  You’re well on your way to fluency.

Last but not least, if you’re looking for a good piece of spaced repetition flashcard software for the iPhone, I developed this free application some 18 months ago.

When You Arrive

As I mentioned above, your “top 100 words” and “top 25 verbs” can be invaluable.  Here’s some phrases constructed out of nothing more than simple pronouns and verbs that will get you through common situations:

• I want (to) sleep here (booking a hotel)
• I need (to) buy (to) ride (getting a ticket for a train, plane, etc.  you can always point at your watch and at schedules when you get down to the details, using a lot of “this one” and “not that one” type sentences).
• I want (to) order this (at a restaurant the names of dishes can be very complex – why not just use pronouns and point?)

• Speak and Create It’s not just words. Nothing you do or say is “just” anything. The energy in you to act wasn’t created by you. As it leaves you it imprints the world, and the world is a diary. Well, what have we written? What have we wrought? And why did we? The......
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