Bill Handley - Fast Easy Way to Learn a Language

Contents

First published 2005 by Wrightbooks

an imprint of John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd

42 McDougall Street, Milton Qld 4064

Offices also in Sydney and Melbourne

Typeset in Bembo 11/15 pt

Bill Handley 2005

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Handley, Bill.

Fast, easy way to learn a language.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 7314 0335 5.

1. Language acquisition. 2. Language and languages. 3. Second language acquisition. I. Title.

401.93

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (for example, a fair dealing for the purposes of study, research, criticism or review), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher at the address above.

Cover design by Rob Cowpe

The numbers given in the chapter headers throughout this book are written in the following languages: English, Greek, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Indonesian/Malay and Finnish.

Other books by Bill Handley

Teach Your Children Tables

Speed Mathematics: Secrets of Lightning Mental Calculation

Speed Maths for Kids: Helping Kids Achieve Their Full Potential

Preface

I have written this book because I love learning languages. I believe that anyone should be able to learn a language superbly well in a year. You should be speaking the language in your first week of study.

This book is about learning a language the fast, easy way. If you really need to, you should be able to learn almost any language quite well in a month. After just one month, you should be able to travel through the country, ask directions, drive, order meals, book a room and hold simple conversations. I tell in this book how I learnt basic Italian in two weeks without taking time off from my job or spending long hours studying, using a very good language course that taught me the language that I needed. It is possible to learn to speak intelligent and useful sentences in a week. I will show you how you can do it too.

Whatever your reason for learning a new language, whether you want to know enough to survive a weekend in the country or you want to be able to give presentations or negotiate in the language, this book can help you learn it faster and more easily.

Bill Handley

Melbourne, Australia

August 2005

< www.speedmathematics.com >

Introduction

I was already fascinated by the idea of learning and speaking a foreign language before I began school. I thought that learning a foreign language would be like learning a secret code. I would be able to understand talk that none of my friends or family could decipher. I could use a special language that no one else knew, or have secret conversations with someone who spoke the language. I persuaded two girls who lived next door to teach me French after they came home from school every afternoon. They enjoyed playing teacher and willingly cooperated. They would give me written notes with the numbers and days of the week written down. I was too young to read but that didnt matter I asked my father to read what they had written. However, his pronunciation was nothing like what the girls had told me. I remember I kept telling him he was wrong and he kept telling me that he was reading what they had written.

When I was about six or seven years old, my father took a special training course related to his work. His method of consolidating what he had learnt was to come home and teach me his summary of the training program for that day after our evening meal. Although I was so young I still understood most of what he told me. (Or I thought I did.) One evening he came home and told me he had attended a special lecture on how to learn effectively. He explained that you have to link new information to information you already know. If the connection is strange, crazy or even a bit risqu, all the better. I never forgot this, and used this basic strategy all through school and college especially for cramming before exams. I have applied it to study in general and also to learning a foreign language vocabulary. Using this method, my students have memorised more than a hundred words and their meanings inside an hour. I will introduce you to this approach in this book.

Incidentally, my father asked me where I got the idea for my study methods. I told him he had taught me when I was six years old. He said he remembered the course and teaching me at night, but he couldnt remember anything about the lecture on study methods (or even doing it) and said he had never used any of the methods himself.

I couldnt wait to start high school when I would begin to learn French in earnest. The idea of school had never been so exciting. It was a huge disappointment. No one in the school even those who finished their final year with top marks in French could actually hold a conversation in the language. We werent taught to speak the language; we even had trouble reading it. Everyone complained about having to learn French. I was ashamed to admit I actually enjoyed it, though at the same time I was disappointed with the lack of progress.

It was hard to become enthusiastic about the French lessons. They began with grammar and conjugations of verbs not much spoken language. The lessons seemed designed not only to result in failure, but also to engender dislike, if not hatred, for the subject. Still, French was my consistently best subject.

When I left school I bought some phonograph records that taught French and attended an evening class at my own expense. My progress was a hundred times faster than it had been in high school classes. We actually spoke the language; we studied the spoken language or dialogue rather than narrative. We used an Assimil course book as our textbook.

During this time I found an Assimil German language course in a second-hand record store. They were selling it cheaply because they didnt have the textbook for the course, just the audio material. I knew I could buy the book from my language school so I bought the records and then I bought the textbook from my school. I was speaking reasonable German inside two months. I had friends who spoke German so I tried my new skills out on them. They couldnt believe their Australian friend was speaking German.

In the meantime I had discovered a very cheap Russian course. I saw it in a shop window as I was walking past and couldnt resist it. At first I thought they must have made a mistake with the price it was so cheap. I realised that the price was subsidised by the Russian government but that didnt matter; here was a genuine language course that I could use. I began to learn Russian. My progress was slower than with German, but I was speaking the language.

My wife and I booked a passage for Europe with Germany as our destination, so I was highly motivated to improve my German. I learnt German from my records (I had now recorded them on to cassette tapes) for six months and this was sufficient to get by quite well in Germany.

Two weeks before we left Australia I bought a course called Italian for Travellers . We were travelling on an Italian cruise liner to Europe so I thought Italian would help. The course was very cheap and contained cardboard recordings of the text. I copied them to cassette tape so they would last the distance and began learning. The program was called the Lewis Robins Reinforced Learning Method and I thought it was great. I practised what I learnt on my Italian friends and I was pleased that I had learnt so much so quickly and so easily. I was so pleased with the course that I bought the French, German and Russian versions as well. I think they cost $3.20 each at the time. They also had a Spanish for Travellers course but I wasnt interested in learning Spanish back then. I have regretted not buying it ever since. Each course began by teaching the words and phrases that would do the most good and give the learner the greatest flexibility in speaking the language. The sentences were spoken in context they werent just random phrases the authors thought would be useful. The importance of this approach is discussed in chapter 4. I have since incorporated the reinforced learning methods into my strategies for other areas of learning and teaching.