Vindication!

At about the 40-minute mark in this talk by Alexander Arguelles are described all the 'way-out' ideas I also have developed for using actual and audiobooks in conjunction to learn foreign languages.

He finishes the talk with another concept: Polyliteracy. (I did not co-invent that!)

Re: Omar Sharif

Up to now, I've been rotating my languages in an order that, though it is not rigidly fixed, tends to cycle. But this morning, walking, I started thinking. I reviewed what I'd been doing. 

If I did one language per day, one cycle would take me a month. Four a day, a week. Six days for five languages; five days for six languages. I would revisit languages every 3 days, if I did 10. It would require me to do 15 languages if I wanted to do them every other day.

And then I came to an op shop. It was the first time for me to enter one since the lockdown started 5 or 6 weeks ago. I bought a book: Monsieur Ibrahim und die Blumen des Koran. It's in German, translated from the French.

It was only at home, when I searched for an image, that I realized I knew the story. There had been a movie with Omar Sharif. I think I watched it with my father. Omar was once one of the best bridge players in the world. I got the book he wrote about it for Dad, but I doubt he ever read it. In his late 80s, all he did was watch TV.

So anyway, I'm going to read Dutch, German and Japanese at will. And I'll freely change the order of the rest. It's time to mix it up a little! (Maybe even include a little TV.)

200 books

I once had the idea of reading 200 books simultaneously, a page at a time from each, planning and pacing in order to complete the last page of every book all on the same day, thereby claiming some sort of world record.

I could still do that.

And wouldn't it be cool if every book was in a different language?

Read between the lines

By reading quickly, I find that I understand more. That's true in English, and for my other languages too. If I read too slowly, then the message falls apart. I may understand more of the words, but not the overall meaning. (Actually, reading quickly helps me to guess at the meanings of MORE words.)

When I skim, I get the gist. But to skim, you need to be prepared to let go of whole swatches of text. That can feel like letting go of the life buoy.

Reading quickly permits the words to link or stand together. They support each other better. I begin to read between the lines, as it were.

Ignore, forget

It's normal to forget things, and with language-learning it's necessary to forget. That's what I believe. I'll call it 'active forgetting'.

This is an idea that I got from William Blake in his Doors of Perception. He writes that it's the brain's job to act as a filter, to filter out most of what beams in from outside.

We are exposed to so much information, yet consciously we can only attend to a small part of it. When reading, you only 'see' certain words, not all of them, and you guess as to how they relate, you largely make up the meaning, and then check to see whether you are correct.

When I scan a text in a language that I only partially know, I ignore most of it. Slowly, though, I see words repeat. I come to know them. My brain gets the message that these words are useful or important, so it lets them in. It doesn't filter them out.

This leads to your accumulating a vocabulary bank, and a set of grammatical skills in a natural order. It would be foolish to try and force yourself to memorize things in a different order. You can't alter or rush the order and the rate of learning, not if you want to learn naturally and smoothly.

By the same token, you - or I, since I'm not advocating for others - I skip the hard bits, the bits I'm not ready for, the bits I'm not interested in.

If I'm reading a book in another language, I try not to read everything. I encourage myself to skip ahead to the next bit that I find easy to assimilate for my current level. I'll skip books entirely if they are too hard, or if their content isn't interesting. There are always better books to read!

Jack Reacher books, for example. They are a great read. However, they do contain long passages of description of firearms, road blocks, and scenery that aren't really necessary. The dialogues work best for me. Active passages. You don't waste time on the rest.

Swedish at speed

In a typical classroom lesson you deal with a single grammar point, and focus on a perhaps 25 words that the teacher imagines are new. You might spend an hour. You'd then forget most of it. That's life in the classroom.

Whereas I do things differently.

In a single minute, I cover 170 words. It's not just vocab, as the words are connected. They make up a grammatical felt. They convey meaning and message. The particular piece of text (Jack Reacher) I'm concerned with has 100 unique words, with the rest repeated 2, 3 or more times. My brains gets to choose what's important, and what to focus upon.

I don't consciously try to commit anything to memory. Instead, across a wide swathe of language, I improve my understanding of multiple language items by a few percentage points each. And that adds up to much more than a structured classroom lesson.

Compulsive reading

Why those particular books?

Well now. First, because they were there. Because I was limited in my choice. It's not easy to find books in English in Japan.

Second, because I like them. They are all books that I have enjoyed, or look forward to reading, in English too.

I read every Lee Child book as soon as it comes out. I find Lee's stories addictive. There's a lot of dialogue, and many short sentences.

I'm happy to read children's books too. I grew up with them, after all! I clearly remember reading them the second time that I learned English. They filled me up with that language like a sponge. I must have the Pippi books around the age of 10, and it's a pleasure to get reacquainted.

The Magic Tree House series is decent enough. It is widely available in Japanese at any second-hand-books bookshop. It's level is exactly right for me now. I'm only up to the 4th book, but there are dozens.

As for Harry Potter, I wouldn't say that I am a great fan. And I don't consider it a children's book. However, it is the most widely-translated series of recent years, and there are umpteen audio versions.

As for John Steinbeck, he must be worth the time - he did win the Novel prize for Literature. I'll give his work a whirl. I like the sedate pace, as long as it doesn't smack too much of 'literature'.

I had to ration my Dutch resources. I only had two books - both who-dunnits. I read the first one quickly, but then had to restrict myself to a chapter per day of the second. De Chirurg is extremely graphic. I don't think that I could handle it in English. The scenes of medical slaughter left me cold, especially after I have just had a hernia operation!

So anyway, that's what I mean by 'compulsive reading'.

Impossible failure

I believe that you succeed at learning a language by simply persisting. By not giving up. If you keep on taking steps in the right direction, no matter how small, you get to your goal.

The great thing is that everything works! Different approaches may take different amounts of time, but absolutely anything will help you learn the language. All that you need to do is keep going. You just need not to stop.

And so, I think long and hard over which resource to use, and how to use it. I wish to put in place activities that are almost addictive, activities that I could continue all day, given the opportunity. Activities that don't stress, tire, or make me bored.

And I feel that such activities must involve a book. A real book. An authentic book - not a textbook, grammar, or dictionary.

It's all about finding a good book. One that you can't put down. One that, while reading, you forget is in a foreign language.

On the shoulders of giants

So that's me set up, more or less. I'm ready to go. I've several languages that I can work on now. The rest I'll start once I return to New Zealand next month. I've outlined how I mean to start - or resume - and I've established a set of starting points.

To most people, this plan of action must appear very loose and unstructured. There doesn't seem to be much study going on. For Dutch, German, French, Japanese and Norwegian, I'm just reading from a book, or books. And for the other languages - Polish, Chinese, Maori, Russian, Hindi and Arabic, I'm somehow boosting myself up to that level.

So what's the deal behind this? Is there any substance to it? Any proof?

Well, I can assure you that I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And I intend to follow in their seven-league footsteps. Their names will crop up in the course of this blog. I'll explain as I go. For now, I'm just retrofitting this blog with my holiday musings.