Abblah Eenglaze

I'm learning Spanish!  Yes, again.  I've happened across a very interesting method recently.  It was developed by an engineer-turned-opera-singer (no, really).  He had to learn to pronounce several European languages to sing the full repertoire expected of your jobbing classical tenor.  To do this, opera singers don't bother learning the language, just the pronunciation.  He realised this was the inverse of the way he was taught languages at school.  He also discovered that if he thoroughly mastered the sounds of the language and its spelling conventions before starting to learn vocab, his ability to recall learned vocab was greatly enhanced.  It also meant he was much better at hearing and understanding the spoken language.

He also carefully chose the vocab to learn.  He looked at the 625 most frequently occurring words in the language, using a frequency dictionary, and learned only those words first.  This allowed him to communicate pretty well when combined with some grammar rules.  The innovation didn't stop there.  He used a spaced-repetition-system to maximise his recall of words learned.  This is basically an index card system.  You check your understanding against a flash card.  If you remember a word, it goes further back in the box.  If you don't, it stays near the front, and therefore appears again at short intervals until it is remembered.

The final difference is that he used no translation.  He wanted the target word not to trigger a translation into English, but to have meaning in and of itself for him.  This, he realised, was the key to fluency.  So, his flash cards used images and words written in the target language.  He might also use English words other than the target word to reinforce meaning.  For example, the name of his actual niece was used to help him learn the word 'niece' in his target language.  Finally, he also used mnemonics to remember abstract grammar, such as noun genders.  I'm a great fan of mnemonics; I used them at college to help me in exams, and have relied on them ever since.

As anyone who uses mnemonics regularly will know, the key to recall is to make the mnemonic bizarre and personal in some way.  And this he does by analysing the four levels of memory processing.  They are:

1. Structure

2. Sound

3. Concept

4. Personal connection

Usually in language learning, one is taught vocab using only the first level - that's to say, word lists.  And that's why the method doesn't work.

An example.  The French noun papillon.  A quick Google images search would render results like this:

It's pretty clear what that is.  A dictionary confirms the noun's gender as male - le papillon.  We use a mnemonic to remember this.  Male nouns explode, so we picture an exploding papillon as vividly as we can - the bits flying into our faces, the noise, the smell of cordite, you name it.  Then we set down the sound of the word in French using the International Phonetic Alphabet, which we've learned.

We now have the first 3 levels at work.  The 4th is accessed by personalising the image.  One might recall a visit to London Zoo's butterfly house as a child, or a picnic in the countyside with a girlfriend for example.
All that info goes on the flash card, and it's used until the word is successfully committed to memory.

It's technical, and it requires a lot of set up time, but it's a fascinating new take on language acquisition that seems to me to be based on very sound principles and empirical evidence.

Chapeaux!