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AN AURAL METHOD TO LEARN
Translations:
AN ORAL LANGUAGE
by Phil Bartle, PhD
Bahasa Indonesia

Català
Have you been assigned to a community where you do not speak the
中文 / Zhōngwén
language?
Deutsch
1. Decide to Learn:
English

Español The first thing to do is to decide that you want to use this method,
and then follow through with the techniques for three months. The
Français
method is not difficult; in fact it is surprisingly easy, but it does
Ελληνικά / Elliniká require consistent persistence and a decision to stick to it to the
end.
िह दी / Hind

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 Italiano Read over the following notes, and then decide if you wish to use it.
The decision is yours. Make your choice.
日本語 / Nihongo
2. Set Aside Three Months:
Português

Română The optimum period is ninety continuous days. You need only spend
five to fifteen minutes a day, preferably broken into two or three
sessions a day for only two to four minutes each. Using this method
will not take much time from your other duties or relaxation time.
Other formats:
3. The Goal is Fluency:

Text This method will help you to become fluent in the language.
Word "Fluency" means that you will be able to think and to operate in the
language. It does not mean that you will have a very big vocabulary,
at first, but it will give you the tools to build your vocabulary from
within the language, as you did (and still do) in your first language.

Other Pages: 4. Use Learning Paths Already Established in Your Brain:

Modules Although you are no longer an infant (the age you were when you
learned how to talk), you can take advantage of the ways of
Site Map learning that worked when you learned your first language, using
some psychological tricks and imagination now to your advantage.
Key Words The underlying psychological trick to this method is to "learn like a
baby learns to talk."

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 Contact
5. Recall Your First Language:

Utility Documents How can you take advantage now of the way you learned how to
talk when you were a baby?
Useful Links
The way you learned how to talk was different in many respects
from the way you learned a second language, especially if you
learned a second language in school. Yet our brain and nervous
system are designed well to learning our first language a certain
way. It seems odd that we would learn a second language without
taking advantage of the learning paths that were set up inside us
when we first learned how to talk.

Examine each element of how you learned your second language in

school. How well does each take advantage of how you learned how
to talk? Did you learn how to write before you learned how to say
words? Did you learn a large vocabulary at first? Did you worry
about how well you pronounced each word before you used it to
get something you wanted? Did you memorize the meanings of
words that you would not immediately need or use? Did you learn
the formal rules of grammar before using those rules? No.

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How painful and boring was the way you learned a second language
in school? Would you like to learn a second language without:
books, reading, writing, grammar rules, memorizing long lists, and
tests? This method may be an answer to your desires.
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6. Imitation of the First:
You cannot go back in time, and you will never be one or two years
old again, so you cannot precisely duplicate the way you learned
how to talk. While you cannot duplicate, however, you can imitate.
This method allows you to take advantage of psychological evidence
that indicates every experience you have in your life is stored
unconsciously somewhere in your brain. Sometimes it can be
recalled only by hypnosis. What you want to recall are the internal
learning methods you used when you first learned to talk.
7. A Psychological Method:
This method uses the learning pathways that were set up in your
brain as you learned how to talk and calls them back into use to
help you learn another language. This learning capacity has a
physiological basis in our genetic make-up that has developed over
millions of years of selection leading to a primate animal having the
capacity to develop a language.
8. You Have Something to Unlearn:
It might surprise you to discover that when you learned how to talk
you were learning what not to say as much as what to say. When
people around you responded positively to some sounds you made
and not to others, the acceptable sounds were reinforced in your
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 mind. You were learning what not to say. Out of all the random or
experimental noises you made as a baby, you learned that some
sounds were not acceptable, or perhaps not useful. Now that you
are about to learn another language, you will be learning to say
things, or to make noises that you had learned not to say or not to
make before.

To begin with, it will help you if you recognize that you will have to
unlearn some of the taboos (against certain sounds) that you have
learned before. This is something like the ridges and grooves on a
record. They are the reverse image of each other, and the
movement of the record player needle moves up and down in
response to the up and down variations of the ridges and grooves.
Since you learned what sounds not to say when you learned to talk,
for you to learn another language now, you will have to learn to
make sounds that you had learned earlier that you should not make.

9. Pronunciation; Start As a Baby:

To begin learning how to unlearn the sounds not to say, start by

making all kinds of random noises with your mouth. Let all those
sounds include those that you might think as rude, vulgar, queer, or
unpleasant. (Include burps, pops, fizzes, squeaks and grunts).

10. Use Your Shower:

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 When you begin this exercise, you may feel embarrassed. This is not
surprising because you will be engaging in behaviour that you learned
(unconsciously and intuitively as a child) was unacceptable behaviour.
The solution to this problem is, at the beginning, to practice alone
(eg in the shower or on a solitary trek), until you can allow yourself
to make such sounds within the hearing of other persons.

11. The Sociolinguistic Function of Laughter:

When you make some of these sounds, you may wish to giggle or
laugh. That is an important indicator. Sociologists have found that
laughter is a social tension reducing behaviour. Your laughter or
giggling is a means to reduce the embarrassment. It is also a
sociological indicator that reveals your embarrassment.

12. Become Indifferent to Making Weird Noises:

So, keep practising alone until you no longer feel a need to laugh.
Then practice with a close and trusted friend, continuing until again
you have no need to giggle. Finally, you can try doing it with an
acquaintance or colleague that is not quite so close and trusted
friend. You may wish to explain why you are making those noises, as
your friend might be surprised that what is coming out of your
mouth are not sounds that make sense. Your objective is to be able
to make strange sounds without feeling embarrassed.

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 It may come as a surprise to learn that if you are physically able to
speak in any one human language, then you are physically capable of
making all the sounds in any language.

Any barrier to pronunciation that you may think you have is

psychological rather than physiological. Thus you should pay
attention to the psychology of learning a language, as in this
method.

13. Do Not Aim for a Large Vocabulary:

Remember that fluency does not imply a level of comprehension and

skill equivalent to what you have now with your first language.
Fluency means an ability to operate, communicate, or socially
interact in a language. Your goal should be by the end of three
months a vocabulary of only three hundred words, but words that
you can use in every day context to get whet you want and make
yourself understood. You want operational fluency, not a large but
awkward vocabulary.

14. Maximum Five, Minimum One Word Daily:

Set yourself a goal of learning at least one word a day for ninety
days. You must not miss a single day. Since you must have minimum
of five minutes every day for your new language, this does not
sound very difficult. The important hurdle is to beware of

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 forgetting your goal and letting a day pass without learning a new
word.

The upper limit of words to learn any day is five. You may be
tempted at first to learn longer lists of vocabulary, but take it
easy. As the three months continue, you might not feel so eager;
those are the times when you have to be sure to learn at least one
word each day.

15. Choose Vocabulary You Can Immediately Use:

When you first learned how to talk, the words you learned were
existential; you learned them to use them, not to memorize them.

Each day choose a word to learn according to what you are doing at
the time. For example, you may be thirsty; your goal then is to learn
the words, "I want water." That is three words. You can bring it up
to the daily maximum of five words by also finding out how to say
"Give me water." The following day, you may be at the table and
feel a need for salt. Good! You already know five words: "give, me,
want, I, water." Use the ones you already know, and learn how to
say, "I want salt," and "Give me salt."

Remember that, on the second day, you have learned only one word,
but you have learned it in the context of using it with the words
that you already know.

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 Practice words and phrases you have already learned on previous
days. Do not forget them. Keep the goal of fluency always in mind
when you select each new word; learn how to use it and operate
with it.

16. The Basic Daily Vocabulary:

What is sometimes miss-called a "kitchen vocabulary," is a list of

two to three hundred words that are used for eighty to ninety per
cent of our daily conversation, and excluding all professional and
specialist words that are not used by everybody in the society. If
you keep choosing your words this way each day (existentially), then
by the end of three months your vocabulary will be very close to
the "kitchen vocabulary" for that language.

17. Maximum 15, Minimum 5 Minutes Daily:

In any hour of intense learning on a subject, ninety per cent of your

concentration energy is crammed into the first five minutes. If you
want to make the most efficient use of your time and of your
learning capacity, spend only that first five minutes in learning your
language for that day.

You can do this a second and occasionally a third time later the
same day, if you feel like it. You do not have to have more than one
session every day, although you must do it at least once for at least

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 five minutes every day.

18. Don't Use a Book to Read or to Record:

Keep in mind how you learned how to talk. You did not start with a
book. You did not know how to read or to write, so you did not use
those skills to learn how to talk. You don't need them if you want
to be fluent in a second language. For the first three months,
reading and recording will be a hindrance to learning fluency.

Do not write down the new words you learn. You have to
concentrate in storing them in your head, not on paper. It is
something like learning how to divide and multiply before becoming
dependent upon a calculator as a crutch. Writing down the words
you learn, in this method, reduces the strength with which you know
them and can use them.

The best strategy is to wait until after after your first three
months before doing any reading or writing in the new language. At
that time, you may find a few delightful and amusing facts, as in
English when you learned how to write and discovered that what
you thought was, "A napple," turned out to be, "An apple." Those
things will not detract from your reaching fluency within the first
three months.

19. Don't Learn Grammar Rules; Feel Them:

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 When you learned how to talk (at age 1-2), you learned that it was
correct to say, "I go," and to say, "he goes." By trial and error
(being corrected by your elders), you learned that it was not
correct to say, "he go." You were not formally learning grammar
rules, but you were being corrected until you practised them.

Many years later you learned the formal grammar rules about how
to decline the verb "to go." Before you learned the grammar, it felt
wrong to say, "he go." In this method, the goal is to remember that
feeling, and use it positively in learning another language.

As you learn each word, each day, you must immediately use the
word in as many contexts as you can. By doing so, you will start to
learn the grammar unconsciously. As described below, you do this by
setting up role playing sessions in which you can imagine yourself
being "corrected by your elders."

Your goal, therefore, is to learn what sounds right. What "sounds

right" will be good grammar.

20. Remember That Tones Have Meanings Too:

In European languages, the phrase, "Where are YOU going?" has a

different meaning than, "WHERE are you going?" (I use upper case
letters here to indicate high tone emphasis). In European languages
we use tones to vary the implications of our words.

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 In Akan, in contrast, the vocabulary can change by a change in
tones. "WO ko," means "you go," while "wo KO," means "he goes."
Tone in Akan changes vocabulary. Whatever the language you
choose to learn by this method, be sensitive to the use of tones,
and be prepared to find them used differently than in the language
you first learned.

21. Use Your Limited Vocabulary in Many Ways:

Although you are not going to consciously learn the rules of

grammar, try to see how a word varies in different contexts, as, eg,
in English, "go" changes to "goes" when it is used with "he." Your aim
is to use grammar; learn what feels right; not learn its rules.

22. Find Three to Five Informant / Teachers:

In your day-to-day rounds, you will meet with some people almost
every day, or every few days. They may be at home, at school, at
work, or where you play. As you get to know them and make
friends, ask if one would be willing to be your teacher in the local
language. You will find that most people would be pleased to be
asked, especially when they discover that it does not take very
much of their time.

23. Train Your Informant / Teachers:

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 Remember that those who would be willing to help you will most
likely be your social equals or subordinates (a steward or cook
would be an excellent choice, if the language is the first one they
learned). They will find it difficult to treat you as a baby, so do not
let them think that they are doing so.You do not have to tell them
what you are thinking; you must give them very simple instructions
of how you want to be helped.

Tell your informant/teacher that you want her or him to teach you
only one word a day. You must insist on this at first with some who
will want to teach you a long list the first day.

24. Let Them Have the Last Word:

The key to the method is to train your informant/teachers to have

the last word. They must repeat each new word you learn. Giving
them the last word requires discipline.

When you learn a word, you may be disposed to repeat the word
after your informant. Discipline yourself to avoid that, and train
your informants to always say the word (or sentence when it gets
to that) after you say it. It may take some time for each informant
to start practising the ground rules that you need.

25. You Having the Last Word is Too Comfortable:

There is something disturbing about having your informant say the

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 word after you. It might not be obvious at first, but you will have a
strong desire to say the word after your informant. If you say the
word last, your mind will feel comfortable, and there will be a
sense of closure and completion.

This feeling of satisfaction is a hindrance to you deeply learning the

word; avoid it. This method actually takes advantage of the
discomfort you may feel when not having the last word.

26. Ensure Your Informant is Socially Comfortable:

Make sure your informant does not suspect it, but imagine when the
word or sentence is repeated after you that you are a baby being
corrected by your elder (parent, sister, neighbour, whoever was
around when you were learning how to talk). You are being
corrected, but you do not want an informant to feel embarrassed
by correcting you, as she or he would not want to contribute to you
"losing face" by correcting you.

All your informant/teacher needs to know is that you want the

word or sentence repeated after you say it. What goes on in your
mind is not their problem or concern. This is a psychological method
of learning a language, so what goes on in your head is an integral
part of that method.

27. Use Laughter to Encourage Yourself:

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 Another item that you may first find as a problem, but can turn
around to help you, is laughter. Many times people will laugh when
you begin to talk in their language. You have been brought up to
fear that laughter is a sign of scorn, and that you do not want to be
the object of their jokes. You are not forced or obliged to have
those thoughts.

When you were a baby, people who loved you laughed because they
were happy with whatever you attempted to do. In many cultures,
the laughter you hear when you try to talk is based on joy, not
scorn.

28. You Can Interpret Laughter As You Wish:

Since you are not obliged to believe that people laugh at you when
you speak, tell your self (as a positive affirmation improves self
esteem) that the laugh you heard was someone who loves you and is
happy you are making an attempt to learn this language.

At first you may not believe it when you tell yourself the laughter
is encouragement. No matter; keep saying it; it will become true to
you as you repeat it.

29. When You Forget to Learn a Word a Day:

What do you do if one day you look back and discover that
yesterday went by and you had not learned even one new word?
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 This method causes a minor emotional depression. It is difficult
when you are now an adult to be corrected every day, even though
those who help you do not know you feel you are being corrected.

As in AA, remember: "One Day at a time." You can not return to

yesterday. Agree with yourself that you are living in today, and can
learn one word, just for today.

30. Your Emotional State is a Part of this Method:

In the normal course of a day, your emotions go up and down. While

you are learning by this method, your average may be slightly below
a comfortable line. Remember that you have set up a situation of
being continuously corrected; your unconscious may become
depressed by that process. Forgetting to learn a word once a day is
a way your unconscious mind tries to cope with that minor
depression which is an integral part of the method.

When you discover that you forgot to learn a word yesterday, then
you know the method is working. Take a tip from those who are
recovering in Alcoholics Anonymous: you cannot go back and change
yesterday, just start with today, learn a new word today.

31. What Do You Do After the Three Months?

The three months that you set yourself to try this method will go
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 past faster than you expected. At the end of it, you will have
fluency, and you will have learned a method by which you can build
on that fluency, and an ability to ask how to increase your
vocabulary by speaking in the language itself. You may even find
that some of your dreams will be in the new language.

What do you do after the three months? You may want to continue
in the same manner, to slowly build up your working vocabulary. Or
you may now be ready to try reading and writing the words you
already know.

It's up to you.

Tuum est.

––»«––

© Copyright 1967, 1987, 2007

Phil Bartle
Web Design by Lourdes Sada
––»«––

Last update: 2011.05.28

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