How to Learn a Language in a Month (I Hope)

I’m headed to Brazil on a business trip next month. I love to travel, so I’m totally stoked. Most of all, I love going to countries with foreign languages. Every time, I dream of being fluent in the language. But it’s not that easy, is it?

Failure of Spanish Classes

I took Spanish in the eighth grade, and loved it. My suburban Houston neighborhood was not what you would call diverse. My Spanish class opened my eyes to the reality of a different culture and language. I had never realized how surreal it would be to express the same thought in two different languages. Doing so was like solving a cryptogram puzzle. And every day, every lesson, brought an exciting new technique for solving them. Every homework was a new set of cryptograms that we had just learned how to crack.

There’s a problem, though. After four years of classes, I couldn’t carry a conversation. I was – and am – intimidated by the awkwardness of trying the first clumsy sentence. So it’s easier to speak English, even around family members who are native Spanish speakers. Twenty years ago I had – or should have had – the keys to the language. But I could never get the lock to turn.

Now I want to learn Portuguese. I only have about three weeks. Four years of classes aren’t an option, even if I thought they would work this time. Should I spend a four hundred bucks on Rosetta Stone? Practice all 300 words and 20 phrases on the EuroTalk CD that came as part of a 33-disc set? Subscribe to a Portuguese podcast? I know, buy an app! Hmmm.

How I became fluent in French

I started learning French in the eleventh grade. I actually walked around the corner from my sixth-period Spanish III class directly to my seventh-period French I class. I spoke a lot of Spanish to my French teacher, much to her annoyance. Every lesson was just as revelatory and every homework just as much of a delightful puzzle as Spanish was. And after finishing French IV, I was…not fluent. Barely even conversational. I got college credit, read some cool stories by existential French authors, and was too intimidated to speak to French foreign exchange students. Same approach, same outcome.

But I am fluent now. I got there, but how? I know it happened in the Peace Corps, but why?. During training, they made us follow “immersion”. We couldn’t speak any English to anyone while we were on the campus. Only French. It was not fun. We hated it and complained. Of course, we were also hot, homesick, feverish from the vaccines, and cramping from intestinal revolts. So Mr. Immersion did not come along while we were at our best.

But we did speak French. We didn’t feel ready, and we weren’t. We still had more lessons to take, more grammar to learn, more vocabulary to remember. But we spoke it anyway. And everyone we spoke to would only speak French back to us. They didn’t even know English. (Or rather, they lied and said they didn’t.)
Immersion certainly worked. It succeeded at the task that an hour a day of exposure in a high-school classroom failed to achieve.

For the next three years I refused to speak English to my Beninese co-workers. I told them it would hinder the language mastery I needed in order to educate the students we shared. Every night I wrote out lesson plans in French. I read French translations of novels I enjoyed, like Jurassic Park. And I let my students correct my mistakes. Until by the end of the school year I was correcting their mistakes. (The class applauded the first time I did so.)

So how does this help me with Portuguese? My co-workers at the office certainly aren’t going to switch to speaking only Portuguese with me. Even if they did, I need something to study, and I need more time – at least six months.

A Different Approach

Right after I downloaded a few iPhone apps with Portuguese vocabulary – they were free – I ran across something useful on Twitter. (Yes – it happens. You don’t think the Library of Congress is archiving the whole thing for nothing, do you?) It was titled “The Learning Secrets of Polyglots and Savants.” It described someone who learned enough Icelandic to hold a conversation after just one week - with an interview to prove it. OK, it turns out the guy is a savant who memorized pi to a gajillion places. (Which I’m totally jealous of, by the way.) But the next guy mentioned was just a regular Irish guy who learned enough Dutch to hold a conversation after only two months - with an interview to prove it. That’s twice as much time as I have, but still gives me hope.

The article described some memory techniques I’ve read about in the last few years. Our brains are wired to be really, really good at recalling places and images, especially when they involve action. Spend an extra 60 seconds coming up with an action image that represents what you want to memorize, and it will stick with you for hours and days, not just a few minutes. Another technique is graduated-interval recall, which involves reviewing the material at ever-longer intervals in order to lock it into the next level of memory, with the least amount of repetition.

Even with these optimization techniques, I’m going to have to prioritize. That’s a dilemma on its own. What do I focus on? Vocabulary covers a lot of ground. Should it be verbs? Travel phrases? Food? Numbers?Days?Colors?Animals?Shopping?VerbTensesPronounsPrepositionsPartsofspeech?????

I googled the-Irish-guy-who-learned-Dutch-in-two-months. He calls himself the Irish Polyglot (a more concise title), and has a website titled Fluent in Three Months. He travels to a new country every three months to learn a new language. I’m even more jealous of him than of the gajillion-places-of-pi guy.

His website gave me one validation and two clues to resolving my dilemma. The validation is that you simply have to start speaking the language. From Day One. No waiting until you’re “ready.” The first clue is to memorize phrases and vocabulary from a phrasebook like the ones by Lonely Planet. The other clue will cause raucous laughter from friends who’ve heard me try karaoke: put the phrases to music, and sing them. For the good of society, I’ll just try that in my head, not out loud. Much.

Implementation

So I’m totally stoked. I bought the Lonely Planet Brazilian Portuguese phrasebook. It totally reminded me of the LP Bengali phrasebook that some friends brought on a mission trip, from which we learned the phrase “Careful. The monkey is stealing your food.” I’m going to create action images, and set them to music (in my head). I’m even going to write my own dialogs and memorize them, the way I prepared my lessons in the Peace Corps. And I’m going to be mentally prepared to just start speaking the language. First with the hummus vendor at the farmer’s market; then with everyone I meet when I get off the plane in Sao Paulo. The only problem is that I’m much better at creating a plan than following through. And I need plane tickets.

Any ideas for how I can make a living by traveling and learning languages?

Favorite Apps

I've probably already mentioned that I'm pretty amazed at all the things a smartphone can do. We may not have transporters or warp drive yet, but we're darn close to tricorders. (I'm sure the iPhone 15 will come out with the ability to detect radiation and bone fractures.) In the meantime, here are some of the things of my favorite apps. (I've tried to note the ones that are iPhone only. And no, I'm not paid by Apple. Yet.)


Games: The Heist (iPhone only)
This puzzle game has been so much fun, I’m going to miss it when I’m done with the last 8 puzzles. It has 60 puzzles in four categories. The first type involves sliding Lincoln Logs out of the way to get a vacuum tube across a square to a connector. The second type is a colorful twist on Sudoku, with icons instead of numbers, and a grid that isn’t evenly arranged. These were my favorite. The next set involves a robot that you use to push diodes over to their connection slots. But you’re in a narrow maze and the robot can only push from behind, so you have to stay away from walls. The last group basically consists of picture puzzles, where you have to rearrange the tiles to put them in the correct order. Instead of pictures, the tiles contain snippets of wire that have to line up in the right way to complete one or more circuits. 


Runners up: 

• Star Wars Arcade: Falcon Gunner – it uses your phone’s camera to provide the backdrop that you play against 
• Civilization Revolution – a fun (and shorter) version of Civilization, but cramped on the iPhone 
• Risk – A quick way to dominate the world (on easy level) 
• Tetris – The old standby 

Social Media: Instagram (iPhone only for now, Android in the works)
I think this is a pretty cool concept. It’s Twitter, but instead of 140-character status updates, you upload photos from your phone. If someone is following you on Instagram, they see your photos in their feed. You can “like” photos (by clicking on a heart) and add comments. When you load a photo, you can share it via Twitter or Facebook. You can pull up your photos on any browser at Web.stagram.com, and you can check out statistics at statigr.am. Oh yeah, you can also apply one of 15 different artsy filters. I almost never do; they pretty much all look terrible to me. 


Runners up: 

• Tweetdeck – So I can post to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time 
• Twitter – I follow Steve Martin, Paula Poundstone, Stephen Colbert, Kiva, Biz Stone, and The Energy Project. 
• Facebook – To check the news feed, and respond to notifications 
• LinkedIn – Good for responding to notifications 

News: CNN Money
CNN Money does not have the best writing – that has to go to the runners up, New York Times and The Economist. However, the writing is catchy. And it’s light enough that I can read it in between sets when I’m doing bench press or squat workouts at the gym. That’s right, instead of listening to music when I work out, I read. Maybe if someone wrote songs about the news each day – that’s music I’d work out to. 


Runners up: 

• NYTimes – especially since the speeded up the load time 
• The Economist – best writing, ever. 

Reference: Google Maps
Seems like I’m always driving someplace new out here, so being able to call up a map at any time is a lot of help. The traffic feature is nice too, since I don’t know the traffic patterns out here either. I am a bit concerned that one day – when the machines decide to get rid of us pesky humans – Google maps is going to give me directions to drive off a cliff, and I’ll just do it. So I occasionally go a different route than the one it recommends. Of course, I always regret it and vow never to doubt Google again. 


Runners up: 

• Wikipedia – Great for shutting down a conversation debating any fact 
• Google Translate – I’m working on my Spanish vocabulary 
• Stocks – To look at the markets more often than a long-term investor should. 

Productivity: Evernote
I’m a total note taker. I have several notebooks of notes I’ll never refer back to. Now I’m saving the trees and keeping that info in someone’s datacenter, where it can be tagged, indexed, and searched. Am I worried that someone is going to hack in and get my data? Only if there is a market for old rental car reservations, Christmas gift lists, and topics I’ve already written about, or no one would want to write about. Hmm…maybe I should be worried after all. 


Runners up: 

• Notes – I keep my gym workouts on here, instead of carrying around a notebook 
• Reminders – coming with iOS 5, I’m hoping this to-do list is as good as Apple says.

Those are the apps I like the best and use the most. I'm eager to see what will come out next, as well as anything good out there that I've missed. Let me 

What's your favorite smartphone app?