the word brain Bernd Sebastian Kamps

the word brain Bernd Sebastian Kamps
Flying Publisher
After reading The Word Brain,
you may decide that you have no
time to learn a new language - but
never again will you say that you
have no talent for it.
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
The Word Brain
To
Charlotte, Carmen, Elisa, Daniela,Chiara, Carlotta, Cristina, Lena,
Caterina, Margherita, Clara, Hannah, Irene, Marie, Romy,
Jeanne, Katharina, Franziska, Jenny, Alexandra, Johanna,
Colin, Oscar, Félix, Jasper, Robert, Michele, Antoine, Anton, Arnaud,
Manar, Ghassan, Lorenzo, Mezian, Giovanni, Albertino,
Martin, Noah, Ben, Tomaso, Elian, Julian, and Thomas.
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
The Word Brain
A Short Guide to Fast Language Learning
www.TheWordBrain.com
Flying Publisher
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
is the Director of the International Amedeo Literature Service
and the founder of Flying Publisher. He edited and published
Influenza Report 2006 and Hepatology 2009.
Between 2005 and 2007, BSK published Free Medical
Information: Doctor=Publisher, launched the Amedeo Textbook
Awards, and created the Amedeo Prize.
www.bsk1.com
Internet projects by BSK
1998 Amedeo
2000 Free Medical Journals
2002 FreeBooks4Doctors
2003 SARS Reference
2005 Free Medical Information
2006 Influenza Report
2006 Amedeo Challenge
2007 HIV Medicine
2008 Amedeo Prize
2009 Free Medical Podcasts
2009 Hepatology Textbook
2009 Multidisciplinary Journal Club
2010 Francese x Sardi
2010 The Word Coach (www.TheWordBrain.com/WordCoach)
2010 The Word Brain
This work is protected by copyright both as a whole and in part.
© 2010 by Flying Publisher & Kamps – Beyenburg, Cagliari, Paris
Proofreading:Emma Raderschadt, M.D.
Cover: Attilio Baghino, www.a4w.it
ISBN-13: 978-3-924774-67-7
Content
Goals 7
1. Words 13
2. Listening 19
3. Reading 29
4. Teachers 37
5. Speaking 45
6. Memory 51
7. Nailing 65
Epilogue 71
7
Introduction
Goals
Language surrounds us when we are infants, language is the
predominant mode of expression at school and university, and, now that
we are adults, new languages are everywhere. In a globalised world –
whether we like it or not – we live in an environment of multiple
languages. Modern times are polyglottimes, and ‘monoglot’ individuals
begin to realise that speaking just one language can be disadvantageous.
They start asking themselves how long it takes to learn another
language and if languages are withinthe reach of everybody. Typically,
they also want to know how to choose good teachers and how to avoid
bad teachers. The Word Brainanswers these questions.
The subtitle of the present guide, Fast Language Learning, may be
subject to misunderstanding. ‘Fast’ isoften equated with ‘easy’ and, in
the context of language learning, easiness could lead some readers to
evoke miraculous second-languageconcoctions administered by
charming teachers to engaging  classmates. When searching for
‘language learning’ on the Internet, you will be informed that it is all
fun, sexy and child's play. If that’s the way you dream about
approaching your next language, stop reading here. There is nothing
snug and cosy about The Word Brain. On the contrary, this short guide
for adults may appear harsh and rude as it is about determination,
discipline, and perseverance. If these are dirty words to you, close this
guide now.
The place where you will be told tolearn your next language could be
the second surprise. Usually, adults think of language learning in terms
The Word Brain
8
of people interacting with each other, either in a beautiful city or a
romantic countryside, in situationsranging from gentle and friendly
meetings to tantra-inspired gatherings. Again, you will find nothing of
all this in The Word Brain. When we later summarise how to rapidly
achieve reading and comprehension skills, I will prescribe you months
of lonely learning sessions with books and audio files. If you don’t like
the idea that fast language learningis essentially a lonely combat, you
can still choose to stop reading here.
The third surprise is the route you need to take. While I set the goals
and define the time frame, it is up to you to find the most promising
road to achieve your goals and to develop the skills needed for an effort
that is going to last months and sometimes years. You will partly invent
yourself as your own teacher. If you feel scared by this perspective,
consider at least reading the first chapter, Words. Thereafter, you may
decide that you have no time to learn a new language, but never again
will you say that you have no talent for it. This revelation might well be
worth half an hour of reading.
So, do you still want to continue? Then let me briefly explain how The
Word Brain came to life. It all started when, on one of those birthdays
that are turning points in life, I offered myself an exclusive present most
of my busy colleagues can rarely afford: Time. I would dedicate two
consecutive years to learning my 7
th
language. Just to complicate
matters, I accepted a triple challenge:
1.  Learn a language at an advanced age – at 50, the memory is not
what it used to be at 20.
2.  Learn the language without teachers, using only books, CDs and
TV.
3.  Learn a difficult language: Arabic.
When I was young, I trained as a physician. After working at the
University Hospitals in Bonn and Frankfurt, I published and edited a
small number of books (www.HepatologyTextbook.com,
www.InfluenzaReport.com, and others) and created a handful of
Goals
9
medical websites, one of which – www.Amedeo.com– has had the
chance to become a Web Classic. Aside from medicine, I have always
cherished a second passion: the acquisition of other people’s languages.
I was fascinated to observe how new languages gradually entered my
brain; to struggle with learning and forgetting; to feel the brain
becoming saturated, craving for a break; and to discover how learning
sometimes makes true ‘quantum  leaps’, when sketchy pieces of
knowledge suddenly coalesce into an almost-fluent understanding.
Sensing the dense fog of incomprehension that lifts over a landscape
you have never seen before isan exhilarating experience.
My passion started at school where the languages I was taught – French,
English, and Latin – had long lasting consequences on my life. At 17, I
met a brilliant and attractive French teenager who is now my wife;
English would prove useful for reading and writing in medicine; and
Latin opened my eyes to the world of words. One week before my 13
th
birthday, I used my new Christmas voice-recorder to register word lists
from our school manual: rosa – die Rose; insula – die Insel; bestia –
das Tier. For several weeks thereafter, I would lie in bed at night and
listen to the recordings in the dark. I didn’t know at the time that this
first experiment with languages would cast the basis for my future
medical career.
Later in life, I took to the habit of learning languages by myself:
Spanish in the early twenties, Italian after emigrating to Sardinia at the
age of 27, Portuguese at 33 during a three-month trip to Brazil. That put
the modern language count at 6. Inbetween or thereafter, whenever
there was the perspective of travel, I studied the basic grammar of other
languages: Swedish, Dutch, ModernGreek, Turkish, Sardinian, Farsi
(Iranian), Swahili, Hebrew, Hindi. Don't worry! With the exception of
Sardinian and Kabyle, I have never spoken any of these languages and
hardly remember a single word of them. But one of the consequences of
repeated exposure to other languagesis that, today, I read grammar as
quickly and as passionately as I would read love letters.
The Word Brain
10
In total, I have spent approximately 10 years of my life absorbing,
playing and experimenting with language. This guide summarises some
of the lessons I have learned. It is a guide for adults. To make sure that
you don’t waste your time, let me describe the kind of adventure you
are embarking on. The Word Brain is not about counting (‘I, too, know
Arabic. I can count to 10.’), ordering a dish of Italian pastasciutta or
saying good morning (‘Buon giorno’ ‘Guten Morgen’),  thank you
(‘danke’, ‘merci’, grazie’ ‘gracias’) or excuse me (‘Excusez-moi, s’il
vous plaît’; ‘Mi scusi’; ‘Entschuldigen Sie bitte’). Most of these
conversational exploits can easily be replaced by gestures. I don’t
question the usefulness of teaching some language skills before going
on a vacation, but this is not the scope of this guide. The Word Brain is
about the effort adults need to undertake to speak and understand
another language. I define ‘speaking another language’ extensively. The
definition includes the ability
•  to read essays or newspapers
•  to understand TV news or documentary programmes
•  to imagine the correct spelling ofwords while listening to TV news
or documentaries
•  to understand everyday conversation
In other words, The Word Brain describes the steps to metamorphose
yourself from a perfect illiterate to a person who has fluent hearing and
reading abilities in another language.To develop these abilities, you
will ideally study on a daily basis. Depending on a number of variables
that I will discuss, the time estimated to accomplish your task is
between one and five years.
I have condensed The Word Brain as much as possible so that you can
read it in a couple of hours. If you have learned other languages before,
you will recognise some of your experiences and find explanations for
your successes, failures or frustrations. If you have to learn another
language in the future, you might find some useful hints about how to
Goals
11
streamline your project and save time. Young teachers will read the
following chapters with particular attention. Although it is not a treaty
on neuroscience, The Word Brain introduces basic concepts of
processing and storage of information in our word brain. Suggestions on
how to use modern communication technologies to facilitate language
teaching indicate avenues for future activities.
The first chapter will show you how language learning can partly be
quantified, thus enabling you to plan your future effort over time. In the
subsequent chapters, you will hear such curious advice as ‘Start
listening, go on listening, continuelistening – but please don’t speak
too early!’; you will discover someof your extraordinary reading
abilities; learn how differently your brain processes spoken words and
written words; see the need of sequencing speech in small slices;
discover the extraordinary accomplishments of your memory; and,
finally, conceive a strategic plan tocrack your next language as quickly
and as reliably as possible.
Reading newspapers, understanding TV– the bar is high. Let’s start
with the number of new words you have to feed into your brain. Be
prepared for the worst.
The Word Brain
12
13
1
Words
Words are the fuel of language. The number of words you are familiar
with determines your language abilities. The more words you know, the
better you are. Put in numbers, this statement reads as follows:
15,000 > 10,000 > 5,000> 2,000 > 1,000 > 500
Between 2 and 18 years, you learned 10 new words every day. Later, at
work or at university, you enriched your brain vocabulary with
thousands of technical words. Now,after decades, you know more than
50,000 words of your native language. Words are the hard stuff of
language; in comparison, learning grammar is a finger exercise for pre-school children.
To be comfortable in another language you need roughly half of the
words you possess in your native language – 25,000. As about 40
percent are variants of other words and can be easily inferred, a good
estimate of truly unique words you need to start with is 15,000 words.
This is a huge number and double what you are expected to learn in
8 years at school. Fortunately, you do not always have to learn them all.
Take the word evolution. In Spanish, Italian, and French, the word
translates into evolución, evoluzioneand évolution. As you can see,
many words are almost identical between some languages and come
with just slight differences in packaging. Once you understand the rules
that govern these differences, you have immediate access to thousands
of words.
The Word Brain
14
In order to understand how many truly new words are waiting on the
learning table in front of you – words you have never seen before and
which you cannot deduce from other languages you know – we need a
short history of your linguistic abilities:
•  What is your native language?
•  Have you learned other languages before?
•  Which level did you achieve in these languages?
•  Which language do you want to learn?
Based on your answers, good teachers are able to make a reliable
estimate of the number of words you must transfer into your brain. This
number varies between 5,000 and 15,000. Worst-case scenarios are
languages that are completely different from any of the languages you
know: for Europeans, typical examples are Hindi, Arabic, or Chinese.
In these languages, only a handful of words resemble European words
and leave you with 15,000 words on the table.
At the other end of the spectrum you will find languages that are closely
related to those you already know. If you ask a 17-year-old French
student to screen an Italian dictionary, he will immediately be able to
tell you the meaning of around 6,000 words without any previous
exposure to Italian. Provide him with additional clues on how Latin
words evolved differently, but still recognisably, into French and
Italian, and he will easily increasehis vocabulary to 10,000 and more.
The descendants of the Roman Empire – the Italians, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and, to a lesserextent, Romanians – are therefore
navigating in familiar waters whenlearning each other’s languages.
Once your teachers define the word quota you have to burn into your
brain, the next question is: ‘how long will it take me to learn these
words?’ You may be surprised to know that the total study time for
wiring a new word into livelongmemory is around five minutes.
Children tend to have it easier because they have so-called ‘fast-mapping’ abilities, a fabulous fast lane for word learning after a single
Words
15
exposure, which partly explains the prodigious rate at which they learn
new words. As an adult, however, youwill take the long road, repeating
new words over and over again. Somewords are easy, others are not.
Among the easy words are the words of everyday life, such as man,
woman, child, water, air, big, small, go, come, do. They are usually
short and their meaning is unambiguous. Other words are longer and
will need more frequent rounds of rehearsal: Gerichtsvollzieher,
jeopardy, abracadabrantesque, zanahoria, sgabuzzino, orçamentário,
Bundesverfassungsgericht. Still other words resist memorising because
their very concept, or the difference between one word and another,
remains vague and confusing even in your native language: haughty,
valiant,  valorous,  courageous,  intrepid,  contemptuous. And finally,
how could you easily learn Semmelknödelwithout ever seeing it, sugo
without smelling it, or tartiflettewithout eating it?
The Memory chapter shows in more detail that word learning is a result
of repeated exposures over weeks and months, a succession of stations,
a Via Dolorosa. You will not be nailed to a cross, but don’t be amazed
that the stations of a typical Via Dolorosa may not suffice to nail new
words permanently into your brain. Learning is a biological process that
requires new connections between brain cells, and these connections are
being produced from a huge numberof biochemical substances. Give
them time to grow.
At a conservative estimate of 10 words per hour, it will take you 500
hours to learn 5,000 words (French/Spanish) and 1,500 hours to learn
15,000 words (European/Arabic). Based on the number of hours you are
prepared to invest on a daily basis, your total study time can be
predicted with fairly good accuracy. Take your daily study time from
the left column in Table 1.1 and pick from the appropriate column on
the right side (easy language: 5,000 words; difficult language, 15,000
words) the number of months you need to complete your word training.
As you can see, a quota of 5,000 or 15,000 words makes a huge
difference. For highly related languages that require a basic vocabulary
of 5,000 words, one hour per day issufficient to be ready after two
years. With difficult languages and a word count of 15,000, a single
The Word Brain
16
daily study hour would put you on a frustratingly extended study course
of 6 years.
Table 1.1: Study time (in months)*
Number of words to learn
Hours/Day
5,000 10,000 15,000
0.5 50 100 150
1 255075
1.5 173350
2 122537
3 8 16 25
4 6 12 19
* At five days per week; figures are rounded
These numbers have important implications. First, language learning
means daily learning. ‘2-hours-a-week’ schedules are likely to be
insufficient. Two hours a week is like saying, ‘I am preparing a Mount
Everest ascension. I climb two flight of stairs twice every day.’ If you
are not ready for daily practise, reconsider your project. Low input
cannot produce high output.
Second, language learning is mostly a do-it-yourself job. The thousands
of words you need to learn are currently outside your word brain and
must get inside. Nobody, except you, can dothis job. Be prepared to
spend hundreds of hours alone with your language manuals, computer
and dictionary.
Third, for adults and adolescents, language learning is a focused and
persistent intellectual effort. This is in stark contrast with the seemingly
easy and playful way young children learn languages. In order to learn
like a child you would need to be born into a new family, with a new
Words
17
mother, a new father, new brothers and sisters, to be raised with love
until the age of 6 and be sent to school for another 10 years.
Unfortunately – or fortunately? – there is no way of simulating being a
new child in a different childhood environment.
So, who is eligible to embark on a full-scale attack on another language
in the sense we defined in the introduction, that is, being fluent in
reading newspapers and understanding TV documentaries and day-to-day conversation? It all depends on time. If you have little or no time –
think of busy physicians – or prefer to dedicate your time to geology,
neuroscience, or evolutionary biology, new languages are out of reach.
Apart from these two cases, however, anyone who demonstrated the
ability to learn the language of their parents are entitled to learn their
next language.
The figures presented above are excellent news. Language learning is
not a bottomless pit, but is as predictable and quantifiable as climbing a
mountain in excellent weather conditions. You are planning the final
ascent to the 4,808 m summit of MontBlanc, starting at the Gouter Hut
at 3,800 m? As you know that ittakes you 30 minutes to climb 100
meters, you can expect to reach the summit in about five hours. Some of
your friends may get to the summit in4 hours, others in 6 hours, but
nobody will do it in 30 minutes.
There is another piece of good news. As you will see in the coming
chapters, importing 5,000 to 15,000 new words into your brain in 500 to
1,500 hours turns out to be THEmajor battlefield in language learning,
representing 60 to 80 percent of yourtotal effort. In comparison, other
aspects of language learning – grammar, pronunciation, etc. – are minor
construction sites. If you are motivated and still willing to follow me,
my first prescription would be that you start learning words on a daily
basis, at least five days a week, and that you start now. In Chapter 7,
you will find a number of strategiesto cope with hundreds of words
every month. You will discover that you have powerful allies. One such
ally is your computer, which will turn out to be a fabulous assistant to
keep track of your progress, shortcomings, and successes.
The Word Brain
18
What would you expect the secondbattlefield to be, grammar or
pronunciation? It is neither! Against all expectations, grammar and
pronunciation are theatres for minor skirmishes. The second major task
in language learning is speech recognition. If I were your teacher, I
would continue tomorrow working on sound waves and training your
ears. Decoding the sound track of people who speak an unknown
language is a dizzy task.
Total workload after Chapter 1
500 – 1,500 hours
19
2
Listening
Have you recently listened to people speaking unfamiliar languages? If
you haven’t, turn on your radio or TVset, select a station from another
country, and within minutes you will hit a broadcast with loquacious
individuals talking all the time.  Alternatively, if you live in a
metropolis, go down onto the streets and spot groups of animated
people speaking foreign languages. Listen attentively. You will soon
notice that humans produce continuous streams of uninterrupted speech.
The overall impression? Phonological porridge, polenta, bouillie. For
the non-initiated listener, it is hard tograsp that there is much structure
to such seemingly random proliferation of sound. The reality is
different, of course. Any single language you come across on Earth is as
differentiated, distinguished, beautiful, and funny as your native
language. Impenetrable as foreign languages appear to be, on the scale
of a human lifetime, they are just around the corner – give them two or
three years, and any of them is yours. It is a refreshing thought that all
humans are brothers and sisters in language.
A porridge-like sense of unintelligibility prevails even after years of
language classes at school. You are able to decipher a restaurant menu
and order a dish of spaghetti, but comprehension vanishes as soon as the
waiter starts talking. The same happens with bakers, taxi drivers, and
hotel employees – again polenta and pea soup. It seems as if years of
classes studying grammar and learninglong lists of vocabulary produce
little or no effect. You can read Goethe, Shakespeare, Sartre, Cervantes,
or Dante, and yet you don’t understand their descendants. Many of us
The Word Brain
20
conclude that we are inept at learning other languages and never try
again.
The apparent easiness with which humans learn their native language
during the first years of life, is intriguing. Not only do young children
readily soak up any of the thousandsof possible human languages, but
they also learn to understand a  huge variety of radically different
pronunciations – mum and dad, the neighbours, the fisherman at the
street corner, people speaking other dialects, stuttering infants, and
toothless grandparents. To date, there is no machine capable of this
level of speech recognition.
How do young children outperform the most sophisticated machines?
How do they structure linguistic input into meaningful units so rapidly?
To answer these questions, look at how you spent the first 6 months of
your life. As a physiological preterm primate, your interactions with the
world were pretty limited – eating, digesting, looking, and listening.
With such a limited repertoire of actions, every single action necessarily
received an immense share of yourattention. Once digestion was
settled, you mutated into an ear-and-eye monster, capturing shapes and
movements around you and soaking in every single sound you heard.
You didn’t lose a minute setting about the most important task of your
life: putting structure into the sound produced by the people who
inhabited your life. The first hurdle was determining the word
boundaries within the language ofyour ancestors. Where do single
words begin; where do they end?
As you see from Figure 2.1, the sound wave per sedoes not confer
information about the boundaries between single words. To show the
magnitude of the task you face in a new language, try to delimit the
word boundaries:
Listening
21
Figure 2.1: Sound wave pattern of ‘ Putting structure into the porridge of sound produced
by the people who inhabited your life.’
Delimitingwordboundariesinaspeechstreamisnoeasierthantryingtodeter
minetheminthepreviousparagraphsohowdoyounginfantscrackthesoundc
odetheyperformfrequencyanalysestakeforexamplethesoundsequencewha
taprettybabyyouarethroughcontinuousexposuretohumanlanguagebabblin
ghumansproduce10000wordsandmoreinasinglehourinfantsprogressively
understandthatsyllableswhicharepartofthesamewordtendtofollowoneano
therpredictablyprettybabywhereassyllablesthatfollowoneanotherlessfreq
uentlyarewordboundariesaprettyba.
Delimiting word boundaries in a speech stream is no easier than trying
to determine them in the previous paragraph. So how do young infants
crack the sound code? They performfrequency analyses. Take for
example the sound sequence What a pretty baby you are. Through
continuous exposure to human language – babbling humans produce
10,000 words and more in a single hour ! – infants progressively
understand that syllables which are part of the same word tend to follow
one another predictably (pret-ty, ba-by), whereas syllables that follow
one another less frequently are word boundaries (a#pret, ty#ba).
1
This type of frequency analysis is dependent on a well-functioning
memory that accumulates an ever-growing number of words and, of
course, extensive training. The problem is speed. As human speech can
produce three and more words per second, there is little time for either
childish astonishment or for adult considerations such as ‘What does
The Word Brain
22
that word exactly mean?’, ‘Is the verb in the present or past tense?’,
‘What the hell is that grammatical structure?’, etc. At full speed, speech
is unpardonable – a single instant ofindecision makes you stumble and
after getting onto your feet again, the sentence is gone. Speech
comprehension is therefore a triple challenge: slicing human speech into
digestible units, endowing themwith meaning by matching the
segments with thousands of existing words stored in your brain
dictionary, and, finally, doing all this without giving it a second
thought. Fortunately, our word brain is genetically programmed to do
these mental acrobatics, and as you have already done it once – when
you learned your native language – you can do it again with other
languages as often as you want. Tosee what it looks like when your
auditory brain cortex works at full-speed, put your brain into a PET
scanner (Figure 2.2).
2
Figure 2.2 Listening to words: High activityin the auditory brain cortex. Adapted from
Raichle, 1988.
3
Used with permission.
Thorough training is paramount. In my experience, it took around 1,500
to 2,000 hours of intense listening to achieve ‘semi-perfect sequencing
abilities’, both in French and Italian. Amazingly, the results were
similar for Arabic, a language so totally different from everything I had
learned before. This seems counterintuitive because in Arabic, I needed
to learn at least three times as manywords as in Italian, and raises a
couple of questions: Could the timeof exposure that is needed to
Listening
23
achieve full sequencing abilities – 1,500 hours would translate into 6, 4,
and 2 hours per day over a period of 9, 12, and 24 months, respectively)
– be a human constant? Should our speech recognition abilities be
independent of the type of languagewe learn? Perhaps even relatively
immune to the effect of ageing? And are young children truly superior
to adults in word segmenting or do they simply dedicate more time to
listening than adults? Some of these questions will be answered by
future research, but I am inclined toaccept that there is a physiological
threshold for human brains to get wired to the ability of dissecting the
sounds of new languages. You would need a minimum of time to
perform this task, but you wouldn’t need much longer than that.
You are now able to solve the close-to-zero-understanding-after-years-of-school problem that we exposed atthe beginning of this chapter. If
teenagers are frustrated when they put their school knowledge into
practise, it is because school teaching is insufficient to get you
anywhere near the 1,500-hour exposure minimum. Even if your
teachers teach exclusively in the foreign language, you will rarely total
more than 500 hours of attentive listening in a typical 5-year course.
Thus, you discover that your teacherswere innocent – they simply did
not have enough time to get you through your speech segmentation
task.
So, if private and public schools are not in a position to provide us with
sufficient exposure to human speech,where can we go to get it? The
best school, of course, is life. Emigrate, either definitely or for just one
study year, and take a linguistic bath in a new language environment.
The younger you are, the more flexibleyour brain, and the easier it will
be to find yourself in groups of people who never stop talking. Add an
intense love affair, and your daily listening quota of 8, 10, or even 12
hours will soon be a reality. Within a year, you are a perfect speech
segmenter.
If you choose to stay at home, you will need speech surrogates. With a
workload of 500 to 1,500 hours from the previous chapter, you may
find it demanding to accommodate another 1,500 hours of training in
The Word Brain
24
your time schedule. You are lucky. As listening can easily be done in
parallel to other activities – commuting, doing sport, cooking, etc. – you
will manage to dissolve the bulk ofyour speech recognition programme
in daily life (like a murderer who dissolves a corpse in an acid bath!).
Thereafter, you just have to changeyour TV habits (more about that
below), and the true extra study time can be reduced to around 100
hours. Just remember these two important pieces of advice: 1) During
the first year of your training, never read a text without hearing the
sound. 2) Only listen to audio sources if you have the corresponding
text at hand.
The immediate consequence is that it is imperative that your first
language manual comes with a CD-ROM (CD). During the 100 hours
of extra study just mentioned, listen to the CD. As expected, even with
the text in front of your eyes, comprehension of the audio files is not
always immediate. In these cases, take single sentences or even single
words, put them in an audio loop and listen to them 5, 10, or 15 times.
Some audio devices come with a convenient button to define the
beginning and the end of the loop. Using this sledgehammer method
cracks every sentence within minutes. More importantly, don’t feel
uncomfortable if you listen to a language CD for the 54
th
time. This is
all but dishonouring, and after all,you did exactly that with your
favourite music when you were young.
Insomnia, too, is an excellent moment for donning your earphones.
Some people will discover that the incomprehensible sounds will lull
them into sleep. Finally, don’t be afraid of unconventional behaviour. If
you are used to having a siesta, put your earphones on and activate the
loop mode. It is certainly impossible to learn words during sleep, but
the sound and music of the new language will certainly enter your brain.
Once you have digested your first (and maybe second) language
manual, you will discover that the Internet offers extraordinary tools for
second-language acquisition:  audio files plus transcripts! (see
example at http://hiv.net/link.php?id=11). Some examples:
Listening
25
Language teaching– Educational material is available for English at
http://hiv.net/link.php?id=8, German at http://hiv.net/link.php?id=7, and
French at http://hiv.net/link.php?id=6. Many more languages are
mouse-clicks away.
Podcasts– Physicians and scientists will find an amazing wealth of
material at www.FreeMedicalPodcasts.com. The website presents a list
of scientific and medical journals that publish podcasts at regular
intervals. Half of the podcasts  come with transcripts. Ranging in
duration from 10 to 30 minutes, they offer top-quality audio files about
progress in science and medicine. My favourite is the weekly Nature
Podcast (http://hiv.net/link.php?id=15).
Audio books– As most free audio books are classics, you will
generally find the free text at the Gutenberg website (see
www.gutenberg.org). Check German audio books at
http://hiv.net/link.php?id=12, English at  http://hiv.net/link.php?id=13,
French at  http://hiv.net/link.php?id=14, and other languages at
www.Google.com. Alternatives are more recent publications, for
example Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by
Jared Diamond (print edition: http://hiv.net/link.php?id=18; audio book:
http://hiv.net/link.php?id=19). Google for more.
The final surrogate for speech in real life is TV. Apart from high-quality
documentaries, which are rare, TV is a poor source of content, and most
of us would prefer reading books orscientific journals. TV is also
mostly irrelevant. Suicide attacks in remote countries; minor
earthquakes, tsunamis, or volcaniceruptions; old, helpless people
murdered by drug-intoxicated gangs of youths; drug-intoxicated gangs
of youths slain by paramilitary troops; paramilitary groups killed in an
ambush by guerrilleros, etc. – all this has little or no impact on your
personal and professional life, and watching TV is basically tantamount
to killing precious life time. Imperfect though it may be, some
broadcasts, for example TV news programmes, have nonetheless the
composition of outstanding speech trainers. The journalists talk
The Word Brain
26
continuously, there is no background music to spoil the sound of the
speech, the language is standardised with only a few slang words, and
the images provide you with important clues for understanding what’s
going on. In addition, TV news provides all the ingredients of a
classical soap opera: the players (politicians) and the content (political
crises) are well known, and you already know half of the story, and
even if you don’t, it really doesn’t matter.
My advice: Stop watching TV inyour native language and start
watching TV in your future language. The TV genres that serve your
purpose most are the news and documentaries if you wish to become
familiar with the language of the media and the language of science;
and soap operas if you are interested in more colloquial language.
Listen to your new TV programme for 15 to 60 minutes every day,
starting on the very first day thatyou begin studying another language.
Persist, even if you don't understand a single word. Remember: it is all
about word boundaries, so try and discover your first words. As you
will see later, identifying these boundaries is partly independent of
knowing the meaning of the words.
Let us summarise:
•  Human speech is a continuous sound stream. To understand the
meaning, your built-in speech-recognition system cuts human
speech into single words, matches them with your vast brain
dictionary, and does all this more or less unconsciously at a rate of
three words per second.
•  To ensure extensive exposure tohuman speech, emigrate or find
surrogates for real life: 1) Language manuals + CD’s; 2) Internet
audio sources + transcripts; 3) TV.
•  If you cannot emigrate, dissolve your training into your daily life by
listening to audio files during cooking, commuting, doing sport, etc.
Change your TV habits and watch TV exclusively in your new
language. Use earphones for enhanced comprehension.
Listening
27
•  Unless you emigrate, speech recognitiontraining is as lonely a task
as word learning. No one can do the job for you. Again, teachers are
of almost no help (see also the Teacherschapter below).
•  During the first year of your training, never read a text without
hearing the sound; and listen to audio sources only if you have the
corresponding text at hand.
•  If you are an insomniac, plug your earphones in and listen to your
audio material.
•  Allow 15 to 60 minutes for speech recognition every day.
Week after week, the sound pattern of words will flow into your brain.
Again, your brain will be acting as a huge sponge, as cracking the code
to a human language is not a reserved hunting ground for infants and
young children. With time, as comprehension sets in, British porridge
slowly mutates into French Cuisine.So far, so good, you might think,
but you have noticed something rathercurious. You have been told to
learn 5,000 to 15,000 words and complete a 1,500-hour speech
recognition course, but nobody has asked you to say a single word.
Legitimately, you wonder if you will one day be authorised to
pronounce some of the words you have learned and to communicate
your precious thoughts to other people.
There are good reasons to restrain your desire to communicate. As you
are a virgin – linguistically speaking – you might prefer to stay that way
for a while. If you accept patience, my favourite prescription is a
monastic ‘3-month silence’. Remember: you are not at school, there are
no exams on the horizon, and you may therefore take a comfortable
route when starting your new language. Concentrate on absorbing
words, sounds and sentences, and, day after day, let the sound of the
new language slowly sink in. Of course, you are too old for an exclusive
baby approach to language learning, but for now, listen passively as
young children do. Good pronunciationcomes as a bonus of patient and
The Word Brain
28
attentive listening. So before you open your mouth, see in the next
chapter what your eyes can do.
Workload after Chapter 1–2
Speech-recognition training, typically 1,500 hours and more, can mostly
be integrated into daily activities. Only about 100 hours of extra study
time are needed while you become familiar with one or two language
manuals. Added to the workload defined in the previous chapter, your
total workload is now
600 to 1,600 hours
29
3
Reading
Ocne uopn a tmie trhee lived in a cietarn vlagile a lttile cnortuy gril, the
prettseit crteuare who was eevr seen. Her mhteor was ecsisxevely fnod
of her; and her ghrodmentar doted onher slitl mroe. Tihs good waomn
had a ltilte red riidng hood.
If you are a native English speaker, you will have recognised the initial
sentences of Little Red Hood. If you are not, understanding the previous
paragraph is more challenging, because your deciphering skill depends
on the number of years you have been reading English. The original
version:
‘Once upon a time there lived in a certain village a little country girl,
the prettiest creature who was ever seen. Her mother was excessively
fond of her; and her grandmother doted on her still more. This good
woman had a little red riding hood.’ The words have been modified
only slightly, with the first and the lastletter still in place and the others
shuffled at random.
How can you read so heavily distorted prose? The answer is ‘image
matching’. Over decades of reading practise, your word brain has
accumulated mental word-images of tens of thousands of words. When
you read a text, you don’t spell the words, you see them. Each word is a
pictogram like a toilet sign in airports, and slight variations of the
pictogram are irrelevant for comprehension. That is why our ‘cnortuy
gril’ immediately evokes the correct image – and why proof-reading is
so subtle.
The Word Brain
30
Reading a book is like seeing a movie. Word-images pass across our
brain screen at a speed of 5 and more words per second and create
mental images of things and events. We were too young – 4 to 8 years
old – when we acquired this skill, and our memory of this seminal event
has faded away. So please sit back for a few seconds, close your eyes
and realise what an extraordinary ability reading is: recognising and
endowing with meaning, effortlessly and within a fraction of a second,
any single subset of 50,000 and more words that inhabit your word
brain. This is not a mean feat. You possess this ability because you are
the owner of the most complex structure in the universe that has
resulted from hundreds of millions of years of evolution: the human
brain.
Being the heir of universe’s top luxury product is not the entire story,
though. Unconscious reading, with  your eyes flying over a text at
speeds of almost a line per second, cannot be acquired in a few months.
Instead, it takes decades of training totune up your brain to high-speed
reading. At present, you read faster than you did at the age of 20; at 20,
you read faster than at 15; at 15 fasterthan at 10; at 10 faster than at 8,
and so on. Reading only one hour every day exposes your brain to some
20,000 words, or 7 million words per year. In people with a higher
education, reading is the most trained single skill, whatever their
profession.
What does that mean for language learning? Well, if reading is like
seeing a movie, you certainly must absorb a huge number of new word-images, and as with listening, somesegmenting is needed. Take the
word parachlorophenylalanine. For scientists with a basic knowledge in
chemistry, the meaning and pronunciation of the word is as evident as
the meaning and pronunciation of love and peace. Meanwhile, non-scientists will return to first-grade spelling techniques and ask
themselves where the syllables start and where they end. Every
language has thousands of these complicated words. Remember the
examples from the Words chapter (abracadabrantesque et al.) or take a
Reading
31
look at words such as leszállópálya, megfélemlítõ, megfigyelõképesség,
újjáépített terület. They are from Hungarian, one of the more granitic
European languages, and unequivocally signal ‘I don’t want you to
learn me’. Does that translate into another 1,500 hours of training for
your eyes? Relax, you are not in for another brain-breaking Via
Dolorosa, this is all a false alarm. Reading is different from listening
because training your reading skills comes as a bonus of the obligatory
learning of the 5,000 to 15,000 words. In order to digest such a huge
amount of words, you must read them – again and again – and check
them – again and again. These lengthy repetitions are sufficient to
create all the word images you need for super-fast reading.
Please note that even with Hungarian or Finnish or Basque, you are still
on home ground. Decades of reading the Latin alphabet have
conditioned your brain for high-speed deciphering of words from any
language that uses this alphabet, even roadblocks such as leszállópálya
and megfigyelõképesség. Exactly how familiar and how tremendously
important the Latin alphabet is becomes evident if you complicate
things a step further and selecta language with equally unfamiliar
words + a different alphabet + the irritating habit of skipping half of the
vowels. The result: Arabic. In Arabicyou will discover, much to your
dismay, how often you need to know the function of a word within a
sentence – is it a noun? is it a verb? isit the active or passive voice of a
verb? – before you can infer the correct pronunciation. As a
consequence, reading, which is supposed to support you during the
learning process, is frequently of no help at all, because you actually
need to know what you are learning before you can read it. The
previous sentence sounds complicated, doesn’t it? Well, that’s exactly
how complicated reading and learning a language is when 50 percent of
the vowels are left to the beginners’guesswork. Anticipate one to three
years of extra study time.
The challenge of different writing systems is indeed immense. (Chinese
is another example, but not Russian as this modifies only some
characters.) Imagine painting the façade of a building while standing on
a solid scaffold – the Latin alphabet is exactly this solid scaffold. Now
The Word Brain
32
imagine painting the same building without a scaffold, just attached to a
rope fixed to the chimney. The second procedure is clearly more
exhausting and agonisingly time-consuming. Just to make sure that you
are not left with any false delusions, add the following facts: a) written
Arabic is spoken nowhere except on TV and at meetings or
presentations; b) in order to speak everyday Arabic you have to learn
additional country dialects which in practise amounts to learning
another language (like learning Italian once you have learned Spanish);
c) in Arabic-speaking countries, few provinces and cities have the
fascination and vibrations to inspire dreams of fabulous 6-month full-immersion experiences such as Tuscany, Dordogne, Seville, Berlin,
Edinburgh, Freiburg, Orgosolo, Amsterdam, Stockholm, or Lisbon –
and you swiftly realise that you need to have pretty good reasons to start
learning Arabic. In any case don’t wait until you are 50.
Let’s get back to your reading abilities and define the learning material
you will use. I recommend that you start studying classical language
manuals. Among the dozens of existing manuals, only a few are
outstanding, and selecting good manuals is like crossing a minefield.
Ask your teacher for help. In particular, make sure that the manual has
word lists and comes with a CD-ROM. Personally, I prefer books
without pictures and drawings because words are all you need (check
www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations.php). Neither the
Bible nor the Torah nor the Koran comes with pictures.
As with audio files, be prepared for repetitive learning cycles. Read the
chapters of your manual 5, 10, or15 times, until you feel comfortable
with every sentence and every word. You will soon find out that reading
is easier than listening, because it does not require high-speed
processing of several words per second. Instead, while deciphering a
text, you can take all the time you need until you understand everything
– lingering on single words, going back and forth through a sentence,
leaping between paragraphs. Remember that in educated people, most
words enter the brain via the eyes; they are not the result of babbling,
Reading
33
chattering, gossiping, or palavering, but of intense reading at school, at
university or during professional occupation.
After the first manual, you may consider studying a second one, but
then you should change strategy. An appropriate strategy for adults is to
read what they usually read in their native language. If you are a
philosopher, read books about philosophy, if you are a scientist, read
books about science. Stick to what motivates you most. Later, you will
discover that words can be divided into three great areas: 1) Language
of science, documentaries, and media; 2) Language of prose;
3) Colloquial language (comic strips, etc.). These areas certainly
overlap, but only to a certain degree. So even if you understand
99 percent of the words presented ina collection of newspaper articles,
this percentage will substantially drop when you start reading novels or
sources that contain colloquial language. Diversify your text sources.
Figure 3.1: Preparing your dictionary for fast word-finding.
Spanish dictionary, 2250 g.
The Word Brain
34
Whatever source you start with – science, novels, or comic strips – you
will need a good dictionary to look up new words. A good dictionary is
a heavy book that weighs at least one kilogram and has a minimum of
1000 pages. Over the years, you will see that it is the single most
important book of your language project. Buy it soon and mark the
pages that correspond to the individual letters (see Figure 3.1). This
simple manipulation will save youprecious time; after just days of
training, you will find single words in less than 10 seconds.
Now take a text of your choice, underline the new words, search for
them in your dictionary, write themdown in a neat, hand-written list or
in a computer document, and learn them. Don’t forget to mark the
words you have looked up (Figure 3.2). Even if you are not going to
learn a whole dictionary by heart, youmay decide one day to repeat the
words that you are supposed to know.
Figure 3.2: Working with dictionaries, highlighting consulted words.
Reading
35
Now read, read, and read. But... don’t neglect the daily listening
training prescribed in the previouschapter! Be careful: over several
years, steady reading practise can lead to a strange syndrome that is
highly prevalent among academics. These people are fluent at reading
the scientific literature about medicine, philosophy, music, or philology,
but don’t understand a person talking about the very same topics and
using the very same words. Their eyes work, but their ears don’t.
The diagnosis? Eye-ear dissociation.The cause? Inappropriate training
of the auditory brain cortex (see the previous Listeningchapter). People
can be perfect readers, but, at the same time, poor listeners. (The
contrary – the ears understand, but the eyes cannot read – exists too:
illiteracy.) To neuroscientists, this is not surprising; eyes and ears are
different entry ports for distinct elaboration and storage sites in the
brain. Training the visual brain areas at the back of the head (see Figure
3.3) has little influence on the performance of the auditory brain areas.
Surprise: what seemed to be a single task – learning a new language –
turns out to be a multi-task project for your word brain. In the Speaking
chapter below, you will find yet another construction site.
Figure 3.3: Reading words: High activity in the visual brain cortex.
Adapted from Raichle, 1988. Used with permission.
The Word Brain
36
Let’s summarise:
•  After decades of exercise, you have developed amazing reading
skills. At full speed, reading compares 5 and more words per
second with a huge library of word-images stored in our brain.
•  These skills are of no use for languages with different writing
systems such as Arabic or Chinese.
•  After finishing your first language manuals, start reading articles or
books that you would normally read in your native language.
•  Over the years, your dictionarywill become your single most
important language book.
•  Beware of eye-ear dissociation.
The last three chapters – Words, Listening, Reading – may suggest that
language learning can be done without teachers. As a matter of fact, for
the most time-intensive tasks, such as word learning and speech
recognition, teachers are of little help. However, words alone don’t
make up human language. You need rules to arrange them in sentences,
and, in the process, some words will be modified. Grammar is the
collection of these rules. Fortunately, the number of grammar rules is
limited, and if you have some experience with grammar, you could also
decide to go on your own. If you haven’t, you need good language
teachers. Finding them can be a nightmare.
Workload after Chapter 1–3
Due to the heavy exposure to written words during vocabulary learning,
no extra time is needed to develop fast-reading abilities. For the present
chapter, we just need to book 100 hours for the text study of one or two
language manuals. Your total workload is now
700 to 1,700 hours
37
4
Teachers
Everyone agrees that there are goodphysicians and bad physicians. To
make that difference can be vital – your health is at stake, and
sometimes your life. With languages, the stakes are evidently more
humble, but still considerable. Learning languages is time-consuming,
and we are reluctant to put our precious time and motivation into the
hands of bad teachers.
It is beyond the purpose of thisshort introduction to shed an
unfavourable light on deficient language teachers, but let me
nonetheless warn you about two types you might wish to avoid. The
first group comprises teachers who do not really know what they do, as
language teaching is one of the rareprofessional activities where people
are allowed to teach a process which they haven’t experienced
themselves. When a surgeon teaches a colleague how to perform a
cardiac bypass operation, he has done this type of operation hundreds of
times. See one, do one, teach one – this rule is sacrosanct in most
disciplines, but not in language teaching. If you book a vacation to
attend English classes in private schools in London or French classes in
Paris or Spanish classes in Seville,the odds are substantial that your
teachers will have a perfect knowledge of one, but only one language –
their own – and will themselves  never have been through the
cumbersome process of mastering another language. The risk of
encountering such ‘monoglot’ teachers is particularly high in English-speaking countries. Spontaneously, a series of questions come to mind:
Do these teachers know what it means to absorb 5,000 to 15,000 words?
Can they imagine how it feels to nail 20 to 50 new words into your
The Word Brain
38
brain every day? Do theyhave the faintest idea of how demanding it is
to penetrate the dense thicket of high-speed human speech? Do they
simply presage the thrill of discovering a new language? In summary,
do they have an appropriate comprehension of the complications and
implications of language learning? They probably don’t. So if your
language classes in Paris, London, Berlin, or Seville, are meant to be
more than meeting and mingling opportunities with people from all
over the world, make sure that your teachers are polyglots. You
wouldn’t want to learn sex with nuns and priests.
The second group of teachers you should avoid are those who do their
job because they didn’t get the job they wanted. Their first choice was
perhaps to be a musician, a philosopher, or a writer. But life is
unpredictable, dreams don’t always materialise, and in order to make a
living, some people accept the role of a language teacher. After a short
period of frustration, most of these ‘against-their-will’ teachers will
settle into their new life and excel in their profession. However, a
minority do not, and will lack the essential skills for teaching a
language: energy and enthusiasm. While in other professionals, for
example real estate agent, woodcutter, or mortician, a lack of
enthusiasm may be irrelevant; in teaching it is not. Don’t agree to
content yourself with anything less than passionate and wholehearted
teachers. You have decided to becomefluent in another language, you
are ready to invest years, and your desire is to achieve the top.
Frustrated teachers are infectiousindividuals who could contaminate
what is one of your most valuable resources: motivation. Protect it.
In order to get a clearer picture of language teaching and, consequently,
of how to avoid bored and boring teachers, let’s address a list of the
services teachers should provide. Traditionally, language teachers
trained and checked six core competences: vocabulary, understanding
of speech, production of speech, reading, writing, and grammar. As we
have seen in the Wordschapter, vocabulary training is inherently a
lonely job because nobody except yourself can transfer thousands of
words into your brain. In what is the most important single task of
language learning, teachers can do nothing for you.
Teachers
39
The second most important task isspeech recognition. Until relatively
recently, language teachers were often the only individuals at hand to
produce human speech in another language. That has changed radically.
In modern times, human speech is ubiquitous, at every corner of your
life and in any language you want. Asa consequence, audio CDs, audio
books, Internet news, and TV, have supplanted teachers as prime speech
sources.
The impact of teachers on the third,fourth and fifth tasks – speaking,
reading, and writing – is equally limited. Writing comes as a bonus of
reading, reading as a bonus of wordlearning, and as you will see in the
Speakingchapter, correct pronunciation comes as a bonus of hundreds
of hours of listening. Grammar istherefore the only domain where
language teachers will continue to play a certain role in the future.
Grammar – the climax of excruciatingly boring language lessons, and a
torture for teens? As an adult, please consider grammar rehabilitation.
Grammar consists of a fairly limited number of rules that tell you how
to modify words and how to arrange them to form correct and beautiful
sentences. More importantly, a big chunk of grammar – verbs such as to
talk, to love, to play, etc. – can be outsourced to pure memory exercises,
which reduces the duration of pure grammar lessons even further. As
these verbs are immensely important in many languages, let’s dedicate a
couple of pages to it.
Verbs usually denote action (learn, listen, read), occurrence (forget,
decompose), or a state of being (love, exist). To English native-speakers, they do not seem impressivebecause, with the exception of a
small number of irregular verbs such as go-went-gone, write-wrote-written, etc., the English verb systemis disarmingly simple. All we can
press out of to wantare two variations, wants and wanted. Just put a
few auxiliaries around them – have, shall, and will – and you will have
created all the tenses and moods you need.
The Word Brain
40
Other languages are more complicated. The Italian equivalent, volere,
needs 6 different forms... just for the present tense:
I want voglio
you want vuoi
he/she/it wants vuole
we want vogliamo
you want volete
they want vogliono
And this is only the beginning. Dig deeper into volere, and you rapidly
discover a whole nest of descendants: volevo, volevi, voleva, volevamo,
volevate, volevano, volli, volesti, volle, volemmo, voleste, vollero, vorrò,
vorrai, vorra, vorremo, vorrete, vorranno, vorrei, vorresti, vorrebbe,
vorremmo, vorreste, vorrebbero, voglia, vogliano, volessi, volesse,
volessimo, voleste, volessero. Surprise: verbs are icebergs, and what you
see in dictionaries, for example ‘baciare – to kiss’, ‘volere – to want’,
‘fare’ – to do’, ‘andare – to go’, are just the tips. Fortunately, there are
strict rules which govern verbs (adiscipline which grammarians call
‘conjugation’); and with the exception of some irregular verbs, all
variations of a verb can be easilydeduced. Unfortunately, easily does
not mean fast, and lack of speed isdisastrous for fluent understanding
and fluent speaking. The solution? The same repetitive training as in
word training: repeated exposure, and heavy nailing. With an additional
‘word load’ of generally below 1,000, this will not demand more than
50 hours of extra training. Search the Internet for free software. Free
verb training for German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French is
available at http://poliglottus.com/verbs.htm.
Now that you have outsourced the study of verb forms to autonomous
learning, grammar per seshrinks to a set of about 30 problems to settle.
If you followed my prescriptions in the first chapters – 1) Learn 20 or
more new words per day; 2) Listen to human speech for at least one
hour per day – all I would ask you atthis point is to rapidly assemble
the knowledge that is needed to  recognise  the most frequent
Teachers
41
grammatical structures. Just recognising grammar requires 10 times less
training than producing grammar. Even allowing for a few tricky rules,
you will be electrified to acquire these passive skills in a few weeks and
to discover that grammar is a fairly manageable thing. You will be
happy to learn:
ƒ  how to use nouns (boy, girl), adjectives (tall, small, pretty), verb
tenses (I go, I went, I have gone, I shall go, etc.), and a limited
number of pronouns (I, you, he, she,me, him, her, my, your, his; to
name only a few);
ƒ  the order in which to arrange the words in a sentence;
ƒ  how to count and to ask questions;
ƒ  how to localise things in time and space.
Important advice: Make sure that you receive grammar lessons in your
native language. Reject all ‘monoglot’ proposals such as being taught
Spanish grammar by a Spanish teacher who exclusively speaks Spanish.
Don’t complicate your life. Your nativelanguage is by far the best tool
for grasping and understanding new concepts.
Let me narrate an episode that mostclearly gives the tone of future
grammar teaching. The star of the tale is T. K., a friend from medical
school who is now a professor of immunology at a German university.
A couple of decades ago, T. came tovisit me in Sardinia and prepare
part of his final medical exams. After studying surgery textbooks for
five hours per day, he accepted the challenge of adding another
three hours of intensive Italian lessons. As I had just developed a small
piece of software on the mythicalCommodore 64 (see the subsequent
Internet release at www.Poliglottus.com), I was happy to test it on a
complaisant guinea pig. As T. had a history of learning French and
Latin at school, the prescription for the 3-week course went as follows:
1,300 words + 10 tenses for 16 verbs + a 10 hour grammar overview on
two subsequent days. The grammar lessons were focused on simple
recognition of the most relevant grammatical structures.
The Word Brain
42
As expected, T. produced only rudimentary Italian sentences at the end
of his learning vacation; however,he was now able to decipher a
newspaper. The experiment nicely showed the feasibility of a fast
introduction to grammar, and also opened the perspective of reading
newspapers or magazines, which is clearly more enjoyable and
motivating than reading language manuals.
Now that grammar teaching will slowly shift away from snail-pace
speed to repetitive rounds of ultra-fastoverviews, let us try and redefine
the part that teachers can play inyour language project. In today’s
environment, the best role for a language teacher is probably that of a
coach. Depending on your previous exposure to your native and
subsequent languages, your coach will prepare an individual time
schedule for your project; recommendbooks, podcasts, audio books,
and broadcasts; provide the first roundof grammar; advise you on how
to manage your daily word quota; teach you how to check that new
words have arrived in your long-term memory; and demonstrate
common pronunciation pitfalls. For the first few weeks, you should plan
daily encounters or two or three lessons per week. Thereafter, reduce to
weekly encounters. Finally, after the third or fourth month, one or two
meetings per month will be sufficient. During the entire course, check
the motivating power of your coach. If you have the feeling that he
doesn’t motivate you or, worse, makes you feel like a donkey, fire him.
Finding good coaches can be more difficult than finding good doctors,
because the reputation of teachers isless transparent: doctors operate
occluded heart vessels in hours and treat syphilis within weeks. Hence,
successes and failures are rapidly visible, which is not the case for
language teachers. But doctors and teachers have a common trait:
overmedication. Many doctors will prescribe antihypertensives, statins,
or antibiotics – to name just a few – even in situations where reduction
of weight, diet change, or bed rest, would be equally appropriate. Most
doctors neglect prevention. Instead ofinsisting on banning tobacco, soft
drinks, or heavily salted prepared meals, they again prescribe drugs.
The reason is simple: as a doctor, you earn more money prescribing
drugs than advocating a healthy lifestyle. In terms of the
Teachers
43
workload:income ratio, the best patients are asymptomatic and
relatively healthy patients with a chronic condition (diabetes, high
cholesterol, hypertension) who need to renew their prescription every
month for the rest of their life.
Do you see the parallel with language teachers? In any case, reject
‘overteaching’.
Let us summarise:
1.  Avoid bored and boring teachers.
2.  Insist on an initial quick grammar overview. Grammar is not a
black hole. The number of problems you need to resolve is finite.
3.  Opt for the coach model and limit the number of lessons. First
month: 10-20 lessons; second and third month: 4 lessons; fourth
month and later: 1 to 2 lessons.
4.  Make sure that your coach explains the grammar in your native
language.
After leaving behind the complex topic of language teachers, you will
cautiously approach your next step: producing intelligible sounds in
your new language. Learning, listening, reading – hundreds of hours,
thousands of words. If you followed myadvice to study in silence, time
has passed. Now the day has come where you want to express yourself.
Speaking is fundamental to humans. Do it.
Workload after Chapter 1–4
The verb training and the first rounds of grammar will not take more
than 100 hours. Your total workload is now
800 to 1,800 hours
The Word Brain
44
45
5
Speaking
The day you utter your first words ina new language is not always a
happy day. Most languages have unfamiliar sounds, and to reproduce
them faithfully takes time, sometimesyears. If you have more than one
new sound in a single word, the probability to get it right approaches
zero. Take the one-second sequence ﺮﻴѧѧѧѧѧѧѧﺨﻟا حﺎﺒѧѧѧѧѧѧѧﺻ– good morning
(pronounce SabaH el-khair). In a single second, you are supposed to
produce three sounds that are totally unfamiliar to most people from
Western Europe. The odds are against you.
Let’s return to your childhood again. How did you circumnavigate the
obstacles that visibly impede fluentspeech in adults? From what we
saw in the Listeningchapter, part of the solution was to postpone
speech, and to just listen to the sounds of the world. It took
approximately 5 to 7 months beforeyou started to babble and utter
meaningless sounds such as ‘ba-ba-ba-ba-ba’, ‘ka-bu-ba-da-mi’; and
only when you reached the age of12 months were you ready to
experiment with real words and two-word sentences, generally in order
to express desire: ‘More juice’, ‘Want cookie’. You took your time
before wrapping your baby thoughts in chunks of language.
Anatomy and physiology conspired. They made it easier to let sounds
come into your brain than to let them out. To let human speech in, all
you need is an eardrum, three tiny bones in your middle ear, and the so-called cochlea. These structures amplify the sounds, and transduce them
to electrical signals for the brain where speech segmentation and
interpretation immediately ensue. Thisis a straightforward process, and
The Word Brain
46
apart from your ears and your brain,nothing else is involved. In
comparison, speaking requires sophisticated mechanics. To proclaim
the resolutions of your brain to the world, you have to co-ordinate
dozens of muscles in your larynx, pharynx, neck, cheeks, mouth, and
tongue. Putting all these pieces into the perfect position in a minimum
amount of time is a remarkableacrobatic performance, and even
children need years of exercise. In fact, only at around the age of ten do
they start speaking like adults (Figure 5.1).
Figure 5.1: Pronouncing words: High activity in the precentral motor cortex.
Adapted from Raichle, 1988. Used with permission.
From the very beginning, comprehension has a head start over speech
production – when you stutter your first barely intelligible sounds, you
already possess a vast passive repertoire of hundreds of words. The
disparity between good language comprehension and poor language
production usually persists throughout a lifetime. Many people may one
day read Thomas Mann, Hemingway, or Voltaire, but only a few will
develop their writing skills.
Speaking skills have another disturbing characteristic: they are subject
to heavy erosion. Stop speaking a second language for a decade or
more, and even simple words such as ‘Goodbye’ are suddenly
irretrievable. At the same time, listening and reading skills are hardly
impaired. It seems as if once you acquire the ability to understand with
native-like proficiency, you have acquired it for life, like riding a
Speaking
47
bicycle. The speaking abilities, on the contrary, would need continuous
stimulation to be maintained.
There are two explanations for thisphenomenon. The first is quantity.
Unless you are incorrigibly logorrheic, listening is the predominant
function mode of your word brain. As soon as you find yourself in a
group of at least three people, the odds are that you will listen rather
than speak. The bigger the group, the smaller your contribution. In
some situations – at school, university, or during meetings at work –
you could listen for hours, and nobody would expect you to contribute
more than a word or two. As a resultof years of listening, the part of
your word brain that processes soundsis better trained than the part that
produces speech.
The second reason is diversity. The words put into your brain are more
diverse than the words coming out of it. You have only one life to tell –
your own – while your co-humans make you listen to hundreds of
different lives in different places and in different circumstances. You
know words annunciated by fascists, fundamentalists and populists that
you wouldn’t want to ever pass your lips. You know hundreds or
thousands of words from listening topriests, rabbis, and imams, but,
again, you would not want to use themyourself because, as a scientist,
you feel that God and the gods exist because our ancestors had the
wisdom to create them. This list can go on and on, including people
from different professions, geographical regions, age groups, etc.
Because of the huge variability of human biographies – sometimes
disgustingly ugly, but most often creative, stimulating, and refreshing –
you know thousands of words you will never utter. What you know of
the world is more than what you can say about it.
(Do we need other explanations such as brain-specific mechanisms
developed over evolutionary time,which make sound memories more
lasting than speech-producing skills? Imagine living the life of a distant
ancestor 100,000 years ago. How would you value listening skills with
respect to speaking skills? What could be more useful for survival, the
correct interpretation of the sounds around you – ‘Is that a wolf? A
The Word Brain
48
tiger? A lion? A bear?’ – or the production of philosophically inspired
sounds? But this discussion is beyond the frame of a short language
guide.)
In the Listeningchapter, I recommended that you observe a few months
of mystical silence. I promised you that you would partly avoid
producing stuttering and ungracefulspeech. Now the moment has come
to step out into the arena. If  you are abroad, every day presents
hundreds of opportunities to speak tofriends and strangers. If, instead,
you are at home, listen to your favourite language CDs and repeat the
now familiar words and sentences. Imitate the sounds, in particular the
length of the vowels and the melody ofthe sentences. Later, repeat the
sentences in real-time, with an interval of just one second. You will be
amazed at how the sounds soon start to come out of your mouth.
Repeating the lessons of your language manuals will take you some
weeks. Again, don’t feel uncomfortable repeating a language CD for the
14
th
time. Thereafter, use the sameprocedure – listening to and
reproducing speech with a one-secondinterval – with sentences from
other sources such as podcasts, audio books, or TV. In the beginning,
real-life speech will be so fast that you will reproduce only fragments of
sentences. Persist. With time, the fragments will become longer.
Have you noticed that I have again limited free expression? I suggested
that you repeatthe sentences of language manuals, TV, and audio
books. In other words, I recommended that you do not translatefrom
your native language. The reason? Translations are risky for a language
novice because they generate a hugenumber of errors. You might get
accustomed to these errors and end upbeing unable to say what is right
and what is wrong. Whenever possible,it is thus preferable that you use
words and sentences that you have already heard being said by other
people. At this early stage, don’t be ashamed to be a parrot.
While transmuting into a parrot is generally feasible, another
fundamental conversion may be out of reach for some individuals.
Imagine that you step into one of the Paris boulevard restaurants and
order an overprized micro-bottle of mineral water and a dish of
Speaking
49
spaghetti bolognese. (Fatal error,by the way. The art of al-dente
cooking hasn’t arrived in France yet.) What do you think you looked
like when you ordered your meal? Tobe honest, you didn’t look like a
weathered adult, in control of life, family and career, but rather like a
clumsy and gawky creature or bungling adolescent, struggling to find
your way in the world. Alas! That’s the way it is: during your first steps
in a new language, at best, you regress to a kind of cutesy childhood, at
worst, you are a weirdo, a nobody, an untouchable.
Some people perceive this as a highprice for familiarising themselves
with other languages and decide that they are not willing to pay the
price. They don’t want, at any cost, to look clumsy, awkward, or inept.
That is, of course, the end of the dream of speaking another language.
Without going through the baby/stranger/klutzy stage, nobody will ever
learn to speak another language. All of a sudden, we realise that
discipline, dedication and perseverance alone are not enough. To pierce
the walls of other languages, you need more extensive qualities. They
vary from individual to individualand comprise a certain sense of
comedy and self mockery; or, in some cases, the determination to break
with suffocating families and to betray the ‘family language’; or simply
semi-schizophrenic prospecting of imaginary variants of yourself. We
begin to understand that the true reasons for ‘not having talent for
foreign languages’ may not be related to memory or grammar or
laziness, but might well be psychological in nature.
I assume that you are willing to pay the price, so that your speaking
skills will gradually improve and accelerate. Speak slowly and
articulate. You will notice that over the years (yes, we are now talking
about years and not about weeks ormonths), speech production will
become increasingly unconscious.Even your foreign accent will
eventually soften, although probably never disappear. Don’t consider
this a problem. If you choose the right words and fold them in perfect
grammar, nobody will ever dare blame you. As in other areas, content is
more important than packaging,. Aslong as you speak fluently, an
accent is not debilitating, on the contrary. In today’s world, especially
in times of peace, some accents are truly charming.
The Word Brain
50
We have almost reached the end of your inventory. To go through the
process of language acquisition, you will
1.  learn 5,000 to 15,000 words in about 500 to 1,500 study hours;
2.  train your ear and associated brain regions to perform real-time
speech processing;
3.  train your eyes and associated brain regions to perform fast reading;
4.  train your vocal tract and associated brain regions to produce
intelligible speech;
5.  train your grammar sense during successive fast overviews.
With so much information to be crammed into your brain, you might
wonder how memory works. Knowing the operating mode of a machine
can be helpful before turning it on. And another question surely springs
to mind: Is there some sort of talent involved in language learning? Do
some people do better than others? Before summarizing the learning
strategies for the monumental taskof absorbing thousands of words,
let’s dig into your memory.
Workload after Chapter 1–5
Due to heavy exposure to human speech during your CD and/or TV
training (see chapter 2), once you start speaking, progress will be fast.
For your initial training sessions, we generously allocate 50 extra hours.
Your total workload is now
850 to 1,850 hours
51
6
Memory
In your native language, your brain recognises – and endows with
meaning – any conceivable subset of50,000+ words within fractions of
a second. That is in stark contrastto what you will experience with
subsequent languages where initially nothing ever happens in
milliseconds. Imagine that, during your first trip to Paris, a friendly
local takes you on a one-hour stroll from Notre Dame to the Louvre,
then northwards up to the Sacré-Cœur hill, and, finally, down to Pigalle.
If I put you back at Notre Dame a few months later, you would
probably find your way to Pigalle alone, recalling places, streets,
crossroads, shops, and buildings. It is hard to believe that this wealth of
information is approximately equivalent to learning 10 miserable words.
Why does it take adults so long tolearn languages while young children
seem to do so whilst playing, laughing and having a great time? Do we
all, shortly after infancy, suffer a subtle form of partial Alzheimer’s
disease? Or are adult brains tuned to find their way in urban jungles
rather than in word jungles?
Let’s take a glass. Imagine that I put my finger on it and ask you what it
is. You would answer ‘glass’, instantly, without hesitating. The word
pours out of your mouth as water pours out of a spring. It does so
because ‘glass’ is woven into your brain in many different ways: you
have a mental image of a glass; you have a memory trace for the spoken
word; you have a memory trace for the written word; you know that the
word has 5 letters, that it starts with a gand ends with an s; you have a
motor recipe for pronouncing the word; and, on demand, you can recall
hundreds of memories associated with the word – glasses raised to
The Word Brain
52
celebrate births, marriages, and anniversaries, or a glass smashed
against a wall. ‘Glass’ is embedded in a dense web of events and things
in time and space. Figure 6.1 shows one such web. Any single of your
50,000+ native words is intertwined in multiple locations of your brain,
floating in a sea of meanings, facts,and emotions. As soon as you wake
up in the morning, all brain words go into stand-by mode, waiting to
jump into consciousness as soon astheir equivalents – written or spoken
words – enter the brain via your eyesor ears. Grown over decades, this
vast network of word webs is the most precious asset of your life.
Figure 6.1. A tiny part of a single word web. Adapted from
www.lexipedia.com/english/brain. Used with permission.
To manage word webs – and other tasks, of course – your brain relies
on complex and compact machinery. First, it contains between 10–100
(10
11
) billion neurones, which are the main information-processing
Memory
53
cells. Second, these neurones are connected to neurones in the vicinity
or to distant neurones. In young adults, the long distance fibre tracts
total around 176,000 km in length – that is roughly half way to the
moon. Third, each of the 10
10
to 10
11
neurones is linked to other
neurones by up to 10,000 so-called synapses. These are highly
specialised interfaces where information is passed from axons – slim
extensions that carry the electric signals generated by the neurones – to
dendrites, which are highly branched tree-like structures that receive the
signals originated in other neurones(Figure 6.2). The resulting picture
is majestic: one billion synaptic connections in a single cubic millimetre
of specialised brain tissue, up to 1000 trillion (10
15
) in a human brain.
One thousand TeraSynapses – that is the number of stars in ten
thousand Milky Ways.
Figure 6.2. A single neurone, its dendritesand its multiple synapses (orange dots).
Yet the most surprising detail is still to come: synapses are not carved in
stone. They come and go as their support, dendritic spines, appear and
disappear. These spines are tiny protrusions from a neurone’s dendrite.
If you teach a mouse to reach out withits forelimb to a single seed (see
movie at http://hiv.net/link.php?id=20), dendritic spines form as rapidly
The Word Brain
54
as within one hour.
4
Most of these new spines will regress again, but
some are preserved and, when stabilised during subsequent training,
leave minute but permanent marks on cortical connections.
5
The
resulting change in circuitry is most likely the anatomical substrate for
long-term memory storage. The resulting plasticity of the brain can
even be observed macroscopically, for example in London taxi drivers
from pre-GPS times, who developed a hypertrophy of the brain region
that is involved in spatial orientation
6
, or in violin players who have an
enlargement of the left hand representation in the sensorimotor cortex.
7
The rate of spine erosion is astonishing. In one study, 96–98 percent of
newly formed spines vanished within days, and less than 1 percent
persisted for months.
8
Using 20 percent of all the oxygen you breathe,
your brain is constantly sorting out newly received information,
enforcing what is important and discarding what is irrelevant.
9
The
extent of the deconstruction going on in your brain was nicely shown by
19
th
century experiments that measured the time of learning – and
subsequent forgetting – of chains of 2,300 nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant syllables such as KOJ,BOK, and YAT. The results were
sobering. After 24 hours, 70 percent was gone (Figure 6.3). Happily,
you will learn meaningful word pairs rather than nonsense syllables, for
example, agua–eau, vino–vin, queso–fromage, and should therefore
obtain better results after 24 hours. However, at Day 31, you might not
perform much better than the memory pioneers more than 100 years
ago. Brain physiology isn’t prone to instant word learning. In word
jungles, progress is slow.
In order to protect young spinesfrom erosion, schedule multiple
training sessions. You will note that, before getting fixed into lifelong
memory, words pass subsequent degrees of knowing. At the weakest
stage, you don’t even remember thatyou have seen a word; however,
you would recognise it when presented in a list of words. Later, you
would say that you once knew a word, but cannot remember it. At a
subsequent stage, a word would be onthe tip of your tongue, yet decline
to come out. Finally, you remember it, first after seconds and then
milliseconds.
Memory
55
Figure 6.3. Forgetting curve. Adapted from Hermann Ebbinghaus, Memory: a contribution
to experimental psychology, 1885/1913.
For our immediate purposes, we will define knowing a wordas
successful recall after one month of non-exposure. Only occasional
words will get there after the first encounter. The vast majority – alas! –
will have to be subjected to the long process of multiple rehearsals
through reading, hearing, or conscious repetitions. Never forget: baby
memory traces are volatile. Imagine your word brain as a castle
protected by high walls and ruled by the lord of the castle, who has
issued unambiguous instructions to the sentries at the gate: no entry
without multiple petitions and repetitions! Memory’s suspicious
gatekeepers want convincing evidence that a word deserves residence in
lifelong memory. Be prepared to comeback as many as 5, 10, or even
20 times, to plead the cause for every single word. Take comfort from
the idea that subsequent learning rounds require less time and produce
The Word Brain
56
better results, allowing the learning sessions to be spaced out. If you
meet a word for the first time on Day 0, repeat it on Day 1, 3, 6, 10, 17,
and 31. Figure 6.4 illustrates these ‘spaced repetitions’ and where they
will take you. Be prepared that the sum of all the repetitions may total
around 4 to 6 minutes per word.
Figure 6.4. Learning curve (red), constructed from truncated forgetting curves.
Dark blue: Initial decline in memory performance.
Light blue: Long-term resultwithout further repetition.
Green: Repetition putting the retention rate back to 100 percent.
We realise that the word learningis hopelessly inadequate to describe
what you are going to do. First, learning does not reflect the subsequent
degrees of knowing. Second, learning implicitly suggests forgetting.
How many things did we once know and have since forgotten? What is
fine for physics and higher mathematics, most of which is irrelevant in
ordinary life, is intolerable for languages where you need every bit of
information for the rest of your life. I am therefore reluctant to tell you
that you learnwords when, in fact, I mean that you need to store them
Memory
57
in your word brain in a fairly definitive way. You must etch new words
and carve and pound and burn and nail them. The alternative for
learning should express that a word willstay in your brain for decades:
it may corrode and slowly become weaker, but it will nonetheless resist
and surrender only to arteriosclerosis. Let’s abandon learning,which is
too cushy, and adopt something more physical. Let’s say nailing. The
definition of nailingincludes the three steps oflearning, repeating and
controlling.
How to nail words is an individual affair. If speed is critical, rely on the
tens of thousands of webs that are already firmly anchored in your word
brain (Figure 6.1). All you need to do is to add two pieces of
information to an existing word web: first, how you write a new word
and, second, how to pronounce it. Everything else – knowledge and
memories – is already in place. In practise, you will have to dress a two-column list, putting your new and your native language face to face (see
an example in Table 6.1). Word lists are not perfect – German Brotis
different from French pain, it looks different, it smells different, and it
tastes better – but with 5,000 to 15,000 words to nail, you cannot afford
to lose time with subtleties. The pre-existing webs of your word brain
are a unique support for nailing new words. Use them. If your teacher
tells you that you can do without word lists, fire him.
Table 6.1 Example of a word list for Germans wanting to nail Italian words
Italian German
amare lieben
la pace der Frieden
odiare hassen
la corruzione die Korruption
la morte der Tod
il cavaliere der Reiter
la gioia die Freude
la gente die Leute
The Word Brain
58
* * *
The nailing curve in Figure 6.4 isan approximation, because memory
performance varies between individuals. Every human brain is as
unique as a human face, and differencesin brain structure due to genetic
variation, intrauterine conditions (exposure to tobacco, drugs, and
alcohol), or environmental factors after birth, can affect learning
abilities. Fortunately, most people with a comparable educational
background show differences in memory efficiency that usually vary
from the simple to the double. If yourmemory is better than mine, it
might only take you 30 minutes to nailwhat I could do in an hour. Does
that mean that there are differences intalent? Probably yes, like in other
domains. Are these differences prohibitive? Certainly not!
Instead of comparing yourself to other people, focus on yourself. With
thousands of words in the waiting loop, you certainly wonder if there
are ways to improve your memory performance. Putting it bluntly, the
margins of manoeuvrability are narrow. As a central function of sleep is
to consolidate newly acquired memories for long-term storage, chronic
excellent sleep is probably a good memory enhancer.Physical activity
such as running also appears to improve learning, at least in mice.
10
Even alcohol, if ingested in moderate dosages, improved memory in
rats.
11
We will await further researchbefore making recommendations
on the subject.
Far more promising are measures directed at avoiding adverse
circumstances and protecting the gradual build-up of billions of spines
and synapses. One such circumstanceis higher age. The younger you
are, the easier new languages flow intoyour brain so that the teens and
twenties are clearly the most suitable moments in life. After years of
formal education, the native languageis consolidated and young people
realise that discipline helps to acquire new skills. So if you are under 30
and dream about learning another language, do it now! Never again will
the conditions be so favourable.
Memory
59
Later in life, job and family reduce available study time. Stupidly,
memory performance declines too, first imperceptibly, and after 50,
undeniably. Now, words need more frequent repetitions to crawl into
lifelong memory. In addition, multitasking abilities decrease, leaving
little space for silent rehearsing of new words while simultaneously
following an ongoing conversation. At some moment in life, memory
impairment is such that the goals wedefined earlier – reading essays or
newspapers, understanding TV documentaries, and following day-to-day conversation – are beyond reach.
You will avoid drugs and alcohol at high dosage. Building up valuable
spines during sweaty days just to blow them out of your brain during
vaporous nights is not what you would want to do. Acute alcohol
intoxication (‘black-out’) is fatal for memory, not to speak of chronic
abuse (‘alcohol dementia’). Even episodes of heavy drinking such as a
bottle of wine impair memory performance during the hangover
period.
12
Alcohol, though, is a minor problem compared to a more widespread
abuse: distraction. If you repeatedlysubtract a single-digit number from
a larger number directly after one ofyour nailing sessions, you will see
that your memory is impaired for the 3 to 5 most recently nailed words.
Certain episodes of life are therefore inherently incompatible with
robust learning: death of relativesand friends, illness or hypochondrial
fears, separation or divorce, job loss or financial disaster. Yet even
more dangerous, because it occurs more frequently, is seemingly
innocuous distraction, for example extended surfing tours on the
Internet. Opening social network accounts, reading incoherent
information from disparate sources, writing short messages,
participating in nonsense quizzes,listening simultaneously to music,
downloading videos or doing whatever else you can imagine – such
acrobatic multitasking is heavy stuff for delicate infant spines. Is
excessive networking inappropriate for the gentle formation of lasting
memory traces? Do precious bits of memory get lost in the cold spaces
of the endlessly anonymous Internet? Future studies might show that
The Word Brain
60
participation in ‘social’ networks is inversely correlated with success at
school and university.
Psychostimulant drugs have been used by a certain number of students
on university campuses around the world. Promoters of these drugs
trivialise this practise as ‘memory-enhancing’ or ‘cognitive-enhancing’.
I prefer to use the name that is more appropriate: brain doping. Over a
short period, brain doping appears tobe effective. Several studies have
shown that dexamphetamine 10 mgon 5 consecutive days, enhanced
both the rate of learning and the retention of the words one hour, one
week and one month later.
13
Not unexpectedly, brain doping was
reported to be highest among men, Whites, and fraternity/sorority
members. Brain-doping subjects alsohad higher levels of cigarette
smoking, heavy drinking, risky driving, and abuse of marijuana,
MDMA (Ecstasy), and cocaine.
14
The most commonly cited motives for
illicit use are to enhance concentration, get higher grades, and increase
alertness.
15
Brain doping is not altogether new in academia. A few years ago
I learned that at least one of my colleagues had been using cocaine to
work the long night hours typical for big projects. In 2008, a scientific
magazine published the results of aninformal survey into the use of
brain-doping drugs among its readers.
16
About 20 percent indicated that
they had used drugs to stimulate concentration or memory.
Methylphenidate was the most popular drug (62% of the participants
who reported taking these drugs), followed by modafinil (44%), beta
blockers such as propanolol (15%) and adderall. These figures may
overstate the phenomenon because people who dope their brain are
more likely to participate in thiskind of survey. Nevertheless, the
numbers suggest that among some academics, drug taking is not a
taboo.
Some people are trying to make the very idea of brain doping
fashionable and socially acceptable. The line of reasoning is as follows:
‘We are ready to give brain-doping drugs to adults with
Memory
61
neuropsychiatric disorders and severe memory and concentration
problems. We – physicians and pharmaceutical companies – would also
welcome that these drugs be prescribed more widely for other
psychiatric disorders. We might even be tempted to apply the same
considerations to children and adolescents with hyperactivity disorders.
After all, why boost the brainpower of other people and not your own?
You already take Italian espresso and caffeine-containing soft drinks. If
children at school took these drugs, would you be able to withstand the
pressure to give them to your children?’
Yes, we most certainly would. What’s more, we don’t appreciate
visions of brain doping ‘benefitting society or extending our work
productivity’. Clearly, the future discussion on this topic needs some
regulation. It is too simple for researchers just to declare competing
interests when they are consultants for pharmaceutical companies that
develop or produce brain-doping drugs. It is also too simple for editors
of scientific journals to content themselves with publishing these
conflicts of interest in a footnote. We are not happy that people who
might be biased in their convictionsfashion the discussion about brain
doping. Scientific journals should carefully select the contributors of
articles on this subject. The potential market for brain-doping drugs is
immense – bigger than that of any antidiabetics, anticholesterols,
antihypertensives, antipsychotics and other anti-XXL drugs combined.
Stakes are high, temptations are great, and way too many researchers
are for sale.
If your friends yield to the temptation of using brain-doping drugs,
don’t follow them! Most drugs have adverse effects – a fortiori when
used chronically – and I predict that after decades of use, brain-doping
drugs will be shown to produce devastating effects on the brains of
those who wanted to – in brain-doping parlance – ‘perform better and
enjoy more achievements and success’. By then, editors of prestigious
international journals of science will have issued a public Mea Culpa
for having invited the wrong people to shape the discussion. Some
researchers will face criminal charges. Pharmaceutical firms will be
struggling with expensive action suits.
The Word Brain
62
Let us return to the initial question. Why does it take adults so much
longer than young children to learn new words? We will never be able
to answer this question because stating that ‘children learn languages
faster than adults’ is wrong. If 18-year old young adults know 30,000 to
50,000 words, where did they get them from? Walking in the open air,
listening to birds and enjoying the dance of butterflies? No, they did so
at school, from early in the morning until the afternoon, 9 months a
year, 12 years in a row. Even if education at school and university is
about facts and concepts, word learning is a huge burden of formal
education. Remember those failed oral examinations because the words
were on the tip of your tongue but wouldn’t proceed any further. Part of
your failure? Insufficient word training. You would not become a
physician, a philosopher, or an engineer without acquiring thousands of
new words. How many words did I learn at medical school? Anatomy,
physiology, and biochemistry alone were good for a few thousands, and
the total word count may well havebeen in excess of 10,000. Word
brains fashion our career.
Young children are language machinesbecause they have time. Italian
is exhilaratingly concise when it translates this idea into ‘Non hanno un
cazzo da fare!!’, saying, in essence, that children have pretty few things
to care about except listening and talking. If we, adults, add time to our
language-learning recipe, children immediately lose their head start.
Adults possess vast brain webs ofmeanings, fact, and events. What’s
more, we are capable of focused working for 4, 6, or 8 hours a day and
are terrifyingly effective when we do so. In comparison, young children
stand no chance of competing. Inother words: start a four-year
language training course today, and in four years, I expect you to have
language skills that are clearly superior to those of a 6-year-old child.
Memory
63
Let’s summarise.
1.  Motivated adults learn languages faster than young children.
2.  Exploit the word webs in your brain and nail words with bilingual
lists. Learn new words on day 0 and repeat them on day 1, 3, 6, 10,
17, and 31.
3.  After your nailing sessions, relax and don’t engage in multitasking
activities.
4.  Avoid excessive drinking or taking drugs.
5.  Avoid brain doping.
6.  Teach your children and grandchildren the following motto, by Eric
Kandel, Nobel Laureate: ‘Studying well is, without a doubt, the best
cognitive enhancer for those capable of learning’.
17
You are now ready to proceed to the last chapter. Nailing is about
strategies to cope with the huge number of words you have to burn into
your brain. You are at the beginning of your private Via Dolorosa.
Hoping for a miracle, a golden avenue, or a royal highway? I am sorry,
but you won’t find any of these. However, some pieces of advice will
make the route less thorny and painful. Let’s go for it!
Workload after Chapter 1–6
Your total workload is still
850 to 1,850 hours
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65
7
Nailing
You are now ready for take off. Depending on the language you are
going to learn, 5,000 to 15,000 words are waiting to be nailed into your
brain. The sheer volume of thistask – 500 to 1,500 hours – may
surprise those who had a naïve or romantic perception of speaking other
people’s tongues. Realistic minds find it encouraging that the time
frame of language learning is predictable.
If you are learning ‘just for fun’ and want to limit daily learning to one
hour a day, avoid languages with heavy ‘word loads’. For people from
Western Europe these are, for example, Russian, Turkish, Arabic,
Chinese, or other African and Asian languages. Instead, choose
languages with a more familiar  vocabulary. Please don’t consider
anything less than daily work; alternatively, you could try ‘pulse
treatments’ of three hours twice a week.
If you learn languages at university and, a fortiori, if you contemplate
becoming a language teacher, things are different. Every language is
within your reach because your daily work schedule includes 3 hours of
word nailing plus hours of listening to audio sources. Don’t even
envisage a more modest approach. Nobody wants language teachers
who are not in command of what theyteach, and anything less than 5
hours of daily study is unacceptable. Those not willing to fulfil these
requirements should reconsider their professional choices.
Let’s get to work! First, find outhow many new words you can nail
every day. In extraordinary circumstances – you are abroad, start at
7 o’clock in the morning, and continue until noon before spending the
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66
rest of the day with native speakers – you can nail 50 or even more
words every day. (I happened once to be in such a situation. It was my
first trip to Sardinia, and every night I clearly felt the progress I had
made during the day.) However, in everyday life, and in particular over
periods of months, nailing 50 words per day is a terrific challenge. For a
start, we will consider 20 truly new words a feasible and respectable
long-term goal. ‘New’ means that you cannot guess the meaning of the
word. For English native speakers, words such as
Sicherungsverwahrung,  Grundsatzurteiland  Bundesgerichtshofare
new, whereas evolución, democraciaand economiaare not.
At 400 new words per month, progress is evident week after week.
Rapid word accumulation is paramount for two reasons. First, you need
to recognise the words that your auditory brain cortex will soon be able
to ‘cut out’ from spoken language (see chapter Listening). Second, word
nailing accelerates your transition from an illiterate to a literate person
and brings you closer to the most pressing short-term objective:
reading!As soon as possible, you must move into territory where you
are able to read everything... because reading is the best conceivable
language training! At first, the  process is slow, like deciphering
hieroglyphics, but if you persist, your reading abilities will soon speed
up. Reading is total immersion par excellenceand will soon trigger
quantum leaps in understanding. In one hour, it exposes you to as much
as 20,000 words. For word brains, reading is paradise.
Just to make sure that we understand each other: I don’t find word
nailing thrilling and I can immediately name a hundred activities I
would prefer to do. However, in the early stages of language learning,
there isn’t any alternative for people who like it fast and efficient.
Remember chapter 1: The numberof words you are familiar with
determines your language abilities. The more words you know, the
better you are.
Nailing can be divided into three distinct activities: learning words,
repeating words, and controlling words. Beginners need two-column
lists that put new and native words face to face. At first, read the words
Nailing
67
attentively one after the other. Checkthe spelling, imagine the sound of
the word and make a guess at the resistance a word is likely to oppose:
easy to learn or not? Four-syllable words such as perseverancewill
demand more time than monosyllabics such as and, or, and but. Go
through the list a second and third time, either line by line or leaping at
random from word to word. Push the words around in your mind,
squeeze them, press them, and stretch them. Finally, test yourself by
covering first the right column and then the left column. 100 percent
correct answers is a good score.
As brilliant as 100 percent results are,the first learning session is only
the starting point for a weeklong consolidation process. Remember the
forgetting curve of the Memory chapter. After one day, the percentage
of correct answers is dramaticallydown, and after one month, recall
may be 20 percent or less. As learning is nothing and recalling is
everything, the second pillar of wordnailing is repetition. Find out
which strategy fits you best, eitherdaily repetitions or repetitions on
day 1, 3, 6, 10, 17, and 31, or any other regime. You will soon notice
that after every re-exposure, memory traces are easier to reactivate.
The third pillar of nailing is control. Determine that every single word
has safely arrived in lifelong memory. Very young children ask their
family for help, and a grandmother might interrogate her grandson,
‘Young boy, please tell me what açúcarmeans.’ But what is practical at
an artisan level is impractical for the mass digestion of 5,000 to 15,000
words, and you wouldn’t want to bother your grandmother, mother,
wife, daughter or granddaughter for months or years on end. To check
progress, develop your own system. Revisiting the word lists frequently
and marking ‘difficult’ words for further revision is one such system.
Alternatively, you can use index cards or word trainers on electrical
devices. For an overview on this topic, please see
www.TheWordBrain.com/NailingSystems.php.
Soon, you will face two problems. The first is saturation. At a rate of
20, 30, or 40 new words a day, the time will come when you will feel
like a force-fed French goose. The diagnosis: an acute attack of
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indigestion. The prevention: nail words five days a week and stop
nailing at weekends. If saturation develops nonetheless, pause for an
entire week.
The second problem is more severe: lack of words. Good language
manuals usually present around 2,000 words – that is far short of your
final word score of 5–15,000. This is a miserable situation, because you
are too good to continue working with manuals, but not good enough
for reading essays, newspapers or novels. At this early stage, not even
dictionaries are helpful – deciphering a text where half of the words are
unknown is achingly slow.
There is one acceptable solution: nailing carefully selected word
compilations that are grouped by topic and divided into basic and
advanced vocabulary. Good compilations present around 7,000 words
and offer free pronunciation audio files (see
www.TheWordBrain.com/BookRecommendations.php). Define the
number of pages you will nail every day and start ploughing your way
through them. People who have never used these books sometimes
observe that learning hundreds of pages of words out of context is not
an exciting perspective. I agree, but I wonder if the alternative –
searching 10,000 words in a dictionary – is more sexy. Anticipate at
least two rounds and possibly another round after 6 to 12 months.
While pioneering the world of words, you will one day have the
curiosity to open a 200-page grammar book. To your satisfaction, you
will realise that daily listening to your audio sources (remember the
manual CDs, TV programmes and audio books of the Listeningchapter)
has paved the way to understanding grammar. In fact, humans have an
innate ability to grasp grammar, and this ability doesn’t disappear with
adult age. Don’t be afraid of the technical terms of grammar, the nouns,
pronouns, adverbs, tenses, modes, etc. Their number is limited. Think
of the parts that you know from yourcar – gear box, headlights, battery,
brakes, suspension, chassis, radiator, dipstick, cylinder, driveshaft,
exhaust pipe, jack, lug nuts, spark plug, hubcap, etc. In comparison,
becoming familiar with a handful of grammar terms is a bagatelle.
Nailing
69
Working through compilations of frequent words is like working on an
assembly line. To break the boring rhythm, try and read real-world texts
from time to time. As your word repertoire increases and the number of
missing words diminishes, you will one day discover how exciting it is
to work on essays, newspapers or novels. Underline new words, search
for them in the dictionary, and writethem down in a notebook. At this
point, you can even slow down your nailing rhythm, but only on one
condition: that you extract from your reading sources double the
number of words that is on your nailing schedule. For example, if you
nailed 20 words every day, look up atleast 40 words in the dictionary.
At this double-strength dosage, searching the words and writing them
down will suffice and dispense you of nailing them in sensu strictu.
Final Workload
Allow for an additional 150 hours toexplore your dictionary in more
detail. Your final workload is between
1,000 and 2,000 hours
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71
Epilogue
We have reached the end of our journey. After visiting your colossal
lifelong memory, your breathtaking speech segmentation skills, your
frantic reading speed, and your pronunciation acrobatics – all unique on
Earth – let’s sit down for a moment.
Two hours of reading have changed the way you see languages and
language learning. Not all languages are equal because, depending on
who you are and which languages you speak, some languages are easier
than others. However, all languagesare equally beautiful. The Germans
will appreciate that Turkish is as beautiful as German; the French will
be delighted that Arabic is as expressive and gentle as French; and the
Italians will be pleased to discoverthat Albanian is as subtle and
amusing as Italian. Even more importantly, we have seen that languages
are within the reach of everybody.Please pass this knowledge on to
your children, grandchildren, and friends.
Although language learning is predictable, there are no miracles.
Success is determined by the number of hours people are ready to
invest. Fortunately, there are potent catalysts, for example life and love.
Just imagine yourself in an intense love affair, spending weeks and
months in close symbiosis, exposed to a single linguistic ‘source’,
discussing the world from dusk todawn, and all this submerged in
memory-stimulating emotions, supplemented with memory-boosting
physical activity. The progress people make in these conditions is
remarkable – sometimes dangerouslyremarkable. I once unmasked a
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72
cheating husband. While talking about Italy and Italian, I noticed that
his language skills were quite honourable, so I asked him,
– How long have you been studying Italian?
– Oh, not that long. Three years, during my summer seminaries.
– And how long did those seminaries last?
– Two weeks each.
– Oh, really? I didn’t know thatyou had a girlfriend in Italy.
– Who told you?
Nobody told me. The gentleman was simply too erudite. You don’t
acquire certain words and a certain ease with language in 6 weeks of
canonical summer-school teaching. Cherchez la femme...
I have already recommended extensive travel for those who are in their
late teens or early twenties. Youth, high levels of sex hormones, and the
desire to find mates, are mightycommunication catalysers. However,
love and sex are not always practical. Later in life, you wouldn’t want
to get divorced just because you needed extra-marital language courses.
For more composed people, there are entertaining alternatives, such as
organised travel tours. I once went to Brazil and booked a 12-day tour
in a local tourist agency. All other travellers being Brazilian, the
5,000 km bus trip (yes, Brazil is a vast country) turned out to be second
among the most intensive languages courses I have ever had.
(Number 1 was the French teenager, of course.)
You will have noticed that I have a special relationship with languages.
In fact, they have shaped my life through an uninterrupted chain of
40 years that links my early Latin experiments to The Word Brain. An
A grade in Latin helped me enter medical school. After medical school,
I worked in a department of infectious diseases and started writing a
textbook on HIV (www.hiv.net/aids1991.jpg) that was to be published
into the 16
th
edition. The textbook triggered the construction of
www.Amedeo.comwhich, in turn, would provide the funding for a 24-
73
month Arabic sabbatical. And struggling with Arabic taught me
fundamental lessons for writing this guide.
I am well aware that some of my advice is demanding and that I have
set the bar high. However, the bar isno higher than we can all reach.
The most satisfying insight of the last two hours is that language
learning is a mere variable of time: you may decide that you have no
time, but never again will you have to say that you have no talent for it.
If, instead, you find the time to learn a new language, I wish you the
very best. Languages are formidable windows to the beauties and
mysteries of the human odyssey. Pushing them wide open is among the
most gratifying moments in life.
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74
75
Index
Age 58
Alcohol 58
dementia 59
Antibiotics 42
Anticholesterols 61
Antidiabetics 61
Antihypertensives 42, 61
Antipsychotics 61
Arabic 14, 31
Audio books seeBooks, audio
Battlefields
listening 19
nailing 65
speaking 45
word learning 17
Beta blockers 60
Black-out 59
Books
audio 25, 39, 68
manuals 24, 32
recommendations 32
Brain cortex
auditory 22, 35
precentral motor 46
visual 35
Brain doping 60
CD-ROM 24, 32, 39, 48, 68
Chinese 14, 31
Coach 42
Comic strips 33
Commuting 24
Cooking 24
Determination 7
Dictionary 34, 69
Discipline 7
Distraction 59
Drugs 59
psychostimulant 60
Eardrum 45
Earphones 24, 26
Eligibility 17
Emigration 23
Eye-ear dissociation 35
Fibre tracts 53
Forgetting curve 55
Grammar 39, 68
Hindi 14
Insomnia 24
Internet 24, 39
Language
beauty 71
history 14
Language manual see Books,
manuals
Larynx 46
Latin alphabet 31
Learning curve 56
Listening 19
Memory 15, 51
decline 59
variation 58
Methylphenidate 60
Modafinil 60
Motivation 37
Nailing 57, 65
Neurones 52
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76
Odyssey 73
Overmedication 42
Overteaching 43
Perseverance 7
Pharynx 46
Pigalle 51
Plasticity 54
Podcasts 25
Poliglottus 40
Predictability 17
Progress 71
Propanolol 60
Reading 29, 66
Segmenting 30
Repetition 55
spaced 56
Saturation 67
Sex hormones 72
Siesta 24
Sleep 58
Social networks 59
Sound wave 21
Spaghetti bolognese 49
Speaking 45
definition 10
Speech 19
segmentation 23
stream 21
Spines 53
erosion 54
Sport 24
Statins 42
Study time 16
Studying
daily learning 16
do-it-yourself job 16
focused effort 16
Synapses 53
Teachers 37, 65
tasks 38
Tongue 46
Travel tours 72
TV 24, 25, 39, 68
Verbs 39
Virgin 27
Word compilations 68
Words 13
lack of 68
number of 13
study time 15
web 52
How long does it take to learn another language?
How many words do you need to learn? Are langua-ges within the reach of everybody? Which teachers
would you choose and which teachers should you
avoid? These are some of the questions you ask
yourself when you start learning a new language.
The Word Brain provides the answers.
If you have learned foreign languages in the past,
consider reading it. If you or your children need to
learn languages in the future, you must read it. What
you will discover in two hours will change
for ever the way you see languages and language
learning. The principles of The Word Brain are
timeless. Our children’s grandchildren will follow
them when they discover the people of our planet.
Bernd Sebastian Kamps
the
word
brain
Flying Publisher