Let's Talk Thai - The Secrets of Learning any Language

Follow these simple rules and you will learn much more, much faster.

Secrets of Learning A Foreign Language

Don’t fight your memory, use it the way it’s been designed to work

People remember, more or less:
20% of what they read;
30% of what they hear;
40% of what they see;
50% of what they say;
60% of what they do;
but 90% of what they read and hear and see and say and do.

Let’s Talk Thai involves all of these mechanisms in order to maximise memory retention. It encourages students to use their eyes, ears, voice and brain, to make and use palm-cards, to imagine and act out situations. This is the "multi-sensory input" approach.

The Appendix of the Let’s Talk Thai handbook gives ten basic rules for learning to speak a language.

Practice aloud
Repeat and keep repeating
Crash through the mental barriers
Make word associations to ‘feel it’ and ‘see it’
Listen regularly to the audio program while reading the book
Make and use palm-cards (also known as ‘flash cards’)
Understand how your memory works
Keep your goal in mind
Don’t expect instant results
Don’t suffer

The first rule, Practice Aloud, is just commonsense. If you want to learn to talk in a new language, you must practice talking. Some people like recording themselves because it is easier to judge objectively if what is said is sufficiently close to the correct pronunciation for a native speaker to understand. Constant practice aloud also builds confidence.

It is also easy to see why Repeat and Keep Repeating is another important rule. Not only does it drum the language into your memory, but it forces you to regularly refer to the handbook and the audio program. There is more chance of identifying a mistake in what you are practicing, and you can be sure that mistakes will occur. You are only human, after all. In the book it is stressed that you must become an expert mimic of the native speaker. It may sound funny at first, but if this is the way they talk, then that is how you must also talk if you are to be understood. This is the way we all learn our native languages as infants.

When learning a new language, stay positive. Mental barriers are real. If you believe you can not do something, you probably will not succeed at it. You can never run away from what you are thinking, so say to yourself: “I can do it”. And of course you can. Thousands of people have already gained the benefits of a basic level of verbal communication, and now it’s your turn. The aim of Let’s Talk Thai is to break down the language barrier by teaching you to communicate in Thai. You’ll feel more relaxed and you’ll enjoy yourself far more, whether you are in Thailand or at your local Thai restaurant.

Temple

Making Word Associations is far more important than many people realise. If you hear words like “desert” or “lightning”, you automatically get a mental image of the word. If somebody says to you “Don’t think about a yellow elephant”, what is the first mental image you get? We can’t help it. So if you are trying to learn a word like “yellow” have the colour in your mind, or if it is a number like “seven”, get a picture of the the numeral ‘7’.

Sometimes the word association is a feeling rather than an image. We only have to say the name of a person we detest or someone who has hurt us emotionally to realise the power of feelings associated with some words.

The rule Listen regularly to the audio program while reading the book is to make sure both are used together. Look again at the percentages listed at the top of this page. Reading the book reinforces the ‘read’ and ‘see’ memory inputs, while listening reinforces the ‘hear’.

Palm cards are part of the ‘do’ ‘read’ and ‘see’ inputs when making them (incidentally it is far better to make your own than to borrow them from someone else) and when you read them and practice aloud with them, you introduce the ‘say’ and ‘hear’ inputs as well as repeating the ‘see’ and ‘read’ parts of memory reinforcement.

The rule Understand how your memory works is to start you thinking about how easy it is to prevent your brain ‘forgetting’ what you are trying to learn. Some people talk about memory ‘decay’. The system is basically the same no matter what you have to remember: revise within 12-24 hours of initial exposure; revise again 2-3 days later; and revise again after one week.

Studying a little each day is best. Just as with a physical fitness course, if you choose to take time off before the end, you may have to backtrack and relearn earlier material. Sometimes a lengthy interruption is unavoidable. Don’t lose heart if this happens. Persist and you will get there, although it will take longer.

For a basic course we need to learn as much as possible, as easily as possible, and with maximum memory retention. The benefits of the Key-Word Method for learning a foreign language are being increasingly recognised as the way of the future.
That is why Let’s Talk Thai is built around the Key-Word Method and was designed and written in accordance with results of recent research. For example, one aim of Let’s Talk Thai is to help develop a new separate language centre in the brain as demonstrated by functional MRI studies in the USA (Kim et al, Nature v388:171-4). Revision at timed intervals is a simplified version for home study of recommendations from Piotr Wosniak’s research on memory building and memory retention.

(For a review of Piotr’s ideas, follow this link)

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak

Let's Talk Thai is published by PD Press, PO Box 4312, St Lucia South Qld 4067, Australia