Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0336: Hacking Arabic grammar

Episode Date: June 22, 2015

Joy asks about hacking the grammar of Arabic. I present a simple two-step process to learn the essence of any language starting with the most foundational grammatical structures. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 336. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Joy asked a question in an email about hacking a language's grammar. Joy says, My parents and I are learning Arabic, and it's been a year and a half since we started, but it's one of the hardest languages to learn, so we're struggling a bit.

Do you have a tip for learning the grammar? So, Joy, I'm going to present to you two tools that we've found very effective for learning a language quickly, and you can use either one of these. I would strongly suggest using the first one if you've already learned a lot of Arabic, and then using the second one if you can find a way to fit it into your system, but definitely at least the first one. So first is learning some short sentences that you can always fall back on. If you have native written sentences that are short, that use common vocabulary, but that you can always fall back on, then you really have the language's

grammar. What we've done at Accelerated Spanish, for example, is take the top list of 130 words, give those to a native-speaking author, and have the author come up with a dialogue that uses all those words in idiomatic context. You end up with a lot of sentences that you can fall back on. If you learn those sentences really well, then you can speak those with confidence because they're native written, and you really know that they're actually true to the language's grammar. Now, you could go out and try to find these sentences in films and in books and things like that, but I think the best approach, if possible, is to get a native to write them and to ask for the native to use only the

most common words so that they're sentences that you'll fall back on with frequency. Now, how does that translate into using more sentences than just the ones written? Well, that's where we get into step two, which is a bit more of a large project. You want to learn your vocabulary by parts of speech, and not just by parts of speech, but by specific function. The idea is that in falling back on those simple sentences, you could then go and replace words with other words that are equivalent in the language, that are grammatically equivalent, in order to change the meaning of your sentence. So a past tense verb could be replaced by another past tense verb. You want to learn your vocabulary in a sense that will easily lend itself to switching out words this way. Because the fact is if

you've learned a bunch of sentences that you know work and then you multiply that by the fact that you know how to switch out those words, then you can say anything in the language. Either one of these techniques would be very powerful, if done correctly, for learning the language's grammar, but it's really the multiplying effect that has the most power behind it. Now admittedly, that second item is, again, pretty sophisticated, and probably at this point the best way to learn how it works is to look through the first few lessons of the Accelerated Spanish course, which you can find for free online at Spanishin1month.com. Also, I'm excited to announce that we will be developing language hacking materials for other languages,

including Arabic, that's very high on our list, by request. So if enough people request a specific language and really show that they would like to put some work in and actually use the materials, not just ask for it and then do nothing, then we will get these things produced in the way that I'm talking about right here. We'll use this same technique. We'll get dialogues written that use the most frequent vocabulary by native speaking authors, and we'll make it happen. And then, of course, we'll release all the materials for free Thank you. all again soon.