Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0362: Mastering a language enough to write poetry in it

Episode Date: July 28, 2015

Mahmoud asks about mastering a secondary language well enough to write poetry and speak eloquently. I talk about the difficulties of truly mastering a language but give some tips for maximizing results. 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 362 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. Mahmoud submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question saying, I would like to memorize and master the English language and speak eloquently as a poet

and become a public speaker. English is not my mother tongue, and I do have some serious issues with regard to memorizing. So I think that the big question here is how memorization and accelerated learning applies to this type of thing when you're wanting to become advanced enough in a language to be able to write poetry in it and so on, to be able to do public speaking and really create your own creations in the language in an effective way. This goes far beyond mere fluency in the language, and it requires you to be able to do a whole lot more than just have conversations and express things. You want to express them eloquently and feel like a master of the language. Now let's start by talking about fluency a little bit. When you want to be fluent in a language, you want to start by focusing exclusively on the

things that get you speaking fluidly and completely correctly with no awkward mistakes. You want to lay that foundation from the very beginning. I talk about this type of thing a lot, things like having dialogues written by natives using only the most common words so that you're speaking with correct grammar and correct proper, you know, common idioms and things like that,

so you're not making mistakes with prepositions and with common verbs, which is what a lot of people who are fluent in a language but not completely idiomatic in the language will do a lot of the time. You want to master that 70% to 80% as much as possible so that you speak effectively and not awkwardly with the majority of the language. Now, once that's down, you'll still only be at about 90% of the language, and getting from there further is very, very difficult. If you think about it, to get to where, let's say, the English listeners of this podcast are in English, to get to the point where you are in English, you've been

spending your whole life on it. I mean, sure, you haven't been focusing exclusively on your English skills your whole life, but for you as an English speaker, speaking to the English speakers, it's taken you your whole life to get to where you are. There are ways to accelerate these things, but the reason you can reach fluency in a language extremely quickly is you can focus on the most important 90% of the language. But to get to that last 10 percent, it takes tens of thousands of words and deep understanding of idioms to get beyond, let's say, 95 percent of the language. So Mahmoud, for accelerating that process, what I would start with is studying your target stuff. The target materials that we've talked about so far are what will get you to fluency. But to get from there to eloquence, your target materials are probably going to be things like, well, the things that you mentioned, poetry and let's say eloquent speech, anything that where you can actually just focus exclusively on the types of things you're going to be doing, as well as a variety of broader materials, such as, let's say, films in English.

You take the film, but you focus on imitation, not simple absorption. You're not going to learn simply by absorbing information, by absorbing good English. You actually have to study it and be able to imitate the idioms that are there. You have to be able to, say, take a movie quote and be ready to say that exact quote yourself rather than just knowing what they're saying. There's a huge difference between those two things. That's why in our Spanish course, for example, we make sure that our students not only understand the dialogues that they're studying, they could actually say those sentences themselves like a native speaker might say them. So you're going to do the same thing, not just with things that will get you to fluency, but with the things that will get you to eloquence and to

poetic speech and to the nuances of the language that you're wanting to master. I would also then practice writing some things that you don't actually officially want to be your official works, like if you're wanting to do poetry, don't write works that you're wanting to publish, but instead some practice materials directly imitating the phrases that you've heard in other poetry from various time periods in English so that you get comfortable using these phrases in an idiomatic way. Then show them to a native speaker who understands eloquent speech and eloquent poetry, and ask him if it sounds like it was written by a native speaker, because that's what's really important. Once you have that down and are comfortable doing that, you're ready to write your own works and to begin speaking in the language, using the language effectively like a native speaker. Check out MasterOfMmemory.com for

more resources on language learning, and make sure to give this show, Master of Memory, a review in iTunes. These reviews have a multiplying effect as to how many people iTunes allows to see the show, so I'd really appreciate it if you could give us a rating and leave us a little comment on what you think of the show. What do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.