Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0370: Learning languages when you don’t know grammatical terms

Episode Date: August 7, 2015

Kobi asks about learning languages when it’s hard to keep track of grammatical terms such as “adjective”, “preterite”, and “subjunctive”. Is it possible to learn a language effectively without understanding grammatical terms? BONUS: Here’s a quizzing set you can use to memorize the key words of this poem: Memorize strange meeting What do you want to […]

Master of Memory 370. 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. Kobe submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question. Kobe says, I love learning languages. I want to learn Italian, Japanese, and Mandarin Chinese, Kobe says, with Duolingo, but the massive conjugation required really broke my motivation, and right now I'm learning Mandarin Chinese with an app called Chinese Skill, which is a nice Duolingo-based

app, but it's confusing to learn new words and stuff while trying to memorize spelling, right intonation, and stroke order of previous words. I don't know if learning through an app is the right method for me. How would you suggest that I learn new languages? Should I continue with the app or try something new? And are there other ways or sources to learn these languages?" So I understand the issue here, Kobe, as the fact that concepts like noun, adjective, direct object, and so on don't really mean anything to some people. Either it clicks or it doesn't, and the fact is they're more abstract than people realize they are. For example, the term adjective is used to mean a descriptive word. So I can go to the dictionary, I can look up

adjective, and I can see that an adjective is a descriptive word. And I go oh okay that's simple, but actually it's not entirely true. It's about grammatical function, not whether or not it's describing something. Because in thinking of an adjective as a descriptive word, I might decide to call someone a genius. And I would think that genius, which is describing them, is an adjective. But it's not. It's actually a noun. So if I call him smart, that's an adjective.

And the difference here is not the fact that it's describing someone. The difference is the grammatical function. That's what differentiates them. Now, as far as the solution goes, I'm not going to say whether an app or another method is the best way to do it. You can experiment with that type of thing, although apps like Duolingo don't tend to be based really on how people speak. They're kind of teaching you the classroom version of the language, which is all right for getting some fundamentals down, but you really should get some real life practice. The basic learning solution that I would present is to start at the top of the frequency list of the language that you're learning and

learn roughly what each of the words means, and then start storing them in a memory palace, but actually in separate palaces or sub palaces based on a quick lookup of the function. So you find out that a word is a noun. Don't worry about what that means. Just go ahead and place it in a particular palace that you're going to put all nouns in, and the same with adjectives and so on.

So even if you don't know what a noun or an adjective is, you can still look up each word and store it in a separate palace that corresponds to that part of speech. Then I would learn some real sentences, some native written sentences that indicate, you know, how the language is spoken. So you have good grammatically sound sentences. And then what you can do once you've learned these sentences is to start switching out equivalent words. Even if you don't know what a noun or an adjective is, you know that they have the same function in a sentence if they're in the same palace. That's concrete. It's not abstract,

like terms noun and adjective and so on. Just remember that you can replace a word that's in this palace with another word that's in the same palace. That's what we do with the Spanish course at Spanishin1month.com, and I really think it's the easiest way to learn grammar because you're not trying to come up with a bunch of abstract concepts. You're just using a bunch of locations and using corresponding words from those locations. And Kobe, I'd be happy to help you out with Mandarin and with Japanese. Those are two languages that are on my list of languages to learn as well, so just let me know if you want some more help with this. For anyone listening, 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.