Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0379: Hack Italian to start speaking it in a week

Episode Date: August 20, 2015

Anne asks about hacking the Italian language. I talk about the best way to approach the beginning of a language project so quickly that she can begin speaking in one week. 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 379. 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. Anne submitted a written question at masterofmemory.com slash question about learning Italian. So I thought that in this episode, I'd present a sort of hacking system whereby you can start speaking in Italian, basically on practically any topic in a very short period of time,

maybe even in as short as one week, if you have the time and focus to put in. We've presented lots of tactics and other episodes about learning languages, but I'm going to present the whole system kind of from A to Z as far as what you should do step by step to get to a good level of conversationalism and a good level of being able to express yourself like a native speaker in a very short period of time. So I'm going to present six units, and you could make these months, you could make these weeks, or you could make them days. But, you know, it just depends on how much time you can devote to this, how much focus you can devote to this, and so on. So let's say that they're days. Day one, what you're going to do is Google frequency vocabulary Italian, find a list of the 80 most frequently used words, and memorize those top 80 words. All right, just memorize what all those words mean.

Now, what you're going to do to memorize them is you'll store all of your adjectives in one memory palace, store your nouns in another memory palace with the masculine nouns on the right and the feminine nouns on the left. Then you're going to store your pronouns in various scenes based on whether they're subjects, objects, this, that, demonstrative pronouns, possessive pronouns, or other pronouns like everyone, nobody, nothing, and so on. And it'll just take a quick look in the dictionary to see which of those those are. You don't have to put way too much thought into that, but store those all in different places to categorize them. For verbs, you'll actually have a separate place for each verb so that you can kind of explore those further. But for now, just use the one most common use of each verb in a separate place. That's all day one.

So you have 80 words and you've memorized them in this organization pattern. You've organized them in different palaces like this. The organization is extremely important because otherwise it'll all get jumbled together and you won't know whether you're using a noun or an adjective and how to structure your sentences and so on. Day two or unit two, you're going to study Italian texts with English translations and that you want them to be native written. You want them to be completely idiomatic, preferably dialogue type texts so that it's the way that people actually speak. Now do it with the English translations, but focus only on those 80 words in those dialogues,

only those 80 words. You don't want to think about any other words. Just focus specifically on exactly how those 80 words are used in sentences, particularly the prepositions and pronouns, because those are very hard to understand between languages, or at least for English speakers, the pronouns will be hard, and for really any language, the prepositions will be tricky. Then also do some listening among this study, listening to exactly what each of these phrases and words sound like when a native speaker says them. So you want to hear what they sound like in a sentence and be able to identify them when you hear them in the future. That's day two.

You're studying the way that these words are used as deeply as possible. Day three, start going deeper into your verb study specifically. Remember that we created a separate palace for each of these verbs, but we only used one of the forms of each verb. Now try creating palaces for the verbs that you've learned modeled after the verb palace that you can see in lesson two from our free Spanish course at Spanishin1month.com. So again, lesson two of that will show you how to structure a memory palace for a verb so you can memorize all the conjugations for every person and every tense without getting any of them mixed up. So you want to spend all of day three memorizing all

of the most common verb forms for all of the verbs that occurred in the top 80 words. So that's what you're doing on day three. And then you'll also do a little review of the original 80 words, all of those 80 words that you learned previously. At this point you have the essence of the language, and it's just going to be coming down to learning how to use it and learning more vocabulary. The essence of the language is in those top 80 words. Day four, study texts again. So go back to your dialogues with Italian and English next to each other, but this time focus on how the verbs are used, the verbs that you just studied. Also give attention to the pronouns, the prepositions, and the conjunctions, and keep listening and imitating the Italian that you hear.

And also see if you can understand what you're saying as you say it. So you might look at a sentence and read along with it, trying to imitate the Italian that you hear. Then look away and say the sentence, and see if you can understand what you're saying without having to think about English, because that's how you start to think in your target language. Okay, so that's day four. Day five, using the palaces that you started building on day one, now go down the vocabulary list some more. Start learning more vocabulary, going straight down that frequency list and learn about one to 200 more words, but again, only words that are on that list. Those are the most important words.

The top 80 words represented the grammar for us, and the top, let's say, 200 words, 2 to 250 words, are really representative of the whole language. So they represent a lot of the vocabulary, and almost being able to express, I mean, really a mountain of things that you need to be able to express. So you're going to do that. Just go straight down that list, learn one to 200 more words. And then also on day five, start to read texts again and see exactly how these words are used in context. Continue to do that, but focus

on imitating sentences and phrases that use these words. All right, so now you have the essence of the language. Day six, practice a few conversations with native Italian speakers. You can use HelloTalk or italki, so there are plenty of resources out there online. Benny Lewis is a good resource for just finding where to find these resources for talking with people live, because he's all about immersing yourself. And so you want to look up the words that you need as you go along, but just start practicing just conversing with these native Italian speakers and seeing how you do.

And then as you go along, you'll start to learn more words that are important specifically to you, but you already know the most important words for the language itself itself and being able to express yourself like a native Italian speaker. So those first six days of study or those first six units of study are going to give you the best foundation possible for speaking fluent Italian that will actually fool native speakers, that'll actually sound like native Italian. Now, I really want somebody to go out and try this challenge. Try this six-day challenge and tell me how the challenge goes. I really want to hear from you guys because it's really all about getting results. You can listen to these podcasts all day long, but if you're not getting results, what's the point? Thanks for the question, Anne. I would love to get an iTunes review from you. And 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.