How to Become Smarter (41 page)

At this point, we can discuss some techniques that facilitate learning a foreign language, since texts written in a foreign language are in the category of “complex reading material.” A foreign language course is often a part of a curriculum at many educational institutions. Attaining good command of a foreign language requires daily effort and will take several years. This section describes some of my own methods that I developed while learning English. In my experience, you do not need to attend any special classes or buy high-priced crash courses. You can learn a foreign language independently and cheaply, and the independent approach is, in my view, the most effective one. Although they taught me English at all educational institutions that I had attended since age 10, by age 19, my English vocabulary was no greater than 10 or 20 words. When I decided that I was going to study English in earnest, I learned more by myself within the first 3 months than I did in the previous 9 years. The basic outline of the recommended approach is as follows (I adapted it to the modern technological advances).

First, you have to learn the basic grammar and basic vocabulary by reading some cheap and small introductory textbook. There is no way around this first step and there are no shortcuts here. Taking classes is a much slower and less effective approach. After this first step, you can either read a more advanced textbook or you may get right down to business and start reading real (unadapted) texts. Just like the textbook approach, the latter approach will introduce you to the more advanced grammar and vocabulary, but it is more fun. In my view, the most serious obstacle to mastering the foreign language is not the grammar, but vocabulary. Therefore, much of your progress will depend on whether you can expand your vocabulary quickly in some fun and easy way. Reading foreign texts the hard way, by going from the text to a dictionary and back four to five times within each sentence is neither fun nor easy.

What you can do instead is find some articles on the Internet that you find interesting, such as news stories or a biography of your favorite musician, and translate them using Bing translator (
www.microsofttranslator.com
) or another free translator in the following way. Copy one or two sentences, paste them into the Bing translator and translate them into your native language. Now read the translation and then the original sentence(s) and make sure you grasp the meaning of each word in the foreign text. The automatic translators are not very good today, despite all the advances in information technology, and the translation they produce is often awkward and funny. Nonetheless, they can facilitate learning the frequently used vocabulary, which is about 5 to 10 thousand words. The inability to learn these first 5-10 thousand words is the glass ceiling that prevents most people from mastering a foreign language. If you can overcome this barrier, further learning of the language will be a breeze. Going back to our foreign language text, if you suspect that the Microsoft software translated some words incorrectly, you can use a paper or internet dictionary to find the correct meaning. Continue copying, pasting, and perusing each sentence until you finish the whole article. You can reread the foreign language copy one more time, reading all sentences in one sitting, to make sure you memorized all the new words. You can also start working on another article in a similar fashion. If you find unadapted texts too difficult and confusing at this point, you can read an advanced language textbook and then try the automatic translation step again. During this initial vocabulary-building step, you need to use a dictionary that provides definitions in your native language.

The advantage of the above method is that you have to make a trip to the dictionary only once per sentence on average. This is better than the 4-5 trips per sentence with the usual paper-based approach. If you are dying to read some foreign text that you have as a hard copy only, you can use optical character recognition (OCR) software and a scanner to digitize the text. After that, you can use the above technique to translate and read it. If you can afford to spend several hours a day on this vocabulary-building method, then you should be able to learn the frequently used vocabulary within 3-6 months. If you can read real-life texts without the translator and encounter one unfamiliar word per sentence or fewer, this means you have mastered the most important vocabulary. Now you can proceed to the next step.

Now you no longer need the Bing translator, and you can read digital or hard-copy texts each day, with the help of a dictionary. Choose texts that you find interesting to make the learning fun. At this point, your vocabulary will be increasing more rapidly if you start using dictionaries that provide all definitions in the language that you are studying (instead of your native language). Most dictionaries are available for free on the Internet, but if you prefer a printed dictionary, that is fine too. If you keep any daily records (e.g., a diary or lab notebook), you can try writing them in the foreign language.

At this stage, you can start listening to the live language on a daily basis. At first, you will be stunned and disoriented by the speed of natural speech, even if you know the meaning of all words. You can improve your listening comprehension by watching movies or TV series on DVD with subtitles. You can stop and rewind as many times as you need to understand each sentence. Now learning the language is both easy and fun because you can combine it with entertainment. Once your listening comprehension improves, studying the language for several hours a day will be a pleasure rather than punishment. You can watch movies in your spare time and you can listen to live radio on the Internet (or with regular antenna reception) while doing household chores. If you use only dictionaries with foreign language definitions, your vocabulary will be increasing exponentially. Up-to-date slang dictionaries are available in a foreign language only, which should not be a problem for you at this stage.

The next step is learning to speak the language. Even if you have an enormous vocabulary and can read faster than native speakers, if you do not learn how to speak, your speech will be halting, painful, and slow. Before I came to America in 1999, I was under the impression that my command of English was excellent, since I passed the language tests with flying colors in the previous year. It turned out that my speech was slow and unintelligible and I had to repeat myself three times before anybody could understand what I was saying. My spoken English became more or less fluent and intelligible after I spent about a year in the States. In my experience, an easy way to improve fluency and pronunciation is to read out loud for 20-30 minutes a day. This approach can make your speech fluent within 2 or 3 months. At this point, you should have a good idea how the language sounds and how each word is pronounced. Your vocabulary is large enough so that you don’t have to use a dictionary often. In addition, you can improve fluency by chatting with native speakers on the Internet and by posting on internet message boards. Both methods are easy and fun, but make sure that you choose clean and safe websites. Beware of swindlers, sexual predators, and other seedy elements on the Internet (this advice is especially relevant to minors). Even though you are not speaking while chatting or posting on internet forums, you are learning to use the language, which will improve both writing and speech. You can also socialize with native speakers in real life if you have an opportunity, but this method may not always be easy or accessible. If you live in the foreign country whose language you are studying, you can also practice the language by socializing with foreigners from countries other than your native country.

In conclusion, the method outlined above is cheap and effective but will require daily work.

• You can expand your vocabulary by translating texts in the following manner: copy and paste sentence by sentence in an online translator.
  
• Vocabulary will increase more rapidly if you use dictionaries that provide all definitions in the language being studied.
  
• Listening comprehension will improve if you watch movies and TV with subtitles and listen to internet radio while doing chores.
  
• Fluency and pronunciation will improve if you read out loud for 20 to 30 minutes every day. Internet chat and message boards are also useful.
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Writing is the most difficult type of work that I know of. Research suggests that most students perceive writing assignments as difficult. Some types of writing, those that are unrelated to one’s school or job, are easy, for example, e-mail and text messaging. Writing e-mails is easy and pleasant even when it is job-related. In this section we will talk about the writing tasks that your job or school requires. This is the kind of writing that you
have to
do, not the kind of writing that you want to do for fun.

Writing tasks involve active creation of information or documents by typing or by writing with a pen/pencil. Some job- or school-related tasks may involve both reading and writing. For the sake of simplicity, those tasks where writing constitutes 25% or more of the total time spent belong to the category of writing tasks (this is an arbitrary cutoff). The following are some examples of writing tasks: writing of term papers, scientific articles or research grant proposals, writing of software, performance of certain types of calculations, and preparation of slides for a presentation. Writing a book is not related to a person’s job in most cases, but it is very difficult—you will have to take my word for it. A writer of a book expects to make a living off of the sales of the book; therefore, writing of books is a job-related task. Please keep in mind that most of the discussion below deals with such writing tasks as writing of scientific papers, term papers or writing of a book. I know nothing about writing of music and poetry, and these endeavors may require a different approach. Now that we defined what a writing task is, we can consider prerequisites to productive writing.

Most of what I know about writing came from my personal experience rather than from hard scientific data on the subject of writing. I am not aware of any formal scientific discipline that studies productive writing. There are books and college courses that explain the rules of academic writing, but educational institutions do not teach students how to become a more productive writer, as far as I know. This is because no one has ever tested and validated this sort of techniques scientifically. In the absence of reliable evidence of effectiveness, no accredited institution is going to teach its students some sort of voodoo material. The techniques described below have helped me a lot, but rigorous scientific proof of their effectiveness is lacking. The kind of mental abilities and the mental state that are optimal for productive writing may surprise some readers. In particular, reading and writing tasks require different sets of mental abilities.

Based on my experience, the list of mental abilities necessary for productive writing is the following: strong self-control and good attention control. That’s it. Writing does not require alertness, fluid intelligence, or good working memory, in the sense that these abilities can be average or below average and this will not interfere with productive writing. Writing does not require creativity either, at least during the phase when you are typing or writing up the text. As you will see later, creativity is useful during the planning phase, when you are looking for ideas and trying to come up with an outline of your future creation. Yet the most difficult phase is the typing and it does not require creativity. The mood state that is optimal for writing, in my experience, is slightly depressed mood and increased emotional tension. We will review each of these requirements in more detail below.

Good self-control is the most important attribute of a productive writer. Self-control is necessary in order to “force oneself” to sit down and write even though you may be reluctant to do so. I am always reluctant to do any writing. In my experience, school- or job-related writing tasks are never easy and peaceful, even if your self-control is up to par. My self-control is good according to self-assessment questionnaires, yet writing tasks always involve a struggle against myself. I am probably a productive writer according to my track record (
Appendix VI
), but I cannot say that writing is easy for me. I know some bright and creative people who lack in the self-control department. These people cannot become productive scientists because they are unable to force themselves to write when necessary. Advice offered below can make writing easier and more feasible for you, but it will not make writing easy. If you have been unable to write anything useful before reading this book, you should be able to write something after you read it. If you were an unproductive writer, you may become a more productive writer. Yet writing is never going to become easy, at least with the advice that this book can offer. Good self-control is also necessary for adhering to the writing schedule that you will draw up for yourself. Adhering to the writing schedule involves both preventing oneself from doing irrelevant things and forcing oneself to do the writing during the allotted time.

It should be obvious that good attention control is necessary for writing. A writer must keep his or her attention on a computer screen or on a type-writer for many hours every day. We discussed attention control in detail in Chapter Three, and the same principles apply to writing.

Knowledge of the subject matter of the text you are going to write is also important. It is possible to write a lot of text without much knowledge of the topics you are writing about. You can do this only if you don’t need to write a text useful to others and if you don’t care if the experts in the field will like your creation. Typing skills are also in this “prior knowledge” category. Most Americans learn how to type with all fingers, without looking at the keyboard, in high school. This is not the case in other countries. For instance, in Russia, most high school and college graduates do not know how to type correctly, i.e. they type with two fingers while looking at the keyboard. When I came to the United States in 1999, I did not know how to type properly even though I had an equivalent of a Master’s degree. The speed and ease of typing increase 3- to 4-fold after you learn how to type with all fingers using the proper technique. Learning how to type may take 1-3 weeks, but it is well worth it and I recommend it to everyone, especially to those who wish to become productive writers.