The Three Secrets of Language Learning

There are three secrets for learning a foreign language.  Most language students don’t know these secrets and only a few of the best language teachers know them.

When you learn and apply these secrets your language learning will be faster and more fun.

1.  Get Your Emotions Right

Think for a minute.  What’s the best and strongest emotion you ever had in your life?

Maybe it was your first kiss, or your first love or some great accomplishment of yours.  Whatever it was, it’s fun to think about it again isn’t it?

Now imagine some new learning technique that helped you learn something you really wanted to learn, while feeling almost as good as your strongest good emotion in your life?

Do you think you might actually be able to come back and do it again tomorrow if it felt that good?  Of course you would.

Now imagine that you are in a high school French class from a few years ago and the teacher is telling you, “Learn these French verbs or I’ll smack your hands with my ruler.”  Do you think you would want to come back and do it again tomorrow?  Of course you wouldn’t.

It’s almost impossible to become really good at something you hate doing.

It’s an unexpected fact of education, that if you use the world worst educational methods, and if you dive into them with great enthusiasm and love for the subject, they will work!

The reverse is also true.  If you take the word’s best learning methods and if you make up your mind to hate every minute of it, then you won’t learn very much.

Our software is based on research proven methods, however you still have to use them with the right emotions.

We want you to feel good at two different times when you use our software.  We want you to feel good when you get something right.  Congratulations, you did a great job.

We also want you to feel good when you get something wrong!  Because getting things wrong is part of the learning process so you ought to feel great about it.  The only people who don’t ever get things wrong are the ones who never try.

Of course that sounds silly, but it sure does work.   It’s especially important to feel good about partial success where you only get part of a phrase or word right.

If you spend half an hour studying a language and if you remember to feel absolutely great every time you get something right AND every time you get something wrong, you will end your study time feeling great and you will come back to study again tomorrow.

2.  You Must be Asked the Questions, Not Told the Answers

Here’s what I mean by that.  All methods of foreign language learning involve a lot of review, but there are two ways for reviewing.  One of these ways will help you learn quickly and the other one will waste a lot of your time.

The most common method is to simply tell you the answers over and over again.  Say for example that you wanted to learn the most common greeting in French.  Most of you probably know this already it is bonjour.

Usually students are simply told the phrase again and again.  That’s mostly a waste of time.  Yes, you do need to be told the answer often enough and slowly enough to copy it, but to make a stable memory of this word you need to be asked the question, “What’s the most common greeting in French?”

When your brain is grasping for something and either getting it right or maybe partially getting it right, you are making great progress.

Say you look at the side of a paper flashcard that says, “What’s the most common greeting in French?”  Maybe you can’t remember it completely so you only can say, “Wasn’t it bo- something?”  You should really feel great about that kind of answer because the memory is now a partial memory and as you keep reviewing you will soon be saying bonjour easily.

It turns out that the easier it is to recall something, the less good that particular review did for long term memory formation!  Another way of saying that is if you review a word, and it was completely easy to remember, you probably didn’t make your long term memory for that word much stronger.

When you review a word, and you have to think for a few seconds, then that’s a review that will help make a deeper stronger memory.   So if you have to think for a couple of seconds before you get the word right, then congratulate yourself, because your memory for that word just got stronger.

3.  Review Items at Increasing Time Intervals

If you review an item 100 times in a row, you will probably quickly forget it.  But if you review the same item only 10 times at the properly spaced times, you will be well on your way to remembering it for a long time.

If you want to know more about why this is very real, then read our article on human memory that explains why spaced repetition is an amazingly effective review method.

The short summary is that if your method of language review, does not help you review at the proper time, then you will waste a huge amount of study time on an endless cycle of learning and then forgetting what you learned.

We would be honored if you would try our software.  There is nothing to download, you don’t have to register for anything, and you can be trying it in minutes.  So please…

1.  Select your language at the top right of this page.

2.  Watch the instructional video.

3.  Press the big red “Try It” button.