EMK HAS BROKEN A THOUSAND HEARTS!

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rdearman
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EMK HAS BROKEN A THOUSAND HEARTS!

Postby rdearman » Sat Oct 31, 2015 11:04 am

One of the most helpful people on the forum has just broken a thousand hearts. Hearts (for anyone who doesn't know) is used when someone likes your posts or comments, and finds the things you say helpful or instructive. I warned him to stop breaking hearts, but he just can't stop himself. So EMK! This song is for you!



I broke a thousand hearts, before I met you
I'll break a thousand more baby, before I am through
I wanna be yours pretty baby, yours and yours alone
I'm here to tell ya honey, that I'm bad to the bone
Bad to the bone
B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-Bad
B-B-B-Bad
Bad to the bone
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emk
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Re: EMK HAS BROKEN A THOUSAND HEARTS!

Postby emk » Sat Oct 31, 2015 12:03 pm

A huge thank you to everybody here for all the good advice and the moral support you've given me over the years!

rdearman wrote:I broke a thousand hearts

Back in high school, they played music in our art class. The radio was always turned to a classic rock station, and a couple of us had a little game we played: Every time we heard the opening chords to a George Thorogood song, we would call out the subject of the song. There were three main choices: "Drinking!" "Womanizing!" "Drinking and womanizing!"

Now, there are a few George Thorogood songs that aren't about either drinking or womanizing, but they never got much radio airtime. Well, except for this one:



After listening to way to much classic rock radio in the late 80s and early 90s, I can hear the opening chords of a Thorogood song, and the lyrics just leap instantly into my head. I never memorized any of them, but they're burned into my brain. And now that I've replayed a couple of Thorogood songs this morning, they're going to be stuck in my head all day. This is, of course, what we call an "earworm": sounds in our heads that won't go away.

And this brings me to one of my pet theories: Understanding a language is a combination of two things: an earworm, and a lucky moment when you can figure out what it means. Now, I'm far from the first person to suspect this. Khatzumoto has written about it extensively, and he pointed to an unpublished study by Paul Sulzberger which claimed that hearing the sounds of a language constantly made it easier to learn vocabulary:

“Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have been exposed to the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words.”… Paul’s main hypothesis is that simply listening to a new language sets up the structures in the brain required to learn the new words.

Now, this doesn't mean that you need to listen to the same recording a hundred times. (Though Assimil and FSI and Pimsleur and a lot of other successful courses actually encourage this.) Just hearing lots of Spanish, for example, will eventually earworm me with short fragments of sounds: common words, and combinations of words. I won't understand what any of it means, no matter how I listen to just the sounds, but those sounds will wear pathways in my brain.

And then someday, somebody will use a word or an expression in a context where I can figure out what it means. And I'll learn that word or expression in a sudden flash of insight, and it will stick with me. The combination of an earworm and a lucky moment of understanding is comprehension.

Now, almost a year ago, I set out to thoroughly earworm myself with Spanish, courtesy of Avatar and subs2srs. I spent maybe 60 hours total on the project, and then life caught up with me: a case of the flu, a vile stomach bug that knocked me flat for a week, a new client that wanted me full time. And so I set Spanish aside entirely (and I live in rural New England, where there's almost no ambient Spanish).

So almost a year later, my Spanish should be nearly gone, right? Well, I just started playing episode 1 of Avatar—which I knew almost by heart—and I still understand almost half of it, the first time through, with my eyes closed. So if there's one good trick I can pass along, it's this: Get so much exposure that you can't help but internalize things, and make sure that you have some way to puzzle out at least some of what you hear. When I do that, everything else gets so much easier.

Oh, and hang out with a bunch other people who all take successful language-learning for granted. Thank you all once again. :-)
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