Part II · Chapter 8

The Method, Step by Step

Why memory loves connections

Go back to the scene at the start of this manual: the Spanish list that's gone by the next day. It's not that you have a bad memory. It's that human memory isn't built to store loose facts. It's built to store relationships.

Memory research has been studying this for over a century, and the results agree. Three of them matter to you:

1. What connects, sticks. What you process deeply, what you link to something you already know, is remembered much better than what you repeat in a vacuum. Psychologists call it deep processing.
2. What you produce sticks better than what you read. If you generate an answer yourself, even by guessing, you remember it better than if someone hands it to you. It's called the generation effect.
3. What you review spaced out sticks better than what you cram. Ten minutes a day for five days works better than fifty minutes in one night. It's called the spacing effect.

Working with codes uses all three at once. When you discover that pie is foot through Grimm's law, you're not reading a fact: you're generating it from something you already knew. And the rule you used (f ↔ p) then serves you for fish/pez, father/padre, full/lleno. Each new word arrives connected to an old one and to a rule. It no longer arrives alone.

The central idea of this chapter fits in one sentence: speed doesn't come from learning each word faster, but from no longer learning them one at a time.

Six moves

What follows are six techniques. I give them to you as tools, not as dogma. Each comes with its warning, because a method that only lists its virtues is lying.

1. Start with what you almost know

Don't start with the thousand most frequent words of the new language. Start with the co-derivatives: the words you almost know without knowing it. Take their skeleton and set them next to their twin in English, whether that twin is an everyday word or a learned one.

Warning: this is where false friends lurk. The fertile ground and the minefield are the same field. Use the test from chapter 5.

2. Learn ladders, not steps

Don't memorize pie = foot. Memorize the correspondence f ↔ p and let it open the door to pez/fish, padre/father, lleno/full. One rule, many words.

Warning: correspondences have exceptions. If you treat them as absolute, you'll invent words that don't exist. Use them to bet, and then check.

3. Hang the vowels on the skeleton

When you learn a new word, fix its consonants first, since they're the stable part, and then adjust the vowels. Remembering a frame and hanging the vowels on it is easier than remembering a whole string of letters.

Warning: in some languages vowels do grammatical work. In German, singen, sang, gesungen (sing, sang, sung) have the same skeleton and only the vowels change, just like in English. If you ignore the vowels, you lose the verb's tense.

4. Let usage decide

When a word could mean two things, don't decide yourself. Look for it in real sentences: songs, shows with subtitles, the news. The code tells you where to look; usage tells you what's there.

Warning: this is the hardest technique and the most important. Without it, the game turns into guessing.

5. Doubt for one second

Before you store a connection in memory, ask yourself: is this real kinship, or a chance echo? One second of deliberate doubt.

Warning: it slows down your enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is good. But without this brake, enthusiasm leads you to store very convincing mistakes.

6. Come back to the rule days later

Come back to the same correspondence in new contexts: today with three words, in three days with three others, in a week with three more. That way the rule becomes structure and not a one-day trick.

Warning: it's boring. It goes against the thrill of the "aha!" Do it anyway.

Hidden access points

There's a resource almost nobody uses that can save you a lot of work. Sometimes a word in the new language isn't a co-derivative of your everyday word, but it is a co-derivative of another word of yours that you use less: a learned word, a technical one, a formal one. That other word is an access point: a hook you already have in your head.

For an English speaker learning Spanish, the learned layer of English is full of them:

Bridge sentences

A bridge sentence is your own language bent toward the other one. You take real words from your language, sometimes less common ones, chosen so the sentence lines up almost word for word with the language you're learning. It's not the most natural way to say it, but it lets you cross into the other language in the shortest possible step.

It works in three lines: the sentence in the new language, the bridge sentence, and the natural sentence. Two examples from Spanish:

See what happens? The bridge sentence uses words you have but rarely use (explicate, inhabit, antique), and with them the Spanish becomes transparent. Explica and explicate come from the same Latin word; so do habita and inhabit, antigua and antique, paciencia and patience. The bridge sentence doesn't just teach you words: it teaches you to move with the rhythm and order of the other language.

A one-week plan

Twenty minutes a day. No more. What counts is consistency, not heroics.

The following week, pick another rule, but on Tuesday and Thursday also go back to three words from the week before. That way your review is spaced out without you having to think about it.

Is it working, or do I just feel good?

It's a serious question, and you have to ask it. Feeling that a language has order is very motivating, and motivation helps you learn. But it can also fool you: you can feel you're making progress without making it.

There's a simple way to tell. It's called taking away the scaffolding. On Sunday, without looking at your notes and without thinking about the rule, try to say or write the week's words in the new language, starting from English. If they come, there was real learning: the structure stayed even after you took the support away. If they don't, what you had was suggestion: the feeling of understanding without the ability to use.

Write down how many come to you each Sunday. If you did the challenge in chapter 7, you already have a first number to compare. That number is yours, and it's more honest than any promise this manual can make.

What this method isn't

It doesn't replace practice. Working with codes isn't at war with traditional teaching. You also need memory, repetition, talking with people, making mistakes out loud. The code gives you a structure to hang all that on; it doesn't do the work for you.

It doesn't require you to know history. To speak a language, it's enough to play at learning it. You don't need to know what Proto-Indo-European is or what each law is called. Some students want to speak, not to know, and that's completely valid. Take from this manual the amount of history that helps you, and not an ounce more. Depth is a luxury for those who want it and a burden for those who don't. The method serves the learner, not the other way around.

It doesn't work the same with every language. It works better the more related the language is to yours. With German it's almost a shortcut for everyday words; with Spanish it's a serious help, especially through your learned vocabulary. And with languages that aren't relatives of English at all? That's the subject of the next chapter.