For the first few lessons your text may not dwell much at all on grammar. These days dialogues are a popular way to start to learn a language. You learn a simple dialogue—usually representing an American (you) talking to a real live foreigner just after you have arrived in his country. But when you memorize these dialogues you are learning grammar without being aware of it. The foreign grammar patterns are being unconsciously imprinted in your mind.
Once you have some of these “canned sentences” memorized so that you can say them in your sleep, you can easily substitute some of the other new vocabulary to make new sentences. “Where is the station?” (airport, bus stop, hotel, taxi stand).
The dialogues at this early stage should be useful and simple—the kinds of conversations you are likely to get into often. Don't be disappointed by the things that you will be talking about at this stage of your lessons. It's going to be limited mostly to talking about your name, how you are, where you're from and how to get to the airport. You'll have to wait till later to get into conversations about philosophical topics, whether the governmental coalition is beginning to crumble, or how the trade imbalance is likely to affect the national inflation. First things first…
At this early stage of your language study you should also be ready to learn lots of polite phrases. Foreigners like polite phrases. They generally use them more than we do in English. Better than that, these kinds of polite phrases are great “fillers” which you can throw in whenever you can't think of anything else to say. Or you can stick them into your conversations and sound like you know more than you do.
Remember, at the beginning you won't likely be making up too many of your own sentences. This is the small talk stage: welcome, how are you, I am fine, how is your family, how do you like Japan, are you an American, how long have you been in Paris, have you been to a bullfight, how much do the egg rolls cost, and so on.
This material will be very important to you. It is the first stage of your becoming the actor I told you about. You should take to repeating these dialogues as if your Academy Award depended upon it. It can actually be fun trying to play the foreigner in the way that I talked about earlier. You want to try to exaggerate all the new sounds and take on your new foreign personality. But the real point of this drill is to drive these dialogues into your memory until they have become second nature. You want to be able to repeat these patterns of conversation without even having to think.
After you have repeated these sentence patterns many times—most usefully with another person—you will already have begun to think in the language. OK, you won't be thinking profound thoughts. Don't rush off to the Presidential Palace or the University to try out your new skills yet. That will come later. But you are asking questions and giving appropriate answers in a foreign language. You are already starting to think in the language.
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How well do you have to know a language to start dreaming in it? One year, two years, almost a lifetime? Wrong. You can actually start dreaming in a language in a few weeks. Whether you do or not partly depends on you and your tape recorder, or the amount of hours you spend each day on language study. If you really listen a lot, and repeat and repeat your sentences, you'll soon find them swimming around in your head. When you go to sleep at night you'll find yourself repeating them over and over—even in your sleep. That's a great sign. It's a sign the language is really getting to you—and into you.
You don't have to know a lot of the language to start using it. To some extent this is going to depend on the textbook you are using and your teacher's own method of teaching. The main thing is that whatever sentences you find in the first few lessons of your book, you and your teacher should be able to form conversational questions from them. If your book has a dialogue about “where is the airport”, you can start asking—and answering—where the airport is. Never mind that this is just a “canned dialogue” straight out of the book. The point is that you are hearing a question in the language, understanding it, and answering it. That is what thinking in the language is all about.
You want to “exercise” the material as often as you can. That is, you want to practice the new words by using them in sentence patterns you already know. Here are some examples of what we mean by “exercising”:
-Where is the pencil?
-Is the pencil on the table? (Give yes and no full sentence answers)
-What is on the table?
-Where is the book?
-Is the pencil on the book?
-My name is John.
-Are you John?
-Is he John?
-Where is John?
-Is John an American?
-What is his name?
-Is his name John?
-Am I John?
-Is he American?
-Is the book American?
-Where is John?
-Is John on the table?
This may seem simple-minded. It isn't. You are already speaking a foreign languge. With each chapter you will learn new words which you can exercise and mix back into the old sentences. You're getting more comfortable with the whole process of hearing, understanding and now generating your own sentences.
Now I'm going to bring up the old business about the tape recorder again. Get hold of a tape recorder and some tapes. You need to listen, and listen, and listen to the material.
Here's how to use your tapes. First, listen to the lesson several times until you think you can generally follow what it says.
Next, listen to each sentence and then put the recorder on “pause” and repeat out loud the sentence you just heard (Some tapes already have pauses built into the recording, giving you enough time to repeat the sentence). If you have trouble saying it all, then listen to the same sentence again and try repeating it again.
Go through the tape out loud several times until you are really pretty comfortable at doing this. I know you may feel self-conscious, or view it as something more suited to a ten-year-old. But believe me, it works. The reason it works is that when you listen to the tape you are training your ear. Your mind is beginning to understand the foreign words without taking out time to translate them.
I just can't emphasize enough how important it is to listen and repeat with a tape recorder. No other technique can get you to understand and speak the language as fast as this one.
If you can't get any tape recordings at all then try to find somebody who can record your lessons or dialogues for you on a blank tape. At the absolute worst, you can record the material yourself. That won't do much for your accent—since your accent is likely to be rather American at the start—but it is still much better than nothing. At least you will be listening, understanding and repeating/speaking—the most important exercises of all.
1. You can start using the language right away by learning and using the dialogues in your book.
2. Use a tape recorder to listen to the dialogues or the sentences and repeat them, until you can do so comfortably. This process is one of the most valuable things you can do to learn a foreign language.
3. Memorizing whole sentences helps teach you the patterns of the language and imprints them on your mind.