Jonathan's blog

Accelerating adult learning of languages (and other topics!)

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published by Jonathan on Fri, 2010-02-26 16:10

I was recently asked by someone older how they could learn languages as an adult as quickly as children do.  They also asked if leaving the television or radio on in the background with a foreign language would be useful...?

Good news!  There are all kinds of ways to speed up learning, even with new languages.

While television may not provide the optimal way to learn another language, it does give people visual contexts in which to place various words.  That does have an impact.

Ergo tv is better than radio for learning foreign languages, because you have potentially a LOT more information from which to learn how to understand/speak another language.

But it's probably far better to get a great CD audio program or podcasts on a foreign language than it would be to listen to the radio.  Then play those audios over & over again in the background, both when you have time to speak along with them as well as when you don't.

And a good learning program for TV/video/dvd is still much better than a good learning program from a book or audio-only.  The more forms of media, the more sensory systems involved, the better.

Bottom line, you can always learn.  Yes, since you're older than a child, it may take some work; it'll certainly take a bit more work than kids have to put in, but so what!

  • Use as many sensory systems involved as you can (i.e. TV/DVD/Video is better than audio only)
  • Take hourly breaks from more intense study sessions for at least 5-10 minutes to get movement into your body so as to integrate the skills into your neurology more effectively
  • Play 60 beat-per-minute music behind that in an ipod or CD player if you can (this keeps you in an optimal learning state)
  • Make sure the speakers are interesting, with active tonal shifts, and not boring.  Then reproduce those same shifts in your own voice.
  • Play these when you're awake, and play them when you're asleep.  
  • Attach pleasure to confusion.  Push past basic understanding towards confusion.  Confusion is a GREAT indication that you've acquired a lot and are busy integrating it.  Confusion should tell you to keep doing whatever drills you were doing when you started getting confused -- NOT walk away!

If you utilize most of the above accelerated learning strategies, you will notice far more rapid results than lots of people would expect from "an old dog trying to learn new tricks."

Lastly, stay with it -- set up the above, keep it going, and trust that results will be forthcoming -- sometimes in steady ways, sometimes not for a while then all of a sudden, whoosh!

The enormous value of IMPROV... to NLP'ers.

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published by Jonathan on Wed, 2010-01-13 22:07

I've been thinking quite a bit lately about the value NLP'ers can gain from doing a bit of study of Improvisation (Improv / Comedy).

Whether it be in social settings (flirting, out with students at night), or in coaching, or during a training, a lot of my repeat students have commented that one of the things they keep coming back to model on an ongoing basis is a combination of my banter skills and also my ability to jump rapidly to widely variant perspectives that still have usefulness or relevance to the current situation -- sometimes therapeutic value, sometimes social value.

I've made an informal study of Improv for years, and one of the core tenets of Improv is to "accept fully the truth of what's presented to you, no matter how bizarre." And yet I find so many NLP'ers, while pacing someone else, often fall shy of this depth of pacing required either for rapport or for Improv purposes.

I'll often hear some NLPers respond to others opinions with comments like "I can understand that perspective, and I'm wondering if you've considered this other perspective?"

Now oddly, that's also similar to another good technique arising from NLP which my good friend Doug O'Brien calls the "Agreement frame," where people learn behaviorally to replace "but" with "and." I.e. "I agree with you that X, AND have you considered Y?" *But*.... the "Agreement frame" is an influence process, not a total agreement process.

For the purposes of banter, flirting, or of stepping inside someone else's reality and making it more desireable (or even undesireable, as in some therapeutic scenarios) from the inside out... you really have to step inside it, and speak & act as if you truly are inside it.

Improv... is just that -- it's the art of total acceptance (and rapid use) of every new piece of information emerging. But then to really excel at what we're doing, to take the lead, we then also have to blow our next contribution out of proportion, too... and add something else newer back into the mix that uses the previously emerging new piece of information.

I've even gone to the point of modifying & customizing some traditional Improv exercises for NLP purposes in a couple of courses I run; I think it's that valuable a skillset to include in our study.

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