Hi. My name is Ogg and I’m a caveman. Okay, well, I used to live in a cave. Sadly, it froze (long story) and I waited there for absolute ages until the science dudes finally thawed me out. But they had to tear open my cave to get me out, so now that they’re finished studying me, I don’t actually have a home anymore. Which is kind of why I’m writing this book.
See, now that I’ve been dragged into the modern world, I’ve got to rebuild my life, but where do I even start? Should I stay here in Canada just because that’s where I woke up? I hear Spain is nice, and I already love German food, but I don’t speak any of those languages - English is my only modern language so far - so my options are a bit limited. I figure, instead of letting the tech dweebs here decide where I should go, I can learn some other languages and then go check those places out for myself.
But learning languages is tough, especially for a guy whose first language was grunt-and-point-ese. I read somewhere that laughter is the sound your brain makes when it’s making new connections and building memories, which is all about forging new connections in your head, right? So I figure it’s a good idea to give your brain lots of different things to forge those connections with.
That’s where the cartoons come in. I never even learned to draw stick figures in school - that technology was still a state secret in my day - but Jefferson is a cartoonist so he handled that part, and now shilling his work to you is the only way I can pay my rent. But seriously, they really did work for me, so they should work for you too.
The process is simple. When you look at a page for the first time, name as many of the things in the picture as you can. Tree, rock, bird, sky… (It’s almost like you’re learning to speak caveman!) Then look at the keyword. (I put them upside down at the bottom of the page, to keep you from seeing them accidentally before you’re ready.)
The keyword tells you what word you’re supposed to remember for that cartoon, and the images are a bit… weird, which makes them easier to remember. So every time you come back to the image, your brain will process all the things you see and help you access the key word - but hopefully you’ll be digging it out of your memory rather than from the bottom of the page.
Don’t worry if you don’t get it the first couple of times, but pretty soon, you’ll be able to yell out the word as soon as you flip the page. (But Pro Tip: Be careful if you’re in a library. Apparently learning words is frowned on there. Go figure.)
Anyway, keep doing the image-word associations until you get good at them. You’ll be surprised how quickly you’ll start naming more things on all the other pages too.
When you get more advanced, you can try translating the captions, but those are harder. The problem with beginner vocabulary books is that most of them are useless as soon as you’re not a beginner anymore. But I wanted you to be able to keep using it - and keep having fun - even after you know the words for girl, and tree, and monkey.
As you learn more of the language, keep writing in the parts of the captions you understand. Then when you finally get the joke, your brain will light up like fireflies in a dust storm. (Oh. My editor tells me that nobody will get that reference. Guess you had to live a bajillion years ago.) Anyway, keep working at the captions, filling them in as you go. When you can read them all - congratulations! You’ll be as close to fluent as an ignorant caveman can make you.
While you work on that, I’m going to go check out some of those other countries I mentioned. I’ve been reading all about Vikings, and trolls, and Norse gods. They all sound like my kind of people. So imagine my surprise when I learned that they all come from the same place! Sorry Spain, but my first trip has got to be to Norway, and that means you can expect a Norwegian edition of this collection as soon as I can get my tongue around the vowels.
In addition to beginner and intermediate nouns, I’m also working on versions for verbs and adjectives too. So if you enjoy this one, check out the rest of the collection. And be sure to tell your friends about it, too. How often do you get to brag that you’re taking language lessons from a guy who can skin a yak with his bare feet?
Anyway, that’s all from me. Maybe I’ll see you - and talk to you - when I visit your country. Until then, keep you spear up and your feet down. (What? Sigh! You guys have forgotten all the great sayings.)
Love,
Ogg
Language is an extremely flexible tool. You can assemble words into messages that express an unlimited number of thoughts. Anything from “Where food?” to “Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.”
But in everyday speech, we don’t typically use words to communicate. We actually assemble most of our day to day utterances using larger chunks of language. What are those chunks? And why do I think they can be used to supercharge your language studies?
Let’s take a look…
While working on the ear training features for the FrankenTongues app, I stumbled across a reference to the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) model of language learning, and the moment I read it, I had to stop everything I was doing to investigate.
Because it resonates loudly with my own views on how we learn languages.
I’m sitting in the car, waiting to begin another long road trip, and in keeping with recent practice, this will be another chance to test my hands-free learning tools. But in light of my current ALG experiment, there will have to be some changes to the plan.