Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Method Review: The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages FAST

As a person in the military myself, I was drawn to this book by the short autobiography written about the writer in the back of the book:
Alexander Hawke has been rated in seven languages by the Defense Language Tests using this method. He has served more than a dozen years in the U.S. Army with the cavalry, Rangers, and Special Forces, and has six military occupational skills, three of which are in Special Forces. He is a black belt in Aikido and an avid outdoor enthusiast. He has been featured on MTV and has lectured for the Congress of Solutions for Disasters


This is his book, The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages FAST


I purchased this book a while back, used it, lent it out, then never had it returned. I bought it again, and again lent it out due to my love of this book. When I like a book, I lend it out so that it may be enjoyed by my friends. I am on my third copy of this book, and if I lose this copy, you can be assured I'll be purchasing another.

The book is written as a guide to learning any language, with a breakdown of the most important words you'll need to know in any language. It's broken down by grammatical type (Verb, Noun, Adjective, etc.) and gives a specific type to learn each day. The idea is genius, and if you need to be UNDERSTOOD in a few weeks of study, this is the best method to go about that. It tells you the steps you need to learn a language, and all you have to do is memorize the words and find a good dictionary to find the words.

The book is designed to work for any language, so it doesn't make use of proper word frequency lists (lists of the most frequently used words in a language) to decide which words you should learn first. It also doesn't work perfectly for using the words a native speaker would, because you don't know which of the five ways to say person (bozorgsal - adult, mard - man, shakhs - person, arabic root, adam - being) is used. Also some words are just never used in a regular conversation, and though they might understand what you're saying, you can't converse back and forth unless they adapt their style to yours.

It also doesn't go in depth on verb conjugation, though that might help you out at first (you can always point and say "I cow to eat to eat" and get understood) so you don't over focus on saying the right tense and lose your momentum (as I've done before many times. Grammar always intrigues and baffles me).

But the book is a steal on online book stores for around $15 USD, and the theory is sound. If you are after a rare language, this is a good starting point, and if you want to cut a lot of the useless fat out of language learning, this will get you where you want to go, faster than most other methods out there.

The book is also available through the publisher, Paladin Press:
Paladin-Press.com

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love this book!

Here's a picture of my desk.

Notice any specific book present?

;)

[IMG]http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e54/Darius137/Housing/myAKdesk.jpg[/IMG]

Anonymous said...

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e54/Darius137/Housing/myAKdesk.jpg