Learning Chinese in 4 Days

"Earworms" has to be the most useless approach I've ever seen. Why not just listen to Pimsleur with the stereo blasting cheesy elevator music in your ear in the background?

Yeah, not to mention the name, "Earworms". Has anyone tried the old subliminal trick of going to sleep with your iPod running through all 800 Cpod lessons and then waking up speaking fluent Mandarin?

Though the subliminal approach (also touted by the fool in that "Four Days Fluent" article) is another load of pooh ... listening to lessons in bed for an hour or so before drifting off to sleep can be pretty effective. The mind seems pretty receptive to this sort of material as it sheds the cares of the day. Of course, it might just as easily be a matter of focus; you're lying there in the dark, warm and comfy, free from distractions.

I agree...instead of calling it "Earworms", they should have named it "Earwax".

Yeah, "Earworms" reminds me of those bugs they used in "The Wrath of Khan" though, according to Wiki it's a German loan word, "Ohrwurm". (I'll let you look up the reference yourself.) Incidentally, I have nothing against the four-hour work week mentioned above. My problem is that I only get paid for four hours. I imagine the analogy is similar in learning (not mastering) a language in four hours.

I was just at the book store yesterday, and was chuckling to myself about all the promises of "fluency" in (insert ludicrous time frame here). I guess it may depend on how you define fluency. I can fluently ask to use the bathroom in Mandarin - does that count? I did see a documentary about a savant in the U.K. who became fluent in Icelandic in something ridiculous like 2 weeks. Sadly, I have been unable to tap similar mental powers in myself. fudawai, I heard somewhere your brain uses sleep time to synthesize information, and the last bit you input will receive most of this synthesis "attention." I used the technique when I was studying for my comprehensive exams and found it worked pretty well too.

You're talking about Daniel Tammet. Plenty of fascinating YouTube stuff (run his name) if anyone is curious. By the way, he runs a website where he has put together language lessons for French and Spanish (everybody's tryin' to get into the act, eh Ken?)

Excerpt from Daniel Tammet's bolg on learning Icelandic. Spot the parallels.. "Though some might complain about the Icelandic grammar, that isn't the point. Icelandic is not grammar, Icelandic people don't speak grammar. If you learn the language, the grammar will follow. I find that the complexity of Icelandic mirrors the complexity of human thought and nature, and the rich tension within the fabric of everyday life. When paint is cast within a portrait, it becomes something more for being part of something bigger than itself. Blue and grey becomes a sky, green and white becomes a landscape, pink and orange and black becomes a human face. So it is with words which become sentences, like raindrops which form a sea. Why shouldn't 'bók' become 'bókin' at the start of a sentence and 'bókina' at the end. Icelandic sentences are composed of more than just words."