Six Odd Things #3: Eins, zwei, drei...

[muckefuck]

#3: I count in foreign languages on the stairs

Back when I was studying German, I realised that I would never be close to achieving fluency if I couldn't get to the point where I didn't have to think about my responses. The only way to do this was through lots of drilling. Of course, I didn't have any German-speakers to practice with during my summers at home, so I had to find opportunities where I could.

One of these was in a pizza place. We had to put exactly 50 slices of pepperoni on each full-sized thin-crust pizza. I decided to begin counting them in German. Soon I was doing all my counting--coins, reps, steps, etc.--in the language.

It worked so well, that I've been doing the same thing ever since with other languages. I try to take stairs whenever possible and now I can count them off up to my apartment in German, Spanish, French, Catalan, Welsh, Korean, Chinese, and Turkish. (Though the other night I realised I'd forgotten the Turkish word for "thirty".) When I have to take an elevator more than a few floors, I'll count off the numbers as they flash buy, trying to establish a visual-verbal link between, say, 9 and dokuz.

I've stopped trying to count reps in anything but English or German, however. Whether because the exertion was more distracting or due to some other factor, I found I was making too many mistakes. Also, it's extremely frustrating to be in the middle of a set and be left hanging trying to remember the word for "19" or "forty".

Comments

[bengt.livejournal.com]

I used to do my high school locker combinations in German to practice..it's kind of the same thing, it helps get the language more automatic