ANIMA

It's hard for me to admit this, but I decided to try a mnemonic strategy that my CEO is in love with: acronyms. My CEO is obsessed with acronyms—to the point where I think the acronyms become too numerous to remember and start to be a liability. But maybe that's how the CEO learns best: acronyms become him. They don't become me, but I see no harm in using the occasional acronym. Allow me to explain.

For years, I've been trying to remember linguistics professor Stephen Krashen's famous five hypotheses of language learning. Off the top of my head, I'm always able to name three or four, but it's rare that I can name all five. So I wrote the names of the five hypotheses down and stared hard, trying to see whether an acronym was hiding in there somewhere.

And there it was.

ANIMA. Latin for the soul, the vital or animating principle of life.

And once I saw that, I knew I could remember everything.

A = Affective-filter hypothesis

N = Natural-order hypothesis

I = Input hypothesis

M = Monitor hypothesis

A = Acquisition-learning hypothesis

Et voilà. Easy as that.

A brief and superficial explanation of each hypothesis might go like this:

Affective filter: the amount of stress you feel while learning a language can affect your ability to learn it. The "affective filter" refers to stress and other factors. A "high" affective filter impedes learning, so the object of the game is to lower the affective filter. Maybe this means using humor or breaking a lesson down into small, easily digestible parts.

Natural order: the idea here is that people in all cultures tend to gravitate to a "natural order" when learning language. Inevitably, certain things are learned first, then other things, often moving from simple to complex, but not always. I think I see vague parallels with Noam Chomsky's "deep structures," the idea that consciousness—because are brains are all pretty much the same shape no matter our race—always follows a particular blueprint, a way of dividing up, analyzing, and processing reality that is distinctly human.

Input: also often called the "I + 1 theory," this refers to the notion that people progress when they get (1) a lot of comprehensible input and (2) input that's slightly above their level of competence, forcing them to "reach upward" and thus to progress further—from level I to level I + 1. When input is totally incomprehensible, no progress can be made.

Monitor: the monitor hypothesis is that all of your stored linguistic knowledge serves as a sort of rulebook that guides language production. This internal "monitor" doesn't produce anything creatively; it merely serves as a guide. Your creative production comes from elsewhere. I guess a lame analogy might be that the "monitor" is like the star-shaped hole in your Play-Doh extruder. But it's not the Play-Doh itself, i.e., it's not the creative output. It merely shapes the output. I'm not sure I agree with this hypothesis. To me, your stored linguistic knowledge is the well into which you dip when you need to produce creative output. No well, no creative output.

Acquisition-learning: learning is the conscious—and self-conscious—process of gaining linguistic ability. If you've ever taken a foreign-language class, you've probably had to deal with books, charts, choral repetition, and maybe even language-lab audio involving headphones. All of this keeps language at the conscious level. Acquisition is unconscious or pre-conscious. Do you remember how you initially learned English? Probably not. That's because you acquired it, i.e., you absorbed English through osmosis while, during your infant years, your brain was furiously wiring itself. The brain-wiring and the absorption go hand in hand. Even today, there are competing theories about whether learning a second language ought to follow a more "acquisition" approach or a more "learning" approach. Evidence seems to skew both ways, and a lot also has to do with the personality of the learner. One thing's for sure: there is no single magic-bullet method for learning language. And as YouTube polyglots prove, everyone's got his or her own method.

So, there we are. ANIMA. I've finally cracked it. Damn you, CEO, for advocating a method that works. For once, I can't critique you.