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19. Teach others
"Each one - teach one." That's the
recommended theme for the nineties from California brain-researcher Marian Diamond.
As well as being professor of neuroanatomy, she's
Director of the Lawrence Hall of Science, a fun-filled resource and learning center
attached to the University of California at Berkeley.
"I want to introduce the concept," she says,
"that everyone can learn to be a teacher. One has to be accurate with the facts as a
teacher, yet imaginative with creative ideas for new directions in the future. As we learn
the facts, we can turn around and share with the next person so that the 'association
cortices' can create the new ideas."6
Diamond
believes that even a child in kindergarten can learn to be a teacher. And she asks:
"Why spend the next 12 to 15 years in only being taught? What one learns the first
day of school can be shared not only with other schoolmates but with parents as
well."
And
whatever your age there are few better ways to crystallize what you've learned than to
teach the principles to others, to make a speech or to run a seminar.
20. Take an accelerated learning course
This chapter has concentrated on simple, do-it-yourself tips. It would take
many books this size to cover every point in detail. But the best way to learn all the
principles is to take a specific accelerated learning course. Inquire what's available at
your school or college. Seek out a private tutor. Or take a do-it-yourself course,
preferably one based the breakthroughs by Bulgarian psychiatrist Georgi
Lozanov, whose work we detail later.
Many of these courses are now available for learning a
new language. Some of the best do-it-yourself courses we have seen are from Accelerated
Learning Systems in England.7 An Australian high school that
covered a three-year French course in eight weeks' part-time study also used the same
methods. Here are the basic principles, and how they're used in a typical foreign language
learning kit:
a. There are 2,700 languages in the world. English has
about 550,000 words. German has under 200,000.8 But linguists agree that about 90
percent of all speech uses only about 2,000 to 3,000 words.9
Understand these fluently, speak them fluently, and you'll be able to converse reasonably
well in your new language. In fact, even 1,000 words learned fluently may enable you to
get by.
Contents Page Preface
Introduction
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