A Chain of Language Learning

A lot of the time, you'll find flashcards or books that show how to use the same word in a variety of contexts. While this increases your command of discrete words, there's another way to think about things. The memory whiz Harry Lorrayne used to come up with ways of linking a variety of items to memorize a list. But for learning language, you don't need to do anything as artificial as that: Language provides the chain.

Consider:

C'est un bon restaurant. J'aime le restaurant. Je vais au restaurant souvent. Mais je vais au café rarement. Je n'aime pas les cafés. Mais j'aime un café: le café à côté de la poste. C'est un bon café.

In this little paragraph you have:
restaurant - 3 times
café - 5 times
the structure "C'est" twice
the structure "Je vais" twice
à+le=au twice
the phrase "J'aime" in the affirmative twice and the negative once

For a newbie to French, there's a fair amount of reinforcement of some basic grammar stuff here along with repetition of core vocabulary. And yet it's (slightly) more varied than your standard substitution drill.

The sentences in my little paragraph are not unlike the sort of thing you find in phrasebooks, and that's where I'm going with this: While textbooks are lousy about giving you real world language, the defect of phrasebooks is they don't show you what to do with it. But if you poke your way through the phrases and try to figure out what's going on in them, you can make chains like this so that new phrases build on and reinforce old ones.

Let's take a look a look at some phrases from an Uzbek manual for soldiers:

Kimdir bizga yordam bera oladimi? Can someone assist us? (Who can give get help given to us?)
Biz sizga yordam berish uchun keldik. We are here to help you. (We came for giving you help.)
Yordam yol'da kelayapti. Help is on the way. (Help is coming on the path.)
Sizga yordam kerakmi? Do you need help? (Is help needed for you?)

My parenthetical translations aren't literal or exact, but give something of the flavor of how these are phrased. Things you might note: bermoq (to give) going with yordam (help) and a pronoun+ga (to). You might also see "keldik" (we came) vs. "kelayapti" (it comes). Knowing these four phrases doesn't just teach you "yordam" (help). It also reminds you of "kelmoq" (to come), the use of -ga and the pronouns "biz" and "siz" (we and you). In short, there's a treasure trove of useful information contained within.

So, a thought: If you're trying to figure out how the language goes together, put down the grammar book from time to time and open a phrasebook. Find some phrases using the same elements and see how much you can figure out about how they work by comparing them against what you know. Finally, using that skeleton of knowledge, learn them by memorizing what you don't know and synthesizing it with what you do. You won't always understand every element of what you're saying, but you'll know enough. And then, when you learn a new bit of grammar, instead of wondering how you'll ever remember it, you'll find yourself saying Hey, that's just like the phrase for...!