THERE is a memorable and unintentionally hilarious scene in the 1999 sci-fi flick The Matrix, in which Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, has a range of martial arts skills downloaded directly into his brain. After a few minutes hooked up to a computer, his eyes snap open and he declares, in that sleepy, stoner voice of his, “I know kung-fu!” Then he sets out to prove it by opening a can of whup-ass on Laurence Fishburne.
Rapid, effortless learning has always been the stuff of fantasy, but now it could be a reality – well, sort of – thanks to a new language learning system called Earworms. Imagine boarding a flight to Shanghai, plugging yourself in to an iPod or CD player, listening to some language lessons mixed with relaxing music and then suddenly sitting up, Neo-like, a few hours later and realising you can speak Mandarin Chinese. That’s not far off what Earworms creators Andrew and Marlon Lodge reckon they’ve achieved.
“When we put the concept together, the idea was you didn’t have to concentrate too hard,” says Andrew. “You’d just put on the CD, relax and let your brain do the learning.”
The Earworms “Musical Brain Trainers”, as they are being marketed, claim to teach foreign languages by using music to tap directly into the auditory cortex – the same part of the brain that processes sound patterns such as nursery rhymes and catchy songs from the radio.
They have already proved a huge hit as MP3 downloads (“our Spanish title was in the top five bestsellers in the US throughout 2007,” says Andrew) and now they have been launched in CD format. Languages available so far include Spanish, French, Chinese, German, Italian, Greek, Russian, Japanese and Arabic.
On each disc, a male English speaker takes lessons from a female speaker of the target language, and the pair repeat key words in time to soothing, repetitive background music.
“The sound patterns on the CD kinda burn themselves into your brain, and once they’re there, they should be available for instant recall,” says Andrew. “So hopefully when you think of an English phrase, your brain will automatically link across to the Chinese phrase almost subliminally.”
It’s a bold claim, so I decide to give the Mandarin Chinese Earworms CD a try. I wasn’t bad at French at school, but I’m pretty hopeless at learning languages that bear no relation to my own: I once spent an entire flight from London to Seoul trying to learn Korean from the back of a guidebook, but by the time I’d touched down only a couple of words had stuck.
The Earworms courses are broken up into two discs. The first is a “survival kit” of essential words and phrases, while the second teaches more advanced skills, such as how to use different tenses and express opinions.
Mandarin Chinese Volume One begins with a lesson on ordering drinks. In a couple of hours pottering around the flat on a Sunday afternoon, only half-concentrating on the sounds drifting out of the CD player, I manage to pick up the Chinese phrases for “I would like a cup of tea/coffee with milk and sugar” and “Please give me a bottle of beer/water”.
True, that doesn’t exactly make me bilingual, but I’ve hardly been trying – the words just seem to have embedded themselves in my head of their own accord. And even more impressively, they’re still there when I wake up the next morning.
Of course, in any language – and particularly in Chinese – pronunciation is key. A quick chat with Rachel Tsai, teacher of Chinese at St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh, highlights one or two glaring errors in my patter. My “Woa siang yao char” (“I want tea”) just about passes muster, as does my “tya nyo-nai” (“with milk”). But when I try to say “and sugar” (“her tang”) I end up saying “and soup” (“her tung”).
It gets worse. My attempt at “Please give me a bottle of beer” comes across as “please give me a bottle of petrol”. (Just for the record, “pee-jio” is beer, “pee-ji-o” is petrol.”)
As Tsai points out, though, if I ever try out my pidgin Chinese in China, the locals will probably give me the benefit of the doubt: “People will judge what you want from the context,” she says. “If you’re in a café they won’t give you petrol. They would gauge that what you’re saying sounds like beer, so they would probably give you beer.”
• The new Berlitz Earworms audiobooks, priced £14.99, are available from bookshops or online at
www.earwormslearning.com The full article contains 826 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
