Let's return to your childhood again. How did you circumnavigate the obstacles that visibly impede fluent speech in adults? From what we saw in the Listening chapter, part of the solution was to postpone speech, and to just listen to the sounds of the world. It took approximately 5 to 7 months before you started to babble and utter meaningless sounds such as "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba", "ka-bu-ba-da-mi"; and only when you reached the age of 12 to 24 months were you ready to experiment with real words and two-word sentences, generally in order to express desire: "More juice", "Want cookie". You took your time before wrapping your baby thoughts in chunks of language.

Anatomy and physiology conspired. They made it easier to let sounds come into your brain than to let them out. To let human speech in, all you need is an eardrum, three tiny bones in your middle ear, and the so-called cochlea. These structures amplify the sounds, and transduce them to electrical signals for the brain where speech segmentation and interpretation immediately ensue. This is a straightforward process, and apart from your ears and your brain, nothing else is involved. In comparison, speaking requires sophisticated mechanics. To proclaim the resolutions of your brain to the world, you have to co-ordinate dozens of muscles in your larynx, pharynx, neck, cheeks, mouth, and tongue. Putting all these pieces into the perfect position in a minimum amount of time is a remarkable acrobatic performance, and even children need years of exercise. In fact, only at around the age of ten do they start speaking like adults.

From the very beginning, comprehension has a head start over speech production - when you stutter your first barely intelligible sounds, you already possess a vast passive repertoire of hundreds of words. The disparity between good language comprehension and poor language production usually persists throughout a lifetime. Many people may one day read Thomas Mann, Hemingway, or Voltaire, but only a few will develop their writing skills.

Speaking skills have another disturbing characteristic: they are subject to heavy erosion. Stop speaking a second language for a decade or more, and even simple words such as 'Goodbye' are suddenly irretrievable. At the same time, listening and reading skills are hardly impaired. It seems as if once you acquire the ability to understand with native-like proficiency, you have acquired it for life, like riding a bicycle. The speaking abilities, on the contrary, would need continuous stimulation to be maintained.

There are two explanations for this phenomenon. The first is quantity. Unless you are incorrigibly logorrheic, listening is the predominant function mode of your word brain. As soon as you find yourself in a group of at least three people, the odds are that you will listen rather than speak. The bigger the group, the smaller your contribution. In some situations - at school, university, or during meetings at work - you could listen for hours, and nobody would expect you to contribute more than a word or two. As a result of years of listening, the part of your word brain that processes sounds is better trained than the part that produces speech.

The second reason is diversity. The words put into your brain are more diverse than the words coming out of it. You have only one life to tell - your own - while your co-humans make you listen to hundreds of different lives in different places and in different circumstances. You know words annunciated by fascists, fundamentalists and populists that you wouldn't want to ever pass your lips. You know hundreds or thousands of words from listening to priests, rabbis, and imams, but, again, you would not want to use them yourself because, as a scientist, you feel that God and the gods exist because our ancestors had the wisdom to create them. This list can go on and on, including people from different professions, geographical regions, age groups, etc. Because of the huge variability of human biographies - sometimes disgustingly ugly, but most often creative, stimulating, and refreshing - you know thousands of words you will never utter. What you know of the world is more than what you can say about it.

(Do we need other explanations such as brain-specific mechanisms developed over evolutionary time, which make sound memories more lasting than speech-producing skills? Imagine living the life of a distant ancestor 100,000 years ago. How would you value listening skills with respect to speaking skills? What could be more useful for survival, the correct interpretation of the sounds around you - 'Is that a wolf? A tiger? A lion? A bear?' - or the production of philosophically inspired sounds? But this discussion is beyond the frame of a short language guide.)

In the Listening chapter, I recommended that you observe a few months of mystical silence. I promised you that you would partly avoid producing stuttering and ungraceful speech. Now the moment has come to step out into the arena. If you are abroad, every day presents hundreds of opportunities to speak to friends and strangers. If, instead, you are at home, listen to your favourite language CDs and repeat the now familiar words and sentences. Try and imitate the sounds, in particular the length of the vowels and the melody of the sentences. Later, repeat the sentences in real-time, with an interval of just one second. You will be amazed at how even the new sounds soon start to come out of your mouth.

Repeating the lessons of your language manuals will take you some weeks. Again, don't feel uncomfortable repeating a language CD for the 14^th time. Thereafter, use the same procedure - listening to and reproducing speech with a one-second interval - with sentences from other sources such as podcasts, audio books, or TV. In the beginning, real-life speech will be so fast that you will reproduce only fragments of sentences. Persist. With time, the fragments will become longer.

Have you noticed that I have again limited free expression? I suggested that you repeat the sentences of language manuals, TV, and audio books. In other words, I recommended that you do not translate from your native language. The reason? Translations are risky for a language novice because they generate a huge number of errors. As a novice, you might get accustomed to these errors and end up being unable to say what is right and what is wrong. Whenever possible, it is thus preferable that you use words and sentences that you have already heard being said by other people. At this early stage, don't be ashamed to be a parrot.

While transmuting into a parrot is generally feasible, another fundamental conversion is out of reach for some individuals. Imagine that you step into one of the Paris boulevard restaurants and order an overprized micro-bottle of mineral water and a dish of spaghetti bolognese. (Fatal error, by the way. The art of al-dente cooking hasn't arrived in France yet.) What do you think you looked like when you ordered your meal? To be honest, you didn't look like a weathered adult, in control of life, family and career, but rather like a clumsy and gawky creature or bungling adolescent, struggling to find your way in the world. Alas! That's the way it is: during your first steps in a new language, at best, you regress to a kind of cutesy childhood, at worst, you are a weirdo, a nobody, an untouchable.

Some people perceive this as a high price for familiarising themselves with other languages and decide that they are not willing to pay the price. They don't want, at any cost, to look clumsy, awkward, or inept. That is, of course, the end of the dream of speaking another language. Without going through the baby/stranger/klutzy stage, nobody will ever learn to speak another language. All of a sudden, we realise that discipline, dedication and perseverance alone are not enough. To pierce the walls of other languages, you need more extensive qualities, which may vary from individual to individual: a certain sense of comedy and self mockery; or, in some cases, the determination to break with suffocating families and to betray the 'family language'; or simply semi-schizophrenic prospecting of imaginary variants of yourself. Now we begin to understand that the true reasons for 'not having talent for foreign languages' may not be related to memory or grammar or laziness, but might well be psychological in nature.

I assume that you are willing to pay the price, so that your speaking skills gradually improve and accelerate. Speak slowly and articulate. You will notice that over the years (yes, we are now talking about years and not about weeks or months), speech production will become increasingly unconscious. Even your foreign accent will eventually soften, although probably never disappear. Don't consider this a problem. If you choose the right words and fold them in perfect grammar, nobody will ever dare blame you. As in other areas, content is more important than packaging; essence is superior to design. As long as you speak fluently, an accent is not debilitating, on the contrary. In today's world, especially in times of peace, some accents are truly charming.

We have almost reached the end of our inventory. To go through the process of language acquisition, you will

1. learn 5,000 to 15,000 words in about 500 to 1,500 study hours;
2. train your ear and connected brain regions to perform real-time speech processing;
3. train your eyes and connected brain regions to perform fast reading;
4. train your vocal tract and associated brain regions to produce intelligible speech;
5. train your grammar sense during successive fast overviews.

With so much information to be crammed into your brain, you might wonder how memory works. Knowing the operating mode of a machine can be helpful before turning it on. And another question surely springs to mind: Is there some sort of talent involved in language learning? Do some people do better than others? Before devising learning strategies for the monumental task of absorbing thousands of words, let's dig into your memory.

Due to heavy exposure to human speech during your CD and/or TV training (see chapter 2), once you start speaking, progress will be fast. For your initial training sessions, we generously allocate 50 extra hours. Your total workload is now