From the Outside In

The Secret to Automatic Language Growth

J. Marvin Brown

Copyright 2003, ALG World Co., Ltd.

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Preface
I’ve been trying to learn languages and teach them all my life. I spent the war trying to learn
Chinese, and I spent the next 50 years trying to learn 20 more languages and trying to teach two.

All this time I was aware, of course, that the only language I really learned was the one I didn’t try
to learn. In an educational system where trying is king, how could we ever hope to find out that
trying was the villain? It took me a lifetime to see this, and the purpose of this book is to tell you
about that lifetime.

There are three great scholars, especially, who contributed to my ideas. Their books will help to
show where I’m coming from, and their bibliographies will serve to connect my thinking to the
relevant literature.

William T. Powers. Behavior: The Control of Perception (1973), Aldine Publishing Company.
Living Control Systems (1989) and Living Control Systems II (1992). The Control Systems
Group, Inc., Gravel Switch, Kentucky.

Stephen D. Krashen. The Input Hypothesis (1985). Longman, New York.

Gary Cziko. The Things We Do (2000). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.
 Cascades – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 5

Contents

Introduction page 6

1. Growing Up: Age 3-20 page 8

2. The Three Veils: Age 3-20 page 11

3. The Professional Student: Age 20-37 page 16

4. The Linguist: Age 37-55 page 22

5. The Second Wind: Age 45-70 page 28

6. The Conversion: Age 55-60 page 33

7. Putting Cascades in the Classroom: Age 60-70 page 37

Conclusion page 42
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Introduction
Just how often do we appear to be looking backwards? As we look through the history of science,
don’t we usually start out getting everything exactly backwards? Look.

1. The earth is flat.

No. It’s round.

2. The sun revolves around the earth.

No. The earth revolves around the sun.

3. Fire consists of the release of phlogiston.

No. It’s the taking in of oxygen.

4. Animals change in order to better fit their environment.

No. They find environments to fit their accidental changes.

Why do you suppose we’re always getting everything backwards? We would expect, of course, to
start out getting things wrong. But why exactly backwards? Our perceptions are backwards. Our
language is backwards. And this is as it should be. But if for some reason we want to understand
reality, we’ve got to look from the outside in. Like everyone else, Copernicus looked from the earth
outward and saw the sun revolving around the earth, and he used words like ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’.
But when he wondered about reality, he put himself outside the earth. I’ll call it ‘the Copernican
principle’: looking from the outside in.

But where’s the Copernican principle when it comes to language learning? All language ‘study’
starts from ‘I’ and works out (‘I’ is the driving force: ‘I’ am studying the language). But while all
‘students’ of language are proceeding from the inside out (like swimming upstream), all toddlers are
caught in a cascade of happenings that batter them from the outside. And what about adults picking
up a language in daily life? Aren’t they caught in a cascade of daily happenings like the toddlers?
No. They almost always start from ‘I’ to drive their actions. Instead of just getting hit by the
happenings, they insist on starting from ‘I’ and asking questions like ‘What does that mean?’, ‘How
do you say this?, and ‘How do you spell it?’

People everywhere have always noticed the vast difference in language learning between ‘doing’
and ‘being done’. But since the ‘doers’ were almost always adults and those ‘being done’ were
almost always children, they made the wrong connection. They focused on age—not direction.
“Children have a magic that gets lost at puberty,” they said. The following story compares two
adults taking up life in a new language.

A Tale of Two Wives

Mary meets and marries Chai while they’re both studying at a university in the States. After a few
years they go to live with Chai’s family in Thailand. It’s a typical extended Thai family: Chai’s
parents, brothers and sisters, and all their children. Maybe 20 people who can speak only Thai.
Her husband is the only one who can speak English. After introductions, Chai’s mother smiles at
Mary, says something to her in Thai, and waits for an answer. Mary is embarrassed and asks
 Cascades – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 7

Chai,“What’d she say? What’d she say?” Chai tells her,“She asked you what you think of
Thailand.” Mary then asks him “How do you say ‘I like it very much’?” Chai tells her the Thai
for this. Mary doesn’t quite catch the words and asks, “How do you spell that?” She then
proceeds to produce a fractured version of the sentence for her mother-in-law. This kind of
struggling continues with slow progress for 2 years, but Mary still can’t understand very much and
it’s very hard for others to understand her. She decides to take a course in Thai, but the course and
the textbook also consist of telling her ‘What that means’, ‘How you say this’, and ‘How you spell
it’. It just does this a lot more professionally than Chai did. She never really learns to use Thai
well.

Zambi came from the village of Makui in central Africa a hundred years ago and her parents
arranged for her to marry a man in the village of Mujambi, which spoke a completely different
language. She arrived there not knowing a word of Mujambi and nobody there knew any
Makuinot even her husband. During the day, while her husband was hunting with the other men,
the women took Zambi along with them as they did their basket weaving and gardening. At night
everybody sat around the fire and listened to stories. Zambi’s daily life could be described as
‘silently tagging along’. After a year of this she understood almost everything that went on around
her and could say a few words and phrases. After 2 years she was quite fluent, and after 3 or 4
years she was almost like a native Mujambi villager.

We don’t have to go to the Africa of 100 years ago to find people using Zambi’s way. We all used
it ourselves. That’s how we learned our native language: tagging along without trying to say
anything for the first year. It works for children. It worked for Zambi. Why doesn’t it work for
everyone? The common belief is that we lose the child’s magic as we grow up. But what about
Zambi? The answer seems to lie in the second part: not trying to say anything for the first year.
Adults just can’t resist Mary’s way when it’s available. But it isn’t available to little children and it
wasn’t available to Zambi. That’s the secret!

I can see the secret clearly nowand I can see how it happens and why. I needed a lot more than
an explanation. I needed a lifetime. So instead of telling you my secret, I’m going to tell you my
lifetime.
 Chapter 1 - Growing Up: Age 3-20
The Kid: Age 3-6

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I hated that question. How should I know? I didn’t
know the answer until after seven years of college. Grownups are always embarrassing kids with
questions they can’t answer. As I look back now I can see that the only thing I wanted to be was
loved. And loved I was--unconditionally. But years later I found out that my mother had been
telling people I wanted to be a professor of foreign languages. I don’t know where she got that. As
a child I had always said I wanted to be a forest ranger. But only because I had to say something
and I was darned if I was going to be like everyone else and say I wanted to be a cowboy. Looking
at it now, there were two points basic to my nature and my future. More than anything else I
wanted to be loved, and second to this I wanted to be different. (And apparently my mother knew
something I didn’t.)

I can’t remember much before I was 3. This is unfortunate for my present purposes since most
language learning takes place during this time. All I can do is to observe a 2-year-old and try to
guess what’s happening on the inside. Anyway, I’ll start my story from the age of 3. At this age I
spent hours sitting on the potty--‘thinking’. My parents and sisters said I was ‘thinking and
stinking’. “What are you thinking about?” they kept asking. It’s hard to put my 3-year-old answer
into words, but it felt something like this. “Me? Thinking? I’m not doing the thinkingthe
thinking is doing me.” You see I wasn’t to learn the passive voice until I was 5 or 6. It’s one of the
last things we learn in childhood English, but it’s the first thing we learn in ‘thought’ and I knew it
well. In fact the passive was the story of my little life. The thinking just happenedlike the
stinking. The winds strummed me like a harp. I was later to hear that ‘life is a cabaret, old chum’,
but most of the things that did me were more like a cascade than a cabaret. Oh, sometimes they
were only a trickle (sleeping), sometimes a flow (thinking and stinking), but most of the time they
were a veritable cascade. Bathing me, rocking me, jostling me, buffeting me, pounding me. And
what did I do? Passive little me? I didn’t do I was done. I just bathed in the cascades. I smiled,
giggled, cried, flinched, shivered, purred. These cascades of happenings were often laced with
speaking. And they kept coming. Into my eyes, my ears, my nose, my mouth, my throat. They
came in here, they went round and round, and two years later they came out here: speaking
happened (just like stinking and thinking had). I had all the answers then. I wasn’t confused by
those unknowns created by adults: “Where did I come from?” “What am I here for?” For me it
was as simple as this: “I happened.” 68 years later when I retired and returned to the States from
abroad, I heard a new slang expression that gave me new hope for the adult mentality with its self-
created confusion: ‘Shit happens.’

I wasn’t a problem child. My mother told me I was a parent’s dream. But that was on the outside.
On the inside I sometimes felt great contempt for the adult mentality. “You’ll understand when you
grow up,” they kept telling me. And of course they were usually right. But not always. Not with
things like ‘thinking happens’ and ‘speaking happens’. I didn’t understand the adult versions of
these things when I grew upnot yet, anyway. I encountered some pretty profound thinking in my
20 years of college, but I often thought that ‘profound’ was another word for ‘nonsense’. ‘I think,
therefore I am,’ for example. What is this thing called ‘I’, anyway? Some little neuron sitting at a
control panel making all those decisions?

But to be fair, I should tell you my clearest 3-year-old memory. We were at Lagoon, an amusement
park north of Salt Lake. My mother was getting me ready to go swimming and was trying to get me
 Growing Up: Age 3-20 12

into my little swimming suit. She stood me about 30 feet from the main walkway, turned me away
from it, and pulled down my pants. I swung myself around to face the walkway and she swung me
back. I was furious. I knew about the modesty of my peter and my behind. But I also had a keen
sense of conceptual geometry. My behind was the size of a plate and my peter was more like a
peanut. I visualized a plate full of peanuts to clearly illustrate the vast difference in size. I could
also see that the clarity of vision of the people trying to sneak a peek was inversely proportional to
the square of the distance. I couldn’t express this in the confusing way adults do, of course, but I
could clearly visualize cones of vision coming from my eyes, and I could see that a little distance
out along these cones resulted in a big difference in area and thus reduced greatly the clarity of
vision. From 30 feet they couldn’t even see that I had a peter, but they could clearly see my behind.
I couldn’t tolerate such stupidity and I kept twisting myself around. I felt like Mom needed a
course in conceptual geometry. The feeling of contempt that I felt toward my mother is the clearest
part of the memory and to this day I feel it whenever I see a little kid reacting to adult stupidity.
But when I grew up I had to admit that Mom was right. I learned a new principle: the degree of
modesty is not necessarily proportional to the size. Sorry about that, Mom.

I learned about language when I was 4. Before that I didn’t even know it was there. Like air. But a
Mexican playmate changed that (little Leo spoke both Spanish and English). One day cousin Zina
was worrying about a test in college Spanish. It took us quite some time to figure out what her
problem was, but we sure had a good laugh when we saw how much smarter little Leo was than 20
year-old Zina. Then a profound thought came to me (I’m translating my wide-eyed feeling with the
adult word ‘profound’). I can speak English!

When I was 5 my father gave me my first lesson in science. He put a dot on an orange and held it
in front of a lamp. The orange was the earth, the lamp was the sun, and the dot was me. I was on
the dark side of the orange and couldn’t see the lamp. Then he rotated the orange so that the lamp
came into the view of the dot (sunrise), passed overhead (noon), and went out of view (sunset). The
world I knew suddenly expanded to include wonders without end. “There are two versions of
everything,” I generalized. “There’s what we see and there’s what’s there. And what’s there can
explain what we see. Whew!” The next time I felt a tingle like that was when I encountered
Darwin’s theory of evolution.

I remember my shock when I found out there had never been a Mormon president of the United
States. We all knew that America was the greatest country in the world, Utah was the best state in
the country, Mormonism was the true religion, and so on. And yet not one of America’s greatest
men had managed to find the true religion? What did that make me? I was born with it! My
mother explained this with one of her adult words: ‘predestination’ or something like that. I took it
to mean ‘just lucky I guess’. But then I started asking around. Little Ake said Japan was the
greatest country; little Johnny said California was the best state; and little Leo said Catholicism was
the true religion. Of course Ake was from Japan, Johnny was from California, and Leo was
Catholic. “Duh!?” (The feeling was clear; the word for it came 50 years later.) I wasn’t looking at
the world. I was looking at my world. Ake was looking at his, and Leo at his. Everyone had their
own world. Here a world, there a world … . I took it all in stride: the expanded world from my
father’s lesson and the many worlds of my playmates. But my future was clear. Just as I was
darned if I was going to say I wanted to be a cowboy when I grew up, I was also darned if I was
going to be taken in by my fortuitous upbringing. From then on, while everyone else was smugly
getting their kicks out of reveling in their upbringing, I would get my kicks out of defying mine.
Dammit!

Kindergarten was a wild time. It was my first social experience and I reacted not as a passive
receiver but an active doer. I was the leader of all the boys and Beth Adel was the leader of all the
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 13

girls. The two of us together ruled like king and queen. One day while we were together on our
throne, I kissed her. Right in front of everybody. It’s a good thing this was 1930. In 1997 I could
have been arrested for sexual harassment.

At the age of 6, I had already picked up two major insights into the world and I had graduated from
the school of childhood cascades with honors in six subjects.

1. Philosophy. Thinking happens.

2. Math. Conceptual geometry.
3. Language learning. Native mastery of spoken childhood English.
4. Science. The expanded world: ‘Things are not what they seem.’
5. Objectivity. The many worlds: ‘It ain’t necessarily so.’
6. Social life. Ruling kindergarten with my queen.

And you know what? Without any study whatsoever I had reached a level in philosophy and
science that the greatest philosophers and physicists haven’t yet reached today (in my humble
opinion).

The Misfit: Age 6-20

Hello study, goodbye cascadesat least during class time activities. This was something
completely new. Study. Normal kids didn’t like it. Whenever possible they rushed from study to
things like games, sports, activities, partieseven carousing and gangs. Anything to get away from
that ridiculous thing called ‘study’ and get a cascade ‘fix’. But study was the thing that got
rewarded. ‘Work hard and make good grades.’ Maybe it was rewards that molded me. More than
anything I wanted to be loved, and my good grades earned me so much motherly love I quivered.

Do you think it’s possible that those study-hating, cascade-loving, normal kids knew something the
rest of us didn’t? Could they have known instinctively that knowledge should be grownnot
stacked? The teachers sure didn’t know this. And our parents didn’t. And I didn’t. I had to wait
60 more years for this insight. In the meantime I kept stacking knowledge from classes and books
while the normal kids were growing knowledge from life. ‘King of kindergarten’ may have been
‘king’ to my peers, but ‘king of first grade’ was called ‘nerd’.

I went through 11 years of school and 4 years of college without ever speaking socially to a girl.
Even though I didn’t know the reason (which I now see as ‘cascade deprivation’), I knew something
was wrong. So did my friendsand they occasionally tried to help me. One day in junior high, for
example, there was some kind of daytime party in the gym with dancing and snacks. One of my
friends, trying to be helpful, said “Come with me, I want to show you something.” He took me over
to a line of wallflowers and introduced me to a shy little girl. I screamed and ran. I realize now I
may have ruined that shy little girl’s life. I only wish I could appear with her on a talk show today
and apologize. “It was me. Not you.” Years later, at the age of 20 while I was studying Chinese in
the Navy, I decided that I could solve my problem by learning to dance. Twice a week for a whole
year I went from Boulder into Denver to take dancing lessons at Arthur Murray’s. I learned how to
dance but it didn’t solve my problem. You’ve got to be able to talk in order to get a date to go
dancing.

My teen years may not have been the proverbial ‘best years of your life’, but they gave me
something every bit as big as the two instant worldviews of my childhood. It just came as a slow
crawl over a period of years. Let me tell you about it.
 Growing Up: Age 3-20 14

Can you remember opening your eyes one day and saying, “Hey look, I can see colors”? Not
likely. We find out we have color vision only by meeting somebody who’s colorblind. Well, I
didn’t know I was comparatively ‘word free’ until I met somebody who was comparatively ‘word
bound’. Here’s an early example. It arose from this common ‘puzzle’.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

I was surprised that this had been posed as a puzzle. My first worldview gave the obvious answer.
But then I was already beginning to realize that not everybody shared this view. They had all
learned about night and day but they hadn’t all made the generalization. I had to explain, “You see,
there’s the way we hear things and the way things are, and we can use the same word for both the
perception and the reality. If ‘sound’ refers to the perception (vibrations in the ears), then with
nobody listening there’s no sound. If it refers to the reality (vibrations in the air), then there’s a
sound with or without listeners.” I was prepared for the fact that some people wouldn’t understand
my difference between perceptions and reality, but I wasn’t prepared for this next question. “Well
then which is the correct meaning of the word ‘sound’?” My jaw dropped. “Huh? Correct
meaning?”

Stuart Chase called it ‘The Tyranny of Words’. But with me, this idea soon grew far beyond
what he had in mind. And it continued to grow throughout my life: a slow crawl out of word
domination. And all this time it was the word-bound people all around me who kept me aware
of what I was crawling from. “The divinity is rightly so called.” Huh? “If something exists it
must have a creator.” Huh? “I think, therefore I am.” Huh? “Is there life out there?” Huh?
And so it went all day, every day. Couldn’t they see the difference between words and
reality?
 Chapter 2 - The Three Veils: Age 3-20
I found three veils between me and reality. More accurately, I found that I wasn’t seeing reality at
all. I was seeing veils. I peeked. And what I saw blew my mind. Behind each veil was a whole
new world. By way of illustration look at the comparisons below. The veils are shown below by
numbers enclosed in diagonals. To the left of each veil is the distortion we all see. To the right is
the real thing.

Veil 1. Perception: Seeing is believing /1/ Reality

Veil 2. Faith: I believe! /2/ It ain’t necessarily so!
Veil 3. Language: Words /3/ Experiences

Understanding how these veils were deceiving me was the thing that came to drive my life. With-
out this understanding, I was pretty much like everyone else. With it, I was me. Perception, faith,
and language: those powerful forces that control human life. But it’s the distortions to the left of
each veil that’s controlling human life. Not the reality to the right.

Veil 1: Perception

Since I was a loner and rarely talked shop with colleagues, or wrote shop for journals, I wasn’t
really prepared for the extent of my isolation. Here’s the first incident that made me take notice. I
had been pretty much on my own in Thailand for ten years: thinkingnot talking or writing. Then
one day I got an invitation to contribute an article to America’s leading linguistic journal in honor
of one of my old professors. I had never really thought of publishing but I was full of ideas. Surely
I could dash off something from the top of my head. Something like my theory of phonemics. It
only took me a few days. It was a good article. Short (just seven pages), simple (a child could
understand it), but revolutionary. I was very proud. It was rejected!

Over the following years I showed the article to the occasional colleague who happened to be
passing through. “Is this so hard to understand?” Most answers were something like this. “Just the
opposite. It’s too simple-minded. Not worthy of a scholarly journal. Anyway, what’s it got to do
with phonemics?”

Veil 2: Faith

I was darned if I was going to be taken in by my fortuitous upbringing. I mean ideas about reality.
Compare Darwin, my mother, and my father. Darwin’s theory of evolution was exciting. Mom’s
acceptance of the creation theory (I believe!) was sweet. But Dad’s attempt to prove the creation
theory was something else. Where Darwin had evidence looking for an answer (deductive
reasoning), Dad had an answer looking for evidence (selective reasoning). Darwin’s way made me
tingle. Dad’s way made me mad. This was true when I was a little kid (I was darned if I was going
to say I wanted to be a cowboy), and it’s true today.

I had to get rid of the baggage. First, religion. Next came patriotism. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t
disloyalI was unpatriotic. I have great loyalty to my groups: my family, my friends, my high
school, all of my universities, my place of work, my country, and the Utah Jazz. But I don’t
necessarily think of them as being right.

After God and country, the next big thing to go was species. Stephen Hawking came right out and
said it: “It seems better to cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.” He wasn’t
 The Three Veils: Age 3-20 17

interested in the universe as it is. He was only interested in how it strums human sensors. He may
not be egocentric or ethnocentric. But he certainly is anthropocentric. Sure I feel there’s
something special about my species but I try not to let this affect my view of reality.

Veil 3: Language

The semanticists of the 1930’s (like Stuart Chase, mentioned earlier) flourished precisely during the
years my semantic awareness was developing. I cheered. But I was already beyond them. They
talked mainly about words. I was concerned with language in general. Things like loaded
categories, abstractions, ghosts, voice (active or passive), causatives, and so on. Sometimes
language seemed more like a mischievous devil than a veil. Of the many different parts of language
that got in my way, I’ll discuss three below: words, loaded categories, and ghosts.

1. Words

My first indication of trouble caused by words came through cases of ‘I saw, he saw’ (I was seeing
things one way and someone else was seeing things another way). For example, he and I had both
heard that the Mississippi-Missouri was America’s longest river. He said this was cheating. The
Mississippi-Missouri is obviously two rivers. I saw a stream of water running from Montana to the
Gulf. He saw words.

Years later I saw what Humpty Dumpty had to say about words. Alice had objected to his strange
use of a word, and he said that he used words to mean exactly what he chose them to mean. Alice
questioned his right to do this, and he replied, “The question is which is to be master (the word or
the speaker)that’s all.” I loved it.

Veil 1 (perception) wasn’t all that hard to talk abouteven though others weren’t aware of it. Most
people can see the difference between the ‘night and day’ of the heavens and the ‘night and day’ of
lamp and orange. They just don’t generalize this to everything elselike I did. Veil 2 (faith) was
even easier. Everyone knows that most people keep the religion they were raised in, and other such
beliefs. They just don’t fight itlike I did.

But veil 3 (language) was something else. It would appear that some people aren’t even aware of
the difference between the mental flashing of a memory and the verbal telling of it. They claim
they think in words. I can only speak for myself. When I recall this morning’s breakfast, for
example, a moving picture pops up. I can watch it repeatedly from different anglesall without a
word. It’s very cleareven detailed. Then I start to tell you about it and it all goes downhill.
“You had to have been there.” The words don’t sharpen the viewthey muddy it.

2. Loaded Categories

When words get in the way of clear thinking, those of us who think with pictures can get around
them. But when a category gets in the way, we’re sometimes trapped. Let me try to clarify what I
mean by ‘category’. When we say that a ‘word’ has a ‘meaning’, the ‘word’ consists of a single
unit that we can write down and point to. But the ‘meaning’ consists of an endless number of
things, feelings, happenings, and so on, that can come under the umbrella of the same word. My
use of ‘category’ here is like that umbrella.

Here’s an example. Take the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’. The words appear to be
similar and the difference in meaning at first appears to be quite clear. But let’s compare their
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 18

umbrellas. When we see a husband kiss his wife at the airport, for example, we don’t say he’s
flaunting his sexuality.

Even people who are trying their best to be impartial are taken in by the umbrellas. The language
won’t let them be fair. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, check your reaction to the following
piece. It’s from the Bangkok Post in a column called ‘Nite Owl’ by Bernard Trink.

Are you a heterosexual?

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
2. When and how did you first decide that you were a heterosexual?
3. Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
4. Is it possible that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of the same sex?
5. If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, is it possible that all you need is to try it?
6. To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies? How did they react?
7. Why do you heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into your life style?
8. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Can’t you just be what you are and keep it
quiet?
9. Would you want your children to be heterosexual knowing the problems they would face?
10. Since a disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual, do you consider it safe to
expose your children to heterosexual teachers?
11. With all the social support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few
stable relationships among heterosexuals?
12. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
13. Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were
heterosexual like you?
14. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to exclusive heterosexuality?
15. There seem to be very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that might enable
you to change if you really want to. Have you considered trying aversion therapy or bible study?

Here’s another example of loaded categories. Compare the names of different races. Most of my
friends are American men with Thai wives, and their children are all half-and-half. I know some
people who are half American Indian and some that are one-eighth or one-sixteenth. There are
mixed races all around the world and the people are described as part this and part that. All except
American Negroes. Why aren’t there any part Blacks? Just look at the Afro-American umbrella.
No matter what word you use to call it, the word doesn't refer to the Negro race. It means ‘any
detectable part Negro race.’ And what kinds of things are defined by ‘any part’no matter how
small the part? Contaminated things, for one. Royal blood, for another. The category just has to
be loadedthe category, mind you, not the word. Here’s a quote from an article I wrote in 1970.

It’s impossible, now,

to describe without disparaging
with terms like ‘Negro’ and ‘Black’.
Our language won’t let us.

When ‘black’ can refer to a light tan skin,

it’s surely not ‘black’, the color.
And a ‘black’ that can mean three-fourths European
is clearly not ‘black’, the race.
It’s ‘black’, the contaminant.

For those of us who don’t want to disparage,

 The Three Veils: Age 3-20 19

it’s embarrassing to use it.

And yet it’s even worse when we try to avoid it,
since that might imply
we’re ashamed for the race or the color,
instead of the implied contamination.
But the language gives us no alternative.

3. Ghosts

Compare what my father said about night and day with his ideas on creation. We couldn’t see the
movement of the earth any more than we could see the creation of the animals. How can we think
about things we can’t seethings like the earth spinning and God creating animals? We do it with
models. For the earth spinning, the model for the earth was an orange, and a spinning orange is
real. Even at age 5 I could see the orange spin right in front of my eyes. But God creating animals
is another matter. We can model ‘God’ as a person, but we can’t see a person creating animals right
in front of our eyes. We’ve used words for both models, but the words ‘orange spinning’ refer to
substance while the words ‘God creating’ don’t. Words with substanceless meaning are ghosts.
And the jump from substance to ghosts is vast.

But science has got a long way to go. Here’re a few of the thousands of ghosts that are blocking
science. Physics: matter, energy, gravity, electricity, magnetism, the nuclear force. Psychology:
mind, consciousness, thinking, memory, learning. Linguistics: phonemes, words, sentences,
grammar. In daily life we can say ‘seeing is believing’. But in science, it’s precisely what we can
see that’s not real; (the colors, weights, and melting points of silver and gold, for example); and it’s
precisely what’s real that we can’t see (the different numbers and arrangements of their protons,
neutrons, and electrons).

I’ve been writing about things that get in the way of clear thinking. I called them ‘veils’ to focus
attention on the way they serve to hide or distort the true picture. Now I’ll call them ‘shackles’ to
emphasize the idea of constrainteven bondage. By the age of 20, I felt that I had rid myself of
veils and shackles. But 40 years later I found out that while I had been seeing shackles on everyone
else, I had been blind to my own. I had been so tightly shackled all this time I couldn’t think
straightand I didn’t know it. You see there was a fourth veil. And it led to my biggest folly.
When I finally became aware of it, I felt like an evangelist caught with a prostitute.
 Chapter 3 - The Professional Student: Age 20-37
University of Colorado: Dec 44 – Jun 46

After high school and one year of college, I joined the Navy. They called it the Navy V-12 program.
In my case it consisted of 3 semesters of free-choice college followed by Midshipman School. The
assignment I chose after getting my commission in the navy was to study Mandarin Chinese, and I
mark this as the start of my 54 years in the field of language study.

We had been selected on the basis of our college grades so we had a dormitory full of straight-A
naval officers. The purpose was to teach us all to read, write, speak, and understand the language
we had been assigned. They didn’t know how to do this then. In fact they still don’t know how to
do it today. But it seemed clear to them that for Chinese and Japanese it meant memorizing
thousands of characters. The schedule was 4 hours of class a day and 9 hours of outside study.
Chow lines consisted of long lines of flashers – flash cards, that is. I thought of 4-year-old Leo
speaking Spanish while 20-year-old Zina was having difficulties, and I recalled my own realization
at that time that I too had learned to speak a language. Then I thought of my ‘memorize, memorize,
memorize, test’ days studying Latin in high school and German in college. But what about
Chinese? This was for real (like my native English), not for grades (like my memorized Latin and
German). I didn’t flash cards with the rest of them, but I did memorize. I didn’t know what else to
do. Then one day, about four months into the Chinese course, something happened.

The teacher was late for class. It was a nice April day in that beautiful setting at the foot of the
famous Flatirons and we all went outside to look for her. After a while she came wobbling up on a
bicycle. She had never ridden a bicycle before and was very unsteady. When she got in front of us
she didn’t know how to stop and get off. She fell. Flat on her back with her legs up in the air and
10 U.S. Naval Ensigns smiling down at her. With an embarrassed giggle, a red face, and her hands
extended to shield our smiling attention, she cried out in Chinese “Don’t look at me!’

For four months I had been memorizing Chinese characters and sentences like ‘This is a book’, but
this was my first bit of real Chinese. To this day, 54 years later, I can still see her lying on her back
with her legs immodestly exposed, and I can still clearly hear the Chinese for ‘Don’t look at me!’
echoing in my head. At the time it brought back the glow I had experienced with my father’s
orange and lamp. I’m looking at the way things appear (‘This is a book’, from class, and ‘Don’t
look at me,’ from life), and I’m wondering about the way things are (what’s happening inside my
head that could account for the ‘plod’ of the former and the ‘flow’ of the latter).

All day I kept thinking of this experience. In the period of a few seconds something had happened
in front of me, sights and sounds had flooded into my eyes and ears, and something had clicked in
my head that resulted in a new kind of ‘knowing’ or ‘having’ or ‘being’. I want to avoid using the
word ‘learning’it was nothing like things ‘learned’ in class. I didn’t ‘think’ itit ‘flashed’ and it
‘echoed’. It was like a cascade of light and sound waves rushing in and washing over nerves in my
eyes and ears and then cascading on into my head to sculpture a device that could echo back similar
waves on demand. A mechanism that could repluck the same nerves that had formed it.

That night I made some calculations. The bicycle episode had taken less than 30 seconds. At this
rate we could experience 800 such cascades a day. That’s 4,000 a week, 200,000 a year, and
300,000 for 18 months. Whatever it was that lay behind this magic, it was obviously a better way
to acquire a language than writing ‘this is a book’ over and over. I really felt that this single
cascade was worth as much as the previous 4-month period of study. If a 30-second cascade equals
 The Professional Student: Age 20-37 17

4 months of study, just think of 300,000 cascades! Why do they force us to memorize things in
order to pass a test? Why don‘t they just ‘drench’ us with happenings and let us absorb Chinese?

I wallowed on for 15 more months. Did it work? Well, we did learn to read and write 3,000
Chinese characters. What about speaking and understanding? It would be a stretch to even use
those two words. Let’s call it ‘struggling’. Was anybody disappointed? Not in the least. After all,
we had all gotten passing grades, we knew all those characters, and we had never seen anyone do
any better. Isn’t that what successful learning is all about?

One day we were assigned to take some visiting Chinese Generals out for a night on the town. I
was elected to do the talking. After all, I had averaged 97% on 18 months of weekly tests. I got
about 10% on this one. Was anybody disappointed? Not really. When they told us our goal was
speaking and understanding, they were thinking of what happens in school language learning
everywhere.

University of Utah: 19 4 6 -48

After getting 4 years of free college in the Navy, I was rewarded with 5 years of free college on
the GI Bill. Then I found that I could get half again as much by taking 24 class hours at a time
instead of 16. What a way to make a living! I went back to the University of Utah and took
whatever classes interested me: mostly math, science, psychology, and languages (French,
Spanish, and Italian). But this time, unlike my misfit days, I was using college for a lot more
than study. I finally found an entrance to social cascades. I joined a fraternity. This is what I
had needed all along. I learned how to talk to girls and thus enter the other half of the world.

University of California: 1948-51

After 2 postwar years at the University of Utah they told me I would have to take a degree but I
didn’t want a degree. I wanted to cash in my GI Bill on as many interesting courses as I could get.
The only way I could see to keep doing this was to transfer to another university. As I browsed
through the catalogue for Oriental Languages at Cal I found that they offered degrees in Chinese,
Japanese, and Oriental Linguistics. I never knew there was such a field as ‘linguistics’, but I sensed
immediately that this was what I had been looking for all along.

The Army and Navy each had their own language program during the war, and neither one knew
how to teach languages like Chinese and Thai. The Navy used makeshift; the Army turned to the
linguists. With J. Milton Cowan in charge, the Army dealt out languages like cards to the available
linguists. “Here’s a language and a native speaker: analyze the language, write a textbook, and
teach it. Charles Hockett, take Chinese; Bernard Bloch, take Japanese; Mary Haas, take Thai.”
And so on. It came to be called the ‘Army Method’, and each book was called ‘Spoken Whatever’.
After the war, Dr. Cowan and many of these linguists went to Cornell, which became the most
enlightened center for language study in the U.S. But Mary Haas wanted to stay at Cal, where she
had been teaching Thai in the Army, and that’s where I discovered both linguistics and Thai.

By this time I had studied 8 languages using the same old ‘grammar translation’ method (memorize
words and grammar rules, translate sentences back and forth, and pass tests). But Thai under Mary
Haas was something else. It was mostly practice. Mary told me that all I had to do to master a
language was to practice until I got near-perfect pronunciation and then immerse myself in the
country for a year. And so I practiced.
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 18

I took a bachelors degree in Oriental Linguistics in one year and a masters in two more. That
finished off my GI Bill. The GI Bill had been designed to help people whose education had been
interrupted by the war. After working my way through my first year of college, I got the next 9
years free: 4 years in the Navy and 5 years on the GI Bill. But what now? I easily got a scholarship
to go on for a Ph.D. at Cal. But after just 2 days of this scholarship Mary Haas got a telegram that
was to change my life.

Cornell University: 1951-53

The telegram was from J. Milton Cowan, head of the Division of Modern Languages at Cornell. He
had been planning a course in Thai, and William Gedney was supposed to return from Thailand to
teach it. (Gedney was the only American linguist other than Mary Haas who knew Thai, and
Cornell was to become the only American university other than Cal to teach it.) But at the last
minute Gedney was detained and Cornell was stuck. Cowan asked Mary, and Mary asked me. I
left the next day for Cornell as the head of the Department of Thai, Burmese, and Vietnamese.

Actually, what this grand position boiled down to was teaching two students in Thai 101 and one in
Thai 102, as I continued my work on a Ph.D. in linguistics. But never mind. Cornell had the best
linguistics department in the United States and the only Center for Southeast Asian Studies. And
there I was at their point of intersection. I had an office next to some of the biggest names in the
field, and I had weekly staff luncheons with them. I had suddenly been transplanted into a
linguist’s paradise.

Bangkok: 19 5 3 -57

The Southeast Asia Program at Cornell was the main center in the country for sending out Ph.D.
candidates to do doctoral research in the country of their specialty: Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma, or
Thailand. To do this research, the candidates needed to learn the language of their country, and
that’s where I came in. I was teaching Thai to the future professors of Thai Anthropology, Thai
History, Thai Economics, and the like. But after all, I was a Ph.D. candidate myself, and I had my
own research to do in Thai Linguistics.

I easily got a one-year grant, which I managed to extend every year for a total of 4 years! Now
what was my own language preparation? I had studied Thai for 2 years at Cal at 3 hours a week
and 2 years at Cornell at 6 hours a week. (The Cornell method was to have an American linguist
teamed up with a native speaker, so two years of my ‘teaching’ was also like two years of my
studying.) So when I arrived in Thailand I had been through almost 500 hours of classroom study
by the Army Method. I could make near-perfect sounds once I had assembled a sentence for
delivery, but I couldn’t even begin to ‘carry on a conversation’.

I was still playing the role of guinea pig for the Army Method and was ready for my year of
immersion. I dutifully moved in with a Thai family and didn’t hear a word of English for my first
year. In actual fact I spent the biggest part of my ‘24-hour-a-day immersion’ as a 28 year-old alone
in my room sleeping, reading, and practicing with my tape recorder. I had meals with the family
and occasional weekend trips with university students.

So where had I gotten to at the end of my guinea-pig year? My pronunciation was excellent but my
speaking was labored. I was plodding, but I was doing it clearly. I thought I had proved it (the
Army Method) right. The process at work here is the thing that conceals the failure of language
study everywhere. As long as we’re getting temporary rewards (like my perfect pronunciation),
goals automatically come down to meet actual progress.
 The Professional Student: Age 20-37 19

After this year in family, I shared a house with my first student of Thai at Cornell. Bob was doing
research for a Ph.D. in anthropology and had come to Thailand a year before me. His experience
with Thai was 1 year study plus 2 years in Thailand, compared to my 4 years study plus 1 year in
Thailand. A few months later we were joined by Don, a young American who had come to teach
English at Chula. Don didn’t know any Thai and he kept turning down my offers to teach him. I
had a Thai girlfriend named Pu who came by every evening and we had a 40-year-old live-in
servant named Som. Bob spent most of the day at his desk interviewing samlor drivers (‘samlor’
means ‘three-wheeler’). Like me and all of my students, his Thai was plodding. Luan (a Chula
student) helped me as a linguistic informant whenever he was free from school.

A typical day saw Bob plodding at his desk with his samlor drivers, and me plodding at mine with
Luan. Som was doing her housecleaning, laundry, and cooking. Things got more interesting when
Peter got home from Chula. He, Pu, and I would be having beer and cockles in the sala. Peter was
very playful and prone to tease, while Pu was very teaseable. Peter would spend a lot of time doing
things like chasing Pu from sala to house, upstairs and down, trying to hit her backside with a ruler.
Pu would be giggling and screaming playful oaths at Peter as she ran away from him. Bob would
be going crazy at his desk. After a year of this, Bob had to ask Peter to move out. I decided to
leave with Peter and we found a new house and lived together as a foursome (Peter having acquired
a girlfriend). The playful situations continued for 2 more years.

Now all of this is merely the background setting for what I’m really getting at: the language
learning that was taking place. I had taught Bob to plod at Cornell and he had been plodding in
Thailand for over 2 years. I offered to teach Don to plod but he declined. I didn’t consider for a
minute teaching Peter to plod, but he picked Thai up fast. After a year Peter’s Thai was more fluent
than Bob’s and after 3 years it was as good as mine. In other words, Peter had gotten a lot more
than I had from the same 3 years of exposure. Why? It took me 12 more years to even make a
guess and 30 years to find the answer.

Cornell: 19 5 7 -58

As different as the Thailand of 1953 was, I was mentally prepared and didn’t feel any big shock.
But returning to the U.S. was another matter. Not only had I been in Thailand for 4 years but I had
‘gone native’, and I wasn’t prepared for the return. Since I’d been gone from Cornell for 4 years,
they had found someone else to take my place. But they could still use me since Thai classes had
expanded and they had added Burmese. I taught Burmese (in effect, studied it) as well as Thai, and
I was caught up again in the flurry of linguistic ideasthis time contributing my own new ideas
that had come from my 4 years of thinking. But 11 months of cross-fertilization (not to mention my
fear of the U.S.) was enough and I was ready for more lone thinking in Thailand. By the end of the
school year I had grabbed up a Fulbright fellowship and was on my way back to Bangkok.

Bangkok: 19 5 8 - 1960

I was assigned to the College of Education in Bangkok as a consultant to the Thai head of the
English Department. This was the first time I had been directly involved with English teaching in
Thailand and it was quite an experience. Almost all students of English in Thailand study their
English from Thai teachers who pronounce English words completely with Thai sounds.

Now when I taught English, the students were willing to accept my funny pronunciation; they
expected a funny foreigner to make funny sounds. But they sure weren’t willing to imitate my
funny sounds and thereby invite social ostracization. They simply replaced the ‘funny’ (me) with
the ‘normal’ (Thai). But what about grammar? Surely I could make a real breakthrough there. I
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 20

reduced the use of the perfect tense to an algorithm. Then I gave them a test. It seemed foolproof.
In fact it was a disaster. After going through a feeling of “What am I supposed to do with stupid
students who can’t even use a foolproof algorithm?”, I accepted the fact that something might
possibly be wrong with my method of teaching. But I didn’t know what. I was still 25 years away
from finding the reason for the massive failure called ‘study’ that we were all participating in.

Cornell: September 196 0 - January 1962

I returned to Cornell to teach Thai and Burmese and finish off my dissertation. I had been hired for
the 1960-61 school year as a ‘teaching fellow’. Before the year was up I was close to finishing my
Ph.D. and they offered me the position of assistant professor (the first step on the tenure track to full
professor). It was time for me to make the most important decision of my life. On the one hand, I
could take the position at Cornella position at the very top of my field in both Linguistics and
Southeast Asian Studies. On the other hand, I could try to support myself for 6 months while I
finished off my dissertation, find $600 for a one-way ticket to Thailand, and arrive in Bangkok with
no job or money.
 Chapter 4 - The Linguist: Age 37-55
I arrived in Bangkok in March of 1962broke, in debt, and without a job. I didn’t need any money
on arrival. I moved in with Peter and Joke (still living next door to my old house). For a job, I
went to the Thai-American Bi-national Center, which was known locally as the AUA Language
Center, or simply AUA. AUA was Thailand’s biggest school for teaching English to Thais.

The American director at that time was an old friend of mine, Gordon Schmader. He hired me as
‘Staff Linguist’: a perfect title for a perfect job. As staff linguist, I was like an ‘elder statesman’ at
the age of 37 (long on ideas and influence and short on responsibilities). So in 1962 I finally started
the job that was to be my life’s work. This work was concerned with the teaching of both English
to Thais and Thai to foreigners, and it took place at Thailand’s biggest and most prestigious
language school.

My Work

As I said earlier, I started from the Army method as practiced at Cornell. They called it ‘mim-
mem’, for ‘mimicry and memorization’. As I used the method myself in the study of Thai, I found
that both the ’mim’ and the ‘mem’ became simply ‘practice’. I practiced words to the point of
perfect mim and I practiced sentences and dialogs to the point of perfect mem. So when I started my
work at AUA, ‘mim-mem’ had become ‘practice to perfection’. Now given the fact that I believed
in practice, what should I have done when it didn’t work -- when it didn’t get to perfection? The
answer seemed clear. More practice. What if it still didn’t work? Better practice. More and more.
Better and better. But what if the idea of practice itself was wrong? What if a language gets into
our head by a completely different means? How many failures would it take before I would
abandon practice altogether and look for some other way?

Much has been said about sticking with something that doesn’t work. Barbara Tuchman wrote a
whole book about it: The March of Folly. She was concerned specifically with government poli-
cies that didn’t work. And she further limited what she meant by ‘folly’ to policies that met these
three criteria. 1) It was perceived as counter-productive in its own time. 2) A feasible course of
action was available. And 3) the policy was that of a groupnot just an individual. Still, she
managed to fill a whole book with unbelievable cases of follies that self-destructed.

Bernard Trink calls it ‘riding a dead horse’ in his column ‘Nite Owl’ in the Bangkok Post of 12
March 99.
Lakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to
dismount. However, in business (and education and government) we often try other strategies with dead
horses.
Among them are buying a stronger whip; changing riders; saying things like “This is the way we always
have ridden this horse”, appointing a committee to study the horse; arranging to visit other sites to see
how they ride dead horses.
Increasing the standards to ride dead horses; appointing a team to revive the dead horse; creating a
training session to increase our riding ability; comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment;
change the requirements, declaring that “This horse is not dead”.
Hire contractors to ride the dead horse; harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed;
declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat”; providing additional funding to increase the horse’s
performance; do a study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
Buying a product to make dead horses run faster; declaring that the horse is “better, faster and cheaper”
dead; forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses; revisiting the performance requirements for
 The Linguist: Age 37-55 23

horses; saying this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable; promoting the dead horse to
a supervisory position.

As you read about my work over these 18 years, you’ll see that I was riding a dead horse and you
might find my folly amusing. Or, knowing that I didn’t know it was folly, you might even admire
my determination. But laugh, pity, or admire, I hope that my folly can help us toward our goal.

English Textbook Preparation

The English terms lasted 6 weeks each (30 hours of class). My basic method was to write a 30-hour
book, teach two classes of it every day for a term, and then rewrite things that didn’t work. Then on
to the next book, and so on term after term. The trouble was that nothing ever really worked. I
mean I couldn’t give a drill practicing the r/l distinction and expect that the students could now
consistently hear and produce the distinction without trying. I had to review it later. It still didn’t
work, and I had to keep reviewing it: twice, three times, ten times. I was trying to do something I’d
never seen anybody try to do before. I was trying to get results in real language use. Most
textbooks would just plan to cover the r/l distinction. Many textbooks practiced something until the
students could pass a test on it. What was my goal? Not just cover. Not just pass a test. (I could
easily have gotten success by testing.) But get it right without thinking. Isn’t that what we do with
our native language? Right without thinking? So what was I to do when something didn’t work?
What did Barbara Tuchman’s clowns and jesters do in their March of Folly? They did more of the
wrong thing. That’s what I did. More. And more. And more. I could call this section
‘Confessions of a Mad Structuralist’.

The first year at AUA I simply wrote material blind (using the methods I had used at Cornell while
doing ‘Spoken English for Thais). But during my second year I got a real education in the problems
of teaching English to Thais. One of AUA’s functions was to teach English to students who were
going on government grants to study for an MA in the States. The first step was to give them a 6-
week term in English at 6 hours a day. Then we had to decide whether they were ready for a
university in the States. (Notice that we had reduced the goal from ‘work’ to ‘get by’.) Fellow staff
linguist Ted Plaister was better at deciding this than anybody, and the two of us together formed a
formidable team to interview these students and decide. We couldn’t trust anyone else. The whole
future life of these students was in our hands. If the two of us decided a student wasn’t ready, he
had to take another term and interview again. And if necessary, again. We interviewed hundreds of
MA candidates. And here’s what we found. Those who had studied at any of the elite schools that
had native speaking English teachers from first grade almost always passed. All others almost
always failedno matter how many terms they took at AUA. In other words, our teaching was of
little help. And my job became clear. I had to produce material that workedor shut up.

I devised drills for language problems. They didn’t work. I reviewed them. They still didn’t work.
I reviewed them again, and again. Nobody will ever know how far this elaborate structuring of
gradual steps went. I had dedicated my life to ‘practice’ and I felt I had to make it work. One day a
student was doing the following substitution drill item.

Teacher: It’s in the bookcase. (icebox). Student: It’s in the icebox.

Now the sentence ‘It’s in the icebox’ was purposely packed full of difficult sounds for a Thaiand
the drill was more of a pronunciation drill than a grammar drill. You will rarely find a Thai who
can pronounce this sentence perfectly. And yet the student’s pronunciation was flawless. How
satisfying. But then the student asked: “Teacher. Wat mean eye bock?” (Of course he was trying
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 24

to say “What does ‘icebox’ mean?”) Perfect pronunciation while drilling had had no effect on
speaking.

Soon after I had finished Book 6, I left the English department and put all of my time on teaching
Thai. My reason for giving up on English wasn’t that I had become convinced that practice was the
wrong way to go. I was still 13 years away from believing this. I blamed my failure, rather, on the
fact that peer pressure forced Thais to speak English with Thai sounds. Students who tried to sound
like a foreigner were socially ostracized: “Just say the words; leave the funny accent to the funny
foreigners.” Furthermore, it was precisely these disallowed sounds that carried most of English
grammar. I couldn’t fight this. All I could do was to wait for these socio-linguistic forces to
gradually change (as they largely did over the next 20 years).

Thai Textbook Preparation

I was firmly convinced that the secret of success for applying my method to Thai was tones. My
four years of teaching Thai at Cornell had clearly shown that students who got the tones right did
much much better than those who didn’t. Every lesson of my first 3 books had a section on hearing
tones (tone identification), one on making tones (tone production), and one on using tones (tone
manipulation). It didn’t work.

My Play

For eight years I led two completely different lives. The professional language teacher by day and
the professional bachelor by night. I loved both lives and pursued them with complete freedom and
dedication. As with my work, I’ll discuss my play only as it has to do with language learning. This
will serve to bring into focus the comparisons that I missed completely at the time. The units of
language learning in my work were teachers, books, classes and courses. The comparable units in
my play were cascades.

Peter’s Cascade

I’ve already told you about Peter’s learning of Thai in 1955. There was Bob, ploddingjust like I
taught him to. And there was Peter, passing Bob up in a year. With these two examples staring me
in the face, I repeated my offer to teach Don Thai. The ghost ‘teach’ had me trapped. What would
have happened if I had used the expression ‘provide for’ instead of ‘teach’? I had provided for Bob
to get Thai at Cornell. I had provided for Peter to get Thai at our house. I couldn’t have duplicated
the Peter cascade for Don, of course, but I could at least have taken note. “Hey, Peter learned much
faster and better than Bob did. There must be a message there somewhere.” Remember my
glimpse after the bicycle incident in 1945? Two steps were needed: I had to see it and I had to act
on it. In 1945, I saw but wasn’t able to act. This time I didn’t even see. And this time it was my
business. Shame on me! I encountered many more cascades over the next 25 yearssome of them
much clearer than Peter’s. But, like the whole world, I kept missing the secret. Zambi’s second
rule.

The Typical Adult Cascade

Some time after I arrived in Bangkok in 1953 I ran into a few old Bangkok hands who had been
there forever. None of them had ever studied Thaiit wasn’t available then. They had picked it up
by cascades. It was terrible. I knew of only three foreigners who spoke clear Thai in those days:
Mary Haas, Bill Gedney and me. And we had all gotten there through study. As the years went by
 The Linguist: Age 37-55 25

I saw more and more people like Mary, Bill, and me, and more and more people like those old
Bangkok hands. The message seemed clear. Study works better than picking up.

Joke’s Cascade

Joke’s cascade was much slower but eventually much better. It started in 1958 when I was in
Thailand on my Fulbright Fellowship. Peter and Joke had just set up housekeeping and I lived with
them for a month while I looked for a house close to the College of Education, where I worked. So
Joke’s cascade covered a period of 3 years altogether. In addition to Peter, Joke, and me, there were
5 other Thais: the gardener with his wife (our housekeeper) and baby girl, the cook, and a baby
sitter (one of Joke’s nieces). Peter and Joke’s little girl was born a month after my return in 1962.

Peter, Joke, her niece, and I usually played croquet on the front lawn in the evenings. Then Peter
and I would have an hour of drinks before dinner. None of the Thais knew any English, so you can
pretty well guess the mixture of Thai and English that took place during croquet, drinks, and dinner.
Joke was exposed to this mixture every day for 3 years, but she never tried to speak English
(Zambi’s second rule). Peter and I would usually speak to her in Thai, but whenever we did say
something to her in English (which we did with increasing frequency over the years) she would
always respond in Thai. They moved to England in 1964. When they returned on a visit in 1967,
Joke’s English had passed up both Peter’s Thai and mine. Anyone could tell that our Thai wasn’t
native, but it wasn’t so easy to tell that Joke wasn’t born and raised in England. And now, 30 years
later, there’s only a rare indication that she’s not a native Brit.

My Nighttime Cascade

Two hours a night every night for 8 yearsmostly just listening. I learned a lot of Thai. Now
those who might say that 8 years is a long time to spend on language learning are missing the point.
I didn’t spend any time at allany more than a baby spends 6 years in order to learn his native
language, or a young man marrying into a Mujambi village spends 2 years tagging along on
elephant hunts in order to learn Mujambi. And surely Peter didn’t spend 3 years chasing Pu with a
ruler in order to learn Thai, nor did Joke spend 3 years playing croquet in order to learn English.
All of these people would have been doing all of these things anyway. And that’s the key. The
cascade is unsolicited, undriven, and the words are unnoticed.

Kwan’s Cascade

With my marriage in 1970, my nighttime cascades stopped and Kwan’s cascade started. Contrary
to popular opinion, the cascade between husband and wife is minuscule. When I first met Kwan,
she had never studied English and had never been exposed to it (a rarity in Bangkok). After about a
year of speaking only Thai to her, I started inserting an occasional English word in Thai sentences
(very common things like ‘newspaper’, ‘coffee’, and ‘take a bath’). Imperceptibly I increased the
number of words over the years, but she never tried to say anything in English (Zambi’s second
rule).

Six years later I took her to the States on a visit. After a week at my sister’s place in Salt Lake I
went to the Summer Linguistic Institute in Hawaii for 6 weeks and left her alone with my sister and
her two sons. She could understand a little of what they said to her, but she had never tried to speak
English at all before this and I’m sure communication wasn’t easy. But they got along famously.

A few months after we returned to Thailand we moved into a compound where an Anglo-Burmese
family was living. Anglo-Burmese English was their native language. Their Burmese was non-
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 26

native and their Thai was minimal. Kwan became close friends with the old Auntie and they talked
a lot. Two years later I left my job at AUA and we went to live in the States with my sister.
Kwan’s English had improved quite a bit during her 2 years with Auntie, but talking with my sister
and nephews was still a struggle.

In the meantime I had gone from speaking to her in Thai with the easy words in English to speaking
in English with the hard words in Thai. She still spoke only Thai to me. We lived there for four
years and I would estimate that her ratio of hearing English to speaking it during this time was
about 10 to 1.

Now here’s the moral to Kwan’s story. Unlike almost all the Thai people I know, her English
doesn’t sound Thai. It sounds American. Her two closest Thai friends have lived here in the States
for over 25 years and their English is nothing like hers. Joke’s English sounds British, Kwan’s
English sounds American, and the English of all the rest sounds Thai.

Servants and Bargirls

Most Thais learn their English by studying it in school. Joke and Kwan learned theirs from
cascades of a rather rare kind. I’ll compare servants in an English-speaking household with bar
girls in a bar for foreigners. Notice this. The main job of servants is to listen. The main job of
bargirls is to talk. Long before I had ever thought about teaching by cascades I had come up with
this formula in my classes: ‘pronunciation index’ = ‘percentage of language heard’ divided by
‘percentage of language spoken’. Servants might say one word for every 100 they hear, for a
pronunciation index of 100. Bargirls might say 100 words for every 100 they hear, for an index of
1. And sure enough, it’s quite obvious that servants have far better pronunciation than bar girls.

I observed all of these cascades without understanding the forces involved. I didn’t know why Joke
did better than Kwan, who did better than Peter, who did better than me, who did better than the old
Bangkok hands I had known. I understand these forces now. The preface says it all in a single
phrase: tagging along in a cascade of everyday happenings without trying to say anything for
nearly a year. This phrase contains Zambi’s two rules. The first rule is ‘tagging along’. The
second rule is ‘without talking’.

But what were the long-term goals of the guinea pig? I had set out to prove that the Army
method could produce perfect speakers. Then, I thought I had proved the method right. Now, I
can see that I had proved it wrong. The difference is hiding in the word ‘speak’. Then, I was
thinking of ‘delivery’ (how the speaking comes out). Since my delivery was near perfect, I had
proved it right. Now, I’m thinking of ‘production’ (how I get from thought to sentence). Since
my production of Thai is very different from my production of English, I must have proved it
wrong. Let me put it this way. When I speak Thai, I think in Thai.

At the end of those 18 years it seems that I hadn’t learned anything. I was still convinced that
the answer was practice, practice, and more practice. Everything in my work kept screaming
out “Teaching and study can’t produce real language learning!” And everything in my play
kept screaming out “You don’t do it. It does you!” The experience was therebut the screams
went unnoticed. I was still unaware of the fourth veil.
 Chapter 5 - The Second Wind: Age 45-70
The 5 Ideas of the 70’s

Race

You’ll remember that I mentioned race in the section on ‘loaded categories’. I had never really been
exposed to America’s racial problem. And during all my years in Thailand my only knowledge of
what was going on in the States was one newspaper and one newsmagazine. Time called it “… the
toughest moral and political dilemma of the postwar era: how to ensure justice for its blacks and
tranquility among its races.” And I thought, “Blacks? Races?” Max Lerner said, “Let’s not kid
ourselves. This isn’t a political or economic or even moral crisis we are in. It is an intellectual
crisis.” And I thought, “Perhaps the problem is all in our language.” It was at this point that I went
on half time at my job, and I ended up taking half of every day for a whole year writing this article.
Here’s how it started.
Race, Complexion, and Ancestry
I found this entry in a Chinese dictionary.
Chu: ‘A horse with a white left hind leg.’
What a strange category to have its own word!
There must be a reason!
Some special implication? Some special need?
Here’s another one, closer to home.
American Negro: ‘An American with
any detectable amount of black ancestry.’
What a strange category to have its own name.
There must be a reason.
I never did find the reason for ‘Chu’.
I’ll have to ask some Chinese historian.
But I can guess the reason for ‘American Negro’:
A cruel, ugly category (not a word) is filling a need!
Whatever we call that strange category,
(be it ‘Nigger’, ‘Colored’, ‘Negro’, or ‘Black’)
it fabricates a prejudice.
(‘’Nigger’ reveals the prejudice, ‘Black’ hides it;
and more harm is done by the hiding.)
The prejudice, in turn, fills a widespread need.

The point developed in the article was that ‘any’ (any part black) implies contami-
nation (or royalty!). No other racial mixtures are defined like this. They all speak of
parts. There must be a reason you can’t be part black. But ‘any’ is only half the
problem. The other half is the ‘anyway’ implied by the remedy. “Even though you’re
contaminated (by ‘any’), you’re entitled to your rights (‘anyway’).” In effect, that’s
what the 1954 Supreme Court Decision implied. How noble! Notice that the problem
in this example lies in categoriesnot words. This is much more difficult to fight. In
fact, even though I see the problem clearly, I still can’t find a way to keep from
implying that certain people are contaminated. Our language gives me no way.

Perception

As I looked over old issues of Scientific American I came across a 1963 article on “The Visual
Cortex of the Brain” by David Hubel. It grabbed me. For the first time I saw a mental unit that had
 The Second Wind: Age 45-70 37

substance. A specific perception (like me looking at a kitten in front of me right now) consisted of
a specific structure of converging neurons that I likened to a neural tree. This structure existed in
space and in time. It had size; it had shape; it had location. In my imagination I could see it take
shape, and I could see it work. Compare this with the usual ghosts of the ‘mind’: ‘thoughts’,
‘memories’, ‘consciousness’, and the like. How big is a thought? What’s its shape? What’s it
made of? A thought has no substance. And what are things that have no substance? Ghosts.

Hubel’s first view was inside the neuron. Different kinds of neurons are turned on by different
things. If a neuron’s thing is vertical lines, for example, it will buzz like crazy when it sees one.
Call it buzz strength 10. If it sees a line slightly off vertical it will buzz 9, and so on down to 0 for a
horizontal linewhich does absolutely nothing for it. Hubel’s second view was between neurons.
Each neuron has many lines of input (from different areas in the eye or from other neurons) and
each input can be different (one line might carry buzz 5, another buzz 2, and another buzz 1). It
adds these inputs together (or combines them in some other way) and sends buzz 8 (or whatever)
down to hundreds of different output lines leading to hundreds of different neurons on the next
level. (My imagination went wild on the two parenthesized parts of the previous sentence; that is,
‘combines them in some other way’, and ‘whatever this combination may be’.) Hubel’s third view
was between levels and between areas. There are several levels of neurons with a maze of
crisscrossing connections from level to level.

But wait. Where’s the kitten? On the outside I was looking at a kitten. On the in-side I saw only a
maze of connections. Where in that maze was my kitten? I went back to the eye and followed
Hubel as he worked his way in. The basic structuring was a convergence of many neurons onto
one, and this time I highlighted the path as I went. I’ll refer to levels of neurons as A, B, C, and so
on. Many A’s (nerve cells in the eye) converged onto a B. Many of these B’s converged onto a C.
And so on until the whole kitten came together. Clearly highlighted in that maze of connections
that crossed several different levels was a neural tree. From leaves to branches to trunk. And that
neural tree was my kitten. All its characteristics were there. The tilts of its lines were in the leaves
of the neural tree. Tilts had converged into shapes (as the leaves converged onto a twig). Shapes
had converged with colors (as twigs converged onto a branch). And so on until we finally reached
the trunk. That trunk was a neuron that connected the whole kitten together. It was the thing that
made it possible for the whole tree to light up as a unit. And the totality of what’s connected to
what, in any given flash, is precisely what a perception is made of. Because of that final neuron, the
neural tree that was my kitten was able to flash as a unit.

Notice where Hubel and I had parted. Hubel went from neurons to connections, to levels and areas.
I went from neurons to connections to trees. He saw a massive maze of crisscrossing connections; I
saw a massive forest of trees. Before that day I couldn’t see the trees for the forest. But once I saw
the trees, look what followed. Each neural tree, once formed (built or grown), stayed right there.
Right where it had formed. While I was looking at the kitten, the flashing neural tree was my
perception of it. When I stopped looking, the same neural tree stopped flashing but it didn’t go
away. It was a dark memory of the kitten. When I thought of it later, it flashed againas a thought.
“But it’s the same tree, Dummy!” (I said to myself). “The perception, the memory, and the
thought. They’re all the same damn tree!” And this tree was no ghost. It was real. How big was
it? At least several inches (from eyes to the back of the head). What was its shape? It resembled a
tree. What was it made of? Nerve cells. I had made an intangible perception, an intangible
memory, and an intangible thought all tangible. It felt great. I looked at the house across the street.
Sproing! Another tree popped up. I looked above at the clouds and the birds. Sproing! Neural
trees were popping up all overall day long. Then I started flashing old memories. ‘Breakfast this
morning.’ Click! The tree lights up and I examine it in detail. ‘Dinner with friends at a restaurant
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 38

three months ago.’ Click! I can see where the entrance is, who’s sitting where, the waiter bringing
the duckeverything. It wasn’t a ghostly memory; it was a physical tree. The same damn tree that
had been built three months earlier.

I had found the substance behind the ghost. The ghost was the words: ‘seeing a kitten’ or ‘thinking
about seeing the kitten’. The substance behind ‘seeing it’ and ‘thinking about it’ was a neural
treethe same neural tree for both the seeing and the thinking. And that, to me, is what science is
all about: finding the substance behind the ghosts.

As I look back now I wonder why I didn’t pursue it. “If it made you feel so good why didn’t you
run with it? Why didn’t you use it to change your way of teaching and analyzing languages?” And
now I know. Blinders. Anyway, there were too many things left unexplained. This had only been
step 1. It just floated around in my head making me feel good for 20 more years. Then it
happened. In quick succession came several more steps.

The DNA Story

It wasn’t just what the DNA story had to tell me; it was how it started me thinking. There was a
progression of excitement. 1) Knowing what a DNA molecule is and how it reproduces itself. 2)
Knowing how this molecule directs the production of all other molecules needed to produce a
particular plant or animal. 3) Knowing how this whole process came about in the first place; that is,
the evolution of these molecules.

Behavior

I was looking in the ‘Letters’ section of Science in 1974 and I saw a reference to the book,
Behavior: The Control of Perception by William Powers. It reminded me of my 1965 article,
‘Phonemics Without Sounds’, which no one had understood. I sent a copy to Powers. He
understood, he was impressed, and a correspondence began. He knew the importance of language
to his theory and he had been looking for a linguist who could understand him. We clicked. I got a
copy of his book and studied it for two years. Then in 1977 I went halfway around the world
(Bangkok to Chicago) to talk with him.

You’ve got to start with ‘hearing,’ and you end up with ‘speaking’. But how do you get to
‘speaking’ from ‘hearing’? My answer had always been ‘practice’. But what was the reality behind
‘practice’? After all it was only a ghost. Well Powers was saying that the brain’s role in behavior
was like that of a thermostat. The engineers call it a closed feedback loop. You look at what
you’ve got (the thermometer), subtract what you want (the thermostat), and the difference activates
whatever it takes (furnace or air conditioner) to bring this difference to zero. In other words, it’s the
difference between what you want and what you’ve got that determines what you do. And you know
what’s controlling what? Do you think it’s the thermostat that’s controlling the furnace? No. It’s
the furnace (behavior) that’s controlling the thermometer (the perception).

Physics

For me, physics was always an enigma. My feeling for physics had been based on little more than
the solar system and the atom. These were both clear cases of guessing what’s there. I had
generalized these examples to all of science, and I assumed that all physicists had done the same
thing. Now I suddenly find out that for almost everything besides solar system and atom, they were
all observing what’s there. Stephen Hawking later came right out and said it: “It seems better to
cut out all the features of the theory that cannot be observed.” He was actually bragging about it. I
 The Second Wind: Age 45-70 39

couldn’t stand it! From 1977, I turned my main attention to physics and in 1980 I quit my lifetime
job in Thailand and returned to the States to study physics and try to do something about this
catastrophe. Imagine it. Physics abandoning the method of science. My God!

Here’s how I would explain their departure from Copernicus, Galileo, and me. On a scale of 10 for
reality, let me give Copernicus and Galileo a grade of 9. Now observe the fall of physics.

1, Newton said, concerning the nature of light, ‘I make no hypotheses’. And he wasn’t apologizing.
The reality score dropped to 7.

2. Maxwell used Faraday’s models of reality to work out his famous equations about electricity and
magnetism. But once he got the equations, he bragged that he no longer needed the models. After
going from guess to measure, he wanted to cover up the guessing. Reality dropped to 5.

3. Einstein appreciated models of reality (note his famous thought experiments). But his fame,
ironically, came from giving up. When he couldn’t make sense of the perception of light, he
blamed the limitations of the human brain. “Let’s face it: there are some things it just can’t do.”
This was a terrible blow to the goal of guessing reality. Score it 3.

4. Feynman used his famous two-slit experiment to show that electrons can’t be explained as either
particles or waves. He said that it’s impossible, “absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical
way.” Reality had dropped to 1.

It was in Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics (1963). He tells of an interesting theory of

gravity that many people had thought up independently since 1750. It goes like this. Space consists
of particles (I’m going to call them ‘trinos’) moving in all directions at the speed of light. We get
hit equally from all sides and thus feel no pressure. Most of these trinos pass right through the earth
and right through usbut not all. A few trinos are strained out by the earth and we thus get hit by a
few more from above than from below. The excess number of trinos hitting us from above exerts a
pressure on us towards the earth. This pressure is gravity.

Now he tells me! Lots of people had thought of it, he says. But nobody told me. It seems to have
been one of the best kept secrets of physics. Feynman explains why nobody pursued it. “If this
theory were true,” he says, “the orbiting earth would get hit more from in front than from behind
and this would long since have stopped it in its orbit.” He admits that it’s an exciting theory, but t
can’t be true. “Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman.” You don’t judge a new theory with the terms
of the old one. You ask the new theory why the earth isn’t slowed down.
 Chapter 6 - The Conversion: Age 55-60
While my own outside thinking was booming, my work was collapsing. Results from our teaching
methods were still far from what I had hoped for and I had run out of new ideas. On top of this I
had suffered eight straight years of uncooperative bosses from Washington. The collapse of my
work was telling me to get out of there. And the boom of my thinking was telling me to go study
physics. But what kind of work could I do? The teaching of Thai in the States had dropped from
thirteen universities during the Vietnam War down to fourleaving lots of Thai experts out of
work. The waiting line was two or three deep at each place that taught it. They were all using my
textbooks but that turned out to be a disadvantage. Over-qualified!

What about Chinese? That was being taught almost everywhere. Could I teach Chinese? Well I
had a degree in linguistics, I had thirty years of experience teaching a tonal language, and I once
knew Chinese. Of course I hadn’t spoken a word of Chinese in 35 years, but maybe I could get it
back. I gave AUA 6 months notice while I finished writing my last Thai text-book and found a
replacement. Then I headed straight for spring quarter at the University of Utah.

I loved it. It was my favorite occupation. I soon finished off math. I took algebra, trig, and
calculus 1 in the spring, calculus 2 and 3 in the summer, and differential equations in the fall. I was
obviously going to be there a lot longer than a year, and it looked like I would level off at two
classes of physics and one of Chinese every quarter.

The extreme structural methods of the linguists had already come under attack by 1964. Wilga
Rivers (The Psychologist and the Language Teacher) had said that while the linguists’ methods
might work for linguists, they didn’t work for the other 99% of language students. Maybe so. But I
couldn’t see that she offered anything better. I felt sure that as a linguist I could still get a lot from
practicing drills even if most people couldn’t. So my return to college life now had three purposes.
1) To feed my appetite for physics. 2) To prepare for a job. And 3) to prove that practice works.
This was to take four years instead of one. Here’s what happened.

Studying Physics

Most professionals soon build up a defense against cranksbut I suspect that physicists are
touchier than most. Just seeing this old guy in their class made some of them suspect a crank.
When I walked into their office they stiffened. And when I introduced myself as a linguist, they
were sure. “How can I politely get rid of this old crank?” I couldn’t bring myself to put them
through this.

I wanted explanations; they gave equations. I had often wondered about the reflection of light, for
example. I looked through dozens of books to no avail. They always just pictured a wave or a
photon hitting a straight line and rebounding. Even though I had trouble asking questions and
getting satisfactory answers, I still thought that they knew something I didn’t. And this continued
for four years of classes. Then it happened.

It was in my twelfth quartera cold day in the April of 1983. I had found a textbook that tried to
explain the reality of magnetism in addition to the math. The realities of relativity are not easy for
an old brain to picture and it was taking me time. I spent two days wrestling with one page of this
booktrying to get their picture. I finally got it. And they were wrong. “Hey!” It hit like a bolt of
 The Conversion: Age 55-60 34

lightning. A sudden realization that was both clear and irrevocable. It was like the bolt that started
it all in 1979: “Quit your job and go study physics!” Clear and irrevocable. This one was “Quit
your studies and strike out on your own!”

Preparing For a Job

As planned, I had gotten back quite a lot of my forgotten Chinese and was ready to start looking for
a job. But by this time I had also learned a lot of Japanese and I was considering the possibility of
teaching Japanese as well. As I continued to get rejections for my Chinese and Japanese
applications, I got an indirect feeler from AUA in Bangkok. The American lady who had replaced
me when I left had taken another job in Bangkok and AUA was looking for someone to take her
place. But I had left in a huff. I had been insulted when I found out that for my entire 18 years at
AUA I had been at the very bottom of the pay scale for the American staff. I most certainly wasn’t
bubbling with enthusiasm about going back to a job where my ideas had run dry. In fact it was the
first time since I was 25 that I was considering doing something more for money than enjoyment.
But this period of ‘why not’ didn’t last long. Before the feeler got any further, my life changed.

Proving Practice

Remember that at the same time I was studying physics I also had classes in Chinese and Japanese.
I was excited as I walked into the Japanese class that fall quarter of 1980. I had never been less
than number one in a language class—and that was without trying. This time I was going to knock
myself out. Getting an “A” wouldn’t be enough. Being the best in the class wouldn’t be enough. I
was going to be the best the world had ever seen. You wouldn’t believe the extremes I went to. I
was more like a threatened animal fighting for its life than a student trying to learn a language.

As I look back now, I can see the folly. Perfect performance isn’t the goal of language learning. It
isn’t the means of learning languages. And it isn’t the proof of language learned. But if that’s true,
just what is this ‘perfect performance’ I had been aiming for all my life? Could it be nothing more
than doing the wrong thing better than anybody else?

It’s surprising how good we get at changing goals to meet results. I had to admit that I couldn’t
speak Japanese, so I changed my goal from speaking Japanese to practicing it. I could practice
Japanese better than anyone else in the world! (It reminds me of a ‘Duffy’ cartoon. Duffy said, “I
always followed the old adage, ‘practice makes perfect.’ And look at me today. Perfect at
practicing.” What could I do with this skill? Teach students to practice Japanese, of course. And
why should I do this? Well they weren’t learning to speak Japanese anyway. With my help at least
they would be able to deliver practiced sentences and get praise and gradeslike I had done all my
life. I teamed up with the head of the Japanese department to teach beginning Japanese the
following quarter. I would orchestrate the practice. She would provide the talk.

I was delighted with the results. I thought the students loved me and had learned more than anyone
ever had before them. I couldn’t wait for the students’ appraisals to come in. I got them on
December 14, 1983, and with my heart beating wildly I read them. They all hated me and my
practiceeven those who had done it perfectly. And they all loved the delightful Japanese teacher
with her charm and her natural talk. I cried myself to sleep that night. I had hit rock bottom.

Now, let me introduce my colleague Adrian Palmer (Buzz). He had come to Thailand after
finishing his doctorate in linguistics to get a few years of experience in the field before starting a
career at a university. During his four years in Thailand we became close friends. We even wrote
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 35

two AUA Thai textbooks together. He eventually ended up at the University of Utah so we saw a
lot of each other during my four years of study at the U.

The day after that awful night when I cried myself to sleep, I went to see Buzz in his office. “What
went wrong?” He handed me a copy of The Natural Approach by Krashen and Terrell that he had
received that very day. I knew all about Stephen Krashen’s ideas on language acquisition. Buzz
had been a close friend of Krashen for many years and had kept me informed. I was interested in
Krashen’s ideas all this time, but I had those damned blinders. What does it take to get past lifelong
blinders? Rock bottom, that’s what. I had read Krashen’s previous book looking down from above.
I now read this one looking up from rock bottom. It was a sudden conversion.

Now while I was convinced of the basic principle of the Natural Approach, I certainly wasn’t
convinced of Tracy Terrell’s way of teaching it. In those two weeks I had to take my version of the
Natural Approach and create a class. Whew!

It was 1984 and the room number was 101 (a student explained the meaning of this to me). We
took it one day at a time. I would stay up all night planning for the next day and then meet with the
assistant for an hour before every class. It was terribly awkward. I couldn’t speak Japanese; I only
had two weeks to invent a teaching method; neither my assistant nor I had ever done anything like
this before; and he only had an hour before class every day to find out what he was supposed to do.
Terribly awkward. At the end of the quarter I braced myself for the student appraisals. They loved
it!

During that fateful quarter I was also sitting in on Buzz’s class on language teaching theory. We
arranged to give a class in Natural Thai the following quarter. All fourteen signed up, along with a
few others. It was still awkward. But unlike Japanese, I could speak Thai. And I was now
experienced (one whole term!).

After a few days it occurred to me that the students might think they weren’t getting real Thai and I
brought Kwan in to join me. My only motivation was to show off. “See? My Thai sounds just like
hers.” But it turned out to be the biggest single step in the whole development of my kind of natural
approach. I had done team teaching at Cornell 30 years before, but that was only a way to bring
together a person who knew how to teach with a person who knew how to speak. The same thing
was true of the two terms I teamed up to teach Japanese. But since I could speak Thai fluently it
never occurred to me to have two teachers. Not until the day I decided to show off.

There were two big differences between my way and that of Krashen and Terrell. Krashen had said
that the students shouldn’t try to say anything during the first ten hours. He called it the ‘silent
period’. Buzz and I both agreed that the silent period should be lengthened considerablyperhaps
by many times. If indeed ‘you learn to speak by listening’, why should they speak at all? Any time
spent with the students speaking would be wasted. Terrell’s method consisted of constant
interchanges between teacher and students, so half of the time was wasted. But two-way talking is
what language is all about. How are the students going to hear questions and answers? Of course!
Two teachers talking to each other. So there were the two basic differences. Two or more teachers
and nonspeaking students. I can’t even imagine a successful program that didn’t have both.

I stumbled through that spring quarter, learning mostly what not to do. The one big breakthrough
came on the last day. From time to time I had spent a few minutes on daily routines: getting up in
the morning, walking to school, making a sandwich, and the like. Nothing more than five minutes
at a time. But on the last day, as a review, I brought them all together. I went through a whole day
of routinesfrom getting up in the morning to going to bed at night. It took most of the hour.
 The Conversion: Age 55-60 36

Student attention was riveted on my every move and they understood everything. It was a big
success. When I later went back to AUA to develop the natural approach, I designed the
classrooms to have sinks, stoves, and other fixtures so we could go through routines a big part of
every hour.

Even though only half of the activities during that first term actually worked, it was enough to sell
the method to those future teachers of languages and I myself was completely convinced. My
future was fixed. I couldn’t accept a job that didn’t give me complete freedom to teach languages
my way. I knew of only one place in the world that could give me this freedom. AUA. They
wanted me to come back and run the Thai department in the old way as I rewrote my old Thai
textbooks. I said this was impossible. It had to be Natural or nothing. They said I could come give
a demonstration class in Natural for one term and then decide.

We moved back to Thailand in October of 1984 and my new life began.

 Chapter 7 - Putting Cascades in the Classroom
Getting Started

Every time I think about that 5-week demonstration term in November of 1984, I almost die of
embarrassment. The director had advertised it as a whole new way to learn a language, and he had
invited professors and language teachers from all over Bangkok to come and observe it in action.
The class consisted of my wife and me and 15 students in front of nearly 100 observers (mostly
linguists and language teachers from the universities). It was like giving a piano concert in your
first week of piano lessons. Not only was our teaching little more than fumbling in the dark, but I
was doing the fumbling in my non-native Thai. I cringe as I recall the experience. The class met 2
hours a day and I spent most of the other 22 hours groping for ideas. It wasn’t a satisfying
experience.

The director had advertised our method as ‘Natural Approach’, and we were stuck with the name.
In Thailand, ‘NA’ had come to mean ‘AUA’s variety of the Natural Approach’. For the world
market, we used the name ‘The Listening Approach’ or sometimes ‘the Natural Approach as
practiced at AUA’. We now call it ‘Automatic Language Growth’ or ‘ALG’. This chapter tells the
history of the development of ALG.

The Methods

I had a pretty good idea of the course I was setting out to build, I didn’t know how to handle those
‘others’.

1. The minimal unit of natural learning is an interesting experience (a happening).

2. The non-speaking part of this happening should carry most of the meaning.
3. There should be two or more teachers talking through the happening,
4. The students should be involved in the happening without speaking.
5. The students’ attention should be on the happeningnot the teacher talk.

Don’t Speak

William Powers had given me the general answer years earlier with his ‘behavior is the control of
perception’which becomes ‘speaking is the control of listening’ when applied to language
learning. But even then there are a couple of steps remaining to complete Powers’ loop and give
the answer ‘you learn to speak by listening’. It took me 10 years to complete this loop. So when
the dam broke, I wasn’t able to get any help from Powers. It was Stephen Krashen that came to my
rescue.

Krashen’s method, in my view, can be reduced to these two sentences. “Humans acquire language
in only one wayby understanding messages,” and “Speaking is the result of this acquisitionnot
its cause.” I especially liked the two word version of the second sentence: “Speech emerges.”

”Understanding messages” and “speech emerges.” When you apply this to toddlers and Zambi, it’s
obvious. But can we put it in the classroom? The classroom answer to the first part would appear
to be “provide lots of understandable messages”. But what do we do with the second part? The
answer really should be “nothing”it’s the automatic result of the first part.
 Putting Cascades in the Classroom: Age 60-70 76

Outlawing student talk may be a bit drastic, but surely it was easy enough to im-plement. I told the
teachers not to let students speak Thai in class. Still they tried to speak!

I put up signs in all classrooms, “Don’t speak Thai in class.” Still they tried to speak!

I papered doors and walls with signsbig ones, “Don’t speak Thai in class.” Surely they can’t miss
all of those signs. Still they tried to speak!

I gave up on signs and went from class to class telling the students “Don’t speak Thai in class.”
They still tried to speak!

I told the teachers to fine students 10 baht (about 50 cents) for every word of Thai the spoke in
class. But they still tried to speak! And when the teachers chose to enforce the fine, they paid. The
teachers used the money for a party every Friday.

The students still tried to speak, but the teachers didn’t report them to me. It was a collusion.

Did speaking really cause damage, or was I being unrealistic? Hard evidence had to wait three
years. In July of 1987 we started the first year-long class of more than a thousand hours, and there
were four students eager enough to go the distance: Paul, David. Peter, and Charlie. Paul and David
never spoke; but, in spite of all our warnings, Peter and Charlie didright from day one. They
finished the course, they all settled down in Thailand, and they all dropped in to see us over the
years. After a few years, Peter and Charlie were struggling with broken Thai like all long-time
foreigners. But Paul and David had passed me up. Me! The original guinea pig of practice and 40
year resident of Thailand!

Now, 15 years and thousands of students later, we’ve had hundreds of students who went more than
a thousand hours with speaking and dozens who went the same distance without. None of the
‘speakers’ ever got close to my mark while some ‘non-speakers’ eventually passed it. But not all.
That is, some ‘non-speakers passed me and some didn’t. It looked like there was something besides
speaking that was causing damage.

Don’t Think

“Don’t speak. Don’t ask. Don’t look up words. Don’t take notes.” I wasn’t doing any of those
things in my own natural study of Chinese and I saw that a new prohibition was needed. What? It
seemed obvious. Don’t think! But wait. ‘Don’t think’ covers them allnot just the linguist’s
meddling. Obviously you’ve got to think about the language for these three: asking questions,
looking up words, and taking notes. But what about speaking? After the language has been built,
you don’t have to think it upit pops. But before the language has been built, it can’t popif you
want it, you have to think it. “Don’t think about the language” covers all of the terrible four.

The terrible fifth then becomes “don’t analyze”, and the terrible five become one: “Don’t think
about the language.” We’ve finally reached the elusive magic to natural learning. Never think
about the language! Toddlers score 100% on this, of course, while most adults, like Mary, score
close to 0%. The difference is so great that it gave rise to the myth that children lose it at puberty.

The Teachers

Developing ALG Teachers

 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 77

After the demonstration term in late 1984, one of our teachers showed an especially strong interest
in ALG and became my assistant as we stumbled through the first two terms of 1985. She then
stumbled through the third term with another interested teacher as her assistant. But in the fourth
term it happened. In just a matter of days she went from fumbler to expert. I was stunned by the
sudden transformation.

But that was nothing compared to the young man who had been her first assistant. He had
graduated to lead teacher in his third term and, like the rest of us, was very uncertain. He always
had a half-smile on his face like he was laughing at himself playing the fool. Then one day I saw
that smile disappear. It was still there as he finished the first activity of the hour and it was gone as
he started the next.

It looked like it was going to be easy to convert our teachers from SA to ALG. Fumble for four
months and ‘Presto’. But it wasn’t.

My wife and I were on a five-day cruise to islands in the Andaman Sea. There were 104 of us
tourists, 4 guides, and the crew. We spent each day on a different island and slept as the boat
cruised on to the next. It was delightful. Those guides kept us entertained all of our waking hours.
I thought of our closest American friends who had visited us 17 years earlier. Once I thought of our
friends understanding (in much the same way our students did), I realized that they would also be
learning Thai (in much the same way our students did). That’s precisely the meaning of ‘natural
learning’: understanding happenings.

The Andaman cruise was the turning point; and now, after 15 years, most of our ‘teachers’ are
guides. If only most of our ‘students’ could be tourists!

Training ALG Teachers

I said above that when children reach puberty they don’t lose the ability to grow languages; they
gain the ability to try. That’s from the point of view of the child. But now look at the adults as they
interact with growing children. When children reach puberty, adults change, too. They change the
way they talk to them.

ALG teaching is not instinctive. It has to be learned. But in some caseslike our second teacher
taking polaroid picturesthe learning can be fast.

Materials

Activities

In 1945 I knew how effective the bicycle incident was; I just couldn’t see how to put it into the
classroom. Then in 1985 I witnessed the conversion of our second ALG teacher as he took polaroid
pictures. That’s how! So this became the unit of ALG materials: planned happenings. I called
them ‘activities’. In the early years we planned three or four activities an hour chosen from the
following 14 types.
1. Classroom procedures: Taking the roll, making announcements, etc.
2. Manipulating objects: Colored blocks, water in buckets, cups, and spoons, etc.
3. Daily routines: Getting up in the morning, making breakfast, taking a bath, etc.
4. Demonstrations: Using a computer, scientific experiments, magicians’ acts, etc.
 Putting Cascades in the Classroom: Age 60-70 78

5. Physical activities: Sports, exercise, physical games, dancing, etc.

6. Fun and games: Table games, party games, puzzles, toys, etc.
7. Information about students: teachers talking about the students’ statistics.
8. Show and tell: Students bring objects and teachers talk about them.
9. Pictures and maps: Snapshots, slides, picture magazines, etc.
10. Role-plays: Taxi driver and fare, waiter and customer, doctor and patient.
11. Stories: Children’s stories, folk tales, comic books, anecdotes, etc.
12. General information: bus routes, weather data, current events, etc.
13. Cultural information about target country: how they eat, dance, bathe, etc.
14. ‘Sheltered’ subject matter (teaching classes in the target language).

Three activities an hour, 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, 5 weeks a term, 9 terms a year. That’s 3,375
activities needed for a year-long course. And these had to be carefully ordered to ensure
understanding. Here’s an example of an activity that could easily be understood on the very first
day.

Understanding without noticing wordsthat’s the name of the game. Anything not attached to an
experience is worthless. But can we really ignore words?

Vocabulary

As we started the course at AUA, the biggest unknown was what to do about vocabulary. Anyway,
we experimented with several different ways of handling words. Like these. Anything that we put
on paper had an ordered list of suggestions for how to use it. It took me three more years to finally
clear up my uncertainty. The answer I found is best explained with these two words: ‘wonder’ and
‘grow’. Words have to growgradually. Experience by experience. And the mechanism of
growing in each experience is ‘wondering’.

Measuring Learning

Let’s look at our model: the toddlers. Of course you know how much your little girl knows without
testing, but what if I wanted to know? I wouldn’t give her a test. I would simply ask her age. If
you told me she was 22 months, I would know that she understood most childhood talk, could say
lots of words, and was just beginning to put two words together into a novel sentence. They
couldn’t say anything in Thai and wanted to know whether it was working. And when they asked
“How am I doing?”, all I had to do was to find out their ‘age’just like I did with the little girl.
“How many hours of class have you had?” And I soon started to get a feeling for what these ‘ages’
meant in terms of results. Just as I knew what most toddlers of age 12, 18, and 24 months could do,
I could tell fairly well what ALG students of ‘age’ 200, 400, and 600 hours could do. And I could
even start to match up the results of student hours with toddler months.

The Second Generation

In mid 1988, we completed our first full year course, and two of the students, Paul and David, had
maintained a ceiling* of near-100%. They were clearly budding successes. A few years later both
of them had passed me up and were bubbling with enthusiasm for the magic they had experienced.
Paul settled down in Northeast Thailand where Lao is spoken. He spoke Thai to them and they
 From the Outside In – The Secret to Automatic Language Growth 79

spoke Lao to him (like a Norweigian settling down in Denmark). Paul’s natural course in Lao was
even better than his school ALG course in Thai, and within a few years his Lao was even better
than his Thai.

* The ‘ceiling’ is one of the aspects of monitoring the ALG student described in detail in the
complete version of this book.

David settled down near Bangkok and kept in close touch with us. In 1994 he expressed an interest
in helping us outjust as I was about to turn 70 and was looking for someone to take my place.
As expected, he could see things I couldn’t. I eagerly continued my yearly visitsbut not to
give guidance as planned. To learn about all the new wonders.