This is an article in a series on linguistic presuppositions, those powerfully effective language patterns that you can use conversationally to persuade your listeners and readers.

Today’s pattern is called the “Spurious Not,” and is similar in structure to both the rhetorical question pattern and the negative question pattern.

You can use it as follows. Take any negative question, separate the contraction (e.g. aren’t you à are you not) and simply make the question. When you separate the “not” out like that, it takes a little bit more brain processor time to make sense of the question.

If you’ve ever see a TV show when the lawyer had some poor witness on the stand, and kept firing away with questions like:

“Were you not there that night that…”
“Did you not see the defendant…”
“Are you not aware that you are under oath?”

These are intended to throw the witness off guard, and make them more susceptible to tell the truth, (or less resistant to cover something up) or in the case of les than ethical attorney’s, answer the questions in a way that throws their client in a better light, or confuses the jury, so that they will have a harder time coming back with a verdict against the attorney’s client.

In order to persuade, it’s best to phrase these like you are asking a question of yourself, and then follow up with a more “leading” statement.

Idea = exercise is the best way to lose weight

I wonder if you are not already aware that exercise is the best way to lose weight, because when you realize that you can save a lot of money by not buying all those diet pills and mail order meal plans.

I wonder if you are not already aware that many people have already discovered that exercise is not only the best way to lose weight, but also a great way to improve the quality of your sleep and boost your self-confidence and self-esteem.

Idea = dollar cost averaging is the best way to make money in the stock market

I wonder if you are not already aware that dollar cost averaging is the best way to make money in the stock market, and can save you lots of time and worry.

I wonder if you are not already aware of many people who are now happily retired simply because they decided before that the simplest and most effective way to consistently make money in the stock market is through simple, dollar cost averaging.

Idea = presuppositions are a great way to persuade people

I wonder if you are not becoming more and more aware that with these simple language patterns, you can easily persuade your friends and family to vastly improve their lives by opening up a world of possibility around them.

I wonder if you are not starting to realize that presuppositions are not only a powerfully effective way to conversationally persuade others, but they will make it virtually impossible for others to manipulate you, as you will be able to clearly see their intentions beneath their language.

I wonder if you are not already seeing the benefit of not only reading this blog on a daily basis, but also of emailing a link to all your friends, so they too can benefit from these powerful language patterns?

Here we go with another article on linguistic presuppositions, the powerful language patterns that you can use to easily, naturally, and covertly persuade others through everyday conversation.

Today’s pattern is the “comparative as” and is very powerful. The structure of a comparative as is as follows: Take two things, and find something about them that is similar. I am as tall as my brother. It is as cold in Alaska as it is in Hokkaido. It is as hot in Arizona as it is in Okinawa.

There are a couple of powerful ways to use this pattern for persuasion. The first is to turn into a question. Let’s say you want to persuade somebody that exercise is the best way to lose weight. You ask the question:

Do you know of any method that is as effective as daily exercise to lose weight?

If they answer “no,” then they admit that exercise is the best way to lose weight. If they answer “yes,” then they admit that exercise and something else are equally good for losing weight. In effect they are admitting they exercise, and something else, are tied for first place when it comes to the best way to lose weight.

Let’s look at some more examples.

Idea = dollar cost averaging is the best way to consistently make money in the stock market.

Do you know of any way that is as effective as dollar cost averaging to make money consistently in the stock market?

Again, if they answer “no,” they are tacitly agreeing to your idea. If they answer “yes,” they are admitting that whatever other method they are thinking of, it is only as good as dollar cost averaging, not better.

Another way to use this pattern, is make it a statement of a question that you asked yourself:

I don’t know of any method that is as effective as exercise to lose weight.

I can’t think of any investing strategy that is as effective as dollar cost averaging that will consistently build wealth in the stock market.

If you have any kind of credentials, or client, you can quote them.

I’ve been a personal trainer for many years, and I haven’t found any method that is as effective as simple daily exercise for weight loss.

I’ve been an investment advisor for two decades, and none of my clients have found a method that is as effective as dollar cost averaging to consistently make money in the stock market.

You can also quote a group of experts.

Leading nutritionists who have been studying various ways of weight loss over the years haven’t found anything as effective and long lasting as consistent, daily exercise.

Financial experts who have consistently outperformed the markets have never really found anything as effective as simple dollar cost averaging for generating a huge amount of wealth over time.

Leading salespeople who have consistently been at the top of their field have never found any other method that is as effective as linguistic presuppositions to easily persuade their clients to buy their products.

Now I don’t know about you, and how advanced you are in your persuasion skills, but if you ever find any other method that is as effective, as easy to learn, and as covert as linguistic presuppositions, I’d sure like to know about them!

This is another article in a series on linguistic presuppositions, those powerful language patterns that can easily give you the persuasive power of a Jedi Knight.

Today’s pattern is stressed sentences, or stressed words within a sentence. Although they can be used in written form, with boldface type, they are much more powerful in person.

Here’s how they work. You take your idea that you’d like to persuade the other person, and place a commentary adjective in front of it, and simply say the sentence. When you combine a commentary adjective, (amazing, wonderful, fantastic) with some voice stress, and some obviously happy facial expressions, the rest of the sentence has a much better chance of being wholly accepted as true.

Idea = exercise is the best way to lose weight.

Sentence:

I think it’s AMAZING that exercise is the best way to lose weight because all you really need is a few minutes every morning.

The results you get from just a little bit of exercise are truly AMAZING.

You can get some really AMAZING weight loss results form just a few minutes of exercise every day.

Idea = dollar cost averaging is a simple way to consistently grow wealth in the stock market.

Sentence:

I just read this AMAZING article that showed how much money you can make by this AWESOME technique called dollar cost averaging.

My friend showed me ASTOUNDING proof of how he made tons of money through dollar cost averaging.

Idea = presuppositions will skyrocket your persuasion skills

Sentence:

The AMAZING thing about presuppositions is not how powerful they are, but how simple they are to learn.

I’ve gotten such FANTASTIC sales results once I started using these simple things called linguistic presuppositions.

Now, I don’t know how many AMAZING discoveries you’ll find regarding these POWERFUL patterns, perhaps you’ll drop in a comment to let us know of the FANTASTIC things you can imagine doing with them in the future.

This is another article in a series on how you can use linguistic presuppositions to easily and naturally persuade others to your way of thinking. Linguistic presuppositions are sentences that on a logical level are very hard to argue with. When you combine several of them together, their persuasive power can be extremely difficult to resist, so be careful not to make anybody think or do something they will later regret.

Today’s topic is the pseudo cleft sentence. Similar to the cleft sentence, but slightly more powerful. The basic pattern is this:

What (idea1) is (idea2)

Where idea1 and idea2 are phrases of varying lengths. The best way to use these is to set it up so idea1 is a positive outcome that your listener or reader will likely enjoy, and idea2 is the cause of idea1, of which you are trying to persuade your audience.

A couple examples

Idea1 = nice, slim, sexy body, drawing the attraction of members of the opposite sex

Idea1 = daily exercise

Sentence:

What will give you an incredibly slim body that will get you more attention than you’ve ever thought possible is simple daily exercise of only a few minutes.

Idea1 = money, (lots and lots of it)

Idea2 = dollar cost averaging

Sentence:

What will get you wealth that consistently grows on its own is the simple practice of dollar cost averaging.

Idea1 = powerful persuasion skills

Idea2 = linguistic presuppositions

Sentence:

What will absolutely skyrocket your persuasion skills so that you can pretty much sell anything to anybody are linguistic presuppositions.

You can juice these up a little bit by prefacing the beginning “What” with some commentary adjectives or adjective phrases:

It’s amazing that what will create a stunning body is simple daily exercise.

It’s funny that most people don’t know that what gives most expert salespeople their massive closing ratios are these simple things called linguistic presuppositions.

It’s absolutely incredible that what can set you up for a comfortable retirement is simple dollar cost averaging.

It’s amazing that what will give you incredible insight into human language, so that you can not only persuade others with ease, but also know when other people are using these powerful skills to try and manipulate you, is reading this blog on a daily basis for more and more information.

This article is part three in a series on using presuppositions to covert persuasion and influence. Presuppositions are one of the most powerful yet least known about methods of influence. They work by constructing a sentence that pre supposes certain things (of your choice) to be true, things that your listener or reader will not question.

Today’s topic is in the category of simple presuppositions, and is another form of noun. If you recall previous examples, we’ve covered simple nouns, names, and pronouns. Today’s nouns are of the “generic noun phrases,” or noun phrases (two or more words describing a noun) that stand for a whole class, usually people.

Like the previous examples, this won’t do you much good on it’s own, but it’s usually a good idea to take it slow when learning something new, to make sure you get the fundamentals down, so later on you can use more complex patterns much more easier and more natural.

OK, lets see some examples:

Leading doctors agree that exercise is good for health.

Top Financial Advisers recommend investing the same amount of money in the stock market every month to achieve the best long-term results.

Great companies have always known that continually developing new products is key to consistent profits.

In the above examples, “leading doctors,” “top financial advisers,” and “great companies,” are all examples of a generic noun phrase. Of course you could say “convicted felons,” “successful dictators,” or “top rated snipers,” but that might give your listeners or readers the wrong impression about your message, unless you were trying to persuade somebody NOT to do something.

Convicted felons know that once you successfully commit your first crime, it’s almost impossible to stop until you end up in jail.

You might say that to a group of high-risk kids, for example.

Usually, however, you are trying to persuade somebody to do something, rather than not do something. In this case, it’s best to choose a class that sounds somewhat authoritative on whatever topic it is you are persuading, to give your ideas some kind of “social proof,” or “authority.”

Later, when we get into more advanced, complex presuppositions, you’ll see how this one technique can be a powerful “anchor” on which to hang other techniques in your speech or copywriting that can greatly enhance your persuasive efforts.

So the pattern for generic noun phrases is:

(Adjective) + (group of authoritative sounding people)

Top scientists
Leading financial advisors
Highly regarded personal trainers
Weight loss specialists
Leading dieticians

Etc.

Next we’ll talk about one more “simple” kind of presuppositions before moving into the more powerful (and fun) “complex” kind.

The more techniques we learn, the more interesting and powerful combinations we can come up with.

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, and I noticed something interesting about her speech. She had always spoken like that, but I hadn’t talked to her in quite a while. Last time we spoke was before I had become interested in language, having read several books on linguistics and other interesting tricks of language, most notably books by Pinker, Lakoff, and Grinder/Bandler.

The thing I noticed now, that I didn’t notice before was her heavy use of indirect speech. For example, I would say “A,” and she would then think “Because of A, then B,” with “B” being something that didn’t sound like such a good thing. But because she didn’t want to (either consciously or unconsciously) blurt right out “B!” She would always hide it behind layers of presuppositions and vague references.

For example, she would mention wanting more money at work, and I would suggest asking her boss for a raise. Instead of saying the obvious “If I ask for a raise, he’ll say no, and think less of me for asking.”

Which is a common enough fear, and generally the immediate reaction of most people when thinking about asking for a raise. But instead of blurting that right out, she’d say something like:

“I’m not sure if I have the presence of mind right now to think of what would happen if I were to do that.”

Which sounds innocent enough, until you unpack that seemingly simple statement and see what she’s really saying:

She is assuming that “presence of mind,” (whatever that is) is something that is difficult to identify, as she’s not sure if she has it or not.

Something called “presence of mind,” is required to understand the result of a request for more money.

“If I were to do that,” is stated as a second conditional. A first conditional is an “if..then” statement using the present tense, which presumes it is something that is likely to occur.

If it rains, I will get wet.
If I spend my money, I won’t have any.
If I drive too fast, I may get a ticket.

While the second conditional, with the past tense, is used for things that we don’t expect will happen, or are impossible.

If I asked my boss for a raise, he would say no.
If I saw a UFO, I would run.

So in response to a suggestion to ask for more money, she hides her “no, I’m too afraid” behind about three layers of linguistic protection.

If you’ve ever listened to a politician speak, you can tell right away that there speech is usually filled with layers and layers of vague ambiguity, so nobody can ever pin them down on what they said, if things go wrong, and if things go right, they can claim they had something to do with it.

It’s no wonder the joke, “how do you tell a politician is lying – when his lips are moving,” is so funny.

In one of the aforementioned books, Pinker was talking about how in societies where they have a history of class distinction, where upper class people could legally kill lower class people, (or other upper class people if they situation warranted it) they have developed a very polite level of speech, which can exist hundreds of years after the threat of violence.

If you were talking to some guy that was carrying weapons, and by offending him you risked getting your head slice off, you’d quickly learn to speak politely. It doesn’t take long for such a society to develop polite language. The American South is one such example. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person, he would demand “Satisfaction,” and you’d have a gunfight at twenty paces on your hands.

Those that study linguistics on a much deeper evolutionary level suggest that all indirect speech has its roots in ancient fears of immediate reprisals. It doesn’t sound dangerous in the least to ask your boss for a raise, at least not from the standpoint of physical violence, but nevertheless, those feelings of fear cause us to hide our real feelings beneath several layers of “politeness” and vague ambiguity.

There is a fascinating book called “Mean Genes,” which illustrates all the ways that our automatic impulses that helped us immensely in our evolutionary past can be a real pain in the you-know-what in modern society. Stuffing our face until we can’t move when we are in the presence of food is one example that you can see everywhere you look in modern western society.

In the past, the several thousand year ago past, that impulse was beneficial. People would go several days without food, and when they finally got some, all other concerns were put on the back burner, and it was time to eat until the food was gone.

Not so helpful when you pass by three McDonalds, two Dunkin Donuts and a Bakery on the way to work every morning.

Of course, the great hope of modern humankind is to rise above our evolutionary based fears, and the ability to use our rational, conscious minds to think our ways around those pesky impulses to plan our future, instead of letting our impulses plan it for us.

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I remember once I played a game with a group of highly educated, professional ESL students I was teaching. I’ve heard this game called “Chinese whispers,” or the “telephone game,” or other things. I even remember playing it once or twice as a kid. And even with a group of kids that are fluent in the language in which this game is being played, it is still funny to see.

Basically you get the group into a circle, and choose a simple enough phrase, and whisper it into the ear of the person on one end. The rules are that they can’t speak the phrase out loud, and they have to repeat it to the person next to them as soon as they hear it. You usually start out with a phrase like “banana ice cream,” and end up with something like “purple gorilla.”

It’s really fun to play with ESL students (English as a second language) because the end result often times doesn’t even qualify as an English word or phrase. But as a teaching tool, it helps to give students an opportunity to really practice their listening skills. The goal, the ultimate goal is to develop listening skills so that even passive listening will yield some understanding. I’ve you’ve ever studied a foreign language, and have listened to a dialogue or conversation that was even slightly above your comprehension level, you know how quickly you can get tired.

On this particular group, I started out with the phrase “blue truck.” Everybody got a kick out of the final answer, and it proved an interesting point.

Moving something from conscious competence to unconscious competence can take time, and come in stages, so doing this particular exercise is one drill, out of many, that can help to speed this process up.

I remember once I was at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a friend of mine and I had just seen what we thought was going to be a Pink Floyd laser show, where they play a bunch of cool music, while you sit back and look at light show performed up above on a special dome. Only we misread the newspaper, and it was a classical music show instead. It was still worth the money, as a combination of good music through a really fantastic sound system, coupled with some skilled laser “shapes” that move around in sync with the music is pretty mesmerizing.

But afterward we noticed outside, on the grass they had some sort of meeting of a local astronomers club. There were several telescopes set up, all pointed at different celestial bodies. I’m pretty sure that was the only time I’d actually seen the rings of Saturn firsthand. After I looked, I had a question, something to do with the rings, and when they are visible. They owner of the telescope gave us a well informed and easy enough to understand answer (although I can’t remember exactly what it was.)

Later on that evening, as we were still wandering around, I heard somebody else ask the same question that I had asked a few minutes ago. With the answer still fresh in my short-term memory, I spit it out as if it were common knowledge. After we were out of earshot, my friend gave me a hard time for pretending to know something that I just learned only moments before. Bu then he made an interesting point.

“Isn’t that all knowledge is anyway, passing on information from one person to the next, in some long chain of people?”

You can spend a lot of time digging into that idea. When we are born, none of us know anything, other than our pre wired instincts, one of which is to learn as much as we can. Obviously, that comes second to survival, getting food and staying safe, but most of us are fortunate enough to grow up where our life doesn’t hang by a thread, so we have the luxury of motoring around and figuring out as much stuff as we can. (Which is really cute to our parents, until we learn to walk, but then it’s a completely different story).

But most of the stuff that we know today as adults came from others. Mathematics, science, history, rules of grammar, most of us didn’t invent these independently in our garage laboratory as children. We were taught these by other people. Who in turn were taught by others. I guess it’s lucky for most of us that ever generation, there are a few brilliant people like Einstein and Edison and Curie that spend their lives trying to figure out new stuff, instead of figuring out how to apply the old stuff.

I had a friend pose an interesting thought experiment to me once. He was giving a toastmasters speech on the illusion of civilization that we live in. None of the stuff we have is inherently known, as discussed before. Each generation passes on information it learned, and that information is filtered through the education system loosely made up of teachers and books and libraries.

But what would happen if all that were destroyed? What would happen to the human race if the only way we could transmit information was by word of mouth? No writing, no video, no audio. Only word of mouth. We still had all the same technology, but everything had to be built according to information passed on only face-to-face.

His theory was that we are really only a generation or two, at most, away from a complete and utter breakdown of society. With no books to refer to, most of the information we take for granted would quickly be lost. I think his underlying point was that people were completely evil, and we would quickly revert to the futuristic world of “Escape from New York” or any other futuristic movie where society breaks down and only the most barbaric can survive. I’m not so sure, but I am sure that we do depend on information passed down from generation to generation. So much so that some believe this has as much effect on human development as the day-to-day survival pressures that shaped human evolution thousands of years ago.

And the interesting concept that my ESL group illustrated was how much quicker digital information is passed than analogue information. Once one of them latched onto a phrase that she not only understood, but could easily repeat well enough to be understood, that phrase quickly passed unchanged to the last person. It was interesting to watch the spread of information. Before that moment of recognition it was slow, and unsure. But as soon as she latched onto that one phrase (which of course had nothing to do with the original phrase) it flowed like water.

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Here’s an interesting mind experiment. Ready? Here is the situation; you have four cards, with the following faces showing. D, 7, 3, F. You are told that each card has a number on one side, and a letter on the other. Now you are given a statement:

On every card that shows a “D” on one side, there is a “3″ on the other side.

Here is the challenge: How many cards do you need to turn over, and which cards, to conclusively prove or disprove the following statement, and which cards do you turn over?

While you may find this easy (I didn’t I had to cheat and read the logic behind the explanation to get it,) most people don’t. In face, when this study was first concocted by a couple of professors at Stanford (where you’d think there’s be some smart people) only about one out of four got the answer right.

Now here’s the same question, presented another way:

You are a bouncer at a bar. The rules are that you can’t drink unless you are twenty-one. Now the cards are “drinking coke, drinking beer, 16 years old, 25 years old.” Or if you prefer, there are four people sitting at the bar. One is drinking beer (you don’t know how old they are) one is drinking coke (you don’t know how old they are) one is 25 (you don’t know what they are drinking) and one is sixteen (you don’t know what they are drinking).

From a logical standpoint, the problem is identical, yet when presented the second way, most people quickly realize that in order to figure out if anybody is breaking any laws, all you do is card the person drinking beer, and quickly check what the sixteen year old is drinking. In effect, turning over two cards to see what is on the other side.

As in the case above, you turn over the “D” to verify it if has a three on the other side, and you turn over the “7″ to make sure it doesn’t have a “D” on the other side. If the D has a 3, and the 7 doesn’t have a D, then the statement is correct. If the D doesn’t have a three, and the 7 has a D, then the statement is incorrect.

The underlying problem is why, when the logic is identical, do so many people have a hard time (as I did) with the first question, and a much easier time (as I did) with the second question?

One answer could be that we aren’t as logically thinking as we’d like to believe. It may be that our brains aren’t designed to think in terms of Vulcan logic like Mr. Spock, but to think only in terms of social interactions, specifically to uncover social “cheats,” those that would break unwritten social contracts.

The thinking behind this idea goes like this. Humans lived in small groups for a couple hundred thousand years. That’s when we developed our “humanness” so to speak. One thing that evolutionary biologists think is one of the major driving forces behind the massive growth of the human brain during our history was social pressure from within the group. Our brains, our language, our thinking was all developed to outsmart each other within that small group of wandering nomads all those years ago.

Numerous studies of chimps and various apes have shown this to be a major portion for the need for their large brains as well. Most of them have plenty of food where they live, don’t need to organize sophisticated hunting parties, or come with complex methods of evading predators. Most of their thinking power, many believe, is so they can outsmart each other and rise as high in the social order as possible.

When humans developed language many, many years ago, we just took it a couple notches higher (to say the least) and developed all kinds of conscious and unconscious social skills. We learned to read facial expressions and body language, learned how to tell when somebody is cheating or lying, and be able to cheat and lie ourselves.

Many species have a specific feature, which is there solely for sexual competition within the species. The most often given example is the peacock’s tail. When peahens get together to choose their mate, they choose the male with the most flamboyant tail. Interestingly, the more flamboyant the tail, the dangerous it is for the peacock, as he is a much easier prey for predators, as well as having to lug that huge thing around should he have to run away.

In other species, they have other aspects. Bull seals have their size and strength, gorilla’s have their silver stripe of hair on their back, different birds have various ways to strut their stuff, from colored feathers to singing ability.

In humans, it is our brains, more specifically our verbal and social skills that became the driving force of sexual selection. Those that were the most eloquent, and the most persuasive, were the most prolific, and left the most offspring. Those offspring, having inherited slightly higher skills for eloquence and social prowess, in turn competed with each other. Continue that process for a few hundred thousand years, and you’ve got these big-brained humans walking around.

Us.

Something to think about yet next time you’re at a bar or club or other social gathering, and watching the vast throng trying to talk their genes into eternity.

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The other night, I decided to go out for a walk. I recently moved to new part of town, and decided to go and check things out. The sun has been setting later and later recently, and I had gotten off a little earlier than normal from work, so I figured I’d just go wandering about and see if anything interesting happened.

The first thing I noticed was this big park on the other side of my apartment building. Bunch of kids playing, lots of toys based on animals. Big gorillas, zebras, elephants that were made into slides and other playground equipment. I stopped to watch, as there were a few benches, and there was this huge grass area adjacent to the playground, so it was a pretty good spot to chill for a bit.

One thing about kids is when they play, they really play. They don’t play, but at the same time worry about their homework or whether or not their shoes really match the rest of their outfit, and if not will anybody notice. They seem to be pre set for a couple things, which seem to be completely opposite, at first glance.

On the one hand, they are pre wired to be automatic learning machines. The amount of things a kid learns between the age of two and ten is simply staggering. If you tried to learn the same amount of information in the same amount of time, you’d be a nervous wreck. They learn an entire language, complete with tens of thousands of new vocabulary words, in about five years. Any that has attempted to learn a foreign language as an adult would be lucky to retain five new words a week.

But on the other hand, they completely forget everything they are “supposed” to learn when it’s time to play. When they see a cool slide or a gorilla swing set, proper subject-verb agreement is the furthest thing from their minds. You’d think that as adults, the extra stress and worry we put into learning new things would help. But it doesn’t seem to. It seems to have the opposite effect.

They say that a kids learning capacity is different simply because they are a kid. That learning a language is easy for kids, but hard for adults, due to some pre wired brain structure due to millions of years of evolution. Some window of opportunity that once is closed, is closed for good. While that’s interesting from an objective biological point of view, it doesn’t sound too promising from a human potential point of view.

This is observable in other animals. Birds will “imprint” to their “mother” within a certain time frame, and they can be tricked into “imprinting” on an imposter if done at the right time. Certain birds learn to sing, but only between two weeks and two months old, and only if they hear another one of their kind singing. If they aren’t exposed to another one of their kind singing during that critical time period, they’ll never learn to sing properly. (Of course when I say, “sing properly” I mean sing well enough to attract a mate.) As for myself, I can only sing properly after sufficient alcohol, and a high-end voice synthesizer, but I digress.

The Jesuits used to say, (and probably still do) that if you give them a child when he is born, he will be a soldier for Christ for life by the time he’s seven. What this really means is that kids can be taught any number of beliefs when they are young, and can take a lifetime of effort to “unlearn” them. It takes a significantly life altering event, to cause an appreciable change in religious beliefs in most people. Not too many people who grow up in strong fundamentalist Christian households decide later in life to worship Zeus.

If I had my druthers, I’d like to conduct a language learning experiment. They say kids can learn languages much better than adults. Two, three, even four languages are a snap for kids so long as they are exposed to them early enough. It is assumed there is some kind of genetic “switch” that makes it harder to learn as adults, but I’m not so sure. Enter my experiment.

Take a bunch of adults, and separate them in three different groups. The first group has to learn the new language the regular way. After they finish their day job, they go to their once or twice a week at some local junior college, and then study the language whenever they have free time. Weekends, during commercials, whenever. These people are only exposed to the target language when they are in class, or they are listening to language tapes, or when (if) they bravely seek out native speakers of their target language.

The second group gets a free pass from work for a year. They are told they still have the obligations as an adult, they have to cook for themselves and maintain their household, but they get a stipend that will allow them to study on their own, along with the use of whatever material they think will help them. They of course, are only exposed to their target language when they organize their environment accordingly. Language tapes, private tutors, whatever they can afford. But when they go shopping, or watch TV, everything is in English.

The third group, I think, would be the most interesting. They are surrounded only by their target language. They never hear English (which in this case is assumed to be their native tongue.) They are surrounded by helpful speakers of the target language who buy and cook all their food (and whatever they want provided they know how to say it), drive them everywhere they want to go (provided they know how to say it), and give them massive amounts of happy praise, including generous physical, non-sexual touching and caressing (like quick back massages and what-not) whenever they speak the target language correctly. They never criticize for mistakes; only give continued encouragement to keep you going. Their only job is to learn the target language, and follow their “keepers” around whenever they go out to buy food and take care of normal, everyday housekeeping matters. And plenty of time for playing, so long as it’s in the target language (video games and what-not).

I think these “experiments” would show that there is a lot more to the change in environment, from child to adult, which makes learning harder rather than some genetic switch that makes it mentally impossible.

Obviously, as adults, unless you are super rich, you can’t really afford to learn things as described in group number three. But you’ll notice some similar advice given by various gurus who teach learning to be successful in any endeavor as an adult.

Surround yourself with people that are already proficient in what you want to learn. Give yourself rewards for every little success, no matter how small. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, and go easy on yourself when you make the “mistakes” that are absolutely necessary for growth and improvement. And give yourself time to play. The only real difference in being an adult rather than a kid is you’ve got to nurture yourself. Try it and what happens.

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So the other day I was out riding my bike, and I took a wrong turn. I was in my old neighborhood, but it had been a while, so I was busy kind of looking around and not really paying attention to where I was going. I saw these kids jumping rope, and they stopped and looked at me when I rode past, so I slowed down to get a look at them. They acted as if they’d seen me before, or knew me from somewhere, but I didn’t recognize them at all. I waited for them to say something to indicate why they were looking at me with such familiarity. That’s when I heard that creepy voice from behind me. I almost fell off my bike when I made out the words, he/she didn’t really mean that, did they?

It was like the other day when I was sitting in one of those government offices to get some government paperwork down. You can always tell you are in a government office (in case you happen to suddenly appear inside of one and you aren’t sure where you are) because the people seem to have a certain “aura” about them, and the office furniture and equipment is usually a couple steps behind the times.

If you strolled into some modern research facility, or the office of a successful construction company, you’d likely find plenty of modern up to date people wearing modern, up to date clothes using modern, up to date equipment. But government office building people and equipment look like they only get upgraded once a decade or so.

So there I was, looking at all the government office people with all the forms scattered about their desks. I zeroed in on this one guy (I was waiting for my number to be called, like it I was a deli or something) and I watched him work for a bit. He’d pick up a piece of paper, read over it for a minute or so, check something on his computer screen, then scribble something on the paper, then put the paper off to one side. Then he’d pick up another piece and do the same thing. He didn’t appear to be doing this in any sort of predetermined order, it seemed completely random. And the place the put the papers down were never the exact same place from where he picked it up. There didn’t seem to be any progression of movement, either. It wasn’t like the finished papers were somehow migrating to some predestined spot on his desk. It seemed to be a pile of randomness that was turning into more randomness.

Of course I’m sure he knew exactly what he was doing, and exactly where everything was, and exactly how far he’d progressed on all of his various tasks that were scattered about his desk. One thing that is always satisfying is having a heap of randomness, and being accused of not having any idea where anything is, and then pulling out exactly what somebody asked for without even a second thought. That’s always a good trick.

Scientists that study randomness tell us that everything is random, and only because we live inside of familiarity do we convince ourselves that there is some order. Of course, everything in the universe follows certain laws (though not of course to some) and everything that exists now, however it exists, from your desk to your brainwaves are due only to what happened before.

The problem is that many times the “what happened before” is sometimes so complex and unknowable that things can appear to happen for no reason at all. Mathematical chaos theory tries to explain this. If you knew everything about the current state of affairs (down to every last movement of every last molecule) you could theoretically predict exactly what would unfold. But knowing everything of the current state of affairs is absolutely impossible. So when things happen, things we don’t expect, it can seem like they just popped out of nowhere.

I read some book once that talked about planning for randomness like a skilled surfer can handle any wave that comes in. If you are expecting a certain wave that will break a certain way, you aren’t likely to have much fun. But if you stay flexible, and learn enough skills to ride whatever wave comes in, for as long as it lasts, you can maximize your enjoyment, and minimize any frustration of wiping out.

This requires knowing what the bottom looks like, so you know exactly when you bail out. It’s probably a better idea to bail out before you get to the jagged coral on the bottom, lest you bash your skull in and suddenly wake up in some government office in a parallel universe.

Many frustrations occur because people try and ride a wave longer than they should. They have a couple of good moves, a few moments of bliss, and stay on too long. While they seldom wipe out from staying on too long, it just takes a long time to paddle out to where the waves are breaking, wasting valuable time. If you only have a couple hours of surfing time, it’s best to make the most of it.

Finally my number was called, and luckily I had all the paperwork filled out in the correct way. Sometimes, especially in government offices, they make you fill out all the paperwork again if you make even one mistake.

“I told you, I can’t eat the spicy stuff. My doctor says I have ulcers.”

I had to stop and process that before I turned around. The old man that was behind me (it was thought to tell from his voice) started telling me that the last time I brought him a pizza, there was too much Portuguese sausage on it. I guess that’s why those kids had stopped jumping rope and were looking at me funny. Just as I was about to respond to he strange old guy, the pizza delivery guy showed up. He looked a lot like me, and he waved at everybody like he knew them. He then proceeded to tell the old guy that he went easy on the sausage this time.

So, he’s got that going for him, which is nice.

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