There are two parts to The Mimic Method - Mimicry Training and Conversation Training.
You start with Mimicry Training. This is where you learn how to perceive and produce the raw physical movements of communication.
By the time you finish the Mimicry Training, you should be able to hear any short expression in your target language, and repeat it back exactly.
Note, you should be able to mimic sounds without knowing the words or meaning. The sound and movement are supposed to come first, then the meaning comes second.
Most adult learners impatiently want to know all the words and meaning, before they even have the physical ability to hear and produce speech. This is why people rely on learning by text - because it gives you a false sense of knowing the language, that inevitably fails you in the real conversation context.
Remember, meaning is captured in the sounds, the way software is captured in the hardware. If you don’t have the right hardware, the software won’t run.
If you skip the first step of learning, you will perpetually trip over the second step.
In the video below, I do a quick tour of our Mimicry Curriculum.
Once you have developed your capacity to mimic, you will be ready to develop your conversation skills.
Conventional approaches will have you focusing on “studying’ - which means opening a textbook or smartphone and memorizing vocab, analyzing grammar, and translating sentences
But understand that conversation is an embodied social activity, similar to dance.
You can’t learn conversation through a textbook or smartphone, any more than you can learn dance through a textbook or smartphone.
The only way to learn how to converse is to actually have conversations.
But to that well, you first need to remove all the psychological and communication blocks that prevent you from feeling comfortable in a conversation context and learning organically within it.
To squeeze the most learning juice from each conversation, you need to know how to engage conversation in a way that is optimized for your level and needs.
That is what we do in our Conversation training. Watch the video below to learn more about the curriculum.
That should give you a good idea of how our program works. Hopefully you can now somewhat visualize the process of transformation.
You start off physically blocked to the flow of your target language. But by slowly acclimating yourself to each separate part of the flow, you dissolve those blocks, and now you can hear, pronounce and mimic intuitively.
Then, you use this mimicry power to enter into conversation and learn the organic way. And to get the most out of this experience, you remove the thinking and communication habits that inhibit you, and get good at engaging people at the level that puts you into flow.
Once you’ve mastered the art of entering flow in each conversation, then you will naturally get better with each conversation, and enjoy the process so much that you’ll want to do more and more of it.
Wouldn’t that be lovely!
We love helping people Flow in different languages. To get a deeper understanding of what drives us, click the link below to learn more about…