What’s the secret to learning a second language?

Sat, 27 Oct 2012 12:30:00 +0000

A FEW YEARS AGO, Captain Emmanuel Joseph decided to learn Arabic before his deployment to Iraq. “At first it was easy,” he told me. At his base in the U.S., he explains, “we had native speakers teaching us basic things like greetings; imperatives like stop, go, walk; and some numbers and nouns. It was very much survival-level.” In Iraq, Joseph (not his real name) continued trying to learn Arabic with Al-Kitaab, the main textbook used by American universities and the military. But he struggled.

“I was forgetting more than I was learning,” he said. “With every chapter in the textbook came a hundred more vocabulary words. The language and the culture were accessible, but I also had a job to do. So I didn’t—and couldn’t—spend all my time studying.” Joseph cast about online for help and came across LinguaStep, an online Arabic-language program that quizzes a user in vocabulary and adapts to a user’s specific rate of learning.

Outrageous fortune

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 12:50:00 +0000

On a 98-degree day in New York last summer, I took the 7 train to 33rd Street in Long Island City, Queens, to meet Derrick Wong. I didn't go to the end of the line that morning -- that would be Main Street, Flushing -- but if I had, I would have landed smack in the middle of New York's biggest Chinatown, home to the city's largest Chinese population, and the place I was born.

It was a day in which power grids went down and subway trains stalled after their third rails warped from the near-record heat. Wong, a compact 39-year-old with an easy laugh and thinning hair, picked me up in a silver Acura at the corner of Queens Boulevard, a heavily trafficked area with an industrial pedigree, adjacent to the subway line. From there, you could see the old Swingline stapler factory, recently repurposed to house the Museum of Modern Art's library and archives.

Though he carries the decidedly mundane title of V.P. of sales and marketing, Wong is actually the de facto fortune cookie scion at the helm of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, the family-owned-and-run Wonton Food Inc. We were on our way to visit the heat and heart of the cookie oven itself: the company's 24-hour factory and warehouse, which is dedicated entirely to churning out 4 million cookies a day, seven days a week, and shipping them out to more than 400 distributors in the U.S. and overseas.

Salon.com > Bonnie Tsui

What’s the secret to learning a second language?

Outrageous fortune