Always on the lookout for new learning hacks and tips, I’ve been digging into Robert Twigger’s Micromastery this week. The premise of the book is simple: learn new skills by breaking them down into manageable chunks and deal with them in a systematic, gradual way.

Six steps to mastery

The system is not so much a concrete plan for learning, as a set of principles to break your learning into pieces, and conceptualise and organise your first steps with them. The author uses a six-part approach as a framework to your first steps in a skill:

• The entry trick
• Overcoming rub-pat barriers
• Background support
• Payoff
• Repeatability
• Experimentation

And, while a bit of this is reinventing the wheel, I found them to be a good reminder of the importance of a structured approach in learning. As a sometimes overeager linguist, a Micromastery approach could organise my educational nourishment into regular light bites, rather than a colic-inducing binge.

So how can these Micromastery tricks help us to learn languages? The book doesn’t explicitly deal with languages, so you’ll have to do a bit of rethinking. But those six conecpts can provide a handy guide your first steps in a new language. Here’s my take on just a couple of the six concepts above.

Entry trick

The ‘entry trick’ rang bells immediately. Specifically, Twigger describes this an easy way in to the skill that pays off immediately. For example, it could be learning to balance on a static board before launching into full-blown surfing.

Where have we heard that before? Well, in languages, it mirrors advice from Benny Lewis and others to start your language learning journey with simple, rote scripts. Like stabilisers on a bike, they support solid skills-building whilst protecting the student from the stress of full-blown grammar and vocab cramming.

The chunk-by-chunk system also lends itself well to thematic language learning like this. Rather than throwing yourself at an amorphous mass of grammar, focus on several, well defined themes to script out, week by week.

True to the author’s promise for these entry tricks, there is the immediate payoff with using scripts. You quickly learn something practical and useful straight away. The reward is both self-satisfaction, and, hopefully, the ability to impress target language speakers early on in your study.

The rub-pat barrier

Twigger’s second point is particularly pertinent to language learning, too. Essentially, the rub-pat barrier is the author’s way of describing things that are difficult to do together (as in rubbing your tummy and patting your head simultaneously).

Now, language learning is full of these moments to overcome. If you’re anything like me, then conversing and not panicking is a pretty important multitasking trick to master in the early stages! You can probably think of many more, such as speaking without pause and not getting verb / case endings wrong, for example.

By anticipating these ‘rub-pat barriers’ before we come up against them, we can prepare ourselves. For example, speaking crib sheets help me to feel I have a safety net in target language conversation. Moreover, mindfulness techniques can be great anxiety-busters – I’ve had great success with the excellent Headspace.

The real rub (!) is that you usually have to experience these barriers before you know they’re there. And you only find that out by throwing yourself into the skill. Sometimes it might be possible to foresee these kinds of difficulty when planning a new skill routine, but you’re a gifted learner if you can spot them all before they rear their ugly heads.

Background support

New skills require more than just a learner – they take materials, other people, paraphernalia and so on. Precisely these things are what the book dubs background support. This encompasses the resources – human and otherwise – that will form the scaffolding around your language project.

I did appreciate the nod to individual circumstances here. The truth is, sadly, that not everyone can afford the equipment to learn certain skills (the author uses surfing as an example). Fortunately for linguists, materials need not cost the earth; sometimes, they cost nothing at all.

And, perhaps most importantly of all, other people can form our background support as linguists. Making sure you have a good buddy network to check in on you – even recruiting family and friends who aren’t learning with you – can help keep you accountable and on track.

Repeatability and Experimentation

And then, we have two of the most vital skills in the set for linguists: repeatability and experimentation. The ability to repeat a skill is the end goal of the linguist: to communicate, to perform language X/Y/Z countless times in the future. And, with each act of recall and review, those neural pathways strengthen and extend. If anything, the notion of repeatability is a reminder to work very regular, active use of the language into your daily routine.

Experimentation goes hand in hand with this, and maps onto the particularly exciting stage of language learning: linguistic creativity. It’s that moment when you start to substitute words in your rote sentences to create brand new, unique utterances. In Twigger’s example of baking, you might start to play around with new ingredients. In languages, you push yourself to geek and tweak the framework material you learnt in your scripts.

Micromastery – a starting point for your own approach

Clearly, the book’s core principles have offer a guiding hand when devising your study plan. Choose your chunks carefully and plan your study calendar bearing the six points in mind, and the system could really be of benefit. Bear in mind, however, that language learning is a cumulative process; at some point, these individual chunks need to join up. The approach is perhaps a little sketchy on forming the whole skill from the constituent parts.

However, the whole idea does speak to the polymath in me. As a general framework for learning multiple, cross-curricular skills, it’s concise and based on common sense. There are elements in there that lend themselves to any kind of learning.

The book has received mixed reviews on Amazon. In part, this might be down to the slightly woolly examples the author uses to illustrate the system. Drawing circles, surfing and baking somehow fail to light the imagination, and a bit of extrapolation to your own world is necessary.

With a bit of effort to graft the ideas onto your own learning goals, Micromastery is well worth a read. There’s much to motivate here, if only to reiterate the importance of clear objectives at the start of your journey.