Creatures of mimicry
In David Malouf’s novel An Imaginary Life, a wolf boy learns how to speak by placing his hands on Ovid’s throat, pressing his fingers on the poet’s lips, feeling each puff of air. But in forming our words, the boy adopts more than the bend of a tongue. Just as he so uncannily warbles by taking the bird into his nature, so too, by speaking, does he enter the realm of humans.
There is endless advice about how to learn a language. What of the wolf boy’s method? Become the creature. Become the frog, the bird, the man. This is the result of immersion, of using a new language in daily life. After all, immersion is a game of massive input—and that changes us, whether it’s a thousand hours of Tamil or of Joe Rogan. We become new beings, hybrids, the lineaments recognisable but rearranged.
The wolf boy also harnesses mimicry. One must practice the right sounds. Mimicking native speakers is called shadowing when done in turns, or chorusing when done simultaneously. Shadowing is key to Pimsleur’s listen-and-repeat tapes, which I find enjoyable. But the tapes promote reflexivity more than pronunciation. To sound better, chorusing seems most effective.
Chorusing for pleasure goes way back. In How Religion Evolved, Robin Dunbar claims that singing is part of the endorphin-rich “shamanic” core of today’s religions, along with dancing, fasting/
As promising as the technique seemed, it required a fiddly workflow in a joyless interface. To make chorusing more seamless and attractive, I built a dedicated tool: Warble. It’s designed for importing your own material, and I included samples so you can immediately see how it works, like looping snippets, adjusting tempo and recording takes.