How Benjamin Franklin helped me learn Russian Diction

I never really learned how to study when I was in high school. I was one of those students who could listen in class, take notes there and then retain it long enough for the test, so I never really put in the time required to learn something in a way that would really stick with me. I was also really lazy about it, and would never double check my work, until my 10th grade Geometry teacher told me that from then on I would either get 100% or 0% on every test, as encouragement to double check my work...

This all held true until sometime after finishing my undergrad, when I read a biography of Benjamin Franklin and how he basically taught himself everything he learned. The method that he used to learn rhetoric I found intriguing:

• Franklin would read through a speech once
• He wrote the speech out as best he could from memory
• He then compared what he wrote to the original, paying special attention to the differences, noticing style, usage of language, etc.
• Then he wrote it out again from memory, trying to remember the style of the original

He repeated these steps until he could perfectly imitate the style of the speech and the exact language of the speech. And then he moved on to the next one until he'd mastered that. In the end, he could read a speech once and repeat it verbatim, just by understanding the style of the author.

How many times have teachers told us how to learn effectively? How many of us have heard "work in small portions", "break things down", "practice slowly and precisely", "study in small increments several times a day"? I'd been hearing that for years (in fact, I was saying it to singers I coached!), but until hearing how Ben Franklin taught himself, I didn't really use it in my own practice.


My first semester of graduate school at CCM, I was in Kenneth Griffiths' Russian Diction class--and I decided to use a modified version of Ben Franklin's method of studying, to see whether it worked for me. Our first assignment was to learn to write the Cyrillic alphabet. Immediately after class, I went to lunch at McD's and sat over my cheeseburger doing my homework, copying the alphabet once. Over supper, I did the same homework, copying the alphabet once again. Before bed, I copied out the alphabet one more time. Before breakfast, I copied out the alphabet again... We only had classes on Tuesdays and Thursday, so by the time the next class rolled around, I had copied out the alphabet a minimum of 8 times. It only took about 5 minutes each time, and by the 5th time I tried to do it from memory.


I repeated this process with every homework assignment. As the semester went on, sometimes it was full text transcripts, and those I would break down into smaller chunks, working on a line at a time and repeating the diction rules aloud every time they came up.

After a few weeks, it was obvious that this really worked! So I applied it to my music history class--by creating a time line made up of post-it notes, that I could put the post-its in position or move them around as needed. This is also when I started created flashcards for language study, so that whenever I had a few minutes, I could pull out a handful of flashcards and study a little vocabulary, no matter where I was. I still have a drawer full of flash cards in different languages (each in its own color, of course 😂).

Everything that I learned in this manner I still remember today. Everything. That class was in 1994. Learning like this really sticks with you, if you can find the tricks that help you--some people are tactile like I am (I need to write things down), so writing it out several times a day works well; some people are aural, so maybe they need to listen to the class several times and then try to repeat what they heard; some people are visual, so they need to look at their notes and then try to visualise them without looking at the page. Everyone has some method (or combination of them) that works best for them, and any of these methods can be applied to the steps that Ben laid out for us.

In this day and age, where we all have iPads, laptops, smart phones, and have so much information at our fingertips all the time, it can be really difficult to force ourselves to really slow down and DO THE HOMEWORK. But the wiring of the human brain hasn't really changed much over the millennia; we still learn best if we break things down into smaller pieces, learn those pieces efficiently and well, and then move on. This summer, I challenge you to try some version of this method on a regular basis; whether it's breaking a text apart and doing small portions for 15 minutes several times a day, or breaking your practice time down to work on very specific gestures or phrases rather than a whole piece at once, any time spent trying this will have been well worth it!

--Ellen