Why celery-eating sharks are brilliant language teachers

The Beijing taxi driver was stunned to hear my utter gibberish. "I feel sad because I'm good at going to hell to watch a shark eat celery," I say in Chinese.

The cabbie was a victim of my new language-learning system in which I randomly grab five flash cards containing new words or expressions and force them into a normal conversation.

The weirder the conversation, the easier it is for me to remember.