Learning a New Language Lecture

imagine this you have decided you're gonna learn a new language you look up all of these amazing people online and see how they've learned this language really fast and then you feel like okay i i need to learn this language within three four five months and once you start learning there being a beginner from knowing nothing to knowing something to knowing a lot that that curve is really really high right from knowing zero to knowing at least how to introduce yourself after that once you're past beginner once you're past intermediate you start to plateau that is where you need focus and discipline the language is not going to be fun the whole time you are going to get tired discouraged frustrated a lot of people ask me do you ever feel you know frustrated in your language learning do you ever want to give up yes all the time you know it's not just a honeymoon journey but what you need to do when you feel like i'm not making progress is really to have focus and discipline if setting a language learning schedule is a way for you to go by all means do it if you need to change up your routine try that if you want to pause on that language and learn another one it's okay remember why you're doing this you are learning a language for the point of communication and for yourself you're not out there to prove yourself to the world this language learning is a very very personal journey another thing i want to touch on about focus is within specific study sessions people spend so much time making their notes look so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing for their instagram posts that they're not actually getting a lot of studying done i've seen this in myself study groups and people have admitted it online and that is a really negative thing you are wasting precious time that you could spend learning new words and grammar structure not everything you do needs to be posted online not everything you do needs to be beautiful just do it learn more and surprise people with your progress later and point number five is faith i just wrote faith because it's another f but this is also like belief in yourself belief that language learning is possible it is possible to learn a language at an older age it is possible to learn two three four languages at the same time it is possible to get a native sounding accent over time nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it just have faith in yourself i'd be really interested to hear you guys discuss this topic at length and ask lindy how she handles learning multiple languages at the same time you cannot unfortunately discuss it at length but i'm pretty sure that lenny can give a concise answer i think people often interpret polygon as someone who is learning multiple languages all at once from the same level like beginner you're starting 12 languages and you're learning them all absolutely not i started with english was my first foreign language actually then i slowly learned french at school and then arabic became a school subject and only in like my grade 10 year of high school i started learning korean it's been 10 years for korean halfway through korean i started learning japanese halfway through learning japanese it was chinese and thereafter little things like vietnamese spanish hungarian and tagalog came along so it has been like 20-ish years of language learning where i'm slowly building up languages on each other none of my languages are completely beginner starting at the same time it's always a little bit like stacking and focusing uh maybe years or months on one language before i learn another language it's really a lifelong thing i think people who kind of become interested in the polyglot world they they might be starting at one or two languages and their goal is to become a polygon and you think you need to learn all these languages at once but you don't realize that um you need to slow down a little and consider how many years and how many months it takes really to to learn the language um the other thing that you were mentioning is kind of like the system i have so i choose maybe one or two focused languages for a set period of months or weeks and then i um integrate it into my day so i might do a vietnamese and hungarian lessons twice a week for three months and then for the next set of three months i might be focusing on another language so it's really just prioritizing and none of my languages really are starting from zero at the same time and that's the answer but lindy i wanted to ask you do you have some does your method do you have a fixed path towards language learning towards every single language you learn when you learn from scratch and do you think that the structure or the idiosyncrasies or some features of certain languages kind of dictate or make you tweak the method or the methodology that you have already adopted um i think for my languages i have a general timeline or mindset that i use um for every language so knowing that i need to start with the basic greetings and then the sentence structure and filling in kind of having one sentence structure that i say for instance i like a verb and then i like verb with someone and i like verb with someone in place so i create these little sentences for myself at the very beginning of a language so in terms of uh knowing what i want to learn by when my structure is the same but like you said the idiosyncrasies or the grammar of a language does dictate a different approach especially the word order so it's a lot easier for me to to understand languages that are similar to languages i've learned otherwise whereas with hungarian for instance that has quite a flexible word order it might give i might require a lot more time to understand the complex grammar and the word order of that so it means that the there's no cookie cutter technique because it depends on a lot of factors as well if you're learning a language that has a different writing system for instance mandarin chinese you're going to have to dedicate if you want a lot of time to learning how to read and write these characters it's not just an alphabet you can learn once and then you can read even if you don't know the meaning if you don't know how to read it and you don't know the meaning so definitely a different approach according to the script of the language and the grammar if you already understand the sentence structure and the grammar there's no need to dedicate a lot of time reviewing grammar notes when you already understand it so it depends on how difficult the language is and how similar it is to languages you've learned before how long did it take you to actually be able to express yourself freely in korean fantastic question again as i always say it depends so i it depends on what you consider freely express for me i would say the turning point was really around the two and a half year mark this might sound really long for some people but that was really where i remember there was this distinct moment where i was like oh my goodness i understood everything this person said and without needing to think what's the word or translate in my head i was able to just have it flow it could be much faster for you if you're immersing yourself a lot more and it could also be very slow if you are not practicing korean so don't use my example of two and a half years as like okay by two and a half years i need to be comfortable to speak you could reach there in like nine months or five years again it depends but i remember i was at a korean festival it was like a food festival somebody was asking me about like how long i've been learning korean why i'm interested in it of course these are topics that i was able to talk about easily talking about why i'm learning korean it was something i'd been practicing a lot like people would always ask me like why are you learning korean and i've been able to answer that question so many times like these kinds of phrases i've been using a lot number one because the topic was easy for me talking about why i'm learning korean i was able to feel really fluid if somebody was asking me about politics or history in korean even now at my level after learning for a decade i would be like i don't really know the words so can you really say that i can express my thoughts freely in korean yes for some topics but for other topics not so much and that's the beauty of learning a language there's always going to be more and more that you can learn things that make it difficult for you to start learning and reasons why people fail to learn or struggle to continue i'm going to start by talking about the perception that people have of multilinguals or successful language learners when i see people just starting out in language learning talking to people who have learned a few languages something that often comes up are questions like how did you learn all of these languages and then they go and say you must have some kind of magic talent you were born this way but people don't actually realize it's not luck or or talent or magic to speak multiple languages it's really time effort skill motivation discipline consistency community immersion all of these factors that contribute to successfully being able to learn a language and then the next obstacle to progressing towards fluency is people learning unnecessary things at the wrong time when learning a language if you're just starting out and you don't know much let's say you're reading a piece of text or watching a video there are going to be so many new words that you don't know and you you might feel like i have to write them all down i have to make flashcards of all of these i have to know everything because i don't understand anything no you don't need to learn every single new word there is because you might not use them immediately rather learn through natural daily conversations another thing i'll say that you should be wary of is not over planning your language timeline and the resources you use and something that always comes up is i think people are always looking for the best method to learn a language and they over plan they think so hard and they're not actually starting to learn a language right away now the reason i think this happens is that on youtube on forums online we are so overwhelmed and bombarded by information of people saying this is the best way to learn a language this is the fastest way to learn and we think that it's kind of impossible to start learning a language if we haven't perfected our method and our schedule about 10 years ago when i started learning korean this wasn't really the case we didn't have did instagram exist back then if instagram existed it was like there was no language community there so i just sort of went into it kind of blindly and i still managed to learn um korean to a pretty decent level but now i think we were trying so hard to find the perfect method instead of actually just starting again like i always say when i started korean japanese ten or eight years ago i didn't have a lot of resources in south africa we had like two japanese textbooks in the entire store if i had gone and been like oh my gosh which textbook do i need what's the best method what's the fastest way to learn i would have been wasting time instead of starting with the little that i did have so i just used like one textbook um i had one person i could talk to and i built it up from there i recommend you not to over plan not to think oh what is the best way to learn just start start with what you have so i've spoken about chunking before but it's an awesome habit you can adapt to look at how you learn vocabulary differently my next habit is to simplify my friend jonathan siebold from seabolt speaks on youtube he made a video about deleting all his language apps which is a crazy idea but i totally understand where he's coming from there's just too much out there and sometimes it's good to just pick one thing to stick with i have found that i've been deleting language apps over the years um when once i find one that really works for me so i cleaned up my phone a lot so even though i have a bunch of korean textbooks when i'm focusing on preparing for something i try and use just one textbook and complete that to the full for spanish right now what i'm just doing is working through some articles on design and after that i'm going to start with some textbooks there are definitely ways that are not going to be effective in your language learning journey i mean if you're just starting out and you do a google search on how to learn a language probably one of the first things you're going to see is duolingo and rosetta stone while these are pieces of software that can be beneficial and helpful to your language learning journey you should not use these things thinking that you're going to get fluent just by interacting with this language learning comes from hearing the language by interacting with native speakers by reading content by writing journals by practicing your speaking just by using one app you're not going to get to a level where you want to be at which is essentially fluent what i mean by there's a wrong way to learn a language is there's a wrong way to approach the method that you already have if you are deadset focused on just learning vocabulary for instance and you're ignoring grammar you're not practicing your speaking you're not getting a holistic approach to language learning then you are not going to improve as fast as you could be language learning is all about the input you need to get comprehensible input so something i do when i'm learning a language is i try and apply it to my job which is a ui ux designer so i'm always looking up articles in spanish or korean or listening to design podcasts that can help me improve my vocabulary in spheres that are relevant to my life and of course bound to be words that i'm going to use a lot so i just googled it incomprehensible input is a hypothesis that says a comprehensible input is language input that can be understood by listeners despite them not understanding all the words and structures in it so this goes back to the question i received on tumblr which is i've been watching children's cartoons lately because i find them entertaining and easy to understand and learn given i'm a complete beginner but a friend always says that that's a dumb idea first of all that's not a nice thing of your friend to say because clearly this person is finding that by watching cartoons they are able to learn because they are getting comprehensible input don't let cartoons be the only way you're learning this language remember to take from a whole bunch of different sources have a vocabulary book or some you know app to learn vocab on have some way that you can learn grammar but keep getting this comprehensible input where you can hear the words that popped up something i do is i don't review my notes a lot i don't go over old vocab words and try and memorize i kind of just hope that by all the input i'm getting from the language that those words will pop up somewhere so the more exposure you get to the language the more you can solidify these words and grammar structures that you have at least learned once or twice something else i want to touch on is your mindset about language learning i've made a video about this which i think will be very helpful for you because a lot of how we learn a language is how we think about learning if you're constantly focusing about i'm so scared to make mistakes i'm so scared to be speaking to native speakers you are adopting this mindset of fear and you're gonna associate language learning with something that is very scary and intimidating it's okay it takes a while for us to get over that hurdle of fear but once we change our mindset the way we learn languages is going to improve watching this video about a guy's weight loss journey and at the end of the video it said something like since success is definite what would you do or now that you know success is a definite thing what will you do to get there so also change your mindset about how you think about language learning you will succeed if you put in this input research some language learning techniques which are applicable to your situation and your learning style but the most important thing is just being consistent having a positive mindset and getting comprehensible input so if that means watching cartoons that's okay at least you are hearing the language we can look at tracking your language process in two ways the first one is your actual progression from beginner to advanced onwards and the second aspect of tracking language learning is actually what are you doing to study this language what kind of immersion are you incorporating into your language learning what kind of tools are you using tracking your language learning activities and progress why is this important well for one it gives you a visual representation of how much time or effort you've actually been spending on your languages if you are creating a plan to study for an exam for instance it's a nice way to see how far you still have to go and to look back on how much you've done now it's up to you whether you want to track the amount of hours you spend there are people who have excel spreadsheets where they log exactly how many up to the minutes they've spent on language learning if this works for you great i don't really see the benefit in tracking minutes because it puts a lot of pressure on my language learnings otherwise if you just want to see what activities you're doing you can use a general calendar view so i can show you a little bit more of how i use this notebook it's just a calendar a small um year planner for muji but you can use a blank notebook so i have a monthly view here where i track what lessons i have in which language i also track my books uh in general like what books i'm reading when and i have also set a goal for myself to write diary entries in my two focus languages uh every sunday so i just indicate those with these uh with these three lines i have an indicator on the side here for the languages i'm learning and i just add them in once i do them so i'm not writing all my list of languages but just korean because i've done something in korean i watched a movie spanish is this red dot so these are when i'm taking spanish lessons or using busu and i've got my diary entries here i write them on sundays sometimes i'm a little late so this one's on tuesday i've just indicated what i did when i don't do something i put it in there as well and then my little essays i do get corrections and i write them in it in my language learning notebook and i also just indicate what languages i've actually um touched on this week so if you set up a language learning journal where you're tracking what you do you can see that maybe you planned on watching videos and listening to podcasts and reading books but you're actually only watching videos then you can adjust your plan going forward it's okay if you're not doing what you originally intended to do the point of tracking your progress is to see either where you need to be a bit more strict on yourself or where you just need to let things go it's okay if you're not following your original plan i do want to emphasize looking at the amount of time you spend learning a language is not going to make you fluent it's it's what you do with the language in that allocated time that is really important but for me as a visual person who loves data i like to track my language learning um i use an app to time where my time goes and it's sort of a different way instead of saying i want to do 10 hours of hungarian this week i just say i love hungarian i'm going to learn hungarian let's see how much time i actually do spend on it and then i adjust my plans accordingly to maybe how i feel um what new languages are exciting to me and so forth uh and then here's just a messy page for my notebook at the end of a quarter i will evaluate my goals see how it went count how many hours i've done um on italki learning a language i'll write a little report of how my language learning went and sometimes i might even write that report in a different language like in french so that's a way to practice my learning plus also be more mindful and analyze how my language learning has gone this thinking comes from what uh what i do at work so i'm a product designer and we work in the agile methodology that means we have sprints one sprint is two weeks and we have a certain number of sprints within a quarter to complete features that lead to an eventual goal and it is called agile because you can go back and change things and say actually this is taking longer than we thought or this we tried it we released it and users don't like it so we're gonna roll it back and adjust you don't plan for the entire year and do something and then have it fail at the end so it's okay to have little failures and learnings along the way so that you can adjust every single sprint but what i'm getting at is that if you are tracking your progress in little increments you can make changes accordingly that is also why i made my language learning plan in quarters and not for the entire year so let's look at the second framework which is agile agility right you're constantly moving you're changing things agile is iterative and cyclical and collaborative this is how we work at startups so let's say you have a product like an app let's say the property search app that i work for right now then we have small features or rather we have big goals that we want to achieve every quarter and then from those big goals we create small sub tasks and then from those sub tasks we say which one is the most important to work on which is going to bring me the best value right now and then we work on those in a sprint a sprint is generally two weeks so how might i be using an agile methodology in my language learning is uh retrospectives so what we do as a team after every feature is we have a little retro meeting where we say what went well what didn't go well and what i have learned so i try and use an agile approach to my language learning for me language learning is just a hobby i want to make sure that my processes language learning resources and methods will help me learn in a fun and fast manner so what i did this year is i split my language learning goals into quarters so that's how we work you know in corporate or in tech you have your goals for quarter one quarter two quarter three and i said okay for the first quarter of the year i'm going to focus on hungarian and spanish and then i'm going to look back at the end of each quarter and do little mini retrospectives with myself to improve my processes i'm very open and public about my processes i'm not scared to make mistakes online and i'm very open about sharing my progress so on my youtube channel instead of saying ah 12 languages for a whole year i have shorter videos which says hey this is how it's going with my language learning it's been going great it's been going terrible here's my progress i invite you to look into my journal as well and then i set a lot smaller goals for myself instead of big vague goals uh again twitter my favorite place on the internet uh i have a thread on twitter where i keep track of my language learning goals for every quarter and i'm also open to changing that as i go along so you'll see here quarter one i had my main foci which were tagalog and hungarian but as you can see as i go along i give updates for instance oh i realized i can't do one chapter of a book a week um i'm sorry i can do one chapter a week not just two chapters in a month so i change my plan as i go along i'm being agile with my language learning how did you get over if you did get over nice one being self-conscious about your korean accent very good question super valid two things here number one actually working on your accent and number two just accepting yourself for who you are and not letting fear get to you so the first thing you can do is just realize that this is going to take time you're not going to sound like a native i don't even sound like a native after 10 years up your listening and speaking exposure and over time you will ease naturally into it the other thing you can do is really look into how do you position your mouth to pronounce certain words it took me a very long time to tell the difference between all and o and i had to have someone explain to me that all you can open your jaw all and o is really rounded so you can go into maybe tutorials that you can find on how to really be positioning your mouth to pronounce these words so that's the sort of technical side the other side of the coin is making peace with the fact that you are not a native speaker it's natural to have your beautiful caribbean accent when you're speaking korean this is absolutely normal so what you can do is just focus on a mindset shift really dive into it and ask yourself why is this so distressing to me have people laughed at me am i worried what people are thinking of me and ask yourself why is that bothering you or where the source of that worry comes from specific to me i never really worried so much about my accent because i knew that over time it would ease out and for me the point was being able to communicate so even if i didn't sound very natural at least i was learning and able to get um my ideas across the more i studied the more confident i felt regardless of what my accent was like and one metaphor that i thought of this morning is probably not the greatest metaphor i'm not very creative with that but what i was reminded of is think of yourself in like an orchestra and you're practicing clarinet for instance if you're in your room at home practicing you're practicing the same piece over and over and over but once you're in that actual situation of playing in the orchestra with lots of other people working together you might get stuck it just feels completely different so we can be working on our listening skills in isolation by listening to something over and over once we're put into a real-life situation like talking to somebody we might feel this is completely different from my experience listening to the language there will be slang people will speak at different speeds there will be liaisons between words different accents you need to experience the language and listen to the language in a number of different varied contexts and that is really what's going to help you improve your listening in the long run first of all let us talk about where you can encounter new vocabulary words first way you can get new vocabulary is watching movies watching dramas tv shows listening to the radio and listening to music so those all fall under immersion i would underline the word that i'm learning and write its meaning above it so i can learn the word in context it's always better to learn a new vocabulary word in context than it is to look at long word lists and just learn singular words you remember a sentence like where is the bathroom a lot faster than you do just the word where and bathroom right that's why phrase books are so useful when you go traveling you don't learn a bunch of single words you learn sentences so on that note learning a word in context from the book is a great idea next we're going to talk about shopping lists and diaries and planners i always write my shopping list in a different language especially if i need to buy something completely new like i don't know asparagus and i don't know that word for example i will look it up and make sure to write asparagus on my list it'll force me to remember the word because if i go to the shop and i don't know what i wrote there i'm doomed so making shopping lists is a great way to reinforce and remember vocab words similarly you can use your diary or planner and change it into your target language planner if you have a meeting for example instead of writing meeting in english or your native language you could write it in your target language chunking is learning entire set phrases rather than little vocabulary words out of content we remember words a lot better when they are in context of a phrase especially something that is related to something we are interested in that's why how i'm learning spanish right now is just going through like articles to do with design or watching tv shows i like and memorizing or learning set phrases we are provided with so many resources and textbooks and apps out there that we want to self-study but sometimes you get to a point where you feel like i just need someone else's guidance during times like stressful times like now when i have my full-time job to do when i have videos to make when i have other languages to study kind of relying on a teacher or a tutor to help me and for me to be teachable i feel like that's just it's just removing a lot of mental strain from my side to think like what should i teach myself today and just hand it over to the tutor so that she can tell me what to do if you've learned to language to some kind of intermediate level took a long break and then came back to it so we're gonna dive into that today i want to start off by saying that you are in a good position all of the material that you've learned before it's still somewhere german psychologist hermann ebbinghaus has something called the forgetting curve i've mentioned this in a few videos before if you are re-engaging with material you've learned before it's going to take you less time to relearn it than it did for you to learn it from scratch if you forget material and you relearn it the second time it's more likely to be ingrained much deeper in your memory kai i would recommend not taking a level test and buying a textbook and starting from scratch i would say start with where you left off go back over everything that you have and slowly ease into the language it's also stressful if you want to get a textbook and you don't know which one to get because a beginner one will be too easy for you and an intermediate or advanced one might be way too difficult so start with what you have what i do when i try and get back into a language is look at the notes i have and take a highlighter or a pencil and go through it page by page and see what which words do i not remember here is the exact notebook i used when i took the lingoda sprint last year the year before and as you can see there are some highlights here in yellow and red and that is me just going through my notes a few months after having taken them so what i do is i just highlight useful phrases that i may have forgotten and transfer this to another notebook the next thing that i would recommend is to take a course or to get a tutor after focusing a lot on hungarian and tagalog at the beginning of this year i thought oh i need to brush up on my spanish so i did book quite a few uh group lessons for spanish and it was so nice to just be in the environment of a group lesson and be with people who are interested in the language and everything is in spanish and you'll be surprised how much you're able to learn when you're taking lessons in the target language something that really helps me to get back into the french mode is just by listening to a lot of french i'll listen to a lot of podcasts or i will watch a series on netflix in french and it surprises me every time how much more fluidly i'm able to speak french after just having listened to it it's not like i've lost all of the vocabulary but i may have forgotten some useful phrases that i need and these things will come out in the podcast you listen to or the movies you watch and it'll be a nice refresher for you tay i also recommend just finding a friend someone you can reach out to again to have a very casual conversation and this could be a language exchange partner a new person or it can be a friend you've had for a long time now the last thing the most important thing if you take one thing away from this video it's to break up your language learning into very very small micro goals for instance let's take tagalog for example the language that i am constantly putting on pause and forgetting i have a textbook which is really really wonderful and what i did at the beginning of this year was to look at all of the chapters in the book i have set aside some time for myself whether that be two months um and then just decide how many chapters i need to do a week or a month to finish the book like i said in the beginning of this video that didn't happen and that is because i set too high of a goal i told myself to do one chapter a week and it didn't work out because i'm really focusing on my design career right now i'm working to improve my ux skills leading the design team i'm also learning hungarian and i want to brush up on my french so looking at my life entirely all of the aspects of my life outside of language learning there's really no time for me to do one entire chapter a week so i figured if i tell myself to do one chapter every three weeks there will be a lot more leeway don't just follow my schedule see how much time you are able to dedicate and break your goal into much smaller pieces you can always practice a language when you write something and ask native speakers online for corrections again this is not having a native speaker in your area who you're meeting in person but you are making use of the wonderful world of the internet to get someone to help you whenever i write something and i want a native speaker to correct it i usually go to one of three one of five places the first is instagram if you are following native speakers or people in the language community feel free to just post something you wrote and say hey i'm open to corrections can you help me you can also do that on twitter twitter has a really huge language learning community a lot of people do also write in their twitter bios open to corrections so you can do that too and when you post something in your native language likely there will be people who can help you uh the third app i like to use is high native again not sponsored but i talk about this app all the time because i've used it for like 10 years have i been around that long i don't know but it's great so basically you can just post something and say like is this correct and people will be like yes it is or no it's not fix it for you hellotalk also has a feature where you can post something and tip number five is to follow native speakers on social media you just need to put yourself out there you could live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and if you have access to the internet you are bound to meet native speakers there is no excuse whenever i learn a language i make a point of following native speakers or at least searching for content in a language so i might be interested in web development for instance what i can do on twitter or instagram is search the hashtags in a particular language if someone has posted about web development i might reply to their tweet or comment on their post and there i am interacting with native speakers this is a bit of an unorthodox way because you're not guaranteed an answer from them but it's still giving you an opportunity to engage with native content and to practice your speaking or writing and if native speakers aren't available you can also learn from fellow language learners on different forums usually language apps have forums studygram community on tumblr twitter and instagram is really huge so just search around the hashtags there and then you have ways to meet people who are also learning the language bottom line as well is remember that this is supplementary to your language study you need to consider language learning in a holistic approach so that is using different apps resources textbooks practicing your listening your writing your vocabulary your grammar and then practicing your speaking and be open to corrections don't be shy when people are fixing your mistakes for you do you use teachers do you think the teachers are important and if so how do you interact with your tutor there's a few people who community tutors sometimes who just they just chat to you and they don't actually know how to teach a language so if you have a teacher who actually knows how to structure a lesson and teach grammar it's a lot easier um than kind of just doing a language exchange so i think teachers are important to some extent when you're very serious about the language and when it's a difficult language that you cannot really teach yourself there like there will always be topics that for you to talk about um it can be boring if you have nothing to talk about which is why it's important to have a professional teacher who knows what they're doing rather than a language partner who you have nothing in common how do you motivate yourself to remember words what brings you back for motivation i have many videos and blog posts about motivation so i will leave you to watch those videos but i'll just say uh at the top of my head remembering why you started and looking back on your progress whenever i feel demotivated i go back and say hey 5 or 10 years ago i couldn't say anything and now i am able to communicate so congratulate yourself for the progress that you are making and tell yourself that the hard work does pay off even if you don't see it in the short term number two try and figure out why i am not motivated is it because i'm tired is it because the content is too hard for me is it because i'm burnt out figure out what is the source of your lack of motivation and tackle that if you're just exhausted take a break there's no shame in taking a break from the language and coming back to it later the other approach is just taking a break waiting it out and slowly easing back into it you need to be expanding what you listen to in different contexts so if we listen to the same piece we're only going to know those phrases and those vocabulary words in that context of the let's say podcast for instance i'm only going to know the phrase as a phrase that popped up in that podcast i'll know what it means but i need to experience it in different situations if however if i do expand my listening to watching a lot more movies uh listening to more podcasts having a lot more conversations with people like i always say speaking and listening go hand in hand a few more thoughts regarding listening another thing i want to take note of is that sometimes we approach listening like we do reading intensive reading right so there's extensive reading um and there's intensive reading where you're really engaging with the text if you're focusing too much on individual specific words you're not going to get the gist of listening and why i think that could be a problem is if you're in a real situation with somebody and you're talking to them you can't pause the conversation of course you can interrupt them and say oh i'm sorry i didn't get that can you repeat it but you're not able to sit there with a notebook and write down everything they say and and pause the conversation this works if you're at a language exchange and that's what you do but in daily life if your goal in language learning is to communicate with people you need to get used to getting to a point where you just understand the gist of it so for many years in korean i was able to understand like 80 of a conversation and i didn't let that bother me because i was still able to communicate i got the gist i was able to listen around and get the gist of it like sit in that discomfort of not understanding everything and up your exposure to the language listen a lot a lot a lot and it'll just start to make sense over time is the key so that's also why i don't like to isolate listening as one skill that i need to sharpen and work on it's immersion it's conversations with people it's exposing yourself to the content it's expanding your vocabulary in different contexts because if you up your vocabulary you'll up your understanding of listening pieces right you can't just study from listening i think the bottom line is that we need variety in what we listen to what do you think about curiosity and multilingualism do you think that makes it sort of big oh you have to be curious to to really appreciate a language i was um giving a talk for a few diplomats you know really uh serious politicians and they had a they had a language academy at um the department of foreign affairs in south africa and so many of the people just approached it as like well okay you know i'm being sent to this country i guess i have to learn this language but i really don't care let me just complete my homework and be done there was no cultural curiosity of like i really want to know why do people do this or man this food is amazing i want to learn more about that so yes curiosity is a a big beneficial skill that will help you learn a language learn language learning is not just techniques and methods and like the fastest way to learn this it's a lot of um principles i i have one video where i talk about like the four f's of language learning it's fearlessness um fun flexibility and with that comes like curiosity and adaptability there are a few like intangible skills that help you learn languages too

imagine this you have decided you&#39;re gonna learn a new language you look up all of these amazing people online and see how they&#39;ve learned this language really fast and then you feel like okay i i need to learn this language within three four five months and once you start learning there being a beginner from knowing nothing to knowing something to knowing a lot that that curve is really really high right from knowing zero to knowing at least how to introduce yourself after that once you&#39;re past beginner once you&#39;re past intermediate you start to plateau that is where you need focus and discipline the language is not going to be fun the whole time you are going to get tired discouraged frustrated a lot of people ask me do you ever feel you know frustrated in your language learning do you ever want to give up yes all the time you know it&#39;s not just a honeymoon journey but what you need to do when you feel like i&#39;m not making progress is really to have focus and discipline if setting a language learning schedule is a way for you to go by all means do it if you need to change up your routine try that if you want to pause on that language and learn another one it&#39;s okay remember why you&#39;re doing this you are learning a language for the point of communication and for yourself you&#39;re not out there to prove yourself to the world this language learning is a very very personal journey another thing i want to touch on about focus is within specific study sessions people spend so much time making their notes look so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing for their instagram posts that they&#39;re not actually getting a lot of studying done i&#39;ve seen this in myself study groups and people have admitted it online and that is a really negative thing you are wasting precious time that you could spend learning new words and grammar structure not everything you do needs to be posted online not everything you do needs to be beautiful just do it learn more and surprise people with your progress later and point number five is faith i just wrote faith because it&#39;s another f but this is also like belief in yourself belief that language learning is possible it is possible to learn a language at an older age it is possible to learn two three four languages at the same time it is possible to get a native sounding accent over time nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it just have faith in yourself i&#39;d be really interested to hear you guys discuss this topic at length and ask lindy how she handles learning multiple languages at the same time you cannot unfortunately discuss it at length but i&#39;m pretty sure that lenny can give a concise answer i think people often interpret polygon as someone who is learning multiple languages all at once from the same level like beginner you&#39;re starting 12 languages and you&#39;re learning them all absolutely not i started with english was my first foreign language actually then i slowly learned french at school and then arabic became a school subject and only in like my grade 10 year of high school i started learning korean it&#39;s been 10 years for korean halfway through korean i started learning japanese halfway through learning japanese it was chinese and thereafter little things like vietnamese spanish hungarian and tagalog came along so it has been like 20-ish years of language learning where i&#39;m slowly building up languages on each other none of my languages are completely beginner starting at the same time it&#39;s always a little bit like stacking and focusing uh maybe years or months on one language before i learn another language it&#39;s really a lifelong thing i think people who kind of become interested in the polyglot world they they might be starting at one or two languages and their goal is to become a polygon and you think you need to learn all these languages at once but you don&#39;t realize that um you need to slow down a little and consider how many years and how many months it takes really to to learn the language um the other thing that you were mentioning is kind of like the system i have so i choose maybe one or two focused languages for a set period of months or weeks and then i um integrate it into my day so i might do a vietnamese and hungarian lessons twice a week for three months and then for the next set of three months i might be focusing on another language so it&#39;s really just prioritizing and none of my languages really are starting from zero at the same time and that&#39;s the answer but lindy i wanted to ask you do you have some does your method do you have a fixed path towards language learning towards every single language you learn when you learn from scratch and do you think that the structure or the idiosyncrasies or some features of certain languages kind of dictate or make you tweak the method or the methodology that you have already adopted um i think for my languages i have a general timeline or mindset that i use um for every language so knowing that i need to start with the basic greetings and then the sentence structure and filling in kind of having one sentence structure that i say for instance i like a verb and then i like verb with someone and i like verb with someone in place so i create these little sentences for myself at the very beginning of a language so in terms of uh knowing what i want to learn by when my structure is the same but like you said the idiosyncrasies or the grammar of a language does dictate a different approach especially the word order so it&#39;s a lot easier for me to to understand languages that are similar to languages i&#39;ve learned otherwise whereas with hungarian for instance that has quite a flexible word order it might give i might require a lot more time to understand the complex grammar and the word order of that so it means that the there&#39;s no cookie cutter technique because it depends on a lot of factors as well if you&#39;re learning a language that has a different writing system for instance mandarin chinese you&#39;re going to have to dedicate if you want a lot of time to learning how to read and write these characters it&#39;s not just an alphabet you can learn once and then you can read even if you don&#39;t know the meaning if you don&#39;t know how to read it and you don&#39;t know the meaning so definitely a different approach according to the script of the language and the grammar if you already understand the sentence structure and the grammar there&#39;s no need to dedicate a lot of time reviewing grammar notes when you already understand it so it depends on how difficult the language is and how similar it is to languages you&#39;ve learned before how long did it take you to actually be able to express yourself freely in korean fantastic question again as i always say it depends so i it depends on what you consider freely express for me i would say the turning point was really around the two and a half year mark this might sound really long for some people but that was really where i remember there was this distinct moment where i was like oh my goodness i understood everything this person said and without needing to think what&#39;s the word or translate in my head i was able to just have it flow it could be much faster for you if you&#39;re immersing yourself a lot more and it could also be very slow if you are not practicing korean so don&#39;t use my example of two and a half years as like okay by two and a half years i need to be comfortable to speak you could reach there in like nine months or five years again it depends but i remember i was at a korean festival it was like a food festival somebody was asking me about like how long i&#39;ve been learning korean why i&#39;m interested in it of course these are topics that i was able to talk about easily talking about why i&#39;m learning korean it was something i&#39;d been practicing a lot like people would always ask me like why are you learning korean and i&#39;ve been able to answer that question so many times like these kinds of phrases i&#39;ve been using a lot number one because the topic was easy for me talking about why i&#39;m learning korean i was able to feel really fluid if somebody was asking me about politics or history in korean even now at my level after learning for a decade i would be like i don&#39;t really know the words so can you really say that i can express my thoughts freely in korean yes for some topics but for other topics not so much and that&#39;s the beauty of learning a language there&#39;s always going to be more and more that you can learn things that make it difficult for you to start learning and reasons why people fail to learn or struggle to continue i&#39;m going to start by talking about the perception that people have of multilinguals or successful language learners when i see people just starting out in language learning talking to people who have learned a few languages something that often comes up are questions like how did you learn all of these languages and then they go and say you must have some kind of magic talent you were born this way but people don&#39;t actually realize it&#39;s not luck or or talent or magic to speak multiple languages it&#39;s really time effort skill motivation discipline consistency community immersion all of these factors that contribute to successfully being able to learn a language and then the next obstacle to progressing towards fluency is people learning unnecessary things at the wrong time when learning a language if you&#39;re just starting out and you don&#39;t know much let&#39;s say you&#39;re reading a piece of text or watching a video there are going to be so many new words that you don&#39;t know and you you might feel like i have to write them all down i have to make flashcards of all of these i have to know everything because i don&#39;t understand anything no you don&#39;t need to learn every single new word there is because you might not use them immediately rather learn through natural daily conversations another thing i&#39;ll say that you should be wary of is not over planning your language timeline and the resources you use and something that always comes up is i think people are always looking for the best method to learn a language and they over plan they think so hard and they&#39;re not actually starting to learn a language right away now the reason i think this happens is that on youtube on forums online we are so overwhelmed and bombarded by information of people saying this is the best way to learn a language this is the fastest way to learn and we think that it&#39;s kind of impossible to start learning a language if we haven&#39;t perfected our method and our schedule about 10 years ago when i started learning korean this wasn&#39;t really the case we didn&#39;t have did instagram exist back then if instagram existed it was like there was no language community there so i just sort of went into it kind of blindly and i still managed to learn um korean to a pretty decent level but now i think we were trying so hard to find the perfect method instead of actually just starting again like i always say when i started korean japanese ten or eight years ago i didn&#39;t have a lot of resources in south africa we had like two japanese textbooks in the entire store if i had gone and been like oh my gosh which textbook do i need what&#39;s the best method what&#39;s the fastest way to learn i would have been wasting time instead of starting with the little that i did have so i just used like one textbook um i had one person i could talk to and i built it up from there i recommend you not to over plan not to think oh what is the best way to learn just start start with what you have so i&#39;ve spoken about chunking before but it&#39;s an awesome habit you can adapt to look at how you learn vocabulary differently my next habit is to simplify my friend jonathan siebold from seabolt speaks on youtube he made a video about deleting all his language apps which is a crazy idea but i totally understand where he&#39;s coming from there&#39;s just too much out there and sometimes it&#39;s good to just pick one thing to stick with i have found that i&#39;ve been deleting language apps over the years um when once i find one that really works for me so i cleaned up my phone a lot so even though i have a bunch of korean textbooks when i&#39;m focusing on preparing for something i try and use just one textbook and complete that to the full for spanish right now what i&#39;m just doing is working through some articles on design and after that i&#39;m going to start with some textbooks there are definitely ways that are not going to be effective in your language learning journey i mean if you&#39;re just starting out and you do a google search on how to learn a language probably one of the first things you&#39;re going to see is duolingo and rosetta stone while these are pieces of software that can be beneficial and helpful to your language learning journey you should not use these things thinking that you&#39;re going to get fluent just by interacting with this language learning comes from hearing the language by interacting with native speakers by reading content by writing journals by practicing your speaking just by using one app you&#39;re not going to get to a level where you want to be at which is essentially fluent what i mean by there&#39;s a wrong way to learn a language is there&#39;s a wrong way to approach the method that you already have if you are deadset focused on just learning vocabulary for instance and you&#39;re ignoring grammar you&#39;re not practicing your speaking you&#39;re not getting a holistic approach to language learning then you are not going to improve as fast as you could be language learning is all about the input you need to get comprehensible input so something i do when i&#39;m learning a language is i try and apply it to my job which is a ui ux designer so i&#39;m always looking up articles in spanish or korean or listening to design podcasts that can help me improve my vocabulary in spheres that are relevant to my life and of course bound to be words that i&#39;m going to use a lot so i just googled it incomprehensible input is a hypothesis that says a comprehensible input is language input that can be understood by listeners despite them not understanding all the words and structures in it so this goes back to the question i received on tumblr which is i&#39;ve been watching children&#39;s cartoons lately because i find them entertaining and easy to understand and learn given i&#39;m a complete beginner but a friend always says that that&#39;s a dumb idea first of all that&#39;s not a nice thing of your friend to say because clearly this person is finding that by watching cartoons they are able to learn because they are getting comprehensible input don&#39;t let cartoons be the only way you&#39;re learning this language remember to take from a whole bunch of different sources have a vocabulary book or some you know app to learn vocab on have some way that you can learn grammar but keep getting this comprehensible input where you can hear the words that popped up something i do is i don&#39;t review my notes a lot i don&#39;t go over old vocab words and try and memorize i kind of just hope that by all the input i&#39;m getting from the language that those words will pop up somewhere so the more exposure you get to the language the more you can solidify these words and grammar structures that you have at least learned once or twice something else i want to touch on is your mindset about language learning i&#39;ve made a video about this which i think will be very helpful for you because a lot of how we learn a language is how we think about learning if you&#39;re constantly focusing about i&#39;m so scared to make mistakes i&#39;m so scared to be speaking to native speakers you are adopting this mindset of fear and you&#39;re gonna associate language learning with something that is very scary and intimidating it&#39;s okay it takes a while for us to get over that hurdle of fear but once we change our mindset the way we learn languages is going to improve watching this video about a guy&#39;s weight loss journey and at the end of the video it said something like since success is definite what would you do or now that you know success is a definite thing what will you do to get there so also change your mindset about how you think about language learning you will succeed if you put in this input research some language learning techniques which are applicable to your situation and your learning style but the most important thing is just being consistent having a positive mindset and getting comprehensible input so if that means watching cartoons that&#39;s okay at least you are hearing the language we can look at tracking your language process in two ways the first one is your actual progression from beginner to advanced onwards and the second aspect of tracking language learning is actually what are you doing to study this language what kind of immersion are you incorporating into your language learning what kind of tools are you using tracking your language learning activities and progress why is this important well for one it gives you a visual representation of how much time or effort you&#39;ve actually been spending on your languages if you are creating a plan to study for an exam for instance it&#39;s a nice way to see how far you still have to go and to look back on how much you&#39;ve done now it&#39;s up to you whether you want to track the amount of hours you spend there are people who have excel spreadsheets where they log exactly how many up to the minutes they&#39;ve spent on language learning if this works for you great i don&#39;t really see the benefit in tracking minutes because it puts a lot of pressure on my language learnings otherwise if you just want to see what activities you&#39;re doing you can use a general calendar view so i can show you a little bit more of how i use this notebook it&#39;s just a calendar a small um year planner for muji but you can use a blank notebook so i have a monthly view here where i track what lessons i have in which language i also track my books uh in general like what books i&#39;m reading when and i have also set a goal for myself to write diary entries in my two focus languages uh every sunday so i just indicate those with these uh with these three lines i have an indicator on the side here for the languages i&#39;m learning and i just add them in once i do them so i&#39;m not writing all my list of languages but just korean because i&#39;ve done something in korean i watched a movie spanish is this red dot so these are when i&#39;m taking spanish lessons or using busu and i&#39;ve got my diary entries here i write them on sundays sometimes i&#39;m a little late so this one&#39;s on tuesday i&#39;ve just indicated what i did when i don&#39;t do something i put it in there as well and then my little essays i do get corrections and i write them in it in my language learning notebook and i also just indicate what languages i&#39;ve actually um touched on this week so if you set up a language learning journal where you&#39;re tracking what you do you can see that maybe you planned on watching videos and listening to podcasts and reading books but you&#39;re actually only watching videos then you can adjust your plan going forward it&#39;s okay if you&#39;re not doing what you originally intended to do the point of tracking your progress is to see either where you need to be a bit more strict on yourself or where you just need to let things go it&#39;s okay if you&#39;re not following your original plan i do want to emphasize looking at the amount of time you spend learning a language is not going to make you fluent it&#39;s it&#39;s what you do with the language in that allocated time that is really important but for me as a visual person who loves data i like to track my language learning um i use an app to time where my time goes and it&#39;s sort of a different way instead of saying i want to do 10 hours of hungarian this week i just say i love hungarian i&#39;m going to learn hungarian let&#39;s see how much time i actually do spend on it and then i adjust my plans accordingly to maybe how i feel um what new languages are exciting to me and so forth uh and then here&#39;s just a messy page for my notebook at the end of a quarter i will evaluate my goals see how it went count how many hours i&#39;ve done um on italki learning a language i&#39;ll write a little report of how my language learning went and sometimes i might even write that report in a different language like in french so that&#39;s a way to practice my learning plus also be more mindful and analyze how my language learning has gone this thinking comes from what uh what i do at work so i&#39;m a product designer and we work in the agile methodology that means we have sprints one sprint is two weeks and we have a certain number of sprints within a quarter to complete features that lead to an eventual goal and it is called agile because you can go back and change things and say actually this is taking longer than we thought or this we tried it we released it and users don&#39;t like it so we&#39;re gonna roll it back and adjust you don&#39;t plan for the entire year and do something and then have it fail at the end so it&#39;s okay to have little failures and learnings along the way so that you can adjust every single sprint but what i&#39;m getting at is that if you are tracking your progress in little increments you can make changes accordingly that is also why i made my language learning plan in quarters and not for the entire year so let&#39;s look at the second framework which is agile agility right you&#39;re constantly moving you&#39;re changing things agile is iterative and cyclical and collaborative this is how we work at startups so let&#39;s say you have a product like an app let&#39;s say the property search app that i work for right now then we have small features or rather we have big goals that we want to achieve every quarter and then from those big goals we create small sub tasks and then from those sub tasks we say which one is the most important to work on which is going to bring me the best value right now and then we work on those in a sprint a sprint is generally two weeks so how might i be using an agile methodology in my language learning is uh retrospectives so what we do as a team after every feature is we have a little retro meeting where we say what went well what didn&#39;t go well and what i have learned so i try and use an agile approach to my language learning for me language learning is just a hobby i want to make sure that my processes language learning resources and methods will help me learn in a fun and fast manner so what i did this year is i split my language learning goals into quarters so that&#39;s how we work you know in corporate or in tech you have your goals for quarter one quarter two quarter three and i said okay for the first quarter of the year i&#39;m going to focus on hungarian and spanish and then i&#39;m going to look back at the end of each quarter and do little mini retrospectives with myself to improve my processes i&#39;m very open and public about my processes i&#39;m not scared to make mistakes online and i&#39;m very open about sharing my progress so on my youtube channel instead of saying ah 12 languages for a whole year i have shorter videos which says hey this is how it&#39;s going with my language learning it&#39;s been going great it&#39;s been going terrible here&#39;s my progress i invite you to look into my journal as well and then i set a lot smaller goals for myself instead of big vague goals uh again twitter my favorite place on the internet uh i have a thread on twitter where i keep track of my language learning goals for every quarter and i&#39;m also open to changing that as i go along so you&#39;ll see here quarter one i had my main foci which were tagalog and hungarian but as you can see as i go along i give updates for instance oh i realized i can&#39;t do one chapter of a book a week um i&#39;m sorry i can do one chapter a week not just two chapters in a month so i change my plan as i go along i&#39;m being agile with my language learning how did you get over if you did get over nice one being self-conscious about your korean accent very good question super valid two things here number one actually working on your accent and number two just accepting yourself for who you are and not letting fear get to you so the first thing you can do is just realize that this is going to take time you&#39;re not going to sound like a native i don&#39;t even sound like a native after 10 years up your listening and speaking exposure and over time you will ease naturally into it the other thing you can do is really look into how do you position your mouth to pronounce certain words it took me a very long time to tell the difference between all and o and i had to have someone explain to me that all you can open your jaw all and o is really rounded so you can go into maybe tutorials that you can find on how to really be positioning your mouth to pronounce these words so that&#39;s the sort of technical side the other side of the coin is making peace with the fact that you are not a native speaker it&#39;s natural to have your beautiful caribbean accent when you&#39;re speaking korean this is absolutely normal so what you can do is just focus on a mindset shift really dive into it and ask yourself why is this so distressing to me have people laughed at me am i worried what people are thinking of me and ask yourself why is that bothering you or where the source of that worry comes from specific to me i never really worried so much about my accent because i knew that over time it would ease out and for me the point was being able to communicate so even if i didn&#39;t sound very natural at least i was learning and able to get um my ideas across the more i studied the more confident i felt regardless of what my accent was like and one metaphor that i thought of this morning is probably not the greatest metaphor i&#39;m not very creative with that but what i was reminded of is think of yourself in like an orchestra and you&#39;re practicing clarinet for instance if you&#39;re in your room at home practicing you&#39;re practicing the same piece over and over and over but once you&#39;re in that actual situation of playing in the orchestra with lots of other people working together you might get stuck it just feels completely different so we can be working on our listening skills in isolation by listening to something over and over once we&#39;re put into a real-life situation like talking to somebody we might feel this is completely different from my experience listening to the language there will be slang people will speak at different speeds there will be liaisons between words different accents you need to experience the language and listen to the language in a number of different varied contexts and that is really what&#39;s going to help you improve your listening in the long run first of all let us talk about where you can encounter new vocabulary words first way you can get new vocabulary is watching movies watching dramas tv shows listening to the radio and listening to music so those all fall under immersion i would underline the word that i&#39;m learning and write its meaning above it so i can learn the word in context it&#39;s always better to learn a new vocabulary word in context than it is to look at long word lists and just learn singular words you remember a sentence like where is the bathroom a lot faster than you do just the word where and bathroom right that&#39;s why phrase books are so useful when you go traveling you don&#39;t learn a bunch of single words you learn sentences so on that note learning a word in context from the book is a great idea next we&#39;re going to talk about shopping lists and diaries and planners i always write my shopping list in a different language especially if i need to buy something completely new like i don&#39;t know asparagus and i don&#39;t know that word for example i will look it up and make sure to write asparagus on my list it&#39;ll force me to remember the word because if i go to the shop and i don&#39;t know what i wrote there i&#39;m doomed so making shopping lists is a great way to reinforce and remember vocab words similarly you can use your diary or planner and change it into your target language planner if you have a meeting for example instead of writing meeting in english or your native language you could write it in your target language chunking is learning entire set phrases rather than little vocabulary words out of content we remember words a lot better when they are in context of a phrase especially something that is related to something we are interested in that&#39;s why how i&#39;m learning spanish right now is just going through like articles to do with design or watching tv shows i like and memorizing or learning set phrases we are provided with so many resources and textbooks and apps out there that we want to self-study but sometimes you get to a point where you feel like i just need someone else&#39;s guidance during times like stressful times like now when i have my full-time job to do when i have videos to make when i have other languages to study kind of relying on a teacher or a tutor to help me and for me to be teachable i feel like that&#39;s just it&#39;s just removing a lot of mental strain from my side to think like what should i teach myself today and just hand it over to the tutor so that she can tell me what to do if you&#39;ve learned to language to some kind of intermediate level took a long break and then came back to it so we&#39;re gonna dive into that today i want to start off by saying that you are in a good position all of the material that you&#39;ve learned before it&#39;s still somewhere german psychologist hermann ebbinghaus has something called the forgetting curve i&#39;ve mentioned this in a few videos before if you are re-engaging with material you&#39;ve learned before it&#39;s going to take you less time to relearn it than it did for you to learn it from scratch if you forget material and you relearn it the second time it&#39;s more likely to be ingrained much deeper in your memory kai i would recommend not taking a level test and buying a textbook and starting from scratch i would say start with where you left off go back over everything that you have and slowly ease into the language it&#39;s also stressful if you want to get a textbook and you don&#39;t know which one to get because a beginner one will be too easy for you and an intermediate or advanced one might be way too difficult so start with what you have what i do when i try and get back into a language is look at the notes i have and take a highlighter or a pencil and go through it page by page and see what which words do i not remember here is the exact notebook i used when i took the lingoda sprint last year the year before and as you can see there are some highlights here in yellow and red and that is me just going through my notes a few months after having taken them so what i do is i just highlight useful phrases that i may have forgotten and transfer this to another notebook the next thing that i would recommend is to take a course or to get a tutor after focusing a lot on hungarian and tagalog at the beginning of this year i thought oh i need to brush up on my spanish so i did book quite a few uh group lessons for spanish and it was so nice to just be in the environment of a group lesson and be with people who are interested in the language and everything is in spanish and you&#39;ll be surprised how much you&#39;re able to learn when you&#39;re taking lessons in the target language something that really helps me to get back into the french mode is just by listening to a lot of french i&#39;ll listen to a lot of podcasts or i will watch a series on netflix in french and it surprises me every time how much more fluidly i&#39;m able to speak french after just having listened to it it&#39;s not like i&#39;ve lost all of the vocabulary but i may have forgotten some useful phrases that i need and these things will come out in the podcast you listen to or the movies you watch and it&#39;ll be a nice refresher for you tay i also recommend just finding a friend someone you can reach out to again to have a very casual conversation and this could be a language exchange partner a new person or it can be a friend you&#39;ve had for a long time now the last thing the most important thing if you take one thing away from this video it&#39;s to break up your language learning into very very small micro goals for instance let&#39;s take tagalog for example the language that i am constantly putting on pause and forgetting i have a textbook which is really really wonderful and what i did at the beginning of this year was to look at all of the chapters in the book i have set aside some time for myself whether that be two months um and then just decide how many chapters i need to do a week or a month to finish the book like i said in the beginning of this video that didn&#39;t happen and that is because i set too high of a goal i told myself to do one chapter a week and it didn&#39;t work out because i&#39;m really focusing on my design career right now i&#39;m working to improve my ux skills leading the design team i&#39;m also learning hungarian and i want to brush up on my french so looking at my life entirely all of the aspects of my life outside of language learning there&#39;s really no time for me to do one entire chapter a week so i figured if i tell myself to do one chapter every three weeks there will be a lot more leeway don&#39;t just follow my schedule see how much time you are able to dedicate and break your goal into much smaller pieces you can always practice a language when you write something and ask native speakers online for corrections again this is not having a native speaker in your area who you&#39;re meeting in person but you are making use of the wonderful world of the internet to get someone to help you whenever i write something and i want a native speaker to correct it i usually go to one of three one of five places the first is instagram if you are following native speakers or people in the language community feel free to just post something you wrote and say hey i&#39;m open to corrections can you help me you can also do that on twitter twitter has a really huge language learning community a lot of people do also write in their twitter bios open to corrections so you can do that too and when you post something in your native language likely there will be people who can help you uh the third app i like to use is high native again not sponsored but i talk about this app all the time because i&#39;ve used it for like 10 years have i been around that long i don&#39;t know but it&#39;s great so basically you can just post something and say like is this correct and people will be like yes it is or no it&#39;s not fix it for you hellotalk also has a feature where you can post something and tip number five is to follow native speakers on social media you just need to put yourself out there you could live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and if you have access to the internet you are bound to meet native speakers there is no excuse whenever i learn a language i make a point of following native speakers or at least searching for content in a language so i might be interested in web development for instance what i can do on twitter or instagram is search the hashtags in a particular language if someone has posted about web development i might reply to their tweet or comment on their post and there i am interacting with native speakers this is a bit of an unorthodox way because you&#39;re not guaranteed an answer from them but it&#39;s still giving you an opportunity to engage with native content and to practice your speaking or writing and if native speakers aren&#39;t available you can also learn from fellow language learners on different forums usually language apps have forums studygram community on tumblr twitter and instagram is really huge so just search around the hashtags there and then you have ways to meet people who are also learning the language bottom line as well is remember that this is supplementary to your language study you need to consider language learning in a holistic approach so that is using different apps resources textbooks practicing your listening your writing your vocabulary your grammar and then practicing your speaking and be open to corrections don&#39;t be shy when people are fixing your mistakes for you do you use teachers do you think the teachers are important and if so how do you interact with your tutor there&#39;s a few people who community tutors sometimes who just they just chat to you and they don&#39;t actually know how to teach a language so if you have a teacher who actually knows how to structure a lesson and teach grammar it&#39;s a lot easier um than kind of just doing a language exchange so i think teachers are important to some extent when you&#39;re very serious about the language and when it&#39;s a difficult language that you cannot really teach yourself there like there will always be topics that for you to talk about um it can be boring if you have nothing to talk about which is why it&#39;s important to have a professional teacher who knows what they&#39;re doing rather than a language partner who you have nothing in common how do you motivate yourself to remember words what brings you back for motivation i have many videos and blog posts about motivation so i will leave you to watch those videos but i&#39;ll just say uh at the top of my head remembering why you started and looking back on your progress whenever i feel demotivated i go back and say hey 5 or 10 years ago i couldn&#39;t say anything and now i am able to communicate so congratulate yourself for the progress that you are making and tell yourself that the hard work does pay off even if you don&#39;t see it in the short term number two try and figure out why i am not motivated is it because i&#39;m tired is it because the content is too hard for me is it because i&#39;m burnt out figure out what is the source of your lack of motivation and tackle that if you&#39;re just exhausted take a break there&#39;s no shame in taking a break from the language and coming back to it later the other approach is just taking a break waiting it out and slowly easing back into it you need to be expanding what you listen to in different contexts so if we listen to the same piece we&#39;re only going to know those phrases and those vocabulary words in that context of the let&#39;s say podcast for instance i&#39;m only going to know the phrase as a phrase that popped up in that podcast i&#39;ll know what it means but i need to experience it in different situations if however if i do expand my listening to watching a lot more movies uh listening to more podcasts having a lot more conversations with people like i always say speaking and listening go hand in hand a few more thoughts regarding listening another thing i want to take note of is that sometimes we approach listening like we do reading intensive reading right so there&#39;s extensive reading um and there&#39;s intensive reading where you&#39;re really engaging with the text if you&#39;re focusing too much on individual specific words you&#39;re not going to get the gist of listening and why i think that could be a problem is if you&#39;re in a real situation with somebody and you&#39;re talking to them you can&#39;t pause the conversation of course you can interrupt them and say oh i&#39;m sorry i didn&#39;t get that can you repeat it but you&#39;re not able to sit there with a notebook and write down everything they say and and pause the conversation this works if you&#39;re at a language exchange and that&#39;s what you do but in daily life if your goal in language learning is to communicate with people you need to get used to getting to a point where you just understand the gist of it so for many years in korean i was able to understand like 80 of a conversation and i didn&#39;t let that bother me because i was still able to communicate i got the gist i was able to listen around and get the gist of it like sit in that discomfort of not understanding everything and up your exposure to the language listen a lot a lot a lot and it&#39;ll just start to make sense over time is the key so that&#39;s also why i don&#39;t like to isolate listening as one skill that i need to sharpen and work on it&#39;s immersion it&#39;s conversations with people it&#39;s exposing yourself to the content it&#39;s expanding your vocabulary in different contexts because if you up your vocabulary you&#39;ll up your understanding of listening pieces right you can&#39;t just study from listening i think the bottom line is that we need variety in what we listen to what do you think about curiosity and multilingualism do you think that makes it sort of big oh you have to be curious to to really appreciate a language i was um giving a talk for a few diplomats you know really uh serious politicians and they had a they had a language academy at um the department of foreign affairs in south africa and so many of the people just approached it as like well okay you know i&#39;m being sent to this country i guess i have to learn this language but i really don&#39;t care let me just complete my homework and be done there was no cultural curiosity of like i really want to know why do people do this or man this food is amazing i want to learn more about that so yes curiosity is a a big beneficial skill that will help you learn a language learn language learning is not just techniques and methods and like the fastest way to learn this it&#39;s a lot of um principles i i have one video where i talk about like the four f&#39;s of language learning it&#39;s fearlessness um fun flexibility and with that comes like curiosity and adaptability there are a few like intangible skills that help you learn languages too

Transcript for:Learning a New Language Lecture

Transcript for:
Learning a New Language Lecture