this is steve kaufman he speaks 20 languages yeah i would say in terms of legitimate polyglots i would definitely say steve kaufman is a legitimate polyglot but is steve a genius or can anybody with the right motivation learn languages like he did what's interesting to me is steve's method for learning languages happens to be very similar to the method i stumbled upon to learn japanese well enough to do business here in tokyo of course steve is at a totally different level having applied his method to 20 different languages here we talk about how he learns languages how this method is actually supported by the research of a famous linguist and we get into several other topics like the way this fits in with how the brain actually works okay well i'm a 75 year old grandpa living in vancouver british columbia and for most of my career like for seven years i was in the diplomatic service and then most of my career has been in the lumber business but since the age of 60 i've become very much involved with language learning so since the age of 60 i've learned 10 or 11 languages including russian korean arabic persian you know romanian greek a whole bunch of different languages i do that on link which is a site that i created with my son lingq.com which is where i like to learn languages and it's just become like my third career languages in terms of learning them in terms of you know uh obviously i have a youtube channel with quite a few subscribers and i try to encourage people to have fun with their language learning so i think that would probably be pretty surprising to most people that you started learning all these languages after the age of 60 um you know one because of this idea that it's much easier for younger people to learn languages but two language learning is basically a skill the you're improving the skill of acquiring new languages right can you i think talk a little bit more about that about yeah so i mean when i was 60 i wrote a book about language learning and i spoke nine languages at the time and now it's 20. uh so you do get better at learning languages the more you learn uh you get better at you understand how to learn uh you he you have heard more sounds so the brain is more flexible you're used to different constructions different ways of saying things so the brain is more flexible so you get better and better at language learning so i still think language learning comes down to finding a way to enjoy it bombarding your brain and trusting that your brain will learn in time i like the way you said that trusting the brain trusting that the brain will learn the new information last time we talked about how the brain is basically a pattern recognition machine exactly you had told me about this neuroscientist i had never heard of uh man manfred spitzer right yup spitzer yeah man spitzer exactly and and he yeah he he's i mean i'm not a neuroscientist he is and maybe there's other neuroscientists who disagree with him but what he says i've i find it it very much applies like basically if we look at the brain in order for us to live we have to have some ability to anticipate what's going to happen so we're in a situation with friends if we go to a restaurant we know what's going to happen we know roughly what they're going to say what the waiter is going to say we have to we can't be starting every situation from scratch that's what the brain does it creates patterns to help us cope and in order to create these patterns it needs lots of input lots of stimulus and so that's exactly how we learn languages we don't learn the specific words that are on a word list or the specific grammar rules that are in a book because they're taught at us and now we're we have to do a test on them the brain gradually starts to identify certain patterns and then starts to naturally produce the language now some degree of grammar instruction or reading about grammar or being corrected can help you uh you know help the brain perhaps but that's not the main thing the main thing is to have to trust that your brain will start to develop patterns and just keep on bombarding it with stimulus did you formulate your method for learning languages around christian's work or did it have any influence on what you're doing or so stephen krashen is a linguist who says that people don't learn language by reading grammar rules or studying lists of vocabulary we acquire language only when we hear a sentence or word and understand the meaning usually thanks to the context for example watch this scene and pay attention to the word kane [Music] you might have noticed that he's looking at his wallet at first and then he's at the atm and then this guy is looking at his wallet too and you realize kane means money krashen says that this realization is important and learning this way is called comprehensible input we've tried everything else we've tried grammar teaching drills and exercises computers but the only thing that seems to count is getting messages you understand comprehensible input i i would have to say that i didn't discover stephen krashen until let's say 10 15 years ago after i had learned a lot of languages primarily through listening and reading so crash and confirmed my experience and crashing what's so great about crashing if you want to read a book about language learning you buy krashen's book it's like 110 pages it's all there i have on the bookshelves behind me all kinds of learned books on language learning applied linguistics all kinds of theories and studies and stuff and it all amounts to nothing it's all reduced to that one little book of crashes so he's the great simplifier he's the great you know guardian not solution he says it all and he backs it up with research and he he confirmed what i found like when i studied chinese which was the kind of the first language well french was first and i did a lot of reading and listening but with chinese especially if i compare myself to the other diplomatic students in hong kong learning chinese i did better than they did i learned in a year but they took two years to learn because i was forever reading i was forever going to the bookstores to find books with wordless behind every chapter and just constantly ingesting the language so whatever he said he sort of explained what i had intuitively discovered our desire to to you know understand this potentially meaningful message that's what drives our language learning that's what helps us learn meaningful such a big part of language learning and that's why these you know role-playing sessions where you sit in the classroom and pretend you're at a restaurant or at the post office are so meaningless because that's not meaningful and that's why i think it's best to delay starting to speak until you have enough vocabulary and a sufficient level of comprehension that you can actually have a meaningful conversation and then you have a meaningful conversation and at the end of it you're exhausted but you've actually been communicating meaning you haven't been pretending to speak the language and i thought that was very interesting one of the things that schpitzer says is you know if you're reading to a child it really it'll be more beneficial if you read about something that is of interest to you and if you read it with enthusiasm then if you read a boring children's book a book that you find uninteresting the child will notice that and the child will pick up on something that you're very interested in and you don't necessarily have to dumb it down too much because the child will pick out those things those phrases those words those structures that the brain is ready to you know absorb identify form patterns around and so therefore when we get into a language we don't have to start with hello how are you my name is the colors the you know the different fruits and vegetables you can almost start anywhere but obviously it helps to have repetition so you know in the case of link we have these many stories where we deliberately have high frequency verbs which repeat a lot because that gives you a better chance gives the brain a better chance to start forming those those patterns but fairly quickly you want to move on to something that is interesting getting back to the story about reading to your child you know if there's enthusiasm resonance interest the brain is going to learn better i kind of had this idea in my head that there has to be some way to indicate to the brain the necessity of what you're trying to learn for example when you're trying to learn learn a language right these there'll be these other peripheral indicators saying hey this is important you need to know it so just like you're saying if you're reading something you're interested in with enthusiasm then the child will pick up like oh this is this is pretty important information is there anything else like that let's say indicators of trying to get the brain motivated to to pick up on the patterns of course if you're in like a better mood if it's a topic you're interested in all of those things better mood if you if you're listening to something and you like the voice like i do a lot of listening and very often you know your typical language starter book the voice is they're bored it's boring they're bored hard to listen to hard to learn from if you have a voice that you like if they're telling a story you know with with passion or whatever it's easier easier to learn easier to pick up on the patterns uh when i was learning chinese i listened to these comic these they had this comic dialogues and they were so much passion and so forth and i attribute the fact that my tones in chinese are actually quite good because i was listening to all of this very rhythmic you know comedians talking and lots of you know banter and stuff like that so that helps um you know in so far as watching videos i i don't think videos are i think videos are very encouraging stimulating uh it's not as language intense as listening and reading in terms of learning uh but i find that if you watch a movie in a foreign language and you understand nothing i think there's limited benefit uh if let's say you know 10 of the vocabulary it's possible with it seems to me intuitively with subtitles in your own language you might pick up more of the words and you might have that sense of being able to participate if it's a sitcom if it's a you know family and you're watching netflix a series and every night you're together with the same family in turkish and you're picking up a little bit more because you can understand what they're saying because of the english that's not a bad thing it makes it more of a fun experience probably you have to be fairly advanced in the language to be able to listen and read along in that language now in the case of turkish for example they use the latin alphabet so that makes it a little easier in arabic i'd have a tough time trying to follow along follow along at the speed that they speak right so uh to me videos are more like a reward and they're fun and they stimulate you but the hard sort of work of learning the language is still to me listening and then reading and saving the words and phrases trying to increase the amount of meaning we have to have meaning you know otherwise it's it's you've got to have some meaning in there somewhere uh in order for it to be uh you know helpful your brain's trying to recognize all these patterns but at the same time it's trying to pick up on like what is the pattern most worthwhile to spend my resources my energy on recognizing uh the other thing that's interesting from spitzer he points out that the brain is very poor at remembering things and i think this is often frustrating for language learners we don't remember things very well we keep them for a short while and they're forgotten but what the brain is very good at is gradually by dint of getting all these things that you learn and forget learn and forget the brain starts to form patterns and so therefore we must always be patient and not be worried because we got six out of ten and that's why traditional language instruction is so bad it discourages people and because we forgot things and the tea there was a recent case of a french immigrant to canada to quebec a truck driver and you have to pass a french proficiency exam to get your citizenship or whatever and he he spoke only french from france he failed because they had some arbitrary fine point of grammar or two or three and he didn't get those right so probably a lot of other people english-speaking canadians who can't communicate at all in french they might know those little points but it's it's not relevant it's not relevant how long have you lived in japan or nine years so it seems to be the case that despite there being so many resources and services geared towards learning english in japan the actual english fluency in japan is not that great why do you think that is uh i think there are many reasons i don't think there's anything that's intrinsic to sort of being japanese because i know japanese people who speak absolutely fluent english i think there are it's how it's taught i mean the same is true in canada my julia i don't know what the situation is in the states but in canada the vast majority of kids that go through the regular english language school system they have french for eight or ten years they can't speak french only those that go into french immersion end up speaking french so it's a complete uh it's i don't think it's any better than the situation in japan i mean japan is a japanese-speaking country you know there aren't that many opportunities to use english but the way they teach it they should focus on comprehension uh and forget the tests for like all of in the bookstores they have all these toy word lists and stuff i mean it's impossible there's all kinds of proof that you can't learn those things there's again a professor at ucla robert bjork who points out that you don't want to try to block learn anything you want to kind of meander interleaving he calls it learn a bit of that a bit of this come back to the first thing again and so this whole idea of block learning these these word lists is so inefficient uh they don't have fun with english you know and of course not maybe many of them will never have fun with english but if they were if to find a way by catering to their interests by focusing more on comprehension by not trying to force them to sit and class and speak to each other in these uh you know english conversation classes don't worry about these word lists don't worry about toei you know i don't think they do worse uh there are some attitudinal things i think there's a tendency in japan to sort of say well you know we japanese are very different we're very unique and so so that they tend to be more reluctant to leave the sort of warmth of their native culture but they're not the only ones who do that i mean you know north americans can do that too you know why don't you speak english type of attitude so the extent to which people are unwilling to leave the comfort of their own culture and just go for it that's helpful and people will do that if they're having fun so here again i think in japan i don't think english teaching is is that much fun for people and so they don't do very well if you're in europe where you can go 100 kilometers and the language changes then of course language learning has a you know has more it's more sort of a natural thing to do but uh i think it's method i think it's attitude uh those two things but nothing would prevent japanese people from speaking english an awful lot better they don't listen a lot you know you go to sweden where everyone speaks english it's not because the swedish school system is better it's because every kid in sweden watches american english television programs and so they speak english before they start school it's input input listening and reading listening and reading yeah that's interesting what you say about leaving the comfort of the culture i feel like i'm comfortable with that but i'm at least for quite a while and i've been trying to fix this recently i feel like my accent and my pitch accent is not very good you know i have a pretty heavy american accent when i'm speaking in japanese and i think part of that is because when i'm trying to sound japanese i feel a little embarrassed like i'm i'm acting i'm putting on an act something about that was a little embarrassing for me so i didn't get into the habit of putting this effort into trying to sound japanese and and use the same intonation they use yeah i mean that's the problem first of all i must admit that i'm not a fan of the concept of pitch it's just another thing that to worry about uh i think basically we want to imitate the way the native speaker speaks with the understanding that we won't get there we won't get there with very few exceptions yeah i've seen there's one guy i've seen him who's japanese i would say there's a few people who sound like totally japanese but most people will get you know closer to that you have to be willing to project yourself into that personality i am japanese i'm gonna be like i'm with these other people they're all japanese i'm going to be like them i can do that it doesn't bother me in french or chinese whatever i'm just but i don't i don't worry about having an accent uh you know the other day i was watching uh golf on television and they interviewed this mexican golfer and he spoke english so well like his use of words was so natural you know at least as good as your average native speaker but he had an accent his having an accent made it better the the use of words the use of language correct use of language accurate use of language rich vocabulary all of these things are far more important than accent and to some extent if you can do all of that with an accent it's almost more admirable and the reverse of having a really good accent but not being able to put words together properly is almost worse in my opinion i would think that arnold schwarzenegger's accent kind of added some uniqueness and interestingness to him uh even though his english is perfect no no he's a he's a yeah he's a show business performer but i'm talking about business people who have a who speaks very well very elegantly and have a french accent or a german accent or a spanish accent or a japanese accent but who really use the language well that's impressive i think trying to sound like a native is is an unrealistic and an unnecessary goal however you should be willing to try to get into the flow and the rhythm of the language the way the natives speak it because very often like in japanese that'll influence how they put you know words together because they're there's they don't speak like it's not like one two three or five they go one and you know but then two and maybe three and you know how they are they're a little more uh oh you want to get into that because that's that's how they communicate so you want to sort of start imitating it basically the the key thing is to get a huge bunch of input do you think there's a certain point at which it's helpful to start look at the grammar rules i think yeah i think regularly uh it depends on the language of course like i i haven't i'm not aware of any grammar rules in japanese none i just people say you know whatever i just hear what they say and i imitate it however there are languages like slavic languages where there's lots of grammar uh whether you have conjugations and declensions and again if i'm most like most of my reading i do on links so every verb i see i can look up we have conjugating dictionaries and i just kind of look at it just to remind myself of how that conjugates but there's no conjugations in japanese so it says i'm not learning japanese i don't know i don't know there are you know compared to when i learn japanese nowadays you can look a word up and you can have a sort of a grammar reference tied to that word and so you can get that constant feedback whenever you're curious about a point of grammar and i think the best time to go at that grammar is when you're curious about something so you can relate the grammar rule to something that you're experiencing or have experienced uh you can always skim a grammar book and it may remind you of some things but if you don't have enough experience with the language all these grammar explanations they just fly past you you can't sort of oh okay now i've read all the rules now i'd understand the grammars that's how it works you have to first have that experience and then you can start tagging you can start identifying and putting labels on some of the things that you have already experienced so yeah you do need to review and you're not like the brain's not going to notice everything when we say it establishes patterns it's going to miss stuff and so it is useful every so often to skim through a grammar book or some book that explains the language or to look up things when you're curious i do that i do it in my persian i do it in my arabic again japanese i learned so long ago i mean i those kinds of resources weren't available do you spend a lot of time just reviewing vocabulary words you've made or lists of sentences or hardly at all hard at all uh my review is i'll go back to my many stories okay so you know we have in every language link we have 60 minute stories each mini story consists of high frequency verbs and the vocabulary repeats five times within the story change of tense change of person question statement negative positive whatever there's a lot of repetition that's kind of like me going to the gym so even if i'm listening to a very interesting podcast this self-help book written in english translated into farsi the guys you know reading it and all that stuff or talking about it i'll do that for a while and then i go back to the the simple stuff and i go over it many many times that's my review and every time i do that i notice something i noticed some structure or some word that i kind of hadn't yet come across enough times for it to really suck in i don't really review grammar rules because actually in most languages there's not a lot of grammar you know most you can reduce the grammar to a very small amount there's some variations on the theme but essentially the grammar it's not unending words are almost unending uh and phrases and so forth but the grammar is is limited limited amount i don't spend much time on the grammar oh and so far as reviewing words again if i'm on link if i turn the page i have an opportunity to review the new words that showed up you know on that page or words that are still like you know the way we have it if it's a word i've come across before it's now in yellow i can review the words that i don't yet know on that page but i will only do it with reference to a specific page of content that i've just read or listened to i'm not going to go through 300 500 1 000 2 000 5000 words randomly flash guarding them it's because i don't enjoy doing it and my big theory is do what you like to do and you'll learn so people who like doing that they'll benefit from it the other thing with flash cards is you kind of get into this trap of look how much i've improved in the language i can now remember 200 flash cards instead of 150 but then you know you're not necessarily understanding things more fluidly when you're listening you're not having easier conversations [Music] you may not retain them that long either you may think you know them now you may not know them in three months and the other thing is um like to me flash cards i just go through them it's just exposure i don't rack my brain trying to remember i don't think there's any benefit in trying to rack your brain i've never found that it's the same with comprehension questions you know trying to remember whether they're mrs so and so you know made you know pea soup or or roast or whatever all those details and what what happened sorry i don't remember just exposure just exposure so in our many stories the comprehension questions we give you the answer and then we get this statement asking a question to give you the answer it's just exposure and similarly with flash cards i'm not into rocking my brain trying to remember i just go through them as fast as i can just exposure what do you think about this 1000 core words idea of like oh you learn a thousand core words and then you can you know you can go order coffee or take a taxi do whatever you need to do well a number of things first of all i have found that even if you have x number of words or phrases you try to learn them before you go to the country you get there it's very difficult to remember them very difficult to use them you don't know what the other person is going to say it's i find it difficult i mean yeah you know i like you know a glass of beer please or where's the washroom those are relatively easy but even then if you don't have a sufficient level level in the language you're almost uneasy trying to use those things uh the reality is that um yeah a thousand the the thousand most common words will account for 70 you know anywhere from 65 to 80 of any given context that's a fact however the most common words you're going to come across them anyway because they're frequent the most frequent words are going to show up frequently the reality with frequency is that it declines on a slope like this okay so the most frequent 50 words are very frequent and the most frequent 100 are less frequent and by the time you get the thousand you've that frequency has dropped way down and now you have to pursue and in order to have meaning because the native speaker you're going to talk to knows 50 000 words 40 000 words and you have no control over what they're going to say so you actually need a lot of words and unfortunately you know you can acquire the high frequency words fairly quickly but trying to acquire all these other less frequent words takes a long time lots and lots of listening and reading so i have never found that to be that you know learned a pareto principle if you learn you know 20 of words that account for 80 of content your your way to the races i have never found that to be the case even while you are continuing to acquire less you know less frequent words and doing it through listening and reading you are also training your brain in the language giving your brain stimulus in the language the brain is starting to create you know patterns in the language so pursue words not not the first thousand ten thousand twenty thousand i'm sure you find that in japanese there's almost an endless number of words to learn don't you find oh yeah yeah of course yeah i was just i had to call the tax office to ask a couple questions about my my return i learned like 15 new words just for that from that phone call another thing is i think people might have this idea that oh you know everything he's saying makes sense but still he's probably has some little advantage over me maybe when he was young he learned he was already bilingual when he was growing up or something could you tell us a little bit more about your background and uh i guess how you got into that's true that's true that's i'm sure that's true i was actually born in sweden and at the age of five my family moved to montreal uh and then my parents who by the way are originally from what was what became czechoslovakia what was the austro-hungarian empire and they said we're in canada now we're going to speak english and and montreal in those days was like 1 30 english two-thirds french and the two were separate right so we basically lived in english-speaking north america she said we're in canada now we're going to speak english so we only spoke english at home but i had heard swedish as a child before the age of five we never spoke speedish again and my parents would often speak german to each other so i heard those languages so i'm sure that helps because it it makes the brain more flexible when it comes to language learning but i i would say though that i have been to many of these polyglot conferences and i think you're aware of these polyglot conferences that they have they had one in fukuoka there was one in montreal they've had them in europe and but i was speaking to a group of people in montreal an auditor auditorium with 600 people and these are all polyglots and when we have our conferences in the evening and we have flags with all the languages that we speak and these people have like 8 10 12 flags on their chest and i said how many of you were raised in a multi-bi or multilingual family and i think out of 600 people six hands went up so it's it's undoubtedly an advantage but not having that background is not an insurmountable problem it all comes down to to attitude to enjoying the process to thinking you can do it thinking it's important to do it all of those things if you look at the successful polyglots many of whom like me have a youtube channel the one thing they have in common is that they all enjoy learning languages and i think that the enjoyment becomes comes first now you could say well they enjoy it because they're good at it maybe obviously people like doing things they're good they're good at right where they have success yes but i think it starts with them liking it and because they like it they do well then that reinforces it they like it they do well and because they do well they like it and so you know it's it's a virtuous circle so finding ways to enjoy it whether it be anime for japanese or whatever and the problem with the traditional textbooks is that the texts they use are boring the drills they give you are boring the audio you listen to is narrated by a person who's bored so they do everything possible to make learning say japanese or korean or any other language not fun and and i think if i were a language teacher i would have one goal i'm not going to test the kids i'm not going to drill them i'm going to find ways to have to make to enable them to have fun that's my only goal and if they have fun they will improve eventually or the difference between someone who i met in japan who was really good at english and not so great at english was the people who are not so great they would always kind of speak about their english language learning as like oh i need to learn english i need to i know i really should get back to learning english but the people who were really good at it it was just kind of something that they did that was that was fun and you know they would just talk about the movies they like to watch i mean you know friends or cheers on us television or harry potter have done more for english learning than all the british council and all these other institutions that that want to spread english no question yeah what what do you think about friends actually i actually taught english as a part-time job when i was in university and i would always recommend friends to people i thought friends touch touches on so many uh situations that at least most of it would actually probably appear in that person's life hanging out at a coffee shop with friends hanging out in a person's apartment going to a birthday party going to a baby shower or whatever it might absolutely it's the best it's the best i don't watch friends i've never watched it but i know it exists but i know the kind of show it is and i've watched shows like that play in turkish and the idea that you get together however frequently you watch it you know you might be binge watching it every night of the week or once a week or whatever so you get together with the same people it becomes almost like your family it's very powerful i felt that way about this turkish series i wasn't my turkish wasn't good enough to benefit from it but where you kind of get together with the same people you become familiar with these people and they're talking about everyday situations and and so you kind of get into it you're almost part of that family i think those are those are great great shows for for language learning if if people like them if people don't like them then of course you know watch tom and jerry or something you know you got to find things that people are interested in how would you define fluency i had done this other interview with an he was an air quality specialist and a professor in animal science and so i was kind of when i was asking him questions i was stumbling over my words and i would i would had so many ums and like uh you know uh do you know what i'm trying to say like i i just sounded like an incompetent speaker so right someone might be like this guy has a great american accent but he's not very good at english so it was just something i was thinking about like how would you just define fluency obviously language is for communicating like you i think comprehension is huge if you're in a conversation if you're speaking to someone in english in japan and you get the sense they don't understand what you're saying that makes that makes me very uncomfortable uh and you can tell the person doesn't understand especially doing business so i would switch to japanese so comprehension is a big part you have to basically understand just about everything to be fluent when and fluency implies speaking and speaking well but it doesn't mean that you don't make mistakes uh you know i talked about that french truck driver who passed his who failed his uh citizenship exam because of whatever grammar thing that he did wrong he's still fluent in french so you can be fluent and make mistakes and you can be fluent and make some basic mistakes like if you're speaking spanish and somebody will point oh you got sarah and the star wrong and you know yeah but to me that's not such a big deal i have russian i have we have a russian employee who is very fluent in english he can go in there he was getting specs for developing sawmill software and stuff and he's totally fluent but he doesn't use articles you know this computer you know he's fluent totally fluent he understands everything he can get into detail of the customer's requirements he can explain technical things he's totally fluent but he misses a few things that that don't exist in his language so i think fluency is a sense of total comfort in the language total comfort of getting your you know ideas across even if you have some mistakes that you always make and you're never ever going to correct it doesn't matter and and it's essentially understanding what the other person is saying not having to say i think you're part and bigger part so to be comfortable in the language natural in the language but it doesn't mean that you're perfect it doesn't mean it certainly doesn't mean that you have no accent you can be identifiable as a foreigner you can make typical english-speaking mistakes take typical japanese speaking mistakes but if you're like totally able to express yourself you understand what the other person is saying as far as i'm concerned you're fluent and i think that's a lot more reasonable goal than having zero accent and never making a mistake it doesn't exist like that not one person and a thousand is going to achieve that obviously you're super passionate about languages is there anything else you're into in your daily life well i like history so and and of course the language takes me into history so but i would read i would read you know persian history in english and arabic history in english and then i read a biography of someone so the language gets me into and now i'm discovering and then i read about the you know genghis khan because that's the whole central asia iran turkey arab is whatever so i i like i find i love history uh my wife is totally keen on golf so i go with her and of course you want to get better so golf is a is an interest you know for the longest time i was playing uh old-timers hockey three times a week but now with the covid and then because we go down to palm springs i don't do that anymore i don't ski quite as much anymore i love getting together with the family i like food i like wine i like enjoying uh every minute of every day you know never a shortage of things to do and i i did i really enjoyed being in the wood business and i love wood and there's a lot of wood in our house and i think wood is fascinating to me if if one of your interests is history like what better tool is there than having multiple languages to absolutely absolutely and you then have a perspective that's quite different and say in the case of iran i found through upwork maybe a person in iran who's made a whole series of of the content items for link where she records it and then she she obviously does the transcript and then she has these circling questions for repetition on the history of iran persian carpets persian food you know minorities in iran uh there's endless supply of of interesting stuff and then and it leads you to other stuff and i mean the history of iran i mean it's it's it's we we learn so little about that in i don't know about in the states but in our school system i mean we don't learn about you know cyrus the great and you know the whole history of iran is a great big hole there that's it's a huge country a huge civilization and same with arabs and turkey and the influence of turks and then and so then you you know xinjiang is in the news now because you know in china with the uyghurs who are the uyghurs so then you read up on that and the uyghurs of course speak a turkic language but throughout central asia there were iranian sort of speakers and turkish speakers and you just get into that part of the world as i did with islamic languages with ukrainian and russian and polish and czech and the romans and stuff so languages opens the door to all and food of course and music yeah languages are open the the road to lots of different things make sure and catch steve on his youtube channel titled steve kaufman lingo steve and check out his website built for applying his method to learning languages link that's l i n lingq.com