yeah people ask me that i'm trying to learn another language what is the most important sentence to learn first it's not where's the bathroom it's not i'm lost help me we have done extensive research on this we have interviewed millions of people and the winner easily is my friend will pay cervezas okay that's today's joke let's go on my name is jeff brown and i am a language lover i love languages i've decided to make this video because i'm going to show you or i want to show you guys how to learn or how to acquire the language of your choice the language of your dreams in one year during this video what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be showing you step by step exactly what you need to do to acquire or to learn the language of your dreams and check this out during this year during this video i'm going to be acquiring a new language i'm going to be learning a new language over the year and i'm going to show you exactly step by step what i do to acquire that language so during this video i'm going to show you what you need to do and i'm going to show you myself learning a new language so i've decided to learn arabic i chose arabic because arabic from what i understand from what i hear is an extremely difficult language so let's talk about the name of this video for a sec the name of this video is called how to learn or acquire any language in one year guaranteed now that's actually not true i'm not going to teach you how to learn anything i'm going to teach you how to acquire a language i'm going to show you how to acquire a language much like a baby acquires his or her first language so let's take a minute and let's talk about the difference between learning versus acquisition acquisition and learning i get the credit for both of these terms but i didn't really invent them uh acquisition and learning was kind of an informal use wallace lambert of canada used it acquisition means picking up a language subconsciously absorbing the language having a feel for it learning means what we did in school knowing the rules being able to consciously remember what they are talk about them etc and the big breakthrough is that they're different and that acquisition is much more powerful than learning which came as a big shock to me because i love grammar so how do babies learn well we know for a fact that babies don't learn language they acquire language babies acquire language naturally subconsciously spontaneously without in thinking about it they acquire language through what's called comprehensible input so comprehensible input is the input that you get if you are a native speaker child growing up in in any culture um the language that adults and caregivers use with you and other siblings and other children all the other humans is comprehensible input so that kind of input eventually creates acquisition we acquire language from that kind of input learning is the sort of super imposition of a conscious grammar where we have a set of grammar rules and so we consciously learn those we haven't absorbed them like we did as a child or if we learn a second language we can also acquire it by simply living in the culture interacting with people and absorbing those rules but learning is what's traditionally been done in classrooms where there's not a lot of acquisition going on instead what's happening is students are expected to memorize grammar rules and then somehow apply those when they speak in the reviews of the research i've looked at the studies that claim grammar worked and you know in their experiments kids had grammar did better in every condition every study those conditions were met they were students who liked grammar who were advanced students who had studied lots of grammar they were thinking about rules they had studied the rules and they had lots of time so this is what the monitor does if you're saying something in another language the sentence pops into your mind then before you say it if you're thinking about this you can inspect the sentence think of the rules you learned and make corrections but it's very hard to do it's mostly used when we give people grammar tests on grammar tests you can focus on form you can think about correctness and you have time so how do babies learn grammar well we know for a fact that babies don't learn grammar babies acquire grammar they acquire grammar naturally again through comprehensible input babies don't learn anything so when do we learn grammar when do we as adults learn grammar well we try to learn grammar when we're around six or seven we have to go to school and we usually take a language class or an english class or a grammar class and in that class what happens the teacher usually says okay everybody i want you to underline the verb once underline the noun once underline the verb twice and the direct object three times and that's when we first try to learn grammar now i've got a secret don't tell anybody but i never learned grammar ever you remember those grammar classes the grammar class i just told you about i never paid attention i didn't i didn't like it so you know what i did i drew i daydreamed and i drew most of the time in fact all of the time so my point is i never learned grammar in fact studies show studies show that we never learn grammar the grammar we know comes from listening and reading to correct speech so why study grammar so for this year as i acquire arabic i'm not going to be learning arabic i'm going to be acquiring arabic similar to the way a child acquires arabic acquires his or her first language i'm not going to be studying any grammar there's a lot of you out there that love grammar i know i've met some of you if you love grammar that's fine and you want to study grammar that's fine i suggest two things number one wait until you're fluent wait until you speak the language fluently or semi-fluently then study the grammar that's the way children do it or what you could do is just just browse grammar maybe one minute a day maybe two minutes a day just look at it and that's it so if you study grammar it actually hurts there's a hypothesis called the monitor hypothesis and what the monitor hypothesis says is this if you study grammar you study study study grammar when you go to speak the language you're going to think of the grammar first and it's going to get in the way it's going to hinder your natural production of the language so once again for this year forget about grammar do not study grammar if you want to do grammar fine browse grammar a minute a day two minutes a day etc 99 of your focus should be on comprehensible input those are things you hear or things you read not on things you write and not on things you memorize so when i speak french i don't generally worry about grammar but there's a few things i like to show off like i make the past participle agree with the pronoun la chose que je pries you know and i can think about it and monitor it and those little things there but i've acquired a lot of french already so it's easy to do we're making students monitor everything and they've acquired very little okay so let's talk about teaching methods there are probably a hundred different teaching methods out there and is there a teaching method which comes closest to the way a child or a baby acquires his or her first language and the answer is yes there are two the first one is called the natural approach and the natural approach was invented in the 1970s by doctors stephen krashen and tracy terrell stephen crashes from ufc and tracy trellis from uci which is uc irvine so basically what happened in the 1970s is doctors crash and terrell got together and they said hey let's see if we can design a teaching method for foreign language classrooms where the students acquire the language similar to most closest to the way a baby acquires his or her first language so the natural approach was born in a nutshell basically in a natural approach classroom this is what happens students don't get any grammar instruction so there's no explicit grammar instruction at all there's no verb conjugation there's no fill in the blanks there's no indirect object pronouns predator subjunctive etcetera none of that students acquire grammar naturally similar or exactly the way a baby acquires his or her first grammar secondly there's no correction so in a natural approach classroom students are never corrected and we'll talk about corrections later and number three in a natural approach classroom the language is entirely done in the target language so there's very little if not any english in the classroom i would say at least 90 target language 10 english only in emergencies only when you really really have to the second teaching method is called tprs and tprs is used mainly in high schools and elementary schools and middle schools and i love tprs so tprs stands for teaching proficiency through reading and storytelling oh i love tbrs and so basically what tprs does is just the way it sounds students acquire the language through storytelling storytelling lots of stories and then they augment that or they reinforce that with reading so the class revolves around storytelling and then after the story there's reading to accompany the storytelling or they read at home so a lot of stories in the classroom a lot of reading at home etc okay so how do we know the natural approach works so during the 1970s they did an experiment and the experiment was done at uci or uc irvine and what they did is they did it using german courses so what they did is they took three or four german courses and they taught half the courses using traditional methods that's grammar translation explicit grammar instruction etc and then they took the other german courses and they taught them using the natural approach and then at the end of the semester or the end of the year they tested the students and the results were astounding the natural approach students scored higher on almost every level the natural approach students remembered more words and they were able to speak for a longer period of time now more recently another test was done and it was done by an instructor named dr beniko mason dr mason is a professor of english in osaka japan and what dr mason does is she teaches using story listening now story listening is a wonderful form of comprehensible input so the natural approach storytelling story listening they all go together hand in hand so once again dr mason she did this test she taught half of her courses using traditional methods and then she taught the other half of the courses using story listening or comprehensible input and then she tested them after five weeks to see how many words they would remember and again the results were astounding the traditional approach students remembered 36 percent of the words and the story listening students or the comprehensible input students remembered 75 of the words that's huge that's a hundred percent difference so you know over the years many tests have been done the natural approach versus traditional approach tpr storytelling story listening etc versus traditional methods and the natural approach storytelling story listening has one has beat to traditional methods in every case school of milwaukee children one you should have the illusion that the class is entirely in the target language but using english here and there for help etc is perfectly fine you do too much of it you're not getting any comprehensible input but and you're going to wind up easily doing 90 percent easily doing 95 you probably wind up doing 98 if it's going to be 90 it can't just be above the student's level and you know i used to give workshops and instructors would come up to me and they'd say well i tried speaking spanish to my students but they didn't understand me and i'm like well yeah your kid won't understand you either if you're talking about inflation to a two-year-old you know you have to talk about their brand new shoes you know and the toy truck they're holding or you know or you know the cute bow they have in their hair and you have to bring it down to their levels and um it's a lot of work it's way way easier to just give them a bunch of grammar exercises this is way more work it's easier to stop and explain a grammatical structure but it doesn't help the student acquire the language so it's an easier process and if you fool yourself into believing that this easier process actually achieves the same results you're going to try to do that process the state department of the united states has come up with a list of languages and their corresponding difficulty levels now this is a list for native english speakers like me i'm a native english speaker so in level one you'll find the easiest languages for english speakers to acquire and in level one you'll have spanish italian french portuguese romanian dutch swedish and africans now the reason these languages are so easy for english speakers is these languages have tons and tons of cognates a cognate is a word that sounds exactly like or similar to the english equivalent so spanish has tons and tons of cognates for example bisicleta moto cicleta caro automobile gorilla etc so same thing with portuguese romanian french italian they have tons and tons of english cognates so according to the state department of the united states it should take you 575 to 600 hours to acquire one of these languages and if you think about that that's nothing that's absolutely nothing 575 to 600 hours you can easily do that in one year in fact that comes out to 11 hours a week 11 hours a week is nothing that's absolutely nothing now think about it if you're taking a five unit five hour language course at your college university high school etc that's only an extra six hours a week outside of class that's less than an hour a day that is so easy okay level two so level two is german and according to the state department of the united states it should take 750 hours to acquire german and from what i hear german is a little more difficult the grammar the german grammar is a little more difficult than say romanian grammar or portuguese grammar or spanish grammar et cetera okay level three in level three you have three languages you have malaysian indonesian and swahili oh how cool would it be to acquire swahili and according to the state department of united states it should take you 900 hours to acquire one of these languages and once again that's nothing 900 hours in one year is nothing so over one year 900 hours that comes out to 17 hours a week that's nothing and once again if you're taking a language course a five hour five unit language course that should take you 12 hours a week outside of class okay level four now level four are the majority of languages on earth this is a huge list this includes languages like vietnamese thai tagalog hmong cambodian etc and according to the united states the state department of the united states it should take you 1100 hours to acquire one of these languages and that's not bad that comes out to 21 hours a week over a one year period and once again if you're taking a five hour language course outside of class that's only going to take you 16 hours a week over a year to acquire one of these languages that's a little over two hours a day that's that's very little time okay level five the most difficult languages on earth for an english speaker to acquire according to the state department of the united states and those are four languages those are japanese chinese korean and arabic and according to the state department of the united states it should take you 2 200 hours to acquire one of these languages so i've got sort of a secret and i'm going to share the secret with you this is what i'm going to be doing this year to acquire arabic i'm not going to be doing any reading or writing i'm only going to focus on comprehensible input listening and speaking exactly what babies do so as you know babies around the world don't read or write anything if i were teaching a language that did not use the roman alphabet i would not do any reading and writing for a really long time i think it's i think it's so easy to do after you have a 5 000 word vocabulary so once your vocabulary in arabic hits 5000 words it won't be so hard to learn to read and write arabic so one of the problems i see is a lot of students who are studying level five languages for example japanese chinese korean arabic they spend a lot of hours reading and writing the language specifically writing the language i've seen tons of students memorize writing reading memorization they spend tons and tons of hours writing the language memorizing characters etc and they spend very little time comprehensible input listening to the language reading the language speaking the language so that's a huge mistake that i see a lot of level five students doing so if you're studying a level five language i'm gonna suggest forget about reading and writing until you're fluent in the language or semi-fluent in language just like a baby acquires his or her first language you need a language parent somebody who's going to help you acquire the language somebody who speaks the language that you want to acquire and help you acquire that language and the best place to find these people number one place is family there might be someone in your family who speaks the language that you want to acquire number two are friends you might have a friend who speaks the language that you want to acquire chances are you do and number three co-workers chances are you probably have a co-worker or two or three who speak the language that you want to acquire in fact all of your co-workers might speak the language you want to acquire which would be awesome so those are the number one places to find people who could be or are going to be your language parents now what if you can't find enough people to be your language parents through your family your friends your co-workers etc another great resource is trades now what are trades trades are basically language exchanges that means you're going to need to find people or you're going to find people who speak the language that you want to acquire and you're going to trade them for the language that you already speak in most cases if you live in the united states it's probably going to be english so if you speak english you're going to trade with someone who wants to acquire english for whatever language you want to acquire so these are language exchanges and i've done this thousands of times language exchanges are awesome now where are you going to find these people there's two or three places to find these people the best place to find people to exchange languages with if you speak english the best place is that an esl classroom and english has a second language classroom at your school your college your university or an english language center in your community so another great place to find trades is craigslist and i just put an ad in craigslist saying i'm acquiring this language would you like to trade english or spanish or one of my other languages for whatever language i'm acquiring and it works awesome i've done it for chinese i've done it for italian i've done it for i think french so it works really really well it's a great resource another good resource are apps and there's a couple apps out there and they're called tandem and hellotalk and these are apps which are designed for people who want to trade language so i've used both these apps that work really well and basically you go into the app you put you type in the language you speak you type in the language you want to acquire and boom it gives you a list of people in your area who want to exchange with you so what are you going to do once you sit down with your language parent your language partner your trade etc so right now i'm going to show you the magic this is the most important part of the entire language acquisition program so you need two things number one you're going to need magazines you need to get as many magazines as you can find and number two you need children stories again you need to get as many children stories as you can find so let me talk first about magazines so it doesn't matter what language the magazines are in and it doesn't matter what language the children's story is in the important thing is that the magazines have tons and tons of pictures now this magazine is sunset magazine i love sunset magazine for language acquisition and the reason i love santa magazine is it has tons of great pictures sunset magazine is a travel magazine which means it's gonna have pictures related to travel food clothing accessories ads etc this magazine probably has around 200 to 300 great words that i want to acquire so when you sit down with your language friend you're going to ask him or her to lovingly describe all of the pictures in the magazine and while he or she's doing that of course you're going to want to participate and the way you participate is this he or she's going to ask you simple yes or no questions about the pictures in the magazine and then you are going to ask some super simple questions too and the most simple questions are what is this what's that what's he doing what's she doing and why why is the most important question in any language so let me talk about children's stories and storytelling in general storytelling is the most powerful way to acquire any language i cannot say enough good about storytelling for language acquisition now storytelling children's stories this is going to be the bulk of your language acquisition program i would say about 80 to 90 you're going to be working on children's stories now just like magazines and like i said it doesn't matter what language the children's stories are in the important thing about children's stories is that the pictures are very big and the text is very small now your language partner your language friend here she's not going to translate the story in fact i don't recommend he translate the sword he or she won't need to translate the story because the pictures are very big it's very easy to follow it's a children's story so just like magazines he or she is going to lovingly retell you the story and the target language and here she's going to ask you simple yes or no questions and then just like magazines you're going to want to participate so you're going to ask what's this what's that what's he doing what's she doing and why now let me tell you something you don't have to do you don't have to retell the story in fact you never have to retell the story in fact retelling the story is probably going to be extremely difficult remember language acquisition is all about listening and not speaking so when he or she is retelling the story you're acquiring the language through listening and not speaking so you do not need to retell the story ever children's stories storytelling in general are the way to go once you sit down with your language parent your language partner et cetera you need to tell them that you have three or four very important rules so rule number one is no english you need to tell that person you know what during our our language session during the hour or two we're together please don't speak any english at all now if you don't understand and i don't understand you have two or three options my favorite option is just to gesture you're going to act it out you're going to try to get the person to understand what you're trying to say and the way you do that is through gestures or acting and that works a lot of times that's my favorite thing to do number two if you don't understand and i don't understand you're going to draw i always bring pencil and papers to all of my language sessions and i love to draw drawing is so so important because remember i want to stay away from english at all costs i want to stay in the target language about 99 of the time now if you want to do five percent english that's perfectly fine i'm going to do about 99 target language and i'm only going to speak english about one percent and that's just during emergencies so no english you're gonna gesture or you're going to draw now if at any time you don't understand and i don't understand and we're stuck we're going to use the term it's not important so we're going to say that in the target language we're going to say you know what it's not important let's move on let's go to the next topic let's turn the page etc so in the target language it's not important and we just move on that's rule number one no english rule number two is no grammar so i'm gonna ask my friend i'm gonna say you know what during this two hours or hour or thirty minutes whatever it is please don't teach me any grammar don't say because it's a girl we say it this way because it's a boy we say it this way if there's a group of people we say this way no remember i'm going to be acquiring grammar naturally like a child acquires his or her his or her first grammar so once again rule number one no english rule number two no grammar and rule number three no corrections so i'm gonna ask my friend and you're gonna need to ask your friend please don't correct me at any time and the reason is correction does not work it's basically a waste of time tpr stands for total physical response and you know that's just a fancy name for commands so dpr stands for total physical response and it's learning a language through movement uh acquiring a language through movement um and it is really considered and it is experience shows and science shows that it's one of the most powerful teaching techniques that we can use in a classroom it is we use dpr every time we present language meaningfully with movement every foreign language acquisition program should include lots of tpr or lots of commands so let me tell you how it works so basically what you're going to do is when you get with your language parent or your language partner your trade whatever you're with ask that person to give you a list of commands or verbs or actions so basically you're going to have your friend tell you just a list of commands so eat drink jump sleep dance sing complain talk turn around jump run anything like that you want to get up to about a hundred 200 300 see if you can do up to 500 commands eventually i like to do about 50 maybe 100 on one session so you don't even need to leave your seat to do commands i like to use my fingers so what i do is i go like this i go jump walk run turn around sit down stand up dance talk uh yell ah complain uh look watch tv turn the tv on turn the tv off cry laugh you can do upwards of a thousand different commands without even leaving your seat it's like osmosis so reading is fantastic the other great thing about reading is that you can so tailor it to the students interests it's one of the first things that i recommend to students right from the beginning if you can start reading little things in spanish particularly things that you're passionate about anyways if you love baseball and you've just watched a game and you already know what the results are now go to go online to a spanish language newspaper and read a little bit about the game in spanish you won't understand most of the words that's okay you already know what the results were so you start getting comfortable you have this whole context behind it what reading does is it puts everything together in fact it takes all that grammar that you've been wondering about thinking about thinking about and what it does is little by little it just puts it all together it's almost like you have this puzzle and it just makes those it makes the pieces and the puzzles just really smooth it smooths out the pieces in the puzzle so you can put that puzzle together easily and they're like oh okay i get it i get it i get it because remember a lot of our grammar the grammar i've acquired has come from reading so reading is hugely important i plus one simply means input plus one input is everything i know and then the one is that means just a little bit extra i plus one is i is input that students already know is a vocabulary and the grammatical structures that students already possess and plus one is going slightly beyond that level so when you're with your language partner or your language friend when i talk about i plus one you're going to need to tell them you're going to say you know what can you give me some i plus 1 and they're going to be like uh sure what's i plus 1. so i plus one is super simple and what it means is they're gonna give you vocabulary but they're gonna they're just gonna ramp it up a little bit they're just gonna be giving you a little bit extra than they normally would for example this is a camping scene and this is a trailer and there's a beach and these are rocks and this is a spare tire they've got a spare tire spare tire is very important you could have a blowout and then the spare tire you need to use this trailer looks vintage looks like a vintage trailer it looks really expensive i wish i had a trailer like that so that's an example of i plus one you never just want to jump in and say trailer beach grass sun water no you want your partner to give you this loving explanation again like you're the baby and he or she is mom or dad one of the things though that is definitely lacking in the online environments that i looked at is the group interaction so much of language is not just the words that we're saying to each other we communicate through our tone we communicate through our gestures we communicate through the space that we occupy and the way we occupy it and when you have a group of students working together in person there's communication that is facilitated by those other factors ineffective how's that and i recommend the work of a guy named john truscott t-r-u-s-c-o-t-t his articles a lot of them are available online just look at john truscott he's a professor of english in taiwan whenever i go there i like to see what he's doing he has reviewed the literature on correction more thoroughly than i have i've done my best but john has done a better job over and over again it is not effective you make a mistake someone corrects you you're supposed to change your idea of what the rule is so i could say j'ali and the person says no no i said oh yeah yeah that's right the verb to go takes you know this auxiliary and not the other one it's supposed to do that uh in reality it only works when the rule is very very simple and you've studied it you have time to think about it and you're focused on form so it's the same constraints as grammar and when correction does work and when formal instruction does work the effect doesn't last very long it fades away after a few months most of the gain is gone so every year students ask me what i think about rosetta stone and apps and when i say apps i mean duolingo to be specific so let me talk about rosetta stone first with rosetta stone i've got some good news and some bad news and i'm going to start off with the bad news first the bad news is first off rosetta stone is super boring it is so so absolutely boring i cannot use rosetta stone for more than five minutes because i am so absolutely bored rosetta stone secondly rosetta stone is missing one thing rosetta stone is missing the people there are no people i need people i need conversation i need interaction i need non-verbal communication i need laughter i need all of that and rosetta stone has none of that rosetta stone is basically a digital um flash card game where they go here's a dog here's a cat here's two dogs here's two cats and you have to guess using the pictures now here's the good news regarding rosetta stone rosetta stone is better than nothing it's anything is better than nothing so if you're taking a five hour class a five unit five hour class every week and you're supplementing that with say five hours of rosetta stone it's better than nothing but compared to actual conversation actual comprehensible input it doesn't come close so now let me talk about duolingo a lot of students like to use duolingo i have a huge problem with duolingo the biggest problem with duolingo is it's memorization it's 99.9 memorization all you're doing is memorizing words and phrases etc memorization is not comprehensible input in fact you could memorize the entire dictionary you could memorize the whole spanish dictionary french dictionary arabic dictionary etc and you would still not speak the language it just doesn't work that way something i'm going to be doing brand new this year which is going to double my comprehensible input given any during any given week or day etc and it's called the mobile phone so what i'm going to be doing is i'm going to be using the recording device on my mobile phone all phones have some kind of recording device and what i'm going to be doing this is the first time i'm going to be doing this i'm going to be i'm going to going to be recording all of my my sessions my interactions with my teachers my friends my language partners my trades etc and then just during the week uh you know maybe a half hour before i go to bed or an hour day in my car i'm gonna listen to those recordings over again and that is absolute comprehensible input it doesn't matter that i've heard it before in fact it's important that i hear it again so i'm going to do that over and over and over again i'm going to get at least two three maybe even four extra hours a week by listening to the recordings on my mobile phone now more importantly i'm going to be recording the children's story sessions because what i want is i want a whole list of stories i want a hundred different stories children's stories on my mobile phone that i can listen to anytime you know what the greatest thing is after this year i'm going to still have these on my phone and i'm going to use that just to warm up to keep current to keep my fluency whatever my fluency level is and i'm going to do that over and over and over again and i'm going to do that for the rest of my life my plan is i'm going to study abroad so i'm going to study abroad this summer in egypt for three months why because i have three months off and egypt is a wonderful country and it's not that expensive so my plan is right now for the nine months i'm gonna get around 500 hours of comprehensible input in nine months and then when i go to egypt i'm going to get another 500 hours of comprehensible input in three months so here i'm going to do around 10 to 12 hours a week and then in egypt i'm going to do around 40 to 50 hours a week easily now what am i going to do in egypt easy i'm going to do trades if i live with the family great if i don't live with a family great but i'm going to be doing a lot of trades i'm going to be trading english for arabic or spanish for arabic or english and spanish for arabic and i guarantee it's going to work i've done it before i'm going to use the apps and in the end i'm going to meet tons of wonderful people i'm going to make lifelong relationships with people and that's pretty much the most important part of acquiring any language it's the relationships you're going to make the lifelong friends you're going to make by acquiring their language today's my first day i don't speak any arabic you know that i know that i know to say hello while we're doing our lesson today you're going to be doing 90 of the talking and you're going to say yes or no so you're going to teach me something and then you're going to say yes or no you're going to say nam or la nam or la okay so today's lesson is going to be on clothing and colors just clothing and colors okay so ah so i know all father and words i don't need to think comra nagafa lambda etc so i've got the words um um um hi jeff isaiak zayak dissolved foreign so in the quest me so how shane okay i just want to take a minute and i want to thank you i want to thank you for sharing in this experience i want to thank you for sharing in my experience of acquiring another language and what i want you to do is i want you to go away with two things right now number one is this you know when i speak another language whether it's english spanish italian french vietnamese chinese or arabic i don't think when i speak in fact i don't want to think when i speak i just want to speak naturally without thinking and you know a lot of people they tell me oh you are so smart that's how you're able to acquire so many languages and you know what actually the opposite is true i'm not that smart i'm just a normal person now if i was super smart like a genius you know i would learn the language i could learn languages but because i'm not a genius and i'm not that smart i have to acquire the languages because again i don't want to think when i speak i just want to speak naturally and number two i want you to know that you can acquire any language the language of your choice in one year if i can do it anybody can do it so again i just want to say adios astrowego bona fortuna bonsans forza saeed salamolecom and zygen for society for society adios