[Music] hi everyone welcome back to my channel today I wanted to talk about starting to learn a new language from scratch um so the language I chose is German the only experience I've ever had with the German language was for two weeks in college in like 2011 2012 maybe uh I took German i ended up dropping it though because at the time I was learning French Spanish Japanese and Chinese and I added German as the fifth language and French and Spanish have similarities chinese and Japanese have similarities but German was the odd one out so when I was learning I just kept mixing it up with the other languages so I ended up dropping it but I wanted to do this because I want to kind of show you how I would go about planning doing self-study for a language especially because I know and lately I've seen many videos online of people claiming to get fluent in 30 days or you know be like a native speaker in 67 days or 70 days or whatever they pick these random numbers then they give you this information like research has proven science has proven da da da da da so for the sake of this video uh I'm not going to get into theory too much i will talk a little bit about it um but I'm going to focus mainly on practical ways for you to plan learning a language from scratch now one of the biggest things you have to worry about when you do that is what is your goal for learning the language if you have no goal or if your goal is simply I like learning there's a really good chance you're not going to be consistent enough to see valuable gains or like important gains in your learning so for example if you really like learning language and you like watching TV shows in language and it's in a second language you might be able to get fluent to the point where you could maybe watch a show and get the gist of what's going on but because there's no concrete goal for you there's a really good chance you're not going to reach the level you want to reach so I would advise having a goal one of the ways you can do that is you want to make sure that your goal is measurable um and so you have to figure out how would you measure it so I'm going to show you an example with a goal that I have so one of the goals I have is I want to pass a test so let's say I want to pass um the B2 level test for German okay um so if that's my goal then I have to think how can that be measured so my goal has to be measured or measurable and it has to be timebound that means I have to have an expected date of when I think I will reach that goal if I don't have a date there's no reason for me to push myself to reach the goal and lastly it has to be realistic so my measurable goal is if I pass the test because obviously if I pass the test I've reached my goal the timebound part of the goal would be something like maybe I want to try getting to this level in 12 months now if I didn't have a job and I wasn't studying for my doctorate 12 months might be a doable goal but I don't know how realistic it is with my life because I'm currently getting my doctorate i'm currently doing research and I'm currently working at a university so getting to B2 level and being able to pass that test I say a better time frame would be be like one and a half to two years and the reason for this is because I know I'm human there's going to be times where maybe I don't feel like studying or maybe I'm sick or maybe I have other things that I'm doing so for example I'm doing research this semester once this semester is over for most of the summer and probably the beginning of the next semester I'm going to be analyzing data so I most likely will not have as much time as I would normally have um and then I'm also beginning my doc or my I'm beginning my dissertation at the end of the year so that would mean I probably can't study every day and when I can study it's probably only going to be about an hour or so so I have to keep that in mind now the other thing is is after you have goals or a goal you have to have a plan so you have to consider if my goal is to pass the B2 test how am I going to get to that goal in my case for my plan I think what I should do is I should study on a weekly basis at least three to four times per week and each time should be about an hour i think that's that would be a good way to do that um and then I need to use uh material that is comprehensible so I'm sure you've seen other videos that talk about this uh Crashen Steven Crashen is a linguist he has a it's called a hypothesis but you could technically say it's a theory um but the hypothesis is comprehensible input that you need input plus one which means slightly above your level uh some people also use this thing they say the 8020 rule um which means like you should understand about 80% of what you hear but research actually says that that's not true you need to understand about 95% of what you hear um for reading that number is more like 98% so you have to understand 98 out of 100 words when you read otherwise the text is too hard to learn incidentally what that means is if you want to learn passively like a child would learn you have to understand at least 98% of what you read and at least 95% of what you hear that doesn't mean you can't learn if it's less than that it just means it becomes more difficult and you're likely to become frustrated or to give up if you're reading the easier thing is you can stop you can look up words but when you're talking to someone or listening you can't always stop you might be able to ask them but imagine if you're listening to a speech someone's giving you you can try to look up words but you might lose track of the speech if you're looking up words constantly i'm try I need to find material that is at my level and because I'm starting from scratch I would need very basic material there's a few ways you can do this i actually purchased some books that I'm going to show you in a second um and then I also found some online resources uh that were free they're just like German books uh some of them have audio some of them don't you could always use things like chat GBT uh and if you needed to do like pronunciation stuff Google translate can read it a lot of a lot of things on the on the web like on the internet would give you resources to be able to do that you can always also use like flashcards so I was looking at Anki decks to download for the first 10,00 like high frequency words if you're ever interested in looking into like vocabulary learning Paul Nation is one of the leading experts on it and I say this because if you go to YouTube and look up vocabulary learning by regular people they might give you some decent advice but a lot of times they're just trying to sell you something and normally it's not that great like I just watched a video earlier today where somebody was saying like linguists and researchers have known this secret and they haven't shared it with like we there's no secret there's no secret okay um people say that because they're trying to convince you that they've learned the secret and they're going to share it with you which honestly sounds like a cult because that's what cults do uh but there's no like secret to language learning um as with all types of learning we know that consistency is key and we know that motivation is key and we know that it has to be something relevant to you and it has to be within your realm or within your grasp for learning if it's too far above your level no matter what it is you're not going to be able to succeed at doing it imagine if you wanted to learn if you want well your body to learn how to lift weights so mentally you know how to do that but your body needs time to adjust to the weight if you started with 100 kilograms when you've never lifted before you will injure yourself right you have to like slowly get up to that and when you want to build you want to lift just above what is comfortable right you want to actually feel that pain pain is gain kind of thing it's the same thing with language learning so you want to make sure that you can scaffold and that's one of the other things so if I'm going to be learning I have to be able to scaffold my learning this can be done in a few ways um one of the things is if you take a class the teacher can scaffold for you that doesn't mean they always will um I know some teachers they don't know how to scaffold very well but if you don't have a class what you can do is there are certain apps online i was just looking at one i think it's called Lingo Pie I think like if you watch TV shows they can put the show with the subtitles on um and the subtitles they will actually write what the person is saying so if you've ever watched foreign movies and you've watched the the movie with the subtitles in the foreign language you might notice that what they're saying and what's written is not the same thing unless you're learning Chinese because Chinese always has subtitles and it always writes exactly what people say so that's one of the nice things about learning Chinese but we're not learning Chinese today they were learning German there are ways to kind of get help on your own like I said if you have a class a teacher or if you have like a language partner that can help you but talking with people and I've mentioned this in other videos just because people speak a language it doesn't mean they're good at teaching it it doesn't mean they're going to help you learn it so you have to consider that some people are going to be better at explaining things than others some people are going to be good at trying to help you get to understanding something that you don't understand and some people don't want to do they don't have they don't want to waste the time a day so that all depends on you for me the way that I'm going to do it because I'm doing it completely alone I don't have a language partner i'll be using graded readers which I'll show you in a second the textbook that I have and then uh YouTube channels so um some of the YouTube channels I haven't really looked at it's just basic vocabulary stuff but once you get a decent amount of vocabulary you can start doing things like watching uh YouTubers in the language start watching children's cartoons in the language now obviously don't go overboard because if you watch something too difficult you're not going to be able to you know understand it so like don't watch the news um especially if you're starting from scratch okay so then here um I want to talk a little bit about fluency before I move into looking at the books with you uh so when you watch videos of people saying I got fluent in this language in 30 days the implication they are suggesting is that they sound like a native speaker which is and anyone who says that to you is a liar and should not be trusted i just watched a video of a guy saying that he's fluent in French Spanish Arabic and Mandarin and then he has shots like I don't know 5 to 10 seconds of each language where he's saying a sentence in you know a few sentences in the language and then it's like wow how amazing it's like yeah he speaks those languages but you don't know what he did when he prepared for that video and if you notice when he speaks in the video which I'm not going to show the video but I'm sure you've seen other videos like this they usually edit themselves so they'll say something stop edit and then go to the ne like cut to the next one so you have no idea how many takes they did you have no idea if they memorize something beforehand like you can easily memorize a sentence or two in a second language and sound like you know what you're talking about um and I promise you I've heard many fluent Chinese speakers speak Chinese and they sound terrible and I'm not trying to say that you know I'm not trying to make them feel bad i just what I'm saying is they shouldn't sell this idea that they're fluent when there's a lot that goes into fluency um like I would say pronunciation is not a part of fluency um but to say like I've shocked native speakers and like it's suggesting that they sound native when they don't and for some languages like in Chinese I've noticed that for some reason if your Chinese is really bad they love to exaggerate how great it is i've noticed this a lot like I used to have a friend he could only say nihow and shama niha means hello and shama means what that's all he could say and one time a a child was like playing with him and of course the kids when you're playing with them they want to talk to you but he doesn't understand them so he would just say nihow to the child and then they would the child was like wow and then which means like you can speak Chinese and he would just say shama because he doesn't know what they're saying and so the kid would just keep talking you know like what they want to do what they want to play and the parent heard this and they they said to me wow his Chinese is so good like a mahal which means like how could his Chinese be this good and I'm standing there talking to the parent fluently in Chinese we're having a conversation and I was like he can only say nihow and shama but they don't say anything to me about how great my Chinese is they only say how great his Chinese is and I've noticed this i've been in China for 10 years i've noticed this like just because you get a compliment from somebody doesn't mean your language is good and in fact sometimes it can mean that it's bad so just keep this in mind when somebody is trying to tell you i used the secret method to get fluent in 30 days like maybe they got to a certain level of fluency like A1 which is the lowest level of fluency in the European framework that's a level of fluency so if you can say what your name is maybe where you go to school how to get to the bathroom what color you like that's a type of fluency so if they say I'm fluent in 30 days I suppose they are yes but they're not like C1 C2 level fluency in 30 days that takes time um so looking at fluency uh usually one of the ways that it's measured is by the vocabulary you know and so A1 fluency is 500 to a thousand words I should say like lemas but 500 words uh that's like 500 active words um if I'm correct and I think about a thousand passive so that's slightly above the level of a toddler but a toddler would have better understanding than we would but they're like active vocabulary because toddlers they speak around like 200 to 300 words that fluency doesn't take very long to get to especially if you have a lot of input because the like highest frequency words the top 1,000 words they're used so often that you can learn them rather quickly it gets harder as you go on though so I read something somewhere that like the top 10,000 words make up like 75% of spoken language but when you get higher like it's like 8,000 words make up 98% of the language so 7 like going from 75 so 1,000 to 8,000 that's a huge jump and it only increases by 23% you know so it's like just because you speak a thousand words you might be able to communicate basic stuff but you're not going to be having long- winded conversations with somebody about politics or about you know uh like maybe traveling you might be able to talk about things bits and pieces here and there but it's not going to be like super super in-depth I guess is the word I'm looking for so A2 is I think like a th00and to I think 2,000 b1 is 2,000 to 3,000 b2 is 3,000 to 4,000 so the first two levels like if you did a college course normally the first two levels you would get in about a year uh like two semesters um if you're like studying diligently and you're taking the classes I think it would you you could get around A2 fluency um or at least the you would be like top A1 fluency low A2 fluency some you'd probably be around a,000 to,500 words and then normally the second year of college you would be getting B1 to B2 fluency and then if you if you majored in a language usually by the time you graduate you you should be B2 to C1 usually like if you're doing the major in school but like keeping that in mind it takes that takes about 3 to four years but you're not studying only that top subject especially in the beginning of your schooling and even if you are sometimes like at my school they had a Chinese I think they had a it's like an East Asian studies major but some of the Chinese the upper level Chinese classes were taught in English not in Chinese so when they did like Chinese literature there were sections of the class that were taught in English so even if you take these advanced classes you know like it doesn't mean that you're just doing the language all the time for schooling and then also the the language itself might change the difficulty so German is easier for an English speaker than Chinese is although I think Chinese is pretty easy because Chinese has no like verb conjugations no singular and plural and they have the concept of tense like time aspect but they don't they don't change their verbs to say you know past tense or future tense so like that's a lot easier and then in Chinese all of the like characters are one syllable so like when you speak it feel it feels like you're talking less if you write it it's it feels like you're writing more because it's like complicated to write but if you're just talking it feels like when you say things it's easier to get them out of your mouth yeah whereas like if you're learning French and Spanish as an English speaker those languages are much easier to learn especially because they follow a lot of like syntax and grammatical functions um they have the same thing as like adding s or like making things plural and singular you know adding past tense morphemes those kind of things so for German I would say to get to B2 the a year and a half is probably a good goal especially if I'm doing things like three to four times a week and if on top of that like once my level gets higher I I'm going to have to study more so like when you learn the first 10,000 words that's done really easily but as you try to learn more words those words are used less frequently and because they're used less frequently it takes more time to learn them so Paul Nation he's mentioned in a few of his articles but to learn a word incidentally which means just by passively reading or passively listening you need to encounter the word 8 to 20 times in different contexts now the number of times of the word depends on what the word is and your motivation or interest in the word so for example a swear word is learned much faster than the word like pneumonia right so if you're learning a naughty word of course you're going to be motivated because it's like interesting it's funny you know i want to show you the books that I got let me put my Apple pen down um okay so I bought five books I think and I think this one let me see okay these are the A1's so I bought A1 books now I bought these on Taba taba is kind of like Chinese Amazon but it's super cheap super cheap like um for all of So this book was 30 yen i think I actually paid less i think I think I got like a special sale because I bought them all together so I think I paid about 90 for these which is like $12 for four books whereas like if you bought these in the States one book would probably be like $6 to $8 so keep that in mind some of these you can find online versions of them i don't know where they would be but I know they exist i found other books like that before like um I can't remember where but I have like a a folder with a bunch of like graded readers but graded readers are one of the best ways to learn vocabulary passively because it's geared toward your level so that it's not too difficult to learn if a graded reader is below your level the benefit of that is it helps with reading fluency which is also an important skill because like um I speak Chinese I can read Chinese but I don't read often in Chinese so when I read in Chinese I'm very slow compared to like my English reading uh so it is a useful skill otherwise if you have it at your level that's the best way to learn vocabulary if it's above your level you can do that but then it becomes a little more complicated and if it's too complicated it can be demotivating so we'll look at these in a second i wanted to see the other book which is the lower level the other book that I got is like a zero which means it's like very very very elementary oh they tape the sides too they really packaged in this put it in the box and put it in this okay this is a very tiny book i mean it doesn't surprise me because so this is a zero which says 100 words you know so this is this is meant for I don't know anything kind of thing it looks a little bit like a ch children's book and there is is there it says there's a listening thing on it oh they have an app so I download the app Eli link and then you scan the cover of the book and then it will let you it'll like do the reading for you so that you can practice uh with listening yeah so it looks like this it's a story it's Aladdin so one of the nice things is I already kind of know that story which means it'll be easy to understand what's going on i don't know if this has changed from the like Disney movie or the actual story of Aladdin but it does help me understand a little bit and if you have audio with books like this one thing you can do is you can do what's called shadowing which means like when you hear the reading you can try to say it with it now that's not going to make you speak fluently but it'll help with pronunciation it helps with you learning how to produce the sounds with your mouth and then it can also help you practice um reading skills i will say when I first came to China uh and I spoke Chinese to people my tongue got really tired because they use their tongue differently especially when you use like there's like an sh sound in Chinese they put their tongue back so like sh like that sh they put their tongue back and my tongue got really tired from going up and down all the time so shadowing can actually help kind of prepare your muscles if you do go abroad because otherwise your mouth will get tired these books um they also have audio i see on the back it says there's an MP3 download um that it's in Chinese on the back because this originally it's sold in China so it's like meant for Chinese learners so for example like when they have their stuff in the back like they explain it in Chinese but I can read Chinese um which is why I was okay with getting this book but they do have English versions of graded readers some languages have more than others like my friend's learning Russian he said it's very hard to find graded readers in Russian but like Spanish French English yeah those are you're gonna have a lot more in those because those languages are more common even here like they have a glossery in the back and the glossery is translated into Chinese not in English which is fine with me because again I speak Chinese these books because they're harder I wouldn't read these right away if I did read this right away right away I would have to keep some type of a like book where I would write down new vocabulary words i might and then I might make a list from that and try to learn those words if you do that if you make a list and you're going to learn words you have to make sure that you do spaced repetition which means you look at the words uh you try to recall them maybe for like 10 minutes so let's say I was going to learn 10 words i would do five to 10 minutes of that where I have the German word I flip over the card look at the English word um then take a break do something else you could listen to songs in German you do something else where you're not like trying to learn words anymore um so you could passively do things or you could do another task like go play piano go for a walk go go do something drink a drink a bottle of water I don't know whatever whatever floats your boat and then after 20 30 minutes come back and look at them again for 5 minutes doing that makes it a lot easier for your brain to first of all notice hey I encountered this a lot so I need to remember this because it's important for my survival that's like a biological perspective but on the other side it also helps you practice with recalling information which is one of the keys to learning if you've ever read like a textbook you know how after certain parts no one likes to do this but it'll be like stop and like think about this for a second answer this question that's supposed to help you recall what you just read and it is it has been shown in science to be beneficial for remembering things i don't say proven because social science doesn't prove things and I know this because I'm a researcher social science finds evidence to either support or refute something but there is no concrete evidence in social science to say we know for 100% fact this is true all the time so like for example if we say like we know that immersion works okay well first of all what kind of immersion second of all does that kind of immersion work all the time for everyone in every situation for every language you know like some languages are easier to understand like as a native English speaker I can go to Spain and hear some words that if I know the sounds are different I can tell hey that sounds like English like you know there's certain things you can do with languages german is the same way like you know or French like color like okay like that's that's not very different you know like for is forest so like there's certain things like that that I think I think people when they talk about immersion they don't realize there's a lot of factors that go into it plus and I mentioned this in another video there is plenty of research that shows immersion is not effective so if it's been proven how would any research ever find that and if it's been proven people would stop studying it because it's been proven we would move on to new things so if you ever watch a video and somebody tells you this scientifically proven fact blah blah blah blah blah blah they're probably lying they're probably lying and if they're not a researcher and they're not somebody who like studies this for their living they probably found one or two articles that said something about it but that's a very biased opinion because when all research is limited so if a study says we found that this was true you need to look at other studies what did they find how did they replicate the study is it replicable because if it's not replicable then you can't say it's proven anything because you can't repeat it right so all things to keep in mind when you're doing this i am going to be doing this i have a calendar um I'm going to show you what I plan to do with this on my calendar and um I kind of want to I'll give you like updates i don't know maybe like monthly updates i don't want to update too often because then it'll seem like I'm not learning anything at all uh so I will be doing updates and uh I want to try to help with motivating you for learning the language so let's see uh this is the calendar from this month i can't do anything on Thursday but I can start on Friday although Friday I'm a little busy so from like 1 to 3 on Friday I am I have I go to the gym and then 3 to 5 I'm hanging out with my partner and our friends so we're going to KTV uh so if I did anything with German it would have to be at night i think I could do that though so I think I could maybe do like 8:00 p.m somewhere around there or if I get up early enough that's a big if if I get up early enough I could do it in the morning so maybe I say like 10 to 11 in the morning um Saturday I if I did another hour I think I could do Well Saturday we're going to see houses apartments I should say not houses so 10:00 a.m we're going to see h apartments that'll probably take an hour or two and then noon I would eat lunch right so I could probably Well then I also going to play games with my friends let's say I do like 3 p.m to 4 or somewhere around there right sunday uh probably won't do anything because I have to plan for research um my students are taking a test next week um that's a part of my study so I won't be able to I have to prepare that monday I have class so I can only do in the afternoon so if I did like 4 to 5 Tuesday is a no-go i have class all day wednesday same thing i could do four to five and then oops and then Thursday I could also do four to five unless I have a meeting i probably don't though but it's it varies every week yeah so like setting up this kind of schedule so if you notice like I could do one two let's see uh one two three four about five days a week i think that's a pretty reasonable goal uh people who try to do like every day and you try to like it is possible to do it but in my opinion it sets you up for failure because it's kind of like exhausting to do it like that especially if you say like well I'm going to set five hours a week and you try to space it throughout the week if you miss a day you can try to make it up on another day by adding 20 minutes to your thing or adding 30 minutes to your thing you know that's my plan right now for what I'll be doing i think uh maybe after a few weeks I can try to post another video of me practicing talking in German and trying to show you like what I've learned so far um or like giving you feedback on what I think about the books i do kind of want to go through um some of the books so maybe I'll look at like a chapter or something to show you what they look like because I think these they don't look bad um some of the books like here they have exercises i don't always do the exercises um sometimes so I I'm getting my doctorate in second language instruction and sometimes exercises they're very like surface level so they're not trying to get you to see if you understand anything which is silly because the point of any communication is you need to understand the message so sometimes I don't do it but if you like doing this kind of stuff it's not going to hurt your language learning it just might not be as effective as other things um but here they also have things like verb conjugations so I think these kind of books especially these in in the I have Chinese ones the Chinese ones don't do stuff like this um although I guess they don't have verb verb conjugations but they don't really talk about grammar in the books where these ones do so these are kind of nice because they I would say they could also make up for a textbook so like if you don't have a textbook and you bought something like this um you know I think that it could be pretty useful this is from these these are printed by a Chinese uh publisher this is Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press but I know these exist in other like like other areas i know that there are other graded readers um yeah so if you have any questions uh feel free to put them in the comments i like responding to people and unlike some of the YouTubers I see I actually do have a background in language education and language instruction at like studying and teaching it and also learning languages i'm not just I read a study somewhere like I've my life's work has been doing this so I've been doing it for the past like five or six years i don't remember but yeah I'm very excited to start and I I'm excited to have you with me on this journey so thanks for joining