August 21 2016The Language Learning Revolution
Visit https://www.LingQ.com My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Follow the new LingQ channel: https://goo.gl/WVnzRS Follow "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. First of all, if you like these videos about language learning please subscribe to my channel and also let me know if there is anything you want me to talk about in particular. Today, I’m going to talk about the revolution in language learning of the twenty-first century. Before I do that, I want to say that I generally make my videos in English. I try to speak slowly and clearly so that people whose first language is not English have a chance of understanding me. Then we make a transcript of the video available at LingQ as a lesson where you can study the text, listen to the audio, pick up any words and phrases that you might have missed. I think this way I reach the broadest possible audience. I am prepared, however, to have conversations with any of you who are native speakers of other languages, languages that I speak. There are about 15 of them and I might have to prepare for some of them, but I’m very happy to have conversations. Not just on language learning, but perhaps primarily on language learning. So the revolution on language learning… When I studied Chinese back in 1968, I had a big open-reel tape recorder that sat in my room and if I wanted to listen, I had to listen there sitting down. Today, I have my iPod Nano for when I am exercising, washing the dishes -- when I’m very mobile. This little iPod Nano has more audio in it than the average language lab would have had back 50 years ago and it’s all things of interest to me. On my iPhone I have the same audio as on my Nano, this way if I’m sitting in the car driving (Bluetooth) I can sync it to my car speakers. If there’s a phone call, I can also pick up the phone call. Again, hands free, etc., etc. and, in the meantime, I can listen to my audio. I can also download audio books from Audible.com and have them all stored in here to listen to. I can also do LingQ on my iPhone; although, if I have the opportunity, I prefer to do it on my iPad. So these three tools are just phenomenal in terms of making language learning more efficient and more comfortable, easier. Now, 50 years ago, my main activity in order to improve my Chinese was listening and reading. I didn’t know or had ever heard of Stephen Krashen, but everything that Stephen Krashen says about language acquisition through input was exactly how I went about it. As a learner of Chinese, I became aware very early of the importance of efficiency because other than your attitude, your motivation, your confidence, the next most important factor is time. So if you can double or triple the efficiency of your utilization of study time it doesn’t just double or triple your speed of learning, I felt it geometrically increased my speed of learning. Very early, I decided I am not going to flip through a dictionary because I forget the meaning as soon as I close the dictionary. Particularly with learning Chinese, it was very time consuming to look words up in a dictionary. I looked for readers on a variety of subjects which had glossaries. The inconvenience of the glossary obviously is that the glossary can’t anticipate which words you know and don’t know. So, very often, the words you want to find a meaning for aren’t there, conversely, words that you know are in the glossary list. Plus, it’s distracting to flip back and forth. The first major revolution was the mp3 file, initially, the mini disk mp3 files and mp3 players, the audio, the transportability, portability of audio. The second thing is the online dictionary, so you can be reading online and immediately see the meaning and, of course, you can do things the way we do at LingQ with these words and phrases that you look up. You can save them, review them, you can do so many things. On a device like the iPhone or the iPad, the text comes alive and all of that makes the learning much more efficient. Granted, it’s more comfortable to read a book, but I find that until I have a sufficient vocabulary level it’s frustrating to always come across words that I don’t know and, of course, look them up in a dictionary, forget the meaning, write out a bunch of lists long-handed that I never look at. The availability of online dictionaries has made it possible to access texts that are perhaps too difficult, but because they are interesting they’re ideal learning material. The third thing is I want to give credit to Stephen Krashen, I totally agree with what he says about the importance of input. Eventually, you have to speak and when you speak you’re involved with the language. You’re fighting, you’re trying to express yourself and it becomes very real.
Watch Video 
