#AskSteve

North American Polyglot Symposium http://www.napolyglot.com/ A bientôt , see you there-

We talk about the Montreal language festival, and Benny's upcoming language books. For more information on the Language Festival happening in Montreal on July 23/24, Click this link: http://www.napolyglot.com Timelines: 0:01 Benny Lewis presentation. 0:30 Why Polyglot gatherings are worth visiting. 2:20 What do regular people can take away from Polyglot meetings? 4:55 Language community generates enthusiasm in you. 6:04 Language events are an opportunity for making friends. 7:25 Upcoming book series by Benny Lewis. 10:55 Benny Lewis collaboration with Teach Yourself. 12:00 Benny Lewis: My goal is to get people speaking. 13:21 A praise to Italki and Teach Yourself by Steve Kaufmann. 14:01 LingQ Beta version. 14:41 We are here to encourage you for learning languages. 16:10 Is Benny really that Irish? 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

Steve Kaufmann and Lindsay Dow discuss a new age for language students, language teachers and language schools. Timelines: 0:01 Lindsay Dow self-introduction. 1:09 Languages are not equally difficult. 1:49 How keen the people in the UK on learning languages? 5:10 Kids advance more quickly in language learning when given more challenging dogs. 7:20 Do kids have a choice what language to learn in Britain? 9:16 Providing immense external language learning resources for kids. 11:16 Balance between motivating VS directing learners. 12:46 Steve: I’m not motivated to learn Esperanto. 15:47 Korean is a hard nut to crack. 17:44 How Lindsay Dow went about learning Korean. 18:20 Korean resources on LingQ. 19:19 One of the biggest mistakes Lindsay did in her Korean learning. 20:30 You don’t have to struggle with pronunciation at the beginner stage. 21:39 Hacking grammar cases in German or Russian. 23:09 People underestimate remembering things. 25:29 How does Brexit affect language learning? 31:10 Why British living in Europe don’t pick up languages naturally. 33:08 Finding a language coach is more important than finding a tutor. 33:58 Tutor won’t do the work instead of you. 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 Check out Lindsay Dow YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/LindsayDoesLanguages *Transcript is available here: https://blog.thelinguist.com/a-new-age-for-language-students-teachers-and-schools

Click the link for more information: http://www.napolyglot.com A bientôt. See you all there. Nos vemos.在Montréal见面。etc.

Together with transcript, this interview will be available as a lesson at LingQ for those who want to use it to improve their English. Please note that I have put this discussion up here at this channel as well as at my "Steve's Cafe" channel. I think it is worth it.

How double unders and our commitment to fitness can be relevant to language learning. Here is the Facebook page of the Crossfit club I belong to: https://www.facebook.com/crossfitbc They really treat me well there, old coot that I am. 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. Today I’m going to talk about an aspect of fitness, which is doing double unders (a form of rope skipping) and how that relates to language learning. First of all, I hope you enjoyed my interview with Olly Richards as much as I did and I did another interview with Lindsay Dow of Lindsay Does Languages, which will be up I think next week sometime, but I just wanted to do this because it’s something that came up. Double unders, they are a form of skipping rope where you actually have to skip the rope twice every time you jump up once. So it’s double under, the rope comes under your feet twice. When I started at CrossFit three months ago, I couldn’t do them. In fact, I tried to do them and pulled a muscle in my back, so I backed off and started skipping ordinarily with the intention that I would eventually be able to do these double unders. I thought about under, I’m always thinking about connections between different things in language learning and so under. In order to do double unders, first of all, I went to YouTube and looked at some videos on how to do double unders. So the U, I first had to understand how to do double unders, understand almost theoretically by watching people and then understand that my body has to understand it. So U was Understand, understand how to do double unders. N, under, UN, N was No Doubt. I had no doubt that I would be able to do double unders. D is Dedication. In other words, when I am doing the double unders I’m focusing on my double unders. I’m not thinking of anything else, I am dedicated to the task. E is Enjoyment. To me, it is fun. It is fun to be exercising. Apparently, double unders are good for you, stimulate the brain, obviously they’re good for various muscles in your body, so enjoy it. The R is Relax. In other words, I think if you’re too uptight you won’t do well, but if you relax and just enjoy it then you can do the double unders. At the end of my video here, I’ll show you a video of myself doing double unders. So application for language learning -- U, Understand. To me, the key to improving in a language is comprehension, to understand when you read and especially when you listen. That’s always my number one focus in language learning. If I can understand, I will learn to speak and I’ll learn to pronounce better, if I can really hear what people are saying and can understand it. N, No Doubt. When I start in a language, I have no doubt that I will become fluent or fluent enough in that language to meet my objectives and there is no end because once I acquire a new language I expect to have it with me forever. So that’s the N. The D, again, is Dedication. It’s so easy to be distracted and look up your Twitter feed, look up your email. When I’m with my language that’s where I want to be. I feel this is the best place for me and where I want to devote my time and energy. I am Dedicated, D. E, I Enjoy it. In order to enjoy my language learning, I have to do things that I enjoy doing. So I don’t do drills and exercises, which I don’t enjoy. I don’t do space repetition systems, which I don’t enjoy. I listen and read and when the opportunity presents itself, I speak, so I enjoy it. Finally, R, Relax, relax in the knowledge that you will eventually get there.

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 Olly Richards YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/IWTYAL *Transcript will be available soon!

Ekaterina is a tutor of Russian and Ukrainian from Dnipro in Ukraine.She also has a youtube channel. http://bit.ly/29iBGDZ with interesting videos that will help you with either language. I have an interview with polyglot Olly Richards coming up later this week. It will have a transcript and will be available for study at LingQ. This video is for those who understand Ukrainian. I will not be providing sub-titles (simply too much work). While my Ukrainian speaking skills leave a lot to be desired, I do understand a lot can read and listen to interesting content. I am now going to move back over to Korean and Polish for a while. Timelines: 0:01 Лекції професора Залізняка. / Lectures by professor Zaliznyak. 1:24 Хто така Єкатерина? / Who is Ekaterina? 2:06 Київська Русь - Росія чи Україна? / Kyiv Rus refers to Russia or Ukraine? 3:35 Міфи в Українскій історії. / Myths of Ukrainian history. 7:07 ДНК склад двох стран відрізняється. / DNA of the two countries differs. 9:36 Огляд історичних кордонів України. / Overview of the historical borders of Ukraine. 13:56 Не треба використовувати історії у свої власних інтересах. / One shouldn’t use history for personal gain. 15:57 Погляди професора Залізняка на історію України. / Views of professor Zazliznyak. 18:09 Треба вивчати історію, щоб розвінчувати міфи. / In order to demystify history, it must studied. 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 Get LingQ's free Ukrainian grammar guide: https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/ukrainian/

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. Today, I want to talk about learning languages via the Word of the Day. Now, there are lots of services that can send you a word every day or you learn a word a day in a new language. In fact, just today I was at my CrossFit session and there was a fellow there. We were talking about language learning and he said that he’s been on this Word of the Day, but he said he has trouble remembering the word of the day. Of course my opinion is having this Word of the Day Program spit a word out you every day -- there is nothing wrong with it. I mean it’s giving you some exposure to the language. It’s certainly not a negative. However, it’s extremely inefficient as a way of learning a language. It is really, in a sense, next to useless. Bear in mind if you like doing that, by all means. The number one rule of language learning is to do what you like to do. However, we need to learn so many words, in my opinion. We need to learn 10,000, 15,000 words in most language and even then a lot of context is beyond our grasp because we’re missing some of the key words. At a word a day, that’s 365 words a year, except that it’s far less than that because any list of words if you are able to remember a quarter of them you’re doing very well. I can’t, I forget most of what I learn. Most words I learn I forget and it’s only when I run into these words again and again in my reading and listening. Of course at LingQ I’ve highlighted it now in yellow and I see it again as a word that I’ve encountered before and slowly by seeing it in different contexts I learn that word. In fact, I learn lots of words at LingQ because it’s not only the words I save, but as we know more words we’re able to infer more words. So we actually learn what I call incidentally more words than we learn deliberately, all from meaningful content, interesting and meaningful content that we’re reading and listening to. So a word a day, possibly 100 words a year, given how quickly we forget what we learn. Maximum, I would say 100 words a year. You need 10,000 words, that’s a lot of years. Ten years gets you to 1,000 words. One hundred years would get you to 10,000. So a word a day is relatively useless, insofar as language learning is concerned. In fact, any kind of learning words out of context, including in my opinion using space repetition systems, is not as effective as massive exposure to the language through lots of meaningful listening and reading. Otherwise, you accumulate this tremendous list of a deck of flashcards. If I have an hour a day to spend on language learning and I’ve got to spend an hour reviewing my flashcards, I don’t have an hour then to spend on listening and reading. As you’ve heard before, I think by far the most effective way of learning a language is to get through that beginner material, get yourself into interesting, authentic material and spend as much time as possible listening to it and reading it. Don’t be trapped into thinking that the Word a Day is doing anything other than amusing you. Before I forget, it reminds me. This sort of literacy organization in Canada did a deal with a newspaper where they have this Word of the Day in English, where they teach people a new word and maybe how to spell it or a word that would be pushing the boundaries of their vocabulary. One word a day doesn’t do much. It doesn’t do much, not in literacy, not in language learning. Get into reading and listening, whether it be in a language you’re learning or even in your own language, to push the boundaries of your vocabulary and comprehension. That will give you a base from which you can start speaking better. Thank you for listening, bye for now.

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. One subject that comes up all the time is if I learn these languages, what can I do with it? You know, the relationship between languages and work or a career, a profession and so forth. Okay, I want to talk a bit about that with reference to my own personal experience. First of all, a general statement… I am not aware of a lot of professions where you can say hire me because I speak a lot of languages. There are some. Obviously, if you are an interpreter, a translator, a teacher of languages, then I speak a lot of languages might get you a job. In most cases, what I’ve found with speaking languages was that it increased the opportunities that are going to come your way, but you still have to have other things working for you. You have to have other skills, knowledge of a specific sector or market, the ability to do business, the ability to be a reliable, energetic person in any number of fields. In my own case, for example, there’s no question that the fact that I left Montreal as an Anglophone, went to France, studied there for three years -- the last two were at [Insert French] in Paris [Insert French] -- then I wrote my Canadian Diplomatic or Foreign Service Exam in French as an Anglophone. I am sure that helped me be selected into the Canadian Diplomatic Service, so here’s a profession where languages count. They want people who are fluent, at the very least, in the two official languages. If an Anglophone wrote the Foreign Service Exam in French, that probably put me in a select group so I had a better chance of being selected. That was the first thing. When I was in Ottawa in my year-end training with the Trade Commissioner Service and I heard that the government was preparing to send someone to learn Chinese, I started taking Chinese lessons on my own so that I could go to the director of personnel and say I hear you want to send someone to learn Chinese because Canada is about to recognize the People’s Republic of China. I’ve already started; I just want you to know that. So the fact that I have already undertaken to start learning Chinese makes them probably think why wouldn’t we choose him? He’s already motivated. So that helped. Obviously, learning Chinese then I was able to go into China and help Canadian businesspeople who were negotiating with their Chinese counterparts in different situations at the Canton Trade Fair and so forth. I subsequently went to Japan, lived there and learned Japanese. Because I learned Japanese quite quickly, on my own I should add, and had a lot of contacts in the forest product sector while working at the Embassy, a Canadian company that wanted to set up their own office in Japan saw someone, me, although quite young at the time, who had contacts in the industry and who spoke Japanese, so I was given the job of setting up their representative subsidiary in Tokyo. Obviously, my knowledge of Japanese not only enabled me to communicate at various levels in the Japanese lumber trade sector and not just those trading company people who spoke English, but a wide variety of people. So I got that job. I subsequently went back to Japan for another company, again, because I spoke Japanese and had contacts. I guess the next major sort of language-learning spurt for me was 1987. I was between jobs, I had been hired by a company that did business in Europe and I said I’m going to really learn up German. So I spent a month scouring the secondhand bookstores in Vancouver finding books that had text and vocabulary lists for each chapter because I just didn’t want to look every word up in the dictionary. There were no online dictionaries, no LingQ, so I found a whole pile of excellent books in German and some good audio cassettes for learning German and did a lot of listening and reading and learned of German. Well, it turned out that in the 1990s I did a fair amount of business in Germany. We were selling wood from Canada into Germany and so I had visitors from Germany and I traveled in Germany. Once you got past the main sort of lumber agents, a lot of the consumers, the wood processors, the different customers for our products were much more comfortable speaking German than speaking English. I think it helped me do business there. Thereafter, we started doing business in Sweden, which became a big supplying country for us and so I again got after Swedish, which I had some background in because I was born there and lived there for five years.

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, Steve Kaufmann here again, I’m in the interior British Columbia in Osoyoos playing golf with friends (a lovely part of British Columbia). I was on the internet and someone talked about the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the need for some set of symbols that would accurately represent sounds in a language. As we know, especially in English, the alphabet doesn’t really represent the sounds accurately because the letter ‘o’ for instance can be pronounced as letter ‘o’ or ‘a’ or whatever, depending on whether it is ‘women’ or ‘come’ or ‘over. However, I don’t think the International Phonetic Alphabet is all that useful. I have never bothered to learn the symbols of the IPA, because to me I have to first hear the language and hear it accurately. And as a non-native speaker it’s often to hear, it’s often difficult to hear where one word ends and the next word begins and so forth. So one of the really useful tools that we have today to teach ourselves to hear the language accurately so that we can pronounce it, is text-to-speech. One of the things that I do (which unfortunately I can’t do for Ukrainian because there is no Google text-to-speech, but it works for Polish and Russian extremely well) is that I save phrases at LingQ. I then review those phrases in the dictation function that we have. So I hear the text-to-speech sounds and I have to write it down. It’s amazing how much I miss, because I don’t accurately hear what the native speaker – or in this case the text-to-speech – is saying. So it’s a very good way to train yourself to hear what the person is actually saying. That’s one thing that I can do with text-to-speech. Another thing I have started to do with text-to-speech, but again only in Polish or Russian where text-to-speech is available, is that I would have saved these phrases in my text at LingQ, and then I review then in flashcards. We also have text-to-speech and the flashcard. So I start up an audio recording, I will press the text-to-speech, I hear the text-to-speech, then I repeat it in my own pronunciation, then I go to the next flashcard and do the same for the next phrase and so on and so forth. So pretty soon I have a sound file of two minutes long or so, which consists of the text-to-speech pronunciation of the phrase and then my own pronunciation. I then listen to that sound file while reviewing my flashcards. All of this is helping me to notice what actually is being said, and I think a big part of pronunciation is actually accurately hearing what is said. I mean, we know for example that often Japanese speakers have trouble distinguishing between ‘l’ and ‘r’ when they speak, but they make the same mistake when they write and that suggests to me that they’re not hearing the ‘l’ and the ‘r’ when they listen to the language. So we have to train our ability to hear. There are even other ways in which you can use text-to-speech to help your pronunciation, but I won’t go into those today, but we are going to be experimenting on those with the members of our LingQ Academy live. You should be following their activities, I will leave a link to the videos about their activities. We’re going to be working with them on their pronunciation using text-to-speech, but we won’t be using the International Phonetic Alphabet. However, for those people who find that useful, by all means! The main thing in language learning is to do what you like to do and what you find useful. Now I’m going out to play golf, thanks for listening!