May 18 2016The New World of Language Learning
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: Yes, I’m very excited that we’ve started our LingQ Academy Live. Our three members, Hanna, Emily and Thomas, are here. I had a short meeting with them and I explained my vision that, basically, we’re in a new world of language learning where learners are teachers, teachers are learners and we learn from the world around us. That’s essentially what we’re going to be doing over the next three months, so you might find our little discussion interesting. There will be more videos along these lines over the next three months, so stay tuned. I can remember when I was roughly your age, I can actually remember. At that time, I spoke two languages. Essentially, I spoke English and French and I was just starting to get involved in Chinese. For me, first of all, everything surrounding French and French culture was a great discovery. The more I got involved and got interested in things French, French movies, French history, whatever, the better my French became obviously. The same was true with Chinese, where I discovered this whole new world of Chinese. Since that time, of course, I’ve learned many other languages, so you have the opportunity to eventually speak many languages. I know you’re interested not only in English, but in other languages. Before I get into the details of how we’re going to approach our English program, stop me if there’s anything you don’t understand, I think what’s happening in the world of education is that if I think back to when I studied languages you learned at school. School was the source. There is school. Teacher-school, that’s where you learned, that was the only place to learn. In fact, in my case even then wasn’t really the case because as long as I relied on school, for example for French, I couldn’t speak French, but when I got interested in French movies… Of course I lived in Montreal, so even though there were a million Anglophones in Montreal if I wanted to access the French culture there I could. So to the extent that I got away from the classroom, I learned more. The amount of language learning opportunity that we have today is so much bigger than was the case 50 years ago. There’s no comparison. When I think of how I use the internet, my iPad and different technology, including LingQ of course, audio books, eBooks, there is so much more stuff, conversations via the internet. There are so many more reasons why today education is not the best school. Education is the world, accessible through all the modern things of communication, mp3 files, YouTube, you name it. I think that’s what we’re going to experience here is that, in a way, the role of the teacher and the learner changes a bit. Learners become teachers, teachers become learners and learners learn from each other, it’s that kind of an environment. So what we’re going to do in the next three months is work with you on English, specifically, and Annie is going to film this so that other people will be following what we’re doing. It’s all part of this idea that people are helping each other, sharing with each other, learning from each other. In the initial period, I’m going to talk about my experience, my experience of learning languages and what I think works, but after a month or so I want to hear about your ideas of what you think works. So we’ll be talking about these things and other people who are following it will also hopefully be stimulated by this and they might come forward with their ideas. We sometimes call it our LingQ Academy Live Reality Show, but it’s a reality show with a message. It’s not just about who gets kicked off the island; it’s actually about something that I think can be helpful and beneficial to you. Now, with regard to our goal, in terms of my working with you I have three goals that I want to teach. 1. I think you are already very much independent learners. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come here. Otherwise, you’d simply go to the local school. So you are independent, but I’m hoping that we can make you even more effective independent learners. In other words, people who go and find content of interest, who know what they want to learn. If they don’t understand something having to do with grammar, they know where to find it on the internet. They’re finding their own material, finding things of interest to them and through pursuing these things therefore they’re learning. So we’re going to talk about ways to become even better independent learners, that’s one thing. 2. The second thing is we’re going to talk about how to improve our English.
Watch Video 
