#AskSteve

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!

Timelines: 2:19 Age is not an obstacle for language learning. 2:59 Time and motivation matter, talent doesn’t. 3:20 Japanese doesn’t seem so hard. 4:01 Deni’s language background. 5:36 4 genders in Chechen language. 8:00 Starting out with Japanese characters. 9:09 Looking words up in a dictionary. 10:30 Different language control centers in your brain. 11:13 Apart from characters Japanese is not a difficult language. 12:33 The biggest stumbling block in Japanese. 14:13 You have to accept a lot of fuzziness in language learning. 14:58 Как Дени стал учить японский? / How Deni went about learning Japanese. 16:23 Как Стивен учил японский. / How Steve went about learning Japanese. 16:49 Канджи, Кандзи или Хандзы? / What is the right term for characters? 19:59 Куда стоит поехать и что делать в Японии? / Places to visit and things to do in Japan. 21:41 Handy phrases for holding a conversation in Japanese. 25:37 Struggling with Japanese keyboard. 28:44 50% of Japanese words are of Chinese origin. 33:41 Steve: I’m always enthusiastic about interacting with different people. If you're new to Russian, you can find some good resources from this LingQ post: https://www.lingq.com/blog/2018/12/14/russian-short-stories/ 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

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 conversation exchanges and language exchanges via the internet. It’s something available to us today that wasn’t available when I started learning languages. It’s amazing. By the way, do you like my Japanese T-shirt? We had a team of Old Timer Hockey players from Japan visit with us and we all got a nice T-shirt. When I think back 50 years ago when I was studying Chinese the idea that I could just get online and talk to someone through some magic computer, I mean can you imagine? Fifty years ago it was just inconceivable that you could do this and nowadays there are a number of sites which offer the opportunity to connect with teachers. Some are free; in other words, just a pure language exchange or conversation exchange. Some of them you hire a teacher or someone to speak to. I can only talk about my experience which is limited to italki, which I have found to be very good. We have a similar function at LingQ, but we don’t have as many tutors as italki. In many ways, I don’t think we do it as well. Some parts of it I think we do better, but when I can find a tutor at LingQ I use a tutor at LingQ otherwise I’ll go to italki. The idea that you can connect with people anywhere in the world who speak the language that you’re speaking, wow! Some words of caution. Personally, and I’ve said this before, until I have a certain level in the language I don’t enjoy the language exchange or conversation exchange because I want to make sure what the person is saying. That’s absolutely number one. Even if I can’t express myself well, I want to understand what the other person is saying and (B) I want to be able to say something in the language because it actually is quite stressful. Even when we’re speaking well, it’s a more stressful way to communicate with someone than sitting with them across a table. It is more stressful. I find that it’s a little bit more exhausting. I should say I have been speaking now. I’ve started speaking with a Ukrainian tutor twice a week and I still have my Russian tutor that I speak to and at the end of an hour I’m kind of exhausted. Now, in order to speak for an hour you have to be at a certain level. Very often, I’ll start at 15 minutes or half an hour and then as I progress I’ll get up to an hour. As I say, it is a little bit stressful, but it’s certainly something to do. Even though I’m a proponent of input-based learning and I’ve spent most of my time and I still do. For example, with my Ukrainian I speak two hours a week, but I’m constantly reading. I’m reading now on Ukrainian history, listening to Ukrainian history, listening to Hora Más Que radio. So input is king, but the output is necessary and these conversation exchange and language exchange sites like italki and what we have at LingQ are a very good way of getting that output experience. As an example of how that works, I’m going to follow this up with a video where I spoke to someone from Russia who commented on one of my YouTube videos that he’s learning Japanese and could we talk a bit about learning Japanese. So what follows here is a separate video. It’s quite long because it’s very difficult to keep these things short, but we speak in three languages, English, Russian and Japanese and we talk, mostly, about learning Japanese. The first 12-13 minutes are in English, then another seven-eight or however many minutes in Russian and we end up in Japanese. What is very interesting in this video, if you have the patience to follow it, is I’ve been speaking Ukrainian and mostly listening to Ukrainian, then I had an hour of Russian with my Russian tutor, this then was followed by speaking to this Denny in Moscow and even though my Japanese is stronger than my Russian I couldn’t get my brain out of Russian. I really struggled to switch over to Japanese and it’s the first time I’ve had that difficulty. Normally, I can move quite easily. Maybe it’s because I’d just had that hour of Russian beforehand and because I find the language exchange via Skype on the computer is a little more stressful than just a casual conversation. I will be interested in hearing from you, bye for now.

LingQ Academy Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp1q3qg2hGlEz2hXv_AuMlg 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

Here is a video report of the "largest English class in history" http://bit.ly/1RAv68h В Україні провели наймасовіший урок англійської мови Timelines: 0:01 The largest English class in History. 0:41 What grates on me about learning English. 1:13 Books on Ukrainian history. 2:45 Треба вивчати різні мови, не лише англійську. 3:45 Кніги, яки я читаю українською. 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

Timelines: 0:01 Steve’s professional career before LingQ. 3:44 How Steve got hooked by language learning. 4:55 LingQ started with a guy from China. 6:16 Saving endangered languages. 7:51 Problem with Korean content at LingQ. 8:13 Let’s have more languages at LingQ! 8:59 What drives Steve to learn new languages. 11:03 A word of advice from Steve for people in their 20ies. 12:17 Grammar rules might be a waste of time. LingQ Academy Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp1q3qg2hGlEz2hXv_AuMlg 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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann

LingQ Academy Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCp1q3qg2hGlEz2hXv_AuMlg 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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Just a short video to remind those of you who don’t yet know about it that we have our LingQ Academy Live taking place for the next three months. We have three students, one from Korea, one from Taiwan and one from Hungary; they are interacting with our LingQ staff here. I don’t know all of the details, in fact, these will unfold gradually, but we will be regularly posting videos about these three students, colleagues call them, as they interact with us and together we find better ways of learning English. We talk about how to use LingQ and how to get the most out of LingQ. We will be producing videos regularly, so you may find this interesting and I will leave a link to the YouTube channel where these activities are being recorded. So just to let you know and please stay tuned. Bye for now.