#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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann Transcript: Hi there. Steve Kaufmann here again and today I’m going to talk about language immersion. If you enjoy these videos on language learning, please subscribe. Also, I remind those of you who are not native speakers, this video, the audio and the transcript can be studied at LingQ. I’m going to leave a link in description box so you can study this to improve your English. I think we all know that language immersion is an ideal way to improve in a language. What do we mean by language immersion? Obviously, it means being immersed in the language. In other words, hearing the language, reading the language, speaking the language, being covered head to foot, so to speak. If we think of the analogy with swimming or being immersed in water, language immersion is being immersed in the language. Normally, this can be the situation if you live where the language is spoken. If you live surrounded by the language, you’re immersed in the language. Being where the language is spoken is no guarantee. In other words, you may in fact be immersed in the language and potentially in a language immersion situation, but don’t take advantage of it. We have many examples here in Canada of immigrants who live here for many years and don’t improve in English because they don’t take advantage of that environment, so it’s no guarantee. Part of the reason why they don’t is because, let’s face it, it’s not that easy. You do have to have a strategy. You do have to prepare yourself. You can’t just go there and expect somehow by magic that you’re going to pick up the language. When I went to Japan I didn’t go to school, but I learned Japanese. I spent a lot of time listening, reading and building up my vocabulary so I could understand what people were saying so I could interact with them. So you still have to have a strategy, even if you are immersed in the language. If you are not where the language is spoken, then I think you could have kind of a related strategy, which is what I do. Right now I’m working on Polish and I would like, one day, to go to Poland. I hope I do go, I don’t know when I will go, but I have that as a goal -- to eventually put myself in a situation where I will be immersed and experiencing language immersion. So I spend a lot of time reading on the internet, at LingQ I use our Chrome extension to quickly import articles from Polish newspapers, while maintaining my Ukrainian and Russian. So I listen and once a week or so I may speak. In other words, I’m preparing myself with the thought that one day I will be in that language-immersion environment and I’ll be ready to hit the ground running. So you do need to have a strategy, whether you’re in the immersion environment or whether you’re trying to create an artificial immersion environment and, of course, that’s much easier to do today than it ever was in the past. Also, when I think of language immersion I think of French immersion. Here in Canada, Anglophone students do all of their schooling for the first seven, eight, nine years in French and by Grade 10 and 11 it tapers off a bit, but at least half their subjects are in French, even in those final years. Apparently, because I have three grandchildren who went through the program, the first six-seven years or so the kids do speak to each other in French and then they are less and less inclined to do so, so the immersion experience becomes less of a full language-immersion experience. Also, they read in class, but they don’t have any handy tools to make that reading easier for them and it is hard to read on science, history, math, whatever it might be, in another language. I think that LingQ would be very useful in this immersion environment because it adds another dimension. So they’re not just reading, they can listen to the text, they can save words and phrases. Also, I think the audio helps give you some momentum. Especially when I was younger, reading in French as a 17-year-old was more difficult. But if you have the audio, if you can easily look up new words and see the words you previously looked up and so forth, it just gives you more momentum and makes it a more complete language-immersion experience, in my view. Anyway, those are my views on language immersion and I look forward to your thoughts. 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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann The discussion between Luca and Anthony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wnbX3Z42EM Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I’m going to talk today about proficiency in foreign languages -- levels of proficiency or levels of fluency. I’m doing this in response to a video I just watched which features Luca, who in my mind is an absolutely outstanding polyglot, and Anthony Lauder from Prague. By the way, if you enjoy these videos where I talk about language learning, please subscribe to my channel. Now, the video, and I’ll post a link to it in the description box, is a discussion, as I say, between Luca and Anthony where they sort of make the point that you don’t need to have a large vocabulary in order to be fluent. Anthony has in the past sort of said that even with a few hundred words you can be fluent or you can be fluent at a relatively low level of proficiency in a language. I don’t agree at all. First of all, let’s look at this word ‘fluency’. Fluency is a bit like the word ‘good’ or ‘well’. If you say ‘I’m fluent in a language’, that actually means you are very fluent. If you say ‘I speak a language well’, it means that you speak it well. If you say ‘I speak the language quite well’ or ‘I’m quite fluent’, that actually suggests something less than fluency. You might even suggest ‘I’m fairly fluent in the language’. To my mind, that’s less than fluent. In the video, they both talk about how Anthony can go around town in Prague and doesn’t need many words to exchange pleasantries with shopkeepers or whatever, but is this really fluency? I don’t think so. There are different ways of measuring levels of proficiency in a language. There’s the European Common Framework of Reference which divides proficiency into six levels from A1 A2, B1 B2, C1 C2… In my view, B2 is where you are fluent, so that’s actually fairly far along. In order to be fluent, you have to be able to do certain things. I think you have to be able to read a newspaper. Now, in Chinese that might cause some difficulty because the writing system isn’t phonetic. So, conceivably, you could be fluent and not be able to read a newspaper, but in most situations someone who is fluent in a language should be able to read the newspaper. In know in English the difficulty level is roughly Grade 7, Grade 8 and that the biggest factor in the difficulty level of any content is the vocabulary level. Granted, you could have complex sentences and complex structures, but I think the main difference, particularly if we’re talking about levels of fluency, is how many relatively less frequent words are used. In order to be able call one’s self fluent, one needn’t be able to read esoteric literature or scientific papers, but one should be able to read the newspaper and to read the newspaper you do need, at least, the vocabulary of someone in Grade 7. That’s a fair number of words; it’s got to be 7,000 to 10,000 words in English. Of course if we’re talking about levels of proficiency or levels of fluency in a language, then I also think the biggest indicator is the number of words you know. So if you are very fluent, I mean if you are at a university level, you are going to know a lot more words than someone who can only read at a Grade 3 level. Now, you could argue that someone could be fluent with a limited vocabulary. It’s possible that someone could be fluent with a Grade 3 level of vocabulary, but if you are an adult and you can only community with children, to my mind you’re less than fluent. If you can only talk about the weather and very basic things, even if you do so fluently, to my mind you’re not fluent. Most adult native speakers have a large vocabulary, a large active vocabulary. Certainly, the people that I would like to communicate with have large active vocabularies; therefore, I have to have a fairly large passive vocabulary in order to understand what they’re saying. I think that fluency implies two-way communication. You can learn a bunch of sentences, you can use Anki or whatever to express yourself fairly quickly, but the trick is to understand what other people are saying. That is why I put so much emphasis on listening and reading. You can see in the background here just some of the language CDs that I own. I also have books and daily I download content from the internet and I listen. Read the full transcript here: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/12255155/reader/

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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve here. If you’re interested in language learning, please subscribe to my channel. I have another channel where I talk about politics. Both of these channels, the videos, the audio, the transcript are available as lessons as LingQ, please check in the description box. Today, I want to talk about output because I had a question from one of my viewers about Swan’s Output Theory or hypothesis, so I looked that up because I wasn’t aware of it. Basically, what Swain says is that we learn from output because output enables us to identify our gaps, gaps between what we want to say and what we’re able to say. Second of all, output has a hypothesis-testing function. When a learner says something, there is a tacit hypothesis underlying his utterance about grammar. In other words, we test whether we know the grammar. It’s kind of like the same as finding our gaps, I don’t see the difference. The third thing is a metalinguistic function. Learners reflect on the language they learn and thereby the output enables them to control and internalize linguistic knowledge. To me, it’s all the same. Yes, we need output. The issue without output, to me, is it’s a question of how much output when. Traditional language instruction puts a lot of emphasis on output and correct output at an early stage. The teacher teaches something and you’ve got to reproduce it and reproduce it correctly. I think that’s wrong because my experience has been that until I’ve had a lot of the language brought into me that it’s very difficult to remember things and it’s very difficult to get the structure right. So a very minimal amount of output in the initial stages is enough, besides which output at the initial stage can be quite stressful because you can’t say anything, long silences, you comment on the weather over and over again. The other thing is any output implies an engagement with someone. So you can’t just output without having a conversation coming back at you and if you don’t understand what’s being said you can’t have a meaningful conversation. So for those reasons I’m not a big fan of speaking at an early stage. The fact is that input, reading, listening and paying attention, is so powerful as a way of ingesting, getting the language in you, learning. It’s faster, in my opinion, than speaking. At an early stage if all the words you’re using are the words that you are able to use, you are going to have a very limited amount of the language that you are engaging with, whereas with listening and reading you can engage with much more of the language and it’s easier to organize and carry with you and so forth and so on. But at a certain point, for sure, you need to speak and you need to a lot. When you do speak later on you do identify your gaps, you see which structures you aren’t able to use, which words you aren’t able to find, so this is extremely valuable. However, I would say the language density, the intensity and the quantity of words, etc. that you deal with when you are engaged in meaningful input and listening to and reading things of interest is much greater than what you can do in an output exercise, so I have conversations. I spoke Czech for an hour yesterday, I spoke Russian for an hour today and I think that a few hours a week of output, in other words conversation, is plenty. Then, I receive my report from my LingQ tutor, I go over the words that I had trouble with and all of this helps me to noticing things in my listening and reading. In a given language, call it either Czech, Russian, Polish, whatever, if I have a couple of hours per week of output that’s enough, but I might have a couple of hours or an hour to two hours a day of input activity and that’s the biggest part of my learning. Eventually, as I progress, obviously I want to do more and more output. If I had the opportunity to travel to the country where the language is spoken, then I could spend a lot more time with output. So output is important. Swain’s hypothesis kind of splits hairs, in a way, but still input over output, input before output, input more than output, that’s my take on it. I look forward to hearing from you, 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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann Transcript: Hi, there, Steve Kaufmann here, talking again about language learning. Today, I’m going to talk about collocations, phrasal verbs and other so-called language hacks. Before I do that, I should say if you like hearing me talk about language learning, if you have some requests -- there was a request for me to do a video Chinese and I may just do that -- let me know what you’d like to hear. Also, subscribe if you like the channel and come and visit us at LingQ. I should also point out that I have started a separate channel here at YouTube where I do my political rants and I’ll leave a link in the description box. For people who study English, there are books on collocations and phrasal verbs. I have them. I didn’t bring it here to show you, but I looked through it and the idea is presented by language teachers that somehow if we focus on collocations. There are many websites that tell teachers how to teach collocations and the same is true with phrasal verbs, get in, get off, get it. There are books with lists of these phrasal verbs and the idea is that somehow there is a special phenomenon called collocations or phrasal verbs and if you somehow master these then you’re English will improve. I don’t believe it. It’s one thing to focus on something that performs a particular function in a language like so-called modal verbs, would, could, should, might. Yes, it’s a good idea to study those in some kind of concentrated form so you get a sense of the pattern of how those are used. In romance languages it’s a good idea to concentrate, at times, on the subjective or in Slavic languages on verbs of motion because those are specific functional patterns, very defined. Collocations, which means, by the way, words that are normally used together or phrasal verbs, which is a form of collocation because certain verbs are used with certain prepositions and they have a certain specific meaning. These are potentially endless and I don’t think if you read a book of collocations or a book of phrasal verbs that you will retain much. Rather, it’s a matter of paying attention when you are listening, reading and getting used to hearing certain words used with other words. Of course if you’re on LingQ you save phrases that you think are useful to you and many of these phrases will be collocations, words that are normally used together. In fact, at LingQ if you save a word you will see a number of phrases that other LingQ members have saved and some of those might be useful phrases for you to save. As you save these phrases, maybe review them in flashcards and notice them in different contexts when reading or listening, you’ll start to have these chunks that you can use. These chunks may well be what some of the language teachers would call collocations or phrasal verbs, but really there’s no shortcut, there is no hack. In order to use to using these phrases effectively, you simply have to do a lot of listening and reading. So that’s my take on collocations, phrasal verbs and other language hacks. Thanks for listening, bye for use.

Visit https://www.LingQ.com Blog post: https://blog.thelinguist.com/google-translate-doesnt-work 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 Transcript: Hi, there, Steve Kaufmann, here. Today, I’m going to talk about Google Translate, but before I do just a reminder. If you enjoy my videos about language learning, please subscribe. One other point is with regard to transcripts. We don’t provide the full transcript here nor subtitles, but we do have a course at LingQ where all of these videos are available. The video, the transcript and the sound and that is for those of you who use these videos to improve your English. Google Translate – I hear all the time Google Translate is no good. It’s not accurate. It’s this and that. I think Google Translate is a tremendous resource and not only for language learners. If I get a text in a language that I don’t understand, then I can quickly put it into Google Translate and get a sense of what the meaning is, something in Finnish, Hungarian, whatever it might be. It’s not 100% and it’s better for some languages than others, but I find it extremely useful. Second of all, Google Translate is an excellent dictionary. It normally gives you a lot of information about the word, some synonyms, the pronunciation, text to speech, so it’s a very good dictionary and quite accurate. This depends on the language. It doesn’t work as well in Korean as in let’s say German or Russian, but by enlarge it’s a very good dictionary. Not only does it do words, it does phrases and that’s very useful. Often, if I’m working at LingQ and I look up some individual words and I don’t have a good sense of the meaning of these words in combination, I can highlight the phrase, put it into Google Translate (we’re connected to it) and I can see the meaning. Not only that, but you can also work the other way with phrases. ‘In other words’, there’s a phrase, how do we say that in Czech. There it is jinými slovy. So if you want to improve your language level by having some handy phrases like ‘in other words’, ‘in my opinion’ or ‘by the way’, then you just put it into Google Translate and you get that phrase. So that’s its function as a dictionary. It also helps me when I have to write in a language which uses an alphabet other than the Latin alphabet. For me, to write in Russian I can do it, but it’s much faster for me to simply type quickly in English and translate it into Russian. I can go into the Russian and fix up those parts that are not correct and voila, my Russian text, if I have to comment on a forum or something of that nature. It also insures that my spelling is correct. Now, it works better for some languages than others. It doesn’t work so well for Asian languages, but it works very well for European languages, in my experience. The last thing I will say is that I find it very useful sometimes if I want to focus on a particular area of vocabulary, let’s say having to do with forestry or something. I can plunk in a text in English on one side at Google Translate, translate it into Russian, Chinese or whatever language, then I can import that into LingQ and I study saving words and phrases. Overall, the text that Google Translate produces is somewhat unnatural and has errors, but in terms of acquiring the vocabulary I find it tremendously useful. To me, Google Translate is not going to replace translators that are required for legal work or business documents, but it does facilitate people working across different languages and makes it easier for us to learn languages and I don’t see that it will replace the need for learning languages. If I’m in a foreign country like China or Brazil and I want to communicate with the locals, I’m not going to do it through some device that translates it back and forth. I want to speak the local language, learn about the culture, learn about the history and so forth. So Google Translate is a tremendous boon. It’s one of the many sort of technological advances that have made language learning so much easier today than it ever was. 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 Transcript: Hi, there, Steve Kaufmann, I’m back from Palm Springs. I’m back here in Vancouver and I’m going to be working out of my tower, call it Montaigne's Tower. This is the top floor here of our house. You can’t see the nice wooden beams, although I could show them to you. I’m going to talk about Spanish verbs and for romance languages I think verbs are the biggest bugbear. So I kind of looked around at what I had in my room here and I just happen to have a book called Portuguese Verbs. You look in it, you know, commands, imperatives, affirmative, imperative verbs ending in this, that and the other, pages and pages of irregular verbs, conjunctions, verbs expressing desire, doubt and volition. I mean it’s very intimidating and all those different endings. Having spent a lot of time trying to learn verb tables, I’m convinced that it can’t be done. At the very best, you can have a book like this on Spanish verbs and keep it in your bathroom to leaf through while you’re on the john, but it’s impossible to memorize, in my opinion. What should you do? Again, I poked into LingQ, because I haven’t been studying Spanish recently at LingQ, saved a few verbs and, low and behold, amongst the dictionaries we have access to is one called SpanishDict.com and it’s amazing. You open any verb up and you will see the conjugation, you will see examples, you’ll see a little video and, of course, you’ll see the meaning. If you do enough reading in Spanish, enough listening, if you’re attentive to the language, if you occasionally review this kind of explanation, but rely largely on the fact that repeated exposure, particularly in different contexts, is eventually going to enable you to get that natural sense for Spanish verbs then you can master Spanish verbs. I shouldn’t use the word ‘master’ because I don’t believe that’s a word that applies in language learning, but the more familiar you become with Spanish verbs, the better your Spanish will become. You won’t have to worry as you to go use a verb what the form of the third-person singular past tense is and so forth, it will start to come out naturally. So my advice on Spanish verbs is lots of reading and listening and if you happen to be at LingQ, select SpanishDict as your dictionary of choice. Even if you get a quick explanation of the verb via our User Hints or via Google Translate, open up SpanishDict and every time you come across a verb quickly review the different conjugation endings, but don’t try to memorize it, then go back to enjoying whatever content you’re reading and, of course, listen to it. I hope that’s helpful, 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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann Transcript: Hi, there, Steve Kaufmann, here. People often ask me, how do you find the time to study languages? Certainly, when I was working I was very much involved in my lumber business. I work out. I play Old Timers Hockey. I do all kinds of other stuff. How do I find the time to learn languages? So two bits of advice… First of all, figure out those tasks you can combine with language learning and that means primarily listening. In my own case, I can drive and listen. I can wait in a doctor’s office and listen or link on my iPhone. I can exercise. I can do the dishes. I can clean the garage. I can walk the dog. So there are a number of things that I’m quite capable of doing while listening to language and I am able to focus much of the time. The second thing is when you are focused on language learning, for example, when I’m reading about Polish history and saving words to my database and looking up again the yellow saved links when learning words, it’s very important to be convinced that this is what you want to do. This is your bliss for the moment. This is where you want to be. This is your sense of flow. It’s too easy nowadays to be distracted, you know, look up your email, go on Twitter or wish you were watching a hockey game on TV. I think this is true not only for language learning, but for any task today. Really say wow, this is what I want to do. I’m enjoying it. I know that it’s going to help me. I’m learning about Polish history. I’m learning Polish words. Just running that Polish through my system is improving my sense of the language. I’m acquiring words. This is where I want to be. So those are the two quick tips here. No. 1, find out those things that you can combine with language learning and, second of all, when you are focusing on language learning make sure you convince yourself that this is where you want to be.

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. Today, I want to talk about conjugations and declensions. I talk here about language learning. If these videos interest you, please subscribe. You probably know that I’m a co-founder of LingQ and if you want to work on your languages, come on over and visit us at LingQ. One of my experiences in language learning early on was that the deliberate study of declension tables didn’t work for me. First of all, for those who don’t know, conjugations are the list of different verb endings that change, depending on person, number and, of course, tense and so forth. So verbs in many languages change quite a bit, depending on those conditions. Declensions, that’s how the nouns and adjectives change. So in many languages, ideally, you have to be able to use the correct form, the correct ending for these verbs, nouns and adjectives. Many people find that very difficult, so do I. The best way to get good at it, in my opinion, is not to get hung up on trying to memorize them. My German learning was severely, I would say, retarded by my effort to try to ace these tables. It’s just so different from what we’re used to in our own language in many cases, like if you were coming from English. In my experience, no amount of studying, reviewing or memorizing enabled me to learn these endings. However, when I decided not to try to ace the endings but rather to learn a bunch of words to try to understand the language, then I started doing much better because here was no longer this obstacle that I have to ace these endings before I can proceed in the language, I just proceeded in the language. I always use this proof that the deliberate study of the endings doesn’t help a lot and the example I use is in English, where the only ending that changes is the third person singular. He goes. It goes. It walks. It says. Yet, the number of learners who speak English very well and have been at it for 10 years or longer, even native speakers, use it go. Especially if the noun or the subject is separated a little bit from the verb, the s ending disappears and that’s in something as simple as the rules of conjugation in English. So the likelihood, to me, that you can ace it -- you can’t. I twittered a bit on this and got the usual reaction. Oh, no, I have to study the tables; otherwise…and so forth. I just don’t believe it. I think very often we think we’re learning something because we’re reviewing tables or reading the dictionary, but in my experience and I think for a lot of people it doesn’t really stick and it is an obstacle, it is something that intimates people. Eventually, you get used to it because you start to notice certain expressions. For example, in Russian the instrumental plural was the first one that clicked in because you heard it so often [Insert Russian], which implied that it was with somebody plural tense. That was one of the first that came. In French you get used to the fact naturally after a while through enough exposure. [Insert French] That’s a positive statement, ‘I think that it is’. But [Insert French]. It becomes subjunctive, so it’s a different again. This whole idea of the deliberate study of something is no guarantee you’re going to learn it. Now, I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t review these rules, getting back to my belief that noticing is the beginning of learning in language learning. So we have to start noticing things and, at first, you don’t notice. So to that extent, reviewing the grammar, going over the rules, and reviewing it again many, many times because the first time you forget most of what you look at. Nothing wrong with reviewing it from time to time, but studying it or reviewing it with the intent that you’re going to ace it, master it, in my experience has not been successful. That’s just a little more background to the tweet I put out the other day about learning conjugations and declensions. Don’t study them, just listen and read and get used to them. Bye for now.

Read all the details here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/come-to-vancouver-and-learn-with-me How to Apply LingQ Academy starts May 16, 2016, which doesn’t give a lot of time. We need to receive all applications by April 5, 2016 at the latest. We will be conducting Skype interviews for those who get through to the second stage. We are hoping to find three to six learners to take part in the course who will be notified by April 15, 2016. That will give you a month to prepare for the trip. I realize the timeline is short, but that’s the way it is. You should be passionate about learning, whether it be learning languages or learning about web and mobile marketing, optimization etc. Tell us what you’re interested in! A genuine interest in technology and technology related fields is a must. Experience in these activities can be an asset but is by no means a requirement. As part of your application, prepare an imported lesson on LingQ. Explain why we should include you in this program. It can be in any language. Include a video, audio and transcript of course. Include the lesson url in your application email. Don’t worry, it won’t all be work! We will find lots of opportunity to enjoy and explore the fantastic summers here on the west coast of Canada. If you are interested, please submit an email to LingQAcademy@lingq.com answering the following questions. No prior experience is required, all levels of English speakers should feel free to apply. Please answer the following questions: What do you do now? Why do you do it? Why do you want to learn English? Which language do you want to learn and why? (For native English speakers) What is your current level in (English)? What other languages do you speak? What are you hoping to learn? After you learn it, what are you going to do with it? What are some of the things that you have done in your life that you are most proud of? If you could do anything in your life, what would that be? What else should I know about you? For those of you who aren’t able to apply, we’ll also be making the learning materials from the course available on LingQ so you will be able to follow along and study the same program. We’ll provide more details when the time comes.

Upgrade your LingQ account here: http://ow.ly/ZvRnQ Transcript: Hi, this is Steve Kaufmann co-founder of LingQ. I strongly recommend that you upgrade and I’ll give you two big reasons. You can read the attached email to look at 10 good reasons why you should upgrade, but I’m going to give you two based on my own experience. The first one is unlimited linking because if you don’t upgrade you’re only entitled to 20 links and the second one is unlimited imports. If you study my statistics in learning seven languages over the last 10 years at LingQ, Asian, Slavic, Romance, difference languages, I create a lot of links, tens of thousands of links. That’s how I learn. I look up the word once, I see it again highlighted in yellow and, eventually, almost without being aware of it, they become part of my vocabulary. So unlimited linking is a key condition -- a pre-condition for learning a language. The second thing you get with upgrading is unlimited imports. After you’ve explored our own library at LingQ and studied the different contents, very often beginner contents, you then have to go out and find things of interest to you. I import hundreds of articles, sometimes with audio, sometimes without audio. It’s my interest in these subjects that keeps me motivated and which drives me to fluency. So there are many other good reasons why you should upgrade by those, in my view, are the two most important. I look forward to seeing you as a full member of LingQ. 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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann Transcript: Hi, there, this Steve Kaufmann here again to talk about language learning. If you like my videos, by the way, please subscribe. I’m very happy to have subscribers. Do take the opportunity to visit LingQ, which is where I do my language learning. I’m going to talk about language learning and I am going to talk a bit about motivation. I do like talking about political subjects, so I’m considering setting up a separate channel here on YouTube where I would talk about whatever comes to mind that’s political, but today I want to talk about motivation based on things that I have just experienced the last little while. With language learning, of course, there’s the motivation, that initial motivation, in other words, to try to get started with the language. Then there is the motivation to keep going and I want to talk about some of the things that influence that. One thing that I have said before is there’s an expression in French which is “________”, which means the appetite comes as we eat. I think it’s very important sometimes to try and get started. I hadn’t done any Polish for about five-six weeks. I’d kind of been putting it off and listened to my Russian and Ukrainian, but haven’t done any Polish. Then I noticed the video I did where I spoke Polish with my tutor had become very popular in Poland. I got 100,000 views and people complementing me on my Polish, so that immediately motivated me. I said, gees, I have to get back to doing some Polish. I hadn’t been doing it, so at first it’s difficult to start up again, but whatever you do as you get into it if you put that initial effort into doing something then it starts to become a habit. So that’s the first bit of advice is to kind of push against that initial inertia. Stay with it for a week or so and then you’ll start to develop certain habits that make it easier for you to continue. So that was the one thought I had on motivation and the other one was the role of a tutor. Most of my language learning, as you know if you’ve been listening to me here, is listening and reading. However, I did decide that I’m going to do more Polish and so again at LingQ I went after some of our Polish members and asked them if they would do some online discussions with me and they said yes. So I started doing this with them and what I find is that whereas before that for like 10 days or so I had just been listening and reading. If I’d had a few Polish discussions where I have been made aware of the words that I don’t have, my mistakes, my problems, where I’m confusing Polish with Ukrainian and with Russian. Having struggles there with those tutors, when I get back to my reading now and listening I am more alert. I notice more. It’s stimulating. Not only do I want to improve so I can do better when I speak to my Polish tutor, but also speaking with a Polish tutor helps to make you more aware or helps you to notice better what’s happening in the language when you listen and read, at least that’s been my experience. So that’s all I had to say and I’d be interested in any comments if some of you have had similar experiences. 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 "Steve's Cafe" Channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann We need the big picture, authentic content, but we also need the nuts and bolts, repetition of patterns. I discuss an outside the box way of doing this. Transcript: Hi, there, this Steve Kaufmann, I am going to talk about language here. However, I did see the republican debate. You know the expression in English “Empty barrels make the most noise”? Trump is certainly the emptiest barrel on the stage, just a blustering buffoon. It’s depressing to think that he’s in the lead. In fact, just watching the schoolboy spat that went on that was supposed to be a political debate is pretty depressing all around. But I’m not going to talk about that, I’m going to talk about sort of the yin and yang of language learning, let’s call it. Obviously, language learning is about communicating. It’s about meaning. It’s about substance. Therefore, we want to learn the language from content that’s of interest to us and when we talk we want to communicate things that make sense. We want to have meaningful conversations and, yet, we do need a certain amount of exercising, of overworking certain muscles, overworking certain patterns in the language. We sometimes refer to it as the big picture and the nuts and bolts or sort of top down, bottom up, but we kind of need both. Just a quick comment… Someone pointed out to me that when Mark Zuckerberg made his Chinese speech to those university students in Beijing, who were an elite group of students and he spoke to them in Chinese, many of the students there were not very impressed. They wanted to hear something of substance from Mark Zuckerberg and his Chinese is not really good enough to actually have a meaningful exchange with these students, all of whom speak English much better than he speaks Chinese. So in the interest of communication, he should have spoken in English after perhaps a brief introduction in Chinese because the authenticity, the substance of the communication is so important. That’s why I like to listen to things that relate to history and so forth and so on, but some degree of exercise we also need. I was thinking about this as I went off to my 24-Hour Fitness, which is not too far from me here in Indio, California. Not only do they have a room full of all this exercise equipment, but then they have individual rooms where twice last week I went to a thing called boot camp where this lovely lady just pushed us through our paces. I was just exhausted between jumping and stretching and pushups and God knows what. How does that relate to language learning? I was thinking of the tremendous cost of university education, a very poor return on the money invested. The professors are not that interested in teaching, they’re more interested in doing research for their peers, which is of very little interest to anyone. It’s a bloated bureaucracy. It costs a fortune. Whether it’s paid for by the student or the taxpayer, it is very expensive. Now, if we had a 24-hour intellectual fitness, language fitness place. I pay $25 a month to belong to 24 Hour Fitness and I can use all their equipment and I can go to all these sessions of Zumba, U-Jam. I don’t know what else there is here, but there’s a whole schedule of stuff and I can drop in to all of them if I want all for $25. I do a lot of my language learning while exercising, so if we had a class where we worked on the subjunctive in French or Spanish, verbs of motion in Russian or Polish, whatever it might be and so if someone was up there leading us through these exercises and we were repeating certain phrases or answering questions and repeating them for an hour focusing on let’s say five basic patterns in a language because, after all, there’s not an unlimited number of these patterns. There are a limited number of them, so you could choose to go to a boot camp or Zumba where the emphasis would be on the subjunctive in Spanish or something. I mean it’s unrealistic idea, but I throw it out there. Similarly, you could get on a treadmill and you could switch to different languages. They would make sure that they have content on there that was at your level and you would pay $25 a month to go down there and access exercise their equipment and participate in their classes. You could either be watching movies on your stepper for half an hour or you could be working on the subjunctive, so you would be combining both the substantial content-based authentic interesting stuff while exercising or you would be focusing on exercising certain aspects of the language.