#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, this is an experiment. I bought myself a selfie stick with a tripod and, just to vary things a bit, I’m going to shoot some videos both inside the house and possibly again outside hoping that this works. In the winter as I’ve said before, largely because my wife likes to come down here because it’s sunny and stuff, we come down here for four months of the year. We like coming down here. We like coming to California to the States. The people here are very friendly. The community where we live, our neighbors are very helpful. We love it. And, of course, being down here I’ve been watching on TV the various debates of the presidential hopefuls, at least the people who are involved in both the Republican Primary and the Democratic Party primary, so I want to comment a little bit. I do, on occasion, make the sort of political video, so what are my thoughts on these various candidates. Let’s start with the democrats because there are only two of them. I think that Bernie Sanders is very irresponsible and very simplistic. I think it would be a very bad thing if he were voted in as President of the United States. The reason I say that is because to him everything is the fault of Wall Street, everything is the fault of big business, if only we strengthened the unions, but if you really listen to what he’s saying there’s so much inconsistency. I watched him the other night and he was saying everyone in the States should have access to a university education free of charge. Maybe, maybe, but if you listen to him he basically has nothing but scorn for factory jobs. He said people shouldn’t have to work in a factory or something to the effect of it’s not the greatest job in the world. On two or three occasions, he implied that a factory job is not a great job and therefore the solution is that everybody should get a university education and then they wouldn’t work in factories. Well, the fact of the matter is that (A) probably only 30 or 40% of jobs require a university education. Even though parents would all like their kids to go to university, a lot of what kids do at university is largely a waste of time. There have been studies to show that they don’t improve their ability to communicate, to use the language, they really don’t learn an awful lot, especially in the humanities, which is a large part of why people go to to university. I think that universities should be heavily subsidized, but I don’t think they should be free of charge and I don’t think it’s a panacea. I’ve worked not as a factory worker, but I’ve spent time working in factories and many people actually enjoy those jobs because that is their social nexus. That’s where they meet people. They do things that are meaningful. They become very expert in certain jobs and that becomes their life. They’re just as proud of that as he is of being a politician. So that’s insofar as Sanders. I didn’t appreciate his whole approach to that and his somewhat demagogic approach to ‘social justice’, as he calls it. With Hillary, again, I’m against this whole dynastic approach. Bill Clinton was there, so now we’re going to get Hillary Clinton. Even in terms of her final comments, she twice, I think, made reference to the LGBT community. I have nothing against the LGBT community, but that’s not an awful lot of people. It might be a bit of a litmus test in terms of the tolerance of a society, but she seemed to emphasize her support for certain interest groups – the unions, the LGBT community and so forth. I felt that that again was unnecessarily sort of narrowing her appeal and made me feel a little bit suspicious of just how much of a person with empathy for all different points of view she is. Moving on to the Republicans in no particular order… Read the full transcript here: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/11852572/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 Timelines: 1:00 We create our own language worlds. 1:43 Slavic languages. 3:05 Learn Russian first. 3:47 How I went about Ukrainian. 4:22 Czech and Russian comparison. 5:51 Historical background of the Slavic language division. 8:24 Slavic language order I would follow. 9:11 Learning sources for Slavic languages. 10:25 Similarities between Slavic people. 11:00 Different language families I relate to. Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. I decided to move outside for this video. I can’t see very well here squinting with the sun in my eyes. Hopefully, this works out; I’ll have a look later on. Slavic Languages -- My experience in learning to various degrees of fluency four different Slavic languages. I’m going to talk a little bit longer than my recent three-four minutes videos, so those who aren’t interested or don’t like the longer videos can turn off the video right now. One thing I should say, too, to me these videos are a form of sitting around a coffee table and talking, so I often don’t know what I’m going to say when I start out. I really wish that some of the people who are part of my YouTube community lived nearby so that we could get together regularly and chat about different things, but of course we can’t. One of the great things about learning languages is that it’s a way of discovering the world. Of course, we create our own language worlds and we do that by finding things of interest, at least I do, whether it be in libraries on the internet or wherever it might be. Through that we create our own language world and we discover things about the world. When I wrote my book on language learning, I had this reference to Zhuangzi and Taoist philosophy and I think it was Laozi that said we can discover the whole world by looking outside our window or something. I mean we have this tremendous ability to learn about so many things today without going very far. Slavic Languages -- If we look at a map of the world we see this area north of the Black Sea, this vast area of steppe land where apparently the Proto-Slavic people originated from. Today, we have a variety of of Slavic languages and they differ from each other because of the different sort of historical influences that effected the development of these languages. Another thing that I firmly believe is that culture or language is not in any way associated with our genes or DNA so that language doesn’t equal some kind of ethnic division necessarily. Often it matches, but it doesn’t have to match. So we have what they normally talk about as the eastern Slavic languages, which is Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian, the western Slavic languages, which is Polish, Czech, Slovakian, and then the southern Slavic languages, which is the languages of the former Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croat, Slovenian, Bulgarian and so forth. My experience has been that I studied Russian first and I would recommend that because Slavic language speakers, that’s a large group of people. Geographically, it covers obviously most of Russia and it’s not just the sort of ethnic Russians who are Russian speakers. Russian is sort of a lingua franca in Central Asia and other countries of the former tsarist empire the Soviet Union. So it covers all of that right into Eastern Europe. So I started learning Russian because that was the biggest one and where I had exposure to Russian literature as a teenager and wanted to read those books in the original language. Then with the development of the whole Ukrainian crisis, I started watching Ukrainian television and couldn’t understand what the Ukrainians were saying only what the Russians were saying. Yet, it sounded so similar I felt as if I should understand it and there were words there that were similar, but I just didn’t quite get the gist of what they were saying. This gets back, too, to this idea that you can’t just have a few words. Some people say if you have a thousand words, 70% of any context, but in fact that is never true because very often the key words are just those words that you don’t understand, so I started learning Ukrainian. I should step back. I did Czech before Ukrainian and the reason for that was my parents were born in what became Czechoslovakia. They were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so I always wanted to learn that language. I never understood any of it and I figured now with Russian it would be easier. Well, it’s easier, but the grammar of those Slavic languages that I have studied is remarkably similar. Read the full transcript here: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/11811923/reader/

I realize I made a mistake and said "English" instead of "Russian" Sorry. The brain does funny things. Pushkin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yz93ZkJlnPk Verbs of motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEw-EWz66jQ About Anna: https://www.lingq.com/profile/AnnaStrelkovskaya/ Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Today I want to talk about Pushkin, verbs of motion and the internet. Why? I want to introduce an outstanding teacher; a person who uses modern technology, who understands the psychology of the learner and who is very creative. I’ve discovered her for my Russian learning and, therefore, for those of you who are learning Russian or even interested in seeing different ways of using technology, I very much suggest that you go to the links that I’m going to put in the description of this video and watch the videos that Anna has created for her class (she is an English teacher at St. Petersburg at University) and just see how cleverly she uses modern technology to put together very interesting videos about Russia. I happen to have chosen the one about Pushkin, but you’ll see that there are others in her collection. Also, a video she’s made on verbs of motion, which is a very difficult aspect of Russian. Of course I can access this. Here’s this person in St. Petersburg developing wonderful material for her class and it’s available to the world through the internet. I’m not stuck with say some less capable teacher maybe at my local school; I can access teachers anywhere in the world through the internet. I think that’s just spectacular. If you look at the video about Pushkin, you’ll see that she repeats dates, which is very handy because dates are very difficult I find in many languages. A number of things are repeated. It’s done with humor. It’s done artistically with pleasant music in the background. Even if you aren’t interested in Pushkin, I think you’d become interested in Pushkin. But, again, not everyone is going to be interested in Pushkin, so you’ll see that she has a variety of videos about Russia, Russian life, Russian history and so forth. Similarly, in her approach to verbs of motion you’ll see that there is a minimal amount of explanation and a lot of repetition and a lot of assists in some of the visual presentation and so forth. Anyway, I think these are extremely well done, but I think the fact that the work of a person somewhere in the world – a teacher – can suddenly be available to people all over the world is a wonderful example of the kind of educational environment we live in. So please enjoy these videos and thank you for listening. Bye for now.

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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Today I want to talk about the use of dictionaries in language learning. But before I get to that subject, I would like to ask you what it is you would like to see me talk about in these videos. I used to make longer videos, more rambling videos eight-10 minutes long, now I’ve gone to a shorter formula. Some people have told me they would rather see some longer ones. Some people say they’d like me to talk about politics, the U.S. primaries, or the refugee situation in Europe, the Middle East or the Ukraine. I know some people use these as a source of encouragement for their own language learning, but some people who are not native speakers of English use them to improve their English as listening and reading materials since we provide transcripts. So please let me know what you would like to see in these videos. I’m going to try to do them twice a week. I could do one short one and one long one. Anyway, I’m interested in hearing your opinion. Now, let’s get to dictionaries. A lot of people place a lot of importance on the dictionary. They like certain dictionaries. They read dictionaries. Some people like monolingual dictionaries. So if they’re learning French, they want the dictionary to be French-French, monolingual, the explanation in the same language as the language they’re learning. Personally, I’m not that interested in dictionaries. Dictionaries are a resource to help me get through my content because, as you know, I’m a content-based language learning, input, listening and reading. Historically, before the age of the internet and online dictionaries, I would look words up in an ordinary dictionary and, as I’ve said many times, no sooner do I close the dictionary then I’ve already forgotten the meaning that I found there. Now by reading online, especially at the beginning stage in a language, we can immediately access the meaning with online dictionaries. That’s a lot better because if you have to spend 10-20 seconds, or in the case of a Chinese dictionary even longer to find the word and then you forget it very quickly, that’s not very efficient. To me, the only requirement of a dictionary is that it contains an explanation for the word that I’m looking for. I recognize that the explanation there will not tell the whole story. It may not even be relevant to the text that I’m reading. I find that particularly the case for Korean where very often the dictionary explanation in Naver, which is a very good Korean dictionary, in fact doesn’t correspond to the context that I’m reading. So, to me, the dictionary definition is often just a hint to get me through, hopefully, in many cases, not always, the text that I’m reading. I know that if I meet that word again and again and again, eventually, I’ll form a picture of the scope of meaning of that word and how it’s used. So I don’t really rely on the dictionary. At times, I have opened a dictionary to kind of read through it and see how many words I know. It seems very interesting to discover new words in the dictionary and the dictionary has the advantage that they’re in alphabetical order, very often, so that you can see related words lined up one behind the other or below the other, but the point is not very much of that sticks. If I can’t remember a word that I looked up in the dictionary which is related to a context, I can’t even remember it for 20 seconds, how much am I going to retain of what I read in a dictionary. Not very much, so I don’t think that’s a very useful way to spend my time. The same is true of the monolingual dictionary. If I look something up and the explanation is in Polish and the explanation contains two more words in Polish that I don’t understand, then I’m going to look up those Polish words and that explanation will have more words in it that I don’t understand and some abstract concepts are very difficult to explain, so I’m not a fan of monolingual dictionaries. To me, the ideal dictionary is the online dictionary. If I’m reading away from the computer reading a book and I come across words that I don’t understand, in most cases, I just move on and forget about it, hoping that one day I will come across that word in my online reading and be able to look it up. I have, on occasion, saved up lists of words, then looked them up and put them into LingQ, but I never continue doing it. It just doesn’t seem to be worth the effort. So that’s my picture on how I use dictionaries. I’d be interested in your comments and also would like to know what you would like to see in my videos. Thank you for listening, bye for now.

How to Set Yourself Apart in Today’s Job Market. 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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I always talk about language learning. I would like to talk about other subjects, too, including politics. I’m here in the States; I could talk about the primaries, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders or talk about our new Prime Minister in Canada. Well, I won’t go there. One thing that comes out in all of this is that there is a great deal of dissatisfaction obviously with conventional politicians, but also there’s a lot of uneasiness because so many people who used to be in the middle class no longer feel that they’re in the middle class. It used to be that if you had a good job in the local factory, perhaps your wife had a job in the factory, maybe your kids had a job in the factory, I mean you were wealthy and you didn’t necessarily have a very high level of education. Many of those jobs no longer exist and they’re not likely to come back, so what can a person do? Well, that’s where I believe that reading and listening, the same things that are so powerful for language learning, are extremely important in order for people to be competitive in the new economy. Of course there’s no guarantee that every educated person will get a job or a good job. However, there are all kinds of statistics that show that the degree of literacy of a person, in other words, how well they read, how many words they know, all the things that are important in learning languages, these are also the things that will determine how well you do in society, how well you do at school, how well you do in your job. Even technical jobs, the level of literacy required to read instructional manuals is very, very high. So, yes, there are problems with people who have reading disabilities and I think these people who have learning disabilities have to help themselves as much as possible. Other people may help them. We know, for example, that listening and reading are very closely connected. People who don’t read well also have trouble discerning sounds, to some extent, so these are things we have to work on, in other words, if we spend the time. Again, just as in language learning, if you have an attitude that says I am going to improve my reading and listening skills, I’m going to improve my vocabulary. If you have that kind of attitude, you’re convinced that you’re going to succeed and you put the time into it. So you won’t be watching the football game on TV. You won’t be going to the bar to drink beer or whatever else it is that you do that might be wonderful. It might even mean taking time away from your family, but you’re going to devote that to improving your reading and listening skills. This, in itself, I think will have a major impact on flattening out that widening disparity between the wealthy, which is largely those that have a high rate of literacy, and the poor, who by enlarge don’t. Now, there are always exceptions. There are very well educated people who have poor jobs. There are uneducated people who have good jobs. I’ve worked with people who have serious reading disabilities and who are excellent at what they do in very demanding managerial positions. There are athletes and singers. There are all kinds of exceptions. However, by enlarge, statistically the better you read and listen, the better your vocabulary, the broader your knowledge, the better you do. In order to become better as a reader and a listener you have to work at it, much the same way as we work at our language-learning skills. So related to language learning, on the edges of politics, there it is, read and listen. Were you listening? Anyway, 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 I study languages for enjoyment and this year I plan to consolidate the languages I already have and enjoy spending time with them. Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I’m back in Vancouver after a month or more and I want to talk about enjoying language learning and I’m going to talk about how it affects me, personally. A New Year, we’re thinking of New Year’s resolutions, I’ve always wanted to learn Arabic, Farsi, Turkish. I kind of want to get into that Middle East, Central-Asian part of the world that I don’t really know much about. In fact, I took with me a book on how to learn the Arabic alphabet and stuff and you know what? I just haven’t got the motivation, to be perfectly honest. What is pulling me back is not my lack of interest in those languages, but rather the fact that I want to enjoy now, this year, the languages that I have already learned because my Korean isn’t where I want it to be, obviously my Polish isn’t where I want it to be. I want to work on other languages because I enjoy the languages. Obviously, that initial period when you’re breaking into a new language is a lot of hard work. It’s like initially planting your garden, but now I’m at the stage where I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor more. So, recently, I’ve been doing more Ukrainian, I had a couple of conversations in Ukrainian and I’m going to go back to my Korean. So this year is going to be a year of consolidation and Arabic, Farsi, Hindi or whatever is going to have to wait until next year and we’ll see what happens next year. I think it’s very important, unless you have to learn the language for an exam or you have to learn it for your work, but for many language learners and certainly in my case, I learn languages for enjoyment and I love doing it, so why would I put pressure on myself when that strong motivation isn’t there. It will come and when I do have that strong motivation I will claw my way through the difficulties of the Arabic writing system, dealing with a brand new language and getting to a point where I can actually start enjoy learning it. I’ve done that now for Polish, I’ve done it for Ukrainian, I’ve done it for Korean and now I have the opportunity to go in there and enjoy my reading and listening, eventually talking to people, watching movies and stuff. So this year I’m devoting to enjoying the languages that I have already engaged with. So that’s my kind of New Year’s position on languages for this year. Thank you for listening, bye for now.

J'ai changé d'avis. Je propose maintenant qu'on se retrouve vers 21 heures au Polyglot Club, mardi le 5 janvier. http://polyglotclub.com/france/ile-de-france/paris

Boris bikes are the rent a bikes in London that Mayor Boris Johnson had a hand in introducing to the city.

Enjoyed Lyon immensely. London meet up will be around 27th or 28th of December. Russian conference on learning English where I will be speaking: http://akintsev.com/pp/steve/1133 Timelines: 0:05 Fabulous time in Lyon. 0:45 The apartment we booked through Air BnB. 1:18 Previous recollection of Lyon. 1:52 Meetups in Lyon. 2:15 Participating in a Russian conference on learning English. 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

Here is my schedule for the next few weeks. Please let me know if you are interested in having a meet up. Dec 12-15 Lyon Dec 15-18 Laugharne Wales Dec 18-21 Bath, England Dec 22-Jan 3 London Jan 3-7 Paris See you soon, à bientôt! 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

Topics: - Making difficult things easier - Achieving success - Enjoying the journey Timelines: 0:01 Maintaining motivation. 0:45 Comparing Business and Language learning. 2:29 The state of flow grows our motivation. 4:03 Be prepared for language learning. 5:13 Struggling with impossible things. 6:20 You need a method to keep you learning. 7:50 Dealing with failure in language learning. 10:12 Find companions to help you. 11:08 I don’t get frustrated in my language learning. 12:28 I believe LingQ is an extremely effective way of learning. 13:47 Stephen Krashen’s theory. 13:57 An advice for young learners. 14:50 My learning strategy. 15:29 How I recover a language. 16:01 Recovering my Polish. 17:17 Websites for finding language partners. 17:44 Do I use flashcards? 18:40 Focus your studying effort on one language. 19:20 Pronunciation improvement. 20:00 Avoid stressful things, do enjoyable things. 20:56 10.000 hours rule doesn’t apply to language learning. 21:58 Do listening to music and watching movies help me learning a language? 22:33 Adding new languages to LingQ. 23:07 Why grammar is boring? 24:14 Meaningful activities in language learning. 24:55 Visiting Poland, Slovakia, Czech republic and Ukraine. 25:29 Do I take language tests to motivate myself? 26:09 The minimal time for daily learning. 27:10 Tonal languages. 27:29 Visiting Turkey. 27:47 Shadowing. 28:17 The indication you are actually improving. 29:25 Learning two languages at the same time. 30:21 Similarities between Portuguese and Spanish. 30:48 Special offer from LingQ. 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 Visit https://www.LingQ.com We learn words because we need them not because they are on some frequency list. My dates in Europe: Dec 11-15 Lyon Dec 16-19 Wales Dec 19-22 Bath Dec 22-Jan 3 London Jan 3- Jan 7 Paris Anyone interested in a meetup? Any ideas on where and when? Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. You can see that I’m back in Vancouver. You can hear my wife practicing her piano in the background. We came back from Palm Springs yesterday and, of course, it’s raining today in Vancouver. I just put up the final video in Polish for my 90-Day Challenge. I will continue to read and listen to Polish, but the 90-day period of intensive study is over. It was a wonderful experience. I learned so much about Poland I now feel that I understand the language. I can understand podcasts so much better, I can read the newspaper. I don’t know what my next challenge will be. I’ve got so many languages that I would like to improve in, yet the challenge of taking on something like Arabic or Turkish really sort of catches my fancy. We’ll see what happens. You’ll notice in my video in Polish that I struggle with some words like for meat, pork and beef because these are words that have not come up in my listening and reading. You can only learn the words that are relevant to whatever your needs are, so if I were visiting and going to restaurants or buying food in Poland I would learn the words for food. Some people think that some words are naturally more important or higher in the pecking order than others and you should learn those first, but I think it all depends on what you are interested in. You need the words for the subject matter that you are listening to and reading, so your interest will dictate which words you learn rather than some arbitrary list, in my view. Again, my language learning is driven by my interests. One further thing I would like to mention is that my wife and I are going to be traveling to Europe, we’re going to visit my son and his family who live in London. We are going to fly to Paris, we’re taking the train to Lyon and we’re going to spend three days in Lyon from the 11th. So we’re leaving here the 10th, we arrive in Paris on the 11th. The 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th we are in Lyon. On the 15th we fly to Bristol and then we’re going to spend three days in Wales and three days in Bath. We’re going to visit and get to know parts of England. Then from about the 22nd on we’re in London until about the 2nd of January. Then we’re going to spend about four days in Paris from the 3rd to the 7th, including a side trip to 02:41.2 where we have some very good friends. So if there is any interest in a meetup either in Lyon or somewhere in Wales, Bath, Bristol and then in London and then in Paris, please let me know. I will put the dates here in the description. You should get the transcript for this video within a day or two, but I’m putting it up right behind my Polish video just to explain that the conversation I had with 03:24.4 was initially about food and I definitely struggled to express myself about what Canadians like to eat. Thanks for listening and I look forward, hopefully, to meeting some of you during my trip to Europe. Bye for now.