#AskSteve

Reviewing video helps me to notice my gaps. Mixed words from various Slavic languages. I have been mostly just reading and listening, and now plan to work more on Ukrainian phrases at LingQ and speak more. Will do another video in a few weeks see if I can improve. Timelines: 0:01 Українська дозволяє мені краще слідкувати за подіями в Україні. / Ukrainian enables me to keep a closer look on the events happening in Ukraine. 1:17 Чи розмовляв Стив іншими мовами, коли йому було 17 років? / Did Steve speak any language when he was 17? 2:51 Навчання та пошук роботи для молоді в Україні. / Studying and Job search for youngsters in Ukraine. 4:44 IT-сектор в Україні. / IT-sector in Ukraine. 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

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

言葉は学問的、知的にではなく、感情的に勉強すべき！ You learn languages with emotion, enthusiasm, will, and not just with your brain. Timelines: 0:01 言葉の勉強は感情的ならば覚えにくい。/ If language learning is not emotionally related, it’s hard to remember anything. 1:31 面白で好きの内容を使うのは非常に大切。/ Using interesting content is essential. 2:31 指導権。/ Be determined in your learning. 2:54 成功する精神。/ Develop success consciousness. 3:24 言葉を通じて文化について調べる。/ Learn about a culture through words. 3:53 楽しく、つまらない事をしないように、勉強してください。/ Learn languages having fun without useless struggle. 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

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, today I’m going to again talk about language learning. If you like talking about language learning, please subscribe to my channel. Today I want to talk about fitness and language learning and, particularly, CrossFit and language learning. Now, we need to be fit in order to engage in physical activity. The more fit we are, normally, the better we do in sports, for example, in skiing or tennis, whatever it might be. I think the same is true in language learning. We need to make ourselves develop our stamina and our physical ability to learn languages. This is something I talked about in my Japanese video and will be getting back to in that Japanese video. In particular, I want to talk about CrossFit because I’ve started doing CrossFit here in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. CrossFit focuses on a limited number of exercises. They work the legs, the core and the shoulders, but always sort of in a freestanding situation. You’re doing squats. You’re doing jerks or snatches. While it’s controversial, their view is that this is very good because you’re not just focusing on one muscle, whereas if you’re sitting at a machine in a gym you might just be working on your biceps or something. I have found it excellent. I find that it has improved my posture, I feel very good, so the question is are there a limited number of exercises we can do in language learning and that by focusing on these we increase our fitness, fitness for language learning. Remember, whatever this sort of concentrated exercise might be we still have to do a number of other things; however, if we can increase our alertness, our ability to notice. I think the ability to notice is like fitness in sports. The more things you notice, the better you’re going to learn the language. So what I’ve been doing in the last week or so is that I will read my text in Polish, I’ll focus on underlining and highlighting more phrases and then I can hear the text to speech of those phrases, so I kind of hear them sounding in my mind. Often, these are phrases with verbs in them; I think those are the most important kinds of phrases. Then, I go to the dictation section at LingQ and I hear the text to speech and then I have to type in what I heard in the dictation. So I’m listening to two, three, four, five words of Polish and I have to write in what I heard. Wow, it’s amazing how I mishear. You assume you’re hearing something when, in fact, what the person said was quite different. So training myself to hear better what is said and to write correctly is not only enabling me to remember these phrases, but is also increasing my alertness, my ability to notice and, therefore, my fitness. So I think this principle of CrossFit, a limited number of exercises that are very good for you. It’s not the only thing you do, but they really improve your general fitness. I think the same might be true of this emphasis on phrases and then doing dictation. I’ll continue doing this and I’ll report back to you. I look forward to hearing your comments. Thank you for listening, bye for now.

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英語の文法書：https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/english/ This is the first in a series of videos in Japanese directed at Japanese people who are studying languages. I explain that I first visited Japan in 1969, and lived there for nine years from 1971. i learned on my own, never attending language school. Having read many books on language learning in Japanese and other languages, I will explain my views, based on my experience and that of others, on we can train ourselves to become effective language learners. If anyone wants to produce an translation I will put it up here. Timelines: 0:01 自己紹介/ Self-introduction. 1:01 英語の勉強に色んなこと要因がある。/ There is plenty of factors in learning English. 1:50 言葉の吸収能力。/ Language absorbing capacity. 2:43 僕は学校なしで自分で日本語を勉強した。/ I have learnt Japanese on my own without attending any language schools. 3:34 言葉の勉強のコツを分けたいと思います。/ Language learning hacks. 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

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.