#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. 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.

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.