#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 Sorry no sub-titles. I struggle with some every day words about food. These words have not been a big part part of my listening, reading and speaking so I can't remember them. It doesn't matter since a visit to Poland would soon fix that, or I would go hungry. After 90 days of Polish, reading 360,000 words, listening for 94 hours, creating 18,000 new LingQs and speaking for roughly 23 hours (mostly on Italki in the month of November), this is a sample of my spoken level. I believe my comprehension is much higher. These 90 days have been a wonderful experience that has brought Poland, its history, its point of view on the world, some of its internal issues, and of course its language, into my life. I will back off a bit now, but will continue to listen to my favourite podcasts in Polish and to read in that language. One day I hope to visit Poland.

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. It’s American Thanksgiving Day and, since I’m in Palm Springs, I will be attending for the first time in my life an American Thanksgiving party, but today I’m going to talk about grammar and ways of teaching or learning grammar and I’m going to compare exercises, drills and questions to, simply, patterns. I’m nearing the end of my Polish Challenge. It’s the 26th, at the end of November it will be 90 days. I’ll do a little video, if I can, with one my Polish tutors. I’ve been talking to Polish tutors on Italki and one of them asked me what problems do you have with Polish and I mentioned a few including, of course, verbs of motion which is always an issue with Slavic languages. So she prepared a lesson on verbs of motion and she had exercises, please complete the questions. So I was doing this in my discussion with her, you know, make sure you put in the right verb and all this kind of stuff. So we did this for an hour and then, as usual, I get a list of my main errors during the lessons, as well as these questions that she had given me and I import these into LingQ so that I can review the words and phrases. I’d be interesting in other people’s reactions, but my feeling is (by the way, I’m sitting on one of these exercise balls, that’s why I’m bouncing up and down, I hope that doesn’t disturb you too much) that the hours spent trying to come up with the right verb and trying to answer the questions and complete the sentences I think didn’t help me very much. I don’t retain very much. I kind of feel there was pressure on me to answer, to complete the sentence and a lot of this pressure actually is negative, insofar as learning is concerned. When I see a list of sentences with different verbs of motion or if people can actually make a little story with different verbs of motion and I can read these and listen to them and save them at LingQ and see them again then, gradually, I will get used to them. You can’t teach something like this. It’s not because we had a lesson and I answered questions that I’ve moved along that much, in my opinion, in this process of learning something. In fact, it may be some of the other issues that came up in our discussion like the case endings. Maybe I picked up on some of that, rather than what she was deliberately trying to teach me. I just have this feeling, it almost confirms it. Not to mention the fact that I prefer just to have a conversation and then to get this list of words and phrases which I review, which is also this very gradual layering combined with the interesting listening that I’m doing about history, occasionally reviewing Piotr’s simple stories. There’s just this gradual layering and accumulation and that this is pleasant and this is slowly effective, but the deliberate testing and answer this question and completing the sentence is less pleasant, more stressful and probably less effective when it comes even to learning the issues of grammar which will eventually slot in if we are determined to learn them. Along the way we occasionally consult a table or look up some rules, but mostly just listen and read, notice and gradually we improve. So that’s my take on deliberate grammar instruction versus learning grammar through exposure to a group of sentences, concentrated examples of a certain pattern and/or then just noticing them in our listening and reading. I look forward to your comments. The next and last video in this whole Polish Challenge series will be an interview with one of my tutors. 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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I’m in the homestretch now, two weeks to go in my 90-Day Polish Challenge. I’m going to deal with two issues today, one is the issue of correcting mistakes and the other issue is why do I do it. All right, correcting mistakes. I put up a video of me speaking to one of my Polish tutors, Katarina. Again, to put this is context, for the first two months I just listened and read very easy content to start with, slowly mixing in more difficult content and for the last month, essentially, just authentic content. Then, after two months, I started speaking. So I have now spoken once a day for about eight or nine days. I put up one of my discussions and someone commented that the tutor wasn’t correcting me and that this was no good, so forth and so on, so let me address this issue of correcting. When I speak with a tutor I don’t want to be corrected while I’m speaking. I make so many mistakes in my Polish that we couldn’t have a conversation if I were corrected every five words or every three words. What the tutor does, and this is the policy we have at LingQ, is send me a list of the words and phrases that I didn’t use correctly or, at least, some of them, then I read this, I import it into LingQ, I save words and phrases. It helps a bit, but the biggest advantage of the conversation is that I’m forced to use the language and to search for words. I become aware of where some of my gaps are, my problems, and then I become that much more attentive when I’m listening and reading. It’s all part of that gradual process of getting used to the language. I don’t think a correction corrects you. I think a correction, if there are not too many corrections is good. Particularly, there are some things we just never notice if it’s not pointed out to us, so to that extent the occasional correction is good. Most mistakes that we commit we’re going to correct ourselves or we’ll make that error one time and we won’t make it the next time, until we get better and better at using the language. It’s a gradual process. It’s so important to speak and eventually to write, if you have the patience to do so. It’s the exercise of speaking and participating in the conversation that’s most important. The correction is probably not that very important, especially if it interrupts the flow of the discussion. As to why I do these things, I’m having a blast with my Polish. I had a discussion this morning, we talked about politics. I understand podcast now like [Insert Polish], which I didn’t understand six weeks ago. I’ve discovered a country and I can’t wait to move on to the next one. I don’t take my language to some level of perfection. That’s fine for those people who want to do it. I’m not going to write a test to see if I’m B2, B1, C1, that’s not my motivation. My motivation is to discover new countries, new cultures, new languages and I enjoy doing it, so that’s my motivation. Thank you and we continue with the Polish Challenge. I’ll do one more video of a discussion with a Polish tutor at the end of my 90-Day Challenge. 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 here, again. Output -- How do we start talking in a language? I’m on my Polish challenge. I spent the first two months intensively listening and reading probably, in total, over two hours a day, on average. Most of it is listening, but also reading and reading on LingQ. I showed you how I save words and phrases when I’m on the computer. I do the same on the iPad, but I do it a little differently on the iPad. I alternate perhaps 70-80% difficult material that’s of interest, history and so forth, and 20% Piotr’s simple stories where I try to get at the nuts and bolts of the language, but I decided beginning in November that I would start speaking. Because I was unable to find enough Polish speakers at LingQ who wanted to offer discussions, I went to Italki and I have been using Italki for about a week now. With Italki I’m trying to speak once a day so that I speak either half an hour or an hour with four or five different Polish tutors and I’m really enjoying it. I find it’s a very useful service. I think, perhaps, the way we deal with lessons and talking to a tutor at LingQ is a little inflexible. We need to maybe look at making it more flexible. At Italki the teachers decide themselves how much they’re going to charge and you can choose, depending on the different prices and which ones you like. I think that’s successful and it’s a very good compliment to LingQ because the bulk of my learning remains this input activity to build up my vocabulary, my ability to understand and so forth. I’m going to finish off here with a snippet of a recording with one of the tutors at Italki. All of them are very, very pleasant. Katarina doesn’t have the best sound, so I sometimes struggle to understand her. Some of the others have better sound. I tried to record some earlier and I didn’t have my thing set up properly, so this is basically me after about a week of starting to talk in Polish. I make a lot of mistakes, but I’m happy making mistakes. I know that in time I will be better. I will do this one as sort of the beginning of starting to talk and I will do another video at the end of the month when I will have had quite a few hours of speaking and, of course, continuing to listen and read because a lot of what the conversation does is it points out the gaps. It makes me aware of what I need to work on, the words I’m missing, the structures I make mistakes in, so I go back and look for these in my listening and reading. With that, you can take a listen. I didn’t make subtitles because I’m very busy down here. If somebody wants to translate it, fine. Otherwise, basically we talk about working conditions and hours that people work in Warsaw, Paris and Vancouver. Bye for now.

LingQ's free Polish grammar guide: https://www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/polish/ My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Learn the Polish Alphabet: https://www.lingq.com/blog/2018/12/05/polish-alphabet/ Transcript: Hi. Today I’m going to show you where I work, but before we do that I’ll show you how I accumulate words. I think on my profile at LingQ I have saved about 15,000 words and phrases and my known word count is up to 20-odd thousand. I’ll show you how I do that, but first I wanted to mention a little bit about why it’s fun to learn languages. I’m learning Polish. I’m listening to Piotr’s podcast RealPolish.com and he’s talking about the Chopin Contest in Warsaw. A contest which he tells me takes place once every five years was won by a pianist from Korean; a Canadian came second. So my wife and I are sitting here having dinner which my wife has prepared and I said, wouldn’t it be nice to see on our iPad a video of these pianists from Warsaw. So we’re drinking wine, California wine, we’re watching a Korean pianist, excellent pianist playing Chopin on our iPad, as a result of studying Polish and having Piotr telling me that there was this Chopin piano competition. Anyway, just like this great global world that we live in, we learn so many things by learning languages. Oh, the other thing I should say is I’ve started speaking Polish. I’m using Italki.com because we don’t have enough Polish tutors at LingQ. I’ve had three sessions so far, I’ve got another one tomorrow and I may, in fact, try to record one of them so you can hear me struggling to speak Polish, but now let me show you how I accumulate all these saved words and phrases. I’m learning so much about the history of Poland, the partition of Poland, the _______, the twentieth century, all this kind of stuff that I never knew before. Anyway, let’s have a look. So here I am. I bought this eBook called Historia Polski. I have an audio book on Polish history which doesn’t match this word for word, but has a lot of the same stuff. Here is a lesson. What we see right away is that there is 223 blue words. That is, words that I have not met before. Most of which I don’t know maybe. So if I click on that, I see a list here of all the blue words and there are 289 links or words that I have already saved. Many of which I know, but not all of which. These yellow words then show up as yellow in my text, I go through them and I tend to read it to myself. [Insert Polish], ‘the Russian Army’ [Insert Polish] Now, I know that word. I don’t need it, so I hit K so I don’t have to save it. [Insert Polish] Okay. [Insert Polish] ‘Unexpectedly’, I know this word already. Even though it’s a yellow word, I’m going to hit K. [Insert Polish] I’m not so familiar with that, so I leave it. [Insert Polish] I don’t know what that is. If I’m not sure that it’s a word or a name, I just hit X so I don’t count it in my statistics. [Insert Polish] The left-wing I guess this is. ‘Wing’, I know it, I hit K. [Insert Polish] I didn’t really know that, so I keep that. I keep on hitting the arrow keys and it automatically saves the word. [Insert Polish] I know is ‘threatening’, so I can now remove that. [Insert Polish] I think that means to be surrounded. The word ‘lap’ comes up in Google Translate. I could look it up in a dictionary, but I think it means to be surrounded, so I’m just going to hit Known. It doesn’t matter. [Insert Polish], ‘operations’ [Insert Polish] ‘conducted’ or ‘carried out’ and I leave the months all the time because it’s so hard to remember the months. [Insert Polish] Now, the hint that I get up here is ‘unsuccessful’, but that’s Google Translate. In fact, it means ‘successful’, so I hit Known. [Insert Polish] Now, that’s a word I don’t know. Even though I’ve encountered it before I’ve already forgotten it. Basically, just to show you, I keep on going through. That’s a name, so I’ll take it out of my saved links. Here’s another name, which I don’t save. Oh, I hit K by mistake, so I’ll go back. Not that it matters, I’m not so fussy about my statistics. I hit X to remove it. [Insert Polish] ‘Started’, I know that, but I leave it there just the same. So that’s how I go through quite quickly finding new blue words. [Insert Polish] I know that’s ‘September’, but I’m leaving it. [Insert Polish], I sure don’t know it. [Insert Polish] I know the word for ‘victory’, so I can hit K to remove it. That gives you an idea of how I do it. As a result of doing all of that, over the first two months of my Polish challenge I have learned a great deal about Polish history, I have added probably 20,000 to my vocabulary so it’s built up this passive knowledge and now, tomorrow, if I’m lucky, I will record my discussion with my Polish tutor on Italki and you’ll see how much I’m able to use when I speak. So there you go, a bit of an update on my Polish challenge.

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, answering some of your questions. I may not get to all of them, but the ones that I did notice. One question, interesting question— Would I talk about brain freeze? In other words, sometimes we know the word, we know what we want to say, but we just can’t remember the word. We can’t say it and the more we try to remember it, of course, the more we insure that we won’t be able to remember it. It happens to all of us. It happens to me at my age. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m older now, but I think it happened to me when I was younger, as well. The more pressure we put on ourselves, if we’re at a party and someone comes in and we’re trying to remember that person’s name, the harder we try to remember the name, the harder it is to remember. If I find that I can’t think of a word or I can’t express what I want to express, I’ll talk about something else. I’ll move into a direction where I have the words and gradually then come back to what I wanted to say. In any case, I don’t let it upset me because it’s normal. The more confident and comfortable we are, the less pressure we put on ourselves, the less likely it is to occur. There was a question from someone in Romania asking— How would I go about learning Farsi? There are no resources. Well, when I started learning Romanian there were no resources, so I went on the Internet, I wrote up 200 sentences in English and I asked someone to translate these into Romanian and record them for me. I paid them for that and the resulting lessons were imported into LingQ. So if there are no Farsi resources, you may have to create your own. Another person asked— How do I use Assimil? A lot of people like Assimil. Personally, to me it’s just another beginner book like Teach Yourself Colloquial. What I get out of it is strictly the lessons, the content. I listen, I read. I used it for Russian. I started using the Korean one and I found it particularly uninteresting. The Russian Assimil has actually some interesting content and to that extent is better. What I don’t like about Assimil is that they don’t give you the glossary, in other words, the translations of the new words. They give you a full translation, which I find very distracting. I find it distracting to read in the target language and then go reading through English to see the particular word I’m looking for. So I don’t use Assimil a lot, but I know that a lot of people do like Assimil. Basically, that’s it, fewer questions. I hope this is of interest to you and now I’ve got to get back studying Polish. 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 Ciick on CC for captions for translation of Chinese 侯宝林: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2wuWf5AOL4 Mark Zuckerberg: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3288170/Mark-Zuckerberg-impresses-20-minute-speech-CHINESE-public-address-learning-language-five-years-ago.html Transcript: Steve Kaufmann here, today I’m not going to talk about Polish. I’m going to talk about Mark Zuckerberg’s Chinese. Hello Mark, if you’re listening. I saw the video of Mark’s presentation in Beijing to a group of university students in Chinese, 20 minutes. I think he did a great job, hats off, full marks. He covered a lot of ground, used some very difficult words and was perfectly understandable. However, I think where Mark can improve is in his rhythm, intonation, the music of the language. When you learn a language the closer you can come to the intonation, the rhythm of the language, the better you’re going to pronounce, the better your phrasing is going to be, the more fluent you’re going to become. Now, when I studied Chinese 50 years ago, I struggled with the tones like everyone does because it’s difficult to remember is this particular word third tone, fourth tone, and to do that on the fly while you’re speaking is very difficult. My teacher gave me a cassette tape of ________, who was a leading Sun Chun performer, which are these comic dialogues in Chinese. I’m going to put in the description box ________ and a link to some of his videos on YouTube. I’m going to put a link to an article about Mark Zuckerberg which shows his video in Beijing. In those days, I listened to these over and over and over again. Even if I only partly understood, I understood some better than others, it was the music of it that captivated me and had a major impact on my pronunciation, my control of tones and my fluency. Today, I would have benefit of transcripts. So, Mark, you can find ___________ or other Sun Chun people in YouTube. If it’s __________ the transcripts I’m sure are available because it’s quite old now, out of copyright I would imagine. Import them into LingQ, save words and phrases, listen while reading and then take it away and listen over and over again in your car or elsewhere. It’s going to definitely improve your fluency and pronunciation. That’s just something brief to say I don’t speak like a Sun Chun performer, I don’t speak like a Chinese person, but I’m a lot better than I was before I was able to get access to these Sun Chun tapes. So that’s my recommendation to Mark Zuckerberg and it’s also something that has application for all languages. If you can find content that captivates you, or you like the voice, or you like the way the person speaks, you want to listen to that over and over and over again so that it starts to resonate because there is that almost emotional tie to the language we’re trying to learn, the rhythm, the music, which makes everything better. So that’s my advice to Mark and my advice to those of you who are studying other languages. Thank you for listening, bye for now. Now I’d better get back to Polish!

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 again, answering some of the questions that you have written on my YouTube channel. I apologize for this light shinning of my gray hair or white hair, but if I don’t put the light on then it’s too dark in here. Hopefully, that doesn’t disturb you. The first question was: What is your motivation to learn new languages? This came from a person in Spain. Another person asked something about, why are you learning Ukrainian, I think? The motivation can be anything. Right now, the motivation to learn Polish is because I speak other Slavic languages or have learnt them and studied them, so I’m curious to see how Polish works. And, of course, every time you learn a new language you learn so much about the country. People ask me, what about Arabic or Hebrew? Yes, I’m motivated to learn those, particularly Arabic because there’s so much history behind that language and because so many people in the world speak it. So a lot of my motivation is cultural, interest in the country. I want to learn about different people and different cultures in different parts of the world. The next question was: How do you keep a language fresh in your mind? How do you not lose vocabulary? In my experience, if I learn a language through massive listening and reading, massive exposure to the language, I tend not to lose it, but the way I refresh it is that I just do more of the same, listening and reading. Now that I have LingQ it’s particularly good. I can go in and do some Chinese, for example. In fact, I think the person who asked this question was afraid they were losing their Chinese vocabulary. I’ll go through and maybe find something on the Internet or I might just get an audio book. I’ll find the eBook, bring it in and listen and then read and save words that I need. I find that that very quickly refreshes my grasp of that language. Read the full transcript here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/what-is-your-motivation-to-learn-new-languages

My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Find Piotr's Stories at http://realpolish.pl/ Ciick on CC for captions for translation of Polish Transcript: In language learning I always say you’ve kind of got to do the bits and pieces and the big picture. The big picture for me is listening and reading, doing things that I’m interested in. So I’m listening to my Polish history, I’m reading Polish history, creating links at LingQ, but you also have to do the nuts and bolts. I’m getting ready now to when I start speaking, so for that I use my iPad and I’ll give you a bit of a demonstration here. Well, I’ll show you in a while. I’m using Piotr’s stories and in each story there’s a bunch of questions, so now I try to answer the questions to prepare myself for speaking. Here’s a question. (Polish: Sylvie has a stomach ache). Okay, that’s a statement. Then comes a question. (Polish: Does Sylvie have a head ache?)? (Polish: No, she doesn’t have a head ache) Okay, that’s the answer. Because I have the sentence view here on my iPad, I see each question. (Polish)? The answer is (Polish). Okay, that’s the answer. (Polish) Okay, that’s the statement. So then (Polish). Next, (Polish). The answer is (Polish). If you come and have a look here, you can see how these sentences move. I’m in sentence mode here. (Polish). So here’s this process, it’s basically simple stories, simple questions. What I think is very clever is that Piotr gives you the sentence. You don’t have to think back to the story, the sentence is given to you right there and you have to try to say out loud the answer. I’ve just started actually answering these questions out loud so I’m not very good at it, but if I continue doing this for a few weeks, in combination with my listening and reading where I’m acquiring a lot of vocabulary, I think I’ll be ready to start speaking the beginning of November. So there you have it. 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 Questions: 1. I’m interested in the process of reviewing vocabulary by reading on LingQ. How do you do it and how often do you stay on one lesson before going to the next one? 2. Any languages you don’t use as much as you had hoped? 3. Are cultural barriers stronger than the difference in just the language? 4. What is the hardest language? 5. Reading, listening and speaking is covered, but how do you write? How do you approach it? How is it different as you go through different levels in the language? 6. What is your view on learning similar languages? Is there any point? 7. Do you have any thoughts about learning a dialect of a language? Does it help or hinder? 8. You stress the importance of knowing lots of words. Why do you think some polyglots constantly insist that you only need to know X words to do just fine in the language? 9. What do you think of the Finnish language? Is it possible to be fluent in Finnish? Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Questions and answers, I did it with my sons last time and we did another one with Mark, but somehow I bungled getting that video into my computer and uploaded to YouTube. So, unfortunately, you’re just going to have me reading the questions, which come from my YouTube channel, questions that you, the viewers and listeners, have asked me... Read the full transcript here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/what-is-the-hardest-language-to-learn

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 reporting on my Polish Challenge. I’m about halfway through the 90-Day Challenge. I’ve had two slow periods, one was when we had a couple of friends visiting from Sweden and we toured British Columbia so there was five-six days with no Polish study and now I have my two sons visiting here in Palm Springs. They’ve gone home, but during that period I wasn’t able to do very much. Although, whenever I was in the car alone shopping or working out in the gym with my two sons I would listen. So I learned more and more about Polish history, but I didn’t have enough time to do my linking, either on the iPad or on the computer, so I’ve fallen behind and now I’m going to start working hard again. I will start speaking. I said I would do it in early October, I think it will be the second half of October. I’m not that fussed about speaking, I have to be honest, because there aren’t many people I can speak to here in Polish. I’m listening to this _________, which is a book that I read in English by Bill Browder about his experiences in Russian and I’m listening to this audio book on Polish history and at the same time reading on Polish history. It’s not parallel text, but a lot of the same names and the same vocabulary come up in both. So I’m getting more and more into Polish and I’m learning more and more about Poland. All of that is fascinating to me. At some point, I guess I’ll have to start speaking. Ultimately, I won’t be good at speaking until I go to Poland, which I hope to do maybe next year. That’s all I have to report at this time. I am going to do a question and answer video, as well, which is sort of a continuation of the one I did with Mark last week. So work hard in your 90-Day Challenge whatever language you’re learning. Bye for now.

My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Transcript: Steve: Hi, Steve here on my seventieth birthday. I’ve got my two sons visiting, Mark, who is with LingQ whom you know and, Eric, who’s manning the camera. Mark: Hi, all. Eric: Hello. Steve: Hello, right. So we thought we’d change the venue a bit. Eric: We’re ready to go. Steve: Okay, here’s the list of questions. We, unfortunately, don’t have time to get to all of them, but we’ll do as many as we can. Please keep sending them in and we’ll try to fit all questions in, if not this time then next time. Mark: For the first question: Steve, would you or have you considered doing live meetups? Steve: Live meetups. I mean yeah, sure. We can do them, we have done them. Mark: We have done them. Steve: We have done them. We use Google Plus on occasion or Skype. Mark: Well, no, live meetups. Like face-to-face meetups, I think, when you travel. Steve: Oh, yeah, when I travel. Mark: You do them in Europe, for sure, when you go travel there. I don’t know if there are LingQers in the desert here, but I think you’re always quite happy to do any meetups that people want to do. Steve: Absolutely, let us know. If you know where I’m going to be traveling we’d be happy to meet up, we’ve done it in the past. Mark: And we’re happy to announce it on our forum and spread the word. The next question: You’ve talked about learning foreign languages as a subconscious process. What do you think? When we choose words… Steve: I think what he means is when we speak do we deliberately choose words or do they just come full out. Mark: Right. Steve: I think it’s a bit of both. It’s a combination of both. I think one thing that’s very important when you learn a language is to trust your instincts. So rather than worrying about, did I chose the right word, is this the right word, is it grammatically correct, just let it flow out as much as possible. Also, sometimes we have the time to think about the word, to think about the right form. To some extent we do that, but the more we can just trust our instinct and have the confidence to assume all the work you’ve put into your listening and reading is just going to enable you to speak more or less correctly. I think we just go with the flow is my advice. Mark: Sounds good. When you’re using LingQ and you link a new word, what do you do with it? Do you study it; take it up to learn it? Steve: Well, you know, I love linking. Particularly, I like using this sort of auto link mode where I’m using the arrow keys and then just going from blue word to yellow word to blue word. So if it’s a blue word of course I’m selecting it if I need it or if I know it I mark it as known. If I come to a yellow word, then I get to review it again. Much of my reviewing of words is when I’m reading on LingQ. In fact, I’ll often read a text where I have no more new words. It’s all yellow words where I have created links and I go through again, sometimes I change the status and sometimes I change some of them to known. So linking words, it’s sort of my first contact with a new word and I know I’m going to meet up with these words again and again in the text, so that’s what I do with it. A lot of people like the flashcards; I do my word review more in the context of my reading. Mark: For those of you who aren’t familiar with the different modes, if you click on the settings control on the lesson page you’ll see the different available modes. Auto mode is the default mode when you start, but some of you may be on different modes. Auto mode is certainly our preferred mode, but obviously there are few different options there you should probably get familiar with. Steve: I tell you auto mode, once you get used to it you go through the lessons very quickly. Mark: Especially using the keyboard shortcuts. Steve: If you look at my statistics here on my 90-Day Polish Challenge, I don’t know, I think I’ve increased my known word total by 10,000 words, I think I’ve linked 5,000 words. I mean I’m right at the top in terms of the number of links I create and the number of words I learn. It has a lot to do with using that auto mode, so I recommend you have a look at it and get used to it. Read full transcript here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/do-we-learn-languages-subconsciously