#AskSteve

On Friday, October 9th - Steve hosted a webinar on 7 Steps to Improving Your English. Topics: - Clear and attainable goals - Get outside of your comfort zone - Trust your instincts

"7 steps to improving your English" live webinar happening this Friday! Register here: http://lingqwebinar.enterthemeeting.com/m/W7MH696U 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. First of all, I want to announce that I’m doing a webinar on how to improve your English and I’m doing it at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time, which is morning time in Japan, because we have a lot of users of LingQ and people who watch my video who live in Japan. The last webinar was in the morning, which is not so convenient for people in Asia. I’m going to speak in English, but I’m going to speak very slowly and clearly, hopefully, so you can ask questions in Japanese _________, Chinese _________, en Français, en Español ________. Any language you want you can ask questions, but I’m going to speak in English. If I’m asked to answer in another language, I will. I’m going to talk about what I consider to be the 7 key steps to improving your English because, after all, a lot of people are learning English. I’m learning Polish. I’m on my 90-Day Challenge. I’m in Palm Springs. Tomorrow my sons, Mark and Eric, who lives in London, England, are arriving here. We’re going to celebrate my 70th birthday and they’re going to spend six days here with us. Every time I come to Palm Springs something bad happens. Last time I ruined my back. I got something in my eye. I got food poisoning. This time before leaving Vancouver, I fell playing hockey, kind of jammed my elbow into the ice and pushed up my shoulder, now my shoulder is sore. Then we get here and the air conditioning doesn’t work, so we have to get someone in to fix it. It gets kind of warm in the evening so we go to a hotel at night, which the development (will pay for – won’t pay for). So lots of stuff happening. And, of course, with my kids here I won’t have as much time to work on my Polish, but all of that doesn’t matter. We all have fun learning languages; we get in the time that is available to us. Please come to my webinar, I’ll leave a link here in the explanation. If you are interested in joining me to talk about how you could improve your English, please do so. I look forward to seeing you. It will be, therefore, this Friday at 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time. That’s it. We’ll see you Friday, which is Saturday morning in Asia. Bye for now.

My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Steve answers these questions from users: Do you recommend focusing on communicating, instead of perfection If my native language is spanish, do you think french would be an easy language to learn? In mandarin, do you suggest learning traditional characters or simplified characters? What's the biggest challenge you had to overcome in language learning What do you think about colloquial and FSI language series? Do you use monolingual dictionary? I think start using that from low intermediate to intermediate helps us become fluent faster in the target language… You have said in the past that French is one of your strongest languages so with that, do you ever keep learning new French words and vocab, with authentic sources such as Le Monde, to avoid complacency? I have been living in Australia since 2013. When I moved here I had just basic english, now I am intermediate, I would like to achieve an advanced level but still have too few words. What is your advice. Transcript:Steve: Hi there, Steve here to answer your questions with my sidekick Kiran. Kiran: Hello everyone. Steve: So we may as get right into them. Kiran: Yeah, okay. We have a lot of good questions this week. Steve: Okay. Kiran: The first one is: Do you recommend focusing on communicating instead of perfection? Steve: Absolutely, perfection is unachievable. There is no language that I speak to perfection, even including English. The whole thing is communicating because it makes it real. You have a real purpose for learning your language. You want to communicate with other people and you make a mistake. As long as your message is coming across and you understand what they’re saying that’s what it’s all about. It’s not about perfection. Kiran: Excellent. The next one is: If my native language is Spanish, do you think French would be an easy language to learn? Steve: Yes. Well, it’s not easy, but it’s easier. The biggest factor is vocabulary. In my experience, the more similar the vocabulary, the easier it is to learn the language. So French and Spanish, I don’t know what the number is, but 85% of the vocabulary is recognizable. I mean it’s written different, it’s somewhat different, but it’s more or less there. Was he saying he spoke French or Spanish? Kiran: He actually speaks Spanish. Steve: Well, you can’t assume it’s going to be easy. Even like Portuguese and Spanish, there are parts of the grammar that are different and words that mean slightly different things. So you can’t assume that you’re going to ace it, but you have such a big advantage because 80% of the vocabulary you’ll recognize. So it’s never easy, but it’s easier. Kiran: Okay. All right, I’m going to read you the next one. In Mandarin, do you suggest learning traditional Chinese characters or simplified characters? Steve: It depends on your needs and interests. When I learned Chinese we began with the traditional characters and then we moved to the simplified, so I have the advantage that if I’m in Hong Kong or Taiwan I can read the newspaper. I think nowadays practically most people are dealing with mainland China, The People’s Republic, so probably simplified is enough. If you have the interest, I would start with the traditional, spend a bit of time there and move to the simplified. However, if you’re in a hurry, you want to get on, you want to read, just study the simplified. It really doesn’t matter. So much in language learning is up to you, what are your interests. I think either way is a good way to go, but if you learn the traditional it’s very easy to learn the simplified. Read full transcript here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/which-language-is-easiest-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. I lost a week in my 90-Day Challenge. I had visitors from Sweden and, basically, I spent the last week with them. I hardly had a change to listen to any Polish or read any Polish. It doesn’t matter. I know that I won’t really lose much. When I go back to it I’ll recover what I had and probably be stronger than ever. Remember my video on interleaving, leaving something alone and going back to it, in fact, you learn better. What I want to talk about today is exercise and language learning. Now, we know that learning languages is good for your brain. It improves your cognitive abilities, staves off dementia, all this good stuff, but a lot of my language learning takes place while I’m physically exercising. I was thinking, maybe our 90-Day Challenge should be walk a half hour a day and listen for half an hour. I’m on my stepper reading my iPad. I run while listening to audio of my languages. I have a few hand weights and stuff downstairs and I get my iPad, iPhone or iPod, Bluetooth it to a speaker and then I’m listening to my Polish as I’m exercising. I think the idea of tying exercising to language learning has all kinds of benefits. It may get you to do more exercise, like even walking. It also enables you to find time to do the listening. If you’re good on a stepper or you have access to that kind of exercise (you know a treadmill), you can actually be reading as I do. I do my iLink on my iPad while exercising. So the theme here is exercise and language learning, let’s combine the two. Continue with your 90-Day Challenge, I will. Bye for now.

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, into my third week of the Polish Challenge. I just want to update you on what I’ve been doing. I mentioned previously that I’ve been using Piotr’s stories. I think they’re a great introduction to the language. Not only an introduction, but a place where you can go back and practice your grammar. In other words, I see them as a replacement for the Teach Yourself colloquial similar sort of beginner books, but they’re much, much better because there’s much, much more content repetition. Explanation almost becomes unnecessary because you repeat these patterns so many times and then, of course, you’re going to go back to them. I’m really looking at if we can’t do something like that for other languages at LingQ. However, I’ve always said you have to move to authentic content as soon as you can, so I’ve been busying myself gathering authentic content. One thing I looked for were Polish eBooks and I found this Red Alert _______, which is a book written by Bill Browder about his experiences in Russia. A very popular book which I’ve read in English, I found the audio book and the eBook. At first, none of the Polish sites would allow me download the book. I had to somehow physically be in Poland and they would physically send it to me, but I finally found one _________. Basically, I went to Google Translate, I wrote “I would like to buy an eBook and download it, is this possible. I live in Canada.” I sent it to any of the eBook sites that had a contact there and ________ came back very quickly, so I bought from them the eBook. I also bought an audio book on Polish history. I was also able to find an eBook on Polish history written by Topolski, so I’ve done about five or six chapters of ___________ in Polish listening and reading creating a lot of links. I’ve added about 8,000 new words to my new words total and I’ve linked 7,000 plus new links at LingQ, so I’m reading and I’m listening and I’m linking. I’ve ordered these paper books and they haven’t come yet, but I have more than enough material now. Plus, I listen to podcasts like ________, which is a podcast that I used to understand 10-15% of. Now I’m up to 50-60%, so I’m progressing in terms of my vocabulary and my comprehension. My speaking is nowhere. Sometime in early October, I will speak either with a tutor at LingQ or with Piotr and we’ll just see how poor I am. I’m not worried because I know from experience that if I continue to work on my comprehension, my vocabulary and my familiarity with the language that all of a sudden I’m going to be able to start speaking. With difficulty, of course, but then I’ll be able to progress quite quickly. So there you have it, thank you for listening. Next week I’m going to be kind of tied up because I have good friends (a couple from Sweden) visiting, so we’re going to be taking them around Vancouver, taking them out to Whistler and we’re going to tour the interior of the province. So I think for a week I don’t know where I’ll be able to sneak in any Polish, but we will see. Thank you, bye for now. Keep working and meet your targets. Read, listen, link, get at it and send your questions in. Bye.

My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Gabriel's Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/fluentasap Transcript: Gabriel: So question seven, I hope I can read this. Someone is asking, saying: I’m enjoying LingQ. I’m learning French and German. When can I start reading books of interest? Steve: Okay. Well, again, I find that until I’m very good I prefer to read on LingQ. If on a page there’s like 10 or 15 words that I don’t know, that’s a problem. It starts to interfere with 11:48.6. Gabriel: You’re grabbing the dictionary every five seconds, right? Steve: Right, if the subject is something that I’m very familiar with or very interested in. Like history, you can actually have a lot of words that you don’t understand. But, if you’re reading literature, I find that you miss those words you’re missing a lot. So I tend to want to find say things that were written in the 19th century, older material that I can get free and import into LingQ. How long does it take to get to a level where you can just pick up a novel and read it, it takes a long time. I can’t just, it just depends. It takes a long time, but I would try it. I would buy a book. Buy a book on something you’re very interested in and try it. Gabriel: Personally, I fully agree. Steve: One thing I don’t do is I don’t then look up every word and try and import it into LingQ. I did that for a while, but it’s just too time consuming and the benefits are limited. Gabriel: I guess it’s nice to just either guess the content or if you understand 90% of the words you can simply… Steve: Absolutely. What’s so 12:45.1 about language learning is you want to be doing different things, so read a book that you don’t understand, do some very simple content, pull something of interest into LingQ and link it. Do all these different things. As long as you’re engaging with the language you’re going to improve. Gabriel: I think that’s quite fantastic. I’m surfboarding some Russian content into LingQ, actually. I had this lady actually do the audio for me, as well, so I’m really excited about that because I can study the words, I can take a look at them, I can do flashcards, which is awesome. I’ve been boosting my learning and my understanding, which is a lot of fun. Next question: How are you enjoying Polish and how are finding, I guess, consonant clusters? Steve: Well, I’m enjoying Polish immensely. I enjoy the Real Polish from Piotr, but I’m also enjoying now an audio book. I bought __________, which is this book about Russian which I’ve read and English and now I’m listening to the audio book. I also found an audio book on Polish history. I’ve ordered some Polish books from a Canadian Web-based bookstore. I’m having some trouble. They won’t let you download eBooks from Poland for some reason. Anyway, I’m enjoying it tremendously and, of course, helped by my knowledge of other Slavic languages. Insofar as consonant clusters, it seems that the Poles will go _______ for something that maybe in Russian would be ______. It’s not a problem, you just get used to it. Gabriel: It just looks intimidating. It’s like oh, my God, there are all these consonants. Steve: I mean how can you have a word that goes ________? Come on now. I shouldn’t say that. How can you have English? Gabriel: The word through, for instance. Steve: Through, those, bow, cough, rough, that’s pretty weird. To that extent, Polish is consistent. Gabriel: I see. Steve: Polish is consistent. The only one that isn’t consistent I discovered is the word for apple, which is ________. It’s not pronounced _________ it’s pronounced ________. So there are some sounds that disappear in Polish. Gabriel: That’s interesting. Actually, I’m legitimately interested in picking it up or getting started within the next few months. I’m going to see your results and then… Steve: Great! I mean it’s a great country. There are 40 million people. They’ve got a great history. Gabriel: I have a lot of friends here, basically here in Vancouver, that have a Polish background. One of my best friends, he actually went to med school in Poland, then he came back and he speaks with his parents. I know a few words, but I’ve found some things tremendously hard, actually. Like the ___ sound. Steve: It’s almost like a W. Gabriel: I was trying to say the word ________ and then my friend said it sounds like you’re saying the word for Belgium. Steve: Okay. Don’t worry. Full Transcript: http://blog.thelinguist.com/steves-answers-on-your-language-learning-questions-part-3

My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Gabriel's Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/fluentasap Transcript: Gabriel: Question five: Where can I find more upper beginner content for Polish? This ties into another question, as well: What are some resources for content? Steve: This comes up all the time and it’s very important. We have, I think, some very good material for Polish at LingQ. This is the learner at LingQ who feels that he’s kind of done all those and wants to find more upper beginner content. My view is if you’ve done all of the sort of beginner, upper beginner, intermediate content at LingQ, it’s time for you to move into authentic content. Now, having said that, I know, for example with Portuguese, this one LingQ member created this wonderful series of 20 lessons where she talked about her trip through Europe. Gabriel: That’s so cool. Steve: Ten minutes each. She’s with her friend, they lost their bags. It’s very much, call it upper beginner or lower intermediate, but she spoke naturally. So we hope that at LingQ more and more of our members… One of my first Brazilian Portuguese tutors, she did also sort of a diary. She took her kids to the zoo and all this kind of stuff. So to the extent that people will create simple diaries, simple conversations on everyday life, I think that’s what we don’t have enough off. We have the sort of learner-oriented this is a dog, Mary is eating her cake. Gabriel: From the very beginning. Steve: From the very beginning. Then you’ve got that upper level, which is podcasts. Gabriel: Literature in Brazilian. Steve: I have my Portuguese podcast, _______ that I listen to. I mean you have a lot of this kind of content say that our members at LingQ create, either it’s a diary, my thoughts on this or I talked to my friend, my husband, my wife, my girlfriend, my boyfriend, that kind of stuff. If we can get more of that with good sound quality with a transcript so that you can read it and learn the words, that’s what we really need more of. As to finding content on the Web, you just have to Google. Maybe you take it and go to Google Translate to get the target language version of what you’re looking for, history of Poland or whatever. Historia Polski, okay, then you put Historia Polski and you’ll get a lot of stuff. Gabriel: Google that, sure. Steve: Sure, that’s what you have to do. Gabriel: For instance, I think I went to LingQ in Spanish and I found some really cool content with the culture. So this lady was talking about the Day of the Dead and I wanted to learn about it, actually. Instead of going to Wikipedia I just saw it on LingQ, so it was pretty cool. Steve: Now, obviously, in Spanish we have a lot more content than we have in Polish, Polish is a more recent language. In Polish I went to Piotr’s site, I’ve mentioned before, I got his stuff and I imported it into LingQ. So sometimes you have to go and find these resources. Gabriel: That’s true. Steve: Piort’s site does real Polish, by the way. RealPolish.pl, I’ll give him another plug. Gabriel: I want to start Polish myself you know. I hope that knowing Russian will help me. Steve: Oh, absolutely. Gabriel: I guess the declensions… Steve: The system is the same. Gabriel: Okay. Steve: The endings are different, but the basic system is largely the same. Gabriel: Excellent. Do they resemble each other every now and then? I noticed that between Croatian and Russian sometimes the endings of the words were actually similar. Steve: Yeah, some of them. Like the instrumental, you know the m or i, that type, but the genitive might be a u instead of an i or something. Gabriel: Interesting. Then question six: What was your experience like learning Korean, Steve? Steve: Korean I’m finding very difficult because there are a lot of small, little words there that seem to have six or seven meanings, so when you look them up it’s not that helpful to the context that I’m reading. And, again, a bit of a problem with content that is interesting, yet at my level. So I have these podcasts that I enjoy, but they’re a little bit difficult. One of them is this _______ that I’ve mentioned, he talks about literature. When he reads from ________ in Korean I’m lost. When he talks about _________ oh, yeah, I can follow him. So a bit of a problem with the language itself in terms of a lot of words that seem to have a lot of meaning. Again, it gets back to the whole content issue. Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. This may sound hilarious, but I’ve been trying to learn how to sing Gangnam Style in Korean. Steve: Oh, yeah. Gabriel: I probably sound hilarious, but I’m trying to… Steve: We’ll have to get a video of you singing that. Gabriel: Whoa! I’ll have to practice, but it should be fun.

My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Gabriel's Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/fluentasap Transcript: Steve: Hello there, we’re here again. First of all, we have a guest today. We have my friend Gabriel from Brazil visiting who also has his own Facebook page. Gabriel: Yes and a YouTube channel. We have everything, a website. The Facebook I am especially proud of. Steve: And you speak how many languages? Gabriel: I’d say I can have a decent conversation in 10, ay Phillip? Steve: I have taken the questions that I received here on my channel and I kind of summarized them a bit. I wrote it out in my handwriting, I don’t know if Gabriel can read my handwriting. Gabriel: There are some words here that are kind of tricky. Steve: The format is that he’s going to ask me the question, I’ll give an answer and he may disagree or whatever. We’ll see how it goes. Gabriel: It sounds great, okay. I’m excited about this. So the first two questions are a bit related. The first one is: In Swedish, how do you learn the different forms of the words in Swedish because there are different declensions? I, personally, don’t have a lot of knowledge of Swedish. The second one is: How do you basically learn Portuguese word conjugations, for example, ____ and ____? I have problems conjugating words in Portuguese sometimes. So how do you do that, Steve? Steve: Well, you know, it’s a problem in a number of languages. There are a number of languages where the nouns or the adjectives change declensions and verbs change, person, tense and whatever. I have gone through the experience of trying to study the tables and I find that it’s not very helpful. I still review them because I come across different forms of a noun or a verb and I’m not entirely sure what form that is. Then I’ll Google for that noun or that verb and I’ll see the table, so I go back there regularly. It’s like going to the water cooler in an office, you go there for a glass of water and you come back. The main thing is you just have to get used to it. Like the person that asked the question about Swedish and said there are so many different forms of plurals, I don’t even know that. I don’t even know that, but I speak Swedish actually quite well. It’s one of my better languages because I’ve spoken it a lot and I’ve listened to a lot of audio books on Swedish history and stuff. What I do when I’m reading, for example from Portuguese, yeah ____ and ____ is kind of confusing, so if I’m reading a book I’ll underline it, if I’m on LingQ I’ll save that phrase. I want to help my brain notice whenever that occurs, whenever that appears, but it’s just a matter of a lot of exposure and there are no quick solutions, coupled with occasionally reviewing the tables. Like the person asked, when I come across a noun in Swedish should I remember all the forms. You can’t remember all the forms. It’s not even worth trying, you won’t. So that would be my answer there. Gabriel: Yeah. Slavic language is the same. Like Russian, all the cases you have to know. It’s intense. So the third question here: How do you find the time, Steve? I’m guessing either learning or keeping up with this. Steve: I mean the big thing is listening. I would say that 70-80% of my learning time is listening. So if I’m doing anything around the house, I’m listening. If I’m in the car, I’m listening. If I’m cleaning the garage, I’m listening. Exercising, I’m listening. The listening enables you to get up to that sort of critical mass of one hour, minimum, a day. If I listen to something and I don’t understand it, then I’ve got to read, then I’ve got to link it, then I’ll perhaps work on my iPad. I do a lot of work, I should say, now on my iPad using iLink because it’s very handy, I sit down in a comfortable chair or I’m sometimes on my stepper at home. It’s a matter of trying to find ways to use dead time during the day. Gabriel: I think this is really cool. Personally, I really like alternating into active and passive listening. Sometimes I’m driving around and I have a language 04:18.3, content, whatever it is. Sometimes if I have time and I can focus on the language, then I go for active listening. Then I’m really paying attention and maybe reading the content, as well, maybe on LingQ, maybe on something else. Full Transcript: http://blog.thelinguist.com/steves-answers-on-your-language-learning-questions-part-3

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, two weeks in to my 90-Day Challenge challenging the language of Polish. I’ve been working heavily with the material from Piotr from Real Polish, which I mentioned last time, both his 100 stories, which are great, and his podcasts. I’ve been downloading content from Radio Polski. The audio doesn’t necessarily match the text, but I’m reading the text. My vocabulary -- I’ve added 5,000 words to my known words in Polish and I have saved another 4,000 words and phrases. So those are words I’m studying. I might know half of them, I’m sure up to about 8,000 words or so in two weeks, but that’s based on knowing some Ukrainian, Czech and Russian. I don’t think I could do that in Turkish. Next year I’m going to go after a language that’s unrelated to anything I’ve ever studied. It might be Turkish. It might be Arabic. I don’t know yet. It might Greek or something. Anyway, I’m enjoying Piotr’s material. I’m listening a lot and I’m going to start answering. His material, the 100 stories which I think are brilliant, he says don’t study grammar, just do the stories. You listen to the story, you listen to a different point of view and then you have these questions which I have not, up until now, been answering out loud. He suggests we answer out loud, but we don’t have to if we don’t want to. So, initially, I haven’t been and I think I’m going to start doing that. I want to get myself out of my comfort zone in terms of vocabulary by reading things. I’ve already read a book on Polish history, I’ve gone to the Wikipedia page of Polish history and I’ve imported all of that into LingQ. I’m going through, because I’m interested in history, gaining words and phrases from the radio site, from the history sites and so forth and at the same time I’m doing the easier material that Piotr has in his 100 stories. So I’m on sort of a two track here. Since I’m not quite familiar with all the vocabulary in Piotr’s stories, having imported them all into LingQ and created links and stuff, now I’m going to start actually answering out loud. I might do it just listening or I might do it while I’m reviewing in sentence view on the iPad so I can actually read the individual question or I can say the answer, go to the next sentence, see the answer and say it again. All of these things I’m going to be doing (A) to increase my vocabulary, but also to prepare myself for speaking because come the beginning of October or soon into October, I want to have a conversation with Piotr. Questions -- send me your questions. When I say send them, just put your questions here at YouTube, we’ll gather them up and once a week I try to answer them. Thank you and I hope you’re all working hard on your 90-Day Challenge. Thanks for listening, bye for now.

Sign Up for the 90-Day Challenge here: http://bit.ly/1O2spNg 90-Day Challenge Blog: https://www.lingq.com/blog/tag/90-day-challenge/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Transcript: Steve: Hi, there. Steve again and… Kiran: Hello. Kiran. Steve: We’re going to go over your questions, which we’ve collected. Now, I can’t answer all the questions, but I’ve collected them to some extent and we’re going to, hopefully, answer most of the questions. So go ahead. Shoot, Kiran. Kiran: Okay. The first one: Writing systems cause problems in language learning. How do you deal with different writing systems in Chinese and Russian, etc.? Steve: Etc. exactly, Korean. I remember the question was like Chinese, how do you start listening and reading when you can’t read anything? What I did when I learned Chinese is I spent the first month only listening and using Pinyin. In those days, it was a different system for using a Roman or a Latin alphabet. So I listened and I read in the Romanization system that we used at that time and then, after a month, I went heavy-duty into learning the characters. I learned the first 1,000 most frequently-used characters as a deliberate exercise. I would study 10 and, eventually, 30 a day, forget them, relearn them, separate from my reading and listening. After about 1,000 characters, I just learned the characters as I went. With a character-based writing system, you have to make a deliberate effort to learn the characters. Once you get to a phonetic writing system, like Cyrillic script for Russian is really not very difficult because it’s kind of almost parallel to the Latin alphabet with a few other symbols. Basically, you learn it, you don’t really understand it. You start reading, it’s difficult to read. You continue reading and listening and, gradually, it becomes more and more comfortable. The same is true for say the Korean script or the Kana script in Japanese. Those are easier to get used to and you get used to them as you read, but where you have characters to learn that’s a big chore. You have to do it and you have to do it every day consistently for a good few months. Read full transcript here: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/10755561/reader/

Sign Up for the 90-Day Challenge here: http://bit.ly/1O2spNg 90-Day Challenge Blog: https://www.lingq.com/blog/tag/90-day... My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Real Polish: http://realpolish.pl/ Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Week one of my Polish challenge is behind me, I have been working very hard. The big event was my discovery of Real Polish, where I found so much good content because in language learning content is king. It’s not about teaching grammar, grammar information resources are available. When you’re curious and want to know about why something works, you look it up. It’s not a big deal. Finding the good content is so important. What Piotr at Real Polish has done is he has created a variety of content for different levels, particularly for beginners. What he’s done is he’s put up 100 stories and each simple story consists of a story told once, then it’s told again with a different point of view, which might be a different person, it might be a different time, like a different tense, then this is followed by questions and answers, lots of questions and answers. You’re supposed to try and answer, I don’t bother. It’s just an imposition on me. I don’t like doing it, but I listen to it. This introduces structures of the language and vocabulary in such a thorough way and, of course, the big thing is that Piotr has a very pleasant voice and narrates these stories in a very interesting way it’s like you’re captivated by it. This is excellent beginner material, lots of repetition, interesting. Sometimes after I’ve gone through the computer linking the words I don’t know, then I do it on my iPad. I look on iLink and you can see it in the sentence view, so I look at each sentence and try to see how the endings change. Just a little bit of that helping the brain to notice, but then I listen and I’m reading. So I’m going to spend the first few weeks on this basic material. I’m also doing some of his podcasts which are more advanced, but already I can now go to the radio and the Polish newspaper and I understand much more than I did before. Piotr’s approach with his 100 stories I think is so clever that I would like to do it in other languages, where you just have 100 simple stories, you tell it once, then you tell it in a different person or in a different time and then you ask a bunch of questions, who did this, why, when. This gradually subconsciously introduces you to the language. Of course beyond that, once you’ve got a certain comfort level with the language, then you have to go after acquiring lots of vocabulary. In any case, in language learning content is the most important thing, interesting, captivating, meaningful, understandable content. I’ll leave a link to Real Polish in the description. I should point out that in my first week my statistics at LingQ tell me that I have added more than 3,000 words to my known word list. Granted, it’s because I know Ukrainians, Russian and Czech to some extent. Thanks for listening and good luck in your challenge. Bye for now.

Sign Up for the 90-Day Challenge here: http://bit.ly/1O2spNg 90-Day Challenge Blog: https://www.lingq.com/blog/tag/90-day-challenge/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ Transcript: Steve: Hi, this is Steve. You may not know Kiran, he’s part of the LingQ team. You can’t see Sam, but he’s the cameraman. We’re going to try to answer some of the questions that you’ve sent us on our 90-Day Challenge and I hope that you are all working hard on the 90-Day Challenge. We gathered some of the questions and there were a lot of questions. Some of them we kind of grouped together and thought it would be interesting if we had a question and answer, so Kiran here is going to ask. By the way, Kiran is working on Spanish and so is Sam. What were some of the questions? Kiran: Okay. The first one here was: How do you learn vocabulary so you don’t get overwhelmed and forget the original vocabulary that you learned? Steve: Okay. First of all, you do forget the vocabulary that you learn. That’s a given. In fact, it’s good to forget the vocabulary. If you forget it and relearn it, forget it and relearn it, forget it again and relearn it, that’s how you’re going to retain it. So I read and listen and, of course, the first time I come across a new word I link it, it’s now converted to yellow and then I’ll see it again. Not only do I forget the meaning, I forget that I ever saw the word before. It’s this process of engaging with the content, forgetting, relearning, forgetting and that’s how you learn. So that’s really not a problem. That’s how I see that. Read full transcript here: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/10755558/reader/