#AskSteve

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

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

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

Here is my schedule for the next few weeks. Please let me know if you are interested in having a meet up. Dec 12-15 Lyon Dec 15-18 Laugharne Wales Dec 18-21 Bath, England Dec 22-Jan 3 London Jan 3-7 Paris See you soon, à bientôt! My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Visit https://www.LingQ.com

Topics: - Making difficult things easier - Achieving success - Enjoying the journey Timelines: 0:01 Maintaining motivation. 0:45 Comparing Business and Language learning. 2:29 The state of flow grows our motivation. 4:03 Be prepared for language learning. 5:13 Struggling with impossible things. 6:20 You need a method to keep you learning. 7:50 Dealing with failure in language learning. 10:12 Find companions to help you. 11:08 I don’t get frustrated in my language learning. 12:28 I believe LingQ is an extremely effective way of learning. 13:47 Stephen Krashen’s theory. 13:57 An advice for young learners. 14:50 My learning strategy. 15:29 How I recover a language. 16:01 Recovering my Polish. 17:17 Websites for finding language partners. 17:44 Do I use flashcards? 18:40 Focus your studying effort on one language. 19:20 Pronunciation improvement. 20:00 Avoid stressful things, do enjoyable things. 20:56 10.000 hours rule doesn’t apply to language learning. 21:58 Do listening to music and watching movies help me learning a language? 22:33 Adding new languages to LingQ. 23:07 Why grammar is boring? 24:14 Meaningful activities in language learning. 24:55 Visiting Poland, Slovakia, Czech republic and Ukraine. 25:29 Do I take language tests to motivate myself? 26:09 The minimal time for daily learning. 27:10 Tonal languages. 27:29 Visiting Turkey. 27:47 Shadowing. 28:17 The indication you are actually improving. 29:25 Learning two languages at the same time. 30:21 Similarities between Portuguese and Spanish. 30:48 Special offer from LingQ. My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Visit https://www.LingQ.com

My Blog: http://blog.thelinguist.com/ My Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/lingosteve My Twitter: https://twitter.com/lingosteve Visit https://www.LingQ.com We learn words because we need them not because they are on some frequency list. My dates in Europe: Dec 11-15 Lyon Dec 16-19 Wales Dec 19-22 Bath Dec 22-Jan 3 London Jan 3- Jan 7 Paris Anyone interested in a meetup? Any ideas on where and when? Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. You can see that I’m back in Vancouver. You can hear my wife practicing her piano in the background. We came back from Palm Springs yesterday and, of course, it’s raining today in Vancouver. I just put up the final video in Polish for my 90-Day Challenge. I will continue to read and listen to Polish, but the 90-day period of intensive study is over. It was a wonderful experience. I learned so much about Poland I now feel that I understand the language. I can understand podcasts so much better, I can read the newspaper. I don’t know what my next challenge will be. I’ve got so many languages that I would like to improve in, yet the challenge of taking on something like Arabic or Turkish really sort of catches my fancy. We’ll see what happens. You’ll notice in my video in Polish that I struggle with some words like for meat, pork and beef because these are words that have not come up in my listening and reading. You can only learn the words that are relevant to whatever your needs are, so if I were visiting and going to restaurants or buying food in Poland I would learn the words for food. Some people think that some words are naturally more important or higher in the pecking order than others and you should learn those first, but I think it all depends on what you are interested in. You need the words for the subject matter that you are listening to and reading, so your interest will dictate which words you learn rather than some arbitrary list, in my view. Again, my language learning is driven by my interests. One further thing I would like to mention is that my wife and I are going to be traveling to Europe, we’re going to visit my son and his family who live in London. We are going to fly to Paris, we’re taking the train to Lyon and we’re going to spend three days in Lyon from the 11th. So we’re leaving here the 10th, we arrive in Paris on the 11th. The 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th we are in Lyon. On the 15th we fly to Bristol and then we’re going to spend three days in Wales and three days in Bath. We’re going to visit and get to know parts of England. Then from about the 22nd on we’re in London until about the 2nd of January. Then we’re going to spend about four days in Paris from the 3rd to the 7th, including a side trip to 02:41.2 where we have some very good friends. So if there is any interest in a meetup either in Lyon or somewhere in Wales, Bath, Bristol and then in London and then in Paris, please let me know. I will put the dates here in the description. You should get the transcript for this video within a day or two, but I’m putting it up right behind my Polish video just to explain that the conversation I had with 03:24.4 was initially about food and I definitely struggled to express myself about what Canadians like to eat. Thanks for listening and I look forward, hopefully, to meeting some of you during my trip to Europe. Bye for now.

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.