#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 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

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