#AskSteve

Erfolg beim Sprachenlernen ist vor allem eine Frage der Motivation. For the English please see my blog post. http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language

My effort in Czech to explain the three key questions on motivation. I struggle to find words, and make mistakes, but this is an important part of language learning. Making mistakes and struggling need not in any way be demotivating. Please refer to my blog post for English. http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language

I have played with Duolingo a little, and quite like it... for beginners! Timelines: 0:02 Is Duolingo efficient? 1:10 Why I prefer Audio materials to Videos. 1:49 You don’t need 1000-2000 words to speak a language. 2:09 I can’t use Duolingo while doing other things. 3:27 There is a better way of spending your time than Duolingo. Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Efficiency in language learning is extremely important. I learned that when studying Chinese 45 or 48 years ago. Because there’s so much time involved, even a 50% increase in efficiency has a big impact. And the faster you can learn the language, the more efficient and the more intense, the better you’re going to learn. That was my experience 48 years ago. Read the rest here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/language-learning-efficiency-and-duolingo 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 the new LingQ channel: https://goo.gl/WVnzRS Follow "Steve's Cafe" channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann

流暢に話せる為にモチベーションは絶対条件。あなたはこの三つの質問にどう応える？。 For English please refer to: http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language Timelines: 0:43 誰でも流暢になりたい。/ Everybody wants to be fluent in a language. 1:38　第１の質問。『私は本当に流暢に慣れるんですか？』/ Question #1: «Am I really able to reach fluency?» 3:53　第２の質問。『私は使っている方法は効果的ですか？』/ Question #2: «Is the method I am using really efficient?» 4:54　使っている方法に自信が絶対あるはず。/ You must have confidence in the method you are using. 6:48　第３の質問。『やっている事にやる価値があるのか？』/ Question #3: «Is it worth spending time?» 9:13　結論。/ Conclusion. 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 the new LingQ channel: https://goo.gl/WVnzRS Follow "Steve's Cafe" channel: http://www.youtube.com/c/SteveKaufmann

I believe we live in the Golden Age of Language Learning, with so many free amazing resources available to us. Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Today my subject is; The Golden Age of Language Learning. It is something that has dawned on me that we live in The Golden Age of Language Learning, now and things may improve, but compared to 50 years ago, 30 years ago, or hundreds of years ago. And I will give you some reasons why. I decided, or I said or there was a request that I would do videos in other languages, so I have started doing that. Read the rest here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/the-golden-age-of-language-learning

La motivación es la clave. For a rough translation refer to my blog post.http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language

Pour un résumé en anglais voir l'article sur mon blog. For a summary in English check out my blog. http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language

http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann I am going to stay with this theme of attitude and motivation which is so important to language learning. But first a housekeeping note; I had said that I would do videos in different languages and I haven’t been doing it, so here’s what I plan to do. I have written up a blog post at my blog (http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language) which you can see a link to it in the description here, and I am going to basically cover this material in – I don’t know – 7, 8, 9, 10 languages, we’ll see. So I have been struggling with this idea, am I going to write a transcript or a translation and stuff, so it will all be there in English. I am going to essentially talk about the same thing in each language, if anyone of you is either a learner of one of these languages or a native speaker and want to provide one of these transcripts, we will put it up, but I am not going to transcribe it in different languages and today I am going to speak in English, but immediately thereafter in French, by the way today is Canada Day July 1st – Canada’s national holiday, so congratulations to all Canadians. Motivation I saw a very interesting video on T E D or Ted by a gentleman called Scott Geller, who is a professor of psychology, maybe, at a university in the States and he referred to self-motivation and in fact the whole talk is about self-motivation and you will find a link in my blog post and he says there are three key questions that one needs to ask oneself with regard to self-motivation and these have tremendous application for language learning. And of course remember that motivation is the overwhelming factor in success. If we want to become fluent, the key to fluency is motivation. Read the rest of the transcript here: http://www.slideshare.net/LykkeSoby/steve-kaufmann-how-to-achieve-fluency-transcript

I think motivation is the number one most important element (factor) in language learning success. Check out my video to see why. Video transcript: https://bit.ly/2S62cq5

I have never believed that there are "auditory learners", "visual learners" or other types of learners. I do believe that learners are motivated by different things. It is these different kinds of motivations that need to be researched and better understood. Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. You often hear that there are different types of language learners. There are auditory learners, visual learners and kinetic learners; people who like to learn by listening, by seeing or by doing. Books have been written on the subject, I think even pedagogy has been developed to suit different kinds of learners. Read the rest of the transcript here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/are-there-different-types-of-language-learners

This topic was discussed on LingQ's forum: https://www.lingq.com/forum/46/36684/?jump_to=1#post-204159 Study this video as a lesson on LingQ: https://www.lingq.com/en/learn/en/web/lesson/558797 Transcript: Grammar, the importance of grammar and how we should deal with grammar, there’s this constant debate. Some people say grammar is a waste of time. Other people say that you have to first learn the basics. It’s a theme that I’ve dealt with before, but I thought I would go into it again. Read the rest of the transcript here: http://blog.thelinguist.com/the-importance-of-grammar Learn from this video on LingQ: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/10201303/reader/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_xNC3wFajE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE3jXTPfb0s http://blog.thelinguist.com/language-teachers A wonderful language teacher Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. Today I want to continue talking a bit about teachers because I made a blog post about why a teacher can be so influential in our language learning, even though I feel that – to a large extent – language learning is dependent on the attitude of the learner, but many people aren’t motivated enough, many people haven’t yet been turned on, many people have inhibitions, many people, probably the vast majority of learners benefit from having the right kind of teacher. A teacher who encourages them, who stimulates them, who provides that human face contact that makes them want to learn for the teacher. All of these many, many reasons. If the teacher is the right kind of person and a good communicator, warm with empathy and enthusiastic, they can be absolutely decisive, a decisive element in the success of the student. And in that regard I want pay tribute to such a teacher, whom I met while I was in Saigon – or excuse me – in Hanoi. His name is Mal Pritchard or Pritcherd – he is an Australian. A retired Australian who lives in Hanoi and when we had our meet-up in Hanoi, he came with a number of other people. He wouldn’t let me pay for my beer and whatever little munchies we had. A very generous, warm, gregarious type of person. And he, in his retirement years, claiming that he can live more cheaply in Vietnam than in Australia on his pension and whatever retirement income he has. He is a volunteer teacher, sort of like the pied piper of Hamelin who gathers Vietnamese students around him in the center of old Hanoi and teaches them English. And it is a phenomenal story in my mind of people communicating across cultural divides, as I remember he speaks some Vietnamese, I can’t say how well he speaks Vietnamese, but he is totally comfortable living in Vietnam. Happy being there. Obviously gets a sense of satisfaction from the genuine good that he is able to do, and I think very often we get more satisfaction in giving than in receiving. And his students are very, very happy that Mal is there for them. So I am going to post in the description links to two videos – one which describes his programme – both these videos are done by Mal’s students, who Mal admits are much more efficient when it comes to technology and such than Mal is. But I did mention in my blog post, which I might also put a link to in my description. I mention Donald Duffy – this excellent Spanish teacher in Delaware in the US. I also mentioned Maurice Rabotin who was a great inspiration to me in my French and then in my subsequent interest in language learning and so here is a bit of a profile of Mal Pritchard. I am sure that there are lots of these excellent teachers out there and they have a major impact on language learning success. So thank you for listening and this is for Mal – I promised to do something like this a lot earlier and with one thing and another I never did, but here we go. Thank you for listening, bye for now.