#AskSteve

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/

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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann. It is day one of the 90 Day Challenge. In my case, it’s a challenge to improve as much as possible in Polish. Quick comment here-- The whole idea of the 90 Day Challenge is that we push each other, help each other, encourage each other, ask questions of each other and so forth. If you have questions, you can put them here below the video. You can put them at my blog and there’ll be a link below in the description. You can ask them on the forum at LingQ. Ask me questions and once a week, at the end of the week, I will make a video in which I will try to answer the questions I get. Now, starting into Polish, let me be quite up front here. On LingQ I have over 6,000 words that, theoretically, I know in Polish. Most of that is because I have gone through Who is She? (kim ona jest in Polish), which is the 26th lesson, a silly little story that we have in every language at LingQ, so I’ve done that. There is a lot of very good beginner material that have been created for LingQ by some of our members, excellent quality, so I’ve gone through some of the beginner material. I have attempted a short audio book called Mandu, Gdansk, very difficult for me. Very nice narrator, nice voice, I can kind of listen along and read, but I don’t really understand it. There are far too many words that I don’t know. I have a much easier time reading newspaper articles that I import into LingQ, then create links and learn that way. So my strategy is the first week I’m going to really go after Who Is She? Simple content, really sort of relearn the stuff that I kind of half learned before. I know that relearning things that we have forgotten, in fact, gives us a better grasp of those things, so I’m going to focus largely on that and hope to move into more demanding material as soon as I feel comfortable enough to do so. If anyone knows of audio like podcasts on current events which also have transcripts, that would be wonderful. As it is right now, I can access podcasts without transcripts in Polish. I can also find, obviously, newspaper articles which have no audio. If I could find a combination on subjects like history or current events where I’m familiar with the background and if I could then listen and read that kind of material it would help me. In the meantime, I’m starting with the material that I’ve already covered before, which is largely Who is She? I look forward to your questions and I want to hear how you guys are all making out. Thanks for listening, talk to you soon, 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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. We’re getting closer to the start of the 90 Day Challenge, just a few days away. So I thought I’d, first of all, tell you the language I’m going to go for, I’m going to do Polish. I had thought of doing Korean, but I have done Korean before. I’m continuing to do Korean as a minor, but my major emphasis is going to be on Polish. I’ve never spoken Polish. I have dabbled a bit in Polish at LingQ. I have an advantage in Polish because a lot of the vocabulary is similar to Ukrainian and Czech. It’s a language I would like to get to where I can understand and speak, so that’s where my emphasis is going to be. A couple of words on what you can expect to achieve. Everything depends on how close the language is to a language you already know. I like to think in terms of three stages in language learning. The first stage you’re sort of becoming familiar with the language. You can tell when listening where one word ends and the next word begins. You start to be able to say a few things. That’s kind of getting somewhat use to the language so that it isn’t strange anymore. That’s a good three months, depending how many hours you put in. So if you’re a beginner, I think that’s really what you can expect to achieve in three months, but it depends how close the language is. If you’re going from Spanish to Portuguese you can achieve more. I’m going from Ukrainian and Czech to Polish, so I will achieve more. With my Korean it just takes me a lot longer. That second stage is where the language is no longer strange and you have a basic sense of how it works, but you just don’t have enough words. Especially when you’re in a language which is written in a different writing system and there are very few common words, it just takes an awful lot longer. It’s not the structure of the language, it’s the words. Even if Japanese or Korean is structured very differently from English, if the words were all familiar I could make it out, but it’s the lack of words. So, again, be realistic. If you’re doing a language that has a lot of common vocabulary with a language that you know you’re going to do better. At any rate, I will be updating you regularly with videos talking about my specific goals, what I’m doing and, hopefully, that will be of use to you. I very much encourage you to go after a period of concentrated effort, this 90 Day Challenge. One more thing, I invite you to send in your questions. One video a week I’m going to be answering questions from other participants. I should point out, as I think I did in the previous video, members of our LingQ team, Mark, Sam, Kiran and Miguel, are also going to be doing the 90 Day Challenge. So best of luck to you in your 90 Day Challenge and I look forward to hearing from you. Bye for now.

On Saturday August 29 - Steve hosted a webinar on 3 Simple Tips for Learning English. There are easy ways to learn English and difficult ways to learn English. During this free, Live webinar, Steve explained how to learn English the easy way. Topics: - Pronunciation - Key Concepts - Trigger words Timelines: 2:21 I am not an English learner, but I have learnt 14 languages. 3:13 You are lucky to learn English, because there so many materials available. 5:00 English pronunciation issue. Don’t rely on spelling. 8:20 Focus on intonation and rhythm. 9:15 Text-to-speech tip. 9:49 Don’t expect to be mistaken for a native. 10:53 Learn words and phrases, not rules. 11:38 You need thousands of words. 12:03 Start hearing phrases in your mind. 13:34 English is an idiomatic language. 14:36 Target keywords. 16:40 Trigger words for tenses. 19:40 Use modern tools. 21:03 Phrasal verbs issue. 21:44 Thinking of grammar rules. 22:30 What is the best way to memorize a phrase or a verb? 23:16 How to pass from an upper-intermediate to a really advanced level? 23:42 I can understand you, but I can't understand films and natives. 24:20 It’s not true we have a very few websites for practicing conversational English. 25:07 I understand films, but I can’t speak. 26:00 Is it necessary to feel confident? 26:48 Is it important to read daily newspapers? 27:27 Can I learn English only by reading for pleasure? 27:40 How to find keywords? 28:20 While reading, would it be a good idea to read out loud? 28:55 How do you find language partners? 29:34 Can reading without sound can cause confusions in pronunciation? 30:14 Everyday I listen but I don't feel I'm doing any better. 31:13 What is the best method to acquire vocabulary in a foreign language? 31:49 How much time do you spend for a language before you switch to another one? 33:05 Is it worth to go to a foreign country to learn English? 34:26 How to learn and improve two different languages at the same time? 35:19 How to develop constancy and diligence. 35:51 How to keep motivation? 35:56 Is it effective way to learn English words separately, not in phrases? 36:44 What do you think of Assimil? 37:35 Do you think that recording of ourselves is a good way of improving speaking? 38:10 Learning English before going to sleep. 38:52 Text-to-speech feature for the whole text. 40:02 Is it useful to listen while working? 40:30 Choosing between American and British accent. British content sources. 42:17 Retelling. 42:54 What is the best way to learn new words? 43:42 Differences between British and American English make a mess. 44:27 What do you think about online classes to practice English? 45:55 Am I supposed to speak only to native speakers? 47:40 Why is speaking much more difficult than understanding? 47:54 In English every word has a large number of meanings and I find it difficult. 49:14 Do you find DuoLingo a good way to start from scratch with a language? 50:02 For you, what does it mean to be fluent in English? 50:46 Is watching TV shows the best way to pick up casual English? 51:45 When do we use "even if" and when "even though" in English? 53:26 Is it useful to think in the language you are learning? 53:46 Do you use the words you have learnt recently in your daily speech as a rule? 55:46 How can I develop a particular syntax for a job interview? 57:74 I listen to the same audio for one week, seven days. 58:33 How much time do you spend for a lesson at LingQ? 59:05 Usage of "even if" and "even though" 59:48 Could you make a video focusing on speaking tips for advanced learners? 1:00:18 Is it useful to listen to a short or a long text? 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

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 Transcript: Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. I am here to announce the next 90 Day Challenge starting on September 1. Now, I’m not going to tell you which language I’m going to study. Originally, I was going to do Korean, but I did Korean the last time. I improved, but I didn’t get as far as I wanted to. I want to take my Korean to the next level, but I’m not going to do it this time. I’m going to maybe continue a little bit of Korean, you know, the 80-20 Rule, but 80% of my time is going to be on a new language and I will announce that in a later video. Why do we have the 90 Day Challenge? Because we’re learning. Many of us are on LingQ or many of us are learning independently and we all know that if you go to a gym you’re likely to work yourself harder than if you just stay at home and do some exercises. So, here again, we’re trying to create some of that group pressure, a little bit of focus, some short-term goals, so we can take ourselves up to another level. If you’re a beginner, you can get to where you’re at least a little familiar with the language. If you’re at a low intermediate level, you want to take yourself to sort of a breakthrough stage so that you can enjoy more movies, more books, enjoy talking to people more. You may have your own specific goals, it doesn’t matter what they are, but if you join us in this 90 Day Challenge then you’ll be part of this group trying to take ourselves to a new level in our language. I won’t be putting out videos every day as I did the last time, but maybe twice a week and then blogging and talking about what I’m doing. Three other members of our LingQ team, my son Mark, plus Sam and Kiran, are also going to be participating in the 90 Day Challenge and they’ll be talking about their own experiences. So we’ll all be commenting about what we’re doing. We want you people to ask us questions, if you have any. I should point out that in addition to my once a week reflections on my activity-type video, I’m also going to have one video a week where I will answer questions from other participants. All of this will be laid out later on, so this is kind of like an advanced news release that this is going to start happening on the 1st of September. You’ll be hearing more about it in another video, so stay tuned and I hope as many of you as possible join us. Thanks for listening, bye for now.

Read about this in English at my blog. http://blog.thelinguist.com/how-do-we-achieve-fluency-in-a-foreign-language Check out Playlist on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWvmu-POSUg&list=PLiFB-yYuG2hhHiqaH6hFB-i4gPBTUkxMT

Forgetting and relearning is more effective than forcing yourself to learn blocks of information. Check out http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research.html Transcript: Hi. Language learning is one of the most enriching, rewarding, satisfying activities we can engage in. If you’re interested in this subject, please subscribe to my channel where I talk about my experience in learning 15 languages. The most important task in language learning, in my opinion, is the acquisition of vocabulary words. If we have enough words, we can make sense of what we’re reading or listening to and we can somehow express ourselves. Vocabulary is much more important than grammar. The grammar you acquire gradually as you become familiar with the language, with the words, but first of all you need words. So how do we acquire vocabulary? Well, I think there are two sorts of approaches. One is the deliberate study of vocabulary by reading vocabulary lists and trying to memorize them or doing flashcards, keeping handwritten lists, these kinds of things, the other is to learn through a lot of exposure. Now, the strategy that you adopt will depend on your personal preference and also, in my view, on how much time you have. If you have a lot of time, six-seven hours a day as I did when I was studying Mandarin Chinese 45 years ago, then you can take an hour a day for the deliberate study of vocabulary. However, if you have one hour a day and two-thirds or three-quarters of that time, which I call dead time, is in your car, doing tasks around the house, walking the dog, then I suggest you don’t try to deliberately learn the vocabulary. There is significant research which shows that what they call block learning, where you take some material and try to force yourself to learn it, review it many, many times and go through, for example, your list of vocabulary or your flashcards over and over in the hope of nailing that and mastering it, that is relatively inefficient and that interleaved learning, (interleaving, I suggest you Google the term) in other words, where you come across some information, then you forget it, you go look at some other information and you come back to that first information, so you’re sort of interleaving layers of different things, forgetting and relearning, actually enables you to learn things better. Very quickly, the Law of Diminishing Returns sets in when we’re trying deliberately to learn something. It’s no longer fresh for our brain and the brain basically pushes back, whereas if you forget and come back to it you learn better. But if you have six-seven hours a day, there’s nothing wrong spending some time reviewing flashcards. If I look at my own pattern where I consume a lot of content through listening and reading and acquiring lots and lots of words, if I had to review them all in flashcards or on lists I would spend my whole… I have to decide. Do I want to spend my time reviewing words in flashcards or do I want to spend that time listening and reading to things of interest. I tend to do the listening and reading, I find that I acquire words very quickly and I have an enjoyable time doing it. Of course, speaking is also helpful. What you hear the native speakers say while speaking is what I call high resonance, just as interesting content is high resonance. You notice things better if you’re engaged in a conversation and you also notice when you weren’t able to find the words yourself and then you hear someone else use them. So that’s very, very good. However, in my own case, I prefer to delay that speaking situation unless there’s a need, if I’m living in the country where the language is spoken. Otherwise, I prefer to delay it until I have something meaningful to say and can understand what the other person is saying. Otherwise, we end up with a very limited range of language that we’re exposed to like, “How are you?” “What’s your name?” “What’s the weather like?” Therefore, again, I prefer to give myself that significant exposure through listening and reading, quite confident that the high-frequency words will appear very often, the medium-frequency words will appear less often, but I will eventually get them, and the very low-frequency words, some will stick and some won’t. If they’re that low frequency, maybe I don’t really need them. Ultimately, the choice is with the learner and my preference is to study in an enjoyable way. If I were in a course somewhere working five-six hours a day having to write an exam, I might take a different approach. There you have it, that’s my take on how to acquire vocabulary. I’ll continue once a week with these discussions on language learning and, if you’re interested, please subscribe to my channel. Bye for now. LingQ Lesson: https://www.lingq.com/learn/en/workdesk/item/10601518/reader/