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Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here. Today is the second in this series of short videos about Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. His second habit was what he calls ‘Begin With the End in Mind.’ This is very important. I’ll give you an example. I had a meeting with about 50 Chinese immigrants, here in Vancouver, who were complaining about the difficulty they had in speaking English. They claimed that they could read, perhaps didn’t understand quite a well when they were listening, but they had real trouble saying something. My question to them is: What is their vision of what they would like to be able to do in English? If their vision of what they want to do in English when suddenly confronted with an English-speaking person is to be able to say something in English. I should point out that these were housewives, wives of wealthy Chinese immigrants who don’t have much interaction with Canadian society, but then when they are confronted with the need to speak English, of course, can’t do so. I said, what’s your goal and they weren’t really clear. I said that if I were you, if I had immigrated to another country, because I’m an adult and I can communicate as an adult in my own language, my goal in this new language, especially if I’m living there, is to be able to communicate as an adult in the new language on a wide range of subjects without struggling, without seeming to be foolish. That’s the goal. You have to have a clear idea of that goal. If you have a clear idea of that goal you will achieve it. If you don’t have a clear idea of that goal, if you think you’re just going to learn some words and try and learn some grammar rules and then wonder why you can’t communicate properly you will probably not succeed. I always make the case if you don’t know where the top of the mountain is, if you can’t visualize yourself reaching the top of the mountain you probably won’t make it to the top of the mountain. So I think the second of Covey’s habits, insofar as language learning is concerned, is this habit of saying here’s what I want to achieve. I can visualize myself achieving this and, therefore, I will work as hard as I can to achieve it. So that is habit number two. Thank you for listening, bye for now.

On Saturday February 14 - Steve hosted a webinar on 12 basic Spanish tips. Watch this to see what went down and maybe learn a few things while you watch. 1. Buenos Días! 2. Questions? Join the conversation on Twitter. @Lingosteve #spanishwebinar 3. Why learn Spanish? ● Widely spoken ● Easy to learn ● You will be bilingual ● It will be easier to learn a third language ● Fun, sun, music dance ● So many different cultures ● Easy to read ● Makes it more fun to travel ● May help you get a job ● Makes you smarter ● Good for the brain 4. It is important to read and listen! 5. Paella! Piña Colada 6. Sergio García Different Pronunciations 7. Cuando calienta el sol Quiero una cerveza Hasta la vista Perro Ramón 8. Una Vaca Besa me mucho 9. Buenos días ¿Cómo está usted?¿Cómo estás? ¿Qué es eso? 10. Learn to notice 11. Train the brain 12. 12 Core patterns- Things & People - Verbs - What? - What kind? - Where? - Whose, to whom, for whom, by whom, with whom? - How? - How many? - Which/who? - Whichever, whenever, whatever. - When? - Tenses 13. Things you want to express- Probability - What if - Reason/purpose - Opinions - Feelings - Connector words 14. Keywords Review- Give and take - Come and go - Start and stop - Know and be able - Have and be - No way José - Hello and goodbye 15. Things and People Most nouns that end in “A” are feminine and most nouns that end in “O” are masculine. A O El cigarro El coche El doctor El zapato Un coche La casa, La puerta, La universidad, La conversación Una casa Las casas Unas puertas Los coches Unos coches The plural of nouns is usually formed by adding S. 16. Verbs ● Hablar ● Comer ● Vivir 17. What? ¿Qué es eso? What is that? ¿Qué quieres? What do you want? ¿Qué hora es? What time is it? ¿Qué pasa? What's up (doc)? 18. What kind? La Casa Blanca Una casa grande Un Gran Coche Los chicos altos Mucho Dinero Muy bueno 19. What kind?(continued) El es más grande que ella Lo más grande La más hermosa 20. Esto, Eso, Aquello Estos son los libros Aquellos coches Este libro Esa casa 21. Where…? Dentro Fuera Arriba Aqui Alli Abajo Yo sédonde... ¿Dónde está tu coche? 22. Whose, to whom, for whom, by whom, with whom ¿Por quién doblan las campanas? ¿A quién es el coche? ¿Con quien hablas? Es el mío ¡Por mi! ¡Este es para mí! 23. How? ¿Cómo estás? ¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Cómo se hace? 24. How many, how much ● Cantidad ● Cuanto cuesta ● Cuesta mucho ● Cuantas veces ● Muchas veces 25. Which/who El hombre que vive en esta casa La mujer que yo quiero La mujer con quien hablo 26. Whichever, whenever, whatever. ● Cuando quieras Cualquiera! 27. When...? cuándo, siempre,ahora, nunca, normalmente, antes, después, hasta, desde Cuando calienta el sol ¿Cuando...? ¿Qué día es? 28. Tenses Don’t be scared..notice and train the brain (Puntos de vista) 29. Lessons in LingQ 30. Resources: Focus on Basic Spanish Patterns: http://www.lingq. com/learn/es/library/courses/189655/ Puntos de vista: http://www.lingq.com/learn/es/library/courses/50858/ www.lingq.com 31. Adiós Chau Hasta luego Hasta pronto Nos vemos Hasta la próxima Links to resources: Focus on Basic Spanish Patterns: http://www.lingq.com/learn/es/library/courses/189655/ Puntos de vista: http://www.lingq.com/learn/es/library/courses/50858/ Ser Vs Estar: Get It Right Every Time: https://www.lingq.com/blog/2018/04/30/ser-vs-estar/ Here are some great Spanish podcasts too: https://www.lingq.com/blog/2018/11/07/spanish-podcasts/

Register here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/3945344952934418433 Do you want to learn Spanish, but not sure where to start? Do you know Spanish, but want to brush up on the basics? Or do you have a general interest in language learning? If any of these questions apply to you or if you enjoy free, fun stuff then we have a great surprise for you: On Saturday February 14th we will have a free webinar hosted by Steve Kaufmann, he plans to share 12 Tips on Basic Spanish with you. This practical webinar will: • Look at the underlying principles of Spanish grammar. • Explore how to use it in ordinary everyday situations. • Include a session, where you'll be able to ask Steve your very own questions about Spanish. We hope to see you there. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. Hope to see you there.

Hi there Steve Kaufmann. This is going to be the first in a series of 7 videos where I deal with each of the seven habits of highly effective people that Stephen Covey covers in his book (of the same name) which I made a reference to in my video last week. First of all I’ll go over very quickly the 7 habits and this is advice for people in their lives, advice for Managers, advice for business people and for people generally. You can Google Stephen Covey’s 7 habits and you will get a lot more information, but there are 7 habits. The first 3 have to do with Independence. The next 3 have to do with interdependence and the 7th one has to do with constantly renewing yourself and constantly improving. So the first one today, I am going to talk about the need to be proactive. I think it’s true in many things in life, if we wait for things to happen to us, some things may have, I mean, many things will happen to you. However by being proactive and taking initiatives and by pursuing your goals, it is more likely that good things are going to happen to you. And certainly I found in language learning that as long as I was a passive learner in school with a Teacher teaching me and as long as I waited for the Teacher somehow or the text book to teach me, I was not making very good progress. Once I took control of my learning, once I went out – and this meant looking for things in the language that interested me; books, in the case with Chinese, in those days before the internet, books with vocabulary lists behind each chapter. Taking the initiative in terms of what I wanted to learn about, what aspects of the language I needed to work on. Taking the initiative not to stay with the program that the Teacher is leading you into in the classroom. Many Teachers don’t like this. They don’t want the students to get ahead of them, this is so wrong because the language isn’t just chapter 1, chapter 2, and chapter 3. The language is basically a whole package and we learn different parts of it again and again and again and so for the student to go out and find things of interest to him or her and then go back and then go back and do what they are doing in class, all of this is good. You have to take the initiative, you have to take responsibility. There are people who say that there’s no bad learners, only a bad teacher. I don’t believe that at all. I think whether you are in a classroom, or whether you are studying on your own, only those learners who take the initiative, who are motivated to take charge of their learning, are going to be successful. And we have amble evidence of this in our school system in Canada, and I am sure in other language schools where a small percentage of the learners actually improve and equally large numbers can improve on their own if they are motivated, so that the important point is not the number of instructional hours, but rather the important point is; to what extend are you prepared to be proactive and take charge of your own learning. So that is the first of the 7 habits that Stephen Covey talks about and it might even be the most important. Be proactive. Take charge of your own learning. And that is the first of the 7 habits of highly effective people. Thank you for listening.

Hi there, Steve here. Today I’m going to do a video out of schedule. I’m trying to be more regular in my videos so that we can prepare transcripts and those will continue to be there every Thursday, but sometimes I have something on my mind that I just want to talk about and today is such a day. A friend of mine sent me an article from a Czech website saying that Bill Gates apparently wants to learn French. The one thing he wants to do in his life is to speak foreign languages and he feels unhappy that he can’t do so. Then I Googled and I found the original interview in English. I’ll put both links in the description here. The important thing is that Bill Gates, with all the money he has, the one thing he wants to do is to speak foreign languages. For those of us who study foreign languages, of course, sometimes we see these extremely wealthy people who have yachts, expensive cars, five homes and can go to expensive restaurants and stuff. It’s important to remember that we are happy inside ourselves and all these other things we can buy with money, cars, yachts and expensive meals, those are only props. Those are tools that we hope are going to make us happy, but we’re only happy inside, really. Just having a car doesn’t necessarily make us happy. We might be happy when we sit in the car, but we don’t live in the car. So if we look at the opportunity to become happy through learning a language, the amount of time that we actually enjoy the language while studying, while reading, while visiting the country, while speaking with people, I suggest that that gives us more happiness than owning a Lamborghini or a yacht. So for those of you out there who are keen language learners, you have a chance to do something that Bill Gates wants to do but so far hasn’t been able to do. Apparently, he studied some Latin and Greek at school and was doing Duolingo and didn’t continue for whatever reason. Of course, I would like to suggest that Bill Gates study at LingQ. I think it’s ideal for someone like him. I think he’s an intellectual. He’s a reader. He wants to not just learn French so like Mike Zuckerberg he can go and answer a few questions in Beijing or in Paris, but I would imagine that he would like to discover French civilization, French culture, achieve a level of vocabulary so he can go to Paris and have intelligent adult conversations with French people. In which case, I humbly submit that the best place for him to learn French is at LingQ. Pardon the plug. At any rate, even without that, those of you who study languages, all of us who study succeed to some extent. We are achieving something that at least two very wealthy people in the world, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, want to achieve. So there you have it, I just wanted to throw that one in. Maybe we’ll get a transcript up next week, but I’m going to put this one up today because it’s topical right now. Thank you and thanks for listening. Bill Gates wants to speak foreign languages. He should learn French at LingQ. Here are the links to the original articles. In Czech; http://www.novinky.cz/muzi/360190-nejbohatsi-muz-sveta-bill-gates-lituje-jedne-jedine-veci.html In English; http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/28/technology/bill-gates-regret/

7つの習慣という有名な本の教えは言葉の勉強に活用できます。http://amzn.to/1DOwXlj Timelines: 0:28 みんなさん、僕のビデオを英語を勉強するためにつかえろう。/ You can use my videos for learning English. 2:07 7つの習慣は言葉の勉強に何の関係？/ How «The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People» are related to language learning? 2:57 僕はどういう風に忘れた日本語を回復するのか。/ How do I revive my Japanese? 5:56 どうして僕は日本人向けの英語の本を信じらないのか？/ Why I don’t trust Japanese textbooks for learning English. 　 7:31 好きなものをたくさん読むと聞くこと。/ Listening and reading a lot to the things of interest. 8:23 言葉の強い基盤があれば話す能力がすぐ開発。/ Speaking develops fast on the basis of a solid vocabulary foundation. 8:54 言葉の勉強を包括的に取り組まないとだめ。/ You must have a holistic approach to language learning. 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

Hi there Steve Kaufmann here. Today I want to talk about language learning and a very famous, successful book – a self-help book – by Stephen Covey called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. I read this and I will tell you why I read it. It is because I found an audio book of this "xxxxxxxxxxxxx" (Russian title) when I was in Riga, so I bought the book and I bought the audio book and I listened to it and so on and so forth. It has applications for language learning and basically the seven habits that Covey talks about are: 1. to become independent, this is extremely important for language learning and it consists of being proactive, you have to take charge of your language learning, I have discussed this before. 2. Start with the end goal in mind, so if you are starting to learn a language make sure you know exactly what you want to achieve i.e. you want to learn it to a specific degree of fluency, in fact visualize yourself reaching that goal (in my opinion). 3. He talks about doing first things first, and to me that means; if you are going to study a language and if you intend to achieve this end goal that you have in mind, do it every day and make sure you do it every day and as I have talked about before have your MP3 Player with you and have your text with you and whenever you have an opportunity: DO IT. So that gets you independent. The other thing he talks about is becoming interdependent with other people – now he talks about management and working with people and of course we’re talking about language learning and so to the extent that we’re communicating with other people and of course being interdependent is important. So to get to this interdependence the 4th thing he says is to think in terms of win-win. Alright, if you are negotiating with someone then of course win-win is important, but where I see this applying to language learning is, no matter what you do, consider it a win. You are struggling with a text, you really didn’t understand it well, it was somehow frustrating, and you don’t think you are making any progress, but you spend half an hour to an hour listening, reading, to whatever extent you understood it, it’s a win because you expose yourself to the language – it’s a win. So everything is a win, when you are studying a language. Then the 5th thing he talks about is: Try to understand and THEN worry about being understood, so if you are a Manager of course, you want to first understand your people before you can expect them to understand what you want from them. To me this is extremely important in language learning. I stress this all the time, it is more important to understand than speak. If you can have that confidence, that you understand what you hear, understand what you read, you understand the language, you have the vocabulary – the speaking will come. It’ll come through speaking, but if you don’t understand it is very difficult to have meaningful conversations. The 6th thing was: Synergy. And I think that synergy also applies to language learning because all of our activities, all of the different learning activities; reading, listening, speaking, writing – they are all synergistic, because everything we do increases our ability to notice. So there is obvious synergy in all of our learning activities. We are doing this number 6 of Steven Covey. And, the 7th thing he talks about is what he calls sharpening the saw, which means constantly developing your skills and I think building up your passive vocabulary, building up your familiarity with the language – all of this is making you potentially a better speaker of the language, so you are in fact sharpening the saw. Now in subsequent videos I’ll get into more detail on some of these “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, but you can Google for it and I think look at how this applies to language learning and I look forward to your comments. Thank you for listening. http://www.change-management-coach.com/stephen-covey.html

The key to language learning success is comprehension. This requires a large vocabulary. Here I explain why this is so. Check out this article by Ernest Blum, The New Old Way of Learning Languages. Check out this article by Ernest Blum, The New Old Way of Learning Languages. http://tinyurl.com/mpm2vxg Hi there Steve Kaufmann here, today I want to talk about words. The importance of words and how many words we need. It is a subject that comes up regularly. I came across a very interesting article and in fact I am going to write a blog post about it. Might have it up next week, I have just started writing it. We need lots of words. Essentially in order to learn a language beyond the sort of very superficial social level we need a large vocabulary. The best way to acquire that vocabulary, in my opinion, is through a lot of reading and reading things that are meaningful and in fact historically that’s how people learned languages. AND… what we discover when we start reading things that are interesting to us, not just text book material is that in fact you need A LOT of words and the vast majority of language courses don’t enable the learner to acquire a sufficient vocabulary to go out and read a book. And I believe that in any of the languages that I have learned I want to get to where I can read book of interest to me; history, literature, whatever it might be that I can without difficulty and enjoyably read things that interest me. To do that you need a lot of words and there is this myth about if you have 1000 words you can cover just about any context in the language. It’s simply not true. Apparently, according to research 100-150 words will probably cover in most languages up to 50% of the words in any given context. However, once you get beyond that the words are less and less frequent. In fact the less and less frequent words appear VERY MUCH less frequently and so the example was given in James Joyce’s Ulysses for example, which apparently has a total of 250.000 words, but uses 30.000 different words. So in order for you to understand every word in Ulysses, you’d have to know 30.000 words. Now, research has shown that as long as you have about 98% of the vocabulary in any given text or book, you can read it quite comfortably unless you’re working on the internet with access to an online dictionary or using it in LingQ – as I do for my language learning, where I can cope with texts that have 20% unknown words because I am saving them and I am counting them again and the whole process is helping me learn them, but I want to get to where I can just pick a book off the shelf and read it and for that I need to have 95-98% coverage. Now, it’s been shown that in many many books, words that only appear once, twice or three times in the text may account for 30-50% of the words in that text, so you are going to be meeting a lot of rare words. So, the unfortunate or the corollary of the fact that high frequency words account for a high percentage of any given text is that you need A LOT of low frequency words in order to make sense of the text. And since reading is so important to building up our fluency and our ability to understand, especially if you combine it with listening. Therefore, the focus on vocabulary and comprehension is much more important than the traditional approach of teaching people some grammar and a few basic words and hoping that they can somehow make it in real situations. THEY CAN’T. Thank you for listening, it went on a bit long today.

多阅读多听, 增加词汇量是学语言的基础。 Why we need a lot of words to learn languages and why reading is so important. Check out this article by Ernest Blum, The New Old Way of Learning Languages. .https://theamericanscholar.org/the-new-old-way-of-learning-languages/#.VMg6jHB4qos

Language-Learning Toolbox Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here again, today I want to talk about what I call a language-learning toolbox. I had a comment on one of my YouTube videos where I said that I tried shadowing, which is a method of language learning or an activity whereby you listen and speak out loud. I don’t want to go into detail on it because I tried a little bit of sort of reading and speaking out loud or whatever and I don’t enjoy doing it. You can look up shadowing in language learning and you’ll find it. A lot of people swear by it. Fine, I said, I tried it and I didn’t enjoy doing it and then people criticized me. One person said why are you so reluctant to add this to your toolbox or something? So, toolbox -- If you are a woodworker or, whatever, a stamp collector, in any hobby your tools are there in order to make the main activity, that enjoyable hobby activity, more efficient, more enjoyable, but the tool itself is not the goal. The tool is there to help you do what you like to do. So, to me, an activity which is a tool, like shadowing, doesn’t appeal to me. To me, the activity which appeals is using the language. So, listening, reading, speaking, writing, using the language, is the activity that gives me enjoyment. The tools, I could say, are the resources I find on the Internet. The podcasts I find, my mp3 player, my iPhone, my iPad, LingQ, dictionaries, these are the tools that help me do the task which I enjoy doing, which is engaging with the language. Those sort of almost deliberate learning strategy-type tools, to me, are not tools, they’re another activity. For those people who enjoy those activities then that’s a great thing to do because that’s what they enjoy doing, but the tool is not the activity. The activity, to me, is what engages me and so I do those things which I find engage me, have high resonance and so forth. So that’s my answer. By all means, people say why don’t you try this approach, that approach, use Anki, use Duolingo. Luca has a method where he translates from the language he’s learning to his own and then back to the other language. There are all kinds of things you can do. Do those things which you enjoy and then those are not tools, those are the activity. The activity should totally engage you and, if it does, you’ll end up spending the time with the language, you’ll end up with a positive attitude and you’ll start to notice the language a little better. So thank you, that’s my take on different language-learning tools. Bye for now.

Learning in the Moment Hi there, Steve Kaufmann here again, today I want to talk about staying in the moment when we learn languages. You can Google and look up living in the moment, staying in the moment. I think today it’s so easy to be distracted. It’s easy to be distracted when you’re on a computer and have access to the Internet, your email or other places you go. It’s easy to be distracted by thinking of maybe mistakes you made or things you want to do tomorrow or frustrations with your language learning, so I find that it’s very important to develop that ability to be in the moment when we are enjoying our language. For me, that might mean when I’m LingQing a Korean text or I’m reading a Ukrainian text that I want to, basically, block everything out and just enjoy it. I find now, too, now that I’m sort of semi retired. Of course I have a lot of memories of things, but I try not to spend my time on the past or the future. I like to sort of say wow, look at the colors even in this room, the texture of what I’m looking at, the sound of the rain outside. Just to cease that moment and to have that kind of an attitude. When you’re enjoying your language, listening to it or even writing or if you’re communicating with someone, just have that sense of that enjoyment of that moment. I don’t recommend that you should think about wow, I’m doing this because later on it will improve me. That’s why I’m not such a big fan on Anki or these other skills where I’m doing something which is drudgery now, but somehow I think it’s going to improve me. I don’t tend to think that way. I say I am doing this now, I enjoy it. I’m learning about Korea, I’m enjoying the sounds of Korean and enjoying that. I happen to know that this is going to help me gradually absorb the language. Just by the mere fact that I’m exposing myself to more of the language, reading and paying attention to words, I know that’s going to help me. I’m not thinking about what it’s going to do for me in the future, I’m only thinking of enjoying this task while I’m doing it. I find that I’ve become actually better in doing that because of my experience as a language learner, so even if I’m reading Spanish now where I have had trouble with verb endings, as we all do in Spanish, because I’m in the moment I tend to notice okay, this is the third person singular of the past tense, which I sometimes have trouble with I can’t notice it. Just by that little tick, I noticed, I’m in the moment, that’s going to help me. I don’t think about how it’s going to help me, I just know it’s going to help me and so I just say in that moment of enjoying the language. So just a bit of advice… I could go on much longer, but I’m trying to keep my videos short. Try to enjoy the moment for what it is rather than for what it might do for you or thinking about previous failures or anything else, just enjoy the moment. Thank you, bye for now.

I often get asked questions like: ‘Which is easier to learn language a or language b?’ or variations of that such as ‘How long will it take me to learn xxx?’ Today I am going to talk about whether some languages are easier to learn than others. The short answer is: Yes, some languages are easier to learn than others, but it all depends… It depends on the languages you already know, as well as your interest and motivation in learning the new language. I studied Korean before I studied Russian, Czech, Ukrainian (and Romanian, which I only did for two months). I spent 6 months on Korean before we had it on LingQ. I was listening to it for an hour or more every day, bought lots of books etc. I later went through another bout of Korean language learning later on when it became a supported language on LingQ. I understand 95% Russian, 85% Czech, Ukrainian and even Romanian, which I, like previously mentioned, only spent 2 months on. No matter how long I have spent on learning Korean, there is no question in my mind that I understand all these languages much better than Korean. Why? There are a number of reasons: Once I had put a lot of time into Russian, Czech became a lot easier, and so did Ukrainian. I have looked briefly at Polish and think it’ll be a piece of cake due to my knowledge of the other Slavic languages. Romanian is also easy to learn, as 70% of the words are similar to Italian words, the alphabet is the same, the pronunciation is similar and the rest of the language has Slavic roots, so again, it was easy for me to learn. Korean, even though 50% of the vocabulary is close to Chinese, it is not immediately obvious what those words are because the pronunciation is very different. A number of things make Korean difficult, but the thing I have found most difficult is that the material that I can find to motivate me is very limited; there isn’t much interesting content to read. The interesting stuff is very difficult, the easy stuff is of no interest to me and there hasn’t been any sort of urgency or anything that’s driving me towards that particular language. However I am going to visit Korea in March and that may turn things around. To summarize: Yes, there are languages that are easier to learn than others, depending on the languages you already know, your opportunity, your motivation, and what other stimuli there might be. It is therefore difficult for me to answer questions like: ‘How long it takes to learn a language’ or ‘Which language should I learn’ as it entirely up to the individual and their situation.