Why YOU Should Learn a Language, Explained in 4 Minutes
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- Опубліковано 23 кві 2023
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A sequel to: • Why Are the English So...
Thanks to my patrons!! Patreon: www.patreon.com/user?u=73482298
Sources:
Alladi, S., Bak, T., Duggirala, V., Surampudi, B., Shailaja, M., Shukla, A., Chaudhuri, J. & Kaul, S. (2013). "Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status". Neurology, 81 (22).
Bialystok, E., Craik, F. & Freedman, M. (2007). "Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia". Neuropsychologia.
Pawle, L. (2013). "Language skills deficit costs the UK £48bn a year". The Guardian.
Roberts, R. & Kreuz, R. (2019). "Can Learning a Foreign Language Prevent Dementia?" The MIT Press Reader.
Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Music by me.
Translations:
Le Napolitain - French
klawik - Polish
Avaxar - Indonesian
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
#learnlanguages #linguistics #economics
Dear people who watch this video. For those of you who care (myself included), I made a mistake on the map I included in the video of Serbia. This map includes Kosovo, which is claimed as Serbian territory. I support the independence of Kosovo, however, and not the Serbian government.
Брате јеси га сјебо сада..
jk Kosovo is independent and I hope for all of us to a peaceful resolution to our Balkan conflicts!
Pozdrav iz Bosne
My man couldn't care less about his comment section turning into a war zone. I can respect that.
Huge respect for not being like many other ytbers that are deathly afraid of mentioning anything political, or try to both sides issues for no good reason when they do
BASED
@@user-lg5gq2he9g thank you i'm just not ashamed of my political beliefs aha
to flex on monolinguals ofc
I recently learned Dutch to an advanced level (over 8.000 base words) and am also intermediate level in Norwegian / Swedish / Portuguese (over 3.500 words) and beginner level in Welsh (around 450 - 500 words) and French (about 2.000 words) and I know around 1.000 words in German / Italian / Latin since childhood from lyrics / TV etc, and am native speaker level in Spanish (over 10.000) since childhood + 1.000 new words learned recently since I started learning languages on my own - showing off is one of the reasons for me, but the main reason is because I want to learn all the languages that sound pretty and have mostly pretty words for the pretty words and be able to understand poetry etc in those languages and also use them in lyrics etc myself, including all Germanic languages and the 6 Celtic languages and most Latin languages and their dialects or languages based on them, like, Italian has many similar languages that are Italian-based, like Sicilian and Neapolitan and Venetian and Corsican etc, and some languages are like a mix between 2 languages, like Limburgish (mix of Dutch-based & German-based words) and Catalan and Occitan (mix between Spanish & French) and the 3 types of Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese / Galician / Portuguese from Portugal) etc, and I want to know all those languages!
Anwy, some of the ‘sponsors’ of this video shouldn’t have been listed, considering the very disrespectful names, it’s beyond ofsv / disrespectful to food / donuts to ever misuse such Holy term in the name or internet name etc that are the exact opposite of hum’ns and don’t belong in a name or internet name that a hum’n misuses, and disrespectful names and all impsts and all other wrong things etc must be bnd, pfff, and also all names that promotes beyond wrong things etc!
And, ‘families’ are also beyond zynfeI and wrong, unless one just takes care of some homeless kid or pets etc on his own, to do a good deed...
ReIationships are only meant for us pure beings (me & my pure protectors aka the alphas) who were blessed with a pure body that doesn’t gx one out and that has a good smeII / no smeIIs aka an enjoyable presence, and were never meant for hum’ns, and all the harrible things that happen to hum’ns in general are a form of karma for trying to be in a ‘reIationship’ and for bngng and bdg and all other zynz - besides, love only exists for me and is only meant for me the only lovable being aka the only wf / bride / gf etc, and my pure protectors aka the alphas are the only beings who can feel love for m only, and hum’ns don’t know what love or reIationships really mean and have always misused the words!
Also, re language learning - another reason why a few months ago I chose to start learning languages on my own is, because it’s one of the best things to do with one’s time, because I’ve already been ferced into existence against my will and without my consent in such a pointIs morteI worId that is beyond wrong, and instead of just waiting for the time to pass, I figured I should at least try to do something I can actually enjoy during that time, and learning pretty words in other languages is one of the best ways to spend that time, plus I have nothing else to do, anyway, since I don’t work and don’t go to school etc, so I would just get really bored if I didn’t do anything and not learning languages and other info on my own, and learning new words and new info at least gives me something to look forward to, and keeps me busy, so I don’t get as bored as I used to be before starting language learning on my own!
Here's a relevant joke from my country (Bulgaria):
A foreigner approaches two cops and tries to ask them for directions. He tries in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian but they don't understand him, so he just drives off. One of the cops says: "Perhaps we should learn a foreign language." and the other replies "Why bother? This guy spoke like 13 languages and it didn't help him any!"
LOL!
😂😂
Loool I'm stealing that!
As a language nerd, I always get mistaken for a genius whenever I bring up how many languages I know. It's a bit weird how hard most people think language learning is. It's not hard; it just takes time and consistency.
So it is hard.
@@jakubolszewski8284 Not really. Learning to play the piano, programming, etc.. these are hard, because they require talent or expertise in other fields (like maths). Languages are as entry-friendly as it gets.
@@jakubolszewski8284 Difficulty does not equal effort.
@@jakubolszewski8284 Painting a 1000km long fence, is no harder than painting a 1m fence. The time it takes, to do a thing, has no bearing on how hard/difficult it is. Also, many talk about what languages are the hardest to learn, based on the numbers on how long it takes the Americans, to teach them to diplomats ...which is completely wrong, for the above mentioned reason.
@@Aadrian7 Learning to play the piano, programming, etc. doesn't require talent or expertise, all it takes is time and consistency, which is true for 99% of things in life. Fact is, really learning a language is among the hardest things you can do precisely because of how much time you need to spend and how consistent you need to spend that time.
It's so true about the instant connection when you see someone speak your language. I know an extremely small language (Faroese) and whenever I hear someone speaking it, I instantly go up to talk to them. Faroese is a small enough language where we are usually only 1 or 2 degrees of separation away from each other.
As a Serbian yes I would be impressed if I heard Serbian somewhere
Same here with macedonian.
An American friend of mine was supposedly studying it. Almost a year after i texted him zdravo and he didn't know what i said. That was after he was bragging about how much Serbian he knew. Never felt more disappointed in my life
Especially in Serbia! ;P
Have you played grand theft auto iv? The main character & the characters relating to his story of being a veteran are of vague nationality but speak serbian sometimes in cutscenes. However he is played by an american super obviously putting on accent. still a really awesome game that inspired me to learn about history i wouldnt otherwise come across when i was younger
Same with romanian
I am totally baffled by the English argument "why should I learn THEIR language, they understand me". Yes they do, but you don't understand them -- unless they want it, which might be much rarer occasion than you believe.
very good point. I think this was my impetus for learning foreign languages initially (aged 10 or so) - to understand the people speaking them.
Because they are arrogant, clearly
I'm bilingual now and I'm very proud of it, I know it's somewhat common but I've become bilingual in a language that's one of the furthest from English (Japanese). I moved to Japan in part to become fluent in it and I'm loving the fact I went from barely able to hold a decent length conversation to holding entire friendships, jobs and romantic relationships in my second language.
いいね！俺も上手くになりたいな～
少しづつ理解さが上がっているんだけど漢字はまだちょっと悪夢みたいな～
😅
I speak 3 languages and english is my third language, but from where I’m from it is not common at all since the majority speaks atleast 2 languages.
I’m learning Japanese too! It’s very impressive, well done :D
I've been studying Japanese for about 3 years now pretty intensely. It does feel very strange to just know an entirely different language that none of my friends or family speak. It's like flipping between two brains as the Japanese language constructs such a different reality than English does.
Learn languages to make niche linguistics videos about them, duh
Also: A different language isn't just a different way to communicate. It's a different way of thinking. A different way of understanding things. A different, sometimes extremely different, viewpoint and perspective. Grasping more ways of thinking, enriches ones ability to look at things and understand them. (this is especially undeniable, when one looks at deaf people's cognitive development, depending on whether they grow up with sign language or not)
Sure linguistic determinism isn't true, but linguistic relativism most certainly is, as K Klein has also implicitly pointed out in several videos. (despite explicitly rejecting it)
I've encountered many things in Japanese, that I find to be completely alien to, and shocking, to the Indo-European mind.
Out of curiosity, by "things in Japanese" do you mean more aesthetic things like how a concept or feeling is expressed, or more technical things like grammatical constructions?
@@theheathbar123 I mean stuff that is even more fundamental, than either of those.
@@ZarlanTheGreen Agree, the language is almost fundamentally the opposite to English, the cultural underpinnings of the language are also fundamentally different. I've found my personality is even slightly different on days where I exclusively speak and think in Japanese to those in English.
@@ZarlanTheGreen do you have an example?
@@iwvaksindustries How about the Japanese sentence: "Seishun suru". Seishun means "adolescence". Suru means "to do". "Doing adolescence", is utter nonsense, to the Indo-European mind ...but in Japanese, it refers to adolescents engaging in, and enjoying, things that are typical of adolescence.
As an Irish speaker in Ireland your second point really rings home. Unfortunately there aren't a whole pile of Irish speakers but that makes it feel great when you hear the language in public. Striking up a conversation as Gaeilge will instantly earn the other persons respect
When I was in highschool I met a 90-year-old person who spoke *7* languages fluently. That was one of the most impressive encounters I had, and encouraged me to learn more languages on my own.
English I got from the schooling system, so that's a given. I also studied Yiddish via an app (and am now listening to media in Yiddish to further train myself) and am in the process of learning French. I also signed up to a weekly Arabic course starting next week.
Learning languages is just so satisfying. Even simple and not really spoken languages such as the conlang toki pona. Plus the cultural aspect can be really significant in many other ways - Yiddish is the language of my great grandparents, and my grandpa's second language. Arabic is the second most spoken language in my country.
Not speaking those languages is a barrier to the knowledge possessed by those people. And I am taking these barriers one by one.
That's awesome, keep it up!
🌈🌈🌈I am learning Modern Standard Arabic.🌈🌈🌈
I (A Dutch person) am learning Finnish because I can and it gives me such joy to see connections between words in Finnish or between grammatic structures between Dutch and Finnish. It even gives me a new understanding of what everyday words in Dutch really mean. Like have you ever really really thought about how "See you!" Is literally the verb for seeing and the word for the person you are speaking to. You say such things but only when you learn them in other languages (where you know the verb to see and recognize it in the saying) can you really appreciate the genius of your own language.
YES ! this is how i feel when learning italian! I'm a native english speaker, and im currently learning italian, and am going to start learning spanish and french in a month or two. seeing the connections in the three languages is cool enough, but when you start connecting them to english and seeing those connections in these "set phrases" like the example you gave! its a really cool feeling.
Well I'm English, and I'm learning Finnish, & Dutch. And my comment was in this video :)
@@pewpew4545 cool! How is it going with your learning? If you ever want to chat in Dutch, I have discord if you want to. (Or maybe Finnish but my Finnish is way too bad for that😅)
@@yoshifan4569 I’ve been learning for just about a year and a half, both languages are good fun but Finnish is very difficult lol
@@pewpew4545 I hear that a lot, but for me, I don't really find it any more difficult than French. Maybe it is because I have to learn French for school but I want to learn Finnish, but idk. What do you find difficult exactly?
I almost feel like a fraud in some sense for having an interest in linguistics and how languages work, but while only being monolingual. Learning how different languages work is always way more interesting than actually trying to read or speak them. The latter is largely memorization, which bores me extremely fast, while the former is more like being shown the pieces of a puzzle and seeing how they can fit together.
In the beginning, it is all memorization, but the more you're able to use a language, whether receiving it or producing it, the more it becomes how you describe the latter. I can't make judgements for you, but I think it's worth giving a fair effort even if you hate memorization.
@@dozyote I _used_ to be bilingual. That was while I was still taking French in school. Since then I've had pretty much one opportunity to use it and I'd already forgotten most of it by then.
The reasons to learn (or relearn) a language just don't seem to make up for the time and focus needed to do so for me. At best I'll start a duolingo course and then get bored of it after just a few hours.
studying the underlying structures and mechanics of language is so much more interesting and important than just memorizing the actual phonological/orthographical forms words themselves (which are largely gonna have the same meanings as english anyway), but when you actually want to speak the language thats pretty much 95% of what you have to learn
Your approach is much smarter. You're right: actually learning all the vocabulary is intellectually pointless
@@appa609 its pointless if your goal is to learn linguistics. its worthwhile if your goal is to learn the language.
I will never learn a language
based. abolish languages.
@@kklein now that's something I can get behind
@@kklein Time to start becoming a babelfish farmer.
Darn, I was looking for an AASL partner too!
I'm currently trying to learn two at the same time. I just hope that I'll continue to learn them
I recently started learning sign language (the one thats used in the german speaking oarts of switzerland), and it’s been a very cool experience so far. It does feel quite different from learning french or english, mainly because it is based on a language i already know, but it really motivated me to pick up french again after leaving school. I’m just happy that there are so many resources to learn a language nowadays. Learning languages is just really fun in my opinion:)
Ich han au eisch welle Gebärdesprach lärne, aber ich han meischtens amerikanischi oder britischi gfunde im Internet. Wie lernsch du das? Git es da Büecher wo du empfehle chasch?
To me, the biggest reason to learn another language is this: you learn that there are multiple and equally valid ways of conceptualizing the world, the things in it, and then communicating it to other people.
Maybe this is just my corner of the States, but you sometimes run into someone who at least appears to not understand that. They're scared of words from other languages (or it seems like a fear response to me). They seem to see English as a sort of default or something. English is a fine language, but it has the same value as any other language.
This is something that I've learned as a perennial Spanish learner. I've never been fluent, but I still learned that valuable lesson. It allows you to engage with others more fully, I think, when you see their way of communicating as different (beautiful, puzzling, exciting), but not scary.
I kind of regret that my second foreign language in highschool was Latin, instead of a language I can actually use. But I guess it's never to late to learn something new.
Latin will help you learn languages quicker in the future!
@@Humulator I'm not so sure. I wasn't really motivated to learn it so I remember almost nothing. A big help when learning English was also watching Videos and Movies or reading Book and listening to music in English. This option wasn't really there with Latin. The only thing I read in Latin were old Letters and poems. That was not fun.
@@Humulator I personally derived more Latin vocab from my technically 3rd language (English) than the other way round.
I however kinda regret not putting in more effort, since just after I switched Latin for French to escape my terrible teacher, I took an interest in history and linguistics and speaking Latin would be a nice to have now.
I always regret I haven’t studied Latin. But the temptation to study a language I can use immediately always wins out.
It makes you sympathise with why the public in the olden days never said anything of literary merit. Mostly because they could barely keep up with the insane 😵💫 grammar ⛓️📜.
The first reason (enjoyment) is all I ever needed and it was nice to hear you say that. Language learning has been the hobby that I most enjoy for about five years now. I do it every day and it makes me so happy. It's sad that some people are always so negative
Learning Dutch as a German is not only fun but also really amusing. Seeing how many words are very familiar yet also very different (and often kind of funny) is always nice to come by.
that’s why I want to start learning Estonian as a Finn! I also kinda get that experience learning both German and Swedish at the same time
Learning Dutch for a German speaker is like learning Portuguese as a Spanish speaker
I find it hilarious, how subtle some of the differences can be.
Wie:
Dutch: who
German: How
Hair:
Dutch: Haar
German: Haar(e)
🌈🌈🌈Learning Dutch is my 3rd foreign language.🌈🌈🌈
I (a monolingual person) am currently trying to learn toki pona. It is not the most useful but I think that it’s a decent starting point
Keep it up, the more obscure a language is the more people appreciate your effort to learn it
a a a that's amazing!! i'm also a tokiponer so if u would want me to help you / give you toki pona resources do be sure to tell me!! o pona!! :3
Ok but keep in mind if you can't use the language often you wont be able to get fluent.
@@belstar1128 i am aware a.. though toki pona communities exist. most people just do it for fun, it's not like toki pona would be useful in your daily life !! still thanks asdf
That's more of a language exercise than a proper language, isn't it? It's about conceptualisation and how to express oneself on the basis of minimalist vocabulary. I don't mean to be discouraging, though, since the entire affair seems quite fascinating, and I think it'll help you grasp foreign manners of expression much more easily.
I've just discovered how to better convince my wife to learn a language with me. Her family has a history of dementia, and she's worried about it. If learning a language helps delay onset, that would encourage her!
Yes that's part of why I'm learning languages, I plan to learn like 15 throughout my lifetime, I really want to delay dementia onset as long as possible. I hope to still be learning languages when I'm 80 lol
Currently learning French, it hasn’t been easy but it’s amazing to be able to watch news from another country and slowly piece together what is happening within their country that would never get talked about outside the local area.
Bravo, je t'encourage !
Bon courage, le français n'est pas la langue la plus facile à apprendre ! Mais tu peux décrire très précisément tes sentiments et la poésie est très belle
I will say that literature in translation is not simply a lesser or degraded form of the original text. When he read Gregory Rabassa's translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude into English, Gabriel García Márquez said that it was better than the original. I'm learning Spanish at the moment, and I seriously doubt that I'll ever get to a point where reading fiction in Spanish, or any foreign language, will compare to the experience of a good translation. Don't get me wrong - I'm going to continue learning Spanish, literature be dammed. But I'll stick to reading for pleasure in my native language.
it's not lesser, but it is different. the translation in and of itself transforms the artwork into something new
Honestly, poetry (and novels, drama, etc with meter) truly shine in their native tongue since they like to play with unique things in their language. Shakespeare in French isn't the same, Faust is a cornerstone of German literature and Arabic poetry becomes much more awkward .
I'm a pretty slow learner and somehow I pulled it off. So it's definitely not impossible. A sure-fire way to not get there though is to stick to reading for pleasure in your native tongue. Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy really. Not criticizing your choice; just saying don't let doubt get in your way if that's the only thing holding you back. 🙂
Just as a side note, I found that there were interesting experiences to be had even long before I reached a level of comfort similar to the one I have in my native language. In the intermediate stages, it brought back a lot of memories of how I read as a child. Memories of not understanding everything, but not really caring and just letting myself be carried by the flow of the text. Oddly liberating.
@@bogdanstamenic2836 True, but it's just so difficult for the same beauty to make itself as obvious in a reader's second language. The drop-off in actual quality as you might say is replaced by an improvement in appreciation and vice versa. It makes foreign literature difficult to read as if it were English literature, but there are certainly great writers who have translated works and sustained the quality of work.
The Borges translation of "Lepanto" to spanish is a million times better than the original.
Every once in a while, I'll encounter a translator note explaining a word or cultural joke and it feels like a tiny glimpse of what I could have access to if I learned the language.
I accidentally paused the video right after you said "Languages are cool and you should learn them" without realizing it, and I thought you were just doing a bit and laughed pretty hard. Then the silence kept on going and I was like, "Wow, you're really committed to this bit, but when are you going to get on with the rest of the video?" Then I realized... lmao
I’m a bit of a weird case with languages I think. I’m Irish, but due to struggling immensely with learning Irish in Primary School I was exempt fairly early on. I don’t regret this happening, I don’t enjoy learning languages all too much, even if I know I’m capable of doing so(I am still learning Spanish in secondary school, I’m not all too great with it admittedly), but I still love linguistics and realise how important it is for others to learn languages. I grew to love English partially because I feel limited to it, but it is really awful when other languages seem to be fading due to the focus on the English language, especially since it seems most people still don’t speak it. Knowledge of other languages is essential in some capacity as you excellently laid out in this video!
I have forgotten most of my school Irish, but I do retain some. I can't chat in the language, but I can sometimes understand announcements or warning signs. My French has also declined since my school days. My Irish Sign Language has improved since school, but is still far from fluent.
To be fair Irish is not a useful language these days. there is not a lot of media just some old books and educational videos. only a handful of rural people still speak it natively and they all know English too. if you are not motivated its hard to learn a language .schools are quite bad for learning languages they force you to drill grammar and after class is done you wont use the language. that is why you have to use immersion. like if you want to play a video game play it in Spanish if its available. or if you want to watch a movie watch it in Spanish but with Irish its hard to do this. since there just isn't much media in that language. if you learn a more major language like Spanish or Russian or Japanese you will have plenty of fun watching UA-cam in those languages or reading. and if you travel a lot of live in a place with tourists or expats you may need to know that language to talk to people.
Same with me and Swedish. I live in Finland where all students whose native language is Finnish are required by law to take Swedish classes. I didn’t have intrinsic motivation to learn the language due to English being more than sufficient enough in Sweden where over 80% of the people speak it.
Being forced to learn an endangered language to shield it from English sounds a tiny bit more like torture to me.
currently learning German. very satisfying to eventually being able to understand things you originally couldn't before.
Großartige Sprachenwahl! Du schaffst das!
@@bastscho Vielen dank!
My main problem with learning a language is: Which one to choose? I really really want to learn my local sign language. But then my family also knows Spanish, so that would be nifty, since I have people to practise. I really like listening to Dutch music too, so that might be a good place to start. I lowkey love Icelandic though. I also took like two semesters of Nepali at university and had French for 5 years in school. Uhm, you see where this is going? ALL LANGUAGES ARE TOO COOL HOW DECIDE
Just pick whichever you enjoy the most coupled with the most utility. Can Dutch music sustain your interest for the years required to learn it, or would your family and your cultural proximity to Spanish propel you into fluency? Anyway, a third language and beyond becomes much easier once you've learnt a second in adulthood
For reference, when I got into this as a dedicated hobby I chose German because I learnt it in school and had a solid foundation, I knew that I like their culture (so many great books and I like the people), and I know that I enjoy the linguistics of the language
Do Spanish or just do all its possible to learn that many languages.
Pick one from UN languages or US critical languages, if you don't know wich to choose
@@TheDrunkMunk that works so well if you don't have ADHD
Thank you for bringing up the dementia studies. My grandmother who died last year at age 100 never learned any second languages (although she was wife and mother to two men who learned French and Spanish). She spent the last ~25 years of her life in steadily declining dementia. We may not know exactly why language learning helps with this, but I know this much: I recently moved into a neighborhood with a lot of Spanish speakers and I CAN FEEL MY BRAIN MUSCLES WORKING in new ways. It's a challenge but I'm very excited by it / me encanta este lucha!
Esta* lucha
Lucha is female for some reason
- a Spanish speaker
@@sparksparkle gracias
@@Winspur1982 Con gusto!
This was great! I'd actually love to see a longer version going deeper into each topic, but it was still fantastic
I am an American who loves Japan and Japanese culture. Last month, I finally got to visit the country for the first time ever. When I was there, nothing frustrated me more than not being able to communicate with the people there because I didn’t know the language. I cherished all the moments I was able to speak with the people there who knew English, it was my favorite part of the trip. Since then, I have decided to learn Japanese, and I’m surprised by how fun the process is. I will keep at it for sure, so next time I visit I will be able to talk to the Japanese people.
It's 2 a.m. and I'm in the state of continuing learning svenska. Wow I like your videos and i want to support you!
Ps. I'm from a small town of Russia and have no need or purpose to learn Swedish... I just love how it sounds and I love the scandinavian accent!
Hearing it is so delightful☀️
я учу русский. Привет из Америки
Every language I learnt so far has fundamentally changed my life in a positive way, so I'd say it has a lot of merit 😂.
The most important reason: dating hot foreign chicks/guys like you’re 007
Addendum: and swearing so no one can understand you
This came up on my recommended as soon as I was finished writing my English paper on EXACTLY THIS TOPIC !! haha I was shocked but it was so nice to see other people actually talk about it. Your videos are always so interesting and I love them so much, so even just seeing this title made me happy. Keep it up! :D
(and to all the language learners in the comments, you got this! have fun with it :))
SERBIA MENTIONED! 🎉🎉🎉
Also, when you learn a new language, you're not just learning a language, you're also discovering a new culture. You can't learn a language in a vacuum. You'll be exposed to music, movies, books, history, different customs and ways to see the world.
Love the TwoSet shoutout!!
I (a German person) am learning Japanese, it's so hilarious that if you don't know the language, you can't say how good someone is in the language. It's always an interesting discussion about languages, because it's absolutely uncommon in Germany to learn a language besides English and maybe French or Spanish. I however got good at English (I mean like best in my grade good), am learning Japanese and I'm also learning Spanish because it's mandatory in school for me
japanese is also funny because a lot of the learners are beginners and those beginners like to give out a lot of advice so if you get the slightest bit mediocre at the language its really easy to spot the people who don't know what they;re talking about. its great to want to help others out but like, please don't tell people to grind duolingo and genki
@@d0xter742 In the online communities this happens a lot. It's hard to improve at Japanese when you can't find enough advanced learners or natives outside of going to the country and that's really hurt my motivation.
Great video!
I like dubbed media in English & Polish. Polish dubbing is most of the time very good.
I hope by Polish dubs you mean actual Polish dubs and not the 99.9% of shows that are using a boring lifeless lektor.
@@Aadrian7
I mean proper dubbing not sh*t lektor.
@@Aadrian7 True! When I went to Poland to visit my gf I saw the movie being dubbed by this monotonous voice, even made me think "is this a movie or a documentary"? :D
@@sledgehog1
Lektor is only used on TV. True Dubbing is gaining popularity since Shrek 1. In the cinema, you'll only find subtitles and if it's an animated film or a live-action blockbuster then alongside subtitles, a dubbed version is released.
@@Aadrian7 yeah the lektor turned me off movies altogether
No matter how far you live from speakers of a foreign spoken language, and how little you may travel, your area almost certainly has a deaf community. Try and learn your local sign language. It could be incredibly valuable, for you and for those around you.
You are saying everything I want to say to people.
I don't know whether to tell you to keep going so more people hear it, or to tell you to stop so that I don't feel like I'm repeating the same talking points someone else has said before.
Also, you do it a lot more clearly, cleanly and concisely than I feel like I can, and at a higher frequency too.
Okay this vid bring back my motivation on learning languages!
I learned Spanish since I was 11 years old because I want to spearhead the advocacy reviving Spanish as one of the official spoken languages in the Philippines because Spanish isn't taught in the compulsory primary and secondary schools there, unlike English.
Great video! Totally agree with you. We tend to focus more on the cultural, and social reasons. Our students want to learn or live in a Latin American country so we help them by offering conversational courses to learn Spanish and Portuguese fast :)
I learned a language when I was a kid, thank you. It was called English. Look at me now, speaking it. Outsmarted, L+ratio
All jokes aside, 100% agree. Good vid
I was in Hanoi and I heard some folks speaking Isaan and my ears perked up and I immediately made a connection I wouldn't have expected purely from the sounds folk's mouth's make.
It's always been on my list to start relearning spanish, once upon a time i was just barely able to hold conversations but now a few years later, I barely remember any. I've seen the benefits to "knowing" a second language and I really want to get back to that point. To anyone taking a foreign language class currently, please do yourself a favor and continue using that language and striving to improve because its startling how quickly you forget things
to speak, duh
Thank you. I think this is my time to continue learning a new language. I’m thinking Spanish but let me know if there’s other cooler one to learn.
Approximately all the languages of the world are cooler than Spanish
(If you want to keep learning a Romance language you can try Occitan !)
Because of my service in the US Army, I have visited or have been sent to countries all over the world. Everyone I have ever met in my travels speaks some degree of English. I am fluent in German (B1-B2), but even in Germany, the natives will speak English with me!!! BTW, AI translation apps works pretty good!!!
Here's a little story from an American who has a lifelong background in language learning. Improving my German (which I had learned from my family since childhood) is easily one of the best decisions I've done in the past year. I got back from a trip to Germany a few weeks ago, and in it, I spoke exclusively German with almost everyone I encountered, except for a small handful that I already knew were fluent in English. I can tell you firsthand that if you speak their language fluently enough, Germans will not treat you as a foreigner or tourist, but as one of their own. That is truly a wonderful feeling, especially considering it's a country and culture that I'm passionate about.
That's my little language learning story (or rather, a language brushing-up story). Hopefully it gives an example of why learning a language is well worth it.
me when the K Kleins
I love language learning. My two issues are focus and fear of mistakes. I am determined tomake Japanese my second language. However, I have more reason to learn Spanish now and it blows my mind how much easier it has been to pick it up. Japanese wasn’t available in my high school so I took German and it was not as easy; adding to not taking it as seriously because it wasn’t exactly the language I wanted to start with.
Many languageshave something immediately beautiful about them and I want to befriend so many of them. Truly, I need to stick with, at max, two and get them high enough before I officially start another. I keep dabbling.
Me, who has older family members who got dementia and watched them slowly deteriorate: you know, French ain’t that bad.
Not hating just kinda sad that there’s needs to be a video to explain why people should learn another language, honestly sad knowing many people see it as useless, especially by monolinguals.
People who think "I know english, other languages are a waste" do not even deserve to get this video for free.
It’s literally one of the most useless ways you can invest the enormous amount of time it takes to just not be terrible.
I'd be happy if English speakers would just learn to write in our native script.
an interesting thing I like to do when I make new friends from other countries (which is most likely to happen online) I like to learn their native language, even if just the basics like some greeting and expressions or the script, so I can bond more with them (sometimes they don't understand why lol)
Ma mémoire a clairement augmenté depuis que j'apprends tous les jours du vocabulaire en anglais / espagnol / allemand / russe / portuguais.
Je m'étonne à me souvenir de tous les prénoms et nom de villes en les écoutant qu'une seule fois. J'arrive aussi à retrouver beaucoup plus facilement des informations lointaines lors de conversations. Alors qu'avant j'avais beaucoup plus de limitations.
Il n'y a pas photo, l'apprentissage des langues est clairement l'un des meilleurs moyens d'augmenter son intelligence, du moins celle de la mémorisation des mots. Et je suis content d'avoir investi dedans ces 5 dernières années.
Another important reason I will add is that you will learn a tremendous amount about yourself as well through the process of learning another language. Similar to how some people in the comments here describe that it is a different way of thinking, it is also a different way of personal expression and that is very apparent when a second language has features not present in your native language. I speak English natively and learned Japanese fluently through college and learning to use and the choices I had to make in speaking style for Japanese taught me a lot about what I value and how I want to be perceived by other people. In particular, Japanese has a system of markers and in some cases conjugation differences that creates 'gendered ways of speaking,' meaning you can speak in a 'masculine' or 'feminine' way in a way that is just not possible in English in the same way. It presents a very interesting and personal functional feature of the language that is only becoming more relevant as conversations and understanding of gender identities and similar topics continues to increase and there are undoubtedly features in every language that will teach you something about yourself and the people around you.
I learned Japanese for 5 years without ever having the opportunity to speak it in my country. One day I decided to try out vrchat and found out it has a whole community of people mainly from Asian countries who speak in Japanese. I made a lot of friends there and most of them aren't from Japan. What amazed me was that only a few of them could speak any English. For a European knowing English is given but had I not learned a third language I wouldn't be able to speak to my now very close friends in China, Taiwan, South-Korea, Indonesia, Japan etc.
I now started learning Chinese and the enjoyment of learning a new language is twofold since my Chinese friends are helping me. In a way, thanks to learning Japanese I'm now able to learn Chinese in a really cool way! It also helps when translating something you want to say. If my native language -> Chinese feels wonky I can try English -> Chinese and double check that the meaning of the translation is correct by Chinese -> Japanese. By learning 1 new language you get a lot of combined advantages with the other languages you speak or learn.
You can never predict what benefits learning a language can have in the future. For any pessimists out there... at least you get to flex on the languages you know :D But I agree that the best reason to learn is just because it's fun. Unfortunately learning Swedish was never fun for me and I believed I would never need to use it. But actually I have needed it for 2 jobs so far and the last job I applied to turned out to be too difficult since I can't speak Swedish. Still, I don't know why but I just don't enjoy learning that language so I'm not gonna beat myself up for that. I'm going to spend my time to learn Japanese and Chinese since I get a lot of joy and valuable connections from that.
I am an Indian who is trilingual (as most Indians are). I speak Marathi, Hindi and English. 4 years ago i came to Russia for studies. In this time I've mastered the Russian language and have made an insane amount of friends, some of which are the closest people in my life. They help me with everything from the language to understanding their culture, but i learnt the language for the first 2 years, only then was I able to barely converse with someone to befriend them.
For me learning languages is always useful for, as you said cultural exploration and communication. However as my teacher said it is an instrument. If you dont use a language regularly there is less motivation.
I'm a teenager but I already have a language learning plan:
1. Learn a language until I become fluent
2. Repeat Step 1 with a new language
Repeat until I get dementia and forget it all
As a German, I speak German (of course) the best and learned English at school and really enjoyed it. I'm also adding Japanese and French to the languages that I speak, just for the sake of learning languages and foreign culture. Learning new languages not just teaches me about a foreign culture on a deeper level, but it also let's me question how a language is supposed to work. For example, the complicated Japanese writing system gave me a completely different view on the Latin alphabet that I'm used to since kindergarten times. In fact, it reallly made me curious about how writing systems could be different than just having one letter for each sound.
So yeah, I definitely can recommend learning a new languages. It's fun, relaxing and changing your view on basic stuff
Guten nacht im learning german as my 4th language i hope i reach a good level
@@nacht3675 Viel Glück :)
learning 15 languages to offset dementia by 60 years
I already love them!
I'm slavic and enjoy russian literature, so maybe i'll give russian a go someday, or pick it as a beginner course at university. I can already read cyrylic so it's a good start
I wish I could have intrinsic motivation, but alas we aren't all blessed
Wanted to learn a Romance language… caught between French and Spanish. Already know German and combined with French I would be very well setup for European business haha
But I live in the USA so knowing Spanish could be useful for interacting with people outside of work.
It‘s true! I've been learning English for 15 years now and I'm suck at it! But the progress I've made is still satisfying! I'm learning a third language now because the only two languages I speak (technically should say write here, I speak languages that don't have writing systems) are at some levels very hegemonistic. Can't imagine these are the only languages I know for the rest of my life. It's suffocating!
To be honest, I got the opportunity to move to Italy. I had previously no knowledge of the Italian language. I quickly discovered that I do not enjoy the Italian language and had to learn it out of necessity. What’s more, is that I found out that in reality dialects are stronger and more widely spoken than originally understood and speak Italian to me as a formality and speak dialect amongst themselves. I’m beginning to question the efficacy of the whole Italian language.
As an Italian myself, I have to agree that the linguistic state of Italy is kind of a mess. "Standard" Italian is a language nobody really speaks, and wherever you go there are significant differences in pronunciation and/or grammar. Native speakers get by just fine, but I can see how complicated it must be for a foreigner.
The problem I have with this video, is that it assumes that you are in a position to benefit from learning a language in the first place.
Where I live, there is simply no benefit at all to learning another language, besides personal interest. Which can only take you so far.
I am learning Polish because it sounds very funny to my East Slavic ear.
People always use the same argument of "but there's no return". Btich there IS a return. It' ms called more multilingual people in the populace as a whole and that a huge societal & cultural benefit to have. That IS valuable.
Yea learning languages has helped me a lot and its actually quite fun if you use a lot of immersion you can learn a language by just watching movies all day for a few years .
1,2,5 are "do you want to be able to interact non-English speakers and their culture?" It isn't an argument really, just a question. If you're interested in foreign cultures/languages and people then you're already probably considering learning their languages. If you're not interested, then none of these points are likely to convince you. 3 is subjective as hell. 4 is right in general but probably wrong for most. You are almost certainly better off learning how to better market in the English speaking market. And 6 is interesting because you can get similar results by learning more English, dong word puzzles, crosswords etc. Because you're more likely to stick with simpler task like word puzzles (simpler compared to learning another language) you're more likely to see benefits, like how keeping weight loss goals lower/easier improves long term success .
I'm not trying to tell anyone they shouldn't learn a language if they dont want to. But I expected better arguments from someone whose solution to English speakers not learning other languages is making it mandatory.
Once you start learning a language, it becomes easier over time to learn even more.
So start with learning a language that is very close in lexical similarity with your own-for example, the lexical similarity of Spanish and Portuguese is 90%. So if you're a spanish native speaker, you can easily pick up Portuguese if you wanted to. Then after you've learned some, you'll have enough experience to move on to other target languages
🌈🌈🌈I should have started Dutch first instead of Swahili as my second language since Swahili is so far from English especially the grammar.🌈🌈🌈
Excluding immersion is there a short hand way to learn a language fast or for people who have a hard time concentrating? Like mnemonics or would I have to create new learning strategies?
Also what's wrong w/ dubs??😕
I am brazillian and let me tell you, learning english by myself at 11 was the greatest decision of my life. I am now able to experience so much more of the world and culture through the lens of a new language. It also makes me appreciate my mother tongue much more, being naturally gifted on speaking such a beautiful romance language
Thanks for getting the message out. BTW, you might want to change your thumbnail. Why learn a language rather than *why to learn a language.
1:01 cant believe the netherlands is finally part of scandinavia
:D
Très bonne vidéo ! Je ne savais pas que tu parlais français, bravo! Tu parles combien de langues en tout ? (peu importe le niveau!)
Et j'ai rencontré des congolais moi aussi, j'adore leur façon de parler ! Le français d'Afrique est riche, c'est une langue vraiment vivante c'est tellement intéressant !
j'adore le français d'afrique, surtout celui du congo. mon français est devenu assez mauvais, malheureusement, parce que je n'ai pas eu la chance de l'utiliser récemment :((
mais je parle 4 langues assez couramment, l'anglais le suédois l'allemand et le français, et je dirais que mon italien est okay aussi
me doing duolingo actually now i understand this whole passage
i always learn because it's super fun
0:30 why does the violin only have three strings?? Furthermore, it doesn't look like there is place for a fouth on the side because the three strings have an equal lenght between them and are placed exactly in the middle. Just look at the fine tuners
About your point at the end (learning languages makes you live longer), it's hard to say if it stands, even with statistics, since correlation does not equal causation. There's actually a bunch of graphs showing 2 things correlated despite obviously not having anything to do with each other.
When 2 things (A and B) are correlated, there's 4 different things that could be happening.
1: A causes B. This is what most people think when 2 things are correlated, and it's called direct causation. With this, learning more languages makes you live longer, which doesn't make too much sense based on what we know, but is possible.
2: B causes A. It actually could actually be reversed, and this is called reversed causation. With this, living longer means you learn more languages, which makes sense because you have more time to learn them. Even then, it doesn't really give a good answer, since I doubt you'd learn a lot more languages within 5 years.
3: A third factor, C, causes both A and B. This means A and B are correlated, but only because there's something that causes both. This is called common causation, and there's actually a name for thinking A causes B because they're correlated in this situation. It's called the third cause fallacy. In this case, we could say there's a third cause (not sure what it would be) that causes living longer and learning more languages.
4: It's just a coincidence. Sometimes, correlations are there by chance, and there's really no connection, it just happens to be like that.
So, we can't really come to the conclusion that learning more languages makes you live longer. We would need more evidence, other than just correlation, to prove this, and since there really is none, we can't just say it's the first case (direct causation). Not saying it can't be true. However, in my opinion, the third or fourth cases are more likely.
And that also doesn't mention statistical biases that could make it seem like there's a correlation when there isn't. Care has to be taken when there isn't any evidence accompanying the correlation.
The other points meanwhile don't seem to have any flaws in them, though I did want to make this comment against the final point, since it's a pretty common mistake to make.
thanks
Great video, K Klein. What do you think about minor languages (Welsh, Basque, Georgian), endangered languages (Navajo, Hawaiian, Inuktitut) or languages that are well spoken but not really mainstream (Amharic, Swahili even if it's somewhat mainstream)? Are there reasons to learn them or should we stick with the mainstream?
learn minor and endangered languages, because it's extra cool and takes part in an important project of language revitalisation. there's no reason to stick to the anglospheres "mainstream" languages!!
@@kklein thanks, I was thinking of learning Welsh, but I always get hit with the "uuuhm, but it's useless to learn it, everyone speaks English there" (I live in Italy, in one region where most people struggle a lot to learn English alone). I think I'm gonna focus on Turkish and then (or alongside but with more limitations) try to learn Cymraeg. Thanks for the answer
@@lorenzo8208 well yes, everyone in Wales does speak English, but then everyone in Catalonia speaks Castilian Spanish (apart from the bit north of the Pyrenees, where they speak French) and people still learn Catalan! Everyone in Wales knows how to speak English, yes, but it's culturally Welsh-speaking, and knowing one language doesn't preclude another.
I think it’s really dumb sometimes with tourist cuz I live in a place that tourists love and I hate that sometimes the English people argue or comment on the fact that they are angry some of us don’t speak English. They expect it and if we don’t know it they get mad. Some stores or restaurants here only speak English and if I go up and ask for my order in Icelandic then they are like “what? English” my language is also dying because of the impact English has on it. Everybody has to learn English to be able to survive here, it’s so frustrating. If you look at how many languages people know from English speaking countries vs everywhere else it’s very difference. Like, if you come to a country, atleast know a little of a language cuz if you don’t you have no right to complain.
0:33 never thought I would see twoset in a k Klein video but here we are :D
Russian!
Fell in love with the Cyrillics, once that was down, it seemed stupid not to continue!
Even though I don't have anybody to talk to in Russia! I enjoyed it and I'm sure that they will come!
Plus it comes in handy, when somebody arguing with you, annoying you, just switch up the language!
Aprendiendo otros idiomas es muy importante.
As a slavic native speaker I totally agree with this video!
I'm from Bosnia and learned English naturally thru tv and the Internet. I can't even imagine how my life and I myself would be different if I hadn't known english.
I've learned german along the way (studying in Germany rn), but I would say learning korean was way more impactful for me.
It's such a different culture and mentality from the west that it hugely expands your way of thinking and enables you to see the world in a completely new way and also feel and understand people you never could have before.
So I would definitely advise learning (acauiring more precisely. Studying a language is almost useless imo) a new language and especially one that's very different from yours but also rich culturally.
I'm in the process of re-learning the Italian I learned in high school, I remembered more than I thought I would but it is still pretty slow going but if it is written I can understand a decent amount.
Just out of curiosity, where do you live? As an Italian I know our language isn't really popular outside of Italy so that feels good to know.
@@cannotfigureoutaname New York, in my neck of the woods most kids I knew had at least one grandparent who was born in Italy. Myself included.
I'll never understand people who defend being monolingual over learning other languages. If you don't want to do it that's fine, but telling others to not do it or that they shouldn't is just silly.
Good video though 👍
It's not that I don't want to, I do, but unless I find a purpose to use it in I will never feel good enough in it or justify learning it except maybe to keep my brain from decaying.