What are your language learning goals? ___ 10 Secrets of Language Learning ⇢ www.thelinguist.com LingQ Grammar Guides ⇢ www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/ My blog ⇢ blog.thelinguist.com/ The LingQ blog ⇢ www.lingq.com/blog/ My Podcast ⇢ soundcloud.com/lingostevepodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learn-languages-with-steve-kaufmann/id1437851870 ___ Social Media Instagram ⇢ instagram.com/lingosteve_/ TikTok ⇢ www.tiktok.com/@lingosteve Facebook ⇢ facebook.com/lingosteve Twitter ⇢ twitter.com/lingosteve LingQ Discord ⇢ discord.gg/ShPTjyhwTN
What I've been doing is trying to make sense of the words as i go, conservatively so i worry less about my comprehension of deeper grammar forms (say gerunds and aspects in ukrainian) and more on the surface level grammar details (cases, conjugations, perspective, tenses, pronouns, prepositions, etc) and make note on them as i go. That way I can adapt and predict future words i run into and it makes my comprehension more efficient as time goes on. Although there are things like perfective verbs etc that kinda hurt me a bit so i try to ignore that but also try to make note of any potential stem changes and note on what changes and when. That's just me tho.
As an educator and language learner, I find you very interesting to listen to Steve. And the main reason I think I find you interesting, is because you challenge a lot of the common threads that I hear from novice and even more advanced language learners in a way that makes sense to me. As an intermediate learner of Japanese, I find it useful for me at my level to hear an experienced person say: "I'm not using SRS, I use lists." "Grammar is #5 on the list, culture is #7". Not because I consider these things absolutes, but because it pivots my perspective a little bit when my habits seem a little overdue for a change. Good stuff.
This 8 video series is the best overview to your wisdom yet! would be awesome as the basis for a book. Your words have directed me and encouraged me enormously as I learned my first and second foreign languages. Without your words it's possible I may have been forever lost in the fog
Cada video tuyo es una inspiración para seguir aprendiendo idiomas. Hasta llego al punto de verlos varias veces. Los pauso y regreso a varios puntos interesantes mientras no quiero que terminen.
Great idea for a video series Steve. Having been someone who’s watched your videos religiously for many years, I’m confident your input related videos will be familiar to me. I’m really interested in your thoughts on writing though, and so I’m particularly looking forward to that video. I’m currently ‘maintaining’ Swedish and have started to acquire Turkish, and I find with my current commitments in life I have plenty of time for reading and listening (I can fit 10 or 20 minutes in here and there multiple times a day just whenever I get time) but I struggle to find the time to speak (Italki tutors need a booking for a specific time and for a specific length of time, and unfortunately that’s not how my life works just now) and so in the absence of speaking I’ve started trying to write a journal entry before I sleep as a way to start to actually produce the language. I’m trying to write about all sorts of things, rather than just what I did that day and how I felt about it. I wonder if you think this will translate to speaking when my schedule finally allows it. Is output output, or is it more nuanced than that? I understand the difference between writing and speaking is similar to the difference between reading and listening in that we can take our time to do one and the other is immediate, but do we think being able to write improves our ability to speak? Obviously I believe it must or I wouldn’t be doing this exercise; I’m curious what other people think. p.s LingQ 5.0. LOVE it.
I think this makes a lot of sense. In my experience, if you are learning a language which is similar to another one you speak, you can skip the "words" part and start by "listening and reading" at the same time, that is what I am doing with Swedish and I did with Italian. Since I speak other languages of the same family, this actually works pretty well :)
@@williambudd2850 Quite creepily aggressive thing to say to a random stranger on the internet. Why do I get the impression you have this hidden hatred against her because she’s female. Had a hard time with women bud?
I totally agree! For someone that wish learning some language, basically I did that in English and Spanish. It worked for me of course, I have to keep practicing it. The best part is when you get talking with native speakers and understand them.
You inspired me into learning two languages at the same time. After two years of self-teaching Russian I started Portuguese, which is easier for an Italian, and especially for an Italian who has a fairly knowledge of Spanish.
Thanks, Steve! Very much appreciate you putting this into words for us. What you say is very much in line with the way I have learned/am learning languages that interest me.
I definitely agree, broad strokes. For anyone who enjoys journaling, I would suggest you start journaling in the language you’re trying to learn sooner. Not only is it a good way to practice while doing something you enjoy (which is the goal anyway), but it’s a good way to realize where you get stuck, have a record of your improvement, and as you improve you get to go back to your old journal entries and correct them to practice your grammar. I’ve improved a lot since starting to journal.
Wow it's so cool you want to learn 7 languanges how cool you are best of luck on your languanges learning goal.😊👍 Wow you're the same with me i learn english + culture either it's just so interesting i love number 7.😍
You didn’t mention the importance of pronunciation, which IMHO it is needed both for improving listening as well as speaking. A further step connected with pronunciation is intonation, but this belongs to a C2 level of speaking a language.
Hi Steve, thank you for your video. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the role of translation in language learning. I remember when you spoke with Pablo from Dreaming Spanish how he said ser and estar do not mean "to be". I understood what he meant, that they are in effect the same concept expressed across different languages but one does not mean the other. However, if we take a more concrete example of say a cup, wouldn't it be ideal to learn that this item someone is holding and drinking tea from is in fact una taza (again, for Spanish) rather than to learn that "taza means cup" - that is to say without the medium of our language through which to aquire a new language. I know LingQ deals with this in some way by not providing a translation but rather hints towards a word's meaning in line with what I have heard you say about the potential for a word to have many meanings depending upon context. For me, this is something of a grey area around which I go back and forth. I like the idea of something like Dreaming Spanish or Naturlich German, Alice Ayel etc for simply acquiring directly in the language but learning from home as I do it seems inevitable at some point that English will be used , even if only mentally, to comprehend the comprehensible input. It would seem obvious from the design of LingQ and your own thoughts on the beginner stage that you utilise translation to some degree but again, a video on whether this short term gain has long term effects, either positive or negative, on being able to speak more like a native in terms of syntax etc would be interesting to know.
Just FWIW, there's fairly strong evidence now that in the early stages of language learning, new words in your target language will be associated with known words in your native language no matter how you learn them. Even if you learn through pictures and don't use translations at all, the new word still ends up being stored in the same locus of the brain as its equivalent word in your native language. It's only much later that things start to get separated into separate loci. So personally I wouldn't worry all that much about it. If your framework of how language acquisition works is the whole "comprehensible input" thing, well, a translation is pretty darn effective in making something comprehensible! ^^ I'm not sure why a picture would be qualitatively different than a translation in terms of making something comprehensible to you. And besides, you can just look at someone like Luca Lampariello to see that people who make heavy use of translation get good results too. I like what Pablo does and there's a lot of value in it, but just be cautious with the "scientific" narrative he uses because there's a pretty strong tendency there to oversell it and blow it out of proportions. Maybe something to bear in mind is that if you're trying to learn a second language to a high level as an adult, your aim by definition can never be to become a monolingual native speaker of your target language. It can only be to become as good as an early balanced bilingual (i.e. someone who grew up with both languages and is in effect native level in both). And early balanced bilinguals are not "two monolinguals in one". Their two languages interact in a wide variety of ways to the point that their neurological profile is different from monolingual speakers. Point being that interference with your native tongue is perfectly normal, and it will never completely disappear because it is part of what it means to be bilingual. Best to embrace it than to fight against it IMHO.
@@bofbob1 Thank you for such a substantive reply. I agree with most of the points you and you have made me aware of a few things I didn't previously know. I am interested in language acquisition both as a casual language hobbyist and do read some of the scientific data on this area. What I struggle to reach a conclusion on is the extent to which translation should be used, not that it is used, which as I pointed out in my original comment. As I see it, a picture of a cup could be just that. Yes, I use the English word to describe it here but surely it's possible with repeated exposure to acquire the meaning directly in L2 without cause for translation and obviously this is what Pablo and others are attempting. I certainly think this would be a good topic for a video. As for Luca, there's no doubt he is a fantastic polyglot but I am not qualified to identify just how well he speaks many of the languages he does. Thanks for the response.
I make a ton of LingQs daily and read content where I don’t know a significant portion of the words, but it’s comprehensible as I add the words to my lingqs. Is it unhelpful for me to read the more interesting content if I don’t have a certain amount of familiar words? I’m tired of being obsessed with grammar, but I don’t want yo waste my time. I want to watch movies and shows, but I’m not there yet.
Stay the Cours and vary things. I do some easy stuff or content I have already been through whee I don't yet know all the words, then I plow through more difficult material with more unknown words. Variety is important. Cheers.
Personally I wouldn't bother with culture, it's not language and in fact with some languages you don't even know what the culture is. If I'm learning English then what is the culture? If I'm learning Spanish then what is the culture? Do we limit ourselves to the language of the country of origin? So for English I'd learn the culture of England for Spanish I'd only learn the culture of Spain....
What are your language learning goals?
___
10 Secrets of Language Learning ⇢ www.thelinguist.com
LingQ Grammar Guides ⇢ www.lingq.com/en/grammar-resource/
My blog ⇢ blog.thelinguist.com/
The LingQ blog ⇢ www.lingq.com/blog/
My Podcast ⇢ soundcloud.com/lingostevepodcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/learn-languages-with-steve-kaufmann/id1437851870
___
Social Media
Instagram ⇢ instagram.com/lingosteve_/
TikTok ⇢ www.tiktok.com/@lingosteve
Facebook ⇢ facebook.com/lingosteve
Twitter ⇢ twitter.com/lingosteve
LingQ Discord ⇢ discord.gg/ShPTjyhwTN
What I've been doing is trying to make sense of the words as i go, conservatively so i worry less about my comprehension of deeper grammar forms (say gerunds and aspects in ukrainian) and more on the surface level grammar details (cases, conjugations, perspective, tenses, pronouns, prepositions, etc) and make note on them as i go. That way I can adapt and predict future words i run into and it makes my comprehension more efficient as time goes on. Although there are things like perfective verbs etc that kinda hurt me a bit so i try to ignore that but also try to make note of any potential stem changes and note on what changes and when. That's just me tho.
If you're in a hurry, the executive summary of the 7 goals begins at 8:30. Thanks for the video.
As an educator and language learner, I find you very interesting to listen to Steve. And the main reason I think I find you interesting, is because you challenge a lot of the common threads that I hear from novice and even more advanced language learners in a way that makes sense to me.
As an intermediate learner of Japanese, I find it useful for me at my level to hear an experienced person say: "I'm not using SRS, I use lists." "Grammar is #5 on the list, culture is #7".
Not because I consider these things absolutes, but because it pivots my perspective a little bit when my habits seem a little overdue for a change. Good stuff.
🏆 S.K.'s Hierarchy of Goals:
👑 No. 1 - Acquiring Words
👑 No. 2 - Reading Comprehension
👑 No. 3 - Listening Comprehension
👑 No. 4 - Speaking
👑 No. 5 - Grammar/Usage (Speaking Correctly)
👑 No. 6 - Writing
👑 No. 7 - Culture
🌸 ¡Por nada! 😉
Than you so much ms Maries Tan Linda ❤❤
Your a huge inspiration, thank you for everything Steve. Hope you have a long long life.
"You're".
@@autentyk5735 i know you can't see it, but i "thumbs down'd" you
@@codyjackschwartz1712 🤣🤣
@@codyjackschwartz1712 Capitalize the I. It's good for one's self-esteem.
This 8 video series is the best overview to your wisdom yet! would be awesome as the basis for a book. Your words have directed me and encouraged me enormously as I learned my first and second foreign languages. Without your words it's possible I may have been forever lost in the fog
Cada video tuyo es una inspiración para seguir aprendiendo idiomas. Hasta llego al punto de verlos varias veces. Los pauso y regreso a varios puntos interesantes mientras no quiero que terminen.
Great idea for a video series Steve. Having been someone who’s watched your videos religiously for many years, I’m confident your input related videos will be familiar to me.
I’m really interested in your thoughts on writing though, and so I’m particularly looking forward to that video. I’m currently ‘maintaining’ Swedish and have started to acquire Turkish, and I find with my current commitments in life I have plenty of time for reading and listening (I can fit 10 or 20 minutes in here and there multiple times a day just whenever I get time) but I struggle to find the time to speak (Italki tutors need a booking for a specific time and for a specific length of time, and unfortunately that’s not how my life works just now) and so in the absence of speaking I’ve started trying to write a journal entry before I sleep as a way to start to actually produce the language. I’m trying to write about all sorts of things, rather than just what I did that day and how I felt about it.
I wonder if you think this will translate to speaking when my schedule finally allows it. Is output output, or is it more nuanced than that? I understand the difference between writing and speaking is similar to the difference between reading and listening in that we can take our time to do one and the other is immediate, but do we think being able to write improves our ability to speak? Obviously I believe it must or I wouldn’t be doing this exercise; I’m curious what other people think.
p.s LingQ 5.0. LOVE it.
This is exactly what I needed! Thanks! Can’t wait for the series!
I think this makes a lot of sense. In my experience, if you are learning a language which is similar to another one you speak, you can skip the "words" part and start by "listening and reading" at the same time, that is what I am doing with Swedish and I did with Italian. Since I speak other languages of the same family, this actually works pretty well :)
@@williambudd2850 Quite creepily aggressive thing to say to a random stranger on the internet. Why do I get the impression you have this hidden hatred against her because she’s female. Had a hard time with women bud?
Thank you sir. That feeling of not doing enough towards targeted language is really an eyesore
I totally agree! For someone that wish learning some language, basically I did that in English and Spanish. It worked for me of course, I have to keep practicing it. The best part is when you get talking with native speakers and understand them.
Hi steve, I'm listen your podcast in google podcast everyday to improve my english learning. YOU ARE THE BEST !!!
You inspired me into learning two languages at the same time. After two years of self-teaching Russian I started Portuguese, which is easier for an Italian, and especially for an Italian who has a fairly knowledge of Spanish.
Some of the best language learning advice I've ever heard... This was excellent.
Thanks, Steve! Very much appreciate you putting this into words for us. What you say is very much in line with the way I have learned/am learning languages that interest me.
I definitely agree, broad strokes. For anyone who enjoys journaling, I would suggest you start journaling in the language you’re trying to learn sooner. Not only is it a good way to practice while doing something you enjoy (which is the goal anyway), but it’s a good way to realize where you get stuck, have a record of your improvement, and as you improve you get to go back to your old journal entries and correct them to practice your grammar. I’ve improved a lot since starting to journal.
Your videos keep me motivated! Thanks so much I get so happy every time I see how happy you are to be learning
Thanks Steve! brilliant and informative as usual.
VERY INSPIRING, TRULY MOTIVATING. MANY THANKS!
Check out that known word list at 2:33. Impressive!
Looking forward to it
Thx Steve. That was a really helpful and very encouraging video. I love ❤️ LingQ and the new version is just amazing 🤩
Wow it's so cool you want to learn 7 languanges how cool you are best of luck on your languanges learning goal.😊👍
Wow you're the same with me i learn english + culture either it's just so interesting i love number 7.😍
Great intel as always 👍🏾
i like your 7 goal i'm going to do your goal for learning spanish my target language
Thanks teacher Steve for your tips 🙏 .
You are such an inspiration thank youuu
I am happy for leam you are the berst god bless you
Une vidéo magnifique ! Votre examples sont très utiles et concrètes 🙌🌟 Merci Steve 🙏
Hi Steve, could you do these videos in other languages too? Your recently French videos were really interesting
Yes I plan to
Thanks for your effort
Mr Steve method is genius thanks 👍
I show you from Iraq اشاهدك من العراق
1st comment :3
Thx so much dear Steve :3
I wish his channel would have been around a long time ago when I first started getting into language learning.
I guess I will be effective to mix reading and writing.
Amazing video
My reading comprehension is really good
My listening comprehension is really good
My speaking couldn’t be any worse.
Keep going and don't too hard on yourself
Gracias 😮🎉😊
Yea i agree with that.
Helpful video
这是一套非常完整非常完备的理论。
You didn’t mention the importance of pronunciation, which IMHO it is needed both for improving listening as well as speaking. A further step connected with pronunciation is intonation, but this belongs to a C2 level of speaking a language.
Thanks
Thank You
Obrigado.
Hi Steve, thank you for your video. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the role of translation in language learning. I remember when you spoke with Pablo from Dreaming Spanish how he said ser and estar do not mean "to be". I understood what he meant, that they are in effect the same concept expressed across different languages but one does not mean the other. However, if we take a more concrete example of say a cup, wouldn't it be ideal to learn that this item someone is holding and drinking tea from is in fact una taza (again, for Spanish) rather than to learn that "taza means cup" - that is to say without the medium of our language through which to aquire a new language. I know LingQ deals with this in some way by not providing a translation but rather hints towards a word's meaning in line with what I have heard you say about the potential for a word to have many meanings depending upon context.
For me, this is something of a grey area around which I go back and forth. I like the idea of something like Dreaming Spanish or Naturlich German, Alice Ayel etc for simply acquiring directly in the language but learning from home as I do it seems inevitable at some point that English will be used , even if only mentally, to comprehend the comprehensible input.
It would seem obvious from the design of LingQ and your own thoughts on the beginner stage that you utilise translation to some degree but again, a video on whether this short term gain has long term effects, either positive or negative, on being able to speak more like a native in terms of syntax etc would be interesting to know.
Just FWIW, there's fairly strong evidence now that in the early stages of language learning, new words in your target language will be associated with known words in your native language no matter how you learn them. Even if you learn through pictures and don't use translations at all, the new word still ends up being stored in the same locus of the brain as its equivalent word in your native language. It's only much later that things start to get separated into separate loci.
So personally I wouldn't worry all that much about it. If your framework of how language acquisition works is the whole "comprehensible input" thing, well, a translation is pretty darn effective in making something comprehensible! ^^ I'm not sure why a picture would be qualitatively different than a translation in terms of making something comprehensible to you. And besides, you can just look at someone like Luca Lampariello to see that people who make heavy use of translation get good results too.
I like what Pablo does and there's a lot of value in it, but just be cautious with the "scientific" narrative he uses because there's a pretty strong tendency there to oversell it and blow it out of proportions. Maybe something to bear in mind is that if you're trying to learn a second language to a high level as an adult, your aim by definition can never be to become a monolingual native speaker of your target language. It can only be to become as good as an early balanced bilingual (i.e. someone who grew up with both languages and is in effect native level in both). And early balanced bilinguals are not "two monolinguals in one". Their two languages interact in a wide variety of ways to the point that their neurological profile is different from monolingual speakers. Point being that interference with your native tongue is perfectly normal, and it will never completely disappear because it is part of what it means to be bilingual. Best to embrace it than to fight against it IMHO.
@@bofbob1 Thank you for such a substantive reply. I agree with most of the points you and you have made me aware of a few things I didn't previously know.
I am interested in language acquisition both as a casual language hobbyist and do read some of the scientific data on this area.
What I struggle to reach a conclusion on is the extent to which translation should be used, not that it is used, which as I pointed out in my original comment.
As I see it, a picture of a cup could be just that. Yes, I use the English word to describe it here but surely it's possible with repeated exposure to acquire the meaning directly in L2 without cause for translation and obviously this is what Pablo and others are attempting.
I certainly think this would be a good topic for a video. As for Luca, there's no doubt he is a fantastic polyglot but I am not qualified to identify just how well he speaks many of the languages he does.
Thanks for the response.
Do you have tricks for forgotten languages we had mastered but no longer master them?
I make a ton of LingQs daily and read content where I don’t know a significant portion of the words, but it’s comprehensible as I add the words to my lingqs. Is it unhelpful for me to read the more interesting content if I don’t have a certain amount of familiar words? I’m tired of being obsessed with grammar, but I don’t want yo waste my time. I want to watch movies and shows, but I’m not there yet.
Stay the Cours and vary things. I do some easy stuff or content I have already been through whee I don't yet know all the words, then I plow through more difficult material with more unknown words. Variety is important. Cheers.
How about pronunciation??????
شكرن
Bonjour ! Je voudrais apprendre à parler Anglais. Avez-vous une méthode efficace pour m'aider à atteindre mon but. Je vous remercie d'avance !
Personally I wouldn't bother with culture, it's not language and in fact with some languages you don't even know what the culture is. If I'm learning English then what is the culture? If I'm learning Spanish then what is the culture? Do we limit ourselves to the language of the country of origin? So for English I'd learn the culture of England for Spanish I'd only learn the culture of Spain....
wow
I enjoy these videos Steve, except for the dumb 2 second clip at the beginning which makes no sense.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
👍👍
👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
i would like to interactin alive with peoples
"Chinese" is a misnomer.
牛逼！~
I want to improve my listening skill on Japanese. I'm watching Japanese animes every night during 20 minutes.
you have learned too many languages. I think you could only learn 5 languages and focus on each of therm to be a true master.
Not everyone has the goal of being a 'True master' though