2020-10-08-How_I_Taught_My_Children_to_Speak_Fluent_Spanish_in_One_Year_With_No_Teachers_No_Classes_and_No_Playmates_or_Spanish-Speaking

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00:00:29.960 | Hello radicals, bienvenidos a Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you

00:00:36.080 | with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life

00:00:40.040 | now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:43.360 | My name is Josh Ruchites.

00:00:44.360 | I am your host and today I'm going to share with you a story and some lessons.

00:00:49.400 | The story is how I have taught my children to be fluent in Spanish in less than one year

00:00:56.940 | without being part of a Spanish speaking community, without enrolling them in a Spanish speaking

00:01:01.720 | school entirely at home as part of our overall homeschool curriculum.

00:01:07.280 | And I'm going to share the story with you and share some of the lessons because I think

00:01:11.200 | these are lessons that are very applicable and helpful to your life.

00:01:15.040 | This show will not contain any technical financial planning.

00:01:18.880 | This is one of those living a rich life.

00:01:20.640 | I think that languages enrich your life.

00:01:22.800 | I think there's a very good reason to teach yourself multiple foreign languages and to

00:01:27.000 | teach your children multiple foreign languages.

00:01:28.840 | It opens up new cultures to you, new countries to you, new regions of the world, new employment

00:01:35.400 | opportunities that may relate to your financial life in a very strong way.

00:01:38.920 | It may help your children in a very strong way.

00:01:42.360 | But I'm not going to be talking about financial planning.

00:01:44.760 | I'm talking about language learning.

00:01:46.400 | But I'm pretty excited with some of the results that I've achieved in the last year.

00:01:49.640 | Including some methods that I made up and have since found out that other people are

00:01:53.400 | applying successfully as well.

00:01:55.520 | And I'll share those with you because I think the results have been pretty astonishingly

00:02:00.440 | spectacular.

00:02:01.940 | And I want to share them with you now for one very specific reason.

00:02:08.040 | I'm close enough to remember what I have done and what I am doing, but far enough along

00:02:16.180 | to have results.

00:02:18.880 | I like very much to wait until I've either done something and really proven the results

00:02:25.040 | out for myself before I talk about it or to really exhaustively research something.

00:02:30.880 | If I talk about something here on Radical Personal Finance, it's generally either something

00:02:34.620 | I have done and I know or it's something that I have researched extensively and I'm very

00:02:40.820 | confident in my opinions.

00:02:43.220 | You will usually hear me, you'll frequently hear me, if there's an area where I get into

00:02:46.960 | where I'm not quite sure, I will quickly acknowledge that publicly and I'll state, "Hey, this is

00:02:51.780 | an area where I'm a little shaky."

00:02:52.960 | And I think that's important to do just from simple personal honesty.

00:02:57.060 | But I don't want to wait until I have all of my results accomplished to share some of

00:03:02.560 | what I have been doing with you because what can happen is you forget.

00:03:06.240 | I always tease my mother about this because you ask my mom, if I go and ask my mother,

00:03:12.240 | whose youngest child is in his mid-30s, she doesn't remember anything about the day-to-day

00:03:18.960 | of raising little children.

00:03:20.800 | It's just blocked from her mind.

00:03:22.680 | And so she'll see one of my children do something, she's like, "Wow, children do that?"

00:03:26.580 | And she's very sweet about it, but it's just funny because all of the day-to-day difficulties

00:03:30.700 | have been blocked from her mind now.

00:03:32.640 | And her mind only remembers the positive things, not specifically the day-to-day, moment-by-moment

00:03:37.840 | stuff.

00:03:38.840 | And it's not that she doesn't have a tremendous wealth of wisdom to share, she does.

00:03:44.200 | But sometimes I wonder if she remembers things as accurately as she should.

00:03:51.020 | And so that's why I want to do this now while I'm still in the process.

00:03:53.760 | So I want to begin with my results, then I'm going to tell you what I have done, then I'm

00:03:58.680 | going to talk about the academic research behind what I have done, which I didn't know

00:04:03.920 | about when I started doing it, but have since found, and then how I plan to continue to

00:04:10.000 | exercise my results.

00:04:11.680 | So for context, I have four children.

00:04:15.040 | The eldest is seven, recently turned seven, and the youngest is one, one and a half.

00:04:22.960 | So at this stage, I have four very young children.

00:04:26.680 | And when my eldest children were younger, my wife and I talked about the idea of teaching

00:04:32.400 | our children a foreign language, specifically Spanish.

00:04:35.720 | Both she and I learned Spanish in high school, and both she and I were, I would say, advanced

00:04:43.260 | intermediate Spanish speakers.

00:04:45.320 | Neither of us is truly expert.

00:04:49.080 | I'm in both now advanced levels because we've been working on it, but earlier in our children's

00:04:55.200 | lives, we were advanced intermediate speakers.

00:04:59.920 | And we talked about, should we try to teach our children a foreign language?

00:05:04.200 | But it seemed daunting.

00:05:06.520 | The task seemed insurmountable.

00:05:09.200 | I wasn't comfortable speaking Spanish to my children enough to actually do it.

00:05:14.880 | It was difficult.

00:05:15.880 | It was tiring.

00:05:16.880 | It was hard work for me to do it.

00:05:18.680 | I didn't know a lot of the daily vocabulary that you need with children, the common expressions.

00:05:23.040 | I could understand basic communication and participate in basic conversations, and even

00:05:28.120 | advanced intellectual conversations, but the day-to-day phraseology of how do you say,

00:05:35.040 | get in the bathtub.

00:05:36.880 | There were words in every language that I didn't know because I didn't grow up speaking

00:05:41.600 | Spanish.

00:05:42.600 | I learned Spanish.

00:05:43.600 | I had two years of high school Spanish.

00:05:45.240 | That's it.

00:05:46.500 | And so all of my other studies have been independent studies.

00:05:50.520 | And so we talked about it.

00:05:52.160 | We thought about it.

00:05:53.160 | And we just decided, you know what, we're not cut out for it.

00:05:55.240 | We're not going to do it.

00:05:56.240 | And so we decided not to try to teach our children Spanish.

00:06:00.560 | Well, that was fine for a while.

00:06:04.920 | But over the last couple of years, we have done quite a bit of traveling as a family,

00:06:09.080 | including some significant travel in a number of different Spanish-speaking countries.

00:06:14.160 | And we thought, you know what, if we're going to be traveling in Spanish-speaking countries,

00:06:18.560 | wouldn't it be nice to actually teach our children some Spanish?

00:06:21.800 | So we talked about it, but we didn't know how to do it.

00:06:24.880 | What could we do?

00:06:25.880 | Maybe we could enroll them in a school.

00:06:27.960 | And we thought about it.

00:06:28.960 | We talked about that.

00:06:29.960 | Should we go somewhere to a Spanish-speaking country and enroll them in a Spanish-speaking

00:06:32.960 | school?

00:06:34.000 | Maybe that would be good.

00:06:35.120 | Maybe it wouldn't.

00:06:36.120 | But for us, for me especially, the opportunity cost of doing that would be too high.

00:06:41.800 | I think that largely standardized schooling is so time inefficient, it's such a waste

00:06:47.080 | of time, that the cost, even though you might get some benefits like language immersion,

00:06:52.120 | the cost of doing that is just so high compared to what can be done in a really productive

00:06:57.220 | homeschool environment at home.

00:06:59.280 | So we decided not to do that.

00:07:00.400 | We thought about hiring a tutor, but what are we going to do?

00:07:03.040 | How are you going to teach children Spanish and put them in classes?

00:07:07.480 | None of my children had any interest in speaking Spanish.

00:07:09.760 | None of them wanted to do it.

00:07:11.440 | So finally I said, you know what, we're going to do this.

00:07:14.560 | And a little under a year ago, I decided to commit.

00:07:18.040 | And I said, I'm going to teach my children Spanish.

00:07:20.940 | So the first thing I did was buy a bunch of books in Spanish.

00:07:26.600 | And I started buying any book I could possibly find, any book I could get my hands on in

00:07:32.040 | Spanish.

00:07:33.360 | And I started with lots of storybooks.

00:07:34.840 | And I began reading the books to my children and translating them.

00:07:38.160 | I found a number of different bilingual books, so I used those.

00:07:41.560 | I quickly found out that I didn't like the bilingual translations, so I just focused

00:07:46.080 | on buying Spanish language storybooks and reading them to my children.

00:07:50.320 | And I would read to them in Spanish, and then I would translate.

00:07:56.480 | And I started with reading short phrases, three, four words at a time, and then translating

00:08:01.840 | into English.

00:08:02.840 | And then I later moved on to reading longer sentences and then translating those into

00:08:07.520 | English.

00:08:08.520 | And we just started reading for a significant amount of time.

00:08:11.840 | Now here I want to insert a small sidebar.

00:08:14.840 | Reading is a standard part of our family and what we do as a family.

00:08:19.920 | I consider reading and the ability to read and the habit of extensive reading to be a

00:08:27.840 | basic meta skill that's part of a basic meta ability of learning how to learn.

00:08:34.480 | And so it's a very significant focus for us in our family to not only teach our children

00:08:40.600 | to read, but also to help them to love to read and for reading to be a significant part

00:08:47.200 | of their life.

00:08:48.280 | I consider reading to be the most effective way to acquire knowledge.

00:08:53.600 | I consider reading to be the most effective way to acquire a broad, I'm going to use the

00:09:00.680 | word life experience, although I recognize its shortcomings in this case, I'll explain.

00:09:06.720 | I consider reading to be one of the most effective ways of acquiring a broad life experience

00:09:11.040 | because you can, by consuming the opinions and experiences of others through reading,

00:09:18.080 | you can be exposed to many aspects of life.

00:09:20.880 | It's not a genuine lived experience, but it's a vicarious experience that expands the brain

00:09:27.720 | and expands the mindset massively.

00:09:30.000 | I consider reading to be a major part of language development.

00:09:35.240 | When I was younger, because of extensive reading, I've always had a good vocabulary, I've always

00:09:39.340 | had excellent grammar, et cetera.

00:09:40.600 | And so I consider it to be a major part of language development.

00:09:44.240 | And I think that through reading, you have the chance to develop ideas, philosophies,

00:09:52.240 | et cetera, in a very powerful way.

00:09:54.560 | And it's more powerful than almost any other input methodology.

00:09:59.960 | There are some people who believe that you don't need to read to be successful, and I

00:10:03.440 | agree with them.

00:10:05.320 | However, any person who is successful without reading, when I look at that person, I see

00:10:11.480 | how if they did read, they could be more successful or they could be more successful faster.

00:10:19.080 | I've never found a situation or an argument in which I believe that reading was a disadvantage

00:10:25.440 | to somebody with the temperament and personality and other basic life skills where they were

00:10:30.400 | destined for success.

00:10:32.560 | The only disadvantage of reading would be if someone stays stuck reading and doesn't

00:10:37.480 | proceed to action.

00:10:38.900 | That would be the big danger point of reading.

00:10:41.320 | But I think that even through reading, you can become aware of that and then discipline

00:10:45.660 | yourself to make sure that you're implementing the knowledge that you acquire.

00:10:49.640 | So for those reasons, reading is an important part of our family educational strategy.

00:10:54.760 | And we have a strategy about how to help our children to be readers.

00:10:59.920 | The basic component of that is from a very early age, we read to them a lot.

00:11:05.960 | We read to them everything from a very, very early age.

00:11:09.440 | We fill our house with books, which is an important component.

00:11:12.280 | So we have lots of little baby books.

00:11:13.900 | We have lots of story books.

00:11:17.400 | We focus on buying the highest quality books that we can find.

00:11:23.820 | We try to focus on living books.

00:11:26.260 | That's a term that comes from the Charlotte Mason philosophy.

00:11:28.600 | And as Charlotte Mason would teach, we try to put a delectable buffet in front of our

00:11:33.760 | children.

00:11:34.760 | And so there are books all throughout the house of all different kinds of books.

00:11:39.160 | And we actually physically put this in front of them in a funny way every night.

00:11:43.440 | When the children go to bed, my wife goes around the house.

00:11:45.400 | Of course, if the books, if their books still out, which with little children, of course,

00:11:49.400 | we have lots of books to pick up.

00:11:51.060 | We pick them up and then she will salt the house with books or seed the house with books.

00:11:56.080 | So she'll go and choose five or six or eight books and we'll lay them out on the coffee

00:12:00.360 | table and they're different every day with all kinds of different things.

00:12:03.120 | And so the child comes, you know, gambling along and they see the book there and they

00:12:09.360 | can't help it.

00:12:10.760 | They reach down and they pick it up and all of a sudden they're exposed to a new different

00:12:14.200 | book.

00:12:15.320 | And so these are part of our strategy.

00:12:16.680 | I guess another important component is in our house we don't have any screens or any

00:12:21.960 | devices other than books for entertainment or education.

00:12:26.080 | So we don't have a TV.

00:12:27.440 | The children don't have digital devices.

00:12:30.220 | We don't let them use computers.

00:12:32.600 | Everything is just simply with books.

00:12:34.000 | And so if they're going to entertain themselves, it's either go play in the yard or play with

00:12:37.760 | toys or read books.

00:12:39.800 | And if they're wandering around with nothing to do, then often we'll say, go read a book.

00:12:43.680 | If we need them to sit down, sit down and read a book.

00:12:46.000 | And so reading is just a basic component of their life.

00:12:50.120 | Now we only have one reader at the moment.

00:12:53.240 | My seven year old is our only reader.

00:12:56.880 | And he broke through in English reading to a very high level very quickly.

00:13:02.040 | He wasn't a kind of superstar of doing it early.

00:13:05.360 | We worked on the early reading stuff and failed miserably.

00:13:09.320 | And so we just quit for quite a while.

00:13:11.620 | But then we came back to it at an age where he was more ready.

00:13:14.480 | We worked through it again, taught him the sounds of the words.

00:13:17.640 | And he broke through fairly quickly and then became a voracious reader in English.

00:13:24.400 | My next child, who is currently five, has not yet learned how to read.

00:13:30.320 | We're working on it, but it's not really taking.

00:13:33.040 | And so now with our experience with the first one, we've learned not to sweat it.

00:13:36.160 | Just take some time.

00:13:37.720 | But we've been teaching our children to read in English first.

00:13:41.040 | So less than a year ago, I had one reader who was reading in English, but we decided

00:13:45.840 | to go ahead and start reading to him and them in Spanish.

00:13:49.840 | And so I read significantly and I just took a lot of our reading time and put it into

00:13:54.840 | Spanish and my wife did some as well.

00:13:56.960 | For context, we probably read, what would I say?

00:14:01.880 | I would guess the average is we read an hour and a half to two hours a day to the children.

00:14:08.120 | I read at the breakfast table, usually 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes.

00:14:13.800 | Read all different books.

00:14:14.800 | I read them books.

00:14:16.520 | Usually I choose books that teach character qualities, teaching virtue, generally story

00:14:23.960 | books, but story books with a lesson, with a parable.

00:14:26.740 | So I switched those books to Spanish and I translated them at the breakfast table.

00:14:31.480 | I usually read to them for 30, 45 minutes before dinner.

00:14:36.420 | My wife will read to them during the day, the younger ones in the morning, during school

00:14:41.000 | time and in the afternoon.

00:14:42.500 | So probably another 30 to 45 minutes from her, I'll read 30 minutes before dinner.

00:14:47.160 | And then at bedtime, I read to them for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes.

00:14:50.760 | So I started to move that reading from English into Spanish, again, with simply translation.

00:14:57.280 | In addition to that, I made a point of trying to speak to the children more in Spanish.

00:15:01.920 | I didn't do any kind of perfect 100% in Spanish, but I tried to speak to them more.

00:15:07.320 | So give them a command in Spanish, translate to English.

00:15:09.640 | Give them a command in Spanish, translate to English.

00:15:11.940 | And I tried to figure out a way to bring Spanish into the house.

00:15:15.840 | Now this was kind of a failure, but I think it did make a difference for my eldest, who

00:15:21.920 | is the one who is truly fluent.

00:15:23.480 | The others are not truly fluent yet.

00:15:25.040 | I'll describe their levels in a moment.

00:15:27.760 | But this did make a difference to the eldest.

00:15:30.240 | I couldn't figure out because we're not part of a Spanish speaking community.

00:15:33.640 | Their children weren't exposed to Spanish, didn't have any Spanish speaking friends.

00:15:37.140 | And so it was basically just me, but I thought, how can I do it?

00:15:39.280 | So I decided to hire basically a babysitter, a nanny, to come into the house a couple days

00:15:44.800 | a week and spend the morning with the children.

00:15:47.480 | And I found a Spanish speaking nanny who would come in and this was helpful just in terms

00:15:53.440 | of handling the homeschool duties, right?

00:15:56.280 | To play with the younger children when the olders were doing school and my wife was engaged

00:16:00.720 | with them.

00:16:02.340 | But I made sure that the nanny came to play.

00:16:05.120 | And the person who this made the biggest difference with was my eldest, my eldest son, who again

00:16:11.820 | was six at the time.

00:16:13.600 | And I encouraged them to hang out.

00:16:16.160 | They would draw pictures, they would play, they would play games, they would play outside.

00:16:20.880 | I encouraged them to cook together.

00:16:23.040 | And again, I continued to buy just every book I could find in Spanish.

00:16:27.640 | I bought Spanish cookbooks.

00:16:29.280 | I bought Spanish all kinds of storybooks, et cetera, and I'd put them out.

00:16:33.800 | One day, my eldest started picking up some of the Spanish books and reading them himself.

00:16:39.820 | And I never taught him to read in Spanish.

00:16:41.280 | We did teach him to read in English, but never taught him to read in Spanish.

00:16:43.800 | But reading in Spanish is one of the easiest things about the Spanish language because

00:16:47.200 | the vowel sounds, the consonant sounds all map, almost all map to English.

00:16:53.760 | And the vowel sounds are very simple.

00:16:55.160 | There are five very simple vowel sounds and they're very consistent.

00:16:57.800 | So it's relatively easy to learn to read in Spanish.

00:17:00.680 | And so he started picking it up.

00:17:01.820 | And so I kept on plying him with as many books as I could possibly find.

00:17:05.800 | His levels started to get more and more and he started to just naturally start to speak

00:17:09.520 | with the Spanish speaking nanny when she would come.

00:17:15.000 | And then it was like he broke through and he started to get to higher and higher levels.

00:17:23.400 | So what I did was I stopped translating and I started reading more books to him without

00:17:28.600 | translation, reading more books without translation.

00:17:31.480 | And I worked really hard to get as many Spanish books that would engage him as I possibly

00:17:35.720 | could and then to move away from just picture books to more textbooks, meaning books with

00:17:42.040 | just text, not the kind of textbooks you get in class, but books with text and four or

00:17:47.400 | five pictures in it.

00:17:48.960 | And what I was looking for is I spent a long time looking for, I've looked for lists of

00:17:56.800 | literature.

00:17:57.880 | For some reason, these lists are not common in Spanish.

00:18:01.460 | If you're a parent and you're looking for books of lists of quality literature for your

00:18:04.520 | children, there are so many books written on this.

00:18:07.280 | There's Honey for the Child's Heart and all kinds of lists everywhere of the classic books

00:18:10.920 | in the English language.

00:18:12.440 | But I've looked everywhere and I can't find those lists in Spanish.

00:18:16.200 | But what I did find, I was looking for something that would engage his attention and capture

00:18:23.120 | his imagination.

00:18:24.640 | When I was a boy, what really made a big difference for me was when I discovered the Hardy Boys

00:18:29.720 | series, the classic Hardy Boys series, the 50 original Hardy Boys books written, I think,

00:18:34.480 | 1940s probably, 1930s or 40s.

00:18:38.920 | And those books just engaged me and I would get them from the library and read them and

00:18:42.520 | read them and I loved them.

00:18:44.200 | And I read so much because I found those.

00:18:47.760 | Well, I went looking.

00:18:48.760 | I couldn't find Hardy Boys in Spanish, although they were translated, many of them, into Spanish,

00:18:52.080 | but I couldn't find them anywhere.

00:18:53.800 | And finally, I went to a bookstore and I found a series in a Spanish bookstore.

00:18:57.960 | I found a series by the English author Enid Blyton.

00:19:04.960 | She wrote a series of books for adventure books for children called, they're written

00:19:08.920 | in English, called The Famous Five and then translated into Spanish called Los Cinco.

00:19:14.160 | And so I grabbed that series and I grabbed the first one to check it out, figured, okay,

00:19:21.160 | venture stories about books.

00:19:22.480 | They're of course wildly unrealistic.

00:19:24.320 | They're not particularly, everything is not awesome.

00:19:26.800 | You've got these 11 year old, a 12 year old, a 13 year old whose parents are either, they're

00:19:32.040 | just totally uninvolved, whether they're neglectful or just encouraging free range children, who

00:19:37.720 | knows?

00:19:38.720 | But the parents are totally wildly uninvolved.

00:19:41.000 | Children do all these dangerous, crazy adventures.

00:19:43.640 | But that author knows how to write for a child's imagination.

00:19:47.960 | And then I started reading to him the first Los Cinco book.

00:19:51.680 | I read him the first couple of chapters and then I just left the book and told him he

00:19:54.720 | had permission to pick it up and read it.

00:19:58.000 | And when he finally picked it up, he did, he went ahead, he picked it up and he read

00:20:01.560 | it and he read it voraciously.

00:20:04.200 | And then I went ahead and supplied him with the second one and he read it voraciously.

00:20:07.960 | And then I supplied him with the third one and he just, he soaked it up to the point

00:20:11.440 | where he was finishing this 250 page book.

00:20:16.480 | And one time he finished one of them in one day.

00:20:20.720 | So basically about, it was a long day of reading, but one to two days of reading.

00:20:25.360 | And that was like the capstone where I looked at my wife and I gave the yes sign and I said,

00:20:31.680 | all right, we've done it.

00:20:32.960 | We have succeeded.

00:20:33.960 | That he is reading effectively in Spanish.

00:20:37.960 | When a child can pick up one of these books, which has tons of words that I don't know,

00:20:42.280 | even though at this point I'm an advanced speaker, when a child can pick up this book

00:20:45.920 | and devour it like this, that will work.

00:20:48.960 | And so I've continued to supply him with those books as well as other books.

00:20:51.760 | I found a number of older, kind of similar genre of books for him.

00:20:57.760 | And I've continued to supply him with those books.

00:21:00.480 | So at this point in time, I consider him to be functionally fluent, fully fluent in Spanish.

00:21:06.880 | And he can understand what is being spoken and spoken Spanish.

00:21:10.200 | He can pick up all kinds of, he can read in Spanish and he doesn't show a preference between

00:21:15.340 | reading in Spanish and English.

00:21:16.720 | I'll describe some of the other books.

00:21:18.240 | I worked hard to find books that I thought would capture a young boy.

00:21:21.720 | So I found these really great Dorling Kindersley, DK books, these awesome about science and

00:21:29.360 | astronomy and space and the human body and history, just incredible, really vivid illustrations,

00:21:36.080 | all translated into Spanish, all written in Spanish.

00:21:39.560 | And so I supplied him with tons of those.

00:21:41.880 | Let me recount actually one story though.

00:21:44.040 | So the thing that's hard about this approach is you don't know what book is going to capture

00:21:47.680 | your child's attention.

00:21:53.040 | The Fulcrum in my eldest in his Spanish journey, The Fulcrum was a book that I just randomly

00:21:58.560 | picked up.

00:21:59.560 | I was at the store and I picked up this book that was for sale.

00:22:04.000 | It was called El Mesías and it was the Messiah.

00:22:08.160 | And it was published by Zondervan, which is a Christian publisher.

00:22:11.200 | And it was a manga book about the life of Jesus.

00:22:18.360 | And I just picked it up and I grabbed it.

00:22:20.480 | I don't like manga.

00:22:23.560 | Most manga, I know it's a big thing to some people if you're into manga, go for it.

00:22:26.840 | But a lot of manga just strikes me as ugly.

00:22:29.640 | It's not attractive.

00:22:31.180 | It's not to me.

00:22:33.060 | And so I don't really want to supply my child with tons of manga, but I figured, "Meh, it

00:22:37.600 | was on sale.

00:22:38.600 | I'll pick this thing up."

00:22:39.600 | And I grabbed it and I gave it to him.

00:22:43.640 | That book captured his attention like nothing I had ever seen.

00:22:48.280 | He read nothing other than that book for about two weeks.

00:22:53.440 | And just for context, that means probably read it for two and a half to three hours

00:22:57.100 | a day.

00:22:59.600 | With my eldest, he has reading time during while the other children nap.

00:23:04.840 | And so basically free afternoon, free reading time, and he would just devour it, read it

00:23:08.640 | for two and a half, three hours a day.

00:23:10.720 | And he loved it.

00:23:12.000 | He loved it.

00:23:13.320 | And that was the book that was the fulcrum where everything kind of, the dam burst out

00:23:17.800 | open.

00:23:18.800 | I never would have predicted that that was the book.

00:23:20.120 | It was just a random, "I'll pick this up and try this one out."

00:23:23.680 | But that was the book that made all the difference in the world for him.

00:23:26.920 | And then from then on, he was reading.

00:23:29.120 | And so at this point, he's functionally fluent.

00:23:32.760 | He's reading novels, just picture Hardy Boyd's novels, kind of a similar thing, a 200 to

00:23:39.800 | 220, 250 page child's novel written in Spanish.

00:23:43.280 | And it's excellent Spanish, really high quality translations.

00:23:47.960 | And he shows no preference between English and Spanish with his reading.

00:23:51.960 | So when we salt the table and seat it with all these different books, he'll pick up the

00:23:56.460 | Spanish books and the English books without any preference.

00:23:59.400 | Obviously, the books still need to be age appropriate.

00:24:02.040 | I've put a few books and tried a few different books that just didn't, he wasn't ready for

00:24:06.000 | yet, which is common with all readers, right?

00:24:07.440 | You don't give Pride and Prejudice to a seven-year-old because they can't appreciate, even though

00:24:11.680 | if they can decode the words, they can't appreciate the subtlety of the human interaction.

00:24:17.480 | But of books that are to his level, he doesn't show any preference between Spanish and English.

00:24:24.920 | And the reading has made all the difference in the world.

00:24:27.480 | So what's fascinating to me is I did this without much understanding of the academic

00:24:35.480 | research.

00:24:36.920 | I have since come to find that there is a whole school of language learning that is

00:24:42.840 | exclusively focused on this, on what's called extensive reading as a language acquisition

00:24:47.440 | methodology.

00:24:49.240 | And it makes all the sense in the world to me, and it maps to the good results that I've

00:24:53.520 | achieved.

00:24:54.660 | And what's fascinating to me is to watch a seven-year-old who is not in a Spanish-speaking

00:24:59.840 | school, doesn't have any Spanish-speaking friends, you know, I try to get some people

00:25:04.680 | to speak Spanish to speak to him, but it's very little other than my wife and me, but

00:25:10.640 | to watch that reading unlock the language, and then to see how effective it's been.

00:25:15.860 | So a year ago, spoke no Spanish, today, fully fluent, consuming 200 or 250-page novels voraciously,

00:25:23.160 | and loving them.

00:25:27.560 | And what's amazing to me is to assess the level of his Spanish ability, where he speaks

00:25:34.840 | completely unconsciously with an advanced grammar.

00:25:44.960 | You know, the other day he was telling me about something in the book, and he's using

00:25:49.080 | this, if you know anything about language and grammar, there's a form that we have in

00:25:55.280 | most languages, we have it in English, but most people are not aware of it, but it's

00:25:58.360 | very important in Spanish and French, called the subjunctive.

00:26:01.720 | And here he is telling me this example with the perfect conditional subjunctive conjugation

00:26:08.480 | of the verb, and it's the kind of thing that generally a third or fourth year Spanish student

00:26:14.080 | doesn't get right in the traditional Spanish education system.

00:26:19.160 | And yet, here he is, just unconsciously using the proper verb form in a really good way.

00:26:25.260 | He's not perfect.

00:26:26.260 | He messes up his noun selection sometimes, messes up his "la" and "el" just like I do,

00:26:32.800 | just like we all do.

00:26:34.160 | Sometimes he messes up his conjugations, but he's totally unaware of them.

00:26:38.580 | He's totally unaware of the errors, and it just flows very naturally from him.

00:26:42.760 | My wife says, "Man, I wish I could just speak as naturally as he does."

00:26:47.920 | And I feel the same way.

00:26:49.800 | Now, let me just go through the process again.

00:26:52.600 | I guess the other thing I need to say, what else did we do?

00:26:55.720 | We did a little bit of focused study.

00:26:57.880 | I was able to find a book.

00:27:00.320 | I think it was also a DK book.

00:27:02.600 | It was written in English, but it was like your first Spanish book.

00:27:04.880 | I found it at Barnes & Noble in Colorado.

00:27:10.000 | I picked it up, and I gave that to him.

00:27:13.680 | And what we had him do as part of his homeschool was each day he would learn a page of vocabulary

00:27:19.520 | from that.

00:27:20.520 | So, it had probably 20 to 30 words of vocabulary, and since he could read, his job was to learn

00:27:25.240 | the vocabulary, and we'd quiz him.

00:27:27.240 | Beyond that, he's done no formal grammar books, no drills, no anything.

00:27:32.400 | I guess my wife sat with him and taught him and went over and explained to him how yo

00:27:37.360 | estoy, tu estas, el/ella, usted está, nosotros estamos, vosotros estáis, ustedes están.

00:27:46.440 | And did the same thing for ser, which means I am.

00:27:49.520 | Sorry, those are the two I am verbs, to be verbs in Spanish.

00:27:54.320 | And so, she went over that with him, but didn't go over future tense, past tense, anything,

00:27:58.280 | but we just read to him.

00:27:59.800 | And really, really phenomenal results.

00:28:02.520 | That's the seven-year-old who's reading.

00:28:04.560 | The five-year-old who is reading has very much resisted this process.

00:28:10.080 | Sorry, the five-year-old who is not reading, not yet reading in English, nor in Spanish,

00:28:14.920 | but has very much resisted learning Spanish.

00:28:18.540 | Didn't have any interest in it, didn't want to do it, didn't want to speak Spanish, didn't

00:28:21.920 | want to listen to anybody speak Spanish.

00:28:24.280 | But I have held strong and continued to read.

00:28:28.120 | And she's been on a similar timeline, but of course she was younger.

00:28:31.680 | And so, I've continued to read.

00:28:33.200 | I continue to do the reading now.

00:28:35.040 | At this point in time, she's not reading advanced, she's not listening to advanced texts, but

00:28:41.000 | I'm still reading storybooks.

00:28:42.360 | One of the series that I found was Franklin the Turtle.

00:28:45.200 | I was able to find Franklin the Turtle books translated into Spanish.

00:28:48.680 | It's a Canadian children's book series that the original just had beautiful artwork, really

00:28:54.360 | lovely, short stories.

00:28:56.320 | And so, I bought tons of them in Spanish.

00:28:59.600 | And I can read to her a Franklin the Tortuga book in Spanish without translating, and she'll

00:29:07.440 | understand it.

00:29:08.440 | And I'm reading to her significant texts, and she's understanding significant amounts.

00:29:13.560 | Now, she still asks and picks out, "Hey, what does such and such mean?"

00:29:16.400 | And I translate any word.

00:29:17.840 | What I've stopped doing at this point with her is I've stopped translating the full book.

00:29:23.360 | For a time, I used to translate all the book, but now I'll translate any particular word

00:29:28.200 | she wants to know, but I have stopped translating the full book.

00:29:32.360 | Similar for my three-year-old, but neither my three-year-old nor my five-year-old are

00:29:37.320 | yet speaking.

00:29:38.920 | Neither of them has been interested in speaking in Spanish, and I've just let it go.

00:29:42.320 | I continue to read to them, and I know that in time it will come.

00:29:46.440 | So that's my experience.

00:29:49.840 | That's what I have learned.

00:29:50.840 | Now, what's exciting to me is there's a lot of academic research, independently done,

00:29:58.200 | actually researched, that would say that what I did kind of by accident, just making up

00:30:03.720 | in my head thinking, "How can I do this?"

00:30:06.720 | What I did is actually a really compelling learning methodology for anybody who wants

00:30:11.800 | to learn a foreign language.

00:30:14.240 | And these theories have, for me, made a big difference in my own personal language acquisition.

00:30:20.740 | And I've seen the effectiveness in Spanish such to the point where my plan is I'm going

00:30:25.480 | to repeat this process probably next year.

00:30:27.880 | We'll see.

00:30:28.880 | I don't want to go prematurely.

00:30:29.880 | I could start another language now with my eldest, but I don't want to just single him

00:30:35.000 | out.

00:30:36.000 | But I'm going to repeat this process with a third language now, probably starting in

00:30:39.280 | 2021, or at least when I think the children are ready.

00:30:43.400 | Now, I should acknowledge, I'm going to tell you about some of these theories and explain

00:30:47.920 | them.

00:30:48.920 | First of all, that Spanish is a fairly easy language for English speakers to learn.

00:30:53.480 | It's a tier one language.

00:30:55.620 | By tier one, I'm referring to the research done by the US American Foreign Service Institute

00:31:03.360 | on different tiers of languages.

00:31:06.160 | The US Foreign Service Institute was tasked, obviously many decades ago, with teaching

00:31:11.660 | Americans foreign languages so that they could be useful when they went abroad for diplomatic

00:31:17.400 | service.

00:31:18.400 | They were in the US American diplomatic corps.

00:31:22.800 | After many years of teaching, they came through with an analysis of how long it takes to learn

00:31:27.400 | a language.

00:31:28.840 | This is specifically for a native English speaker.

00:31:32.980 | They have five tiers of different languages.

00:31:39.320 | Tier one languages, which are languages that are closely related to English, they estimate

00:31:44.800 | that it takes about somewhere between 575 to 600 hours to teach a tier one language

00:31:52.920 | to an English speaker.

00:31:55.280 | Tier one languages include Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese,

00:32:00.120 | Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish.

00:32:02.400 | The reason these are fairly easy for English speakers to learn is there are a lot of cognates.

00:32:11.800 | There's a lot of similarity.

00:32:13.400 | There are a lot of words that sound very similar between English and Spanish.

00:32:19.440 | If you understand English and you speak English, then you can pick up a lot of the words that

00:32:26.160 | are cognates, that sound similar.

00:32:29.880 | If you think about it, let's say their research is that it takes 600 hours.

00:32:34.440 | Let me now map that to what I have done with my children.

00:32:36.680 | If it takes 600 hours to teach a language to somebody, then if you divide 600 by 52

00:32:44.280 | weeks, so 600, calculator failed, 600 divided by 52 equals 11.5 hours a week.

00:32:51.320 | If you divide that, let's divide the 600 by 365 to get a daily number, that's 1.64

00:32:58.560 | hours a day.

00:32:59.560 | Now reflect back on what I told you that we do, that we did, that I do with the children,

00:33:05.600 | that I told you that we read to the children probably something like an hour and a half

00:33:11.080 | a day to two hours, depending on the day.

00:33:14.560 | Again, I read 20 to 30 minutes a day at the breakfast table.

00:33:18.600 | My wife will read to the children sometimes all together, and this ranges depending on

00:33:23.960 | what we're doing, but sometimes it's a couple of hours a day.

00:33:27.040 | Sometimes it's an hour a day, but certainly not less than an hour a day during the normal

00:33:32.640 | day.

00:33:33.640 | I read to the children usually when I get off work at five o'clock, five to six o'clock,

00:33:38.160 | so usually 30 to 45 minutes of reading there.

00:33:41.440 | Then I read to the children before bed for 30 to 45 minutes.

00:33:47.800 | In that context, the idea that a child can learn a language in a year or so just with

00:33:54.680 | reading is a very realistic context for one of these easier languages for an English speaker,

00:34:00.320 | such as Spanish or any of those languages I said.

00:34:04.640 | And then if you add to that what I described about my son just starting to read to himself,

00:34:10.760 | if you picture the fact that, let's say that he reads, I would estimate three hours a day,

00:34:16.960 | something maybe that's too little.

00:34:21.560 | So he does school, which of course is largely reading, but school is in English.

00:34:27.020 | So let's just say he reads to himself two to three hours a day, then you can understand

00:34:31.800 | that he's very quickly learning the language, a language like Spanish.

00:34:36.160 | Now category two for the Foreign Service Institute, they estimate German is a category two or

00:34:41.560 | tier two language requiring about 750 hours.

00:34:45.500 | So if you divide 750 by 365, that would come out to be about two hours a day.

00:34:51.560 | A category three language requires 900 hours where there are significant differences between,

00:34:59.180 | sorry, there are differences between English and these languages, Indonesian, Malaysian,

00:35:04.020 | and Swahili.

00:35:05.180 | Category four, they estimate takes 1,100 hours.

00:35:08.340 | These are languages with significant linguistic and cultural differences from English.

00:35:12.220 | I'll read you the list.

00:35:13.720 | It's Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Croatian,

00:35:20.340 | Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer,

00:35:23.980 | Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Russian,

00:35:28.740 | Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese,

00:35:34.580 | Xhosa, and Zulu.

00:35:36.500 | And then category five languages require, from their estimate, these are languages that

00:35:41.820 | are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers, require about 2,200 hours of input.

00:35:46.940 | So that would be Arabic, Cantonese, Chinese, Mandarin, Chinese, and Japanese, and Korean.

00:35:52.900 | So if we were to estimate 2,200 hours and divide that by two hours a day, that would

00:35:58.940 | now be 1,100 days of study, which would come out to be about three years versus one year.

00:36:05.360 | So I don't think that we would have achieved these same results in one year if we had been

00:36:11.640 | doing this in Arabic.

00:36:14.000 | But what we did get was dramatic results with Spanish, which is awesome.

00:36:18.740 | And I want to talk now about this particular methodology, because there are a couple of

00:36:23.800 | things that are very much that I see working really effectively with as I watch the children

00:36:31.280 | learn Spanish.

00:36:32.280 | And I'm going to talk about some of these language theories, because they're really

00:36:39.000 | helpful to me, and they've changed how I have started studying languages.

00:36:43.800 | I've recently, my goal for this year was I was really, really studying Spanish, partly

00:36:49.680 | so I could do a better job with teaching my children.

00:36:52.560 | But I decided, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to try to see if I

00:36:55.200 | can get a C2 certificate in Spanish, which is advanced, near native speaker.

00:37:00.360 | And so I was working and working on that.

00:37:02.200 | But I didn't really have a plan for how to do it.

00:37:04.160 | I hired a tutor that I worked with, but the tutor could talk with me, but I didn't really

00:37:09.160 | have a plan.

00:37:10.420 | And I just didn't like a lot of the stuff that I did.

00:37:12.840 | And I said, and then I came across some of these theories, and it totally changed my

00:37:16.520 | learning.

00:37:18.560 | Because what I stopped doing was doing anything that I didn't like.

00:37:21.720 | I stopped doing anything I didn't like.

00:37:23.120 | I stopped doing grammar exercises.

00:37:25.240 | I stopped doing drills.

00:37:26.240 | I stopped studying vocabulary.

00:37:28.320 | And what I started doing was reading.

00:37:30.500 | And I just started reading extensively.

00:37:31.880 | And I've since learned that not only is this incredibly powerful, but it's proven that

00:37:37.240 | simply doing extensive reading will help you to learn a language very, very dramatically.

00:37:44.840 | Now the leader in this space is a linguist named Stephen Krashen.

00:37:49.960 | And years ago, he started studying the process and he came up with five different hypotheses

00:37:59.280 | that he identified that make all the difference in the world.

00:38:02.540 | Now his first hypothesis was called the input hypothesis.

00:38:06.200 | The input hypothesis states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language

00:38:11.000 | when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current

00:38:15.960 | level.

00:38:17.320 | Krashen called this level of input I plus one, where I is the learner's interlanguage

00:38:22.920 | and plus one is the next stage of language acquisition.

00:38:26.520 | So from my experience now over the last year teaching my children this language, I see

00:38:35.460 | that this is something I did really effectively.

00:38:37.280 | I started with very simple children's books.

00:38:40.200 | And there's a whole world of what's called TPRS, where people will encourage us to tell

00:38:46.000 | stories and never to translate.

00:38:47.520 | I don't know if that's the best theory or not.

00:38:49.440 | All I know is that for me, I translated.

00:38:52.880 | But there's a whole world of theory where people say you shouldn't even translate.

00:38:55.680 | You should just start with books and point to the pictures and tell the children stories

00:39:00.640 | and repeat it with very, very simple stories.

00:39:03.480 | I just started with children's books and I did the translation.

00:39:06.680 | But the language was fairly simple.

00:39:10.600 | Children's books are not a great way of learning language because the vocabulary doesn't repeat

00:39:14.200 | enough, I think.

00:39:15.800 | But still, they listen enough that they started to get the basics.

00:39:20.620 | And that was really useful to them.

00:39:24.980 | Now there are three corollaries that Krashen teaches.

00:39:27.960 | And by the way, I'm pulling this outline directly from the Wikipedia page, which you can review,

00:39:32.840 | called the Input Hypothesis for Language Learning.

00:39:35.480 | And there are three corollaries.

00:39:36.480 | Number one, that talking or output is not practicing.

00:39:40.720 | So Krashen stresses that speaking in the target language does not result in language acquisition.

00:39:45.800 | Although speaking can indirectly assist in language acquisition, the ability to speak

00:39:50.040 | is not the cause of language learning or acquisition.

00:39:53.240 | Instead, comprehensible output is the effect of language acquisition.

00:40:02.320 | So this is something that I did accidentally.

00:40:03.920 | Well, I didn't want to bother my younger ones were so resistant.

00:40:08.640 | I didn't try to make them talk.

00:40:10.320 | I didn't try to make them talk at all.

00:40:11.880 | I just read to them.

00:40:13.200 | And it turns out that this has been very, very effective, that they're starting to speak.

00:40:16.600 | Again, my very resistant five-year-old is starting to speak a little bit naturally.

00:40:21.880 | Just a couple of sentences, you know, "Yo quiero esto," and insert a noun here.

00:40:28.640 | But it actually turned out that really effective, that just me talking to them was a good, was

00:40:34.200 | a very effective form of learning.

00:40:37.720 | Now number two, the corollary of the Input Hypothesis.

00:40:40.740 | When enough comprehensible input is provided, I plus one is present.

00:40:45.220 | If language models and teachers provide enough comprehensible input, then the structures

00:40:49.800 | that acquirers are ready to learn will be present in that input.

00:40:53.640 | And according to Krashen, this is a better method of developing grammatical accuracy

00:40:57.920 | than direct grammar teaching.

00:40:59.240 | And I've seen this happen.

00:41:00.720 | I see that I can, that my eldest child now understands and speaks using subjunctive and

00:41:08.720 | conditional and all of these more advanced forms, but that happened naturally at a natural

00:41:16.920 | pace.

00:41:17.920 | And then number three, the teaching order is not based on the natural order.

00:41:20.640 | Instead, students will acquire the language in a natural order by receiving comprehensible

00:41:23.720 | input.

00:41:24.720 | And so what we did wound up being really effective, just providing lots and lots of comprehensible

00:41:29.040 | input.

00:41:30.040 | Now, number two hypothesis is called the Acquisition Learning Hypothesis.

00:41:34.840 | The Acquisition Learning Hypothesis claims that there is a strict separation between

00:41:38.600 | acquisition and learning.

00:41:41.440 | Krashen saw acquisition as a purely subconscious process and learning as a conscious process

00:41:46.840 | and claimed that improvement in language ability was only dependent upon acquisition and never

00:41:52.520 | on learning.

00:41:54.200 | And so this particular feature is something that I have seen, that having, I've not taught

00:42:00.320 | my children anything related to the language.

00:42:02.920 | I've simply had them listen to it and then hear what it meant by translating.

00:42:07.680 | I read in Spanish, then I translate.

00:42:10.000 | I read a phrase, then I translate.

00:42:12.200 | I read a phrase, then I translate.

00:42:14.240 | And simply through repetition, they have absorbed the words.

00:42:18.320 | And what's funny to me is hearing my five-year-old, so give you a picture, a typical scene.

00:42:25.840 | I'm holding in my hands the Franklin book that I read to my children last night at bedtime

00:42:30.880 | called Franklin Quiere una Mascota, Franklin Wants a Pet.

00:42:34.760 | And so here's a typical scene of how this works.

00:42:37.920 | I'm reading to the children, to all the children.

00:42:40.400 | The seven-year-old is listening and enjoys the story and enjoys the pictures because

00:42:45.380 | it's simple and fun and beautiful pictures.

00:42:47.700 | But he understands everything perfectly.

00:42:49.920 | The five-year-old on occasion asks a question, but the three-year-old has a much more limited

00:42:54.040 | vocabulary because a lot of the books that I've read to him, or read to all of them,

00:42:59.080 | he just is uninterested in.

00:43:01.280 | But I'll read a sentence like this.

00:43:02.680 | Si yo tuviera una mascota, quisiera que fuera un pájaro, dijo Oso.

00:43:06.960 | So this is a, grammatically speaking, the translation is, if I had a pet, I would like

00:43:14.400 | that pet to be a bird, said bear, Oso.

00:43:19.200 | So, but this is a fairly complex or advanced grammatical form.

00:43:24.480 | Si yo tuviera una mascota, quisiera que fuera un pájaro, dijo Oso.

00:43:29.960 | It's a conditional and subjunctive form of grammar, which none of the children have any

00:43:35.860 | clue what that means, but the three-year-old will hone in on the word, you know, mascota,

00:43:42.280 | right?

00:43:43.280 | He knows what pájaro is because we can point to, you know, birds outside of the window,

00:43:48.080 | but he'll hone in on mascota and he'll ask, what's a mascota?

00:43:51.680 | And the five-year-old has never been taught what mascota is, but she'll respond, oh, it's

00:43:56.160 | pet.

00:43:57.160 | And now she's doing the translating for him after having acquired or absorbed the words.

00:44:03.020 | And watching this process is fascinating to me because it really does work.

00:44:08.280 | Let's go on.

00:44:09.280 | Number three, the monitor hypothesis.

00:44:10.800 | The monitor hypothesis states that consciously learned language can only be used to monitor

00:44:16.120 | language output.

00:44:17.120 | It can never be the source of spontaneous speech.

00:44:19.960 | And so the idea here with the monitor hypothesis is that as adults, when we study a language,

00:44:26.600 | then we are trying to analyze if we're saying something right.

00:44:31.240 | So if I were going to say a Spanish sentence like this, si yo tuviera una mascota, quisiera

00:44:36.560 | que, and I have to stop and ask, you know, what do I say?

00:44:40.960 | Quisiera que ser?

00:44:42.640 | No.

00:44:43.640 | Quisiera que fuera or fuese?

00:44:46.920 | Quisiera que, I have to monitor that.

00:44:49.440 | But when you're doing that, that slows you down.

00:44:52.520 | And so the monitor system where you're actually analyzing, okay, I'm using a conditional form.

00:44:58.240 | Si yo tuviera, if I had una mascota, quisiera, I would like.

00:45:04.720 | If I had, I would like.

00:45:06.680 | That's something that basically, it gives adults more progress in the beginning, but

00:45:16.000 | it actually slows everybody down.

00:45:18.760 | Because when Krashen talks about it, in order for you to actually analyze your speech, the

00:45:24.960 | acquirer or learner must know the rule, which is difficult condition to meet because it

00:45:29.160 | means that the speaker must have had explicit instruction on the language form.

00:45:32.880 | You have to understand in English that if you were going to say, if I had, I would like,

00:45:37.080 | so you have to know the rule.

00:45:39.840 | You have to be focused on thinking about the rules and speaking it, and you have to have

00:45:43.240 | the time to use it, which requires you to slow down and think about it.

00:45:48.000 | But if you can just simply get rid of the monitor and not use it when you're speaking,

00:45:53.600 | which is hard for adults, right?

00:45:55.080 | You can do that when you're writing, you can stop and think, if I had, I would like.

00:46:00.700 | But you can't do that very well when you're speaking, then you can learn more effectively.

00:46:05.160 | And so watching my son, he doesn't have a monitor.

00:46:08.160 | He has no fear of speaking the language.

00:46:10.680 | He's never known that you're supposed to be embarrassed about speaking a language, which

00:46:15.640 | we'll come to in the fifth hypothesis.

00:46:17.880 | He just simply speaks the language.

00:46:19.480 | And so he'll naturally use the proper forms unconsciously in many situations.

00:46:26.000 | And so it's fascinating to see that.

00:46:27.960 | Number four and five, the natural order hypothesis states that the language is acquired in a

00:46:31.800 | particular order and that this order does not change between learners and is not affected

00:46:36.120 | by explicit instruction.

00:46:37.520 | This basically means that all languages have an order that children learn them in.

00:46:42.640 | And this is unique to the language, but your child is going to use certain forms, certain

00:46:47.480 | conjugations, certain tenses, certain conditionals later after they use the present thing.

00:46:53.960 | Your child doesn't learn to say, "If I had, then I would like," at beginning.

00:46:58.920 | Your child first learns, "I want."

00:47:02.520 | That's how the English language works.

00:47:04.320 | Now, that's that natural order hypothesis.

00:47:06.560 | I have observed it in watching my children develop their language, but that's not particularly

00:47:14.200 | interesting to me.

00:47:15.200 | The most important is actually number five, the active filter hypothesis.

00:47:19.960 | This states that learners' ability to acquire language is constrained if they are experiencing

00:47:23.820 | negative emotions such as fear or embarrassment.

00:47:26.920 | At such times, the effective filter is said to be up.

00:47:29.760 | And this is a very big deal for me.

00:47:31.880 | This is very hard for me, especially if when learning a language, we focus on speaking

00:47:38.840 | because I want to speak properly.

00:47:41.040 | I want to speak with proper pronunciation.

00:47:44.600 | I want to speak with excellent grammar because my pride is involved.

00:47:48.080 | My self-image is related to how I speak a language.

00:47:51.920 | I take a great deal of pride in how I speak and wield the English language.

00:47:56.480 | I take pride in my vocabulary, in the way that I express words with interesting pictures

00:48:03.880 | associated with more interesting phraseology and construction.

00:48:08.840 | It's important to me.

00:48:10.320 | And so that naturally goes over to foreign languages, but I'm not good at that.

00:48:16.560 | And so it's difficult for me to do that.

00:48:18.640 | And so here what I have seen is that in the home environment where I have never, we don't

00:48:23.840 | give our children tests of any kind.

00:48:25.860 | I think tests are basically worthless for learning.

00:48:29.840 | They're worthwhile for placement.

00:48:32.160 | You know, a test, you know, the SAT, although this is of course a subject of much debate,

00:48:36.160 | a test like the SAT may be very useful for a college to place students and to assess

00:48:42.200 | them, but for learning, you don't learn anything from tests.

00:48:45.120 | So we don't give our children any tests of any kind as part of their schooling.

00:48:49.680 | And I don't intend to start anytime soon.

00:48:52.400 | When they reach a point where they need to start doing that, we'll practice some test-taking

00:48:55.240 | skills, but tests are not particularly useful for learning.

00:48:58.280 | And so because my children, especially my eldest, who again is the one, is the only

00:49:02.960 | one who is actually fully fluent at this point in time, because of just an exclusively positive

00:49:09.720 | environment, he's never gotten anything wrong.

00:49:12.400 | No one has ever told him that he said anything incorrect in Spanish.

00:49:15.900 | No one's ever said, "Oh, you did this wrong.

00:49:17.880 | You said this wrong."

00:49:18.880 | He has no filter.

00:49:20.460 | He has no problem speaking and trying things out because he doesn't have any fear or any

00:49:29.060 | embarrassment.

00:49:30.540 | And watching how powerful that is to me has been a real light bulb, a real revelation,

00:49:35.920 | an epiphany as I've seen, "Wow, look at how powerful this is."

00:49:40.440 | When you have an environment of unconditional positivity and you have an environment where

00:49:48.640 | there's no fear of mistake, then the brain doesn't shut down and start to control output

00:49:54.580 | and make a person feel bad because they can't say something perfectly.

00:49:58.280 | It's fascinating to me to have seen it really effectively over the last year to just a really,

00:50:05.240 | really high level.

00:50:06.640 | I want to talk for a moment about extensive reading, because what I have now researched

00:50:11.640 | and come to understand is that what I have done has, for the reasons stated, good anchoring

00:50:18.680 | in the academic literature, which I didn't know when I started, but I now do.

00:50:23.280 | And more importantly, what I have done with my eldest, who's a reader, has tremendously

00:50:28.760 | strong anchoring in the academic literature.

00:50:31.960 | That extensive reading as a language acquisition process is very, very powerful, because what

00:50:39.800 | it does, if you get the material right at the right level, and so again, it needs to

00:50:43.440 | be comprehensible input, the reader needs to be able to understand the majority of what's

00:50:48.640 | on the page, which means that it needs to be simple, but just a few extra things.

00:50:53.940 | When you get that level right, though, the reader will automatically acquire the vocabulary.

00:50:59.920 | I'll mention the Los Cinco books.

00:51:01.560 | The Los Cinco books are fascinating to my son because of the stories, because of the

00:51:06.720 | adventures.

00:51:07.920 | They have a significant number of words that he doesn't know, but he knows enough to be

00:51:13.720 | able to capture the gist of the story.

00:51:16.520 | And because he's reading them and then rereading them and then reading them and then rereading

00:51:20.400 | them, he picks up the words naturally, as I did with the English language, to the point

00:51:26.000 | where now his vocabulary in Spanish is probably not as extensive as mine, because he hasn't

00:51:31.040 | done, he hasn't done reading in as many areas as I have, so I would imagine that my vocabulary

00:51:40.680 | is clearly more extensive than his, but he knows lots of words that I have never taught

00:51:46.960 | him.

00:51:47.960 | Now, when he speaks to me in Spanish, he'll break out some word that I simply don't know,

00:51:54.800 | and I can understand what he's saying by the context of his speech, but it's a word that

00:51:59.920 | I'm sure he's never heard, I'm sure that he doesn't know, and that it's something that

00:52:07.000 | he picked up exclusively from his reading.

00:52:11.320 | And to me, that's exciting, because it means that if I can simply continue throughout his

00:52:16.600 | lifetime of plying him with enough books that are of interest to him on diverse subjects

00:52:25.880 | of all kinds of things, and I mean that, I do it with a very wide variety.

00:52:30.280 | The storybooks I love, because there's nothing more than a good story that captures your

00:52:35.680 | imagination to get you to read hundreds and hundreds of pages, but it can't just be storybooks.

00:52:41.440 | I've got books on all kinds of stuff, so there's a very diverse level of vocabulary, and he'll

00:52:46.560 | in time pick up a diverse vocabulary from the diversity of these books, but extensive

00:52:50.960 | reading as an, even as an exclusive strategy, it works.

00:52:57.120 | The last point I want to make on Spanish and this process is to briefly discuss accent.

00:53:02.960 | The place where my eldest, my seven-year-old, is still novice, not novice, the place where

00:53:11.960 | he's not advanced at this point in time is in his verbal accent, in his spoken accent.

00:53:18.200 | He doesn't speak with a horrible American accent, but he doesn't sound like a native

00:53:25.560 | Spanish speaker, and I think this is natural due to his limited exposure to Spanish speakers.

00:53:32.400 | I have not succeeded in exposing him to a lot of spoken Spanish.

00:53:38.040 | I could, right?

00:53:39.080 | I could go and find a Spanish school with native Spanish speakers and enroll him in

00:53:43.800 | that, but again, I think the cost of that is too high.

00:53:46.760 | But that's where he hasn't had enough exposure to the spoken language in order to really

00:53:52.640 | develop a native-like accent, although he may have a native-like level of vocabulary,

00:54:01.800 | which he does for his age, an age appropriate.

00:54:04.200 | He's beyond his age.

00:54:06.160 | He's reading books that are targeted to readers past his age in the Spanish language, when

00:54:11.880 | we need to look at degraded readers, degraded for children.

00:54:15.680 | And although he may have extensive vocabulary and good grammar instruction, what he doesn't

00:54:18.760 | have is a native-like accent.

00:54:21.520 | And I'm sure it'll come in time, but it's just going to be a matter of more listening.

00:54:25.560 | The only thing I've been able to find that for good audio consumption is I found the

00:54:30.920 | Boxcar Children series in Spanish on Audible, and so I got all of those and he loved those.

00:54:36.600 | And so that gives him exposure to a narrator.

00:54:39.520 | But I haven't been able to get enough audio books in Spanish for him because of number

00:54:43.320 | one, the subject matter of it's been hard to find high-quality audio books designed

00:54:48.280 | for children.

00:54:49.280 | And then number two, I have significant resistance still with my other children to listening

00:54:53.800 | to Spanish audio books.

00:54:54.960 | I force it, but not for too long.

00:54:57.200 | And so that'll be the big thing where he still needs to step up his game and listen to more

00:55:01.520 | spoken Spanish so that his accent will naturally correct and he'll acquire more of a native-like

00:55:06.520 | accent.

00:55:08.200 | But on all the other levels, I'm very, very pleased with the progress and I'm very pleased

00:55:13.640 | with the methodology.

00:55:15.720 | So what does this mean and where do we go from here?

00:55:17.800 | Well, where do we go from here?

00:55:19.400 | The first thing is that I'm very confident now that we've cracked the code for reading,

00:55:28.200 | I'm very confident that for as long as my son is in my home, I can keep his language

00:55:34.960 | ability up by simply buying him more books.

00:55:39.160 | I now consider this to be the most important benchmark in language learning is simply acquiring

00:55:45.440 | the ability to read in the foreign language that you're learning to the point where you

00:55:51.200 | can enjoy it and read whatever kind of books that you enjoy.

00:55:55.800 | In hindsight, I now realize that this was the biggest weakness for me in my own language

00:56:01.080 | journey.

00:56:02.080 | I practiced speaking when I was younger, but I had two years of high school Spanish,

00:56:06.920 | I practiced speaking, I learned, I spent time when I was in college in Costa Rica in a Spanish-speaking

00:56:11.640 | country living with a Spanish family, speaking in Spanish, that helped some.

00:56:15.880 | But then when I went back to the United States, I spoke virtually no Spanish for years and

00:56:21.760 | years and years and my Spanish language abilities atrophied because I didn't reach the point

00:56:26.920 | at which I was reading for pleasure in Spanish.

00:56:29.560 | I would pick up a book and it would just simply be too hard.

00:56:33.160 | I had to look up too many words and I was too much of a perfectionist to just let the

00:56:37.040 | words wash over me like a child does.

00:56:39.760 | And so I never read in Spanish and I couldn't listen to audio books that I enjoyed in Spanish

00:56:45.720 | because they had too much vocabulary that I didn't know and that I couldn't enjoy.

00:56:50.880 | And so for me, what I have done over the last year in my own Spanish journey is I've cracked

00:56:56.600 | this level for myself, is I got to the point, as I previously discussed, using the application

00:57:01.840 | that Steve Kaufman developed called LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q, which is phenomenal.

00:57:05.840 | I got to the point by reading in LingQ that I could just enjoy reading novels in Spanish.

00:57:11.400 | And so I picked the kind of books that I like to read.

00:57:14.040 | For me, I enjoy thrillers and I started reading them in Spanish.

00:57:18.760 | So I would buy a copy of a Tom Clancy book that was translated into Spanish.

00:57:24.320 | Then I would download it, I would strip the DRM from that, load it up into my app, into

00:57:31.440 | my LingQ app, and then read it in LingQ to the point where I could get enough vocabulary

00:57:36.360 | to where now I can read that same book without the crutch of LingQ and I can enjoy it.

00:57:42.800 | I've also worked hard enough on amplifying, now the Spanish is affecting my English, on

00:57:52.240 | broadening my English vocabulary.

00:57:55.360 | Sorry, I've been successful enough at broadening my Spanish vocabulary to also to the point

00:58:01.440 | where I can listen to audio books.

00:58:03.040 | And so the last year I've listened to what, eight, probably eight or 10 novels in Spanish.

00:58:11.800 | So I found the Michael Connelly crime novels, those translated into Spanish and a number

00:58:17.280 | of other ones as well.

00:58:18.660 | And so I can get those on Audible, I can download those and I can enjoy those stories.

00:58:22.940 | And so I'm at the point now where going forward, now that I'm reading, I'll be able to maintain

00:58:28.820 | Spanish.

00:58:29.820 | So as long as I read a couple books a year, a couple of novels a year in Spanish, listen

00:58:34.080 | to perhaps a couple of audio books per year in Spanish, I'll be able to maintain my Spanish

00:58:39.060 | ability in a way that I couldn't before.

00:58:41.740 | And I think this is a big concern with children is if we can get them reading comfortably

00:58:45.900 | in Spanish, then they'll be able to maintain that language for life.

00:58:50.020 | Whereas if we don't, then it's very easy for them to lose a language.

00:58:53.580 | You can lose, you can learn a language to a very high level at seven years old and at

00:58:58.460 | 45 years old, not be able to speak the language a bit.

00:59:02.000 | And so I now see that with any language that we learn, I think the most practical goal

00:59:07.620 | should be get to the point where you can sit down with an adult level book of whatever

00:59:14.040 | genre you're interested in.

00:59:16.260 | Could be self-help, I read self-help books in Spanish.

00:59:18.940 | Now it could be a novel, whatever, could be anything you're interested in, but an adult

00:59:24.620 | level book, the kind of book that you would read in your native language, get to the point

00:59:28.980 | where you can sit down, you can buy one of those off the shelf or order off the internet

00:59:32.420 | and enjoy that book in the foreign language.

00:59:35.540 | You may not know every word, that's fine.

00:59:37.580 | But if you can do that, then all you need to do to maintain your language ability is

00:59:42.180 | simply read the book, read a couple of books a year in that language and or listen to a

00:59:46.540 | couple of audio books a year in that language.

00:59:49.640 | And that's not hard, that's not hard work.

00:59:51.780 | If you can get to the point where it's enjoyable for you to read the book in the foreign language

00:59:55.940 | and find something that you genuinely enjoy.

00:59:59.240 | So for language maintenance, I now believe this is the level.

01:00:05.540 | I've gotten my son to that, which is exciting to me because now we can possibly go on to

01:00:09.300 | another language.

01:00:10.820 | Let's talk about learning another language.

01:00:12.460 | I have now decided for myself that this is going to be my primary language learning methodology

01:00:19.220 | going forward.

01:00:20.900 | Because over the years I've tried to learn other languages.

01:00:23.340 | You know, for years I've tried to learn French.

01:00:25.580 | I've really tried.

01:00:26.820 | The problem is that I thought that because I was, this is how I learned a language in

01:00:29.860 | high school, I thought that if I was going to learn French, I needed to find either a

01:00:34.260 | French class or a French teacher or a French grammar, you know, exercise book.

01:00:40.380 | And I thought I needed to do exercises.

01:00:42.780 | I thought, well, if I learned in Spanish, "Oh, ah, ah, almost, on," I need to figure

01:00:48.380 | out what that is in French and repeat the same thing.

01:00:50.420 | And so over the years I would buy a French language instruction book and I would usually

01:00:54.300 | do about 30 pages and I would get bored.

01:00:56.860 | I would buy a French audio book course and I would listen to about the first third of

01:01:00.780 | it, then I would get bored.

01:01:02.400 | And I would just do this again and again and again.

01:01:04.020 | And I would buy something and then get bored.

01:01:06.500 | And I never made any progress with the language because I was bored.

01:01:10.820 | But once I realized and basically gave myself permission, one of the things I've done as

01:01:15.700 | an adult, I've stopped doing things I don't like, is I gave myself permission.

01:01:19.100 | I was like, "I'm not going to do that anymore."

01:01:20.820 | And once I realized that just simply reading and listening in a foreign language is a perfectly

01:01:25.980 | valid methodology of learning a language, then to me everything has become fun.

01:01:37.020 | And so what I've done is I've just started over the last week, I decided, because I can't

01:01:42.740 | take a Spanish exam because everything, all the test centers are shut down, I decided

01:01:46.220 | I was going to switch to French.

01:01:47.880 | And so now my strategy is I'm just reading.

01:01:50.740 | I'm reading and listening in French.

01:01:52.940 | And I'm finding it to be very, very effective.

01:01:56.740 | Last week I finished my first ever book that I've read fully in French.

01:02:00.140 | I read Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days.

01:02:08.540 | And I read it in French.

01:02:09.540 | It's an open source book.

01:02:10.540 | So I was able to find it.

01:02:11.540 | I read it in LingQ, which helped me with the vocabulary.

01:02:13.660 | And then I listened to the audio recording of it that came with it.

01:02:19.500 | And so I could listen to a native speaker read it to me, which helped me with my pronunciation.

01:02:24.060 | One of the things with French is, unlike Spanish, I've never been able to understand the French

01:02:27.180 | pronunciation rules.

01:02:28.180 | And I've always felt like I need a teacher to teach me these rules.

01:02:30.300 | Well, just by reading the book and listening to the audio book at the same time, it's made

01:02:34.380 | all the difference in the world.

01:02:35.860 | And so now I'm studying French, but I'm studying it in a way that's really interesting to me

01:02:40.780 | of I'm exclusively reading.

01:02:42.740 | I'm reading and I'm listening.

01:02:44.540 | I've got several audio books.

01:02:46.100 | I'm listening to Tim Ferriss's Four-Hour Workweek in French.

01:02:50.500 | I'm listening to a Michael Connolly novel in French.

01:02:55.140 | And I'm reading several books in French as well.

01:02:58.380 | And I'm reading the original Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne book translated into French,

01:03:03.420 | the one that was published back in the 1970s.

01:03:06.380 | I'm reading a couple of another Jules Verne novel in French and just reading things.

01:03:11.220 | And the stories are good enough that they keep me interested, even if I don't know the

01:03:15.500 | language.

01:03:16.500 | And I'm seeing really, really awesome progress in my abilities.

01:03:22.100 | I'm not at all trying to create any output at this point in time.

01:03:25.460 | I'm not trying to speak in French.

01:03:26.700 | I'm not trying to write in French.

01:03:31.060 | I'm just listening.

01:03:32.060 | And the reason for that is I always thought you needed to speak a language to learn a

01:03:36.020 | language.

01:03:37.020 | Certainly, at some point you need to speak.

01:03:40.340 | But Steve Kaufman has convinced me that you can speak much later and that your speaking

01:03:46.420 | will be better if you can understand broadly.

01:03:49.260 | I don't gain much pleasure out of sitting down and having a forced conversation with

01:03:54.060 | somebody and practicing a dialogue of how to check into a hotel.

01:03:58.340 | If I'm going to talk to somebody, I want to talk about something interesting.

01:04:00.820 | And that's one of the theories that has been effective for him as a polyglot is simply

01:04:05.420 | getting yourself to a very high degree of understanding before you try to speak.

01:04:10.340 | So certainly you do need to speak, but I've come to be convinced that you can wait to

01:04:15.740 | speak until later and that if you can understand broadly, you can do it.

01:04:20.020 | I've also become...

01:04:21.860 | I'm persuaded, haven't proved it for myself yet, I'm persuaded to some degree on the activation

01:04:28.580 | hypothesis.

01:04:30.140 | There are some language learners and teachers who believe that if you focus exclusively

01:04:37.100 | on input where you read and you listen and you develop a broad degree of understanding,

01:04:43.600 | what happens is the language is basically there in your head.

01:04:47.700 | And then once you go to a place where you need the language, one person's estimate is

01:04:55.220 | three days that if...

01:04:58.660 | What's his name?

01:05:00.040 | This is what Victor Huliganov says.

01:05:03.340 | I forget his English name.

01:05:05.580 | Huliganov is a persona that he plays, but he's an accomplished polyglot and he's established

01:05:11.780 | something called...

01:05:13.220 | Developed something he calls the Gold List Method, which is a method for vocabulary acquisition.

01:05:17.700 | And in his writings, he believes that once you learn the language, you need three days

01:05:23.940 | where you're in...

01:05:25.640 | Whether you're in country or in a context where your brain says, "Oh, this guy needs

01:05:29.260 | this information."

01:05:30.700 | And then you'll...

01:05:32.060 | If you spend...

01:05:33.060 | So if you learn French and you go to France and spend three days in a French speaking

01:05:36.140 | environment, then after three days, everything that you know will be able to come out of

01:05:40.540 | your mouth in a very fluent way.

01:05:42.060 | Now, I don't know that that's true yet or not, but for me, it solves a big problem that

01:05:45.900 | I have with language learning, which is that I don't really want to make artificial appointments

01:05:52.220 | for language study.

01:05:53.580 | I've done this a little bit, but I don't really want to sit down and say, "Okay, I got to

01:05:57.100 | do two hours a week to talk to some random person on italki where I don't know if we

01:06:01.820 | actually have anything in common or if we actually want to be friends."

01:06:04.340 | I don't like talking to people in that context.

01:06:06.820 | It's artificial.

01:06:07.820 | It's not fun.

01:06:08.820 | It feels like work.

01:06:09.900 | And so to have the permission basically to say, "I can just listen.

01:06:14.260 | I can just listen and read."

01:06:15.940 | And then in time when there's a chance, then talking will be appropriate and it'll work.

01:06:21.380 | That's a pretty cool thing.

01:06:22.380 | I'm testing that right now with French because I have no intention of trying to talk or write

01:06:26.060 | right now.

01:06:27.060 | I'm just simply reading and listening and we'll see what happens.

01:06:32.300 | I'm going to try.

01:06:33.760 | My intention is if I can get my five-year-old to the point where she'll actually start speaking

01:06:39.380 | Spanish, then I'm going to see if I can repeat this process in 2021 with a new language because

01:06:46.380 | it's been so relatively easy for me to do it with Spanish that I want to see if I can

01:06:54.260 | repeat it with French because it hasn't been all that hard.

01:06:57.940 | All it required me to do was to buy a huge number of books and read to my children.

01:07:03.420 | And so if I can do that in one language, then why not in a second?

01:07:07.980 | And so that's one of the reasons why I've decided I need to get my French to the point

01:07:11.580 | where I actually can read to them effectively so I can do this again until I can get them

01:07:16.500 | to be independent learners.

01:07:18.180 | And so that may be kind of one of my family projects for 2021.

01:07:23.020 | I just got to get my hands on the literature and then figure out.

01:07:26.780 | So by the way, if any of you live in France, if any of you want to rent me a house next

01:07:32.060 | summer, if you have a house or if you have a guest house or something like that, reach

01:07:34.780 | out to me.

01:07:35.780 | Send me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com.

01:07:38.060 | But I'd probably like to come and spend next summer in France, come for about three months.

01:07:42.900 | Because if we can, that would be a fun experiment to see if I can, if I can, if I start in January

01:07:52.500 | with reading to them, then what kind of progress would we make if I went ahead and brought

01:07:57.860 | them to an immersive environment, either in France or maybe Quebec or some other French

01:08:01.780 | speaking countries is also adequate.

01:08:04.360 | And what would be the experience of that in terms of their language acquisition, I think

01:08:08.720 | it'd be an interesting scenario.

01:08:09.720 | And if I came in the summer, I could find some summer camps and do some interesting

01:08:13.640 | things and then test putting them into an immersive environment.

01:08:16.860 | So reach out to me if you've got a place that I can rent for a few months rather than just

01:08:20.460 | doing something on Airbnb.

01:08:22.560 | What I am convinced of, and here's where I want to close the show, is that if you have

01:08:25.940 | children who are learning languages in school, you know, I have nieces and nephews that are

01:08:34.740 | learning Latin as part of their language study.

01:08:40.700 | And I've been sending my sister all these resources and saying, "Listen, look, if your

01:08:45.660 | children are going to learn Latin, at least make sure they actually learn Latin and not

01:08:50.180 | just learn how to do a couple of declensions artificially."

01:08:55.680 | And so I'm convinced that for any language, the secret is get the content, get the input,

01:09:00.660 | the comprehensible input.

01:09:02.260 | And so this is, there's a whole movement called the Living Latin Movement where people are

01:09:05.980 | translating modern books into Latin so that there's material to read in Latin.

01:09:10.620 | And there's people where they're speaking in Latin and recording things in Latin.

01:09:13.540 | But if your children are going to learn Latin, don't just make it a classroom thing where

01:09:17.580 | they're going to study it for three years, hate it, and then go on.

01:09:20.460 | Give them books and get them reading it.

01:09:22.620 | And do this with whatever they're interested in.

01:09:26.380 | So if your children are studying German, get them bunches of books and see if you can do

01:09:30.720 | this process.

01:09:33.260 | That's all I have to say right now.

01:09:34.380 | I've tried to give you a clear idea of the levels where my children are, and I wanted

01:09:41.500 | to do that, but to have an idea so that you would have an idea of what's possible.

01:09:49.180 | But from here, you just take it and apply it, and I'll keep you in the loop as I continue

01:09:53.660 | this experiment and see if I can bring my younger children up to fluent as well.

01:09:58.960 | And then we'll see if we can repeat this experiment in the years to come, and I'll report back

01:10:03.740 | on that with you as well.

01:10:06.700 | Now I'm going to do a little experiment.

01:10:08.460 | I just paused for a moment and I went downstairs and I got my son and I told him to come up

01:10:12.100 | here.

01:10:13.100 | Son, I've been saying and sharing with my audience a little bit about the progress

01:10:22.900 | that you're making in Spanish.

01:10:26.900 | I told them that you've been learning a lot of Spanish.

01:10:30.740 | Is that true?

01:10:31.740 | Yes.

01:10:32.740 | And I was talking with them about some of your favorite books.

01:10:40.020 | What do you like about this series of the five?

01:10:42.980 | What do you like the most?

01:10:49.860 | I can't decide, but this is the book that only has something under the ground, and all

01:11:01.700 | the others have something under the ground.

01:11:05.540 | This one doesn't, but it does have a cave.

01:11:10.220 | That's number three, that's your favorite, right?

01:11:12.580 | Yes.

01:11:13.580 | But that doesn't mean that I don't like the others.

01:11:17.700 | I understand.

01:11:18.700 | I'm not saying that you don't like the others.

01:11:20.260 | I'm just saying that that's your favorite.

01:11:23.380 | It's called "The Five Escape."

01:11:27.500 | How many times have you read this?

01:11:33.780 | I don't remember, but I read almost all of them, but there are like two or three chapters

01:11:42.860 | that I don't prefer to read because it's enough with us.

01:11:57.220 | And in this book, it's called "The Five Escape."

01:12:00.540 | What do they escape from?

01:12:02.140 | I haven't read this.

01:12:03.140 | They're called the Sticks.

01:12:04.140 | The Sticks?

01:12:05.140 | What is a Stick?

01:12:06.140 | Is that a name?

01:12:07.140 | It's the Stick family.

01:12:08.140 | They're evil, they say.

01:12:09.140 | I understand.

01:12:10.140 | And look, here's Julian trying to stop Jorge from going with Tim to the island alone, in his boat.

01:12:11.140 | Does this story take place on Kirin Island?

01:12:12.140 | Yes.

01:12:13.140 | So they went back to Kirin Island?

01:12:34.140 | Now, Julian said, while they were walking to where the boat was, we'll put all of these

01:12:43.900 | things inside the boat.

01:12:46.140 | We'll go home and make noise so the Sticks find out that we're there.

01:12:53.740 | Then we'll go to the platform so they think we're going to take the train.

01:13:00.700 | And then they went to the island.

01:13:05.140 | They all got in the boat.

01:13:06.140 | Tim didn't jump and he sat on the platform, which was his seat.

01:13:11.140 | He was talking with his tongue out, very excited.

01:13:15.540 | He knew very well that something was happening and that he was also participating.

01:13:23.020 | It was no wonder that he was shaking his tail frantically.

01:13:31.020 | We're leaving now.

01:13:33.020 | Wait, if you were comparing the Five and the Hollister series, which one would you prefer?

01:13:47.020 | The Five.

01:13:48.020 | Why?

01:13:50.020 | Because there are many more things happening in the Five than in the Hollister.

01:14:00.020 | There's a little more adventure?

01:14:03.020 | Yes, but what is this?

01:14:06.020 | That's my microphone.

01:14:08.020 | I'm recording this conversation to share it with my audience.

01:14:12.020 | Okay.

01:14:13.020 | Because I was sharing with them the story of your Spanish learning.

01:14:20.020 | I wanted them to listen to your life.

01:14:25.020 | Where is the little red one of these?

01:14:28.020 | I don't know.

01:14:29.020 | There was a red one.

01:14:31.020 | What is this toy?

01:14:33.020 | An airplane.

01:14:34.020 | An airplane?

01:14:35.020 | Yes.

01:14:36.020 | And where did you get it?

01:14:38.020 | You already know.

01:14:41.020 | Yes, but I'm trying to provoke you to talk about something.

01:14:46.020 | I got it at the dentist, right?

01:14:50.020 | And I took off the machine that made the wheels spin on their own.

01:15:03.020 | I just want them to do it under my hand.

01:15:09.020 | Like this.

01:15:11.020 | You took off the spring.

01:15:14.020 | We're looking for that word in Spanish.

01:15:17.020 | And I took off these too.

01:15:22.020 | Okay.

01:15:23.020 | Well, do you like Spanish?

01:15:25.020 | Do you like to speak Spanish?

01:15:26.020 | Yes.

01:15:28.020 | Especially with books, right?

01:15:30.020 | Yes.

01:15:31.020 | Okay, well, thank you for coming and thank you for...

01:15:34.020 | They were running away from the horrible sticks.

01:15:39.020 | But it's true that the sticks are horrible.

01:15:45.020 | Oh, how strong.

01:15:47.020 | Okay, thank you, son.

01:15:50.020 | So, there you go.

01:15:51.020 | For any of you Spanish speakers, you can make your own assessment.

01:15:54.020 | But one year ago, he didn't speak Spanish.

01:15:57.020 | And you can assess his own level of Spanish at the moment.

01:16:02.020 | The hardest part with children is getting them to talk.

01:16:07.020 | We try to do narration in our household, which means tell things about it.

01:16:11.020 | But he doesn't do narration very effectively in any language.

01:16:18.020 | So, figuring out how to provoke -- he's very talkative.

01:16:20.020 | But figuring out how to provoke a spontaneous conversation is not easy.

01:16:23.020 | But there you go.

01:16:24.020 | Thank you so much for listening.

01:16:25.020 | As we go, I would remind you that I sell a course called

01:16:29.020 | "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis."

01:16:32.020 | And that course was prepared last year in anticipation of the kind of crisis

01:16:39.020 | that we're living through right now.

01:16:44.020 | It's still just as valid now as it was then.

01:16:46.020 | And I would say it's borne the test of time very, very effectively.

01:16:51.020 | So, if you would like a plan for how to survive and thrive the coming economic crisis,

01:16:57.020 | it's coming, I would encourage you to go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:17:01.020 | Check out that course, radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

01:17:05.020 | I think that you'll be pleased.

01:17:06.020 | And the basic concept that I teach is how to be prepared at home, wherever that is,

01:17:12.020 | but also how to be prepared if you choose to relocate,

01:17:15.020 | especially the value of relocating to a foreign country.

01:17:18.020 | And right now, you can see what a big difference the country that you're in makes

01:17:24.020 | in terms of your experience of something even like a pandemic.

01:17:29.020 | You are having a very different experience of your life of your pandemic,

01:17:34.020 | whether you are in the United States or in Canada or in Germany or in Mexico

01:17:41.020 | or in Brazil or in the Bahamas.

01:17:43.020 | Every single one of these countries has different characteristics.

01:17:46.020 | Now, you feel free to insert what you think is good or bad about that.

01:17:50.020 | But what you'll see is that your country of residence during a crisis makes a dramatic difference

01:17:58.020 | in your experience of that crisis.

01:18:00.020 | But in order for you to be able to go elsewhere,

01:18:04.020 | you need to have done some prior planning and preparation.

01:18:07.020 | There are many people right now as we look forward to another presidential election,

01:18:12.020 | there are many people right now who are looking at Canada and they're saying,

01:18:17.020 | "You know what? If so and so wins, the person I don't like wins the election,

01:18:21.020 | I'm going to Canada."

01:18:22.020 | Well, the answer is no, you're not, unless you've done the hard work of actually sitting down

01:18:30.020 | and figuring out legally how to do it.

01:18:32.020 | If you're just an American passport holder and you want to be a tourist,

01:18:36.020 | you're not going to Canada.

01:18:37.020 | They're not going to accept you right now.

01:18:39.020 | You're not going to Spain.

01:18:41.020 | They're not going to accept you right now.

01:18:43.020 | And so you've got to do the advance work to have the necessary paperwork for you

01:18:47.020 | to be able to go to that country.

01:18:50.020 | I brought a couple of months ago Brandon Miller on from Canadian Immigration,

01:18:55.020 | Maple Immigration, and we did an extensive show on how to move to Canada,

01:19:00.020 | how to get a second passport in Canada.

01:19:02.020 | And I heard from Brandon, by the way, that a bunch of you reached out to him,

01:19:05.020 | which I think is awesome.

01:19:07.020 | You reached out to him, got a free copy of his book called "The Second Passport."

01:19:11.020 | Some of you have engaged his services, which I think is great.

01:19:15.020 | Brandon is a great guy.

01:19:17.020 | And so you've got to do that stuff in advance.

01:19:19.020 | So start with the course at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store called

01:19:23.020 | "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis."

01:19:26.020 | And if you have some ability in language learning,

01:19:30.020 | you'll be a whole lot more confident looking around the world.

01:19:34.020 | The great thing is that English speakers can live well in most countries of the world,

01:19:38.020 | but still if you only speak English, you're kind of stuck to the English--

01:19:43.020 | native English countries, which may or may not be what you're looking for.

01:19:47.020 | But if you're confident that in a year you can learn fluent Spanish,

01:19:51.020 | that opens up dozens of countries.

01:19:53.020 | If you're confident that in a year you can learn fluent French,

01:19:55.020 | that opens up dozens of countries.

01:19:57.020 | And we go on down the list.

01:19:59.020 | So thank you for listening to today's show.

01:20:00.020 | I hope you've enjoyed it, and I'll be back with you very soon.

01:20:02.020 | So go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store.

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01:20:35.020 | you

2020-10-08-How_I_Taught_My_Children_to_Speak_Fluent_Spanish_in_One_Year_With_No_Teachers_No_Classes_and_No_Playmates_or_Spanish-Speaking_Friends