Language_Learning

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:03.880 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while

00:00:08.200 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:11.280 | My name is Joshua, I am your host, and today we're going to talk about learning a language.

00:00:14.680 | I'm going to first give you a few reasons as to why you should seek to learn additional

00:00:19.400 | languages to what you already speak, and then give you some helpful tools, things that have

00:00:23.760 | been useful to me as I have tried to enhance my own language ability.

00:00:34.480 | To begin, why?

00:00:35.920 | Why should you learn an additional language to the languages that you speak right now?

00:00:41.960 | Many reasons why you should do it.

00:00:44.040 | Let's start with the financial ones to be most relevant to Radical Personal Finance.

00:00:48.880 | When you think about your life and your earning ability, in order for you to earn more money,

00:00:54.960 | you need to systematically develop additional levels of skill.

00:00:59.340 | And every additional skill that you can develop will enhance your opportunities to earn money,

00:01:06.480 | if it's properly marketed and properly positioned.

00:01:09.720 | So I want you to imagine that you are jobless right now, and you are a high school dropout

00:01:17.480 | who spends no time, who has not done anything productive, has developed no economically

00:01:23.880 | valuable skills.

00:01:24.880 | You're a high school dropout whose primary skill is drinking beer and getting high.

00:01:30.400 | All right, that's it.

00:01:31.400 | Now, you want to go get a job.

00:01:32.400 | What do you do?

00:01:33.400 | Well, you've got basically nothing.

00:01:35.880 | You've got basically nothing to offer except possibly your physical strength and ability.

00:01:42.440 | So you might qualify for a job moving furniture, or you might qualify for a job driving a lawnmower.

00:01:49.560 | I've done those jobs.

00:01:50.680 | I've made money at those jobs.

00:01:52.760 | It's tough money, but that's all you're qualified for.

00:01:55.560 | That's about all you're going to do, and you're never going to make very much money in those

00:01:59.760 | situations.

00:02:01.040 | So if you want to increase your earning ability, you have to develop your human capital.

00:02:05.240 | You have to develop your skills.

00:02:07.600 | So that comes in a number of different ways.

00:02:09.440 | It might come with academic credentialization.

00:02:13.000 | Getting a high school degree, finishing your GED could possibly be a solution.

00:02:17.240 | It might come with getting a college degree.

00:02:20.680 | You're going to have an easier time getting a job if you have a college degree than if

00:02:24.120 | you don't have a college degree.

00:02:26.120 | Might come with having an advanced degree.

00:02:28.160 | It's probably going to be easier in many cases for you to get a job if you have an advanced

00:02:31.680 | master's degree than if you only have a bachelor's degree or if you only have a high school

00:02:36.560 | diploma.

00:02:37.800 | It's going to be easier for you if you have additional industry-level credentials.

00:02:42.080 | So maybe you want to become a welder, and so you pursue some kinds of welding credentials.

00:02:47.880 | Or possibly you're a financial planner, and so you have a certified financial planner

00:02:53.160 | designation, etc.

00:02:54.760 | So you're a graphic designer, and you get some certificate from a known graphic design

00:02:59.880 | firm.

00:03:00.880 | These forms of credentialization are useful, and they move you dramatically up the earning

00:03:06.120 | chart.

00:03:07.120 | You're likely able to demand more money.

00:03:09.040 | You're likely able to get paid more money, and they'll reduce your time spent on unemployment

00:03:14.600 | and make life generally easier for you.

00:03:17.840 | But the real magic comes when you don't just stop with the mainstream stuff.

00:03:22.480 | When you additionally develop other skills and abilities.

00:03:26.040 | I like how Scott Adams uses the term "the talent stack."

00:03:28.960 | You develop a thick talent stack.

00:03:31.520 | And so maybe you have some experience with marketing.

00:03:34.520 | Well that makes you more marketable.

00:03:37.680 | Maybe you have some experience with a certain expertise in a certain software program.

00:03:42.240 | Makes you more marketable.

00:03:44.260 | But one of the things that you can often do is bring in additional language ability.

00:03:47.920 | Makes you more marketable.

00:03:48.920 | Say, for example, you have a college degree in marketing, and you have some real experience

00:03:55.620 | in the world of advanced marketing.

00:03:57.920 | But now you want to go and get a job, but in addition to that you have a foreign language

00:04:02.360 | ability.

00:04:03.360 | Maybe you're skilled and bilingual in Spanish and English, or Chinese and English, or it

00:04:08.040 | can be anything.

00:04:09.040 | Serbo-Croatian and English.

00:04:11.080 | Or some value.

00:04:13.000 | Now you can reach a more interesting market, and you're more valuable.

00:04:16.960 | If you come into a bilingual social media marketing management role, just the fact of

00:04:23.400 | your bilingualism will probably mean that you can negotiate a $10,000 or $15,000 or

00:04:28.480 | $20,000 or $50,000 increased salary.

00:04:31.800 | Even in fairly simple jobs, you'll find that being bilingual is very useful.

00:04:37.520 | Number of years ago when I was just out of high school, I spent some time managing a

00:04:40.400 | tree nursery.

00:04:41.720 | And one of the things that was useful that helped me get the job was I spoke both Spanish

00:04:45.760 | and English.

00:04:47.180 | And so I was a white, native American English speaker.

00:04:52.600 | But because I was Spanish, I was able to easily integrate and interface with all Spanish speaking

00:04:59.560 | all of our employees, were all Mexican and Guatemalan migrant workers in the tree nursery.

00:05:05.100 | The other foreman was a Mexican, but he spoke excellent English.

00:05:10.160 | And one of the big reasons that he was a foreman was simply his bilingual ability.

00:05:15.600 | And so you can just see how obvious it is that a white owners, American owners who didn't

00:05:22.060 | speak a lot of Spanish, they needed go-betweens.

00:05:23.960 | And so in his case, his name was Fernando, he was a good manager, but it was primarily

00:05:30.280 | his bilingualism that allowed him to be an effective interface and allowed him to make

00:05:35.320 | a lot more than the other guys were making, which put him in a much better financial situation.

00:05:40.040 | So if you're a welder and you're working with a lot of Spanish speaking guys, it makes a

00:05:44.000 | big difference.

00:05:45.000 | If you're a landscaper, one of the simplest things, I used to work with a lot of Spanish

00:05:49.240 | immigrants in the United States.

00:05:50.240 | And I always say, guys, take your English seriously.

00:05:53.400 | If you're working and you're hired as an entry level Guatemalan immigrant, and you only speak

00:05:59.800 | Spanish, you're going to cap out your wages at 15 bucks an hour.

00:06:04.640 | But if you can just simply learn English, you'll very quickly end up things like having

00:06:09.360 | a driver's license, having a good driver's license is in good standing and knowing how

00:06:13.520 | to back a trailer, you quickly move into a foreman role, into a management role, three

00:06:17.840 | basic skills.

00:06:18.840 | And I used to teach the guys, and I tell it to you, so it helped other people.

00:06:24.360 | The three basic things to make it to double your income, if you're starting as a low wage

00:06:31.840 | kind of entry level worker, is going to be having, I guess I should add more than three,

00:06:39.080 | the four.

00:06:40.160 | Number one, being a legal resident, that makes a huge difference in your earning ability

00:06:43.880 | of being a legal resident versus not being a legal resident.

00:06:47.520 | So number one, legal resident.

00:06:49.000 | Number two, having a clean driver's license, having a no accident history.

00:06:53.360 | I had a friend of mine who had a job, he was a foreman of a crew, had an accident, he got

00:06:57.920 | laid off from his job because the owner of the company couldn't afford the insurance

00:07:02.480 | anymore because of the accident that he had.

00:07:04.120 | It was his fault accident.

00:07:06.000 | And so the insurance rates spiked and he got laid off because he didn't have a clean driver's

00:07:09.760 | record.

00:07:10.760 | It was a stupid thing to allow to happen.

00:07:13.400 | Of course, things happen, but having a clean driver's record.

00:07:18.080 | The thing I used to say in landscaping was know how to back a trailer, know how to drive

00:07:21.960 | a trailer without backing the thing into the ditch.

00:07:23.800 | If you talk to any owner of a landscaping company, one of the hardest things is finding

00:07:27.320 | somebody who can actually just drive the trailer properly and safely and not put the trailer

00:07:31.340 | into a ditch with thousands of dollars of equipment.

00:07:33.760 | And then number four, speaking English, being able to actually speak English.

00:07:37.860 | It dramatically improves the marketability of somebody's ability to interface with customers,

00:07:42.560 | the ability to be a go-between, to manage crews, et cetera.

00:07:45.960 | And so I've seen in those kinds of jobs, bilingualism is incredibly valuable.

00:07:51.000 | Now, if you're listening to the show, you're of course either speak English or are learning

00:07:55.120 | English and certainly without a doubt, English is the single most important language that

00:08:01.280 | you can learn on a global basis.

00:08:03.080 | English is the number one most widely spoken language in the world.

00:08:07.320 | It is the lingua franca, the common third language in any kind of professional context,

00:08:12.720 | about 1.2 billion English speakers around the world.

00:08:15.960 | And without a doubt, it is probably the single best thing that any person anywhere in the

00:08:23.400 | world can do is learn English to enhance their marketability and enhance their job opportunities.

00:08:29.680 | You and I probably as native English speakers probably have an advantage, a real privilege

00:08:35.080 | that it comes easily to us because we're probably native speakers.

00:08:41.320 | But things go the other way as well.

00:08:43.160 | Learning additional languages as a native English speaker will additionally enhance

00:08:47.080 | your marketability, especially if you are a culturally native English speaker.

00:08:52.240 | Somebody who can go back and forth from the United States to China and speak fluent Chinese

00:08:57.080 | and fluent English and who can understand the cultural interface is going to be very,

00:09:02.680 | very marketable.

00:09:03.680 | So over the years, I've become convinced that one of the best things that you can do for

00:09:07.720 | your earning ability is develop additional language ability.

00:09:10.720 | It really hinders people who don't develop additional language ability if they're involved

00:09:15.640 | in that kind of context.

00:09:16.920 | Now, that's the financial context, but there are many other reasons to study languages,

00:09:20.560 | even just to keep yourself smart.

00:09:23.880 | One of the most important forms of exercise that you can do for your high quality of life

00:09:30.400 | is to exercise your brain.

00:09:32.380 | You want to get a little bit smarter every day, and the way that you get smarter is to

00:09:35.760 | make your brain work hard.

00:09:39.200 | If you don't keep your brain working hard, it seems to decay.

00:09:42.640 | It seems to atrophy, just like your muscles, your physical muscles.

00:09:47.000 | The brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised.

00:09:48.960 | There's good evidence, although it's not overwhelming, I've read good evidence from the medical people

00:09:55.900 | that say that anything that you can do to keep your brain exercised is going to enhance

00:10:02.880 | the longevity of your brain and your quality of living throughout your lifetime.

00:10:07.840 | There's evidence of just simply people being engaged in the social environments.

00:10:11.520 | One of the reasons why I think retirement can be very dangerous for people in their

00:10:14.880 | mental health has to be navigated very carefully if you're going to retire from your job.

00:10:19.880 | Retirement can be very dangerous, but you can also keep your brain engaged with additional

00:10:24.120 | studies.

00:10:25.120 | You can study hard things to learn new things.

00:10:27.240 | It doesn't have to be in a foreign language.

00:10:29.120 | You can be engaged with subjects that are keeping you stretching out and keeping you

00:10:33.240 | learning.

00:10:34.240 | But one effective way to keep your brain working is to always be learning an additional language.

00:10:40.840 | There's good evidence that multilingual people seem to experience delayed onset of mental

00:10:47.560 | diseases like Alzheimer's.

00:10:49.320 | Very, very useful.

00:10:50.520 | So learning languages can be useful from a physical perspective.

00:10:54.800 | Other benefits as well is the ability to integrate culturally with other people.

00:10:58.160 | It's really fun.

00:10:59.160 | It's much more fun to go to a country and visit and travel when you speak the language

00:11:02.920 | or at least a little bit of it than when if you're a total outsider.

00:11:05.720 | It can be really interesting and help with your empathy.

00:11:08.520 | I really appreciate one of the things that I've learned a lot over the years is I've

00:11:12.880 | been able to develop a lot more empathy from multilingualism by being able to travel and

00:11:17.880 | being able to get to know people genuinely and have them open up to you.

00:11:22.400 | You know, I talked about my experience with immigrants to the United States, with Spanish-speaking

00:11:27.720 | immigrants.

00:11:28.720 | It's always been much easier for me to interact with Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United

00:11:33.820 | States than many of my friends because I can speak Spanish.

00:11:37.840 | I can interact with them and I can find out what it's like to live in their shoes and

00:11:42.420 | ask the questions that you're always curious about but that you wouldn't be able to get

00:11:46.520 | answers to if you couldn't cross that language barrier.

00:11:50.240 | Many many reasons including financial reasons to learn a second language, learn an additional

00:11:56.000 | language.

00:11:57.680 | And I want to focus most of today's talk on just some practical tools that I have found

00:12:03.880 | useful.

00:12:05.040 | But I do want to address kind of how and why, just the reasons why you should want to in

00:12:11.940 | addition to these basic reasons and how you can actually do it.

00:12:16.000 | Because we do genuinely live right now in a golden age for almost everything.

00:12:23.200 | We live in a golden age for almost everything, we really do.

00:12:27.320 | Including language learning.

00:12:28.320 | We live in a golden age of language learning.

00:12:30.160 | I think that things will get better in the future for language learning but I don't know

00:12:33.320 | how.

00:12:34.320 | I think they will but I don't know how.

00:12:36.640 | Certainly people would say, "Well, it'll get better for not needing to do language learning,

00:12:41.560 | simultaneous machine translation."

00:12:44.000 | We're already living in that.

00:12:45.280 | It's being tested, it's effective.

00:12:46.960 | Right now you can take your cell phone with you and you can pull out Google Translate,

00:12:51.400 | you can hit the button, you can speak it and it'll spit out the language translation on

00:12:55.360 | the other side.

00:12:56.360 | That is true and that's going to increasingly be a force for connectedness around the world

00:13:01.680 | as we increasingly have real-time machine translation of languages.

00:13:06.640 | But I'm talking about actual language learning.

00:13:08.200 | We live in a golden age.

00:13:09.600 | Some of these tools that I'm going to describe to you are wonderful and make things incredibly

00:13:16.720 | easier than they were a decade ago.

00:13:20.200 | I want you to take advantage of that.

00:13:22.360 | But in this golden age, at the end of the day, you've got to decide why you're going

00:13:26.760 | to do something.

00:13:27.760 | I've become convinced that the single – maybe that's too strong – a major distinction

00:13:34.480 | between people who will be successful in the coming decades and people who are not is just

00:13:38.840 | going to come down to motivation, desire, simple desire.

00:13:43.040 | And the master skill that you can develop in yourself is the ability to focus your desire,

00:13:48.920 | to increase your desire so that you experience motivation in ways that other people don't.

00:13:55.160 | My wife and I have an ongoing thing.

00:13:56.280 | I give her business idea after business idea and one of the common themes I tell her, "Oh

00:14:01.320 | look, this would be an interesting business idea right here in this particular area and

00:14:07.160 | here's how I would learn it."

00:14:08.560 | For example, I think about it with restaurants.

00:14:10.680 | We travel a lot and sometimes you miss certain kinds of cuisine.

00:14:14.240 | And I've become convinced that I could move almost anywhere in the world and set up a

00:14:18.820 | foreign cuisine restaurant that was superb even if I didn't know how to cook the food.

00:14:24.840 | Because you can learn the intricacies of any cuisine in the world right now on YouTube.

00:14:31.000 | I'm not Italian.

00:14:32.760 | I don't particularly love cooking Italian food.

00:14:35.400 | I'm not great at cooking Italian food.

00:14:37.680 | But I could become a world-class Italian chef with a few months of practice and the information

00:14:46.320 | that's easily available on YouTube.

00:14:48.440 | And I could move to downtown Beijing and open the world's best Italian restaurant.

00:14:52.440 | I would adopt an Italian accent so that everyone thought I was actually Italian, which I can

00:14:56.400 | also learn on YouTube for free to speak my English with an Italian accent and a few chosen

00:15:02.200 | Italian phrases and I could be an Italian immigrant to Beijing with the best Italian

00:15:06.120 | restaurant in town.

00:15:07.480 | Now, I'm of course grandstanding a little bit, but I genuinely do mean it.

00:15:14.880 | You can learn because the information is now widely available.

00:15:19.040 | And in the information age, it's not access to information that distinguishes those who

00:15:24.200 | succeed.

00:15:25.200 | It's largely motivation and those who are actually willing to learn the skills and make

00:15:29.880 | the information that's out there truly theirs.

00:15:33.040 | This can be done in almost any industry.

00:15:34.760 | I just use cooking because it's easy and it's a fairly universal language.

00:15:40.480 | We all like to eat, I think.

00:15:42.520 | And it's fun.

00:15:44.720 | It's fun.

00:15:45.720 | But that's the point, is that you need the motivation.

00:15:47.600 | And so with language learning, it's exactly the same thing.

00:15:50.320 | The thing that keeps people from not effectively learning languages is not skill.

00:15:55.200 | It's not ability.

00:15:56.200 | It's motivation.

00:15:57.520 | It's the actual motivation.

00:15:59.200 | If you have motivation, you figure out a way that works for you.

00:16:03.320 | My ways might not work for you, but if you have motivation, you'll figure out how to

00:16:08.560 | speak the language.

00:16:09.960 | You'll figure it out.

00:16:12.320 | There are so many of us who come from immigrant families, the families that moved to the United

00:16:15.480 | States and had motivation and learned English.

00:16:18.320 | There's so many immigrants who go abroad and have motivation and learn the local language.

00:16:22.160 | And you've got to figure out how to motivate yourself.

00:16:24.800 | And that's going to be the key distinction between your effectiveness with language learning.

00:16:29.520 | It's not going to be a matter of skill.

00:16:31.400 | It's going to be a matter of motivation.

00:16:32.920 | It's why you kind of see that a guy moves to Spain and falls in love with a beautiful

00:16:38.840 | Spanish woman who only speaks Spanish.

00:16:41.160 | And all of a sudden, three months later, the dude's fluent in Spanish.

00:16:44.800 | Meanwhile, you've got some guy who sits in class in three years of high school Spanish

00:16:51.080 | and three years out the other end, he can only say, "Buenos dias, como estas?"

00:16:57.160 | And that's about it.

00:16:58.160 | It all comes down to motivation, motivation to learn a language.

00:17:01.640 | So I don't know how to help you with motivation.

00:17:05.640 | You kind of got to know yourself and understand what is going to motivate you and then put

00:17:10.640 | in place structures of reward for yourself that go based upon your own motivation.

00:17:18.920 | One of again, those mega skills that you can develop is the skill of self-knowledge, self-awareness

00:17:24.000 | to understand your own psychology and figure out what's going to work for you and what's

00:17:28.040 | not going to work for you.

00:17:29.520 | And if you can harness the power of understanding what works for you, you can put in place plans

00:17:33.720 | in anything that will help you to achieve the things that you want to achieve.

00:17:40.000 | I want to bust a myth though, and then I'll give you some tools.

00:17:45.280 | In addition to the positive side of motivation, there are some negative things that you'll

00:17:50.080 | have to overcome.

00:17:51.680 | Perhaps you're an English speaker and you're 55 years old, you've never learned a second

00:17:56.000 | language.

00:17:57.920 | The chances are you may need to overcome some limiting beliefs, some lies that you may have

00:18:05.620 | believed that have kept you down.

00:18:08.880 | And two of the most common ones is I'm just not good at languages and it's easier for

00:18:15.460 | young people.

00:18:16.460 | So the first one, I'm not good at languages.

00:18:19.360 | This is a total myth, a complete and total myth.

00:18:24.740 | Everybody in the world is good at languages.

00:18:29.480 | My evidence for that is everywhere in the world, little babies come into the world with

00:18:33.840 | no ability to speak or understand languages other than a little bit of nonverbal communication

00:18:39.880 | and they learn local language.

00:18:41.200 | No matter how hard it is, no matter how complex, human beings are language machines.

00:18:48.800 | We're made in the image of God and God is a God who speaks.

00:18:51.800 | It's one of the key distinctions about God is God is a God who speaks and thus we're

00:18:59.520 | language learning machines.

00:19:02.040 | There's almost no limit to the language capacity of a human being.

00:19:06.720 | There's no limit to the number of languages that you could speak.

00:19:09.440 | There are people out there who can speak dozens and dozens of languages with very high levels

00:19:15.520 | of fluency.

00:19:17.160 | Really the only limitation is the amount of time to learn, the amount of time to learn

00:19:23.680 | and to practice and we're all limited by our need to sleep and the 24 hours that we have

00:19:28.160 | in a day.

00:19:29.300 | But beyond that there's almost no limit to the human capacity for languages.

00:19:34.440 | Now some people are more effective than others.

00:19:39.400 | Sometimes that's because of some form of natural ability.

00:19:42.680 | I noticed this with my wife.

00:19:44.260 | My wife seems far more capable than I am with regard to language ability.

00:19:48.880 | It annoys me sometimes because she'll hear a word one time and she'll remember that word

00:19:55.140 | basically forever.

00:19:56.560 | I need to drill the word dozens of times to beat it into my head.

00:19:59.920 | I look at her and I just I sometimes tell her, "You waste this ability that you have

00:20:03.600 | because you don't work on it very much."

00:20:05.800 | I speak better than she does a lot of times because I work a lot harder but I think she's

00:20:09.640 | more naturally skilled than I am.

00:20:11.840 | So some people do have some natural skills but all of us can develop some skill.

00:20:17.120 | All of us can do it.

00:20:18.280 | The key thing I think usually that separates people who are skilled at learning languages

00:20:22.240 | is the process of learning how to learn it, learning what works.

00:20:25.240 | Which is why oftentimes if you speak to somebody who speaks multiple languages, a polyglot,

00:20:29.840 | a lot of times it's easier for someone to learn their third or fourth language than

00:20:33.760 | it was for them to learn their second.

00:20:36.200 | This is the same with almost anything.

00:20:37.680 | It's probably easier for many people to earn a PhD than it was for them to earn their high

00:20:41.580 | school degree, depending on the context of course.

00:20:45.200 | Because when you're learning something new, you have to develop some new skills of learning

00:20:49.100 | how to learn.

00:20:50.160 | With languages, it's no different.

00:20:51.800 | So if you're just, you speak one language, you're an English speaker and you want to

00:20:55.160 | sit down and learn a second language, it's going to take time for you to figure out what

00:21:00.240 | routine is effective for me.

00:21:02.860 | What helps me to develop this language ability?

00:21:04.760 | But once you've learned that with your second language, then you could add a third one and

00:21:09.080 | a fourth one and every one will get easier.

00:21:12.020 | Same thing with money, right?

00:21:13.020 | The first million is the hardest.

00:21:14.560 | Why?

00:21:15.560 | Well, there are some practical reasons that starting without any capital is harder than

00:21:21.400 | starting with capital.

00:21:23.400 | But there's also a whole set of skills, a whole set of mindsets, a whole set of ways

00:21:27.080 | of thinking that you've got to develop.

00:21:29.480 | If you start from zero, to go from zero to a million dollars, to become a millionaire

00:21:33.640 | requires a complete transformation of who you are.

00:21:36.760 | But once you're a millionaire, to get another million dollars saved up just requires you

00:21:41.360 | to do a little bit more of what you've already done, to become a little bit more of who you

00:21:46.320 | already are.

00:21:47.720 | And so things get easier with time.

00:21:50.120 | Now the second, so the first myth is, "Oh, I'm just not good at languages."

00:21:53.720 | Everybody can learn languages if you have the motivation.

00:21:57.560 | Now the second thing is you'll say, "Oh, it's just easy.

00:21:59.280 | It's harder when you get older."

00:22:00.760 | I'm thankful that this is a myth that the language research has pretty well debunked,

00:22:05.480 | pretty well exploded over the last years.

00:22:08.380 | It's one of the most widely held myths that it's easier for children to learn foreign

00:22:12.560 | languages.

00:22:13.560 | I am teaching my children foreign languages and I'm convinced it's completely false.

00:22:19.960 | It's harder to teach children foreign languages than it is an adult.

00:22:27.800 | Because children basically only have, small children basically only have one way of learning

00:22:35.960 | and that's passive absorption instead of dedicated study.

00:22:40.840 | What children do have at a young age is lots of time and they basically don't have to do

00:22:45.680 | anything else with their time.

00:22:47.360 | Our children when they're born into the world, they come into the world and we do everything

00:22:51.840 | for them.

00:22:52.920 | We change their diapers, we feed them.

00:22:54.400 | They have no responsibilities other than to sit around and learn.

00:22:57.680 | And basically all they need to do is learn how to talk and learn how to walk.

00:23:01.120 | And so they have all the time in the world and they absorb, absorb, absorb, and absorb,

00:23:05.640 | but their actual learning process is extraordinarily slow.

00:23:09.320 | The time it takes for your child to start spitting out intelligible sentences is a very

00:23:14.400 | long time.

00:23:15.640 | Starting from zero, what, they start about 18 months to start making intelligible sentences,

00:23:19.240 | two years old.

00:23:20.680 | Whereas you and I in 18 minutes we can make intelligible sentences in a foreign language.

00:23:26.200 | So adults can learn far faster than children can.

00:23:30.120 | Adults just usually don't have as much time as children do have.

00:23:33.820 | If I brought you into my house and I fed you and I watered you and I met to all of your

00:23:39.320 | physical needs and I said your only job for 24 hours a day, your only job is to learn

00:23:46.640 | this other language, give yourself a few months, you could be fluently speaking another language.

00:23:53.000 | Far faster than a child.

00:23:54.580 | So it's a matter of the amount of time that an adult has to invest.

00:23:59.040 | An adult has the ability to learn much more effectively than a child because an adult

00:24:02.600 | can take part of different material, an adult can study, an adult can review, an adult has

00:24:07.560 | all kinds of learning systems at their fingertips that make an adult's progress much better

00:24:12.640 | and much faster than a child.

00:24:15.520 | So now on the foundation of my busting those two myths, I want to encourage you, you can

00:24:20.680 | learn another language.

00:24:22.240 | No matter how many languages you've learned, you can learn another language if you want

00:24:26.040 | to, if you have the motivation and you can learn it quickly if you have the right tools

00:24:30.700 | and the right facilities, the right materials.

00:24:34.540 | So I don't want to give you a lecture on all of how to learn a language.

00:24:40.360 | It's beyond my skill set and the internet is your friend.

00:24:43.840 | There are many qualified language teachers out there that will give you their experience

00:24:48.080 | and I'm not the world's greatest polyglot, although my ambition is to be a decent polyglot,

00:24:52.840 | but it's just an ambition, it's not a reality and I've had the same struggles that you've

00:24:57.680 | had.

00:24:58.680 | There have been times when I've learned a lot and there have been times when I've gone

00:25:00.800 | years without learning anything, but we really do live in a golden age of language acquisition

00:25:07.600 | and I want to give you some tools that I think will help you if you are studying another

00:25:12.680 | language.

00:25:13.680 | These are tools that I think are completely game changing.

00:25:17.520 | The first thing that you need to do is you need to develop a strategy for language learning.

00:25:23.080 | What I think makes a lot of sense as a strategy for learning languages is learning words.

00:25:31.760 | If you can learn words and learn what words mean and if you learn enough words, you'll

00:25:37.160 | learn a language.

00:25:39.160 | Now the natural acquisition of words is going to start with listening and then for adults,

00:25:46.120 | a huge benefit that we have is of reading.

00:25:50.000 | You need to listen to words and you need to read words.

00:25:53.240 | If you are someone who is bilingual or more, you'll know that the most common thing that

00:25:58.520 | someone says to you when they find out you speak another language is, "Oh yeah, you know,

00:26:02.720 | I am interested or I speak a little bit of this other language, but I can understand

00:26:07.560 | better than I can speak."

00:26:08.880 | It's always what someone says because it's always true.

00:26:12.820 | You can always understand better than you can speak.

00:26:16.640 | That's a natural part of language.

00:26:19.320 | And so language learning often starts with learning to understand and then learning to

00:26:23.920 | speak does come on down the road.

00:26:27.280 | You have to learn to understand words and that means learning new words.

00:26:31.440 | And so you need some methodology to start to study and to learn new words.

00:26:37.040 | Now that methodology doesn't have to be complex, but you do need something.

00:26:41.640 | And the key thing that you want is you want what the language people call comprehensible

00:26:46.240 | input.

00:26:47.520 | You want to have something that you can understand.

00:26:51.400 | If I put on a movie in Chinese and I just put the movie on and it's all Chinese, you

00:26:58.560 | won't, unless you, assuming you haven't studied Chinese, you won't understand, right?

00:27:04.680 | Because it's just too much.

00:27:05.680 | It's too much language.

00:27:07.440 | But if you go into the local Chinese food restaurant that you really love to get takeout

00:27:13.280 | and every time you walk in to that restaurant to get your Chinese takeout and you say, you

00:27:19.400 | know, hi or howdy or good afternoon or however you greet people in English.

00:27:22.920 | And if the Chinese person behind the counter said, "Ni hao" and responded with, with "Ni

00:27:28.120 | hao" every time, pretty soon you would figure out that "Ni hao" is a greeting, right?

00:27:31.960 | It's a greeting.

00:27:32.960 | You understand that because they always say exactly the same thing.

00:27:35.880 | And you've got two little words, two little tones that are pretty easy for you to listen

00:27:39.400 | to and you can understand.

00:27:41.640 | And then if somebody tells you, you know, "Xie xie" that you should say, thank you.

00:27:48.160 | And they say, and you say, how do I say thank you?

00:27:50.800 | And they say "Xie xie" and every time you get something you say thank you in Chinese,

00:27:55.120 | then pretty soon you're going to learn that.

00:27:56.400 | You've got comprehensible input.

00:27:58.240 | And this is how children learn as well.

00:28:00.400 | When we deal with our children and we're teaching them language, we speak to them in the context

00:28:05.800 | of something that they can understand.

00:28:07.760 | So if I'm telling my child, you know, put this over there, I'm going to use my fingers,

00:28:11.560 | I'm going to gesture, put this over there.

00:28:13.760 | And they're understanding by the tone of voice, by the situation that we're in, put this over

00:28:19.040 | there.

00:28:20.040 | They understand that put this over there means I need to take this thing over there.

00:28:23.760 | And they can tell that by the way that I'm communicating.

00:28:26.720 | Or if I bake a loaf of bread and I butter a piece of bread and I get it out of the oven

00:28:31.120 | and it's hot and it's butter and I hold it out in my hand and I say, would you like a

00:28:34.480 | piece of bread?

00:28:35.480 | Or would you like a cookie?

00:28:36.680 | They're understanding, okay, this is bread and this is cookie.

00:28:39.600 | And daddy's saying, would you like this?

00:28:43.400 | It's comprehensible.

00:28:44.980 | And so what you've got to do is you've got to find something that's going to be comprehensible

00:28:48.840 | to you.

00:28:49.840 | And most of the time, this starts with simple words, simple phrases, learning buenos dias,

00:28:54.640 | buenas tardes, you know, these basic things and learning them in their context.

00:28:59.520 | And so you've got to find some kind of material that's going to help you to gain some basic

00:29:05.780 | comprehensibility.

00:29:08.520 | Now the world of this kind of material is wide open to you.

00:29:11.880 | You can pick up a phrase book if it's a language that you can read.

00:29:15.200 | For example, a language like Spanish, which is easy to learn to read, you can pick up

00:29:18.640 | a simple phrase book and start memorizing some phrases.

00:29:21.180 | You probably know some simple Spanish phrases.

00:29:24.040 | You know that buenos dias means good morning and buenas tardes means good afternoon and

00:29:27.760 | como estas, you know, you know these things because you've heard them and they're very,

00:29:31.000 | very simple.

00:29:32.000 | Well, you can start there.

00:29:33.360 | I think it's very effective to start with some audio courses.

00:29:36.580 | Years ago when I was driving a lot, I would go to the library and I would get from the

00:29:41.740 | library all the Pimsleur courses and all the Pimsleur courses in all the different languages

00:29:45.820 | start off the same way.

00:29:48.260 | They start with these basic phrases, just greetings.

00:29:50.780 | I remember one time I had gone through the Pimsleur Chinese course and I had learned,

00:29:56.100 | you know, eight phrases and I was in China.

00:29:58.980 | And I'm sitting there in China and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to try out my Chinese phrases."

00:30:05.480 | And it was the most fun thing in the world.

00:30:07.820 | Ni hao, wo hui shuai yi jie putonghua.

00:30:09.900 | You know, like starting off with the basic stuff.

00:30:12.620 | And I got to the end of my six phrases and the Chinese person is sitting there just coming

00:30:16.420 | back at me at rapid fire and I'm just sitting there dumbfounded because I've completely

00:30:20.100 | lost all, I exhausted my six phrases in Chinese.

00:30:24.240 | But it's a good place to start because it gets you the ability to start.

00:30:27.420 | And so you can pick almost anything, almost any introductory course and start it.

00:30:31.060 | And I recommend that you just pick something.

00:30:33.280 | You can pick something online, you can pick some podcast, you know, Coffee Break Spanish

00:30:37.820 | or Coffee Break French or, you know, pick up a Pimsleur course or a living language

00:30:42.440 | course or go to the library and try it.

00:30:44.200 | Almost anything can start you.

00:30:46.160 | And once you start to get a couple of phrases, you realize that you can learn a couple of

00:30:49.760 | phrases.

00:30:50.760 | And if you can learn a couple of phrases and a couple of words, you can learn thousands

00:30:53.000 | of phrases and thousands of words.

00:30:55.260 | The good thing about most languages is you don't need that many words to be able to carry

00:31:00.620 | on a basic conversation.

00:31:02.840 | The English language has the largest lexicon in the world.

00:31:05.520 | I think it's something like 250,000 words right now and growing.

00:31:09.240 | So English is without a doubt the hardest language in the world to learn massively because

00:31:16.800 | the lexicon, the number of words that are present is the biggest in the world.

00:31:21.940 | My English vocabulary, I did took a vocab test, my English vocabulary is probably something

00:31:26.680 | like 30 to 35,000 words was an estimate I took recently.

00:31:30.020 | I don't even know a tenth, I mean I guess I know maybe 15% of the entire English lexicon.

00:31:36.720 | But the lexis of other languages is much, much, much, much smaller.

00:31:43.920 | See what I did there?

00:31:44.920 | I just mixed it up on you and used two different words for the same thing.

00:31:48.460 | Lexicon and lexis, same word.

00:31:51.500 | The lexicon of other languages is much, much smaller.

00:31:55.880 | So I think I've heard estimates that French has a lexis of maybe 50,000 words and Spanish

00:32:00.780 | something like 30 to 50,000 words.

00:32:02.740 | But you don't need even a fraction of those to carry on a basic conversation.

00:32:06.740 | A basic conversation can be easily had with some estimates a thousand words, some estimates

00:32:12.360 | a few thousand words.

00:32:14.100 | If you develop a few thousand words in a foreign language, you'll be able to pick up a newspaper

00:32:20.560 | and read and understand 85% of the words that are written in that language.

00:32:25.380 | And so a few thousand words is a very doable target if you can figure out a way to learn

00:32:30.100 | words.

00:32:31.320 | And so that's your goal is to learn words.

00:32:33.780 | Now here's some of the tools that have been effective for me over the years.

00:32:36.740 | Number one, I do like audio-based courses.

00:32:40.020 | I listen well and I can often hear things and so I like audio-based courses that turn

00:32:44.260 | drive time into learning time.

00:32:46.460 | I've done this with a bunch of languages.

00:32:48.980 | Some of it sticks, some of it doesn't, but it's really fun to be able to say hello in

00:32:52.180 | a dozen or two languages.

00:32:53.860 | And you can learn that with just going through a few Pimsleur CDs that you can get from your

00:32:57.240 | local library.

00:32:58.660 | And so I like to do some of the audio-based languages.

00:33:03.220 | Where I find the audio-based languages for me stop working is once we get past the first

00:33:08.460 | introductions.

00:33:10.260 | But if you want to pick up a Portuguese CD or a Chinese CD and play it in your car where

00:33:14.660 | you're going back and forth from work, you can get your few basic introductions.

00:33:19.220 | And that gets you started on learning a language.

00:33:22.820 | Really really valuable.

00:33:24.960 | What I find to be incredibly valuable is the use of flashcards.

00:33:29.960 | For me flashcards are a key thing.

00:33:33.080 | But over the years I've learned what flashcards work and what flashcards don't work.

00:33:38.300 | I speak relatively fluent Spanish.

00:33:40.660 | One of my goals this year is I'm working and studying hard for an advanced level Spanish

00:33:50.380 | diploma.

00:33:51.460 | And I've got a lot of work to do to get there, but I'm working really hard towards that.

00:33:55.580 | But I've never had...

00:33:57.380 | I've had almost no formal instruction in Spanish.

00:34:01.580 | In fact my formal instruction in Spanish is limited to two years of high school Spanish

00:34:05.340 | and then about a month and a half of instruction when I was in Costa Rica in college.

00:34:10.300 | That's it.

00:34:11.420 | But when I arrived in Costa Rica in college after two years of high school Spanish, I

00:34:18.300 | was able to carry on fluent conversations in ordinary circumstances in Spanish.

00:34:23.780 | And the secret was twofold.

00:34:27.260 | Number one, I spoke with people.

00:34:30.500 | And number two, I used flashcards.

00:34:33.140 | Start with number one, speaking to people.

00:34:35.420 | What I observed and have observed over the years is that if you want to genuinely learn

00:34:40.620 | a language, you've got to actually use it.

00:34:44.260 | And the thing that keeps people back from learning a language is fear of looking and

00:34:48.180 | sounding stupid.

00:34:49.980 | And every advanced language learner that I've ever listened to and learned from has just

00:34:54.860 | simply overcome that fear.

00:34:57.020 | Has been willing to just simply look and sound stupid.

00:35:03.900 | We all experience that fear.

00:35:05.460 | A moment ago when I'm trying to say, "I can speak a little Mandarin."

00:35:11.540 | That's Mandarin Chinese.

00:35:12.540 | It means I speak a little bit of Chinese.

00:35:14.900 | A little bit of Mandarin Chinese.

00:35:16.740 | But I have no idea if I do that well or not.

00:35:19.620 | It's scary for me to record myself when I know I have fluent Chinese speakers and I

00:35:25.100 | haven't yet learned Chinese.

00:35:26.100 | And so I don't know if I speak it well or not.

00:35:28.540 | But that fear is just as present in me as it is in everyone else.

00:35:32.120 | I've just learned over the years that there's no point in succumbing to that fear.

00:35:35.460 | You just have to act in spite of it.

00:35:37.820 | And I only ever had two years of high school Spanish, but what I always did was I always

00:35:41.260 | practiced speaking to people.

00:35:43.700 | And whenever I had the chance to practice with Spanish speakers, I would do it.

00:35:47.300 | And if you just do that, you'll get better.

00:35:49.580 | Same thing when immigrants come to an English speaking country.

00:35:52.840 | If they will be willing to try, they make progress.

00:35:56.980 | But if they sit back and are scared to look stupid or sound stupid, they don't make progress.

00:36:01.660 | For me, the other thing was flashcards.

00:36:03.100 | The one thing I did was I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought a box of a thousand flashcards,

00:36:09.340 | thousand Spanish word flashcards.

00:36:10.860 | They still sell it, the blue box.

00:36:13.100 | And I learned those thousand flashcards.

00:36:15.660 | And on one side was an English word, on the other side was a Spanish word.

00:36:18.300 | I memorized them.

00:36:19.800 | And those thousand words gave me the ability to speak Spanish by memorizing the thousand

00:36:26.740 | words.

00:36:27.740 | Now, that was what totally changed me because I arrived when I was in college, I arrived

00:36:32.420 | to a study abroad program and I found out that I could speak and yet tons of other people

00:36:37.580 | couldn't speak because they didn't have enough vocabulary.

00:36:41.620 | And so flashcards work for me.

00:36:43.820 | Over the years, I've developed better techniques though with flashcards because although physical

00:36:48.660 | flashcards can work, they're not as good as some other systems.

00:36:54.100 | Another resource I'd recommend for you, Gabriel, I think his name is Weiner, wrote a book called

00:36:58.420 | Fluent Forever.

00:36:59.420 | He published it a few years ago, but it's a great book.

00:37:03.300 | Fluent Forever.

00:37:04.300 | He has a website fluent-forever.com.

00:37:07.220 | But basically the book is an introduction to language learning, but it's 50% or more

00:37:12.580 | here's how you make great flashcards.

00:37:14.960 | And there are a few components that you can use for great flashcards.

00:37:18.700 | The first thing, I prefer digital flashcards over paper flashcards.

00:37:24.500 | Paper flashcards can be useful, but digital flashcards are better because they can go

00:37:29.700 | into a digital flashcard system that utilizes spaced repetition learning.

00:37:35.980 | One of the things that I try to teach to high school students and to other students is how

00:37:40.420 | to harness the value of spaced repetition learning, a little bit of learning theory.

00:37:47.300 | You can remember almost anything in the world forever if you're reminded of it often enough.

00:37:53.960 | You're never going to forget your name because you're reminded of it all the time.

00:37:57.100 | You've used it all the time, but you might forget what an unusual word like supercilious

00:38:05.060 | means if you don't use it all the time.

00:38:08.160 | Think about all of the things that you studied in school.

00:38:11.860 | You learned what protozoa meant, but now although you might recognize the word, you probably

00:38:18.020 | don't really know what a protozoa actually is or what a dendrite actually is.

00:38:23.780 | You probably don't remember.

00:38:24.780 | You probably don't remember what the periodic table for ... You probably memorized when you

00:38:31.700 | were in school.

00:38:32.700 | You probably memorized the periodic table, but it would be unusual if you remembered

00:38:36.100 | what K meant or it would be unusual if you remembered what ... I can't even come up with

00:38:42.500 | the examples off the top of my head anymore.

00:38:44.420 | The more unusual rare earth metals were.

00:38:47.220 | They're chemical symbol.

00:38:48.700 | But if you used this stuff or if you were reminded on this stuff, you would remember.

00:38:54.700 | Example, when I was in high school, I memorized all of the capitals of the states and all

00:38:59.740 | the capitals of every country in the world, but I remember some of them, the ones that

00:39:04.060 | I used, but the other ones of them, I don't remember very much.

00:39:07.100 | But what you can do is if I put together a flashcard system and had you memorize all

00:39:12.460 | of the capitals of the world and you memorized them and then you reviewed them, say every

00:39:18.620 | three months or every six months or once a year, you would still know them.

00:39:21.780 | That information would still be in your head.

00:39:24.540 | That's basically what a spaced repetition system means.

00:39:27.300 | You can do this with a box.

00:39:28.580 | You can do it with a physical box.

00:39:29.780 | It's called a Liebner box or Leitner box, something like that.

00:39:33.380 | I can't remember the name because I don't care enough to put it in my flashcard system.

00:39:37.580 | But the better solution these days is to use an electronic system.

00:39:41.500 | And there are a number of different applications that use this basic system.

00:39:45.380 | The idea is you create a flashcard that has a piece of knowledge on it that you want to

00:39:49.140 | maintain and then you review that flashcard until you learn it.

00:39:52.580 | And then once you learn it, you allow a computer algorithm to feed that flashcard back to you

00:39:58.140 | right when you're about to forget it.

00:40:00.260 | So let's say that you're trying to memorize that the capital of France is Paris.

00:40:05.580 | We make a flashcard, Paris, France, and then you memorize that and then you review it every

00:40:10.840 | day for the next three days.

00:40:11.980 | Well, now you know that the capital of France is Paris.

00:40:15.020 | Then the flashcard system gives it to you in a week and you show it a week that you

00:40:18.340 | still remember it.

00:40:19.440 | Then the flashcard system gives it to you in a month and you show, yep, I still know

00:40:22.500 | this piece of information.

00:40:24.140 | Then in three months it gives it to you.

00:40:25.420 | Yep, I still know this.

00:40:26.420 | And yep, I still know this.

00:40:27.660 | And eventually that knowledge becomes part of your permanent memory.

00:40:34.260 | And at some point in time you'll never forget that the capital of France is Paris because

00:40:39.060 | you've been drilled on that enough times to where you'll never forget that little bit

00:40:43.700 | of data.

00:40:44.700 | Well, you can do that with France, but you can also do that with the capital of Serbia.

00:40:49.620 | You can also do it with the capital of Senegal.

00:40:52.980 | There doesn't have to be any reason why Paris, France is any more part of your permanent

00:40:58.100 | memory than another if you were reviewing those other things enough.

00:41:01.780 | And so the solution that I use for this is a computer program called Anki.

00:41:09.100 | And Anki, it's totally free if you use it.

00:41:11.140 | There is a paid version if you want to do mobile syncing with your mobile devices, but

00:41:16.260 | there's a totally free version that you install on your computer.

00:41:18.600 | And so for any kind of piece of data that you want to commit to memory, I think that

00:41:23.920 | you should put it into an Anki flashcard system that you review regularly.

00:41:27.840 | And you can do this with really anything, any piece of data.

00:41:33.160 | So school, studying in school, this should be the basis of how students study for tests.

00:41:37.540 | As you're going through and studying for an exam, you read a chapter and then you take

00:41:43.100 | all the bits of it and you take all the information, you make flashcards with it and you drill

00:41:47.180 | it until you memorize the key bits of information.

00:41:50.060 | And what I love about Anki especially is because it's all computer based, you can put anything

00:41:55.580 | into it.

00:41:56.580 | You can put video clips, literally.

00:41:59.160 | You can put audio.

00:42:00.780 | You can put pictures.

00:42:03.180 | You can make flashcards in any possible way.

00:42:06.780 | And so what I'll do is I do this sometimes with books that I'm seeking to master.

00:42:10.520 | And I'll take a book that I want to master and I'll say, and I'll turn it into flashcards.

00:42:15.440 | And so if you've got something that's really valuable, then you take it and you turn it

00:42:20.220 | into flashcards.

00:42:21.640 | And that's really, really useful.

00:42:25.580 | And you can drill something into your brain.

00:42:29.180 | It's one of the ways that I memorize outlines from books.

00:42:31.780 | You know, here are the three things, here are the five things.

00:42:34.520 | Take it, put it into a flashcard, drill it into your head until it becomes a part of

00:42:38.700 | you.

00:42:39.700 | And you can put screenshots.

00:42:41.520 | And so this is one of the reasons why I love digital books, where I'll take my books, read

00:42:45.140 | them digitally.

00:42:46.140 | I'll create a flashcard, ask the question and the answer.

00:42:49.140 | But then underneath the answer, I'll put a screenshot of that part of the book with it

00:42:52.380 | marked up, highlighted in all my marginalia, so I can imprint on my head where that information

00:42:57.620 | came from.

00:42:58.740 | And it's incredibly useful to you as a learning technique.

00:43:03.100 | Now with languages, what I have learned to do is follow the instructions laid out by

00:43:09.260 | Gabriel in Fluent Forever, where he talks about the specific bits of data that you want

00:43:15.120 | to be on a language flashcard.

00:43:16.580 | And over the years, I've struggled and struggled and struggled to master a vocabulary if it's

00:43:21.900 | just translation.

00:43:22.900 | If it's just, you know, on one side you have a card that says "house" and on the other

00:43:30.580 | side you have a word that says "casa".

00:43:33.620 | I just struggle to memorize that.

00:43:35.420 | And it's fine when it's "casa" and "house" because these are fairly common words.

00:43:41.060 | But what about when you get to words that are uncommon like "atisbo" and "estropearse"

00:43:46.140 | and like these more advanced vocabulary.

00:43:47.860 | I've drilled cards dozens and dozens and dozens of times and the words just don't seem to

00:43:52.880 | penetrate into my head.

00:43:55.140 | But when I read Fluent Forever and I started applying those techniques, it really improved

00:44:00.240 | my skills.

00:44:02.020 | And so here are some recommendations that the author of Fluent Forever makes for how

00:44:06.980 | to make flashcards.

00:44:09.660 | What you do is you make multiple flashcards for the same word.

00:44:11.980 | And he has a whole system that you can get in the book and you can download his templates

00:44:15.420 | for free.

00:44:16.420 | I highly recommend it to you.

00:44:17.780 | But now I make multiple flashcards for the same word.

00:44:20.060 | And what I do is I take a word, let's say it's a word that I'm trying to learn.

00:44:25.740 | I'll give you some words from my current Spanish studies.

00:44:29.540 | A word like "artasco".

00:44:32.860 | Artasco basically means satiety.

00:44:35.060 | But it's a very unusual word.

00:44:36.860 | It's not the kind of word that is used much.

00:44:39.860 | But if you're like "comer hasta el artasco", like to eat until you're satiated, it's an

00:44:44.860 | unusual word.

00:44:46.100 | And that's the kind of word that I really struggle to keep in my head because it's not

00:44:49.540 | something that I would use on a daily basis.

00:44:53.020 | It's not something that I have much of a connection to.

00:44:56.940 | And it's not a cognate.

00:44:58.480 | There's not a natural cognate between satiety and artasco.

00:45:02.900 | That's very different than a word like "feroz" and "ferocious" where there's an easy cognate

00:45:07.540 | and it's easy to remember.

00:45:09.220 | And so what I do is I create a series of cards.

00:45:13.300 | I follow the Fluent Forever model where I create several different cards.

00:45:16.860 | But I put on one side is the word "artasco".

00:45:20.380 | But then on the other side I use an image.

00:45:23.340 | And I find a picture of the word for "artasco".

00:45:27.560 | And I find something.

00:45:28.560 | I use Google Images and I drag the image from...

00:45:32.060 | Did I just say I use Google Images?

00:45:34.860 | I confess that sometimes I do use Google Images.

00:45:36.980 | I try to use DuckDuckGo Images but I confess I'm not a Google...

00:45:40.220 | I'm not perfectly free of Google for the non-Google folks in the audience.

00:45:46.020 | I don't use Google for searches but I do use it for image searches.

00:45:49.820 | So I'll use that and I'll get an idea of it.

00:45:51.700 | And part of the process is you have to make your own flashcards.

00:45:54.900 | Because when I'm actually trying to figure out what does a word like "artasco" mean,

00:45:58.460 | I go do a search.

00:45:59.460 | I go to images.google.es.

00:46:00.460 | I use for Spain.

00:46:03.700 | And I do a search for "artasco" and I try to understand.

00:46:06.900 | And I take a look at the articles that come up and I look at the images and I look at

00:46:10.100 | the words until I get a sense of what this word means emotionally.

00:46:14.060 | I try to feel it.

00:46:15.060 | I don't want to translate it.

00:46:16.060 | I don't want to just translate it directly because it doesn't just mean satiety.

00:46:20.180 | I want to get a feel for what does this weird word mean.

00:46:23.620 | And then create a flashcard with it.

00:46:25.700 | So I'll grab some images.

00:46:26.700 | And you can have one image.

00:46:27.820 | You can have five images.

00:46:29.220 | And I'll put those images on my flashcard.

00:46:31.740 | In addition, I'll go ahead and grab an audio recording of this.

00:46:35.860 | Now this is easy in Spanish.

00:46:38.300 | You don't really need this because Spanish is so easy to learn how to pronounce.

00:46:41.860 | But I struggle still with things like French pronunciation.

00:46:45.400 | So with my French flashcards, sometimes it's not intuitive to me how a word should be pronounced

00:46:50.680 | or Portuguese.

00:46:51.680 | It's just not, it's much more complex in terms of the pronunciation rules than Spanish has.

00:46:57.980 | And so I'll grab a recording from a website called Forvo, forvo.com, where you can grab

00:47:01.780 | a recording of millions of words that native speakers have recorded.

00:47:05.660 | And I'll put that audio recording there on the flashcard.

00:47:09.540 | Then I'll put some example sentences.

00:47:11.040 | So again, here the internet is superior.

00:47:12.580 | I'll grab some example sentences from various dictionaries or various real life sentences.

00:47:17.340 | And I'll put those on my flashcard.

00:47:19.300 | And then if I have some kind of personal connection to it, then I'll try to put a personal connection.

00:47:24.240 | And all of these things are memory techniques that enhance the connection that you have

00:47:29.940 | with something.

00:47:30.940 | And so when I say the word "artazco," I can very clearly see in my head my flashcard that

00:47:36.400 | has a picture of a child, sorry, of a dude stretched out across a desk, staring at a

00:47:42.080 | plate of food, you know, completely overwhelmed as far as how much food that he's eaten.

00:47:48.760 | And this really helps me because now the word is not just a translation which doesn't stick

00:47:54.960 | in my head.

00:47:56.080 | Now it's an emotional experience.

00:47:58.480 | And I do this with all kinds of words.

00:48:00.280 | Well, I do this with all words actually.

00:48:02.400 | And I always find some way to make it visual.

00:48:06.160 | And that's helped me so much to be able to picture my words and to make them mine.

00:48:16.680 | It's just been incredibly valuable to put them into a picture because the pictures imprint

00:48:24.040 | themselves on my head.

00:48:25.360 | And what it also does is I used to do translation.

00:48:29.520 | And every now and then I will put a little bit of English.

00:48:31.880 | But I don't put translations anymore on cards.

00:48:34.880 | I always keep everything exclusively in that language.

00:48:39.560 | So if I need a, what's another word, you know, a word like "berrinche," right, which means

00:48:44.400 | temper tantrum.

00:48:46.480 | So I don't need, it's an obvious thing.

00:48:48.240 | All I need is a picture of a child having an obvious temper tantrum.

00:48:51.600 | And I'll know intuitively this is a berrinche, this is a temper tantrum, not this is a, I

00:48:59.680 | don't need the word, I need the image.

00:49:01.600 | And that helps to learn to really think in another language much faster as well.

00:49:06.980 | And so I'll always find an image.

00:49:08.160 | And if I can't find, if it's an esoteric concept, then I won't, if it's not directly that, then

00:49:19.920 | I just put a number of different pictures.

00:49:21.680 | A number of different pictures that communicate the meaning of it and communicate it to me.

00:49:27.040 | And so you can find out more information on that flashcard system.

00:49:29.520 | I would strongly recommend to you the book Fluent Forever and strongly recommend to you

00:49:33.880 | that flashcard system.

00:49:35.760 | Because so then you start studying and so you learn, you take 20 or 30 new cards a day

00:49:39.920 | and what you do is you start with the new ones until you learn them and then they're

00:49:42.880 | fed back to you.

00:49:44.240 | And Anki has a really easy system where you say when you want it, do I know this, do I

00:49:48.040 | want this in one minute to review it, do I need it in 10 minutes, do I need it in 10

00:49:51.560 | days, do I need it in 10 months.

00:49:53.680 | And so you just naturally build out this card database.

00:49:57.280 | And you review the cards little by little right when you're right at about the point

00:50:00.500 | of forgetting and then you review the cards until it really becomes part of you.

00:50:05.140 | So I use that for learning vocabulary and mastering words is the key.

00:50:11.200 | Anki.

00:50:12.200 | Now another system and the next thing you should do when you're learning vocabulary

00:50:16.800 | is you should use, you should learn the most commonly used words.

00:50:20.560 | So you can begin with a frequency dictionary.

00:50:23.720 | If you're just starting and making cards yourself, start with a frequency dictionary.

00:50:26.560 | Start with a simple phrase book and learn the phrases so that you have some of the useful

00:50:30.360 | phrases of where's the bathroom and good morning and how do I get to the train station,

00:50:36.800 | all that standard tourist stuff.

00:50:38.720 | But then you can start to use a dictionary of usage.

00:50:43.240 | And because it doesn't make any sense for you if you're a new language learner, it doesn't

00:50:47.400 | make any sense for you to learn unusual words like desempañarse and hartasco and berrinche.

00:50:55.840 | It doesn't make sense for that.

00:50:57.160 | You need to learn words like casa and carro and comida are much more useful for you because

00:51:01.840 | they're going to be used a lot more.

00:51:03.760 | So you start with a frequency dictionary and you learn the first couple thousand words

00:51:07.000 | in their order of frequency of use.

00:51:10.440 | Now the other tool that I love is a tool called link.

00:51:15.960 | And I used link years ago but it wasn't very good and I forgot about it for a long time.

00:51:21.840 | Link is a website, link.com, link.com, but it's a website and it's an app, etc.

00:51:30.080 | And link could in and of itself be your only language learning system.

00:51:33.900 | Link was developed by a polyglot named Steve Kaufman.

00:51:37.080 | And what he developed is a system that allows you to consume content, spoken content, written

00:51:44.200 | content, etc. and to consume it in a way that you can mark the words that you don't know

00:51:49.440 | and mark the words that you do know.

00:51:50.920 | It's a little hard for me to relate verbally, much easier if you just check out the device,

00:51:55.680 | check it out.

00:51:56.680 | But what I do is I use link for learning words with written material that's more at an intermediate

00:52:03.960 | and advanced level.

00:52:05.320 | Now link works for some people to start at a beginner level and I think that's great.

00:52:10.240 | I've not used it for that.

00:52:11.640 | I use it for intermediate and advanced level.

00:52:14.180 | Back to the point of comprehensible input.

00:52:16.440 | One of the challenges of giving yourself comprehensible input is giving yourself something that is

00:52:22.080 | interesting and that has words you don't know but that's not too hard.

00:52:25.860 | So if you sit down to a newspaper and you don't usually read newspapers in English but

00:52:31.560 | all of a sudden I hand you a French newspaper and I say here read this, you have to sit

00:52:36.760 | down and you have to figure out how to look up every single word.

00:52:39.520 | It's too hard, it's too time consuming, it's mind-numbingly boring and it saps your motivation

00:52:45.520 | to continue.

00:52:47.560 | And the process of looking up words is a time-consuming process.

00:52:53.160 | Let's say I'm going to sit down, I'm going to read a novel in Spanish or read a book

00:52:55.680 | in Spanish.

00:52:56.680 | I like to do that but I got to look up still a lot of words and it's time-consuming.

00:52:59.720 | I got to circle the word, look it up, write it there, then reread it, then I got to go

00:53:03.280 | make a flashcard, etc.

00:53:05.240 | What I use is I use link to read.

00:53:07.480 | And so I take a book or you can use any content anywhere.

00:53:10.760 | You can upload newspaper articles, any webpage you're reading, you can load anything into

00:53:14.840 | link.

00:53:15.840 | I like to use it for books and I find it helpful at the intermediate level for me.

00:53:20.400 | So I take my books and what I do is I get the book, either I buy the e-book, I buy an

00:53:25.960 | e-book, buy a Kindle book, take it, strip the DRM, put it into my library and then I

00:53:30.960 | export that into Anki or you can do this with PDFs, any PDF that you have you can export

00:53:37.440 | it into Anki.

00:53:38.720 | And then what Anki will do is Anki will study that and as I'm reading I read in Anki and

00:53:43.040 | it gives me the ability to do a couple of things.

00:53:45.640 | Number one, if I don't understand a word I can just tap the word and it will immediately

00:53:49.960 | show me the definition for it.

00:53:51.560 | I choose the proper definition for the word and it'll immediately add it to a list.

00:53:56.120 | But as I'm reading in Anki over time you develop a system and it'll ignore all the words that

00:54:01.680 | you don't know and it'll just show you the words that you do know.

00:54:04.600 | And then what it allows me to do is to grab the word that I don't know, let's say I'm

00:54:10.040 | reading and I find a word.

00:54:14.820 | Right now I'm reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson in Spanish and so one of

00:54:20.880 | my words from today is the word "asana" which means the feet.

00:54:27.680 | But I can just mark that, I'm reading it in Anki and I can just mark that word, tap my

00:54:33.200 | finger on the word and say "ah, the word asana means feet" like F-E-A-T, not your physical

00:54:39.920 | feet, like a feet of accomplishment or a feet of engineering.

00:54:44.720 | And I can mark this word and now it'll automatically create for me a note that includes the context

00:54:54.680 | in which I read it.

00:54:56.080 | So the context in which I read it was from the Jobs biography.

00:55:04.960 | Así que construyó una compañía en la cual los saltos imaginativos se combinaban con impresionantes

00:55:10.760 | hazañas de ingeniería.

00:55:14.520 | And so I have now the context that comes from the actual book that I was reading and that

00:55:18.720 | goes right on my card.

00:55:20.320 | And I can either study all that vocabulary in Anki and I can do flashcards and reviews

00:55:23.940 | and tests, etc.

00:55:25.520 | Or I can do it in LingQ or I can export automatically flashcards to go over to my Anki decks and

00:55:32.440 | I can study there in my preferred flashcard program.

00:55:36.080 | And so this is the single best way because what it allows you to do is to constantly

00:55:40.760 | consume content that challenges you and to make it so easy for you to look up content

00:55:46.480 | that you can find challenging content.

00:55:48.960 | For years my language ability stagnated because I didn't enjoy the process of reading content

00:55:56.460 | that was hard.

00:55:57.460 | I would get a Spanish novel, for example, and I want to read in Spanish but it's hard.

00:56:02.100 | It's hard when you have to look up 10 or 15 or 20 words on a page.

00:56:06.320 | But yet to advance that's the level you need to be at.

00:56:08.480 | You need to be at the point where you're reading something that you understand the vast majority

00:56:12.360 | of but yet there's still stuff that you don't know.

00:56:15.280 | It's annoying to sit there and in one page of a novel have to look up 10 words and it

00:56:19.200 | turns one page into this time-consuming thing.

00:56:24.360 | But with LingQ I can read and consume advanced level stuff and it's so easy just to find

00:56:30.280 | the definition that I can quickly build those words into my vocabulary.

00:56:34.840 | Now I still use the flashcards because especially I'm trying to move words from my passive vocabulary

00:56:40.320 | to my active vocabulary.

00:56:42.280 | In Spanish right now that's my major focus is in order for me to advance in Spanish I

00:56:46.680 | have to add several thousand words into my active vocabulary and that means not just

00:56:52.280 | words that I would understand in context.

00:56:54.840 | I understand "hacernas de ingeniería" I understand that's feats of engineering in context.

00:57:01.800 | I could probably figure that out but that word's not part of my active vocabulary.

00:57:05.560 | I wouldn't use a word "hacernas" in my daily speech but I want to and so I need the flashcards

00:57:11.920 | still.

00:57:12.920 | But if you're not trying to do that this allows you to just consume much larger levels of

00:57:17.240 | material.

00:57:18.240 | And what happens if you can do that easily it allows you to consume material which makes

00:57:24.720 | most of the grammar in your happen naturally in your head.

00:57:28.920 | So my experience in the English language probably yours as well.

00:57:34.000 | I can't I can think of one or two things that I've ever gained from a single English grammar

00:57:41.160 | class ever in my life.

00:57:43.680 | About the my one example is I know that if you're going to use a gerund then you make

00:57:48.240 | a possessive pronoun before the gerund.

00:57:51.680 | So the technical rule in English if you're going to say you know I appreciate your coming

00:57:57.260 | over the proper way to say it is I appreciate your coming over.

00:58:02.420 | Coming is a gerund a verb that ends in an ing and so that should be possessive.

00:58:07.160 | I appreciate your coming over to say I appreciate you coming over is incorrect.

00:58:12.280 | That's about the only English grammar rule that I can ever I can come up with off the

00:58:15.720 | top of my head.

00:58:17.120 | But I generally have impeccable English grammar because I have read hundreds of thousands

00:58:24.320 | of pages in English.

00:58:27.640 | And I enjoyed most of that reading.

00:58:29.980 | And so for me LingQ solves that issue of making it possible for me to enjoy reading in a foreign

00:58:37.260 | language which allows me to ignore most of the for me very boring grammar exercises of

00:58:43.940 | sitting down and manually going through these again boring exercises in favor of just letting

00:58:54.480 | my brain work it out.

00:58:56.100 | The human brain is a grammar learning machine.

00:58:59.400 | Children in any language when they speak the language they're exposed to the language they

00:59:03.660 | connect to the language.

00:59:05.340 | Children in any language can naturally learn the grammar of the language without having

00:59:10.340 | to learn the rules.

00:59:11.800 | And so it's one of those kind of secret cheat codes that I don't think I ever studied for

00:59:17.060 | an English test in my life specifically because things just feel right and things feel wrong.

00:59:24.320 | Now you do need parents that speak properly.

00:59:26.760 | That was an advantage that I had that many people don't have is I had literate parents

00:59:31.460 | with proper grammar.

00:59:33.680 | And so we didn't grow up speaking poorly.

00:59:36.400 | We didn't grow up speaking slang.

00:59:38.920 | My parents would be extraordinarily embarrassed if I said me and Tom are going to the lake.

00:59:47.420 | And I do that with my own children.

00:59:48.420 | You just naturally correct those grammar mistakes that your children make and you give them

00:59:52.420 | a huge leg up in life a major advantage.

00:59:55.820 | But you can do the same thing in foreign languages.

00:59:57.380 | You get to the point where you can't explain why something is wrong but you just know that

01:00:04.560 | it feels wrong.

01:00:06.640 | So those are my most useful tools.

01:00:09.040 | Anki for learning vocabulary especially for building vocabulary as part of my active memory

01:00:14.160 | and then LingQ for consuming large amounts of vocabulary.

01:00:18.960 | What else is involved with language?

01:00:20.920 | Well expression.

01:00:22.060 | The ability to express.

01:00:25.760 | Missed a point before I go on to expression.

01:00:29.200 | Back to golden age of language learning.

01:00:31.960 | The most important thing in language learning is to find interesting content that you actually

01:00:36.620 | care about in your target language.

01:00:39.160 | If I were to go back 20 years for me to get target content back when I was in high school

01:00:43.920 | and college and I was interested in languages I couldn't get much of it.

01:00:49.480 | Couldn't get much of it because let's say I want to learn French.

01:00:54.000 | Well I can get the Pimsleur French CDs and I can get a French book but I always struggled

01:00:57.800 | with the French books because I never learned my pronunciation rules.

01:01:01.400 | But how do I get good French content?

01:01:04.560 | Well there started to be some improvements with DVDs dubbed in French but the breakthrough

01:01:10.000 | was the ability to access things like French podcasts and I used to drive around and listen

01:01:17.000 | to the BBC in French and I could just stream it right to my phone while I drove around.

01:01:22.560 | That was game changing and now with YouTube where you can take anything that you're interested

01:01:27.440 | in no matter how obscure and enjoy that content in your target language it's far more interesting.

01:01:38.240 | And so I can take something totally esoteric.

01:01:41.400 | I don't know I enjoy prepper channels on YouTube but I don't really watch them in English I

01:01:45.480 | watch the prepper channels in Portuguese or in French or in Spanish and so it gives me

01:01:52.200 | the natural way to enjoy something that I think is fun and interesting to me but to

01:01:57.560 | do it in a target language and that's the kind of content no one in their right mind

01:02:01.000 | twenty years ago would ever have created some language DVDs of some random dude doing a

01:02:07.000 | tour of his bug out bag.

01:02:09.160 | Makes no sense because there's no market for it but in YouTube I can go and find some guy

01:02:13.440 | who's got 300,000 subscribers to his channel and I can use that as my language study.

01:02:18.440 | And then of course I can import that into Anki if I want to and add it to my vocabulary.

01:02:23.000 | Anki is a tremendous tool for that.

01:02:24.720 | So this is where we live in a golden age because I can have access to interesting content all

01:02:32.880 | over the world.

01:02:33.880 | So if I'm going to read the newspaper there's no point in reading it in English.

01:02:37.680 | I don't need to read the New York Times or the Washington Post.

01:02:40.520 | I can scan those headlines but if I'm going to read a newspaper article why not read it

01:02:45.400 | from Argentina or why not read it from France.

01:02:50.400 | Why not get a different perspective and get it in an international context.

01:02:54.240 | And so with LingQ and with the modern connectivity I can just grab an article from you know Mexican

01:03:02.560 | newspaper pop that into LingQ read it in Spanish while at the same time adding my vocabulary

01:03:08.960 | words that I'm going to learn for that article.

01:03:11.440 | It's just it's incredible how much easier and how much more fun all these modern tools

01:03:17.120 | make the acquisition of language.

01:03:20.120 | Now let's go to expression.

01:03:22.560 | All of us are going to be better at listening and understanding than we are at speaking.

01:03:29.480 | And the other big benefits of listening and understanding for example one of the things

01:03:33.400 | that I'm doing right now to level up my Spanish ability is focusing on other accents.

01:03:39.320 | So I have I can understand 100% of Mexicans.

01:03:43.280 | I struggle to understand Cubans and so I'm watching Cuban YouTube channels to try to

01:03:49.040 | train my ear to understand Cuban Spanish because it's just it's difficult for me and if in

01:03:54.360 | my Spanish exam I'm presented with a "Cubano, frecuent, I'm going to be dumb."

01:03:59.920 | I can't do it I can't do a Cuban accent in Spanish, sorry in English but you know it's

01:04:04.160 | Cuban Spanish is really tough for me.

01:04:06.800 | I've many times I've been in Miami and I sit and talk with a Cuban and they'll respond

01:04:10.640 | to me and I look at them and I think I thought I spoke Spanish but now I speak to you and

01:04:14.600 | I don't have a clue what you said.

01:04:16.360 | Well I can easily access that kind of material so the connectivity makes things better.

01:04:20.960 | What about speaking?

01:04:22.720 | First thing I would say is if you're going to improve your ability in a language you've

01:04:28.440 | got to speak it.

01:04:30.440 | And here again we live in a golden age of communication partners.

01:04:34.760 | You might be interested in learning a language but you might not know anybody who speaks

01:04:38.320 | that language.

01:04:39.800 | I, you know, when I have an interest in French, I'm studying French right now, Spanish, French

01:04:45.040 | and Portuguese and so I don't know any French speakers.

01:04:50.840 | There's no one that I have to talk to speak in French with and so there's no natural,

01:04:54.560 | I'm not a part of a natural community of French speakers, I don't, I just don't have it.

01:04:59.200 | But with the internet I have the easy ability to speak to French speakers and there are

01:05:03.680 | tons of websites out there.

01:05:05.000 | You can do language exchanges free if you want to help someone improve their, you know,

01:05:09.280 | you speak English, you want to do a language swap.

01:05:12.360 | There's a wonderful website called italki.com which connects language teachers and so you

01:05:16.600 | can, with students, and so you can easily book conversation partners and at, you know,

01:05:22.680 | six bucks an hour, seven bucks an hour, book yourself a chance to speak with a native French

01:05:26.640 | speaker, a French tutor and you don't have to go to France, you don't have to go to Quebec,

01:05:32.000 | you don't have to go there, you can practice in the comfort of your own home.

01:05:35.040 | It's an incredible opportunity to actually speak.

01:05:38.200 | So you have to speak in order to improve a language.

01:05:40.680 | You're always going to be better at listening but you have to speak.

01:05:43.320 | The secret technique that I've done over the years that has made me very skilled in speaking

01:05:48.400 | more fluently than most other students has just been simply learning to translate and

01:05:54.280 | one of the things that I have done for years is if I'm working in a language I force myself

01:05:59.800 | to translate the language in real time.

01:06:02.720 | I would, I started this when I was in high school learning Spanish.

01:06:06.160 | I would be sitting in a church meeting listening to somebody preach and I would try to simultaneously

01:06:13.120 | translate it and of course in the beginning stages, I did it a lot of times because I

01:06:16.800 | was bored when I was in high school and I wasn't really into the content, I just practiced

01:06:19.760 | it for language ability but I would listen and I would try to translate and if you just

01:06:26.960 | do that because you're forced to find workarounds, you can start to be fairly articulate quickly

01:06:32.720 | because your brain gets used to finding the words that you do know of how to express the

01:06:36.960 | concept and what frustrates people is when they don't have the, when they don't have

01:06:43.920 | the skills to, they don't have the advanced vocabulary to express themselves in a language

01:06:50.560 | perfectly, they often get frustrated if they can't find a workaround.

01:06:56.000 | And so if there's an advanced word that would be the perfect word for the context, it's

01:07:05.600 | nice to know that but you don't need to know that, you can just rephrase it, you can change

01:07:10.380 | and adjust how you're saying and so you can learn this very easily in some languages,

01:07:16.520 | a language like Spanish which has multiple tenses.

01:07:19.360 | So if you wanted to learn to say I will eat, you could of course say comeré, right, I

01:07:24.400 | will eat but it's easier just to learn voy a comer, I'm going to eat, expresses the

01:07:29.240 | same thought and you can get there easier.

01:07:31.760 | And so what I've done over the years is just whenever I'm listening to something that is

01:07:34.800 | not really engaging me, I practice translating it.

01:07:37.080 | So you could do this at work, you're sitting in a meeting at work, kind of boring, try

01:07:40.200 | to figure out how would you translate this into your target language and that skill of

01:07:46.720 | just translating in your head and doing it real time will make you very fast to be able

01:07:50.960 | to express yourself even if you don't have the perfect vocabulary, even if your grammar

01:07:56.060 | is not perfect, you'll still be able to, you won't be fumbling for words like many other

01:08:02.120 | people are.

01:08:03.120 | So that's another technique that I've used over the years.

01:08:06.040 | There are many other things that you could say, just a simple modern technological system

01:08:10.480 | like Google Translate is game changing.

01:08:13.300 | What I do is I keep Google Translate on my phone, losing all my privacy credentials here,

01:08:18.400 | I keep Google Translate on my phone and if there's a word that I'm searching for then

01:08:24.200 | I just, I quickly look it up.

01:08:26.960 | So for example, the other day I was trying to tell my children I'm going to tuck you

01:08:30.120 | in, right?

01:08:31.120 | Tuck you in bed is an important, I was speaking up in Spanish and tuck you in bed is an important

01:08:36.580 | thing to convey but I didn't know how to say it.

01:08:39.040 | And so I quickly grabbed it, it's "arroparse", I quickly grabbed it, I grabbed the word and

01:08:45.560 | then what I do is I look it up in Google Translate and then I star it and Google creates a thing

01:08:50.920 | where anything that you star it'll create a list for you and then later I go ahead and

01:08:55.080 | I just pull out my phone and here's all the words that I've looked up throughout the day,

01:08:58.640 | they're all starred, these are words that I need to know because I wanted to know how

01:09:01.600 | do I express to tuck you in and so I learned the word is "arroparse" and so then I grab

01:09:06.760 | it, I pull it over to my flashcard system, I create my flashcard and now I know that

01:09:10.840 | word, I'll never forget it because in my flashcard system I've learned it and now I always know

01:09:14.280 | the word for "arroparse" or the word to tuck you in.

01:09:19.600 | And so these little techniques are so much easier than the way I used to do it with an

01:09:23.960 | index card and a paper dictionary and blah blah blah blah.

01:09:27.880 | So those are some of my most valuable tools.

01:09:31.760 | I have not expressed to you any kind of comprehensive language learning system.

01:09:38.680 | There are many other tips and tricks that you can put into place.

01:09:44.160 | What I want to close in by close with is simply expressing to you this.

01:09:49.300 | If you are interested in a language and if you're motivated to learn a language, the

01:09:54.400 | tools are at your fingertips.

01:09:57.280 | Grab yourself some books, grab a link account, you know set up some flashcards, try some

01:10:02.240 | of the things that you need to learn.

01:10:03.440 | Some languages are more complex than others, right?

01:10:06.420 | It's much more difficult for a native English speaker to learn Chinese than it is to learn

01:10:12.480 | Spanish.

01:10:14.200 | But if you just simply because the number of cognates and the amount of familiarity.

01:10:20.200 | But it's actually, I haven't learned Chinese yet, but from my interest in reading about

01:10:25.320 | the language, I think that it's harder for an English speaker to learn excellent Spanish

01:10:30.600 | than it is to learn Chinese.

01:10:32.480 | My understanding, again not being a Chinese speaker, so if I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong,

01:10:37.280 | but a language like Spanish is very easy for an English speaker to learn basic Spanish.

01:10:44.240 | But Spanish is complex because it's a language filled with tenses and all the tenses have

01:10:48.940 | to agree.

01:10:50.160 | All the verbs have to agree with the nouns and the adjectives and everything's changing

01:10:53.760 | in masculine and feminine and singular and plural.

01:10:56.520 | And so to speak it properly with really high level grammar is very difficult.

01:11:02.280 | There are something like a hundred and fourteen ways that you can conjugate any, there's over

01:11:06.920 | a hundred ways you can conjugate any Spanish verb.

01:11:09.920 | And so advanced level Spanish is very challenging.

01:11:13.600 | Whereas Chinese is very hard for an English speaker to learn in the beginning because

01:11:19.040 | you're dealing with a tonal language, you're dealing with a language where there aren't

01:11:22.320 | any, probably any cognates that go back and forth, no words that you would naturally understand.

01:11:29.840 | You know, a cognate again, a word like possible in Spanish, posible, in French, possible,

01:11:36.600 | in English, possible.

01:11:37.600 | So you can look at that and say, "Oh, that's probably possible."

01:11:39.960 | Whereas Chinese, I have no idea what the Chinese word for possible is, but it's not possible.

01:11:46.000 | But Chinese doesn't have the same complex grammar that Spanish and French have where

01:11:49.880 | all of your genders and your numbers have to match up.

01:11:54.440 | So there are languages that are going to be objectively more difficult to learn, but every

01:11:59.000 | language has its thing that makes it a little easier.

01:12:01.480 | Once you get past the tones in Chinese, you're going to have a simpler grammar than you are

01:12:06.200 | with a language like Spanish or French.

01:12:09.400 | But these modern tools make it a lot easier.

01:12:11.980 | So if you have the motivation, if you have the interest, if you have the desire, these

01:12:17.140 | modern tools can make it so that you can learn a language very, very quickly.

01:12:23.040 | I'm not a polyglot.

01:12:24.640 | I aspire to be a polyglot, but I'm not a polyglot.

01:12:27.520 | I am a busy father, a busy businessman.

01:12:30.720 | I have limited amounts of time.

01:12:32.600 | My motivation ebbs and flows.

01:12:36.000 | Sometimes I care, sometimes I don't.

01:12:37.360 | I'll go months and months without studying something.

01:12:39.720 | Sometimes I'll get motivated and really pour on the studies.

01:12:43.740 | But I am convinced of this.

01:12:45.840 | I can take any language in the world, and since I've learned other languages, I know

01:12:51.360 | how I learn to some degree.

01:12:53.800 | I can take any language in the world, and in a few months of study, I can carry on basic

01:12:59.280 | conversations in that language.

01:13:02.080 | And what that makes me feel is it makes me feel incredibly empowered.

01:13:07.160 | Because I know that I could go from...

01:13:09.840 | There's some languages that would be harder, right?

01:13:10.840 | With Chinese, I'd need a few years.

01:13:13.040 | I'll learn Chinese, but it's not yet.

01:13:15.400 | Not yet.

01:13:16.440 | But I'll need a few years of study.

01:13:17.440 | It's going to be challenging.

01:13:19.280 | But I can take almost any language, and especially if it's an easier language, like a romance

01:13:24.600 | language.

01:13:25.600 | Give me a year, and I can be very fluent in it.

01:13:28.000 | And that's a really empowering feeling, because it makes me feel like I can live anywhere

01:13:32.200 | in the world.

01:13:33.200 | I can move anywhere in the world, and I can connect.

01:13:36.040 | I don't have to always be an outsider.

01:13:37.200 | I can very quickly make progress.

01:13:39.560 | And the learning of it opens up my skills, opens up relationships.

01:13:44.760 | I can't tell you how useful it's been.

01:13:47.760 | I went through all those Pimsleur programs and learned how to say, "Io parlo un poco

01:13:51.800 | d'italiano."

01:13:52.800 | You can ingratiate somebody very quickly and open up a conversation when you can speak

01:13:57.040 | their language.

01:13:58.040 | Even if you only have a few memorized phrases, it makes all the difference in the world.

01:14:02.920 | So I encourage you, if you have an interest in learning a language, clarify your motivation.

01:14:08.980 | Think through a system that you think would work for you.

01:14:12.000 | Start using some of these modern tools.

01:14:13.700 | My tool belt is Anki flashcards and LingQ.

01:14:17.320 | I do use other things as well.

01:14:19.040 | There are other forms of content.

01:14:21.760 | There are other classes that can be useful from time to time.

01:14:24.400 | Those will vary with the language.

01:14:25.640 | There are many books that you need.

01:14:26.800 | There's a real value in having some phrase books and grammar books, etc.

01:14:30.640 | You want to invest into your materials.

01:14:33.260 | But you don't have to.

01:14:36.680 | The Foreign Service Institute in the United States has foreign language materials for

01:14:39.960 | all kinds of things, all kinds of languages out there.

01:14:42.980 | And if you want to improve your talent stack, one really good way you could do that is by

01:14:49.520 | learning a language.

01:14:50.880 | In order of most spoken to least spoken, the five or six most commonly spoken languages

01:14:54.320 | in the world, number one English, number two Mandarin Chinese, number three is Hindi, number

01:15:00.700 | four is Spanish, number five is French.

01:15:05.820 | So you should learn the language that you're interested in, but those are some very highly

01:15:11.960 | spoken languages.

01:15:12.960 | And if your career is feeling a little bit stale, you'd like to open up a new market,

01:15:20.160 | this is one of the ways that you can specialize.

01:15:22.680 | You can be the Creole speaking accountant.

01:15:27.560 | And if you are a white American accountant who also speaks fluent Creole, or who also

01:15:33.800 | speaks fluent Spanish, or who also speaks fluent Hindi, or who also speaks Somali, you

01:15:39.560 | can open up a whole new market for yourself and you'll be highly referable.

01:15:44.560 | Now obviously if you're living in Columbus, Ohio and there's a huge Somali population

01:15:50.440 | around you, your knowledge of Somali is not going to make you a better accountant.

01:15:56.760 | But your knowledge of Somali will open up a huge potential base for your accounting

01:16:02.480 | services.

01:16:03.920 | And you don't actually even have to, it's not that the person can't speak English.

01:16:08.880 | You know one of the things I learned over the years by speaking Spanish, and I use French

01:16:13.760 | with Creoles, I don't speak Creole yet, but I've often used it with Haitians, is by being

01:16:17.960 | able to speak a little bit of French.

01:16:20.160 | You know I'm a white American, but I've worked with so many ethnically, with Spanish speakers,

01:16:28.640 | Latinos and Spanish people, and Haitians, that even though they spoke great English

01:16:35.680 | and we would do our work in English, the ability to kind of solve that cultural compatibility

01:16:40.400 | where I could demonstrate, you know I'm a financial advisor, but you know I went to

01:16:44.240 | Haiti on my honeymoon and I can speak a little bit of French and I can understand Creole,

01:16:49.160 | that opens up a community connection in a way that other things don't.

01:16:53.960 | And it opens up a similarity.

01:16:56.520 | And you've got to do that.

01:16:57.520 | If you want good relationships, you've got to learn how to be a little bit culturally

01:17:00.800 | sensitive.

01:17:03.680 | Every culture has their things that make people culturally sensitive, and a little bit of

01:17:07.360 | cultural intelligence, a little bit of cultural wisdom goes a long, long way.

01:17:16.520 | And languages are one way that you can express that cultural intelligence.

01:17:20.000 | Hope you've enjoyed the show.

01:17:22.160 | Hope some of these resources are useful for you.

01:17:24.920 | Again, the book Fluent Forever, the application Anki, A-N-K-I, and LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q, those

01:17:32.520 | are the primary resources that I mentioned.

01:17:34.840 | And bon chance.

01:17:40.960 | Great job, mijo.

01:17:41.960 | Nice, mijo.

01:17:42.960 | Good game.

01:17:43.960 | Yeah, congrats.

01:17:44.960 | Thanks.

01:17:45.960 | I'm hungry.

01:17:46.960 | How about tacos in Boyle Heights tonight?

01:17:47.960 | They're the best tacos in LA.

01:17:48.960 | No, the best tacos are in Southgate.

01:17:50.760 | The tacos al vapor there are so good.

01:17:52.720 | If you really want the best tacos, the secret ones are actually at this little place downtown.

01:17:57.760 | Excuse me, I thought my tacos were the best tacos.

01:18:01.000 | I was about to say that.

01:18:03.000 | No one can beat your seasoning, honey.

01:18:04.520 | Yeah, mom's tacos are good, but the ones in Boyle Heights are-

01:18:07.080 | The ones in Southgate are still better.

01:18:08.520 | We have food at home.

01:18:09.520 | Tonight, I'm making the tacos.

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Language_Learning_Tips