Language Learning Secrets: How to Make Difficult Languages Easy
00:00:00.000 | How important is for languages that don't use the kind of Latin alphabet?
00:00:05.120 | How important is reading and writing? Reading and writing is something I also tend to
00:00:10.800 | put later in the intermediate regardless, even even for Latin based languages like
00:00:15.760 | Spanish or French, I wouldn't really pick up a book and try to read it until I'm at the
00:00:21.840 | intermediate stages because it's just too much work. Like I literally with Spanish when I first
00:00:28.400 | started one of my failed experiments was I picked up El Señor de los Anillos, Lord of the Rings,
00:00:34.400 | and I thought if I read this I'll be fluent by the end of it and it took me weeks to get to page two
00:00:39.360 | because I was literally looking up every single word so that was really not a good use of my time
00:00:45.280 | whereas when I've reached the intermediate stage then it becomes more manageable then I'm only
00:00:49.920 | looking up every like 15th or 30th word so I can actually read significantly more and it becomes
00:00:57.360 | more pleasurable so personally I leave reading till later. I wouldn't necessarily say this is
00:01:03.360 | something I would prescribe to everybody because I've interviewed a lot of other language learners
00:01:10.160 | it's people will see a lot of episodes on my podcast where I talk to a lot of very interesting
00:01:15.040 | people and like I can think of a bunch of them. There's Steve Kaufman who runs the website Link,
00:01:22.800 | there's Professor Krashen who's very famous for talking about comprehensible input which is a
00:01:31.360 | philosophy in language learning where you try to get exposure to something that is within your
00:01:37.040 | language level and that leans a lot more towards reading and people would actually read from the
00:01:42.320 | beginning so that may work more appropriately for a lot of people but what I've found is it
00:01:48.400 | tends to work a little bit more for maybe either older generations or people who are really not as
00:01:55.440 | passionate to speak the language and that's fine they have a lot of goals in the language but
00:02:01.200 | walking up to people and using it with them ultimately is maybe not their biggest priority.
00:02:05.840 | In my case I'm a traveler I'm a nomad so speaking the language is by far the biggest priority. I
00:02:12.160 | need to make friends, I need to interact with people in complicated situations so speaking is
00:02:18.400 | my priority. Once I've done that then I come back to reading and writing and that's regardless of
00:02:23.920 | whatever script it uses. In terms of how they're different I don't really change how I learn a
00:02:30.960 | language when it's European versus when it's something like an Asian language. I mean maybe
00:02:35.920 | with something like Chinese that has a character-based writing system in that case I would
00:02:43.840 | absolutely learn all my vocabulary through pinyin which is the romanized version of Chinese
00:02:51.040 | characters. So people would say well Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world.
00:02:55.600 | Actually Mandarin is not that hard. Grammatically it's very straightforward and the way the words
00:03:03.040 | are formed is very logical so I really don't think Mandarin is that bad of a language. But of course
00:03:09.360 | Chinese characters are a huge barrier that you have to work through so I just decide let's take
00:03:16.640 | this in two stages like a native Chinese person would have done. Chinese children learn how to
00:03:23.120 | speak first and then they learn how to read and write so that's what I was going to do. I learned
00:03:28.000 | how to speak Mandarin and I would remember my vocabulary through pinyin which is using our
00:03:34.320 | letters from the Latin alphabet to remember how to say the words and then with time I added Chinese
00:03:41.040 | characters so I could begin to read when that was in my triage system of a bigger priority.
00:03:47.760 | So that's the case with that but then for a language like Korean that I'm currently doing
00:03:52.320 | its writing system is actually very logical. You can learn it in a weekend if you put
00:03:56.800 | some intensive time into it. It's very straightforward so a lot of languages
00:04:02.160 | that have a phonetic system like Cyrillic for Russian or for Arabic or Greek or in the case
00:04:09.280 | I'm doing now Korean you can still incorporate learning the writing system because that's going
00:04:16.720 | to help you a lot with vocabulary. You really want to be learning your vocabulary through its writing
00:04:21.680 | system when it's phonetic and people get intimidated because when I saw Korean before
00:04:29.280 | learning it I was like wow all these circles and lines this must take years to master.
00:04:35.440 | It is so easy. I cannot overstate how easy the Korean writing system is to be able to pick up.
00:04:44.640 | It's extremely logical and it's something I did in a weekend so you would be surprised for a lot
00:04:50.560 | of languages. It looks intimidating because all these squiggles and lines you've never seen before
00:04:55.440 | but it's like anything you put a little bit of time in and it becomes manageable.
00:05:00.800 | Are there some languages that do skew on the harder or easier side to learn?
00:05:09.120 | I definitely have talked about this quite a lot. There's a podcast I've done with
00:05:14.080 | Paul Jorgensen and he's a big YouTuber, millions of subscribers from the Lang Focus and in that we
00:05:22.080 | talked about how to make difficult languages easy. People can find that in my podcast talked about it.
00:05:26.800 | Very fascinating when you dive into that one particular topic but what I say in general
00:05:32.640 | whenever I'm thinking about this is I like to get people in a different mindset and I'll give
00:05:39.120 | you an example. When I was in Spain learning Spanish I met a Spaniard who was learning both
00:05:46.000 | Japanese and French and I said to him well obviously French is going to be a lot easier
00:05:50.560 | for you isn't it because it's in the same language family and he said absolutely not.
00:05:54.800 | Japanese is so much easier and I didn't get it. I was like how? It's so different and he said
00:06:00.960 | because I'm forced to learn French in school whereas I really want to go to Japan. I like
00:06:06.320 | anime. I think Japanese girls are cute. I've always dreamed of living in the country and that
00:06:11.440 | completely transformed his experience and it made Japanese easier and I think when people come from
00:06:18.080 | this more academic way of looking at a language they think of how am I going to decide which
00:06:23.440 | language is harder. Well I'm going to put one language on one side another language on another
00:06:28.320 | side and compare them side by side and if I see more common words like between English and French
00:06:35.440 | that makes it easier and if I see complicated grammar like Japanese having a different word
00:06:41.520 | order in the sentence that makes it hard and that for me is such an inhuman way of deciding which
00:06:48.720 | languages are hard and easy and it is easy to scale it like you can say regardless of the person
00:06:54.640 | this language is harder than that but realistically each person has their own situation when it comes
00:07:02.000 | to learning a language they have their own passions they have their own motivations and
00:07:07.120 | when I think of all the languages I've learned and I compare my experiences I would say something
00:07:13.520 | like Chinese was actually easier for me than Spanish and people always think that doesn't
00:07:20.320 | make any sense because Spanish is much closer to English and and all these other reasons you know
00:07:26.240 | but ultimately I had a bad language learning approach with Spanish for a long time it took
00:07:32.160 | me a very long time to get to fluency with Spanish to even get to a conversational level
00:07:37.440 | and I kept kicking myself I kept telling myself your Spanish is miserable people are laughing at
00:07:43.280 | you who would want to speak Spanish with you and all of these reasons are why it took me so long
00:07:49.920 | to learn Spanish whereas with Mandarin at that stage I had a good language learning approach
00:07:55.600 | I had a good attitude I embraced making mistakes so after three months I reached a pretty good
00:08:02.560 | conversational stage and people can see YouTube videos of me where I'm interviewing people in
00:08:08.320 | Mandarin three months after I've started to learn the language I could not do that with Spanish
00:08:13.600 | now this does not mean I'm going to say universally therefore Mandarin is easier than Spanish
00:08:19.120 | obviously not it is the context of I was a more confident person I had a lot better motivation
00:08:27.120 | with Spanish I didn't have great motivation at the start I didn't really know why did I want
00:08:31.760 | to learn Spanish so I was putting the effort in in a very inconsistent way whereas with Mandarin I
00:08:39.360 | knew I want to travel China I want to take a train 2,000 kilometers deep into the country
00:08:45.440 | I want to make a video of me getting a kung fu lesson in a village with a kung fu master all
00:08:51.760 | these dreams that I managed to make come true I had these in mind and that made Mandarin easier
00:08:58.960 | so when I talk to people and I see they've decided they want to learn a particular language
00:09:06.640 | and it has real genuine significance in their life like their family background is there
00:09:12.720 | or they have a love interest in the country they want to move in with or whatever it may be
00:09:18.560 | that is their passion and that is going to make that language significantly more approachable
00:09:24.800 | because they have huge motivation to learn it so the fact that other languages are easier or harder
00:09:31.040 | is insignificant because they aren't going to be easier if you don't care about them so whatever
00:09:37.760 | language is the most important in your life that is the easiest language because that's the one
00:09:43.600 | you're going to be able to get momentum to learn