Hello, everybody. This channel is dedicated to my greatest passion -- languages.
My name is Luca and I'm from Italy.
I've been studying languages for about 20 years and a few years ago I reached a very important conclusion: languages cannot be taught; they can only be learned. Once you realize that it totally changes your approach and you understand why the famous "language classes" have such a low success rate.
So I decided to share not only my passion for languages but also techniques for studying them, with optimism, passion, effective methods and experience. Learning a new language takes time but it's not difficult.
My mission is to help people understand that. If anyone tells you you that just knowing English is enough tell him "he who learns another language acquires another soul".
Entendí esto hace un año y medio cuando comencé con OIP y hoy, puedo hablar inglés, aún no fluidamente pero ya no estoy en donde comencé 😊😊 muchas gracias, Luca
I’m C1 English and wanna reach C2 in 8 months, and I’m leaning Portuguese: should I learn vocabulary in context by theme ? ( house - human body - work - nature - animals etc…) ??? Trying to reach C1 Portuguese in 12 months
The example of making vocabulary lists and always forgetting them is very telling. I think they help a little but only when used in conjunction with real life like reading books, talking to people, etc. If you spend 6 months memorizing vocabulary be it with Anki or a notebook you’ll barely have made any progress at all. But if you read lots of books for six months or talk to lots of people you’ll definitely have made progress. If you combine that with a little bit of vocabulary study I think you’ll be learning as fast as can be expected. I took a look at my Korean and with a few exceptions I think I’ve got the ratio upside down: 80% rote study mostly Anki and 20% reading and listening. It varies but the ratio wasn’t where it should be for sure. I fixed that and it’s helping I think but still very slow.
Fantastic and important content once again. You stand out among any other polyglot and language coach. The best language content by far. Thank you Luca
One of my problems is that I want to learn every single word that I don't know like you said on the video. And this is overwhelming me to the point that I procrastinate to watch or reading something . Because I think there's gonna be lot of words I don't understand. And I want to put everything on anki. I don't really know what's the right content for me.
If Luca makes his videos even more multilingual (like this one in the beginning) and reduces his/our reliance on English, I'll promise to watch his videos religiously :D Such a cool concept
Liebe Luca. Ich danke immer dir für deine Hilfe. Vor schon eine Woche habe ich meinen 3 Monate-Lernplan angefangen. Eigentlich lerne ich Deutsch seit 3 Monaten aber nach dem Lesen deines Buch habe ich diesen "3 Monate Plan" begonnen. Jeden Tag bevor zur Arbeit gehen lerne ich 1 Stunde mit meiner Podcastliste. Das heißt höre, lese und analysiere ich den Podcast des Tages. Also nach der ersten Woche fühle ich mich sehr wohl und immer super motiviert. Ich liebe diese Sprache! Dankeschön caro Luca per i tuoi consigli d'oro ma sopratutto per la tua umiltà. Viele Grüße aus der Französichen Schweiz ❤⚘🇨🇭🤟
Day two: It's amazing how you have an American accent. It's really cool and inspiring for those of us learning languages and trying to improve our pronunciation!
Turkish has many dozens of endings, and each ending affects the meaning. Each sound changes the sentence meaning. I got nowhere in Turkish until I found a course that taught a new ending every lesson (for more than 100 lessons). I added a lesson there daily to my normal study methods.
This is pretty much the only way I've ever gotten anywhere with Japanese. 30 min, 5 min off, 30 min, 5 min off. Reading very hard text, looking up every unknown word/grammar. Making sure I've parsed it properly etc.
Luca, I really enjoy your videos, but I find your materials a bit overpriced. Charging €48 for this 'book' seems excessive. While I'm glad you have supporters willing to pay, I don't believe it's a fair price.
Not only do I find you to be very inspiring for the polyglot in transition I am progressively becoming but I admire your calm and level-headedness in your responses to these comments. You love languages and astronomy among other things and we seem to have a few interests in common.
Alongside other polyglots such as Steve Kaufman, Laoshu, Richard Simcott, Olly Richards, DamonandJo and loki2504, you have been a great source of inspiration and motivation. I have yet to watch all your videos so guess what? I will. One video a day. Starting from the first one. These were the good old days, the inception of the polyglots. It was so positive and got me excited about the language learning journey. I'm grateful for these videos and look forward to going on a language learning adventure :)
I mostly use chatgpt to create flashcards . It take only 5 -10 minutes to create 10-1000 cards with details like word, meaning in native language, antonyms, synonyms, few examples etc. JUST give him the list word and say create a . CSV for given word with desired details and import it in anki. It just 5 minute work. And making flashcards manually can be boring but more you spend on a word easier you remember that cards. Its not waste of time at all. Flashcards and quizzes are best ways to remember and revise word.
First, you should try to find out what you want to do with a language. I would love to have compelling conversations in English, French, Italian, Spanish, but I live in monolingual Brazil and I'm not good at striking up conversations. So, my online attempts were not nice. It always starts with small talk and then it seems there's not much to talk about. So I just focused on reading and listening to those languages, and it's been great. With the current tools, you can start reading in a foreign language on a tablet in very little time. I am reading an ebook in Romanian (which I studied quite intensily for 3 months before that) and I can translate individual words, whole sentences or paragraphs. I do all of those at times. So, I read paragraph, then I translate it with Google translate. All of that without leaving the page. I read aloud very often. If I tire I can have the tts read the text to me. So, all of that I do with a few clicks. In all of history and until 10 years ago, you would have to rely on dictionaries and not be able to search for idioms while reading. It was cumbersome, expensive and tiring. Starting reading in a foreign language was like running a marathon. Nowadays, it is like jogging on the park. Couple that with watching movies and videos, and I get a kick out of learning languages. Back to what I said in the beginning, you have to know what you want to do with the language and learn the language for that objective. If reading is your thing, read, read, read, (while practing a bit the other skills ofc). If you hate reading in your language and just wants to speak the language, talk,talk, talk, and practice saying sentences and pronunciation on your own. It all seems quite obvious, but many people are led to believe they have to do the one "right thing", even if they hate it.
The embracing your inner Tarzan part reminds me about the concept of brevity, where you communicate with short and concise words as possible. In other words, ''less is more''. The idea of having to think in keywords and not having to think of a long sentence is a perfect way of building up your speaking and communication skills as well. For example, if I were to say ''I like to learn Spanish'' I could probably say ''Yo quiero aprender español''. This one might be grammatically incorrect, but it didn't need to be, because the idea is communication, not perfection.
I watched this video a few months ago. At that time I couldn't understand it without captions. Now I'm watching it for the second time, I can understand all of it without any captions. Keep going!
*⭐️ This is my tip for anyone wanting to effectively study for a vocabulary test. ⭐️* I had a vocab quiz/test with ~30 mostly new, unknown words and I had 1 week to study the words. Did I study the entire week? No. 😭 However, I only studied about 10-15 minutes on the actual DAY that we had the vocabulary test/quiz (mind you, I did not know the definition of 95% of the words prior to studying)! I scored a 90% with 36/40 which I’d consider amazing considering how little I even practiced or studied. What I did to memorize the vocabulary was to first go through the list of words we would be tested on and tried to make connections on what words sound similar but also had the same meaning. I wrote down two synonyms for each word. These were the words that I already knew I didn’t have to study as much because of how much more memorable they were. When I didn’t know the definition of words and was stuck, I highlighted them and made connections to those words in one way or another! For instance: One word was “pilant” which means easily influenced or flexible. A connection I made is that the first three letters of pilant sound like “pilot,” which I then made a phrase where “pilots must have a FLEXIBLE schedule.” Another example was “ebullient” which means cheerful. With ebullient, I noticed that it sounded like “bully” so I made the connection that ebullient is someone OPPOSITE of a bully! I did this for all of the words I didn’t know any synonyms or words that sounded similar and studied them more rigorously. This may not work for everyone, but it certainly pays off to try.
