I personally have found that passive listening is great for confidence. Cuz if you listen to a podcast when you can't understand anything, and then listen to the same podcast 4 or 5 months later and see how much more you understand. Also, just with everything else, it's not as useful in the beginning, but later on at a B1 lvl it help so much.
That's true! I used to learn to Kontra K a lot. He's a German rapper. Nothing was better than to listen to him a few years later and see that I was making progress
People don't want to accept the fact that you can't learn a language "FAST" unless that's all you do. We have 365 days in a year. You'd need to learn (and remember) 10 words a day to get anywhere near intermediate. Let's not forget, you need to repeat the words you learn so as to not forget them. Be patient guys !
That's such an old fashion thinking. Just learn anki cards! I learned Spanish Portuguese and French in just 2,5 years and it was just a hobby (I graduated from Law School and language learning wasn`t my main focus). I'm not a genius anybody can do this, just learn vocabulary everyday (20-30 minutes a day is more than sufficient) and just don't give up!
And it's even more with a language like Mandarin where not only do you have to remember how to say a word, but the character for it. Han characters are like an ancient game of charades where the writer refuses to give you anything but the absolute bare minimum to figure out the meaning and the "sounds like" part doesn't sound like it anymore bc it was written a couple thousand years ago and the pronunciation changed... There was some logic, but it's been such a long time that now there is no other way than to memorize all 3000 basic characters. Best you can do is use all the mnemonic tricks you can so it doesn't take you 3 years. If you're really clever about it, it'll probably take you a year or so to get the absolute basics people graduating from high school are required to know...
This is so true I personally learned Vietnamese in a converstational way in just about 3 weeks I didn't even send much time, i just learned what i needed which at the time was going to the local market where i was living. I went there and ONLY used it, zero english After the first week i was in and out the market in full Vietnamese with few tone errors by the end of the month..i was talking to the security guy about who the single and cute girls were
Pimsleur teaches you around 1200-1500 words in 5 months and those are actually banged into your long term memory. Doing 10 words a day with it and supplementing last 2 months with assimil will land you a vocabulary of around 3500-4000 words with good speaking and listening skills in 5 months. That’s a very good result. Have tried this myself and have no issues talking to Russians or watching their shows. A couple times a week I find myself not knowing a word and that’s okay. No grammar book, no tutor, no fancy app. If you study languages in college class format, getting here will take years. Either pick an audio program to start with, or go live in a country or your target language. There is no substitute for active conversation in a language. Pimsleur does deliver it well.
Learning a language “fast” or “knowing it” quick really sets people up for disappointment. Sort of like “losing weight fast,” not really possible and if you do it’s quite overwhelming and almost always short term. It’s a process and you gotta be patient with yourself. If you put in the work you will eventually be know, but it takes time. Yeah, process can be quicker if you dedicate a lot of time, but you won’t be fluent in a day or a week. Passive listening has its place, but you gotta do more than that. I’ve been studying languages and though my French is likely my best, I am still not fluent. It takes time.
To be fair its all possible, it is just the probem people hopefully wish but take less action You can lose weight REAL fast drop your calories pretty much go Vegan and do 400 push ups a day I sh** you not you will drop weight pretty fast unless your 400+ lbs obviously this is a different case Language is the same, immerision is the secret to fast learning, but MOST get stuck in grammar books or yourtrube videos without just using it.
@@EndlessTravelsI don’t think just going vegan will make someone thin. Sure, it will significantly help but if you’re eating the same amount of calories as before going vegan, you won’t lose weight. I 100% agree with immersion though.
What most people fail to realise is that the benefits of passive listening is that you aquire the patterns of the language intuitively on a subconscious level while using up no extra time. I do it while brushing my teeth, working on out, mediating, walking, on transport etc. It's better than playing games, listening to my native language or humming to myself.
I think passive learning like listening to music in your target language while cleaning/working out/ walking when you would otherwise not be studying is great for improving
I think passive listening is good to some extent. It’s not gonna help you with vocab but getting used to the language is important. Learning how they break off sentences is important. It’s also good for your subconscious.
People underestimate how hard it is to start from 0. I only started improving a lot with my first foreign language when I was trying to learn around 25 words a day and dedicating time every single day to vocabulary review. My experience is that even consistent, hard work leads to slow progress. Sometimes I wonder if some youtubers exaggerate their levels because understanding movies after a few months sounds really unlikely to me…
I watched one of his video. In the video, he memorize sentences perfectly including intonation, pronunciation, and everything. He totally copied Japanese speakers sentences. I don't know he does it all the time, but he doesn't do only passive listening. Especially he is talking about pitch accent. If you want to get it, you need to copy native speaker's sentences.
Out of the three immersion / Anki based learning approaches, AJATT is by far the best. If you do it right, you could expect fluency in roughly a year and a half (For Japanese at least, I’m sure it varies depending on the language :) )
It’s weird. I used to swear by passive listening. I’m sure it was key to my learning German and Spanish as well as I did. But it didn’t seem to help me at all with Japanese. Of course it was just one activity I did including reading, reading grammar explanations, and memorizing vocabulary (no SRS then though). But passive listening to Asian languages almost feels like a waste of time. I’m much more dependent on memorization, real conversations, and classroom or tutoring. You really have to check out -all- the advice on RU-vid and elsewhere and try everything yourself personally to see what works for you and the language you’re studying.
I think if English is your first language, passive listening to other Romance languages is helpful because of shared cognates and vocabulary. Take the word ‘police’ in English. It’s ‘polizia’ in Italian and ‘policia’ in Spanish. The problem is Asian languages and European languages have two entirely different origin roots (Latin for Europe and Eastern symbolic languages). By that logic a Chinese person might pick up Korean a lot faster than French
I think learning 5 words for a few months will help "get you into" native content doesn't mean what you think it does. I think it means its a great step to start listening to native content. It doesn't mean that you will understand it all. 5 common words a day over 90 days is 450 words. If you learn that many of the most common words it will definitely help you a lot when you start wanting to try and listen / read native content
Yeah, I guess you be able to understand a percentage of native content. I am just worried that that percentage is not very high. When I was learning German, even with 10-12 words a day, for the entirety of the first two years, I could pick out individual words and understand a percentage of what I was watching, but I didn't understand most phrases, so it was pretty boring because I couldn't concentrate on the storyline, so I would move on from it really quickly. If your experience is different, I respect that, and by all means, keep doing that. I am just saying 5 words a day has not worked for me to start dabbling in native content in a few months
Hmm, I don't think 60 words a day is realistic 😅at least I personally use them in a way that you absolutely dont move on from your current cards until you know the full pronunciation, every translation, and writing of that word, and with Chinese, 30 flashcards for example will take me a literal 90 minutes or more. If you see the stuff that matt vs japan had done, 3-5hrs a day in flashcards is crazy. But most beginners in language learning should focus on consistency over everything else, and if 5 words a day if going you can handle especially in the beginning, then you should do that. I personally only do a limited amount of cards and then go and use subtitled videos and reading to hear or see those words in their different forms and contexts.
I agree. With my schedule, and I think most people's, it's unrealistic to learn 60 words a day, but in my experience it's also unrealistic to learn 5 words a day and expect to understand a language in a few months
I'm going through a Latin textbook at a pace where I learn 100 to 165 words per week, which amounts to about 14 to 23 words per day. I've witnessed people acquire basic fluency with this method in about three months, and I think I'm very much on my way there. I know it's an ancient language, but I think the comparison still stands, because there's not much reason not to treat ancient languages much like any living language in terms of learning. Fluency is fluency, and there is living spoken culture around natively "dead" languages.
Yeah. It really depends with the familiarity that you have with the language. 14 words a day for 2 years worked for me to comprehend most content in German, so 14-23 words a day, sound really good to me
Watching this video many stuffs in my head now. Some people 🔎 methods and tips and tools for learn fast, but I 🤔 why ? Why, people want to learn fast? Really I don't know, I thought that is good you study constantly and have fun and like your progress ...but some people want to faster... Congratulations for your video.
I'm only think if you want to understand Native Speaker you need a lot of words for I'm learning French and Italian at the same time i know like 6000 words in each one i can understand pocasts but i can to movies and videos i think its harder because native Speakers speaks with informal speech that i'm still don't understand.
Comprehensible input is going to be really good. Find youtube channels in german that draw pictures and act out what's going on so you can slowly pick up vocabulary. I've been doing this for about 4 months and it's working!
my way of passive listening is either listening to music or watching videos that i find interesting in my target language. this puts me in the language and i also catch new words that i'm learning, as well as short phrases that people say. The Main Thing I Get from Listening Is Pronunciation in different voices, and when i'm trying to think about how a word is pronounced, my brain remembers the word being pronounced in the native speakers voice in the videos
You are the best :D do you have any resources that you recommend for learning Portugese? i have just started to write flashcards of 1500 words but i don’t really know how to continue :(
Thank you! I used channels like "Minha História em Animação" and the series "3%" on Netflix. I didn't use a textbook for grammar, but you can check out conjugator reverso to learn some verb conjugations
@@KarenVanessaBuitrago thank you so much! Keep doing what you are doing! If you do videos where you visit for example a german retaurant or so and you show your skills, that would be so cool or new challenges :D wish you all the best
Mira el canal de matt vs japan, ahi tiene explicado que efecto tiene todo tipo de listening, el pasivo se lo tendria que usar cuando no se puede estar activamente dandole toda tu atencion, porque obviamente no siempre se puede, en mi experiencia siento que ayuda, aumenta mi comprension de oido, escuchar algo es mucho mejor que no escuchar nada cuando estas con otras tareas como ejercitandote.
I used to be a big fan of Ikenna and started learning Spanish cos I thought I could do it on 6 months. 6 months later, I was still learning basics. Quite discouraging for learners who want to learn a language well
Que opinas de los vídeos de Steve Kauffman? O de Lydia Machova?. Ellos también dan sus ideas y son diferentes. Estaría bien que hicieras un vídeo hablando de esos métodos. Linda tarde, greetings from Mexico
Passive listening got to be the stupidest advice I've ever heard. The only thing that's gonna help is your accent maybe but you won't some how subliminally just learn new words while doing something else. I've been passively listening to Spanish music for 3-4 years it literally hasn't taught me shit unless i take the time to look up the lyrics and study the song. A better thing to do is talk to yourself out loud or in your mind in your target language while doing something else.
learning language through lyrics, in my opinion, is the worst thing to do. no musician write lyrics 100% grammatically correct and majority of times sentences do not even make sense :D All the languages I have learned, have lyrics in the most confusing meaning ever.
It reminds me of the idea where people truly believed, they could listen to a language passively while they were asleep and it would go straight to their subconscious. Next morning, they are fluent speakers.
People like Ikenna truly demotivate a lot of people. I like people like you or Lindsey who truly put time and effort into language learning. I dislike people who have made it into competition and truly never show REAL process from zero to B1 level of language. They kind of make it into a show. A lot of them actually have learned some of those languages before so their "process" is obviously quick if you know it. It is impossible to become fluent in chinese or arabic (if you are english speaker and don't speak any other language) overnight or in 3 days or 3 months, if you have to learn alphabet along with tones, words and grammar. it's just common sense. It happens faster for people who have experience with certain language's grammar or alphabet before. Language learning is all about - finding the right technique, time and practice. As you said - write as much as possible but you can not become fluent in a language if you do not have constant communication with a native who will help you. If I am not mistaken then Xiaomi (the guy from NYC) learned chinese mandardin for 10 years to truly master it. Even still he says he is not completely fluent, even though his wife is chinese, yet some dudes say "get fluent in chinese in 3 months" LOL
Xiaoma also lived in China for over a year and went there more than once. RU-vid polyglots know their audience, and attempt to build the most by doing things like clickbait titles or outrageous numbers of languages. Many in the audience will believe it. I pointe out multiple times, that Xiaoma in his clickbait title of how he became fluent in Spanish in 20 days, was complete nonsense. Yet, there were people that actually believed he achieved what was in the title.
Just came from a video of his after liking a commenter with a similar stance as yours. I'm trying to learn Spanish seriously and hearing Ikenna say that anyone can learn a language in 6-12 months with the proper motivation immediately stood out as a sweeping generalization for learners. We don't all absorb new information at the same pace, so I got the heck out of there in hopes that someone else saw this as well. I think I'll take a page from this video and do things gradually like I'd originally planned and get actual results instead of making it a huge race to the finish line.
Ikenna is not fluent in any other language, but English. He even stated his language learning is NOT to get a job. Obvious reason, his levels are not high enough to work in an environment if he had deal with people who only speak the languages he claims to speak himself. Outside of English of course. If it is just for fun and recreational, then his advice is okay.
@@lsky1207 I stated IKENNA is NOT learning languages to get a job and his levels are not high enough to work in an environment needed to deal with people. I did not state fluency is by having enough vocabulary to get a job. If you are unaware different jobs have different criteria for language levels. I can state without doubt, that Ikenna is not at a level to give Mandarin lectures at a university. Check the C.E.F.R. list of proficiency. Ikenna is not even B2 level in his languages to go to post secondary. Except English.
