📲 The app I use to learn languages: bit.ly/3PTUrCT 🆓 My 10 FREE secrets to language learning: bit.ly/4aURv1f ❓Have you ever struggled to stay engaged with a language? Let me know in the comments!
I like how you talk about reviewing older material. When I get discouraged and burnt out, I go back to review readings from a few months ago and marvel at how easy it is to read. I just have to remind myself that each new chapter's reading will be just as difficult when first learned, but will become similarly easy in a few months. I just have to keep at it.
The biggest advantage that I did, was watching series I like and knew since childhood in the target language. If you watch a random series you get bored and frustrated it will not bear fruit. Watch a childhood series in your target language and your hearing will extremely advance!
I’m 17, live in America, and about to live in Germany for 2 years for an LDS mission. I have zero foreign language experience but I’ve always wanted to speak a second language. I’m glad I found your channel, it’s helped me prepare a lot!
Listen to the Book of Mormon in German while following along in English. You will learn quickly once you get to the MTC regardless, but the Book of Mormon is always helpful. :). Good Luck. :D
It blows my mind when I see Mormons learn a language for their mission. I've seen white British dudes on the huge street in my town just seamlessly flip into Chinese when they see a Chinese dude. Very impressive.
Your videos are always so interesting... I am a Brazilian Portuguese teacher, and I see the importance of engagement on my student's learning. I try to keep them engaged in everything we do, in meaningful conversations, in grammar aspects and in vocabulary, especially by showing them natural contexts of use. I see the difference it makes, because they always say "This was helpful" or "This will be useful", even when I think it was a "boring" class. I will surely keep what you said in mind when I prepare my classes. Best wishes!
Fascinating presentation. Thank you. What I found fascinating was where your learning preferences differ from my learning preferences, which highlights the very important topic that each learner is unique and should employ techniques suited to his specific learning style. Where we agree: I think *live* conversations with native speakers, spontaneous, unrehearsed, and in the wild are among the very best learning experiences. If always learn so much and if I make a mistake I never forget. Likewise I *absolutely hate* faux conversations in a classroom environment with other beginners. Never works for me. Where we differ: I love grammar. I think there are times a good understanding of grammar can boost progress significantly. And testing: we agree and disagree. I hate testing for measurement or grading. But I *love* testing for a *self-check* and for *solidifying* my comprehension. In the end we agree on some major points: being engaged in the material is powerful and input input input. Thank you!
Always happy to listen to you explain the psychology of language learning. I am currently in Montreal to complete my diploma in special care counseling, et je dois atteindre le niveau 7 en français d'ici Mai 2025. I never dug the concept of a critical period, which I was also taught about in my course. I'm from India. Even though our whole schooling is English there, we don't speak and thus learn English that well until we "have to use" it. Thanks a lot! You're of big help in my 3rd language acquisition - Le français👾! (And Quebecoise - which will be my 4th language haha).
For me one of the engaging ways to improve prononciation and learn few words in the process is learning songs. It s a very strong emotional link with the language I want to learn even if for now I can only understand few words. It s a fun way to learn beside grammar and leasons and an opportinity to write down the lyrics with a new alphabet.
Steve. Minor polyglot here (English, Spanish, Italian, Finnish). I finally got onto LingQ. It's very good. So far, I have only tested Finnish, which I speak at intermediate level. I can confirm that the graded Finnish levels are well designed and with native speakers. I haven't tried other languages yet, but dying to try French. Best, Jeff
The language comes not by learning or whatever but via the mechanism of emotiation. Emotions + associations. When those to things about the unknown and new words appear, the language comes. And it is the only way, as I can guess.
Funny enough I stumbled across this video just after I made my own language learning video, this was awesome. I absolutely loved the graphics you used! Wonderful tips on engagement. Thanks for sharing 🙂
In my short language learning journey I have found flash cards to make words stick with a vague english meaning association, but the process is so unbelievably uninteresting I'm looking to move onto learning from immersion and interesting content. I think it was a useful way to begin immersing and know what some percentage of words mean without having to look up every single one. I used a deck of the 1500 most frequent words and I got through about 6-700 of them so far.
Do flash cards at the beginning and then totally and completely immerse yourself into the language without any cards until you get really fluent in the language, only then you can start using cards back for more advanced words, terminologies, concepts etc. My second language is Russian and I’d acquired it without any cards at all just by sheer immersion and now I’m bettering my English as my third language. I used to do flash cards at the begging of my English journey back in the days then I’d just gave up and completely immersed myself by doing listening and reading only and now I’ve started writing new words and sentences to my notebook from the books just to do some writing and just for the sake of writing ‘cause I believe that physically writing something down with your hand helps your to remember them even more but I rarely review them ‘cause I don’t wanna make a chore out of it.
Hugely agree with the annecdote regarding low frequency words being acquired through context vs repetition. Flashcards used to work so well for me but now my lingq count is past 10k they dont work nearly as well.
It's beginning to dawn on me how few people read to their children. I'll bet it's a huge factor on how well children do in school.. and very likely how well they learn language, including foreign languages!
Always very encouraging. It is interesting that learning a language doesn't have to be about how fast you pick it up. The important thing is it becomes yours.
Thanks You i don't dedicated much time, i'm learn like 13 days aproximate , and the more difficult of the english for me is use phrasal verbs , i've mistake but I don't afraid to speak or write , that make more easy acquire much more vocabulary, also I see something and associate for not mix or use my native idiom like conection or translation but conect directly whit the experience , sorry for My mistake I wait that You understand me
Regarding the phrasal verbs, you will not want to memorize each one, just try to perceive by the context their meaning, this way you will evolve faster. There is no rule behind the meaning of them so you must keep in touch with the language for better comprehension.
@@gabrielbarbosa4091 yeah but It a little dificult because only one have diferent meaning in diferent context but recently start to learn I wait can learn , in fact was a little difficult understand all the text but i do the better that can , I wait don't have mistake
Couldn't agree more with the last point. I accidentally aquired a fair amount of German only because I had a crush on the singer of a German rock band. Then the singer switched to English in his songs and in interviews and let me no other choice than learning English from then on. Unfortunately as you grow older you lose the ability to fall in love that easily XD
Very insightful presentation! I use most of these ideas in my teaching and I absolutely agree that engagement in meaningful contexts regarding all skills. I follow what's fun for my students whenever I can :))
this is very accurate. i noticed when i learn many languages, that at first few encounters, i slowly starts to react to some word hints , and until a day it slips out of my mouth and by then its mine. this bulk learning, from obscure to clear is much much more effective than try hard on specific set of vocabs
My process of learning Brazilian Portuguese right now is the following - I'm a beginner. I don't if it is right or wrong, but it is a nice, slow and interesting way for me to engage with the language. Firstly, I watch content that is appealing to me. So videos about teaching something like those from Manuel do Mundo, and content like gamers, try not to laughs, etc. if im interested in Badgers, I look for content about them in my TL. Secondly, I add all of the songs into a playlist so I can listen to my hearts content. Sounds awesome = added. Thirdly, when watching a video and a word feels like it is really important, as if the word "stands out" from all the others, I try and guess the meaning. After that, I check in a dictionary or translation app for it's meaning. This is how I acquired that "agora" means "now", and "hoje" means "today". I guessed that "agora" meant "today" initially . Fourthly, if an interesting video pops up about some grammatical piece, like forming questions, I watch it and practice in the videos comments. Today, I found a video about "que", "o que" and "qual" by Street Smart Brazilian Portuguese. I practiced them in the comment section and the teacher taught me to use "ser" for "hoje"! So, instead of "Que dia está hoje?", we use "Que dia é hoje?". Related to the last, I practice writing Portuguese sentences using what I already now. Then, I try to speak aloud my sentences.
I agree that it needs to be a subject that the learner is interested in, I don't mind doing some online exercises to see how verbs are conjugated and how the structure of the grammer in sentences works.
Well spoken and reflects and enhances my limited insights into learning new languages. Good video for those interested in increasing new language learning capabilities.
Totally agree with you. Not only it's not enough, but it's actually boring. That's why, only 15min of committed daily grammar routine (in the morning preferable) is enough for you to become great at the language. The rest of the day, learn from really enjoyable things 😊
It helps a bit, but just know that people don't talk like that in real life. The majority of the language in anime is very informal/strange for daily speech.
Thanks, Steve, I really like LingQ, but there is small suggestion if the playlist could have ⏱️ timer function? Because we can listen to it while going to sleep and without worry whether it is playing the whole night
Здравствуйте Стив, насколько я поняла Вы не запоминаете отдельные слова. То есть, Вы просто слушаете и читаете на изучаемом языке интересную для Вас на тот момент тему, верно?
My question is: how to engage with a language when we are starting from scratch, from the very begining, without relying,at least at first, on text books to learn the basics of the target language?
I feel i´m passing the beginner level, just for context, and I've found one of my 'problems' I´m facing now is that I´m only engaged with horror or terror stories. It´s not that it´s difficult to find that type of material, obviously. It´s just I'm starting to feel that my vocabulary is very 'specialized'. I can tell many advanced level parts of a house, for example, but I barely can say any animal. So I hope my interest will get wider to help my vocabulary growth. On a side note, I hated those type of excercises they ask you to do in a language test where you have to pretend the thing they tell you to talk about is something you cared about. It's sort like a barrier for me and it takes me a lot of effort to really showcase my abilities in that language when they ask me about 'my perfect house' or 'hat I did last holidays', things like that I never ever thought about before sitting there in the exam. But, I kinda understand why they do that and don´t let the student talk about whatever they want instead.
That wine experiment made me think...many Spanish-speaking countries (Spain, Chile, Argentina) produce wine, what would happen if they played music in Spanish? Which wine would they buy? Will it be according to genre (like tango makes people buy Argentinian wine)?
Within my roughly 2 years and 4 months of learning Portuguese (br) I have only spoken for about an hour. Total 😅 I would like to speak more.. wasn't really an option though. Hopefully soon I'll be able to speak more because I noticed from the first time I spoke to the 2nd I understood so much better and even spoke slightly better. And then the 3rd time was even better of course. So If I was able to speak for hours and hours I think I'd easily be b2 right now. But there's so many difficult things and so much to learn since it is my first language. Just glad I was able to find LingQ about 9 months ago
Olha, eu sou timido mas fluente em português (br), to estudando Ingles ha 1 ano e 4 meses, tenho 17 anos, se quiser conversar... Well, I'm shy but fluent in portugues br (my mother tongue). I have been studying English for about 1 year and 4 months. I'm 17, if you wish talking...
@@loboguarana709 poss entender sem a tradução, mas obrigado 😂 eu também sou muito tímido.. mas eu adoraria conversar contigo. Onde você gostaria que eu entrasse em contato com você
As a late-diagnosed autistic, languages are hard bc I just hate small talk, no interest in talking about family/kids and the other basic intro speech of NT's, and a lag in understanding what responses are expected based on non-verbal communication. Any tips for neurodivergents? I do have an extreme and limited interest in ancient texts, so that's why i have to study a foreign language
Hello Steve! Could in q proper moment share the books you'd read to learn french - If you had did? I noticed that, when I read a book I was able to assimilate easily the words in there proper contexts.
yea i agree with this but i am learning a few rare languages like Albanian and there just isn't much interesting media in that language its mostly just stuff that appeals to a lot of people but not really people like. me its all either reality shows or soap operas or sports. it kind of feels like media from my own country in the 90s that i was trying to get away from when i started learning English. but they haven't really embraced the internet much some smaller languages used the internet to make it so they can make more media for cheap and now they can compete with the bigger countries. while other just ignore it and the local media is permanently stuck in the year 2000 while the young people get immersed in English speaking culture or sometimes French or other languages. another thing i noticed that as i get better at languages i start to dislike certain content i enjoyed at first just because i misunderstood it. like there was this youtube channel from Rwanda making news videos in Kinyarwanda. but maybe they just changed recently but i realised their videos about international topics are just Russian Chinese and even north Korean propaganda. in languages like Russian and Chinese i can just find stuff made outside of the country or stuff that isn't political or controversial. and people may ask why i am learning these smaller languages i often meet Albanian people irl and Rwandan people too. the Rwandan population is still growing too .
I’m guessing that, in addition to the physiological issue of changing brain functions as we get older, we have also by then spent quite a lot of our time (professionally, in school, etc.) reading stuff that doesn’t necessarily interest us and we are DONE. 😂
I've lived in Japan for almost 9 years and my Japanese is still, at best, caveman level. Your English far exceeds my Japanese, so you're not doing so bad.
@@Tsunkuotaku In my observation of immigrants to US I came to this conclusion. In the first TWO years those who don't become at least intermediate in English, they will NEVER go beyond the very beginner level. On another note, someone (adult) definitely can become near native in a year or two. But most adults are not willing to undergo the psychological stress associated with that. What stress? Stop using your native language (completely) and you will be very stressed for about 3-6 months. Then you acquire a second language and it becomes enjoyable rather than stressful.
I really can't find anything compelling or engaging at my level. I've tried all the podcasts and various levels of anime. I'm bored to tears and not understanding even 10% of it. And I have been studying for years. Ugh.
