Q&A with Steve Kaufmann: 1 million subscriber edition

Q&A with Steve Kaufmann: 1 million subscriber edition

I’m just kind of curious about all this technology and, and how we can make these you know, videocasts so easily. So this is a trial. I’m not quite sure how it’s all going to work out. It’s test number one and we’ll see what happens.

So I received my gold plaque from YouTube for 1 million subscribers. And as promised, I am going to answer as many of the questions that I received as possible. I have bunched them into different groups just to provide some background. I’ve been at the, this YouTube channel of mine, LingoSteve, since 2007, I

Believe, 2003, I wrote this book, The Linguist, Personal Guide to Language Learning, and at that time I had nine languages in my career as a diplomat and as a I’m a forest industry executive. I described how I learned these languages and why they were useful to me.

Then in the last 20 years in my involvement with LingQ and with my YouTube channel here, I have actually learned another 11 languages to varying degrees. And I’ve never been so involved with this whole issue of language learning. And I discussed this at my channel.

So, having said that, let’s move to the questions. The first category is listening and reading. You know, if you follow me on this channel, that I consider input. As Stephen Krashen says, listening and reading using comprehensible and compelling input is how we learn languages. So questions. One. Steve.

Some research says that reading paper books is more beneficial. So I prefer paper books, if I know enough words in the language, if there’s three or four words on a per page that I don’t understand, I’m still comfortable reading a paper book.

Anything more than that, I prefer to be into a digital environment. I can import that, you know, an ebook into LingQ, I can find the audio book. And so I’m trying to acquire words. It’s a different process than just reading, but my goal eventually

It is to read a paper book and I think it’s more beneficial and more pleasant and fewer distractions. Two, what are your thoughts about watching videos in the target language with English subs or target language subs? So watching video on YouTube and elsewhere with English subs, in my

Case, because that’s my native language. It’s something that I do I import videos from MTV Lebanon, Sade After Dinner in Arabic, and I go through them in sentence mode and I can see in the case of Sade After Dinner, I can actually see the English subtitles.

I hear the language, I see the subtitles. It’s a very useful thing when you’re at an early stage in the language. When you become more advanced, you don’t need the subtitles, but in order to read the target language or listen to the target language and actually read the subtitles in the target language.

It’s not something that I’ve ever done. I think it would be difficult. It may be beneficial. I just don’t do it. I’m either relying on English subtitles or I’m totally relying on what I hear. Three, what is the best way to teach English as a second language in a classroom setting?

As Manfred Spitzer said, we learn languages in our brains. So the task, in my opinion, of the language teacher is to motivate the learner. It’s. It’s difficult because the kids aren’t that motivated all the time, but the number one task is to somehow make them motivate.

You can’t force the language in them, but if you can get them to do a lot of listening and reading in class or on their own, if you can make the language interesting to them, and that’s the challenge of a teacher, and I’m

Not in Cambodia and I don’t know how that is done, but to me They’re going to learn through input, primarily. They’re going to learn if they find things of interest to listen to, and if you can motivate them. And I think a classroom is a great place to motivate, to stimulate,

To encourage, to support. So lots of luck to you. Four. Is it better for us to know every word or sentence when practicing listening? Blah, blah, blah. So this comes up all the time. No, don’t try to nail things down. Things will remain hard to understand. You’ll listen to the same.

Portion over and over again, you still won’t understand it. You just have to keep going. Be prepared to move on when you understand 50, 60, 70%. I think the sign of a good language learner is the willingness to accept uncertainty, fuzziness, things not being clear.

And so this, the sort of key takeaway here from the listening and reading section is just relax, listen, read, and learn. Next section, speaking, any correlation between speaking early as a baby? And learning a second language, theoretically, if you’re exposed to

Another language, as a child, you are more open to new sounds, new structures, however, it’s not a condition. And I was at a polyglot conference in Montreal, and I asked an audience of 600 people, how many of them grew up in a multilingual environment?

Very few hands were raised, so you don’t need it, but it certainly, I think, helps. And there’s evidence, too, that Swedish kids that hear You know, English language television in English, they start, you know, their schooling in English and they do much, much better because they’ve heard so much of the language pronunciation.

Someone noticed that I had in previous videos going back many, many years talked about what specific things I did to improve my pronunciation in Mandarin, Chinese, and French. So the emphasis is still on listening in the case of Mandarin, Edison to Xiangsheng, which is these comic dialogues where. The intonation is exaggerated.

I consider intonation to be important. If you can take sentences, listen to them, try to sort of follow along or repeat what you heard with an emphasis on intonation, that’s going to improve your pronunciation. And second of all, sounds that are specific to that language, which are

Difficult for you because you don’t have them in your language, like yu in French, or I worked very hard on que the yue sound in, in Mandarin Chinese. You have to work on those sounds. However, the key thing is when you go to speak, don’t worry about it.

Practice whatever you want, but when you go to speak, whatever your pronunciation is, it’s good enough. Relax. Next question is, would you consider making videos, this sort of level up video where you go up to people and speak to them in their language and surprise them? I don’t like doing that because.

I don’t want to surprise them. I don’t want to take their video without having their permission. Once you ask them for their permission, it becomes a bit of an artificial situation. So no, I don’t do those. How are your output sessions? Well, in a language where the writing system is difficult, I have

Read with my tutor, like in Arabic or Persian, or answered questions from the mini stories where I know the question, I know the answer. And so I can sort of get into some form of communicating in the language and gradually we drift to normal conversations.

The bulk of my Online discussions are just plain conversations. I’ll get into later on what I’m now doing with my Arabic tutor where there’s a little more of a grammar component. So on this whole subject of speaking and pronunciation, again, to me,

The takeaway is have no fear, make mistakes, just go for it. Next section, vocabulary and grammar. So this person says difficulty remembering words. I can’t express my thoughts. Perfectly normal. It doesn’t mean that those words aren’t in your memory. It’s just that you haven’t had enough practice at recalling them.

And very often it’s a matter, too, of being in specific situations. So, you may know the words, but you haven’t been in that situation before. There’s a certain amount of tension. You struggle to find the word. But the second or the third time you’re in that situation, you’ll start to find those words.

It’s perfectly normal. Don’t worry about it. Continue with your input activity and just expose yourself to these conversation opportunities. And however well you do, it’s all good for you. A person has to pass an exam and so they like the input and everything else, but should they change their strategy for the exam?

Well, for sure, get a hold of previous, you know, exam copies. You have to understand how that exam is structured. You should time yourself so that you’ll be able to finish the exam. Practice writing the exam. All of those things are good. But typically, most of these English language exams are focused on

Vocabulary and being able to have a sense for what’s correct grammatically. You will develop that best through massive input, listening and reading. So you’ll naturally know what’s correct. And you’ll naturally know what the words mean. Some focusing in on grammar can be helpful, but it’s a small part.

The major part of it is to massively continue with your. Input based activities is at least a bit of grammar necessary at some point. And that ties into the fourth question with your approach. Don’t spend too much time on grammar. And does that work for Arabic, which has a complicated grammar?

Well, other languages have complicated grammar, Slavic languages. For example, my experience has been that I need to get the language in me. So the focus initially is on input and hearing the language and reading the language and getting a sense of the language and getting

The brain used to trying to form patterns and trying to understand how the language works and so forth. However, at some point later on, it is useful to go back in and sort of look at some of the grammar points when these grammar explanations refer to things that you’re already familiar with.

And so I’m doing that in Arabic right now. But it’s still a small part of my activity. The bulk of my activity is listening, reading, and speaking with my online tutor. How much of that sticks, I don’t know. It’s part of my overall exposure to the language.

So the takeaway from vocabulary and grammar is be patient. Don’t be hard on yourself. You will continue to make mistakes for quite a long time. Next section, time management. How many hours a day did you spend when you first learned Chinese and Japanese in order to become fluent?

Chinese was different from Japanese in my case. Chinese, I was a full time government language student paid by the government to learn Chinese. I went at it three hours a day, one on one with a teacher, five hours a day at home reading, listening, writing, learning characters.

So that was my full time job. Japanese, I learned entirely on my own. So I was in Japan, surrounded by the language. I did a lot of listening and reading. One thing that was common to both, I would scour the bookstores looking for readers with vocabulary lists behind each chapter.

Because in those days, we didn’t have the technology that we have today. Today, I can find anything I want on the internet. I can read with online dictionaries. I can bring any e book or any text or YouTube video or Netflix.

Bring it into LingQ and learn from it and look up the words and phrases. So the technology has advanced. So technology has changed, but the learning process hasn’t changed. And in terms of the amount of time that I spent, I spent nine to 10 months with Chinese to reach a very high level.

Whereas with Japanese, it took me longer because I was, you know, at that time, by then I had a family and I was working in English and so on and so on. But the process was the same. How many hours of comprehensible input should you have before starting speaking?

There is no hard and fast rule, and I don’t go by how many hours. I go by how many words do I know, the way we count them at LingQ. And typically I’ve found that I need five or ten thousand known words before

I can have a meaningful I’m going to be doing a session with an online tutor. That means that I can kind of start to understand what they’re saying and I can start to say things. Otherwise it’s pointless to be there and just kind of go round and round

In circles saying, how are you? Is it raining? You know, very limited conversation. When I get on with my tutor, I want to very quickly go into meaningful conversations. And I find that at a minimum you need five or 10, 000 known words, passive vocabulary on LingQ.

So it’s not a question of how long. It’s a question of. Level of vocabulary and how long it takes you to get there is going to depend on many factors. Next question. Have you noticed that a short break after studying hard and if

You leave the language and you come back to it, you’ve improved? Yes, I’ve said that many times. I’ve called that the period of benign neglect. You leave the language, you go off and do another language or you simply don’t do much with the language and you come back to that first language.

You may have slipped a bit, but by and large, though, you’re further ahead than you were. The language, for whatever strange reason, continues to gestate in your brain. And a number of people have heard me say that, and they say, yes, I agree.

So, the takeaway with this whole time management section here is, you know, don’t begrudge yourself the time. Find the time. 10 minutes here, half an hour there. Continue doing it. Take a break occasionally if you want, you will be rewarded. This is the second to last section, the method.

Do you think it’s at least doable to learn any languages the way children do? By and large, the process is the same. It’s a matter of a lot of input and the brain is starting to create patterns. Some patterns are wrong and get corrected through exposure or

Through someone correcting you, but mostly through exposure. But the child typically has fewer inhibitions. The adult likes to come across as intelligent as an adult, and so therefore they’re reluctant to expose themselves as being less than intelligent in this other language, but the adult has a large vocabulary.

An adult in six months or a year, depending on the language, can be talking about politics and economics and all these things because the adult knows these things and has the corresponding vocabulary in his or her own language, not the case with the child.

And also I think the adult can take advantage of certain grammatical explanations. Not so useful up front, but at a later stage to go in and start to understand a little better how this language works, because some patterns, some things will have eluded them.

So, by and large, it’s similar, but there are differences. What is the best way to start a new language from scratch? Well, I always start with our mini stories, where there’s a lot of repetition of high frequency verbs, particularly, and patterns. And a starter book, some kind of starter book.

And if the script is different, I have to find some resources to help to learn the script. That’s what it is. It’s the same for all, it doesn’t matter what the language is. Here, this is a person who is Swedish, married to a Polish lady, they have children.

The Polish mom speaks Polish to the kids, but she speaks Swedish better, he says, than he does. How can he take advantage of his situation to learn Polish? Okay, it has been my experience that you cannot expect your spouse or partner to be your language teacher.

So you have to go and learn it on your own, because you’re used to speaking to your partner in a language. And it’s not going to work to say, okay, now I want you to speak in Polish. It’s not going to work, but if you get good enough by having learned on your

Own, the way I talk about, then maybe when you’re with the in laws or you’re in Poland or you’re with friends and all of a sudden you start speaking in Polish and pretty soon you develop a new habit, which is to speak in the company of your spouse in Polish.

And the sort of takeaway from this section is. It’s, whatever you’ve achieved in the language, you know, enjoy it. Give yourself credit for what you’ve achieved. Don’t worry so much about how long is it going to take. And the final session, section, and it was quite a long section.

So many people were asking questions about which language. So one, how do you decide which language to study next? It could be anything. There’s no hard and fast rule. Government sends me to learn Mandarin Chinese back in 1968. I moved to Japan. We’re going to be traveling to Greece.

I visit Jordan, get interested in Arabic. I come to Vancouver. There’s lots of Iranians. I’ve learned the Arabic script. Why not learn Persian? It could be anything. So there’s no fire, hard and fast rule. Why haven’t you learned Latin and ancient Greek?

So much of our culture is based on texts in these languages. Of course it would be interesting, but you know, inevitably when we learn languages, we are forced to choose. Right now I’m more interested in improving in my Arabic and I will eventually

Move on to Hindi simply because there are so many speakers of that language. So it’s not that I’m not interested in ancient Greek and Latin. I just don’t have the time. It’s a lower sort of priority item for me. Similar question. Why don’t you learn the native languages of Canada?

Again, I would be interested. I am interested. If we had say Cree, I would certainly dabble in it. Try to understand a little bit more about how those languages work. Problem two is that. There’s so many different native languages, even Cree, there’s Cree is spoken across Canada.

And apparently, and I don’t know this for a fact, but the different forms of Cree are quite different one from another. So again, it’s a matter of priority. And also the fact that we don’t have those languages at LingQ.

We do have Latin at LingQ, by the way, not ancient Greek, but we have modern Greek. Now here we have Arabic and how do you deal with sort of standard Arabic and you know, Levantine Arabic and so forth.

So I am glad that I spent most of my initial I spent a little period of time in standard Arabic, and I’m now trying to learn Levantine Arabic, and it is a little difficult because my brain goes into standard Arabic, and

I dabbled a bit in Egyptian Arabic so that I could kind of understand a little bit of Egyptian movies. I kind of look at it. It’s still one language. And I think learning standard Arabic is useful because so much of what’s available online and certainly written material is all in standard Arabic.

Then, because movies Largely what I’ve seen is either from Egypt or from Lebanon. I wanted to get a better ability to understand those languages, but now that I’m getting deeper into Levantine Arabic, I find that it is warmer than standard Arabic because it’s actually the language that people speak naturally.

So I think, and if a person has more exposure to Egyptian people, then obviously Egyptian Arabic would be the choice, but to get into that spoken Arabic is, is the place to be eventually. But to have a base in standard Arabic is a good thing. Regarding learning Chinese characters, what would you recommend?

Okay, I think whatever I did is irrelevant because there are so many good apps today for learning characters, whether it be for Chinese or Japanese. And I think people simply, simply need to do their own research and find apps that help them learn the characters, take that as a separate activity, and then

If they are working on those languages at LingQ, where we have Furigana, we have Pinyin, you can continue reading and increasing your familiarity with the characters, while at the same time having this other separate app, which helps you to learn new characters.

So the learning process is essentially the same, but you have to have a separate stream to work on the characters, but what those most effective systems are today, I don’t know, because I learned Chinese and Japanese long before that type of technology was available.

Do you feel each new language you learn makes the following ones easier to learn? Yes, of course. I’m not sure that it’s, it’s incremental. It gets easier and easier, easier. But it certainly makes it easier. You’re, you become more flexible. You’re more confident that you know how to learn.

So there’s less resistance because I think if we only know one language, there’s a certain resistance to the new language. And the more you learn, the more it’s just, yeah, whatever hit me. How do you learn different languages at the same time?

So I have been doing this and my conclusion after sort of struggling with Persian, Arabic, and Turkish is that I would have been better off to focus on one. But I was curious to look at all three. If you have one very strong language and you want to

Really get good at it, do that. Like maybe an 80 20 split in terms of how you use your time. To some extent, when you leave one language and go to another, then that first one, when you go back to it, you’re refreshed. So there is some advantage to doing that.

But by and large, I now tend to prefer to stay with one language and not try to do more than one language at a time, or stay with one for three months and then go for another. Three months with another language. And last of all, which is your favorite language?

I get this all the time. I have no favorite language. I love them all. I get totally wrapped up into, you know, the enjoyment, the sense of achievement. Oh, look at me. I can understand this. Or I said something, I had a conversation. And of course it’s not always a sense of.

Victory, like occasionally I’ll have a conversation in Arabic and I feel I was tongue tied the whole time, but on the next occasion, maybe I will feel that I did okay. So no, they’re all, they’re all lovely and they’re all unique and the sounds

And there’s a certain, almost like Sensual delight in being able to, you know, produce these sounds of this other call it exotic language, all good. And I guess the takeaway from this last section is perhaps this takeaway for the whole, all of the questions is it’s all worth it.

All the languages are worth learning, whether it be ancient. Languages or indigenous languages or whatever, different forms of Arabic. And so they’re all worth learning. They’re all fun to learn. As long as we have an attitude that says, I want to be doing this. I enjoy doing this.

I’m happy with what I have achieved. And I recognize that there will always be gaps and things that I can’t do. So there you have it. I think I may have left out a few questions, but I tried to group them all together so that I’ve responded basically to.

Thank you very much for continuing to support Lingosteve here at YouTube. And I’m going to continue producing videos. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.

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CC subtitles available in multiple languages.

To celebrate the milestone of reaching 1 million subscribers, I answer your most pressing questions about language learning. Thank you for continuing to support this channel!

⏲️ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 how it all started
0:15 I received my YouTube golden plaque!
0:31 Who is Lingosteve?
1:13 Questions about reading and listening
4:15 Questions about speaking
6:38 Questions about vocabulary and grammar
8:58 Questions about time management
11:42 Questions about my method
13:59 Questions about choosing a language

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