17 Language Hacks That Changed My Life Forever

so the other day I just realized that I've been making videos about language learning on YouTube for over 10 years hundreds of millions of views almost half a million subscribers here all wanting to learn languages and so I thought it would be fun to go back over the last 10 years and pick out the very best language learning tips from this whole period these are the language learning ideas philosophies strategies that I would want to take with me out of a burning building if I was going to start a new language today this is what I would want to know so whether you're just starting to learn a new language or you're a seasoned polylog there will be some in here for you let me know what you like in the comments and let's get into it to knuckle down focus and concentrate on one thing at a time because focus is the key to learning languages and that's the genius of the hoarding villain he knows that getting you to hoard more and more language resources is a guaranteed way to kill your language dreams forever he is evil and he must be stopped but stop him you can and there is one simple change you can make to banish him into the The Ether forever whatever stage of language learning you're at right now beginner or Advanced there's one thing you could do promptly to improve your language skill so let's do this together right now we're going to do this right now okay so what I want you to do right now is to take down one language book from your shelf or one one course whatever it may be something that you're currently working on or one that you feel like is the best fit for you right now and then I want you to hide everything else literally take all your other books CDs whatever put them in a box seal it shut whatever it takes and then that one book or resource that you've chosen You're simply going to work through it from beginning to end and then don't open that box of other stuff until you've reached the end of the book or the course that you've chosen because when there is no hoorde of books to jump around on the hoarding villain can't get to you nothing you can do cuz you've only got one thing that you're allowed to work on and if you do this a few magic things are going to happen you're going to start being focused like a laser you get the full benefit of that one resource that you've chosen you go much deeper than you would if you were just jumping from one thing to the next focus and persistence on one thing for this reason I designed the story learning method to be built around a story because then the job of focusing becomes super easy for you your main job is simply to make it to the end of the story and then the learning takes care of itself the time off actually allows you to kind of just take stock of the way that you study identify these bad habits that might have crept into the way that you've been learning and it's an opportunity for you to so right let's try things a bit differently also when you're away inevitably you think about these things and and you think about you know how should I be using my time and that just it's an opportunity to think and reflect to me it makes perfect sense that if you've been studying something for for a few months and a couple of weeks off when you look at it in the in the grander scheme of things is only going to be beneficial like I said I've noticed this lots of times before when I've been studying a language quite intensively sometimes you step away for a month and then you have an opportunity to speak the language maybe after after that month or so and everything's just so easy cuz your brain's hard at work in the background Making Connections making sense of stuff so I say I'm all for breaks I'm all for taking time off I think apart from anything it's your life that you're dealing with you've got to live your life and we can't just be permanently on call permanently you know working plugging away at things we've got to take time off in my case what happened was I'd been studying can for quite a few months and then I took few weeks off and did nothing fact it was the opposite of nothing and went and studied another language the effect of that was I kind of I kind of came back and my speaking ability was like double what it was before if you study every day during the week could you take a couple of days off if you've been studying for months non-stop what happens if you just take a month off what's the worst that can happen in fact I'll probably rephrase that and say what are the potential upsides the potential benefits and if you're someone that doesn't like to chill out if you're someone that doesn't like to take breaks taking a break of this kind could be uh an incredibly powerful thing to do as difficult as it may see at first s learning an alphabet with less than 50 50 letters in is not really that hard it's the kind of thing you can do in a weekend if you really want to and you know you can look for all these crazy tricks and methods for remembering them but really when I've learned different alphabets in the past I found that the only way like by far the most effective simple way of doing it is to Simply sit down like say to yourself I'm going to sit down and learn this alphabet now and I'm not going to get up until I've learned it and what you'll find is an Arab an alphabet like Arabic for example you can learn it in a few hours each Arabic letter has four similar forms when they come in different positions in the word separate beginning middle and end [Music] b [Music] t now you might not be able to write it very very beautifully um and you might not be able to to to to read everything instantly but you can learn the basic the basics of an alphabet like like Arabic within a few hours and certainly within a few days and the quickest way to end the frustration and get the regular practice you need to start speaking your language well is to go out and find a bunch of speaking Partners teachers whoever it may be that you can meet with regularly and who turn up to meet you with the express intention of giving you your vitally important speaking practice without feeling like you're taking advantage of a friendship now the psychological trap I think is that feeling that it's logical for your friends to be the ones that you should practice speaking with cuz they're the ones who are close to you the people that you know you know why does it make sense to go out and find new people you think but it's precisely because you need to interact with these people a lot and regularly that you need to leave your friendships out of it and yes this means you need to get out of your comfort zone get out there meet new people but it's easily done these days thanks to websites like conversation exchange.com or apps like tandem so go out there and make it happen take responsibility for your speaking practice and keep going until you get your language level to a point where you can go and hold a genuine conversation with your friends and colleagues in their language if there's been any language advice you've had for me that's really helped you in your own language learning from this video or elsewhere on the channel I'd love to know what it is in the comments please let me know and if for some reason you're still not subscribed to the channel hit that subscribe button because that really helps to show your support real language spoken in the real world is nothing like your textbook textbook language is is simplified for one and language audios are spoken by voice actors slowly and articulately so that you'll hear every syllable now perfectly reasonable for a language course but in real life people speak differently let's try something here now you see this sentence on the screen try saying this now out loud in the way that it might be read in a textbook for for example despite the fact that he arrived sooner now try saying it at a normal conversational speed despite the fact that he arrived sooner you hear the difference between those two take a second to think about all the different sounds and things that change in this sentence when we say it naturally despite the fact that he arrived sooner despite the fact that he arrived sooner when you hear everything that changes see we tend to join sounds together kind of like a slur between words and even twist those sounds into something new Al together makes sense this is known in linguistics as connected speech and you may have no idea that you do this even in your own language if the material is at your level very important and you have a transcription in front of you also very important then you can keep listening to the audio at full speed with all the support that you need and then just like magic with time you'll be listening to native speakers chatting away and you'll realize that you understand what they're saying and when you've actually experienced this feeling of wow I can actually follow along now at full speed speed once you've actually had that experience in a language you will never want to go back to listening to unnaturally slow audio again the real question is that if you you know if you add that second language into the mix then you're going to just do everything less efficiently and for me that's a problem because I would much rather spend my time focusing on one language and make fast progress in that one language that's going to get me get me further faster the implication of that is that you know you do want to learn two languages it's probably much better to learn one language first and then later on go the day and move on to a second language you're going to be able to focus on a much deeper level with both of those languages if you're one of those people and you want to learn two languages at once then there is uh one piece of advice that I think is going to be really helpful for you which is to as far as possible and as far as it makes sense for you to choose two languages from different language families if you're trying to learn Spanish and Italian for example um at the same time you're going to get confused because they're too similar and you your the lack of a distinction between the languages is going to mean that you uh you just get confused and you can't clearly delineate things like uh verb conjugations uh in your head um it would be much more effective and much easier for you to learn say uh Spanish and Japanese or Italian and Chinese two languages from a completely different background because then you just going to be able to much more easily compartmentalize them in your head the best time to learn a particular grammar point you see is not when it comes up in your textbook the absolute best most helpful most awesome time to learn a bit of grammar is when you've just been into a cafe and you tried to order something using a phrase you've learned but something wasn't quite right and the guy understood you but the message didn't get across quite right and you thought it was right but it wasn't quite and something something wasn't completely clear the reason why is because you were missing a helpful bit of grammar a little twist the that would have expressed what you wanted to say with perfect clarity that piece of grammar right there well that's something that you're ready to learn right now you're ready for it you were very close to getting it right and it's just that little bit of grammar that scuffed you see that right there that's when you want to learn a piece of grammar but the Relentless focus on grammar that you see in virtually every language curriculum it does something poisonous it instills in students the belief that they can't start speaking or using the language yet until they've learned all the grammar can you imagine applying that logic to the piano I'm only going to start playing the piano once I've mastered music theory you'd never get anywhere you'd give up before you started we need a completely different approach to teaching grammar that is smarter than simply presenting a humongous list of rules and tenses and things that have to be learned do yourself a favor put the textbooks away get out there and speak and don't learn grammar before you really really need it stories are exactly how we teach languages here at story learning if you've never looked into it you really should learning with stories is a whole new way of learning languages and we've taught tens of thousands of students a new language using this method it works because when You' learn a language with stories not rules the language just sticks in your head more easily which means you learn faster and with less stress anyway if you're Keen to see how it all works you can get a free tour of the method just look for my story learning kit in the video description below there's a link to click it completely free it will take you to the right [Music] Place words very rarely exist in isolation some words do I mean the word book for example or or the word table well those are quite descriptive and you won't get into too much trouble using those words but there are tons and tons of words in any language which are actually used fairly infrequently and whenever they are used it's always within a particular phrase or variation of a phrase in fact if you looked back at all the stuff you say over the course of a normal day you would be absolutely amazed how few decisions you actually had to make about the words that you used and the words that you chose you see a staggering number of things that we say are not cleverly concocted in the moment we don't construct the grammar as we go cleverly choosing our prepositions and verb tenses to conform to the rules in English we might like to think that we do and if you're a teacher you might like to pretend to your students that all your perfect grammar is down to your personal genius but in reality a huge amount of what we say is nothing more than a bunch of phrases we've used thousands of times in the past adapted a bit to fit the situation actually you can apply this technique of learning chunks or phrases do everything that you do I've been through entire periods in my language learning when all I learn is phrases no single words just phrases I pick phrases out of the material that I'm reading or listening to I put them into flashcards and I learn them that's right I would actually memorize whole sets of phrases and I promise you it's far easier than you think most importantly that it has an immediate impact on your speaking because you are now no longer thinking in single words but rather in phrases and what does it mean if you think in phrases it means that you start to speak in phrases longer more flowing phrases and you sound a lot more fluent so it's [Music] win-win this is where the idea of quantity over quality comes in if you focus on quality meaning like intensive deliberate study what happens is that you're kind of engaging your gray matter maybe but that doesn't help you there's very very thin link between that and actually remembering or acquiring what you're studying okay but by having an approach that that focuses on quantity in other words you see these words and phrases and grammar whatever it is many many times over you give your brain the opportunity to remember it naturally which is a lot more fun it's a lot more effective but also it means that you can cover a lot more ground as you get more advanced in a language that starts to reverse because as you reach higher levels then you kind of get into a quality over quantity situation because the amount of unknown material in the language in is starting to reduce and so the way that you can keep progressing is by understanding those those more intricate grammar points for example or learning your you know the L some of the more academic or specific topic spe subject specific vocabulary in a language that's where you going have to take a more academic approach to doing it do you ever find that when you're speaking a foreign language you get fatigued you get tired you maybe your your brain starts to hurt your head starts to pound after a while of speaking so if you find that you are getting tired after like 30 minutes of speaking English the only thing you need to do is to push yourself further that means trying to speak for 2 hours or 3 hours finding situations where you can do that you will suffer probably at the beginning but that's the the way that you build up your tolerance and your stamina for the language it really is as simple as that you know you're doing a great job by already speaking the language that's great now it's just a question of keep going press on and get yourself that that practice and very quickly you know you won't find yourself getting so [Music] TI in most situations when you're abroad it's pretty hard to get extended periods of language practice right most people on the street are not going to stop and talk to you for you know for 5 10 minutes even 1 minute it can be hard right most of the time the people that you speak to are going to be people in Shops and and things like that people who have some kind of transactional reason to uh to talk to now I guess a hairdresser is also a transactional type of thing the difference is that it takes a lot longer the thing about that period of time is you are forced to speak the language that whole time force might seem like a strong word but you've kind of got this social contract going on when you're getting your haircut which is that the hairdresser feels obliged to to speak to you and to ask you questions and to make conversation and you feel obliged to uh to to reply even if it's in a language you're not particularly comfortable with or you know you're in in the middle of learning if you are there kind of face to face with someone who's doing something for you like cutting your hair you know you feel pretty rude not making every bit of effort you can to actually interact and um and and talk to the person what happens is you go through this very interesting kind of uh Journey over the course of that time the first 10 15 minutes or so can be uh a little bit tough you're kind of finding ground you you're you're getting used to speaking the language and then you kind of settle into a bit of a routine and then bit of a rhythm and then after half an hour or so what what what could happen is the kind of tiredness can set in so you suddenly get really tired oh man I can't talk anymore and my my head is my head feels like it's going to explode you kind to reach this pain threshold of speaking the language which if you ever spoken your target language for you know extended periods of time you know what I'm talking about right it's like your brain just can't handle anymore but the strange thing seems to happen after whenever that kind of pain threshold gets reached which is when you come out the other side it's like you've shaken it all off and youve just kind of really found your rhythm with the language you're just kind of speaking it without thinking it's almost as if like you got used to the pain and the tiredness and you you just don't care anymore you just you just talk whenever I've got my haircut in different countries I've been through this similar experience where beginning is kind of a little bit painful and then you kind of pass the the the the pain threshold the tiess barrier by the time you come out you've actually spent an hour at least or more in there speaking in the language it's a very special situation when you've got someone who will actually just be there and make conversation with you it's to look for opportunities like the haircut situation where you can engage in an activity where the language itself is not the point where speaking the language or being judged on your language ability not the purpose of that activity but when you get your haircut the language is not the focus the focus is on actually communicating and speaking with the guy or the girl like that there are many other similar situations that you might be able to put yourself in can you take Sala classes like I did in Japan in Japanese can you go and do yoga classes can you sign up to I don't know can you take a course of some kind or an evening class that's conducted in the language that you're learning anything like this where you are put into contact with other people who you can then speak with independently of being judged on your language level where where your your Mutual focus is on something else that not only gives you a chance to speak the language but to also bond with them socially because again you've got this shared experience which has nothing to do with the [Music] language I started to do something very simple which was to add a 15minute session to the end of my day I like to study in the morning right it's where I'm most fresh or I can guarantee I've got the time for learning so what I would do for a while is just study in the morning and then go off and get on with my day and come back the next morning but when I added a 15minute review section at the end of my day I found that I started retaining huge amounts more than I did um without it and in that review session all I would do is kind of go back and look at what I was studying in the morning that might be recapping some of the vocabulary listening to the dialogue I was studying a few times rereading passages from the dialogue whatever it may be but it's the act of coming back and looking again at something that you've already studied really reinforces it the more times that your brain comes back to something the more the higher chance the higher likelihood it has of actually remembering it you can do some writing using what you've learned you can talk to yourself in the shower using as many new words as you can or my personal favorite what I tend to do these days just go back and read and reread earlier chapters from uh from the book whatever book you're reading it doesn't really matter what matters is that you deliberately review what you've learned you'll find new vocabulary sticking in your mind far more reliably than before so you can feel a sense of uh progress and satisfaction in your learning now let me give you one very simple way to take action on this right now what I want you to do is add one very simple step to your daily routine at the end of every day I want you to sit down for 10 minutes just 10 minutes and look over the last thing or set of things that you have studied you don't need to write anything you don't need to study anything just take 10 minutes to look back over whatever it is that you've done recently with your languages your vocabulary notes a chapter from a book that you've just read the audio from the most recent dialogue that you've been going through in your in your course just add these little 10 minutes into your study routine and you'll be amazed at how you retain stuff more easily once you said something a few times in real conversation having studied it before or read it before you're much more likely to then remember it for the long term because you've used it for real communication that is the polyglot equivalent of personalization in the language teaching world and you could be forgiven for saying that this is rather obvious I of you did think that well like many of these rules of language learning you would be right but like I always say simple is best simple always makes it easy to remember and I like that when you're honest with yourself about the main reason you're trying to learn a language when it starts to get tough when the kind of honeymoon period is over and you're really knuckling down and studying every day trying to you know get this language around your head it's that motivation that deep reason that you've got full learning that's going to keep you getting up in the morning keeping working on it and keep you keep you motivated this reason is going to be different for you than it is for me than it is for everybody else um you know you may have a a husband or wife whose language you want to learn you may be worried about your kids and you may want to make sure that you learn a language for the sake of your kids you may have retired to the south of France and you want to integrate with the local Villages you might want to get a promotion that you need to speak Chinese for there's all kinds of reasons but whatever it is take a second to just think honestly for yourself what is your primary motivation write it down somewhere like etch it somehow in your brain because if you can keep that real in your head and you can keep that Vision alive you will keep the motivation you need to keep going the only step you have to do after that is to make sure that you you base your studying around those things so you you make sure that you know you don't just study a certain book or course because someone said it was good you do it because it meets your your [Music] goal mistakes ladies and gentlemen are how we learn via negativa we know what is wrong with more clarity than what is Right knowledge Grows by subtraction etc etc And yet when we're learning a foreign language we spend so much of our time trying to avoid making mistakes mistakes are bad they say well mistakes are bad Aren't They isn't the word itself a negative something to be avoided whether it's the correct verb conjugation you're looking for the perfect pronunciation for that difficult word you're trying to remember or in my case using completely the wrong word and making people's dinner go cold we see our mistakes as a source of embarrassment annoyance despair a lot of people I meet even talk about giving up their language studies because they're still making mistakes see I say it's time to rethink mistakes I say it's time to recognize mistakes for what they are mistakes are actually the way we learn that's right how else do you think we ever gain confidence in our languages if we don't go up and go out and mess up from time to time but you have to mess things up you have to you have to get it wrong and screw up mistakes and learning from mistakes are how you gain the confidence to know when you get it right so it's time to reframe how we think about mistakes not as a big negative that we that we have to learn to live with rather we should relish making mistakes and actually look forward to making them even going out of our way sometimes to make mistakes putting ourselves out there as much as possible so that mistakes can be made and lessons can be learned I know it sounds crazy but really this is just a decision of deciding not to react to the mental Panic of making mistakes that's been programmed into us by years of formal lessons and memories of school draw power and courage from your mistakes you will be happier for it the secret to learning languages when you're busy is to take advantage of every small break and little bit of time that you have throughout the day you may not always have an hourong block free every night but you do always have 5 or 10 minutes here or there if you learn to pounce on these short chunks of time and use them for something productive then you'll find yourself making lots of progress right away I think the most the the biggest danger for everyone in language learning is that you come up with excuses or or come up invent reasons why you can't do something or you you you spend so much time planning and preparing to study that you don't actually sit down and do the work at all I would much rather that you spend 10 minutes every single day doing one thing than work out some big plan to study for two or three hours a day I really don't think it's necessary to spend hours every day studying I mean it's great if you can but it's not necessary the point here is that you can do great things with 15 minutes a day but only if that's 15 minutes a day every every single day without taking any days off or or very rarely taking any days [Music] off however much you're doing however much you're studying just keep going I'm going to say it one more time just keep going I'm not going to tell you what the best way to learn a language is but I'll certainly tell you what the best way to not learn languages and that's by giving up have faith dig in keep going and good luck if you devote your life to language learning and you study languages regularly then lots of great things happen but not least inside your brain and in this video over here I will show you how it is that your brain changes and develops over time as you dedicate yourself to learning languages so go and check that out right [Music] now

Channel: Olly Richards

Views: 37,722

Keywords: Olly richards, Steven krashen, comprehensible input, foreign languages, how to learn, how to learn a language, how to learn a new language, language, language hack, language learning, language secrets, language tips, languages, learn a language, learn a new language, learn chinese, learn languages, learn two languages, learn with stories, learning languages fast, learning with stories, ollie richards, olly richards, polyglot, stories, story learning, storylearning

Id: IKnyclDyhaQ

Length: 26min 21sec (1581 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024