813. Language Learning is a Voyage of Discovery / Steve Kaufmann Interview

hello Steve nice to talk to you Luke nice to talk to you how are you today I'm fine I'm absolutely fine it's the morning for you it's the evening for me you're in Vancouver how is how is that I I don't know how Vancouver is because in the winter uh the rainy season in Vancouver uh my wife and I come down to Palm Springs here in California where it's sunny every day so here it's sunny I imagine in Vancouver it's raining yeah right you don't need to worry about the day but it rains a lot no I don't care wow Palm Springs how nice so it's great to be able to speak to you you've been interviewed lots of times before about language learning and I was wondering how I could possibly ask you something that you've you haven't been asked before and I think I probably can't um yeah all right so we might go over some of the same ground that you've covered in previous interviews but we will see that's okay so first of all let's just sort of like cover the basics I suppose so you're obviously you're known as a language learner one of the most famous in the world I would say well I don't know that's amazing but whatever yeah but um so how many languages do you do you speak well you know when you say speak I have spoken 20 let's say I have um interviews on my YouTube channel where I have spoken 20 languages but I would say that perhaps a dozen I could easily speak and another eight I would struggle either because I'm in the process of learning them say Persian and Arabic or because I I you know developed them to a certain level whether the country spoke while I was there and now I would have trouble I would have to refresh it so sort of yeah end of the 12 that I speak you know I would say uh maybe half a dozen I speak quite well and then less well as you proceed down the list so half a dozen that you speak quite well you say how did you find quite well well in other words I can have a comfortable conversation uh make mistakes I'll be missing a few words I will understand just about everything that's said uh but I'm sort of more comfortable in some than others I can express myself more accurately you know in some whereas in some of the weaker ones I'm I'm looking for the words that I really know I know and try to build what I have to say around those words whereas in the languages that I speak really well I would just say whatever I want say whatever you want in those languages you speak really well okay okay now most of my listeners um are probably trying to learn one second language probably there'll be others who are who are you know got several but most of them are just trying to deal with English and trying to learn it really well um so why why is for you Steve why so many why so many languages you know it's just circumstance I didn't set out to learn a lot of languages uh the first language that I sort of learned to uh the level of fluency was French because I got very motivated I had a teacher who made french civilization very interesting to me I ended up going off to France I took my University training in France then the second language that I learned was Chinese because I was working for the Canadian government and they wanted to train people in Mandarin Chinese back in 1968 so I was sent to Hong Kong where I learned Chinese then we were transferred to Japan so I learned Japanese uh you know when I was traveling when I was a student in France I used to hitchhike around Spain so I learned Spanish and then once you realize that you can learn languages and you think you know how to learn them it's fun uh right now I'm I'm discovering so much about Iran and the Arabic world just by learning those languages and every language that I have learned you know I learned so much about the country and the history and it triggers an interest in in those countries and so all of a sudden you know the world different parts of the world you know come alive areas where you had nothing but sort of vague stereotypes those places come alive so it's just interesting for me yeah you kind of put it in a nutshell you know you you went to work in Hong Kong and you you learned Chinese you learned Mandarin Chinese um how well when I was in Hong Kong and bear in mind that in 1968 you had the cultural revolution in China and the objective we were going to Canada was going to recognize the People's Republic of China so they felt it probably wasn't politically appropriate to send me to Taiwan so I went to Hong Kong which is not a mandarin speaking place however I had three hours a day one-on-one with mandarin speaking teachers and I spent the rest of the day reading and listening I read enormous amounts of Chinese and that kind of you know established in my mind the idea that to learn a language you need to listen and read a lot like a lot I'm talking millions of words so that the brain gets used to the language and and you start to discover the patterns of the language they can be explained to you you may or may not understand or even remember the explanations but more than anything else you just have to get the language you know flowing into your brain so that the brain will gradually start to get used to the language how long did that take then to go from absolutely nothing well that was actually that's quite that's quite intensive isn't it what you were doing there very you know in with Chinese that like you know three hours of one to one and then lots of time reading and listening uh that is very intensive it was the most intensively I've ever studied a language um not only did I have three hours one-on-one but I spent I must have studied seven hours a day like I go home I practice writing because you have to write you have to learn the characters and I would listen to my open Real tape recorder or I would read and I would go down to the bookstores in Hong Kong and look for readers you know where you have Chinese with glossaries for every every chapter and and uh it was very very intensive like I was obsessed and it took me from from zero to where I read I remember I read my first novel uh after about seven or eight months and uh I wrote my uh I had to write the British foreign service exam and I think I did that after 11 or 12 months but we had to we had to translate newspaper editorials from English into Chinese from Chinese into English you know writing out by hand kind of thing so it was a very intensive one year yeah and how was that year were there not moments in that year where you felt kind of demoralized demotivated where you felt like this isn't working how you know did you hit a wall or something no never never I have hit walls now because I'm not doing it quite as intensively right so there are days when I say holy I've been a Persian and Arabic for over three years and I still can't speak the language and and so I'm very much aware of the sort of plateau where you're you're not progressing but in the case of my Chinese it would first of all would absolutely fascinated me because what I was reading I was getting you know short stories Chinese literature from the 1920s and the 1930s learning the whole of you know Chinese as a as a language culture civilization everything about it was so totally new and different that I was just obsessed I just kept reading and learning it and uh never had that sense of hitting a wall in fact because I was progressing so quickly and holy cow here I am six months into the thing and I'm I'm reading all this stuff and understanding it no uh I I think there's a I think uh one of my conclusions at that time was if you are able to do it very intensively the way I did it you will you will learn you know geometrically faster because you're just bombarding your brain with the language and all the other sort of other diplomatic students in Hong Kong that were Japanese there were Europeans uh they learned more slowly than I did and they learned less well and I just I just was totally into it and so within a year I did better than they did after two years so intensity is is good if you have I'm not sure I could do that again but besides I was working for the government they paid me my salary I had a job learning Chinese so whereas now if I can get in an hour a day an hour and a half a day every second day that's all I do so the intensity isn't there but intensity really pays dividends what about when it came time to I mean you were speaking with your one-to-one teacher but when it came time to actually start using Chinese um in diplomatic situations how did you feel so uh the first opportunity would have been uh they had this sort of Canton Trade Fair twice a year and so even as a student after six months or so they the Canadian government sent me up there and so I was sitting in I can't remember exactly how many months it was but I would sit up there and and the job was to help Canadian businessmen who were in Guangzhou uh you know in their business dealings with the Chinese so I would sit in meetings and yeah I would struggle at first to uh translate and but you struggled and then she gets better you know that's all uh yeah and and I mean even in Hong Kong our teachers who are from Beijing they would every so often have dinners at their place or we would go to lunch you know and so we'd be speaking some in a more sort of informal environment but even in our one-to-one sessions uh we very quickly abandoned any formal instruction and they were just we were talking most of the time one-on-one right okay you never felt sort of you never had one of those days where uh you kind of things didn't sort of come out right or you made misunderstandings you may have felt like oh you've made a fool of yourself did you ever feel like terribly bad at the end of the day before no but you know one of the things they would do is they would drill you they had these uh expansion drills I I am I am a man I am a man from Canada I am a man from Canada studying Chinese so they'd have these expansion drills and there were days when you say geez do I have to do this again you know so some days you know first thing in the morning some days you're not as awake as on other days yeah but never no never any sense of GI said something wrong you're gonna say something wrong I'm gonna get my tones wrong and all this stuff it doesn't matter didn't matter one interesting thing I feel that my Chinese is better now than when I graduated or when I finished my program there and part of it is I've done a lot of listening to Chinese uh you know audiobooks or uh you know CDs or whatever uh but but the language continues to gestate so one of the interesting things that I've noticed in many languages is even if you're not spending time with the language the fact that you have put so much effort into the language it's now kind of fermenting in your brain and so actually I would say that I speak all of my languages better now than ever just because they've had maybe because I've learned other languages and and the Brain just becomes more and more flexible a lot of stuff that you have learned and forgotten is still somewhere in your memory Reserve so the question is are you able to retrieve it or not and I think my ability to retrieve it improves I think for sure my pronunciation in Chinese has improved since the time I was studying it intensively so if you put a lot of intensive work into learning a language it will continue to to gestate in your brain yeah to bake yeah or or yeah to um to age I mean it's like languages are like I like wine then I suppose yeah absolutely or cheese oh geez yeah I'm not sure I'll pass a certain parts after a certain point it's a bit too much yeah but yeah with certain kinds of good if it's a good wine you can you can leave it right yeah yeah for sure but um I mean again you've probably been asked this before do you think that you are a special case or do you think that you know the experience that you've had is universal uh I think the big thing is motivation and time I often quote this uh professor at the University of San Diego who said there's only there's only right she said there's only three things that matter in language learning the attitude of the student the time you spend with the language not reading an English grammar book about Chinese but with the language and then your ability to notice what's happening in the language and I think anyone who is motivated and spends their time will develop the ability to notice and yeah circumstances favored me but uh you know different language environments but I remember uh I was at one of these language you know polyglot conferences in Montreal and I was speaking to a group of about 500 polyglots people who you know came to this thing and we would have you know go to a bar or Cafe in montreala and everyone would have their the flags of the languages that they spoke and there were lots of people there who spoke seven or eight or nine or more languages but I remember asking this group I said how many of you uh were brought up in a multilingual family you know looking for things that maybe made this group different and hardly anyone put their hand up so these were people who were motivated to learn languages and there's no question that once you learn one and then another and then another and once you sort of recognize that it's not such an extraordinary thing to do and you have the confidence that you can do it and you put the time in and you enjoy the process if all of those things are there you're going to learn if you don't resist the language a lot of people when they're older especially they don't want to change they don't want to you know take the risk of trying to pronounce the language the way it's supposed to be pronounced they kind of hang back and kind of their own you know native language or other languages that they know there's a lot of attitudinal things there but fundamentally I think everyone can learn some may learn better than others but everyone can learn what do you think it is that stops people well they're not confident that they can do it so if you're gonna climb a mountain then you don't think you can reach the top you probably won't reach the top uh you know if you look at countries like Sweden where everyone is exposed to programs in English say in American or British TV programs and so by the time they start school they've heard so much English that they all speak well I mean some differences but they all more or less speak well um so I think it's exposure to them it's attitude time with the language and with that comes this ability to notice what's happening in the language so noticing that in fact they don't pronounce it this other way which is based on how that would be pronounced in your language actually it's pronounced this way you know a lot of people uh people learning English for example they will pronounce English words based on how that word would be pronounced if it were written in their own language so you have to overcome that you have to start noticing that no in English English has a very messed up writing system and you actually have to learn how to pronounce each word you can't just rely on how it's written but you have to notice that absolutely so you talk you talk a lot about in person listening a lot and reading a lot is then is there no place for you for the sort of deliberate practice in language learning for example you know doing some controlled practice with certain grammar points or um you know pronunciation control pronunciation practice how does that kind of deliberate practice fit into learning a language for you I think it can help it depends how much time you have available so if in my case I had six seven hours a day to spend on learning Chinese so I am sure that we practiced specific points of grammar uh in our you know one-on-one situations there um I think though people are a little bit it's very difficult know you can practice like I've often you know talked about the third person singular of the present tense in English which takes an s and you can practice out all you want until that slots in as a natural thing to do people are going to continue to you know when speaking on the Fly they're gonna not have the S there and at some point it clicks in so I think a lot of these points of grammar with enough exposure and with enough practice too I mean I'm not against output I think it's eventually to speak well you have to speak a lot you have to speak a lot it's just that I don't think you need to speak a lot at the beginning when you have few words when you don't understand uh when you have enough of the language that you can understand that you can have meaningful conversations with people then you should have lots of conversations um but uh so yeah if you have a lot of time sure do drills whatever I when I don't when I'm only spending an hour or two a day I prefer to spend my time on on input because it's easier to organize uh I don't have to set up a time to be with the tutor online to do sort of specific drills I've never I have I I you know in the language that I have learned since Chinese I've never found the specific drilling of particular grammar points all that helpful Because by the next day I've forgotten it it's you know it just will click in at some point and um yeah so I went to speaking at everyone's different yeah everyone's different right yeah yeah when does actually speaking come in for you so you um if we start with uh taking you know learning a language from scratch you start reading okay let's let's do that let's start with learning a language from scratch to I can have a conversation in this language um okay what what's your very first step so you've been doing Arabic and Persian recently so tell us a little bit about let's say Persian how did you start yeah so obviously with both Arabic and Persian you have a big issue which is the writing system uh it goes from right to left uh the symbols are completely foreign they in fact the individual letters they change depending on whether they're at the beginning the middle or the end of a word so that's a major obstacle so when you start out when I listen it's just noise I don't get anything it's just absolute noise the writing system is just a bunch of squigglies zero so what I do is we have at length we have these mini stories where the same story more or less repeats five times different person different tense uh you know a negative a question but more or less the same stuff is happening five times so and we have six here though so I do the first lesson I listen to it I understand zero then I go sentence by sentence looking up the words and in the case of Arabic and Persian I have had to put separate effort into try trying to get a Toe Hold on the writing system and and slowly slowly by didn't have you know occasionally reviewing what the symbols mean then again looking up words and listening to that sentence and and then maybe listening to the next sentence and and then I gradually progress so I I understand thirty percent of lesson one I moved to lesson two and and I understand thirty percent are moved to lesson three but then I go back to lesson one and over the first three months or so I will listen to those stories it adds up to about 30 times or so like many many times looking up words reading it again listening again so I'm at an early stage when I'm discovering the language so my tolerance for uninteresting content is quite High because I'm quite interested in trying to discover the language and so that'll go on for like three four five months and then I start moving to more kind of meaningful content it might be something on his history or it might be you know in the case of Persia I had uh this collaborator in Iran create 26 episodes on the history of Iran followed by these again these certain questions so there's now more interesting is the history of Iraq but it's the same process listening reading looking up words listening again reading again still not understanding and I just keep doing that and when I reach about five we count the number of words you know at link so when I reach about 5 000 known words then I'm kind of motivated to start talking first of all I now have phrases that have been bouncing around in my brain plus I can understand some so there's no point in having a an online you know chat or you know a lesson with someone when you can't understand what they're saying you kind of keep on saying you beg your pardon beg you pardon so but at that point we can have a limited conversation we may for example what I did with Persian because we have these many stories which include questions so then I would read which is very helpful because I was trying to learn to read this Arabic script right yeah so I would read read it wrong she would correct me I read it wrong correct me and then having read a little section then she would ask me questions the questions would in fact be the very questions that were in the text so I I knew the answer so I could answer so that got us into it and then pretty soon within a couple of weeks I'm no longer interested in doing that so then I Stray into other subjects and we talk about a variety of other things and gradually the range of things that we talk about and pretty soon we're talking about the history of Iran yeah wow that's that's that's amazing yeah but your level of motivation is incredible and also your tolerance for uh you know not understanding what you're reading oh yeah it's impressive too because I think that's a reason why people don't maybe won't follow that technique because they're just you know the the tolerance for sort of failure is pretty low exactly you know I say you you have to have a high tolerance for you know uh fuzziness not understanding making mistakes all of those things that's absolutely key tolerance for forgetting you're going to forget and in fact forgetting is good you forget you relearn you forget you relearn it's in there somewhere in your memory Reserve eventually you'll be able to retrieve it just accept the fact that you are putting stuff into your brain and just keep going so that all of that doesn't bother me I know I am moving forward I know that in other words the key the key measurement in language learning to me is not what's achieved how well you pronounce how well you know how accurately you speak the key measurement should be your activity level if you are active spending time with the language you will get better so the only thing you need to worry about is you know my actions how active am I am I listening am I reading am I speaking am I doing things if you are you're getting better this is probably reassuring to hear this Steve because uh these are sort of things that I've come to myself I mean I'm not really a language learner I mean I sort of try and speak French in my daily life let's not talk about that because you know it's I mean when I'm talking to you and there's me like struggling to speak French but um as an English teacher which is you know what I've spent most of my life doing and working on and desperately trying to help people to improve their English and doing this podcast for 14 years now as well just like banging on about all this stuff over and over and over again I have said many of these things too it's about time and motivation and practice and you know that's the equation and uh it's like climbing a mountain you know you don't don't look at the whole thing like you have to do it in one go you do it step by step and just sort of try and enjoy it uh motivation you know I I've talked about all these things before so this is very encouraging uh stuff it's just a just that people just actually have to have to do it um and also enjoy those moments of uh progress those moments when you do anything when you manage to succeed in any way uh you can kind of enjoy those things um yeah if you were if you were one of my listeners right let's say you were you know someone trying to get over the intermediate Plateau what would you do if you were that person well uh I would say find find things first of all every opportunity you have to speak speak obviously and without worrying about how you do how you sound mistakes you make anytime you have an opportunity to speak go for it when you're with people and so forth but there are many things you can do even when you're not with you know people where you can speak the language so as you know I believe in listening and reading I think audio books together with ebooks are tremendous because I I believe that if if I hear a non-native speaker of English speak English the person who impresses me the most is the person who uses the language well who has you know a good vocabulary whose choice of words the order in which the words you know are are put together that's the person that impresses me the most not necessarily the person who is trying desperately to have an American accent or a British accent but who can't use the language very well so the focus is on building up vocabulary building up you know natural phrasing and I think if you listen to any kind of audio book whether it be literature or self-help books or you know any books on your area of you know marketing if you're into marketing or whatever and especially if you can access then the transcript because when we listen there's lots that we don't understand and then I always like to have a transcript so then I can go in there and if I use Link I save words and phrases because I want I want to mine this material for phrases and structures and uh even in terms of introductory phrasing or how I want to be able to structure my language when I use the language so I think there's a lot that can be done just through listening and reading in an intelligent way and then when you do have a chance to speak just go for it don't worry about how you sound and and in a way you have to sort of project yourself as so if I'm speaking French Japanese Chinese whatever I just see myself as a I'm a speaker of French I'm a speaker of Chinese I'm not sort of this timid non-native speaker attempting to speak the language I just am a speaker of the language so you've got to have that kind of a positive you know self-image but also you know build up your weapons build up your vocabulary your phrasing your comprehension comprehension is big if you don't understand what the other person is saying you're at a big disadvantage you're intimidated if you understand everything you can struggle a bit to speak it doesn't matter yeah going back to that thing about saying don't feel timid about speaking another language because I mean no one own no one owns language do they I mean there's no intellectual property rights on language as far as I know um you know it's it's totally open source so people learning English English is yours oh yeah language learning metaphors you know it's it's it can be difficult to talk about language learning it becomes a bit sort of metaphysical or something doesn't it so metaphors are quite useful do you have any favorite metaphors or analogies for learning a language for me of course it's a voyage of discovery because so my situation is different many people learning English they're needing they need English for their job or because they're gonna because they are you know immigrants or they're planning to emigrate or they're planning to go work in London or New York or they want to go to university so it becomes a necessity so that puts pressure on them for me it's just a voyage of Discovery but I think also um you know when you speak another language it's a bit of a game you're imitating it's almost like you're play acting yeah uh it it's there's a bit of an unreal there real is my own language when I'm speaking some other language I'm play acting I'm pretending to be you know a French Chinese Japanese yeah so it's kind of fun that way but that's my dilettante approach uh but when you're in serious situations I mean when I lived in Japan I did business in Japanese everything was in Japanese it wasn't a game we were talking business yeah but but still I have a sort of a lighthearted approach to it uh I don't worry and I should point out too we were talking about people being afraid to make mistakes uh I have done business with so many people either in English or in their language but when we speak English you know it doesn't matter like swedes which begins very well they still make mistakes Germans who speak English very well they make mistakes that reflect you know structures in their own language and that's very hard to get rid of and it doesn't matter it doesn't impede communication nor does an accent impede communication I think very often the sort of accent thing becomes a bit of a vanity project you know I'm going to speak where it was so little accent that no one can tell we can always tell very rarely you find a non-native speaker who learn the language as an adult who it can be you know completely mistake taken for me unlikely to happen and why would you want to do that anyway unless you I mean the only only a spy really would want to do that right well no I mean okay you want to obviously the goal the pronunciation goal is the native speaker at some level whether it be someone from Scotland or Britain or Australia doesn't matter uh Scotland is in Britain but you know what I mean yeah you know at the moment at the moment Steve at the moment yeah yeah so uh but but that's the model that you're trying to imitate so it's normal I'm trying to imitate so the closer I get the better it is of course yes you want to but but so there's the sort of Ideal ideal goal is to sound like the native it's like ideally I play golf I would like this I would like to hit the ball like Tiger Woods but I'm never going to do that and that doesn't prevent me from enjoying golf so my idea is to speak like say a native in French or Japanese or Persian I'm not going to do that but it doesn't prevent me I can have that as a goal and yet be perfectly satisfied with achieving much less than that goal yeah aim for the Stars hit the Moon right kind of thing you just still hit the moon it's not bad right it doesn't mean you're falling flat on your face let's put it that way yeah um okay so learning languages like it's a voyage of Discovery um I've heard you mentioned before that I wonder if you'll remember this uh that learning English or learning a language is like mowing your lawn in your garden oh yes I use that as a because because many people feel that they have to absolutely Master something so if they go into a lesson they do a lesson I gotta Master everything in this lesson I'm going to master the basics and it's just not realistic uh if if I do a lesson or if I listen to something I can understand it 60 70 and then I'll move on and I'll go back again later on and I'll pick up what I missed so in a sense I was just thinking that because I was mowing my lawn and I let it grow a bit long so I adjusted my lawnmower so it wasn't cutting quite as close to the ground right so then I can push the lawnmower it's easier to push the lawnmower I go one pass at that higher level then I go back in and adjust the lawn mower down and then I pick up the rest of uh of the of the mo of the lawn right yeah so by having a two pass three passes going you know skimming it the first time getting a little deeper the second time that's fine you don't have to master stuff when you first go at it make it easy for yourself so the a nice short a lawn with like short grass is the goal like you want your lawn to be um uh you want the grass to be cut so it's all neat and short but since you've left it quite long because you've been in Palm Springs Palm Springs and if you haven't been mowing the lawn in Vancouver you've left it let it grow quite long but you can't get that goal with the first in one go because it's too hard it's too hard you can't the machine won't do it it'll clog up the machine and you'll fail and it's you know so you have to just kind of do just as you say skim the very top of the grass and then come back and do another pass and do it again and again and again and rather so it's again it's like the mountain metaphor you can't climb it in one single step you can't eat a you don't you wouldn't eat a pizza in one single go how do you eat an elephant you eat it one spoon at a time how do you mow your lawn after you've left it for ages you skim it and then you skim it again and you keep skimming it until you get to the desired um exactly yeah okay and I my dad I might add that you know we have these mini stories at link which are basic that's where we begin yeah yet I can always go back to the many stories and I will always notice something that I hadn't noticed before a word that I still hadn't remembered or a structure you we can always go back always go back and find things that we hadn't noticed before so we're not gonna pick it up all of it the first time so we can always go back and go back and go back and notice different things if we're paying attention repetition repetition repetition repetition repetition I don't know how many repetition and Novelty that's the other thing that I say you know this I quote manfish Spitzer who is a German neuroscientist who says the brain requires repetition but also novelty people are feeding their brain novelty yeah new stuff like rain wants new stuff you can't just feed it repetition uh you've got to give it novelty and this gets back this whole idea of interleaving you can give them person you know here's his list of words learn them by the third time you're going over the list of words you're not learning anything you have to move on and come back the center leaving go and study it over there and then come back here and then maybe hit the same basic vocabulary or the same type of content in some other context and then you come back again so it's sort of a you know a grazing type of process it's more effective than the sort of block learning you can't just pump stuff into the brain repetition repetition repetition there has to be a mixture we need repetition but we need knowledge so we're like cows really in the way that cows eat grass right that's another one learning a language is like a cow eating grass because right because you got to keep moving if you stay in the same sort of part of the field all the grass will be gone you got to move to some other areas eat some grass in the meantime that area will have grown some more grass and also isn't it true that cows have got several stomachs so a cow will it'll take loads of grass chew it for a while swallow it sort of digest that for a bit and then they'll they'll bring it back and swallow it a bit and chew it a bit more right that's a very good metaphor I like it I like it it's a little disgusting but um yeah I guess it works yeah that's how it works that's how it works yeah so there you go chew on the language swallow it leave it let your stomach try and digest it bring it back up it is amazing how sometimes you'll be reading something in a language you're learning and and you come across some vocabulary which will trigger the memory of some other vocabulary that you'd you know put into your memories or long ago and all of a sudden it comes up and you can't control that but that's those things do happen yeah okay another one for you um I've heard you say that uh learning a language is like cross-country skiing do you remember saying that well I I have done a lot of listening to well it is in two ways really number one because when you're cross-country skiing very often you know you're on a plateau so you're just going so you may as well enjoy you may as well enjoy it the scenery like when I go cross-country skiing I'm going through the forest or whatever and I'm enjoying the scenery but the other thing about cross-country skiing it's just like jogging it's a great opportunity to listen so I have gone through the forest listening to Russian novels and cross-country skiing and I'm out in their cold and it's a beautiful day and so it's a great language learning environment I think when if we can learn while we're active I think there's some evidence that that's good that the brain is kind of chemicals are running around in the brain that help you learn so um being active and learning is good there's probably people listening to this right now in the gym or running somewhere go for it good keep it up guys yeah absolutely I was just going to ask you actually about you're just your experiences so I mean um you know you've you've sort of had many different uh lives sort of thing um like I understand that so you first came to Europe in when you were a teenager is that right so you grew up you grew up in Canada uh and then at some point you came over to England and then France right what happened yeah well you know actually I was I was working uh on construction in the summer and I decided I wanted to go over to Europe so I went down to the port of Montreal and for three you couldn't do this today but for three consecutive days I went to these ships that were in the port and I said I'd like to speak to the captain and they said fine today there would be a metal detector or something you know but and I I said I want to work my way across to Europe and so on the third day there was a German vessel and the captain said sure if he lost a sailor went overboard in Quebec City so you can come on wow really well that is space because one of the sailors had gone overboard and hadn't survived took off yeah not gone overboard like he just left he just left oh okay but he died yeah I shouldn't have said gone overboard he left them he went away so yeah AWOL yeah so so uh yeah so I spent 10 days you know pounding on rusty metal and scraping metal and painting that's all there ever was to do on the ship yeah uh but then I hitchhiked around Europe and I ended up in in France and studied there for three years you you already spoke French when you arrived did you oh yeah because I had my sort of moment of discovering French when I was at McGill University and I had this professor who made it all very interesting for me so therefore I was motivated to God I wanted to go to France and study in France because I became so you know interested in French okay and you studied at salespo the University yeah the first year I was at uh Noble and then I and I started studying political science there I don't really know for what reason and then I transferred to Sion sport I got a scholarship from the French government so uh first year in England I had about three jobs selling newspapers on the you know in the cafes on the main square and and teaching English and all kinds of stuff and then I got to Paris and I had a scholarship so things were improved right so your French was a decent enough level to be able to study political science at University okay and then so then you ended up you you were a diplomat but you also spent time selling Canadian Lumber like wood and stuff right right so first of all um I was accepted into the Canadian diplomatic service largely I think because I wrote the foreign service exam as an anglophone in French so that improved my odds of being accepted right uh there weren't that many anglophones who would have written that exam in French and then I heard that the government wanted to train people in Chinese so actually I started taking Chinese lessons in Ottawa and then I went to the director of the former you know Trade Commission service said look I hear you're going to send someone or Chinese I'm your man because I've already started doing it why wouldn't they choose me I've already shown an interest in you know in learning the language yeah so then I was sent to Hong Kong to learn Chinese thereafter I ended up in in Japan Tokyo at the Canadian embassy and then I was looking after Forest Products within you know in the commercial section of the embassy and then a company out of Vancouver was looking to set up their own office in Tokyo and so then they recruited me and made me an offer I couldn't refuse so I said okay okay so you were there in Tokyo essentially selling Canadian wood to the Japanese is that right yeah it's a big Market it was a big market so I set up an office for this Canadian exporting company and we had uh yeah and we were selling Lumber and uh I did that for one company went back to Vancouver and then I was recruited by their made main competitor to go out to Tokyo and do the same thing again both Lumber and paper products again to Asia like main Market being Japan but also the other markets of Asia okay what was it and then in 1987 I set up my own company in Forest Products exporting to Japan okay all right what kind of Forest Products just big lumps of wood well it yeah I mean it's typically um you know Lumber it's it's San Lumber uh and particularly with my own company we were making uh you know Kiln ride and playing the components of different sizes to suit the specific needs of the Japanese Market okay what was your experience in Japan uh that was the 80s so I lived in Japan basically much of the 70s like uh 71 to 77 and 80 to 82. yeah and then I was traveling to and from Japan throughout the 80s and then when I started my own company 87 that continued you know three four times a year I'd be flying off to Japan to meet with our customers um yeah my experience was it was wonderful Japan has a wonderful wood culture the way they appreciate wood was very interesting to me uh once you speak Japanese and you can deal with the downstream people uh it's it's it's it was wonderful they were very you know accommodating welcoming and accommodating and they they you know you have to all you have to do is you have to I mean it's a very demanding Market you have to uh give them what they want and uh understand you have to understand what they want and uh you know we were shipping Lumber to Japan we were shipping containers with 30 000 pieces in the container uh you know 22 millimeter by 57 millimeter by one meter long 1.3 meter and and they had to be the knot size had to be just so and we had to measure you know take samples every so often and send them graphs of the upper control liver lower control limit of knot size and twists I mean it's very very demanding yeah and inevitably inevitably you uh have problems quality problems and then you you have to oh I apologize I will get the whole plant floor together and we'll talk about this and we'll fix it then you have to demonstrate the sort of commitment I mean it's it's a serious it's serious yeah but at the same time then there are moments here you play golf with your customers or you they take you out for dinner and so it's it's it was a wonderful experience all around and very educational I'm sure yeah I mean I lived in Japan for two years but I mean that was you know 2002 2003 um but in the 70s I guess it must have been fairly uncommon for a lot of Japanese people to see a Westerner it wasn't that uncommon but uh I would say that in this if I compared Japan in the 70s to now they were more conscious of the fact that you were a foreigner so some of them didn't like you other people gave you special treatment but you're always different yeah whereas now that's not so much the case you just person a and he or she is person B and and there's less of that sense of us and Them uh which was more there but they were still overwhelmingly nice to me yeah I can say overwhelmingly pleasant experience sometimes I made them feel uncomfortable they didn't know how to deal with the Foreigner kind of thing but but that became less and less the situation and and I find now you have Japanese people all over the world doing all kinds of different things Japan has opened up a lot since since the 70s absolutely okay um so going back to the fact that you're you're learning Arabic and Persian at the moment and so you're reading a lot of uh content in those languages about uh so you you like to read sort of non-fiction or historical um accounts and things don't you like to read the history of Persia and so on right now realistically uh in Arabic I can't do that very well Arabic is very difficult because you have sort of Standard Arabic which is almost it's not a real it's not a language that people speak to each other so then you have to get at least a smattering of Egyptian Arabic and laventeen Arabic so so that you can at least have a chance of understanding the movies and stuff like that so Arabic is it's a long road like I'll never get to be very very nervous Persian at least it's one language one country uh and I have this person who has given link so much content in Persian including on the history of Iran but a lot of it too it triggers an interest right so I'm I go through her material on the history of Iran which is a Leisure uh and but then I'll read in English about Iran so through the language even if I'm not reading about the history of Iran in Persian it's triggering an interest in Persian history as is the case with Arabic and Turkish for that matter yeah I just get interested in the in the area so I read it in English as well yeah um yeah the history of the culture yeah I see have you learned anything interesting then about those places well I think what's really interesting is is to follow the development of Islam and the expansion then of of Islam and the Arabs out of Saudi Arabia into you know the Middle East and eventually into uh into Iran and the extent to which the Persians were so influential first of all within within the uh you know uh Islamic State you know the Abbas particularly under I think the the first group was the Umayyads and the next group where the abbasids or something but very much influenced by Persians and in particular uh sort of Eastern Eastern Iran Afghanistan Uzbekistan the area around central Asia was a major Center of of civilization and learning and Mathematics and Science and philosophy a thousand years ago I never knew that and those people were particularly influential uh in the development of the whole Middle East and stuff so it just you learn a whole bunch of stuff um and and of course pretty violent history I guess uh you know and you've got the abdomen Empire and the Arabs and the Persians and then of course India which was very much influenced by at least the Persian language because uh the Mughal Empire those were essentially turkic and then again you learn about the sort of interaction between the Turks and the and the Persian speakers and the turkic language speakers and that's just fascinating yeah it is isn't it it's absolutely never-ending and when you then use the language you know when you actually speak the language you know you sort of start to get a taste of you somehow enter the world of of it all don't absolutely and and in Vancouver we have a lot of immigrants from Iran so every every chance I get I use the language and of course I get a very positive response I think the Iranians are amongst the most appreciative when you speak their language uh and I have a sense of Iran of 2500 years of history that I never had before we think of Iran today we think of the molars and we think of women all dressed in black and and the horrible suppression of of uh demonstrators and it's it's a lot of negative stuff but uh I realize there's 2500 years of history there interaction with India with Greece with uh Central Asia with China uh again I've watched some Iranian movies they have very good movies it's in many ways the sense of a country with this tremendous ancient history but yet very modern in a way Iran is more Western than the Arabic countries I think uh certainly than Egypt you know are the less less sort of high-bound religious and stuff and quite quite uh quite moderate in many ways yes and have you noticed any similarities between Persian and English is there some some words are similar no [Music] I mean there's you know there's words like bechtar is better okay it sounds kind of similar but no comparison there's no relationship there's 15 common vocabulary between Persian and Arabic and also between Persian and Turkish uh but the structure of the language is very much European like Arabic the structure is it's an Indo-European language isn't it Indo-European language very very similar structure but it has its own thing you know like for example much is made now in the Western World about gender neutral pronouns which to my mind is a silly thing but uh in Persian and Arabic they only had not Arabic but a Persian and Turkish they only have gender neutral pronouns there is no he she is it's just ooh okay it doesn't necessarily mean that they're you know that they're more Progressive in terms of gender neutrality and stuff meaningless but that's quite convenient though isn't it to not have to worry about agendas because I mean you know in for example with French I mean that's a bit of a nightmare exactly Arabic has gender but the Persian doesn't have gender a person has many things if Persian were written in the uh in the Latin alphabet it would be quite easy to learn other than the fact that there's not a lot of of uh you know Common vocabulary like obviously when an English-speaking person learns French or vice versa they have a lot of freebie vocabulary yeah not the case with Persian but leaving that aside in terms of the structure of the language it's it's the writing systems that's the biggest obstacle I mean it's not an obstacle that's what it is period but but yeah yeah challenge maybe if we want to put it in more positive terms um right what what um do you have any plans to have a go at any other languages um maybe you know at some point you know it's so hard you keep adding languages and then that means the languages you learned before you no longer speak them very well so at some point you know but I am kind of curious about the structure of South Asian languages so it might be Hindi or we have a lot of Punjabi speakers in Vancouver if we get one of those languages at link we have Gujarati but I'm not very motivated to learn Gujarati the inconvenience with the Indian language is that they all have their own writing system sort of so at least if if they all had the same writing system then it wouldn't matter almost which one you learn because there's some of the northern Indian languages leaving the southern Indian languages aside so I might I might do that we'll see okay no immediate plans all right currently I'm enjoying bumbling along in Persian on Earth okay well hey it's really fascinating to talk to you thank you so much for your time yeah I enjoyed it okay and um well I mean do you want to do a bit of Shameless self-promotion at the end well it's just that I enjoy language learning I have a YouTube video at least a channel called lingo Steve uh sorry you're welcome to come and watch my videos there subscribe if you want uh I have this language learning platform which I uh co-founded with my son Mark called link lingq.com which is where I learn languages and I think it it fills a need it's uh part of the whole picture I think anyone learning languages is going to want to do a variety of different things uh maybe take lessons maybe buy some books maybe travel to the country and I think link kind of is quite complimentary fits in there absolutely okay well Steve paufman thank you very much and have a lovely day I enjoy the look yeah me too thank you thank you okay okay bye for now

Channel: Luke's English Podcast

Views: 136,152

Keywords: learn, learning, english, lesson, lessons, luke, podcast, luke's, vocabulary, native, speaker, interviews, listening, pronunciation, british, accent, london

Id: s6eusTDAUrc

Length: 53min 52sec (3232 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 22 2023