Do THIS and you will speak Russian – Canadian polyglot's tips– @Thelinguist

hello everyone welcome to my channel today i am thrilled and excited because we have a wonderful guest it's a big honor to me i'm happy to welcome stephen kaufman i'm sure you know this amazing man and uh welcome welcome thank you i'm looking forward to our discussion very happy to be here for people i'm sure everybody knows but just in case somebody didn't know uh you are a polyglot as i learned a long time ago you speak more than but maybe not speak but you are familiar with uh about 20 languages at different levels right right yeah i mean uh just a brief sort of uh introduction for most of my career i was in the lumber business i started out as a canadian diplomat which is why i learned japanese well chinese initially and then japanese in my lumber business i needed you know other languages and so i worked on my swedish and german and so forth and so on so i was vaguely interested in languages a big event in my sort of language learning career was when at the age of 60 i decided to tackle russian and so and that has had a big sort of impact on me and my language learning and about that time my son and i started this language learning platform called link which is where i learn languages and i've just had a lot of fun with languages and now i'm learning arabic and persian and that would be number 19 and 20. wow yeah this is uh truly inspirational because a lot of people can't even handle russian to a certain point so mark and i by the way nor can i even russian language teachers make mistakes all the time so it's yeah it's a journey lifelong journey learning languages so about russian about russian based on your experience compared to other languages in terms of learning experience how difficult it is to learn russian okay like to me every language has its difficulties and things that make it easy to learn so in the case of russian uh i obviously the difficulty is sort of the intricacies of slavic grammar not unique to russian but common to polish and ukrainian and czech and so forth and so on uh the case system and the verb system uh on the other hand a big advantage with russian is the wealth of material that's available there are some languages where you can't find stuff you know whether it be radio tv programs audio books things of that nature for russian the quantity of high quality audiobooks first of all excellent narrators uh and then you know radio material i was able to use i know it's a bit controversial in russia but ecomuskvy has every day uploads 10 15 interviews with transcripts so it's a limitless source of you don't have to agree with what the commentators are saying but as a source of language it's phenomenal and there are probably others so russian is and not to mention of course 19th century literature in other words outside copyright copyright free material of very high quality that i can import in the link so it's one of the languages with the greatest amount of compelling content so to me that makes up for the difficulty of the language yeah but all the things you mentioned they are quite advanced for most people for you they are they are perfect now like hamas curry classic literature do you remember how you started those first steps right so i started this was i started before we had russian at link so i and and my approach is always like the beginner material the beginner stage is the first three to six months when you have very little sense of the language and you need a lot of repetition and typically what i used to do and what i still recommend is to get two or three different beginner books that cover more or less the same material but they're different books so you get a little bit of variety but you're essentially focusing on focusing in on the same beginner material and the early stages any language i find actually quite encouraging because in a short period of time you go from knowing nothing to actually being able to say a few things and understanding a few things now in languages that i've learned since then i use our mini stories at link because there's so much repetition and in particular repetition of verbs and i've always felt that verbs are key to being able to express yourself but once i have a certain sort of level after three or six months depending on the language then i've i forced myself to get into more challenging material uh recognizing that that you know in that early stage you meet the same words over and over again so you get it's easier to learn the words because there's very high these are the high frequency words as you progress in the language frequency the sort of declines very very quickly and so you end up having to do a lot of listening and reading and that's why i try to move into things that are interesting even though they're difficult as early as i can but the first period uh you know and in these starter books they'll have some grammar explanations that you'll read and forget read and forget and gradually if you repeat enough you'll start to get sort of a toehold in the language and that's what i did with russian but very soon thereafter i moved into uh authentic material yeah that's a great suggestion to use several sources because i know a lot of people just focus on one book and even if they don't like it they try to follow it anyway and at the end of the day they get disappointed and just quit entirely same with with following just one teacher for example like following somebody on youtube and just watching their stuff there are so many resources today that it's right it's better to to get into you know i often quote manfred spitzer who is a german neuroscientist who studied the brain and how we learn and he he makes this point which i think is so important the brain requires repetition but also requires novelty you can't just feed the brain the same stuff over and over again the efficiency declines quite quickly so you have to but you do need repetition to learn you know neurons that fire together whatever that there's a famous saying by actually a canadian neuroscientist who said that the neurons have to fire together so you need that repetition but you also need novelty so however you do it you have to provide the brain with new things interesting things novelty so that can be different books covering the same material it can be different teachers different content different learning activities but you do need the variety yeah i agree with you about this balance between skill skills speaking listening reading uh there is approach that it's better to dive into this pool with sharks and like start speaking instantly but from i'll be honest i didn't learn with your method simply because i already spoke english by that time so i didn't need to learn anymore but i read about it on on wikipedia in russian wikipedia they say that your method suggests that you don't even try to speak for several months so you concentrate on listening on reading a lot of texts but you don't try to speak what do you think about that has it changed somehow or you i uh i just feel you should speak when you feel like speaking and so i don't think you should feel obliged to speak early you can speak whenever you feel ready to speak and it'll depend on where you are when i was in japan i could speak from day one because i could go into a store and try to use whatever little japanese i had but if i'm learning a language here in canada or if i'm in russia learning a language and i don't have people to speak to then i wouldn't wait until i get an online tutor because uh you know i think everything we do in language learning should be meaningful so if you're going to speak with someone that should be a meaningful conversation if you don't have vocabulary if you don't understand very well you can't have a meaningful conversation so typically i will wait until i have the way we count them at length three thousand five thousand words in the language that i at least understand something i might have some words then i start speaking online and and anytime you start speaking it's difficult when you when you sort of transition from input activities to output activities it's going to be difficult and it'll gradually get better and eventually to speak well you have to speak a lot but the more vocabulary you have even passive vocabulary the better your comprehension the less painful it's going to be to start speaking so i'm never in any hurry and and i think it's wrong when teachers try to insist on sort of correct output early because it's going to take a while for for the brain to get used to the rules of the new language so i'm very casual whenever you feel like speaking speak don't worry how you about how you do enjoy the process [Music] i think your method will be great for a lot of people who feel shy to actually start speaking so it's great because more and more i see people who try to encourage people step out of your comfort zone start no matter no matter how much you understand no matter what so it's great that uh you encourage people to be comfortable follow their own pace until they are ready fully for this process i mean we can't really overstate the importance of comprehension and comprehension is not just a matter of having the words it's also a matter of being used to different scenarios in the language i remember i was in st petersburg and i went to buy a train ticket to go to viborg and i know all the words related to buying the ticket but so i wait in line so after about five minutes there i am in front of this lady and she's not very patient and she says i didn't know what she was saying because i had never been in that situation before so you have to be exposed to that situation now the next time i do that then i can somehow i can anticipate what she's going to say and i'll be able to operate so the better your comprehension and the more different scenarios you've been exposed to the better you're going to do but but the most uncomfortable feeling is when you don't understand what the other person is saying yes it's so discouraging and even if you can ask some question uh what's the point asking it if you wouldn't understand the answer exactly yeah so what what about this link um you created this platform this method uh right so if some of my students would like to learn it how would you would like to use it for learning russian how would you describe it so they understand what's going on there well you know i'm a great believer in the importance of input well-organized input activities listening and reading and what link does is is it provides a vast sort of library of content first of all and then the opportunity to bring in content from anywhere youtube ebooks audiobooks you name it and you use these this sort of almost unlimited library of content to learn and when you're listening of course you listen you don't understand you read you save words and phrases to a database of course you look up the meaning and there's a variety of dictionaries depending on your native language you can connect to the dictionary that you prefer uh and so you look up words you can review the content even if it's an audi if it's a long book you can go sentence by sentence and so it's just a means of accessing the wide array of content that's available now on the internet you know it didn't used to be the case it used to be that i had to fly to riga latvia to buy russian audiobooks because we don't have them here but now you don't have to do that you can just go online and you can subscribe to i don't know lit rest or one of these services and you can download anything you need but all of the material that's available on the on the internet is is can be used and all of the functionality at link that helps you learn from content is available whether it's something in our library or something that you import so it's just a platform a learning environment we track your progress we track the words you know the track and we track the words you've learned all of this is kind of motivating because so often we feel we're not really progressing in the language and yet when we see on our page that there's fewer and fewer unknown words we understand more so those are the it's basically an environment that some people find congenial and and and um pleasant for language learning and pleasant is important in language learning uh because if you enjoy the process you'll stay with it and you'll just keep going and if you keep going you're gonna succeed there's no question if you if you put in the time and you stay with it you will improve you won't get worse because you have to trust the brain the brain learns you just have to keep at it with a positive attitude yes this is great you mentioned that pleasure is the key for progress this is this is so important i will leave the links under the video and in the comments for for your platform and uh for your youtube channel as well um so i don't want to take too much of your time i know you're very good or not happy to talk to you i should say by the way that the discovery of russian was was a phenomenal sort of phase of my life at the age of 60 because i had learned japanese and chinese and i i very much tended to sort of de-emphasize grammar so grammar is every so often you look at it but you don't worry about it it's not the focus of language learning and then people would say to me well that might work for japanese and chinese but it won't work for russian because russian is you know all these slavic languages have all these complicated issues of grammar and so that essentially was the reason why i decided to learn russian other than the fact that i had read russian novels in translation when i was young and uh but it was a lovely and and so then i started watching movies i remember the first movie i watched was jestoki romance which is in the 19th century and it's my yeah it's my favorite yeah i mean i was like it was so exotic so phenomenal and and that whole russian world it has a tremendous appeal and as you continue to explore it you can be in the 19th century you can watch sabachi cersei for example which is 20th century there's so much stuff there and i spent a lot of time on russian i would say two three years every morning before going to work i would grab either i was listening to you know turgenev or cuprin or whatever audiobook i was listening to in russian subsequently reading it on link or i would grab three or four interviews from ekko muskvy chevron what's his name svanitsa or all these different people and and i would listen and then come home and read it two three years full time waffle time like an hour an hour and a half a day and it was lovely and then it opens the water opens up other slavic languages so once you have russian you can do czech you can do ukrainian and all these countries have their own history have their own traditions and so these places that where you're like just as something on the map come alive and so i very much recommend and mind you i feel the same way about arabic and persian as i discover you know different parts of the world but in particular my experience with russian it was phenomenal and i i very much sort of encourage people and congratulate them for deciding to learn russian it's a wonderful language to learn and there's lots there to discover yes and uh being in love with culture with history with the literature this definitely helps at least to keep your motivation today all those movies this just was horrified we found it in english dubbing so all the voice over you don't hear russian voices but the english voices and a lot of people yeah yeah i would recommend that because it's such an attractive movie to watch if you can get it with english subtitles nowadays we all are used to watching netflix we're used to watching the original version with subtitles in our language uh and i think that is is more of an enticement to work on our russian so i would i would recommend they watch this toki romance uh you don't need to be or any of those old soviet movies that are really excellent uh but watch them with english subtitles until you're good enough to watch them without subtitles yes i agree reading the russian subtitles is a real challenge because it just goes too quickly if it's not your own language it's very hard to read subtitles in another language it is it is oh let's see we've been speaking english for way too long something let's do something encouraging so to to finish this interview with uh some positive optimistic enthusiastic note let's wish our students something in russian okay yes [Music] what are you talking about is great you speak fast no mistakes it's it's great it's it's amazing yeah i feel a little bit because i have been away from russian for so long i always feel and that's another point we should never actually regret we should never worry about how we do so i shouldn't say that i should just speak and i speak the way i speak and if i speak better sometimes and worse some other times so be it yeah you speak wonderfully i'm sure it will be a wonderful encouraging interview for my students and uh yeah thank you spasiba thank you

Channel: Real Russian Club

Views: 102,294

Keywords: Russian language, Russian lessons, Slow Russian, Daria Molchanova, Russian teacher, Travel to Russia, Learn Russian, Russian language course, Russische sprache, Russo, tips, Canadian, LingQ, Tricks for learning Russian, иностранцы о России, канадец говорит о России, канадец учит русский

Id: 1uMzq866UtE

Length: 20min 1sec (1201 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022