How to become fluent in English - Interview with Steve Kaufmann from LingQ

hey come closer listen do you want to know how to become fluent in a language like english do you want to know what fluency is how to achieve it what you should really focus on first to become fluent if so then stick around and listen to this video it's a special video because i'm going to be doing an interview with the ceo of lingq lincu is a fantastic tool i recommend it all the time to my students to build your vocabulary and improve your listening skills it is amazing and one more thing the guys at lincu have agreed to give all of my students a 35 discount off their annual plan so if you are interested in using the tool you can get it for free but there is a paid for version which gives you lots more check the link below you'll get a 35 discount off the annual plan but here in this video i'm going to interview steve kaufman he's a polyglot he speaks over 20 languages so trust me he knows a bit about language learning we're going to talk about learning english lots of questions most of which came from you the students and i've tried to ask him a lot of those questions it's a really interesting interview some real nuggets golden nuggets of information so stick around let's jump straight in and listen to steve now okay great so we're here with um steve kaufman um i hope i pronounced that right yeah it doesn't matter right great welcome to keith speaking english keith speaking academy um it's great to have you here um i'm i'm a big fan of language learning and also of ling q i mean i've used that myself for my chinese so i was very excited to uh to get in touch with you and to have this opportunity welcome and it's really nice to see you i'm glad to be here i'm always pleased to talk to someone who's enthusiastic about learning languages and who likes link and who seems to be pleasant and who seems to be pleasant so happy to be here i'm pleasant most of the time yes maybe not first thing in the morning but most of the time and so yeah i mean i have recommended link cue to students because i think it's a great tool i mean as you may be aware most of my students are learning english to prepare for the ielts exam so they're very focused on exam preparation um and i think it's an invaluable tool for for listening for reading and in fact all kinds of skills for speaking as well so it'd be great to find out maybe first of all i mean for you to introduce yourself and fight and tell us more about how you got interested in languages and where that zest for linguism came from well um i guess i was exposed to languages um i was actually born in sweden and at the age of five my family moved to canada so i promptly forgot my swedish and only spoke english we spoke english at home but and i grew up in montreal which theoretically is bilingual but in those days in the 50s it wasn't very bilingual so we lived in a you know there was a million english speakers and two million french speakers and there wasn't much communication between them that has now changed if you go to montreal today it's very bilingual uh but then i got interest and we had french at school but i couldn't speak french uh it was the traditional you know we had grammar things we learned the 16 verbs that take et as an auxiliary verb that's about the only thing i remember but then i got very interested in french because of a teacher who inspired me a professor at mcgill university as a result i ended up basically throwing myself at french i ended up going to france for three years as you know i studied there and then my first assignment i joined the government my first assignment was to go to hong kong to learn mandarin chinese we subsequently lived in japan so there were all these things that exposed me to languages there a little better lighting and and then you know i was interested so um i don't know i when i had was a student in france i used to hitchhike through spain so i spoke some spanish but it's really in the last 15 years that i've been really you know kind of more committed to learning languages uh because we have link and so i learned you know russian korean and uh you know greek and now i'm working on arabic and persian and and so it's just become a bit of a of a of an obsession and and uh it's one thing to learn languages for work but as you start exploring languages because of everything that these languages bring uh you know uh in terms of the history the culture the all the different things the movies on netflix uh it's just fun to discover yet another world of of language and of people and so that's i enjoy doing it i enjoy doing it and of course we have this involvement with with link right yes so i mean that's interesting because you talked about the kind of the frustration of learning french at school and then after working and learning different languages you created link what was the impetus then to create link why did you do that there were two there were two things really one was you know i had books at home german books spanish books and i'd read them and of course every tenth word i don't know so i'd either look it up and forget it underline it make a list look them up and forget them and really it was very frustrating so i always felt there has to be a better way and um once i became aware and then the other thing too was of course when i was studying chinese we had these great big open real tape recorders and when i discovered there was a thing called initially mini disc players and then mp3 players and that we had digital you know text that we could actually look words up online without having to go through a dictionary because we know we're going to forget whatever we find in the dictionary we're going to forget so you've got to be able to look it up over and over again quickly and so i had this idea and then we had an employee from china who didn't speak english very well and so we thought and well he had a high score in toefl but he just didn't understand he didn't understand where we were coming from we didn't understand what he was trying to say so partly culture but partly vocabulary partly comprehension and so because we had a company that was in the wood products business so we had developed a whole bunch of software for handling you know the international trade and wood products because you're dealing with different measurements different currencies delivery dates scheduling production all this kind of stuff so we had software people so we decided to develop a system to help this employee he went hey i went back to china and then we decided to turn it into a multi-language platform along the same principles i believe that vocabulary is the biggest not to crack in language learning not grammar vocabulary and if you have if you have enough words and you can only acquire the words honestly through lots of listening and reading and if you have acquired those words through this honest process of exposing yourself to the language you will naturally acquire much of the phrasing and much of the grammar or at the very least you'll have enough experience with the language that the grammar explanations will make sense and and may help you gradually notice more and more of the language the problem in traditional instruction is that they hit you with all these grammar explanations when you don't yet have enough of a feel for the language you aren't even curious about these points of grammar so to me link is all about acquiring words you know and we lived in japan and when i look at the people there who buy these books the five thousand words you need for ielts or for you know together oh yeah you haven't got a chance just to go through those books you haven't got a chance you're not going to retain them in my view you have to actually do so much listening and reading that these words naturally become a part of your initially passive and then some of them will become part of your active vocabulary that's interesting and that that's something maybe to dig into a little bit because i i agree by and large i think that the the way grammar is taught in a very systematic way is not helpful at times right and i like what you said i think it's one of your seven secrets to language learning right the words over grammar words be more yeah right right but lots of ielts students do get these lists of words and they send them to me lists of thousands of words that they need to learn and so they sit there and try and learn them in a rote manner so what's the a better way to learn vocabulary well i mean we think link is a better way to learn vocabulary one thing that that i have done but i'm not a student of english but if i were a student of english i would grab the 5 000 you know ielts words or the academic word lists or any of these other word lists and i would import the whole thing in the link and see how many of them are blue that you don't know them and how many of them are yellow that you're trying to learn them well initially they'd all be blue right but get them in there and now go off and do other texts you know study whatever you're interested and see how many of those words on that list start to turn to yellow or eventually to white but uh or at some point you know if you were on link and you had spin on link for save six months link will tell you you know ten thousand words or whatever the number is because link tracks how many words you know so at that point if you bring in your 5 000 ielts words then you will see on that list how many words you still don't know so i would use link as a tool to to see how many but i think ultimately you know there's all kinds of research that says that if you study something like a list and you sit there with a list and you keep studying that list in other words block learning you are not going to learn them very well if on the other hand this process is called interleaving if you kind of look at this and do something else and wander around and come back forget relearn forget relearn you learn them better and in a way lots of listening and reading is a form of interleaving because you are encountering these words in different contexts and i see now in my arabic when i started like arabic was just noise and i understood nothing and i had to deal with a difficult for me writing system but now most of my pages at link are white i have 13 15 unknown words including names so those don't really count and then maybe i have another 200 or 30 or 40 that are yellow words that i'm gradually learning but the rest of them are known white and so to me and i do a lot of listening i listen first thing in the morning when i make breakfast i listen i listen if i don't understand i go and read it look at words listen again so to me that's the process now other people may have other processes you know it's great it's interesting just just for listeners who are not sure maybe about link cue if you haven't used it the the vocabulary changes color right there are different colors as and when you look right the color changes from blue to yellow and white right so you can have a record of what you're you're learning that's great that's really interesting on vocabulary if i might add one thing that i have done started doing recently is because the words are initially blue if you haven't seen them before then you you see them you look them up they're now yellow or stat is one and every time you read through something the word shows up again you can move it manually to status two or you can go through flashcards which will automatically move along in status but you can in your vocabulary section and of course you can also create tags if you want so sometimes i go to my vocabulary section and i will look at everything that i've saved under connector phrase or whatever it might be but i can also look up just my status three words these are the words that i'm close to being able to learn and so then i'll just collect my status three words and there i'm likely to be able to knock them off say yeah i know this word now i know this word now so there's an opportunity to move a bunch of words to know and that's kind of fun to do because at least with those words you have a chance of either recognizing you know admitting that you know them or at least seeing them again to move you closer to knowing them but randomly a whole bunch of words i think is very difficult right so it's nice i mean it's kind of a systematic approach but you're wrapped in context every everything's giving a wide context right one of the um the other areas that a lot of students asked me and in fact i i i told the the students you were coming on and uh they gave me a list of all questions that i would love to rescue it's like hundreds of years but i'm not gonna go through them all no problem but one of the the common themes that come out is um about fluency how do i get how do i get fluent in english or a language and how long is it going to take me the million dollar question all right so to me fluency mean fluency on the european scale which many people are familiar with to me is b2 now if you are if you are working for a an american or a british company b2 is not enough unless you're in other words if you have contact with the outside world b2 is not enough but for me and my dilettante approach to learning you know whatever persian and stuff b2 is fine b2 is fluent i make mistakes i sometimes don't understand sometimes look for words but i can still get in a conversation and talk about everything from politics to history to you know a wide variety of subjects and the person i'm talking to feels comfortable and i feel comfortable i don't want to keep asking and beggie pardon what did you say and that person doesn't feel that they don't quite understand what i'm trying to say so to me that's fluency uh now the way i happen to believe to be fluent therefore implies speaking well so while i talk about input and and as the main way to get the language into you to get good habits in the language natural phrasing in the language uh eventually to speak well you have to speak a lot and it's very difficult for someone who lives somewhere where the language isn't spoken there just is not enough speaking opportunity to become really speaking fluent even if you speak online through italki five times a week or five hours a week it's just not enough to be genuinely fluent in my experience you have to be there for some period of time so that's a bit of a problem yeah to be in the country or if you have a bunch of friends that you meet with regularly but you need a lot of speaking uh now what you can you can get close to that you can build up your potential through again lots of listening and reading i think movies are good uh if you don't understand well enough try to get to where you can at least use the the the subtitles in the language of the movie uh rather than subtitles in your native language which i think is not very effective right right but but the thing about a lot of these uh these series on netflix i find is that it kind of introduces you to the culture you're in you're with the same group every time your wife there's you know 30 episodes you're always meeting the same people it's like your family right and they're all speaking that language that you're trying to learn which for your listeners is english so all of these things lots of reading i find link is helpful to get as much of the language in you right if you are in a situation where you don't have the language you know you can't use the language every day if you are where the language is spoken you still have to make that effort with the input otherwise your language will stagnate you still have to want to improve acquire natural phrasing and natural phrasing correct word order is a much bigger issue than pure grammar in my experience uh and and and all certainly a bigger issue than than pronunciation i know people who speak excellent english i had a banker from switzerland he had a heavy heavy swiss accent and his use of words was so precise so natural so elegant and he had an assistant who was from britain i don't know what part of britain he was from but his use of language was i mean in every country some people use their own language better than other people yeah and retreat certainly my swiss banker spoke english better than his british side council probably from london yeah maybe i don't know i don't want to cast dispersions and different regions yeah it's just his use of words his use of words was very basic whereas the the uh the swiss banker with his act so i'll just say that because people can build up their you know elegant use of the language without necessarily nailing that native speaker accent which i think is not so important that's great news it really is i mean ielts doesn't evaluate accent i mean it evaluates pronunciation but students get obsessed with accent and that's a great message then that actually not just for ielts but for language learning it's not essential at all it's not that important no accent you have when when it comes to learning a new language i mean i saw that you're starting to learn arabic and persian and turkish now those are languages where you may not be surrounded by those speakers so what do you do how do you practice those languages for speaking i i don't do a lot of i rely on online tutors and then we're in the situation here in vancouver where we do have uh quite a few people from iran immigrants from iran so if i happen to go into a shop where the clerk is iranian i will try out my persian on her or him but that doesn't happen very often so i that's that's a disadvantage i don't have people to talk to with other languages you know i would spend like for czech or for greek i spent six eight months get as good as i can be then we went to crete for a week or i went to prague for a week so i i've been to russia so yeah eventually i want to go that's part of the fun of learning the language and just learning much about the country and and so you've you've you know i've read now about isfahan or or whatever tehran so it would be fun to go there and visit but most of the time no i don't have that opportunity that's where people learning english are in a much better situation because english is everywhere there's no shortage of podcasts on every possible subject one thing i've started doing is using uh this automatic uh transcription service happyscribe which wasn't very good a couple of years ago and is now excellent and so i get my arabic podcast from al jazeera on the politics of the middle east and stuff and i put it on happy scribe 10 bucks a month i get i don't know how many hours of free of transcription so that these podcasts have become accessible and and i mean if you look up their podcast apps i mean there's pot you there is not there's a podcast on the byzantine empire in english there is a podcast on everything and then they're transcribed into arabic so you can read it and listen to it well no i only i have to deal with arabic podcasts so but all i'm saying is that in every language there's an abundance of podcasts so if you're learning english you can get happy trans happy transcribe happy scribe i think it is to transcribe that podcast if you're listening to a podcast on marketing or cooking or medicine or whatever happens to be your field then and if you're not catching all the words and phrases then i think that it's a very good investment to get those transcribed you can then import them in the link for example and save the words and phrases but the short answer is eventually it's if you can't find some place where you can do a lot of speaking that's good otherwise you're stuck with your online tutor which is either a language exchange or you're paying 15 an hour or whatever it might be to talk to someone when you're learning a language i mean do you think there should be an order of skills that you should focus on certain skills first or everything at the same time what's your approach to the order well obviously i can't speak at first well actually speaking is in a way the easiest thing to do because you can hear something and repeat it and you can learn to say how are you but if we say that the skills are listening comprehension and then um well speaking of course and then reading and writing i tend to focus on listening and reading initially i don't worry at all about about speaking at the early stage i don't worry about my pronunciation because i know from experience that i don't even hear the pronunciation very clearly initially and if i wait until i've heard a lot of the language i have a better chance of getting the pronunciation right so i definitely focus on listening and reading and listening is so easy to do you know i listen while i prepare breakfast which i do or i listen cleaning up and i listen exercising so i listen all the time and when i listen then i don't understand you know initially i understand nothing but then i go to the text and i look up words and i understand a little bit and then i listen again and then i read it again and so it's that whole process of listening and reading and i use text with a lot of repetition your students are not at that early stage i mean most people learning english are not at the beginner stage but i have a set of type of material with a lot of repetition especially high frequency verbs that i use to get me going then i go into things of interest which uh you know again for your ielts people they're either going to go study somewhere or they're going to work somewhere so they should be going after things of interest to them although not only like not only their technical field i think they should also go into literature and this you know uh series on netflix to get a wide sort of base in the language everything on netflix nowadays almost everything oh yeah it's amazing like youtube um yeah no very interesting and i was wondering as you were speaking i mean thinking about the languages that you've learned contrasted with when you were at school you've obviously learned to be an independent learner right how important is it to learn how to learn a language well i think it's important i think the biggest thing is to take control of your own learning right so if you have to take the initiative um so you know you have to want to learn uh you have to seek out content of interest to you and content that you like like you know from school the teacher says open to page 25 today we're going to read this yeah but i'm not interested in this you know so so so you and nowadays it's so much easier because of the internet so find things it's very important that what you listen to that you find the voice pleasing you know if you get a scratchy recording and the voice is very wooden and or you don't like the voice for whatever reason that is difficult to learn from whereas if the subject matter captivates you if the people speaking are pleasing to your ear so therefore it requires some effort to go and find stuff that that is going to work for you so that there's initiative there i think there's also initiative required for example on link you say words and phrases phrases you want to be able to use find those phrases save those phrases these are the phrases that you want to be part of your language it's not because the teacher says here's a phrase maybe i'm not ready for that phrase maybe in two months from now i'll be you know all over that phrase but right now i don't need that phrase i'm not thinking in terms of that phrase so you've got to be the one to find the phrases um you've got to notice where your problems are that's where speaking comes in like i s treat my sessions with a tutor as a place to discover my gaps what am i missing so then i got to go back when i'm listening and reading and actually try and pay attention that in fact it's not spoken this way it's spoken this other way which as you know we miss so much we don't notice we don't notice and all of a sudden six months later when we listen to something for the 30th time we notice something that completely passes by earlier so you have to want to notice and even if you want to notice you won't notice everything but you have that that mindset i want to i want to learn this language i want to learn these phrases these are the phrases i want to be able to use from this content and then if you're curious about a certain aspect of grammar you know for example i here i have a book on english grammar modal verbs they go on for 25 pages of modal verbs if you get hit with that without being in any way curious about it you haven't a chance of learning it it's not because it's explained to you that all of a sudden you're going to understand it and be able to use it on the other hand if you're saying like when do i use could and should and might and ought to and have to and and then you go in there and now you're curious so you read about it you still don't remember it but at least you're discovering something now that you're interested in learning so i think the the key is is that that whole initiative thing that you want all the different aspects of learning the language that's great so be curious have fun they're all really important curious the language oh yeah absolutely i totally agree i mean my own experience has been absolutely the same it's it's made all the difference i struggled at school to learn languages i really did and it wasn't until i went abroad and had a chance to communicate really that it all started coming together um when you're i mean i'm amazed does it get easier as you learn more languages because some people say the older you get right the more difficult it gets whoa is that true well you know i i can't i don't know if if it would have been easier for me if i were 20 years younger obviously but i have not found it more difficult what happens i think is it is possible that uh you know our brains slow down i it's possible that we learn more slowly as we get older it's possible but not it's no significant difference the biggest factor is the level of motivation the level of motivation how how independent you are the availability of interesting content that you can access so that has been a problem for certain languages uh was the case for me in korean let's say in russian there's just an abundance of stuff excellent audio books and i like 19th century literature those are all free of copyright i can import them into link lots of very good russian movies again with our web browser we can bring them in the dialogue into link sometimes so i mean you got to have good content available and if you're motivated i don't think it matters what your age is i think that that as you learn more languages what happens is you know the if you only know one language then you know the control center in your brain is set up for let's say english or japanese or what you know french and so then it's a little difficult because the range of sounds that you're familiar with the different ways things can be expressed you're kind of a little bit inflexible but the more languages you learn the more flexible you are nothing surprising oh they say it that way oh that's fine uh and you're more confident you have more experience in learning a language as an activity so i think in many ways anything you might lose because of age you gain through these other advantages fantastic and what is your favorite language of all those you've learned i i people i often get asked that question i don't have a favorite language i enjoy them all i enjoy them all really do brilliant fantastic that sounds really really good great um steve we're probably going to come towards the end i just would like to ask a final piece of advice for for students particularly preparing ielts right this this test what advice would you give the students well you know my advice and of course you have much more experience with ielts than i have i've never taken any of these tests but what i have seen of these tests i've been in bookstores in japan and leaped through these you know i mean they've got bookshelves after bookshelves after bookshelves nothing but taking tests right and obviously at some level it is a useful thing to to look at examples of the test but you know what what is the test like it's going to reduce your level of anxiety it gives you a sense of what's going to come at you but ultimately the success in ielts or toeic or toefl is going to depend on a number of things number one is your level of vocabulary number two how fast you can read so i would also work on developing my reading speed um you know we i looked at our stuff at link and it varies from 150 to 250 words a minute um certainly uh you know anything that is red is slower and when people are talking it's faster and so you i think you have to get to where you can easily follow people are speaking quickly uh because you have to read this stuff quickly uh if you have done a lot of re listing and reading you will naturally know what's correct in terms of grammar right so uh you know everything about if you have a solid base in the language good vocabulary you can read fast you understand well you're not going to behind be behind the eight ball in so far as you know time is concerned but if you're having to read everything three times and you're not really sure which is the most natural phrasing and which is correct a lot of these things should be slam dunk should be natural for you i think but i say that never having taken the test but if i were to prepare for a test like that i wouldn't do anything different i would just continue to improve my overall level in the language and then i would take the time to look at what i can expect on the test but i wouldn't spend most of my time you know trying to you know understand the test and develop the techniques for acing the test which seems to be the emphasis in some countries i would focus rather on improving my overall level in the language and that would give me such a strong base that it's a bit it's almost like you know if you're going to be in a some kind of a sports competition and you read up on you know read up on tennis but you're totally out of shape and in no kind of physical condition you're not going to do very well so you need to be in good physical condition that's brilliant that is great advice i think that's so true i think there's an obsession with the exam technique and of course it's important and knowing the rules is important what you should and shouldn't do in the exam but it's all about the level of english and i really i love that yes because i think it's great for ielts students to really focus on just improving your general english ability reading speech vocabulary you put a big emphasis on that i think that's great um and and be you know curious and have fun because there's so much stress with ielts absolutely i think if people have fun it can also help them quite a lot yes fantastic that and you know one other thing you have to look beyond ielts like we had this chinese employer had an employee who had a high score in toefl and he couldn't function so even if you fool the test where does that take you you know well that's it yeah and then there's a longer term vision right what do you want to do with the language after you've passed the test and things exactly right brilliant i can hear your bell ringing if somebody wants to come in sorry somebody will pick that up great steve um this has been fantastic i think some really invaluable advice really interesting thank you very much for um coming along and sharing all of that um maybe as a final message how can people find out more about you i know you've got a blog as well as maybe a book i mean do you want to tell people a little bit about how they can find out about you yeah well first of all i have my youtube channel which is called lingo steve i have a book called the linguist on language which is available at amazon i have a blog of the same name i believe i should know okay and of course we have link where people can learn and improve in english or learn other languages which is available for free there is a paid version i know but you can get quite a lot free as well um so there are different plans what is free essentially is yeah the so that it is you know i i think link is probably the largest repository of audio and text language material on the internet because 37 languages and there's tons of stuff in every library and that's all available for free download once you start using some of our functionality like like importing youtube videos as lessons where you get the audio and the text and the the uh the video as a lesson or or netflix or importing newspaper articles where you know we're tracking what you know how many words you know and all of the basic learning functionality fairly early on you're asked to pay it turns out to be about 10 a month for to access all those languages but if you just want to come and grab audio and text to work on on your own it's all fantastic sounds great i know it is great i've been there it's good um excellent so steve thank you very much for um all of the advice and talking to us i'm sure the the students i enjoyed it good luck to everyone to find out more as well yeah thank you very much we will stay in touch take care steve thank you bye-bye thank you bye-bye and that's it thank you so much for watching i hope you found that enjoyable as well as useful look out for my next videos and to get more tips about ielts speaking language learning and subscribe to the channel leave me a comment below let me know what you thought about the interview and if you would like more of the same take care my friends bye bye

Channel: English Speaking Success

Views: 234,725

Keywords: ielts speaking, ielts speaking success, ielts keith, ielts speaking 2020, keith speaking academy, english speaking success, ielts fluency, ielts fluency and coherence, become fluent in english, become fluent in english speaking, lingq review, steve kaufman, ielts speaking fluency practice, ielts speaking fluency, ielts tips and tricks, ielts tips how to prepare for ielts, ielts speaking interview

Id: Faa_2QqgPgg

Length: 34min 20sec (2060 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 11 2020