How to Overcome the Intermediate Plateau in Language Learning - Luca Lampariello | PG 2022

foreign [Applause] good morning welcome to day two first talks we have Luca lamparielo now um and again remember for the questions you go on slido enter the keyword bubble and then you can already now ask your questions you can vote on them and at the end we will go through them and it's much faster and much more effective and now the scene belongs to Luca good morning to you all I hope you can hear me well and I'm very glad to be here and to the thank you big thanks to the organizers of the polygia Gathering for giving me this chance of talking here and thank you for coming here so without further Ado let's get started this is a talk about overcoming the intermediate Plateau so I'm going to lay out some strategies and some principles on how to move past the so-called intermediate Plateau where people tend to get stuck and to reach fluency in any language so let me switch now the microphone with this let's see so the first question to address is what is this intermediate Plateau right because it's important to define the problem and the intermediate Plateau is that phase or stage or area of language learning where you tend to put in F the same effort that you put before but you get stuck it seems like things are not moving and it's very frustrating for a learner and that is kind of inevitable unfortunately because of the way our brain is and works so the other key question is why do we hit the intermediate why does this happen right and it's something called the law of diminishing returns I don't know if you've ever heard of this but basically the law of diminishing returns means that we reach a level where we put in the effort but unfortunately we get very little return because of that so for example this is what an average language learner expects you know the things to happen I I got as time goes by I'm gonna reach fluency but this is actually what really happens so you you know with time you put in the effort and then things unfortunately stall and I want to stress the fact that I'm talking about the average language learner meaning that the average language learner unfortunately does not know and does not expect this to happen and when this happens they are the laws they say well why is there something wrong with me right um so I want to approach this the entire problem of overcoming the intermediate Plateau from three different points of view of three different angles and the first one we're going to see it from a psychological point of view because I believe in education we're very focused on strategies on techniques on the nitty-gritty details and the technical stuff but actually the psychological factor is one of the most important things in language learning and is often neglected in within the education educational system so the first thing that we're going to see is prepare your mind the second one is more about the technicalities like learning how to learn which I believe is extremely important in the 21st century is a skill and the third one is we're going to tackle the problem of overcoming the intermediate Plateau from an organizational point of view so how to organize your language learning so the first part is about preparing your mind and the goal of this is to develop an unbreakable language learning mindset I I've been learning languages for 30 years and I've been coaching hundreds of people and I believe that this is the biggest problem some people they are not sure that they can actually learn a language that's the biggest problem I remember when I was starting to write a bike which is a skill it's a motor skill I was super frustrated I started at the beginning and I I just couldn't ride a bike but then I you know it happened and I figured out I can do it and there's a big difference between those who have learned a language to fluency and those who have not learned a language to fluency those who have never learned a language to fluency are not sure that they can actually do it and this is a very important point to develop a language learning unbreakable mindset now I don't know if you ever heard of this it's called the motivation dip and this reflects what I was saying before meaning that there comes a point where your skills stall and then your motivation goes down because you start at the beginning of Learning a language and then everything goes well I'm learning new words I'm learning new grammar things and then all of a sudden things stall and that's the moment where your motivation goes down and this happens to a lot of people I would say I would dare say to most people that's why they tell themselves they throw their hands up and they go like no this is not for me language learning is not for me I'm not good enough so this is a direct reflection of the law of diminishing returns so the first important thing to take into account is the fact that you have to be aware first of the motivation dip then of the law of diminishing returns and this the other important thing which I believe is essential is to build an emotional connection build or rebuild an emotional connection with your target language and what do I mean by that I'm going to show you a little exercise that I do I think it's very powerful so let's talk about that let's talk about connect emotionally with your target language Einstein who's my biggest hero I have posters all over my place of Einstein it says imagination is more important than knowledge knowledge is limited and Imagination encircles the world I remind you that Einstein was not particularly good in mathematics but he was particularly good at what is called thought experiments he could imagine something even before he had to apply physics or mathematics to it and I believe that imagination is the most beautiful and most powerful weapon we have to project ourselves into the future and to create the future we want so what does Einstein and Imagination have to do with language learning for is there any french are there any French people here so you might also not non-french people might know that la boom is a cult movie in the 80s and I remember when I was I was 13 I had been struggling with French at school and then I found out that I could watch French TV with French subtitles and my French was okay I was not doing very well at school but then after I saw Safi muscle my French lit up my motivation literally exploded so and I remember and I remember in particular this movie when I was I think I was fourth between 13 and 14 when I had started watching all these French movies and I started imagining in the back of my mind every single time every single time I sit down and I wanted to learn French I thought about I projected myself into the future and I was thinking of actually using the language with Sofi maso in Paris romantic environment talking about why I had learned French why he wanted to live in France you know sometimes we tend to learn languages because you know some people think it's cool to learn Chinese it's cool to learn Spanish it's cool to learn Georgian but until that moment I did not exactly know why I was learning French you know I was at school and French was just another subject nobody had told me you have to learn French or French is great because of this this and that but when I started watching not only Sophia soul but when I want started enjoying the French culture through television and I realized this is a language I could be using in the future this is a language that could make a difference in my life and it did actually because then I moved to France I lived in in France and I got to know a girl who was very similar to sophomore so sometimes dreams come true but I believe that dreams come true because also because it's not just random sometimes we can imagine things to happen and sometimes things do happen kind of in a way we want them to happen so for me this was really important imagining myself always in the back of my mind why I'm learning a language is so important I remember once I I've been learning Hungarian for around six years or something like that and I still remember my uncle he was just asking random you know when you you meet your parents you haven't seen in a while hey what are you doing I'm learning Hungarian and he looked at me and said why why would you learn Hungarian why like why he said or do you have to go through this ordeal and and the thing is that he he could not imagine that but for me learning Hungarian was important there's 10 million hungarians so and I I knew that once you know once I learned Hungarian I would have gone to the country now I'm going to Budapest in a little bit I was in Budapest for so many times and learning and speaking Hungarian has made a lot of difference I always every single time I learn any language I always have in the back of my mind subconsciously the desire and the clearer vision of why I'm learning a language this makes a whole difference because language learning is a long road it takes four or five ten years to speak a language well if you forget why you're learning a language then at a certain point when life gets in the way or you know stumble upon some obstacles then you let go and you say why why do I have to learn this language so an exercise that I do I I used to do I now has become automatic so it's in the back of my mind but I asked some students to do this and they find them very powerful is to take some 20 minutes in silence you take a piece of paper take a pencil and you think and project yourself into the future thinking how you're going to be using a language in a meaningful way within meaningful circumstances things that talk to you right things that make you vibrate things you connect with and in the description when it comes to describing or writing down a little story of yourself using the language living the language breathing the language you can think about it make it emotional make it detailed make it strong make it Vivid make it concrete and make it realistic and what I mean by realistic is that things that you think are actually going to happen it's not just something in a vacuum now this is the kind of thing that I have in the back of my mind when I'm learning Greek but you can just tweak it to any other language so I'm going to read it to you I'm going to read it from here September 2023 I mean paros a small island in the Mediterranean Sea it is 11 A.M while standing on the beach I can feel a light breeze on my face I spend the next hours alternating between swimming in the water and relaxing on the sand reading a book written all in Greek at lunchtime I go to a restaurant that serves traditional Greek food and eat there with friends Greek and foreign alike we chat in Greek and English my friends are surprised I can speak so well but I assure them that I'm not that good yet we laugh together and I suddenly feel as learning this language has caused the whole of Greece to open itself to me so this is for me is emotional because you you it's not just a description of something it's just an emotional connection it's something that is realistic for me it happened before in the past some used in the past and connected with the future because I've been to Greece a number of times although the truth be told when I was in Greece I still did not speak Greek but I know what it would be what it what it might change to speak Greek in Greece and I um asked my students not only to write on paper because I believe that paper is still much stronger than just filtering things through a screen but also to make it just very evident you know you can see here that this is a student who's learning an Argentinian student who's learning was learning German at the time and he wrote the story projecting himself to the Future and he put a flag on it I'm particularly drawn by you know colorful stuff so adding a flag is is very motivating for me and and for him as well so it's not just taking the time 20 minutes or 30 minutes to think about how you're going to be using the language but it's not just a one one time exercise it's something that you shouldn't have there in front of you all the time so it's important to be aware of the law of diminishing returns and the fact that you're going to experience a motivation dip then it's important to connect with the language but that's not enough you know you can be emotionally connected with the language but then you have to actually learn the language and at the intermediate level this is particularly tricky because at the beginner level you know you just grab a course for beginners and you just learn you don't know much about the language so it's easy to start the problem comes when you hit the so-called intermediate phase where your good enough to be able to read simple dialects but you're not good enough yet to enjoy authentic content so it's this kind of Gray Zone that is really frustrating you tell yourself why can't I do this stuff yet so we're gonna I do believe that methods are important but methods derived from principles instead of showing you some you know specific methods I'm going to talk about the principles that guide these methods and then make a difference there's a lot of principles but I'm gonna you know for lack of time we're just going to talk about the the three most important ones and the first one is consume compelling comprehensible and Rich content the second one is engage in purposeful practice and the third one is stay within the Goldilocks zone so let's take a look at each and every one the first one is consume compelling comprehensible and Rich content what do I mean by that does any of you know Stephen crashing so for those who don't know Steven crashing is a very famous linguist that talks about you know the importance of input to put it simply in simple words and he says and I quote we acquire language from input we learn from understanding what we read and what we hear not from speaking and writing our ability to speak and write fluidly and accurately as the result of acquiring language from input when I read these words I was uh I'm so sure about them because I said okay input but are you not supposed to speak in order to you know if you want to speak well you have to speak but actually the the more you know the more I think about it the more it makes sense an example of that is the fact that I was convinced that in order to improve my Hungarian always back to Hungarian I had to speak so I had two tutors and I spoke with them twice a week so once with one tutor and once with another tutor and I thought well the more I speak the better I'm gonna get at speaking or the better I'm going to get at the language actually my my speaking skills and my listening skills just stoled and my reading skills as well because I was spending all my time speaking and not much time listening or reading or listening and reading or watching and this is about acquisition there's a there's a difference between acquisition and learning that I hadn't grasped until then and there's a big difference so now it's more like I understand that acquiring a language is the base and learning a language actively consciously learning a language is something that you put on top of that it's not the first thing it's the second thing so exposing yourself to the language is important but especially at at this stage exposing yourself to content that is both compelling comprehensible and rich is particularly important what do I mean by that compelling is something that is interesting right so it seems obvious to you guys they're all polyglots you know what it is to get grab stuff that is compelling but for the average learner probably who are listening or will listen through the internet the problem is that they we were all used to starting you know using stuff we didn't like at school they gave us stuff we couldn't care less about so it's really important to design your own language learning to take initiative to take to to make sure that you always come up with content you like and that you create the content the second thing is that the content has to be comprehensible and what I mean by comprehensible is that for example if someone comes to me and this happened like learning Spanish and they go like hey Luca I've been learning Spanish for three weeks I've been listening to the radio the whole day but I don't understand anything I said well you know I said one one step at a time right but it's surprising because for us it's okay you have to understand in order to make progress right but a lot of people just listen to the radio thinking I'm just going to listen to the radio the whole day and then magically I'm going to be speaking the language this does not work in the real world so the content has to be comprehensible and here's the trick and this is an important part the content has to be comprehensible but it has to be rich as well what do I mean by rich rich means that a Content that you consume if you want to move forward if you want to make progress has to be content that contains language that you do not know so can be 10 it can be twenty percent it can be thirty percent but it has to contain vocabulary and structures that you do not know and if you wanna you know combine these three you want to make sure that you use the tools that the internet provides in order to make the incomprehensible comprehensible have you ever heard of Google lens for example Google lens is an app that you can use with with a telephone that's it's free and you just can scan a text and make it immediately comprehensible so if you have I don't know learning Chinese for example you can just scan a text and this Google Lens transforms this text from Chinese into your native language and it even reads it in both languages so and I repeat this is a very important point if you consume content that is compelling and comprehensible but it's not rich you're not going to advance much so this is specifically a talk about the intermediate stage right you have to make sure that the content is also Rich contains information that you do not know it you can learn from in order to advance let's see if this works so this is the kind of language learning strategy that I have redefined with time at the base you can see there it's input 70 or 80 percent of the time then you have output can be ten percent or it could be 20 the Hungarian lessons that I have is on top of of the inputs strategy so I spent most the bulk of my time listening reading listening and or reading and watching stuff on top of that I also have output activities one hour a week or two hours a week and on top of that I have grammar studies or like grammar drills that's at the end of it not at the beginning so it's something like 70 20 10 and this is how we actually learn languages at school we have on top at the beginning at the base we have study you know grammar or grammar drills all the time then you have output depending on the country in Italy it's not even output we don't even speak the language I don't know about now but and just on top of that we have some input there oh let's do some input sometime you know when the when the time comes no wonder why people do not learn languages there's this infuriating thing that people a lot of people who don't know anything about language learning they go through years of school they don't learn a language and they think it's me I'm not the one who can learn a language but it's not them it's the system that does not work that's why I'm so passionate about not only language learning about education because it's important once you understand what this implies if the entire education system changed just this kind of strategy things would would turn for the better I think so I made it a a rule a fundamental rule that is I'm reaping huge benefits from this which I did not do before is that I make sure that no matter what I spend at least 30 minutes listening to the spoken language of my target language every single day it can be listening and reading or it can be just listening for example listening to stuff I have previously understood avoiding the radio ordeal you know because if you just listen to stuff you cannot understand you're just I'm pretty sure this happened to you guys you listen to something that you just partially understand you lose focus you think about something else because you lose interest if you can't understand it so that this is really a simple rule but it makes a huge difference to listen to your target language every day no matter what and then you do something else you can do grammar drills you can talk but this is important it's not even difficult to do these days you just get the material you shape it you know you create your own material and then you just spent 30 minutes listening to your target language let me just check how much time I have because we have 45 minutes here and it's already 22. okay so with that principle number one out of the way let's talk about engaging purposeful practice have you ever heard of this term purposeful practice simple practice deliberate practice so simple practice and purpose of a practice is the the mode in It's called The Learning mode it's the way you learn a language mind you this is not what you do this is how you do it it makes a huge difference let me give you an example of that so let's take the four areas right listening reading speaking and writing let's start with simple practice in Reading simple practice is equivalent more or less to extensive reading I'm pretty sure some of you have heard of this extensive reading is just reading for pleasure right you're reading a book for pleasure for the pleasure of it so you're sprawled on the couch or laying in bed and you're just reading for the the fun and the sake of it while purposeful practice requires more concentration more focus and it's about for example analyzing a script listening to the script marking every word and you can see the difference between intensive and extensive reading in intensive reading you read for example one page and it takes you 15 minutes to go through that page because you're listening to it you're reading you're marking words in extensive reading what you're doing is just you're reading for the pleasure of it but this is only possible when your level is high right otherwise you cannot do that and the same thing for listening again the radio stuff so if you have developed if you have a high level you can listen to the radio and maybe you can understand 60 70 80 90 of it but if you don't have a a good level yet then you have to resort to purposeful practice which is listening and reading at the same time because if you don't read what you're listening you can't understand it if you're listening comprehension is low speaking if you are like with your friends like we're gonna do tonight we're talking just chit chatting with people that's simple practice you're just using the language as it comes but purposeful practice you're using the language with a purpose for example with a tutor of yours and you know that you have maybe a specific Topic in mind and you're speaking so that you can get out of your comfort zone and you make mistakes you get feedback and you'll learn out of it it's completely different it's a completely different level and the same for writing you can write just a journal for the sake of it or you can write an essay or you can write a short text and you can get feedback and again both of these are very important if you want to make progress now for the sake of Simplicity because language learning is actually more complex than this imagine that learning a language is like climbing a hill the first part from zero like from scratch to B2 which is on the on top you know be too fluency we call it fluency depending on your definition of fluency and then the outer stretch from the top to the end of the infinite end of the valley is like native like you know ability fluency competence and um at the beginning if you're learning for example a language that is really distant from yours let's say an Italian learning Georgian or Russian at the beginning you have to engage in purposeful practice because imagine an Italian learning Russian just listening to the radio or reading a book Dostoyevsky something easy right it's going to be very difficult so you have to start with asimil or you have to start with teach yourself or you have to start with something that has that simple dialogues where you can actually you know decode the language little by little that's 100 purposeful practice if a language is really similar you can kind of tweak this like Italian Spanish but let's for the sake of Simplicity let's let's consider this as a standard procedure standard path then 100 zero at the very beginning 90 10 so 90 purposeful practice 10 simple practice and then the thing flips once you reach a B2 level if you want to keep improving but this also goes for you know from B1 to B2 you have to do both you have to engage in deliberate practice and simple practice if you just engage in simple practice meaning for example that you have a B1 level and you just talk to people you know you just practice a language you just write something you just read something but you don't do any concrete purpose of you know you do not engage in any purpose of all activity your language learning skills are gonna stall and this is exactly what happened with my Hungarian and other languages as well so if you want to continue improving then you want to engage in purpose of a practice most people who reach B2 they never go beyond because because of the law of diminishing returns you have to put more effort in order to move from B2 to C1 so the bottom line of that was that it's important to consider both modes okay it's not just simple practice we can't hope to just use the language and then we're going to get to eloquence and mind you this is important if you want to get eloquent in a language if you want to get it really good if you want to be able to express yourself well if you just want to speak fluently that's a different matter these are two different layers or two different levels competence levels now principle number three which I really like and I think it's really important it's called stay within the Goldilocks zone and this is a really important one language Journey has to be rewarding if it's not rewarding you're in God you're not going to do it you know the secret if you want to call it a secret The Secret of polyglots is that they love it they love learning languages you know but this is not the case where a lot of people have to learn languages for whatever reason they have to move to in country they have to you know uh learn languages out of necessity more than out of Desire uh or out of passion the Goldilocks zone in astronomy actually the Goldilocks is like a little story you know but it turned into a Content was transferred for example in the in the field of astronomy it's a small range of orbits around a star that are ideal for liquid water to exist um it's also called in in there's other technical terms for this but the concept is that the Goldilocks zone is attached to the Goldilocks Rule now I don't know if you've ever heard of James Clear he's a very famous habit groom that talks about habits he wrote Atomic habits among other things and he says humans experience big motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities not too hard not too easy just right so if you're doing something that is too easy for example let's let's suppose that we are we have a an intermediate level lower intermediate level and someone after six months of learning whatever French Russian they give us back the Asimo book or the teacher stuff we're going to look at it what's that I don't want to engage with asthma it's too easy right but at the same time as I said at the beginning they're not able to read Dostoyevsky yet so they're frustrated whatever so something that is in the middle just right could be for an intermediate learner could be for example a podcast with a transcript again that has the features that I told you before it's Rich it's interesting it's it has new information and it's engaging and it's comprehensible so the the bottom line is that to reach fluency language learning has to become a habit there's no other way around it I'm going to show you now how I turned this into a habit and you have to make sure that you the resources that you're using are challenging enough motivating to use and helpful for making Daily Progress then that resource or those resources are within the so-called Goldilocks zone and you can continue learning for months days months and years on end so with those two things those two parts out of the way let's talk about organizing your learning activities this is a very important one especially for non-expert polyglots like you guys so it's important to develop a powerful and sustainable language learning routine without that you're not going nowhere it's like you know people talk about methods you have a Ferrari but if you have no fuel you're not going anywhere so there's again here there's a lot of important rules we're going to talk about these three which are particularly important the first one is design your environment the second one is make it easy to start and the third one is keep track of your learning so design your environment has three main features it's about time place and reminders so let me give an example of that this is how my beloved Greek language learning routine looks like I always have a glass of water I have my language learning material you can see it here from you can see the you know this is a script of easy Greek I don't know if anybody is learning Greek but then I have a book about Linguistics and I have my my notebook and I always have it there so I have it there it's all right and then I have the the globe which is really important motivating why am I learning language because I want to travel the world I want to breathe language I want to talk to people I want to connect with the world so it's important that before anything you have your resources ready and winning and nothing else you just want to clean the the desktop and now this seems obvious my desktop has been a mess there's always been a mess I have all sorts of things and once I started clearing the mess things got better because you just see Greek you have no other distraction remember every single object on that desktop subconsciously makes you think distracts you makes you think about stuff connected with that the second one is make sure your learning space is clean and distraction free this is also another rule that I had I don't know about you guys but I guess you know also use the phone to learn phone or computer I have removed every single distraction notifications from my phone or notifications for my computer a lot of people still to this day have them it's the worst thing that you can do when it comes to language learning people say how can I remember things first of all you have to focus if you can't focus you're gonna just it's just a filter that cuts half or even three quarters of the information have a clear plan for which activities you will complete for the day I don't know about you but I know when I sit down I know exactly what I want to do because I I think about it beforehand so rule number two and this is a really important one is make it easy to start now I thought okay well you know in order to learn a language you have to learn it every day but this is more difficult to do it's easier said than done as they say so I I've been thinking about this and I thought okay how can I make sure that I learn every single day it doesn't have to be every single day of the year because you know sometimes life gets in the way today for example it might be the first day after the beginning of the year I've been doing Greek ever see every single day for at least an hour a day today I might not do it because you know because of the polygia conference that's okay but in general I try to keep a streak of like a constant streak because that's where the magic happens The Compound Effect starts uh working and this is called anchoring again this is a concept that habit gurus have developed it's called hankering or it has other terms technical terms but the concept is pretty simple and it works really well and it works this way if you want to make if you want to make sure that you do something every day attach it to other habits that you have so that you don't have to think about it and you make it automatic because if you have to make a conscious effort of actually um you know thinking oh now I have to sit down and learn languages if this comes out automatically to you then it becomes much easier so what I do is I wake up I make my bed that's the first thing I do it's important for me it gives me discipline I write a journal for 20 minutes about my life I meditate I exercise and then I learn languages as soon as I finished exercising I know I'm going to learn languages for 30 minutes so 45 minutes then it's done then I can move on to the rest of the day and this has been working really well for me on top of that to compound this I keep track of my learning and keep track of my learning some some people might find this a little bit heavy because after you learn that you have to write what you've done but you can keep it simple so basically I use a digital journal and what I do is I write what I actually do for for example here you can see I write the date 27th of September 2020 Rome the number of the session what I've done and possibly even comments I've been I found these comments to be very helpful because they helped me think about the things I'm doing sometimes change your taste changes and you have to take that into account if you want to adapt to your skills changing and keep learning and keep it interesting if this is too complicated some people might find it heavy to write all this after the learning session you can just I don't know if you ever heard of the Jerry Seinfeld's don't break the chain you just grab a nice wall calendar and you just take oh I've done I know I've done my my Greek session I've done my Georgian session my Russian session so you can actually see it it's like in the face and this is a simple so let's review and then we have the questions kind of running out of time um so the intermediate Plateau is something that you cannot avoid it's just going to happen because of the way our brain is structured we tend to our skills tend to Stone unless we do something about it and to overcome the plateau it's important to address it from three different points of view it's important to prepare your mind learn how to learn and organize your learning activities in particular to prepare your mind it's important to be aware it's really important to be aware of what happens like the law of diminishing returns and the corresponding motivation dip but it's also important to connect emotionally or reconnect emotionally and to keep it in front of you because the why is more important than any how the second the second point is to learn how to learn so again we haven't talked about specific specific techniques here but it's important to make sure that you abide by these three principles consume compelling comprehensible and Rich content has to has the the content has to have these three components engage in purposeful practice together with simple practice if you want to keep improving and stay within the Goldilocks zone so that it's rewarding and you keep doing it because if it's rewarding your brain will want to do it again the following day to organize your learning activities so that the third the third part is to design your environment make it easy to start and keep track of your learning if you want to in a simple way because it's motivating you're keeping track of your learning you look back and say oh I've covered a lot of ground so um the last thing I want to say is that again I'm in general very passionate about language learning but most of all education and for those who are here and those who listened to this talk through the internet it's important to know especially for those who never learned a language it's important to when things get tough like when you're climbing a mountain think about the next step right focus on systems instead of goals instead of thinking I will get there and to obsess about it because language learning and this might sound trivial is we are wired to learn any language we've learned our own native language we can learn every language if you still don't believe it just Design Systems that will help you take things one step at a time because this is a very important point and make sure you never ever forget why you're learning a language thank you just I forgot the last slide but anyway if you can put it on well this was just uh you know just in case um you know the website YouTube Instagram email uh I just wanted to say just in case you want to ask me a question I've been working for example specifically on a course which addresses these problems and just if you want to know more about about this let me know just you can send me a message through whatever here yes thank you again Luca Luca um we now go to the questions again to ask the question go on slido enter the hashtag Babel and we already see the questions just to let you know I will close the option to ask new questions at 9 43 so that we can have again get over to the next talks so uh yes please start answering your questions you can just look at the screen and um so I Mark even the first question okay let's address one by one how is it possible to have an extensive morning routine if you don't have flexible working hours uh well then it depends on a number of things if you're I don't know who asked this question but if you're not you can move it so there's there's a couple of solutions you can for example make sure that you wake up a little bit earlier so you create some space or you can make for example a 10 minute block you don't have to learn for an hour you can learn for 10 minutes and then you can move your language learning session later if you're working from nine till five for example you have to take into account also the energy you have to ask yourself what is my energy flow I always have the same energy flow I'm very my energy is very high in the morning then it crashes around two so if you see me sleeping there are two you know why just clap Clash it literally crashes between two and four so knowing this I have indeed a more flexible working schedule so I decide how to structure it but I would say if you have the the chance depending you know on on your schedule you can make it into three different learning sessions during the day and whoever asked this question can ask me later I don't know the person normally I take into account everything it's a complex it's actually a complex question because it depends on on the person but I normally would say look at where your energy is at the highest peak and then think about breaking down things so that you can learn maybe 10 minutes in the morning 30 minutes of lunch time and maybe 10 minutes in the evening depending on your energy distribution I'm watching Korean dramas with two subtitles I keep rewinding until I grasp it is this effective or is it better to watch until the end and then repeat it's a very interesting question um I would say whatever floats your boat as they say so um the most important thing is that you enjoy doing this my question is do you enjoy more watching Korean dramas with two subtitles and rewinding it or do you like watching it just in one shot and then you know um do it step by step my suggestion would be to install if you have it language reactor this app then what you can do is to download the entire script bilingual script because it's free it's fast and then you just with one click you have the PDF with both languages you read the script you can analyze the script before you watch the drama and then you watch the drama and you're gonna enjoy the drama so you first do the kind of purposeful practicing and then you do the simple practicing you break it down into two different steps that's what I would do and that's actually what I do how not to spend too much time looking for Effective content well I think I think that it's a big investment and I think the most important thing that you actually want to do is to spend time maybe not considerable amount of time looking for Effective content because once you've done that then you can dedicate your time to learning so what I normally do is every month or every two months I spend a couple of hours looking for Content that is good at my level so that then I have it and I just can work on it um I I think it's it's worth the time maybe five or ten hours is a little bit too much but I think nowadays if you write for example best resources for intermediate Learners if you're if you use the imagination that Einstein was talking about you can find everything on the internet in in little time short time then you have to think you have to have some criteria to abide by in order to assess or to gauge whether actually those resources are good for you but in general I think that you should invest time into looking for resources that are good at your specific level what do you focus on when visiting the country where the language you're learning is spoken I focus on input I get as much input as possible so that I can go there and I can use the language mind you sometimes you have this these tourist books that you can you know learn sentences like um how much is the bread or how can I do this how can I do that I don't do that you can if you want to but I just try to get um as much language in me as possible normally if I either travel to the country or I go living in country I make sure that I get at least a B1 level to a B1 level because if you go there as a beginner it might backfire actually if you go there as a beginner you think I'm going to learn the language like it's just the language that's going to flow into my head it doesn't work this way you should get at least to an intermediate level a low intermediate level then you can reap the benefits of having a base that you can leverage in order to to improve so my simple answer is that get as much input as possible listen to the language because if you listen to the language you understand it then you're going to feel more comfortable using uh the language and another thing I want to say is that for example no matter what it depends on the person I'm not a particularly introverted but I don't like using a language when I still don't speak it well in shops I know I don't know if Richard is here for example I spent time with Richard the first time in Poland Richard thrives in having all sorts of conversations everywhere I don't particularly like that so even after years even under after understanding the language well sometimes I use English and that's totally fine as a defense mechanism sometimes I don't want to feel like awkward you know so it's totally fine but the bottom line is that if you understand a language well you're going to feel much more comfortable in any situation that's the first thing understand the language well before you engage in any conversation because every single experience that you have never lived before in another language will be a little bit awkward because it's getting out of your comfort zone and getting out of your comfort zone you know always entails a little bit of grow growth in general always entails a little bit of discomfort so keep that in mind it's going to happen psychologically that you're going to feel awkward no matter what at the beginning do you vary your method in any way depending on the oh do you vary your method in any way depending on the language to your percentages differ based on how similar your new Target is to languages you already know this is very interesting um question we talked about it yesterday with some friends Lucas and company over there um I would say that the strategy is fundamentally the same so in terms of strategies and tactics as the ancient Greeks talk about it right so strategy is the overall strategy is always the same but the tactics are slightly different for example for Japanese I made the enormous mistake of trying to learn it as you would learn any other European language thinking oh that's easy you know I've learned French I've learned Spanish I've learned Russian and you know these languages the things that they have in common is a subject verb object kind of structure right but Japanese is a different Beast because you have to think backwards and I made the mistake of not taking that into account so by using what I normally use which is my bi-directional translation that actually backfired and that's why I found it difficult to actually learn Japanese I dropped it for a little bit I will take it back but with it tackling it from another perspective so I would say generally the strategy does not change but the tactics so the the some specific methods or some things that I do depend on the language especially if a language has a different syntactical order syntax is my Nemesis if a language has a different syntax I've been hearing from Lucas that Turkish is a nightmare in that regard because it has cases and difference in tactical order then it will be very cautious about how to tackle it because if you tackle it the wrong way it can just backfire especially at the beginning what activity do you recommend the most to move from intermediate to Advanced this is opening a can of worms I can talk about this for three hours so we don't unfortunately we don't have time to address this but what I would simply say is that the activities that I normally recommend are um reading books a reading in intensive mode by using I use Google Lens I will publish a video and it's also in the in my course I have found a way and since then I'm super excited I can uncode decode every single even dostoyesky I can read anything if I use Google lens and I can transform this into intensive and extensive reading if you want to move to the advanced stages you have to read and you have to read books because books contain the kind of language that is not within the everyday language that we use this is really important that's what I would recommend 100 is to read stuff that is could be novels could be non-fiction books extensive and intensive reading and then massive listening and watching watching movies listening to podcasts that are interesting things you can understand listening and reading this is the most important thing if you want then depending on what your aims are then you can also engage in purposeful practice what I do with my tutors is that this takes a long time to explain but I divide the the speaking prepare the lesson beforehand I consider just one specific topic and then I find a way for those who are interested I can explain this later I find a way to constantly get out of my comfort zone so that I can learn as fast as I can and then in Phase number three I re-listen to the recording and I try to integrate the feedback in order to keep improving on my skills that's purpose of a practice at its best and for writing you can write if you want to also improve your writing then you have to write you have to write essays you have to get feedback if you don't get feedback you're not going to improve that much you need someone who gives you feedback sorry this has been a little bit short but it's it's a very complex issue but we don't like it by the way what what time is it two more questions okay how do you maintain all your languages what's your weekly maintenance schedule oh boy so um I I I I keep uh I keep a journal like this is called my maintenance language Journal so I've been keeping this I've been keeping this journal for over the last two years to figure out how I actually maintain languages so I can take a look back and say okay how is it that I actually maintain languages the first rule is to make languages part of your life if you don't do that it's really difficult to maintain languages languages are living things that you have to use if you don't find a way to use them it's going to be extremely exceedingly difficult to to maintain them it's going to be very very tough so just to give an example English I use it all the time English is a language that I I read write it has become actually the primary language because I use it much more than my native Italian Italian I speak it because I live in Rome so I speak with my friends when I go out but actually it's fun it's funny but in my you know in where I live in my household I hope I use English um a lot French I use it all the time French is a language that has been part of my life since I moved to France and and got to know Sophie muscle I got to know I saw some imasso so I've been using it because I have a lot of friends uh also in in Rome I used to live with French people uh German I use it a little bit less than the others but I also use it quite a lot because I I got into the habit of for example reading the speaker on a daily basis I divided my apartment into areas where each area in each activity is connected with a with a language so I know this sounds a little bit crazy but that's how it works for example I know in the bathroom I read I don't know Russian in uh in uh when I wake up I do Greek so um in in the kitchen I listened to French or polish or for example other other news so basically on a daily basis I use between six on a good day it's 10 languages on a poor day it's five or six I use them for purposeful meaningful practice so sometimes it has become so second nature that I don't even think about it you know some languages has become just part of my life that's how I maintain languages and on top of that I divide languages into two systems system one is the languages that where I got to a level where I can use them for my life system two is a language where I still have to actively learn them in order to reach a level where I can't maintain them there's maintenance mode and there's learning mode so in this case it's like I'm finished Hungarian Hungarian Greek and Serbian are the languages that I'm actively learning where I have to sit down and learn every day but the other seven or ten I use them on a daily basis and there are three or four I very rarely use like Swedish Dutch Japanese and Chinese now they've been in the back burner because unfortunately I can't deal with 15 languages every day otherwise I would go crazy you know I have a life apart from my anyways so sorry okay there's another one or a we don't have time okay okay so thank you uh I could take a picture of the answers I can answer some later yeah yeah you're still here

Channel: Polyglot Gathering

Views: 10,650

Keywords: Polyglot, Gathering

Id: Fo4-W0ijtkk

Length: 52min 13sec (3133 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 10 2023