How to Reach a Very High Level in a Foreign Language @Days of French 'n' Swedish

hi guys this is luca from lucalampano.com and i'm very pleased to be here with lamont from the channel days of french and swedish hi lamont how's it going good thanks buddy how are you good good how's it going down under because you're in australia right yes it is spring and it's very wet and but a nice temperature but yeah it's going well fine fantastic so um lamont is a very interesting guy he talks about language learning on his channel but also about other things and he's got a very very very interesting vision um and perspective on language learning and not only on language learning so if you haven't started following his channel yet you should do that without further ado let's get started let's dive in the interview this is going to be um you know we're going to cover some interesting topics hopefully interesting for you um about language learning and not just about language learning so let's get started i have a list of questions here the first question is lamont how have you how has language learning impacted your life let's say how has language learning second language acquisition language learning in general change the way you live the way you learn the way you act um it it's almost like how has it not impacted my life would be a much quicker question to answer because for whatever reason until i was like 30 i just didn't do any kind of anything that was difficult at all like i just didn't i'd never got up early i never worked on anything i never pursued anything creative i just expected the whole world to just come to me and and i just for some reason one day is a short way to say it i started learning swedish and i guess the thing that's interesting about learning foreign languages is that you're never very good at it and like even if you are very good at it you're actually not nearly as good as a native speaker normally so i think it at the end of my first year of swedish i sort of realized okay this takes really deliberate effort like unless i'm unless i'm just going to give this up like i have everything else i need to really focus on this and i need to start thinking about how i spend my time like you know because i could i could do this or this is so that every everyone could do anything but if i'm going to get good at this i need to think about what parts of my day i'm using like when am i most awake and and how how to use that time valuably and then with youtube which came a year or so after that it did the same thing with so i started talking about language learning on youtube but um doing language learning and doing youtube and like just keep i keep sort of adding every time i get a little bit comfortable i add something and so it's just completely changed how i do everything in terms of i'm very deliberate now i'd i'd i'm always trying to move towards some goal and i wasn't at all in my 20s like just not even slightly so whether it was language learning or whether it was just going to happen anyway that's how it's impacted me so you thought that before you started seriously started learning languages you thought that you would just get to it and you would learn the language just by getting exposed to the language itself was that what you were thinking in general uh no i i do me uh no i i didn't take it seriously at all i didn't really take anything seriously i never put any effort into anything because with with putting effort into something comes the risk that you might fail so everything everything that i started to get a little bit good at i would leave probably for that reason i like i didn't know that at the time of course but i probably as soon as i started to get a little bit good you start having this pressure and this expectation of yourself and and i would leave it alone and for some reason with language learning maybe because i started talking about it on youtube i don't know i i thought oh hang on i need to actually do this deliberately i can either go or i can go back and pursue something else that i've been semi into in the past like music or something um but but i sort of decided to focus uh more on languages but i know i didn't i didn't really believe that i had it in me to learn a foreign language um not because like talent i just didn't i i didn't think that i had the stuff you know like that the grit um so i guess it was it was sort of an experiment to see if i really could do it yeah very interesting you used a couple of interesting words here um which are grit and then you talked about learning deliberately what do you mean by learning deliberately and what how does that impact language learning now i know we're opening a can of worms here but um you know i've been watching a lot of videos and reading a lot of books about second language acquisition and i guess you've done also some research on that and um there is this um comprehensible hypothesis right that if you uh get exposed to content that you're that that is both compelling and understandable then you're going to basically learn uh the language but the liberal practice is something where you have to sit and deliberately engage in activities where you know where you're focused and you aim at something specific so do you think that deliberate practice is that important to language learning or do you think well you just if you expose yourself to the right stuff and you do the right things and you talk to people then it's inevitably you're inevitably going to learn the language anyway i know that this is opening a can of worms but you know i think that mostly you're going to get quite good if you just expose yourself to enough of the language and have conversations even every now and then i don't think they need to be regular and i think that most uh western europeans from from countries like germany and denmark and sweden and stuff are basic basically proof of this in english in that most of them can speak very very good english and a lot of them haven't had that much deliberate kind of practice uh on it but um i was i guess i first of all i was actually talking more about the fact that i didn't i didn't even have a goal to do with anything so i didn't deliberately swear even if we even if we say okay it's all just passive and you can just watch compelling input uh i wouldn't have watched anything before unless i wanted to watch it like and like it basically if it was in a foreign language then i wasn't watching it to learn the language i was just watching it because i wanted to watch it like i watched the bridge a couple of times but that's just because i liked it it's not because i wanted to learn swedish or danish i couldn't have even told you that those two languages were different before i was into languages um so i i more meant the like having a deliberate approach to my life uh as opposed but now i'm only really just getting into the realm of deliberate practice because i would say that i've only now come to the point where that's what's going to improve my swedish before i'd say just my exposure to swedish had not been enough um and that's only i would i've really only changed my view on this in the last kind of 18 months or so i used to be trying to learn the language very uh like it was maths like and put this here and put this here and then try to assemble that as i speak and it's only in the last 18 months that i've just thought no i've just got to get swedish streaming through my brain all the time gotcha um thanks for the answer um one one observation is that you were you were talking about the bridge the bridge is a tv series uh both in swedish and in danish i think it's 60 in swedish and 40 percent in danish talks about the you know something that happened on this bridge that connects the two countries and it's a very interesting show i i saw i watched some of it i don't know if you've watched the entire series and if i hadn't known like like back in the day i would have thought danish was some kind of weird swedish because they speak both languages and you get confused anyway it's unrealistic how much they in the show how much they can understand each other in real life they use a lot more english than in that show but absolutely especially because swedes have a hard time understanding danes and danes understand swedish much better but we're going to talk about that another another time so one thing that really struck me because i've been watching uh binge watching your videos lately because i find them very interesting is um that you said something that struck me and that happened to me as well let's talk about deliberate practice and you know simple practice i distinguish these two modes of learning right you do something just for the sake of doing it as if you were doing in your native language like reading something for the sake of it or watching a movie just for the fun of it um you said that you had been doing at the beginning i remember you you talked about it in a video about the comprehensive comprehensible input you said that you were an advocate of a the more i speak from the very beginning tell me if i got it right you thought maybe a couple of years ago that the more you engage in conversations the better and faster you're going to learn but then you realize that after a lot of conversations your level was kind of stalling is that correct that's right that's what happened to me i just realized okay well i'm i talked to my two hungarian tutors and my my level just told and i realized that i need more input so um the main idea that i always tell my students and let me know what you think about it is that no matter what happens input still remains the most important the most powerful source of um you know of improvement let's put it this way because anything that you do on top of that like deliver practice is fantastic right especially at this stage where you get a b2 and you want to move to a higher level but don't you think that input should be the main um let's say the foundation of your second language acquisition of language learning um especially at the beginning i do uh but i think a lot of people are very i do think that and i think a lot of people are very um i don't know even just the sound of like the the input hypothesis or whatever they they get very caught up in like labels and they go like oh no but you also you also need to speak and stuff and it's like yes you do also need to speak especially if you want to be really good and you want to be able to express yourself very fluently like for example luca in english he doesn't he he's much more fluent than i am in swedish because because he's outputted a lot but he's done that on top of this input he's got this subconscious understanding of how english works to the point that when when he comes to express a meaning he doesn't need to think oh but what about do they conjugate this verb with that verb with this person or what's going on here it just all just flows out and that in my experience takes a lot of input and it didn't matter how much swedish i spoke because i used to speak a lot like a lot every day for an hour generally and didn't matter how much i did that i was always kind of assembling the language as i went and going uh now i need to say this and now i need to say this and not only does that not sound very swedish but it's it also never really gets you any further like you've you've basically you can only say things that you've said before yeah that's absolutely true it's implicit in explicit learning so when you're thinking consciously thinking what kind of grammar structures am i am i using it's really difficult to do it on the fly when you're talking to someone so i believe that you learn language both implicitly explicitly i recently found a very very interesting presentation by a japanese linguist on on youtube i would link i would put the link in the description box where he talks at length about all the models that we have um for example krashen's model and he talks about the fact that now that model is kind of old with respect to other things and i do believe and by watching that uh the video realized that actually um my vision of things is that you mainly learn languages implicitly but you also have to learn them explicitly and you need the right balance and this balance depends on the face it's a very interesting video i recommend you to watch it i'll you know i'll send it to you but fundamentally to just to address this question might from my perspective is that you need both you need to have a lot of input and learning implicitly but you if you want to get really good past the so-called b2 level where you can interact with other people and you know the language fluently you speak effluently you need to do something else you need to engage in deliberate practice come come to think of it that's what you've done in your native language right uh lamont i mean you've been speaking with people you've been learning english within your family and with your but then you've learned to read and write at school so you know you've done a number of things that you would not normally do in your real life if we're learning a foreign language say swedish have you done like have you written dissertations of given presentations in swedish i'm still sort of deciding which of those routes i want to go down like but i'm starting to do more difficult things i started to slowly translate a book from english to swedish and and i'm having that checked by a teacher i'm not just assuming that uh assuming that i'm right but um yeah that sort of stuff i i if i'm being brutally honest with my level i think it's probably at around a obviously it's not as fluent but it's it's around the mental level of a of an early what we in australia would call high school so like 10 11 12 years old it's that's about as uh what's the word eloquently as i can express myself in swedish so so i need to think about what a 10 11 12 13 year old would do a school um interest so i'm probably not quite up to dissertations and things yeah i mean i could attempt that but i think that would be at the point where the difficulty is a little bit inefficient because i i would be spending so much time thinking oh what's this and interesting yeah so you need some deliberate practice right absolutely to go to the to the upper level because i recently watched an interview where krashen talks about the fact that you need just to get input as much as you can and then output doesn't serve the purpose i do believe well i i do believe that he has a point when it comes to input input the so-called input hypothesis meaning the more the more exposure input you get the better or the merrier i also believe that in the in the power of deliberate practice um and um i will put a couple of links in the description box if you want to know more about the concept of deliver practice and there's a lot of interesting research on that okay now on to the the the next question um how does physical i don't know if you like you know working out running swimming any physical activity and how does that impact your life and like does it have any role in language learning do you do any activities i don't know when you're working out do you listen to languages where you go running maybe in australia it's too hot to run in the summer i don't know it is often too hot to run in the summer but um i used to run quite a lot i haven't r i i don't exercise as much as i would like to but i'm trying to actually set up my uh house so that even when it's hot i can get on an exercise bike and be like watching a series um because yeah i want to i want to be learning a language whilst uh exercising and it's i i think that exercise is really important i'm i must admit that i'm at the moment i'm not great at convincing myself to do it um but at the very least i i do walk with audio books on um and then occasionally i just change it up and just go for a walk or a run with nothing in my ears and that's quite refreshing but i think when i do that all the time i used to never have anything in my ears when i ran and then that got kind of boring and then i started listening to audio books and now when i don't do that it's a nice change so is there's there's ways that you can vary your your routine but i mean your but as language learners i guess we would value our our our mental strength like our you know our brains our in intellectual capacity um but that can't happen without without the body like you're not not just like a head a jar um so so you need to keep your body healthy but i'm i'm not the best i've i will admit that um just before luca and i were discussing that we don't always we don't always treat our bodies the way that we would ideally like to yeah how about you yeah well i'm finding it a little bit difficult to do physical lectures working out um especially these days there's a big friction in starting like everything the most difficult part is actually in starting so you have to set up the environment so that it kind of um you know helps you get started i'm finding it difficult these days to do that even though truth be told the weather is great for example for running because i love running i've been running it for i've been running for the last 20 years or something but now because of the kidney stone that i have i had you know this little problem in the summer still have it it's more difficult i try to run but after after a couple of minutes my back hurts unfortunately so still have to go to the doctor but that's a that's a different matter but um when i do physical exercise when i run i i have to say that i'm not a fan of listening to language podcasts while i'm running i always connect running with music if i have to listen to music if i have if i have to go to the park i will listen to music but i've established this simple rule that the last 10 minutes of my running session is dedicated to language learning so when i go back home when i'm on my way back home for 10 or 15 minutes i will listen to a podcast and i have connected working out the working out session is always connected with polish so every time that i do a workout session i'm doing for example i'm listening to music because it helps me you know with movement i get excited but then i every time i take a shower if i don't have to for example wash my hair i have the the air pods which allows me to listen to a polish a polished podcast and then when i i groom and i do other space and the time and the activity dedicated to listening to podcasts in in in polish so i've connected a number of activities either before uh the you know the running or the working out session and after that that where i spend time especially listening to languages that i have let's say at a b1 b2 level so listening is once you get to that level it's very easy to connect with other things and um so and not only that but also when you engage in physical activity then you're you know you're in a good mood after that you're full of endorphins whatever they call them so it's very beneficial for me it clears my mind for me running as a sort of motivation you're just in out there out and about and you're just enjoying nature and and it helps me also with with language learning in general it's important to do it but sometimes we know that we have to do you know stuff but it's difficult yeah anyway thanks for the answer um we have a couple of more questions here so are you an organized person have you become an organized person what what about getting your life organized and how has language running impacted that if if it has in general you have a very structured day you're more like hey you know let's do whatever whatever comes um i'm more organized than i used to be i wouldn't say that i'm an organized person overall uh luca luca and i was supposed to meet a year ago and not no we haven't been so disorganized that it's taken a year to to help make this happen but we were supposed to meet a year ago and i got the day wrong and i went to the movies um when i was supposed to be with because i definitely wouldn't call myself an organized person um and with regard to organizing my day i no not really i would i'm gonna say no i'm not an organized person i was more organized when i was working a nine to five and i would generally have to get to work at about seven o'clock um uh so it was actually more like a seven to midday or seven to one job um i was organized then but and i ironically actually spent a little bit more time learning languages then because i always had an hour an hour trip each way the short answer is no [Laughter] i try i'm always productive i'm a productive person i'm not always organized in how i do that sometimes i'm editing videos at one in the morning other times i'm still watching a series in swedish at one in the morning i'm i'm never doing nothing which is good but i'm never doing the same thing at the same time of day if that's what you call organized and the reason that one one of the many reasons that i'm standing is that the ceiling is much cleaner than the floor so gotcha i know the answer to this but yeah yeah i'm not gonna delve into that that much uh when it comes to my organization um i'm probably going to make a video about that actually i have but we still have to publish it i'm kind of an organized person so i always have like blocks of time during the day and it serves me well but you don't have to be that organized i remember the people who take a look at my calendar go like oh my god how do you how do you live like that you know but um i believe that there's this kind of stereotype that if you plan everything then your life doesn't have flexibility anymore i don't believe that it can give you more flexibility if you know how to do it so i'm i've become more flexible with time i understood that if you block every single minute your plans or your plan never goes exactly as you had planned so i've learned to be structured but also to give uh you know to give a little to give space to create space for more stuff you know in just in case plan b and everything else okay one last question before we get into the q a because you guys asked a lot of interesting questions you want to keep it you know we want to keep this video relatively acceptably uh you know at an acceptable length so to speak um let's talk about motivation motivation in general and motivation in language learning um what do you do to stay motivated like you've been learning swedish for how long you've been learning swedish more or less almost five years total i would say two years of that i was reasonably focused on french like more focused on french than on swedish but 18 months now just swedish okay have you had a how have you kept the motivation so high have you had any motivation dip and and do you have any tips or pieces of advice for those who get unmotivated um in you know in the long path along the long path of language learning um i've got a few that are like you can take or leave um one of them is that i've got all these like series i want to watch books i want to read like you know series either in swedish or like a actually a kids show but like a good kids show dubbed into swedish and books i want to read so i just generally just go the next thing the next thing so i finish one book and i just say oh i really wanted to read that book um so the hard part now is deciding when to stop that and and to go back to french because i do want to do that at some point too um i'm looking over here at my bookshelf that's uh so that's one thing is just to have these tasks and to see that as the value in itself but that doesn't always work um another one is like i think it's sometimes called the pay-per-click method um by some salesman who who had like a jar of paper clips on his on his desk and so that he could see how many sales calls he was making he would just move one paper clip to the other jar every morning uh that and until he was done and that was the thing so not worrying about the results so much like am i not wearing oh am i getting better at swedish have i reached this milestone because milestones are very hard to measure in language learning um so i'm doing like a really big version of that with uh these seeds that i have in a little jar where every hour of swedish i do whether it's input output deliberate practice anything and every hour i spend on swedish i move a seed over and i know that when i finished that thing of seeds my swedish will be a lot better than it is now so and that's what i want i don't know i don't i can't measure a thing of how good would a wheel um that's that's my tips but you you're gonna have dips in motivation and you can um you can yeah that's okay i guess is what i want to say i think it's normal to have different motivations sometimes you tell yourself what the heck am i doing why am i doing that right so my very short piece of advice is that when that happens i think you should focus more on the steps rather than thinking about the peak of the mountain because if you're constantly thinking when am i going to get there and you focus too much on goals then you lose sight of the systems that make those goals reaching those goals possible and i believe that that's the first thing and the second thing is that it's if you get unmotivated you're doing something wrong and you should change the way you learn whether the material you're engaging in or the way you're doing it i think that plays a role so thank you lamont this was very interesting um and now let's start with some of the questions that i have here i don't have my contact lenses so i um let's let's take a look at the first question so pepe's world is it normal when learning a language to have difficulty understanding accents you're not used to i've been learning spanish for about three years now and sometimes it's not easy for me to understand certain accents what's what's your short answer to that good answer is yes very normal three years is not even that long unless you've been going like all spanish all the time kind of thing um you three years you shouldn't be expected to be an expert on all the languages that exist especially in spanish there's got to be hundreds um and also that i wouldn't it in the first kind of well the first stages up until a b2 level even it would be ideal if you didn't have too much exposure to different accents and you focused on one accent because i still struggle to understand norwegian which i guess you could consider like an extreme accent of swedish so that's yeah i i fully agree i fully agree with lamont i think you should stick to one accent when when you start and then if you don't understand accents within the spanish world it's pretty normal i think the chilean accent you know from chile is infamous for being very difficult if you haven't been exposed to that so it's completely normal don't worry about it just keep getting exposed to the language as much as you can and then if you want to understand a specific accent then get exposed to that accent and you will understand it in no time so um brew bf sorry for butchering your name i can't really see here i'm a b b 2 c 1 level in english i'm at b 2 c 1 level in english i'm currently doing some bi-directional translations for a few weeks however i feel i'm in i'm in the intermediate plateau and is it really difficult to measure my progress in english how can i overcome that you were saying that before how can you measure actually uh the progress progress in a complex skill such as second language acquisition acquiring a second language well luca might disagree with me on this but i would say to not really worry about measuring it because i think it's very difficult to measure like i was saying before that a swedish 10 year old is much more fluent than i am but i would probably do better on an exam meant for university students or something because they're totally different skill sets so i i wouldn't worry so much about it's it's it's very hard to measure who whether you've gotten good at a language or whatever so at that level if you really are b2 to c1 especially if c1 i would worry about developing specific skills that you would like to have so if you would like to be really good at talking about technology or i.t or global warming or the climate in general or something then develop that skill and and don't worry so much about how good you are at english as a whole i think lemon i don't disagree at all with you i agree i agree with everything the only thing i would add in this regard is i don't know if you ever heard of a book which is really interesting which is called measure what matters and language learning is indeed a complex skill that is difficult to to measure i think that if you can measure something it could be for example the amount of hours you spend or what you do you can measure there are some things that you can measure you can put in numbers if it helps you if it gives you a sense of direction and what i normally do is that i actually do not measure my skills because it's it's really difficult but i do do i do two things first of all i keep a journal where right what i do every day and the amount of time um you know that i spend engaging in in these activities like for example in greek and hungarian um but i also write on and off comments that where when i have eureka moment so you can't you know as i said before you can't really measure progress but you can write sometimes oh i actually started understanding words in a movie i remember when i was watching um i uh i don't remember exactly now the name of the movie i think you you probably know it it's a it's a movie about uh it's a funny movie about the police in sweden uh and cops and the main actor i think he's from lebanon he he made a you know he made another movie before that that i really liked that was the very first movie that i watched together with sorry guys this is in the first word is the f word in english but it's the the name of the thing is it's called omo which was a movie that marked me uh when i watched it i remember back in the day i i you know i found the script in swedish and i was going through the entire script um anyway eureka moments where you suddenly understand stuff i remember i watched i started watching after a year learning the language and i said oh my god i actually understand what they're saying and so i think if you keep track of the amount of time that you spend or the activities that you are engaging in and you jot down some comments on and off on how you're doing things if you can improve them or eureka moments that's an indirect way of measuring your progress because measuring uh something like language learning is really difficult at least directly in terms of numbers that's why i think um so how important do you this is beyond the basics in polish interesting name uh how important do you find the process of constructing your own sentences rather than being spoon-fed ones through texts and apps or doesn't matter is seeing the words on the page enough or do we need to actively be training our ability to translate without any crutches slash visual aids i was a little bit confused by this question because the end of it seems to imply that when we're speaking we would be translating or maybe maybe he means um because i know this guy sort of i know who he is um uh maybe he means that when we're writing uh i i don't know because outputting i would be trying to avoid translating and and if there's still a if you feel a need to translate um then i would say you probably need more input i don't my experience with it is that just a very a very input-weighted uh blend of of input and and speaking means that you will produce your own sentences that are still correct um and and still sound like what a native would say so yes i i think seeing that i don't think seeing the words on the page but hearing hearing the words in your ears and seeing the words on the page i think that is enough but i think most people significantly underestimate how much you need agreed um for me it's um in language journey it's neither the this or that it's this and that so and if i if i may i would say that it's important to get exposed to a number of um sentences the more the merrier but then what i normally do just to give an example is i take a piece of content that can be a text and you know a podcast then i take specific words or actually fragments of that podcast they put them into a notebook gonna make a video about that because people have been asking me and then i basically um make sure that i write fragments that are flexible enough so that i can create my own sentences so it's a i bridge the two worlds i i i expose myself to send to sentences within a specific context i get them out of the page so to speak and i transfer the information into a notebook and then i use them to have a meaningful conversation either with myself or a tutor telling about the content of the podcast so that i can you know i get the best of both worlds so to speak but again i would get exposed to a lot of you know the language and the more the merrier um language guide elena or elena this is the it would be the italian pronunciation that's my sister's name elena do you think it's possible to learn a language if you wear many hats in life like being a mother working at home parents etc etc being a parent blah blah blah i really liked this question um because i think it acknowledges the reality that it's very difficult it's not i i think there's a lot of uh talk out there i'm sort of i don't want to just mention anyone specifically but i think there's a lot of this idea it's like oh you you know you can just do it if you put your mind to it and you can but you there is actually a reality to your life and i found we were talking before about organization i found that i need to be as organized as my life is complex so back when i first started learning swedish i i did heaps i did like three or four hours a day and i did that with ease because i didn't have anything else that i was really doing um you you could say i was i i was a loser i didn't have anything going on so i was just just learning swedish um but but now i i spend i will freely admit i spend a lot of time making videos it was totally up to me i would just learn learn languages for like eight hours a day but i've have a living to make and everything so i'd spend a lot of time making videos i also have two kids um i you need to be very deliberate with your time and and it it's possible i think when when you're not when you're not as good as you could be in terms of being deliberate with your time it's you you feel like you're in this permanent place of like feeling like i'm i'm getting the most out of my time that i possibly could be but then like when i when i saw luca's timetable i was like what the heck is going on the first time we met he ran straight from straight from speaking to me straight to to a danish lesson and and i was like this guy really has completely filled his life with with stuff that he's doing so i i think that you can but it is difficult um and and you also need to set up systems that work so for example i'm trying to raise uh well especially my younger son my older son's it's a bit late for me to raise him now but he also watches with us we we watch stuff in swedish so i watch i raise my youngest son in swedish as much as i can which then gives me time in swedish as well and i don't know i certainly wouldn't get as much swedish as i do if i hadn't made that choice so you've got to put in realistic things and also i've dropped like i don't read in english anymore people give me books one person in particular gives me a lot of books they're like i think you'll enjoy this and i'm like i'm not going to read that because it's in english so i even read the stuff that luca's recommending now like stuff like atomic habits and whatnot i i'll read that in swedish as well fantastic great great um just if i can chime in chime in um it's difficult it's difficult especially if you have a family but i i believe you can always squeeze in 10 minutes if you can for example i have an american student of mine she's she's traveling all around the world she has two kids so she's very busy but at the same time she started i you know we started talking about it and she realized that um you know it's about making it a priority language journey if it's a priority for you so she makes the sacrifice quote unquote um of waking up earlier when kids are still sleeping and then she puts in the time but it's difficult in the long run and i do understand you have to work on systems and you have to be consistent if you really want it you know that's at the end of the day you have to you have to want it in the long run that's a difficult part um so this is another really interesting question by this is a difficult silly adrienne saladrian i'm not sure how to get over the feeling of being stuck i study an hour every day but i feel like i'm not making any progress or i'm not progressing as quickly as i would like this is a very very common question like how do i get unstuck when i got stuck you know i guess it would depend i would need to know more details about what you mean by stuck but it sounds to me like pretty common plateau kind of thing whether it's the intermediate plateau or the advanced plateau like um and that's why i would i would just do something like the paperclip method or just say you're going to do like you'd be going to do another 100 hours in the next three months so a bit over an hour a day or like and it's you can't really not not get better if you if unless you're unless you're like c2 already and you're trying to get very specifically better which i doubt then if you just keep doing an hour every day you will get better i don't think anyone progresses as fast as they uh as they feel like they should like i've just been experimenting in in a new language in like the last two days really because i'm testing this app and so i was testing it with a new language and it's so exciting because i see like literally every word i've never seen before but i've at the time that you see them i'm like i could i could learn that and i could learn that oh this this language is easy if you just learn learn like these thousands of words that i'm saying that i've never seen before then i'd speak the language but it's realistically you can't you just can't take in more than maybe at this stage 15 20 words a day or for you it might be eight words a day because you're already more advanced i don't know but it's no one i don't think anyone's out there thinking yeah i'm i'm smashing this i'm i'm going to be where i want to be in a month's time it just takes a long time and i think unless you worry about how long it takes the faster you go like i've sort of started relaxing about my swedish recently and i had a lesson the other night and it was flowing out like never before i don't know what it was but get into the floor and relax stop thinking about it stop worrying about it yeah but it's a very hard answer to accept you just stop thinking about it but yeah well no well no that's that's that's fair enough actually um it's it's a very uh actually complex answer to answer it would take um it would take quite a long time to answer properly now we want to cover other other questions because we're running out of time here but to you know uh to to be concise to make a long story short for me um it's like when you want to lose weight you take you took a look at yourself in the mirror and you don't see any change day by day but actually you do so you should stop worrying about it focus on the system and most of all as i said before make sure that you reflect upon your language learning what am i doing are you doing it correctly are you doing things automatically are you doing things just because you heard that these things need to be done at this stage so take your language learning in your hands think about what works for you because everyone is slightly different or different and then you will make progress if you put in the work and if you work if you think long term so here's a few questions from youtube so we we covered some questions from instagram uh let me see this is a very long question i'll read the first part of it by day the 13th interesting name would you guys say it's beneficial to just listen to the sounds of a language that you want to learn for a period of time before even getting into actually trying to learn and understand the language so for example you would simply listen to your target language for about six months for a year get accustomed to the sense of the language and only then get into the language i do wonder if it will lead to better results in the long run an interesting question i've heard anecdotes that it does um so that i spoke to one swedish guy who said that the only non-native swedish speaker he'd ever met who sounded like a native so that's a very very big call the only one he'd ever met did that he just listened to swedish for like six months without ever actually attempting to speak it and then started moving towards actually learning how the language works and um but even matt versus japan who's like you know pretty extreme in his methodology even he said well that's a pretty like you've really got to have faith that that's going to work if you're if you're going to attempt that um because okay you might it's not a big deal to just listen to a language for six months if you're not doing anything else but if i'm not totally positive that's going to work then i'm probably going to try actually understanding it and everything i certainly think it's kind of an extreme version of the input hypothesis or the input heavy version um so whether you whether you could cope with that and whether you would be okay if that maybe didn't work out the way you'd hoped i don't know fair enough i i agree with you so i don't need to add anything else um i think you should start learning the language as far as i'm concerned you can listen to the language maybe for for one week or two weeks but then you know you you're an adult you can actually use scripts and etc so i that's what i would do i get into it immediately but to each his own as they say um um so what is b2 for you i think we covered that but you know we use maybe we were getting into a you know like a this is a opening a candle um what is b2 for you how do you know that you're good enough in one language that it can become maintenance phase that it can become maintenance phase and you can start a new one this is what she literally wrote this is an interesting question how do you know okay now i'm good enough that i can i can just maintain the language um i really don't know i'm not good at this because um i i'm working on that right now like as we speak i'm working on is it can i like is this a good time for me to go back to french and i'm pretty like i'm pretty confident that my swedish is at c1 um like in terms of measuring there's a like with certain things you can measure and go do i tick that box do i tick that box i'm pretty confident that my swedish is a c1 but still i feel when i compare my swedish to my english i think well it's not very good and it makes me want to get better at swedish so i i i don't know but some i know some people have these things like could you learn i think richard simcott has said could you learn you he calls it like a stable language or a base language or something um oh anchor language that's it the one of the measures of it is could you learn a third language or whatever language you're up to through that language um so but luca would luca would know more about this than me because he has languages at at like various levels i just have swedish and english really so in my case i think it it's just when you feel it meaning that again it's difficult to gauge uh exactly your skills so when i feel like i i can do certain things like i can have a conversation with people on the street or i can start understanding movies or i can start understanding the content of podcasts that are relatively complex that's a moment where i think i can start maintaining a language at least by listening to it and it's a it's a difficult it's a it's a complex question to answer so the the short the short version is that when you feel it when you're able to do certain things like understanding the language more or less around you without you know the aid of a script or visual aids like subtitles and when you start engaging in conversations so you feel confident enough that's the moment where i feel like i can actually start getting into maintenance mode if i want to or just to get into deliberate practice and keep improving this is a very short answer it takes more time but we're running out of time i wanted to go through one last question here we have more questions guys sorry for not covering all of them but it's just a matter of time if you're interested we can always make another video with lamont um how much time do you spend per day listening to and reading a language as you are in the process of learning uh as you are in the process of learning it i'm doing about 30 minutes of listening without taking notes and 10 minutes of listening and taking notes with harder material is that enough i i think that's actually pretty good at first because i i have this theory that it's not if if you just throw in like six hours a day at the start then a lot of that goes to waste because a lot of that time is you spent your brain just like filtering out things that it can't uh it can't ask it can't your brain that those things are important because it's like you just can't learn that quickly so if you throw in six hours a day of input for example it it might actually work out to an hour and a half a day that your brain actually can take any of that in so 30 to 40 minutes especially if 30 minutes of those are like that you're doing something deliberate and trying to learn new things i think is good i think after a while when you start being able to understand things to a to a certain extent without any aid just just hearing it or just reading it then it's good to try to step that up um one just to just to make the language more a part of your life but two because you're trying to sort of override some base assumptions that your br especially if this is your first foreign language um you're trying to override these kind of assumptions that like oh this is how words go together this is this is how it works in english so this must be how it works in whatever you're trying to learn um and and just a ton of like uh no it's not impossible for everyone but bombarding your brain with the language once you reach a certain level maybe b1 i think is a good idea if it's possible and that's why if if you learn a fair bit before you say move to the country then you generally end up speaking the language well but if you don't learn anything when you move to before you move to the country and then you might get in a situation where you just speak english all the time okay great fantastic great answer my short very short answer to that is you have to ask yourself is that enough for you like there's no good enough or you know the more the merrier but then you have to be realistic with your time and energy if you can do 30 minutes that's great 30 minutes a day i think the most important thing is frequency doing it every day if you can do it 15 30 minutes it's great if you can do a little bit more that's even better you get there faster but the more important thing is do it every day and get exposed to interesting and compelling content thank you so much lamont it's been great to have you um where can people find you uh they can find me at youtube.com days of french in swedish and not not and um um but if you just punch into youtube days of french and swedish or days of french in swedish it will come up um yeah it's only youtube at the moment so gotcha very interesting channel i highly recommend it and your your style your editing style fascinates me i have to learn a thing or two about that um thank you so much again lamont have a fantastic night because it's night in australia and it's morning here and i will see you soon here on youtube bye bye thank you [Music]

Channel: Luca Lampariello

Views: 42,493

Keywords: foreign language, high level in a language, how to learn a new language, language learning, learning a new language, how to reach fluency, how to become fluent, Days of French 'n' Swedish, Luca Lampariello, polyglot, language education, language acquisition

Id: 5_T0yfRvx-U

Length: 53min 15sec (3195 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 21 2021