Idahosa Ness - Learning by Eye vs. Learning by Ear: Which is better? [EN] - PG 2017

you but I'll go ahead and get started my name is a dosa Edelen s yeah I don't look at that it's like it confuse you in fact we're gonna talk about that today it Dowson s I'm from the United States and I am the founder of a company called the mimic method just curious show of hands anyone heard of me or my program all right sorry some familiarity I apologize then if you've heard me say these things a million times today we're going to talk about Oh little contacts limit method main method calm we make language courses that focus on pronunciation and hearing all right and today what I want to talk to you guys about is the difference between what I see is a two different paradigms or systems for approaching foreign language and that's to either learn it by ear or to learn it by eye and we're gonna talk about which of these two approaches is better alright to start off I want to talk about something called the streetlight effect I'm sure many of you have heard this parable the story before but policeman at night doing his rounds and he sees a drunk man in the street under a streetlight on his hands and knees searching for something so he comes and he says hey what are you looking for and a drunk man is like oh I lost my wallet he's okay I hope you find your wallet so you get down on the ground to keep searching together and after a couple of minutes they don't find the wallet and then the policeman asks are you sure you lost your wallet here and then a drunk man says oh no I lost it over there in the park is it okay so why are we searching for it here it says well this is where the light is right and this is a common kind of effect we have in human psychology where we want to solve a problem we kind of stay in our comfort zone and we base our problem-solving around what's easiest what's most convenient for us even if it's not exactly what we need so what I want to try to convince you in this presentation is that they learn by I approach which is the most common approach the way most adults learn foreign languages is equivalent to the drunk man searching for his wallet under the streetlight it's not necessarily the best way it's the most comfortable way for us however what you're really looking for might actually be out there in the darkness so what I hope to do is coax you into the darkness perhaps join me in the dark side of learning a language by ear and as I go through the points here very often I face a lot of resistance to the things I say we're very used to depending on our eyes on visual stimuli to understand the world so you might kind of resist me when I tell you to come and join me in the dark side but I just ask you that you try it out consider it a bit and I'll leave some time for Q&A at the end and you can you can challenge me okay so first to clarify what do I mean when I say learn by eye versus learn by ear so when you learn languages by eye what I'm talking about is your primary means of getting new words or new phrases comes through the visual medium so you learn new words through reading them on paper or on a screen and then you reinforce your memory of those words through writing or typing with your hands all right in contrast we have to learn by ear approach where words come first and foremost auditorally through your ear and then you reinforce it by mimicking with your mouth okay so learn by eye visual learn by ear auditory now the traditional approach that we've all gone through at some point in school or whatever is primarily a learn by I approach there are very few programs out there that are really purist in learning a foreign language by ear only okay now to prove this I'm from the US the most common foreign language studied in the u.s. is Spanish so what do you do on your first day of Spanish or for you maybe it was French or maybe English whatever you know your teacher goes up on the whiteboard and they draw the first word he's usually good word for high and they're like hola except in my case my teacher was from Minnesota so she's like Ella all right and then they're asking you to learn quite a few things here seems quite simple but you're actually learning a lot of things in this first lesson first obviously you're learning what does it mean how do I use this okay what's the context I meet somebody in Spain or Mexico I have to say hola that's the semantics question but beyond that I also have to learn how do you write it so if you were a smartass like me in school then the teacher says okay what is this word and then I'm like holla like no it's not what it is the H is silent in Spanish okay so why write it in the first place I don't know it's just how it is just remember that or you gonna feel the test okay fine so now I have to learn how do you write it that's orthographical question all right but I also have to make the connection between those two things what does it mean and then how's it written so that next time I see that word written down on a whiteboard on a computer screen or on the paper I can make the connection make the association and then finally beyond that I have to learn how does it sound how do I make those sounds how do I pronounce it that's a phonetic question and then of course like we said before I have to make a connection between how you write it and how you pronounce it in English whenever I see that H symbol I like to go but apparently they don't like doing that in Spain so I have to remember that connection when I see an H don't do anything all right and then of course most importantly I need to make a connection between what it means the semantics and what it sounds like so I can recognize this word in conversation all right now a question for you guys in the traditional thing so when you're growing up learning language in school what did your teachers what are your educators focus on most of these three concerns semantics orthography and phonetics somebody call it out with ography anyone else semantics cool ok you want to be good school then so uh so what so someone said orthography some sort of semantics so what I would argue is that semantics seems to be more obvious one what does it mean that's what we care about but if you actually look at what do people penalize you on so what did my Spanish teacher fail my Spanish grades on what was that based off of well I would argue that it was actually more orthography right spelling so think about when you see someone make a really long argument on Facebook and like this is why I believe that the European Union should be this way in the blah blah but then they say they spell it they misspell the word there and then anyone's like oh you're an idiot you misspell that word he's stupid right and then I don't get so kind of bougie about how things are spelled and that's how I was if I did my Spanish test and I said all laughing with us but I forgot the H I get minus five points on my test I'm being penalized because I didn't learn the orthography same thing if you do the most popular language learning app right now duolingo if you this person's I think assumed in Swedish and he got the sentence right I drink your coffee but he forgot the e so you don't get your points you don't get your lean guts your coins oh my god so once again we're putting the emphasis on spelling on orthography now what do you think educators focus on the least and the traditional model call it out somebody phonetics I pretty obvious right phonetics no one really cares about that so once again go back to your Spanish teacher or your English teacher French teacher and you try to say you're like Ola oh yeah good job good enough next lesson right or you can do a lot of these pronunciation apps or whatever and they say repeat after you and if you try this I've done this before try your worst pronunciation but kind of close enough it will give you a link on so we'll give you coins and Pat you on the butt I'm gonna send you on your way you will not get penalized for saying Ola but then you go to Mexico you to Spain and you're like Ola and then doesn't quite work maybe they understand you but depending on the language depending on how badly you pronounce that word they might not actually understand you when I was learning Chinese in China there was not enough emphasis placed on people learning the phonetics learning the tones so you see people who live in China for years and they know all these words they can write beautiful Chinese calligraphy but then they go into a taxi and they try to order it and tell the guy like okay I want to turn right and turn left to here and the guys just like I have no idea what you're saying right now you know so you can really see this level of priority reflected on the step by step approach of a traditional model to learning a language the very first thing you do when you learn a language in the traditional model is you learn reading and writing right you learn how to spell it was Chinese or another kind of character system how do you make these characters and a lot of time is spent on this and the idea is once you know how to read and write you can then learn new vocabulary through the visual medium and then you can study grammar grammar theory and then like a computer you can plug these vocabulary words into your grammar algorithms and then translate things back and forth and the whole point of this stage is to be able to translate from your first language to the second language back and forth with grammatical and orthography orthographical accuracy then the idea is once you can write and read you should be able to lift that ability magically off the page into the world of conversation so you go out there and then you meet somebody and you start to speak the way you write and hopefully understand the way you read that's the idea you just translating it into the oral context then once you're already fluent in the language and you can have a conversation if you come and say you know what I have a really thick accent I want to sound more like a native speaker maybe just for fun I'll learn hearing and pronunciation I'll perfect my accent a bit and then you know that'd be kind of cool but really don't really put emphasis on this in a traditional model it's more like a nice cherry on top sprinkles on your ice cream sundae like it's a cool thing to have you can impress people at a party with your accent but it's not necessary right this is what it's kind of communicated to us now that question to you guys's of these three abilities if you had to choose one to have perfect and just leave the others which ability matters most to you understanding and speaking right understanding screaming that's why we're coming to this conference we want to understand and speak with other people from other cultures because language is just a tool the technology is our first technology for connecting with other human beings and the primary way that we human beings connect with each other even with the internet and all that is through conversation right now I'm speaking and you're understanding and I hope we're all having a beautiful connection right now okay so human connection understanding it speaks what matters most but you know we get emails every day we ask people what's your biggest frustration and they all boil down to the same two major frustrations either I can read but I can't understand native speakers when they talk to me fast they blend the words together I I can I know the words on paper I just can't recognize them in a conversation or I can write and my grammar is good I can do a good email and text message but when I speak I don't have the confidence well I don't have the clarity the speed that I want people ask me to repeat myself because they can't understand my accent these are the most common frustrations you get from people who've been learning languages in the traditional approach so what's going on here is people are having trouble understanding and speaking you all raised your hand that's the most important thing for you that's why you signed up for that language learning program so what I would argue that that traditional learn by I approach is failing us it's failing us as a society most people do not actually become conversationally fluent in a language despite years and sometimes thousands of dollars of investment they can read and write I get emails from Chinese people all the time and it's perfect flawless Shakespeare English oh my oh well this guy's really good and then I get in a call and they have they can't speak they have no idea how to say these things right so I say that's failing because you can't connect with me on the conversational level test test good yeah so the question is why does it fail now why does it fail it's actually perfect segue to my next point which is this fact I was gonna use a different example but what you use this example right now I can read and write English perfectly from the US been doing this as a kid however if I can't hear you or rather if you guys can hear me oh sorry yeah gotcha and then he asked his question to me and I want to answer it and I'm like oh really good question so what's going on once again I can write what I just said to you and flawless English perfect spelling I was Spelling Bee champion in my school in fifth grade I promise but if I can't pronounce the words then I can't clearly express them I can't speak them to my friend here all right so keeping that in mind it should be very obvious now why the traditional or conventional learned by I approach is failing us because look at worried putting hearing and pronunciation it's the bonus skill we save the very end and the teacher Pat's you on the butt on your first attempt your pronunciation is really off but whatever is good enough to keep moving they save it for the end so that's why I learn by ear approach we switch it around if you need to hear before you understand then you need to train hearing and make sure you can hear enough at least same thing if you need to be able to actually create articulate pronounce the words then you need to train that before you get into trying to express yourself through speech so the learn by ear approach places that emphasis at the front you start by trying to master the hearing and potentiation of your second language first then once you're comfortable with the sounds you go and start communicating with people learning the language by ear then once you're already conversationally fluent you want to increase your command of the language build your vocabulary your eloquence through reading and writing so in other words before you learn what stuff means or how stuff is spelled you first need to get comfortable with how stuff sounds or a simpler way of putting it is get your accent right at the beginning that should be your first plan of attack when you're learning your next foreign language so the question is why then do the educators focus on spelling over accent once again you can fail your Spanish class because you forgot to put your H in front of Allah and all the other spelling rules are Spanish but have a terrible accent and no one's gonna penalize you in fact you can get a perfect score I know people who like someone in my class a plus in Spanish sounded terrible sounded super gringo accent what does it matter so why do educators focus on spelling / accent street light effect when you misspell a word is very obvious everyone can see it everyone can make fun of you on Facebook right when you mispronounce a word it's not so obvious to a native speaker they might hear something's off but they can't show you what to do make can say like okay I'm mispronouncing it what do I do now and I don't know just do it different I guess right it's not it's not so clear it's out there in the darkness so people just say oh whatever we have to make money on these angular apps but just keep going with how it's going right so the question then is how do you train accent how do you train pronunciation without spelling without relying on your eyes how do you do it if your eyes are closed and this is the question I asked myself and how I started my company and the answer came to me based on my experience playing music my whole life who's curious how many people here I see people like shaking their hair he's got like oh yes Sookie alright so Suzuki this Japanese guy who brought this classical music training program to the US and so when I was a kid my mom put a violin in my hand and took my xbox controller or whatever out and so I played violin since I was five and the controversy of the Suzuki school was that you learn by ear they say if you're a kid learning a language learning in a new musical instrument it's not so important that they're able to read sheet music they need to have a feeling for the sounds I have a feeling for the music how the you know classical music goes so what we do in these classes so my teacher is they give me a song like twinkle twinkle little star and then they and over time I start to make these connections and what's going on is all I'm doing in my brain really is I'm coordinating my ear with my hands so I have that and that's a sound that I have in my head and then I'm making connection between those sounds and my fingers so right so it's a connection between sound and a physical movement which is exactly what speech is that's all I'm doing with you right now there's the sounds that are coming out of my mouth which I am producing and creating for you like with physical movements if I were an alien species coming down here and we didn't have any context for language to them all I'm doing right now is just smacking my tongue around and you guys are just like yeah yeah he's really good at that the other day I was in a park and I saw a bunch of ducks and they're just like and it is and I'm like man like what are you doing you're just making noise and I'm pretty sure they weren't having a conversation because they're talking over each other but then again we do the same thing so who knows so for violin I was learning the sounds of music I was coordinating my ears and my hands to be fluent in the sounds of music and then in English or Spanish or any other languages that I speak I'm just coordinating my ears and my movements with the sounds of speech so the real question is how do you learn and train the sounds of speech well in our program that's basically three steps to it the first step is to learn the elemental sounds what's the most basic units of speech learn those in isolation these are your building blocks then these elemental sounds combined into what you call syllables and then these syllables have their own kind of logic to them so you need to be able to learn in that and then finally these syllables combine into a rhythm into a up and down movement of intonation or its own melody speech melody in this case these are the three steps it sounds syllables and then sentences so to give you a example if I said to you in very cheesy American English have a wonderful conference and then it was your task to mimic me and say exactly what I said exactly how I said it you'd have to break that down into three basic pieces first you have the elemental sounds and what I'm using here is the international phonetic alphabet if you break down exactly what I said as I said it with my pronunciation my accent you'd have 15 different elemental sounds go through them from starting the top left I have a whoop aah mmm [Music] it's alright that's all I did all I did I just made those weird sounds but in a special order its first I combined them in eight syllables in this order I said have uh one der full con friend but then because I'm not a robot or so you think I put those into a melodic flow I stressed certain syllables more than others so the big orange ones are the stressed ones and I said have a wonderful conference thank you have a wonderful conference all right so that's the melody so we actually just launched a new program called the elemental sounds master classes and you might be surprised to hear that even though we say there's like 25 letters or 26 letters in a given language there's always way more sounds in a language than people think why because we focus on orthography for example how many vowels are there in English a lot right so you guys are polyglot so you know that where you go to most audiences like five AEIOU and sometimes why right but actually there's many depending on whatever accent you speak there's as many as 16 vowels you can have in English right so it's 39 elemental sounds in Spanish 38 in French 55 in Portuguese 56 in German and just to be clear to on terminology to make phonetics less scary to people I change a lot of the terminology to make it more you know clear what it is elemental sound is sort of like a phoneme except not because diphthongs which are the combination of two vowel sounds I consider its own elemental sound because it requires his own brain structure to understand it so for example if I said to you hi that I sound is a diphthong and you understand it differently than the component phonemes of an e alright so just a little technical thing there so the question always people ask is that how great you can learn pronunciation accent how do you actually learn the language once you've learned the accent and the pronunciation and the hearing so you guys are seeing movie Terminator 2 or terminating London you've seen it yeah and once the night remember it stuck with me as a kid was the the kid John Connor was calling his foster parents and the foster parents like it's like gene what's going on and it turned out like the crazy melty Terminator robot had actually killed his foster parents and was pretending to be them on the phone so then the Terminator takes the phone and starts to do the voice of the kid he's like what's the dog's name its jack hey mom is woof this is the thing he does a perfect mimicry of the little kids voice right am i all cool how cool would that be if I can take a random Slovakian person in the street and they say something to me and I can just do their voice perfectly like some souvlaki and girl Slovakian girl comes I do exact imitation she probably cow and run away because I sound exactly like her but it would still be a cool skill to have along with like you know taking like million bullets not dying but so what if you could perfectly mimic the native speakers of your target language the perfect accent well that looked like well I want to talk to finishes off the path to knowing something so the problem is people say oh I know that word I just can't hear it and I can't recognize it in conversation well if you can't recognize it in conversation you don't really know that word in conversation you only know it in the visual medium of reading and writing so the path to knowing in any medium is first you make an association you make a connection between two things then you have to remember it you have to retain it for the next time then you have to recall it when that association comes up at a relevant time so to give an example there any Slovak any people from Slovakia here are you closest can you tell me what the word for Apple is oh it's a fan that just isn't where it's abroad yeah buco all right I'm gonna try it yeah but a cool yeah right I don't speak any slovakia but yeah but a cool all right so there's an apple out there on the thingy on the table that I want to eat right so I'm like oh what's that called and if I trained Slovakian pronunciation I should be able to hear exactly what he said perfectly and then mimic it perfectly I'm like yeah blue cool and then so once again he says it yeah blue cool i mimicked it yeah blue coup boom I've now made a connection an association between the concept of an Apple the object of an Apple the sound yeah but oh cool and the actual feeling in my mouth and the movement of my tongue and lips yeah but oh cool so there's a three-way connection going on here Apple sound movement now I have to retain it so I come in here the next day I find my friend here and then he's like huh and then I'm like ah and I remember you never remember the first time right you always forget but next time you reminds me I'm okay you optical you have the cool cool cool next time he comes and he's like alright get it right this time and I'm like yeah yeah we got it all right so now what I've done is that retained it now what happens next time is I forgot to change the thing at the top is to recall things so next time I come in and I see the Apple he's like I'm hot yeah but cool and I already got it I recalled it my recall speed is down to zero so I can say that I actually know the word alright and we're best buddies now so that's all it is and you just have to do that for every word every sentence everything notice in this whole interaction that we had our eyes were not involved at all okay I could have my eyes closed the whole time yet I'm still learning it I'm still coming to know Slovakian language or whatever language you may be but this only works if you're the Terminator so if you can mimic alright so you need to train that skill first it's not easy each language is different some languages are much more difficult depending on where you're starting from but it's just a question of going through what are the elemental sounds which ones do you struggle with what do you have to do with your mouth same way with a violin it won't be easy the first time a fingers be really awkward but when your mom is yelling at you every day when you're a kid to practice for an hour eventually you get really good at it okay and it's just how your brain works it makes these connections very quickly and you learn fast so that's if my presentation I want to take the rest of the time to answer questions but you want to find out more my website is mimic message comm we have a bunch of free programs new free stuff coming out for example for those languages as I mentioned we have these checklists kind of walking you through each of the elemental sounds what their international phonetic alphabet symbol is how to hear it how to distinguish it from similar sounds that people confuse and yeah are our mission as a company is to shine the street light out into the darkness a bit more so you can learn by ear without all the difficulties that usually come with learning in my ear due to a lack of resources all right so all I got for you guys I'll be pizza Q&A now yes are we doing this do I have to repeat the question yeah cool it's babies because I want to walk around get not lazy yeah sure so there's no looking involved for me to make the association so for example um I just I wanted I want to read the biography of Helen Keller right and she's she couldn't hear she couldn't speak but she knew it Apple was so I can look at Apple but if I were blind I can feel the Apple right so why say there's no eyes involved what I mean is what's the most usual way so someone asked me how do you say my name my name is yowzah however it's spelled I be a HOSA and I've learned don't ever tell people how my name is spelled until they've already learned it because inevitably especially if you're from the United States you will call me Ida Xhosa every time because you make a strong association between ID aho and Idaho if you're from the US and I can tell you right now I've never set foot in Idaho and I probably never will okay no relation sure yeah [Music] yes exactly so the question was she was speaking about when she's learning language or doing interpretation the more inputs you have whether it's visual body gestures then the faster you can learn in the case of learning or in the case of communication the the more you can understand so right now for example I'm doing this weird thing of my hand which is body language which you can only really see the visual medium I'm gonna keep doing it for the rest of presentation is to freak you guys out no but so good point so the idea here is this like there's a general concept of learning the the more associations you can build in then the faster you can get is a tighter Association Network so if I had this guy's thought bubble and aside from the visual of the Apple I had the smell of an apple for example the touch of it the taste of it all these things work into one big Association link and so for example in our programs we do use visual aid because the first thing you need to learn is have an awareness of your mouth for example the difference between the vowel sound E and a vowel sound a from seat and sit is a difference in tongue position however unless you've trained phonetics you probably don't have awareness of where your tongue is in the mouth and it's kind of tricky to learn that at first so we bring in the visual medium of having a vowel chart so you can see that like you know we show you how the thing moves up and down and then after a couple of minutes you're like oh okay now I can feel it so the visual medium helps what I'm saying however is that the visual medium of orthography in the other person's language is actually more of an interference because here's why if I for example once again spent grew up first 18 years of my life in United States so when I see a vertical line and a horizontal line slightly above the median then I think I have a strong association between that sound that feeling my mouth and that visual symbol right and I've reinforced that association billions of times every single time I see a tea and my brain just like yes that's it then you go to Brazil and you learn Portuguese and there's ti oh and you want to say deal but in Brazil they say choo and now it's a different sound different sound different physical movement but now I have to change I have to undo that trillion times enhanced Association and it can be really confusing I've listened to thousands of recordings tens of thousands of recordings of people trying to pronounce things in foreign languages and I can tell you from experience that the majority of pronunciation errors don't come from someone not knowing the sound it comes from them pronouncing it as it would be pronounced in their first language yeah and this is especially the case for anyone who knows English as a second language because our whole writing system and spelling is completely messed up right so so the idea here is that bringing in that visual medium it's going to interfere with you there's nothing wrong with visuals if you you know if you have sight however you want to use them that's actually true and consistent yeah you'll make sure so first of all thank you for the interesting talk and very important work I do think that hearing is not emphasized enough in the community and I do want to point out that especially one a lots of people ask me so what's the secret of learning Chinese of learning Cantonese those tones I cannot pronounce them I cannot produce them that's totally not true everyone can pronounce that and in all the foreign languages when you find a group of human beings that can produce the sounds and means that we have the muscle capacity to produce the sounds what's really bothering us is like we can't hear the difference so and so like by hearing the difference really like concentrating on hearing I do think that people improve their pronunciations tremendously and the second thing is to answer your question in terms of using you know visual cues and looking at Apple instead of looking the word Apple I think what we are like confusing here is the first representation and a primary representation and secondary representation so primary representation in your brain is actually the concept in an Apple and the secondary presentin in your brain is like the actual word Apple or upper in German or whatever it is so the idea here I guess is to skip the secondary representation jump from the primary representation to the primary representation so that's how I understand it and I do think that visual cues always help and they should be welcomed and the the other thing that I want to point out is that I think people would generally agree that speaking and listening versus reading and writing they're two different systems if you take a look at their worlds like in literally a literary populations they more or less all can speak their mother turns fluently so they don't need to read and write in order to speak in language fluently so I guess here it really comes down to the goal of learning a language if you feel like you want to do research read I'll write a lot so then you ultimately wouldn't need that but I think for all of us here who want to learn like I don't know five six ten languages you're not going to be writing a research paper on Shakespeare in all ten of the languages are you so ultimately if the goal is to communicate then I do think that this you know for hearing and speaking focused focused method would really work and on top of that I think it's not just about being you know correct but when you have a great pronunciation or intonation or accent in a new language you connect better with the people there immediately like how do you how do you end up speaking the language so well and then you immediately become friends so do you think there's a big bonus with that thank you thank you I'm uh after hi are you ready to do my next sales video touch a couple of points there cuz you you said everything that we really communicate in our meeting our stuff the point on Chinese for example well I took Chinese my brother already spoke Chinese and he told me didn't University he's like before you move on make sure you get the tones right and I literally spent two weeks just sitting there with my headphones like and like just getting it perfect and and then once you have it and at first you don't get it and then once you have it you have it and you have it forever it's just they're just part of your life from that point forward and I went to a conference once when I first had these ideas a lot of connections were being made in my head between my experience learning music in my experience learning language and I went to a conference called the Society for a musical perception and cognition and they had a study that showed people who you can actually look at the auditory cortex and kind of measure the feedback from it and hear how somebody hears so what they did it was they take Chinese tones and then they play it to a Chinese person who obviously speaks a language a American person who doesn't speak the language and then an American person who doesn't speak Chinese but has trained music for several years and then they mapped out the tones so you took like the third tone like the maha that one and a Chinese persons here with their auditory cortex basically mapped it perfectly they just traced it perfectly and then like the non musically trained American were just like like just this crazy noise scatter plot so he actually did not hear the tones there's nothing wrong with him he just could not hear then he talked the musical person and it wasn't as good as two Chinese but you can see there was some mapping and that makes perfect sense to me because once again for a very long dark period in my life my mom would make me wake up every morning and practice my violin and a very first so the what you do the very first thing you do in violin is you sit there and you tune it and you sit there with your 440 megahertz and and you're just tuning this thing and I have once again I have thousands of hours in my life just trying to get a perfect a so my brain has made his association and very strong high-resolution perception of tone so it's no coincidence then that when I come into a more tonal language than English like Chinese I still have work to do because the different context but I have less work to do now does this mean that the only way you can learn Chinese is if your mother tortured you for twenty years to learn should violin know there's lots of ways you can do it it's just focus and training and what I find for pronunciation is that people try it once and then they give up it is like aha I'm like ma no ma huh I just don't have an ear I'm tone-deaf I'll never learn whatever you know and I'm like anything else in life you wouldn't do that if you went to like a gymnastics class and the guy was like okay this is how you do a backflip you try it and then you you tried it and fell on your face you won't be like haha I just don't have the backflip gene I wasn't born in backflip land and I'll never learn back flipping and and my friend made a really good point I always tell people you know if Chinese people can do it so can everyone else because no matter how different we look in skin colour eyes hair we all have the same mouth the exact same you're not gonna go to Korea and find that their mouths are like different and their tongues are like we know is the same thing it's the same thing so whatever they can do we can do whatever he can do I can do I can do better so no all right yes sir thanks for the interesting talk I'm an extremely visual person so like for example when I was learning Romanian somebody was trying to teach me how to say thank you and they told me like I'll try to be very quick like I twenty times I couldn't remember it when I heard it once they wrote it even though I didn't know the orthography I immediately remember it and also in the early stages when I'm listening to something when I'm listening to podcast like I see letters running through my in my brain so do all the other hand I have many friends who are just extremely good at learning by ear so they just listen to what and they they can speak really fast and they they take up the writing really like later so my question to you is do you think like there are different personalities in this or are we the same we just use different techniques and I have a follow-up question to that I'm right now I'm learning Mandarin and there there's there's a like a different style of writing and one advice that I got was not to not to concern myself with been in too much but I'm visual so if even if I listen to Chinese and try to repeat it I need to somehow make the connection to the characters so which kind of order of learning in Chinese would you suggest like you wish first like should we learn and then concern our stuff with the characters or like reinter leave it somehow thank you yeah the most common question we get about learning style and personality type and is related to what you were asking me for so I actually similarly I actually do see words in my head I'm actually quite visual however I do have more confidence in the listening form due to my experience learning music now what I tell people is you know if I went to a painting class and my goal was to learn how to paint and then a teacher is like okay so this is how you draw the mountains I'm gonna come here but I'm like no excuse me teacher I'm an auditory learner so you need to like sing that mountain to me because I won't write it won't work and the reason for it is because painting is an essence of visual art visual practice there's no getting around it if my goal is to paint I need to develop my visual abilities so if your goal is to have a conversation with a Chinese person in the auditory context you have to learn sound you have to become confident with Chinese sounds now getting to what she said you can use visual inputs to accelerate your comfort with those sounds however you want to make sure that the right ones you know you use PE the problem apini once again is that you have associations between your first language and those Roman characters so that's why to say remove it entirely and then take the time to really learn the whole point of our program is to make that process much easier but if you just spend time listening and like I said with the back flick example you don't give up right away you would be surprised at what your brand can do in a new medium I never do anything really before but when I was in middle school it was like the cool thing to do to draw Dragon Ball Z cartoons and anyone saying check out my Goku oh but the one guy was like the coolest kid cuz he had like perfect Goku's and I couldn't draw you know I just couldn't do it and then one day I was like screw it I sat down with a picture of piccolo and I spent like six hours just sitting there I'm gonna get this right I never do anything than a besides a smiley face before i sat there for six hours really paying attention my own that shape is different from this shape that's different this and I came back like a week later with like a perfect rendition of piccolo it should be up and like the Louvre it was so good and it was the first thing I ever do in my life but the secret was that I took the time and in the process I learned a bunch of things and the problem is if you use the visual as a crutch and because you're used to it that's what I meant is under the streetlight is comfortable then you you'll never learn that capacity and so that's why I recommend to you people are very resistant to that idea there's a lot of identity that goes into like oh I'm a visual type we're all visual people if we have eyes we're all spatial people you can use these spatial visual media to help you but I promise you if you really take time to perfect your hearing and pronunciation it'll make everything way easier in a conversation alright guys thank for going over I hope you enjoy it thank you [Applause]

Channel: Polyglot Gathering

Views: 28,313

Rating: 4.9248118 out of 5

Keywords: Polyglot, Gathering

Id: BIsWyOf8SXI

Length: 49min 32sec (2972 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2017