Steve Kaufmann here. Um, today, you know, I'm going to, first
of all, I wanna say that I did, um, a, a webcam interview with Luca, the wonderful
Italian polyglot, and, uh, we are going to put it up here at my YouTube channel. But I'm waiting until I'm away because
while I'm away, I can't do any videos. I'm gonna be in Australia and New Zealand. And so, uh, Alex is gonna put up
some pictures and, uh, I think we went, Luca and I went at
it for about 40 minutes or so. So it's gonna be 10, at
least a four, uh, sessions. So that's when you'll be seeing
those interviews that I did with, with Luca, just so that there's
not a blank for a whole month. Um, you know, I want to talk about
today the subject of language learning um, something that's kind of been
running around in my mind and this is what I would call the fundamental... this, I, I come up with all these things
that are the key to language learning. And I may have used this before, I
don't know, but it suddenly dawned on me that, you know, the most
important thing is, is it fun? Do you enjoy doing it? You know, uh, and, and I mentioned
this, you know, in my seven secrets to language learning, I think the first
one was spend the time and the second was to do things that you enjoy doing. But the subject came up because, uh, at
a forum at LingQ, someone mentioned the gold list, which is a, a form of, of
sort of handwritten, spaced repetition, devised by David James, who's a wonderful
polyglot, uh, Englishman, who lives in Poland and speaks, I don't know
however many languages, and speaks at least five of them very, very fluently,
including Russian, german, I believe, and, and I'm not sure which others. And he has a, a, a variety of persona at
YouTube, one of which is Victor Huliganov. So you can easily find him. And, uh, he has a lot of useful, uh,
information on language learning, and I've watched some of his stuff and
I agree with a lot of what he says. And he has devised this system,
which he calls the gold list. And the gold list consists essentially
of the following, and that is to, to, uh, uh, maintain lists of words and phrases to
write them out longhand, uh, in writing. Therefore, to write the target
language, uh, down one side and the translated meaning on the other side. Typically have a list of 25 or 30 of
such words, and I might get this wrong, your best to go off and see one of
his videos are Google for gold list. But, um, the idea is that you write
these out and then forget about them for 14 days, that the mere, uh, fact of
writing them down is good for you and then puts them somewhere in your brain. Uh, if you look at them 14
days later, you will probably remember about a third of them. So then you take the remaining two thirds
and, uh, create another list with these. Uh, and then you look at it 14 days later. And so what's interesting in all
of this is a, that you're writing, which is I think, a good thing to do,
b, they're, you're not deliberately trying to learn it, cram it. And this is one of the points where I
very much agree with David James, and that is that a lot of our deliberate learning
activity, forcing ourselves to learn a declension table or a grammar rule. Even answering questions or any of this
stuff that's hard work uh, it basically just puts things into our short-term
memory and that's, that's what they do in, in French classes here in Canada. And that's why kids graduate and
can't speak French, even though they passed their French every year. Some of them did quite well in
French, but they were cramming stuff into their short term memory. And now, uh, 10 or 20 years
after graduating, they don't remember a thing, or very little. Uh, so his thing is just write them
down, look at them two weeks later. So I decided that I would try to do this. Uh, I would try, I said I would do this
for my reading that I do away from LingQ away from the computer in Czech, and
also with some of the words that I can just, you know, take a random vocabulary
list from our vocab section, or take a tagged list of connector words in Czech. Or, you know, date of case or whatever
I wanna do and start writing them out. So I've started doing this and so then
there was much discussion at our forum at LingQ about what's effective in language
we're learning and what's not effective. And some people thought that the gold
list was a good idea and some people thought it wasn't a good idea and some
people said, yeah, I've been doing it and you know, basically it works. And that kind of basically something
clicked in my brain and I, I realized that most things uh, Anki works. Uh, you know, Super Memo works. You know, these flashcard
SRS systems work. Um, probably Benny's, uh, you know, go out
and walk around and talk to people works at least for him or some of the time. I don't know. So everything can work
if you enjoy doing it. But there's no point in telling someone
who doesn't like to do flashcards that he should do flashcards because it works. Because any evaluation of how well things
work is, is necessarily subjective. We think it works becasue we do it
and we're improving so it must work. Does it work better than something else? Well, somebody else is
doing something else. So, you know, how do you evaluate? The, the big thing is, do
you want to spend your time? Becasue in language, unless you've got
unlimited time to spend on language learning, most of us have a limited
amount of time, unless you're a full-time language learner as I was with Chinese
back 40 odd years ago, most of the time you've got an hour or so a day to spend,
so where do you wanna spend your time? And that to me becomes the
most important criterion. So now I've been going at this gold list
thing and I quickly discovered that I was not at all interested in creating a list
of words that I didn't know the meaning of in my reading away from the computer
because it distracted me from reading. I didn't wanna do it. Even if there's 15 words on the page
that I don't understand, I'd rather just read through and have an imperfect
understanding of what I'm reading, rather than each time being distracted
from my reading and have to write this down and either then or subsequently
looking the word up in a dictionary. That's just, I don't wanna do it. So if I don't want to do it by
definition, my new definition, it's not effective because I don't wanna do it. So how long would I keep doing
something that I don't want to do? And even if you're in school and the
teacher's gonna force you to do something, I don't think things that you are forced
to do are gonna be that effective. I notice, for example, you know,
another subject comes up is how often should you listen to content? I find it boring to listen to the
same thing over and over again. Is it effective to listen over and
over again or should you be constantly going out, going on to new stuff? Again, it depends on what you like to do. If it's interesting content and if
it's a nice voice such as this Czech material that I found here, uh, history,
I can listen over and over again. Whereas the news from Radio
Prague, I can only listen to it once because it's read in a very
dead pan voice by the newscaster. I, I cannot listen to it more than once. So, but both are effective, you
know, getting a new article from Radio Prague on what's happening
in Czech Republic, politically, whatever it's adding to my vocabulary. By the same token, listening more than
once to this other material, which is really making me, you know, familiar
with alignment, that's effective too. So again, it's whatever you find fun. That's, it's kind of easy. And so when you look at all of the
research that's done by, uh, you know, second language acquisition
experts, and they study the effect of studying word lists or doing this or
doing that, it really doesn't matter. The only thing is, if, if you're a
teacher, how, what can you find that the, that the student actually likes? Some people, I, I must say some of
the time I like flipping through my, my flashcards, uh, but I own, I now
do them the easiest way possible. In other words, I put on the flashcard
the term, it's the new word, the translation into English and the
captured phrase, phrase from LingQ. And I just go through them,
bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. I don't want to rack my brain to
try and think what the meaning is. I would rather just expose
myself to the flashcards. It's a break from reading. It's something I can do
while I'm waiting somewhere. I just open up my, uh, you know,
my iPhone or whatever, and I, and I just go through the flashcards. And I don't look to the other side becasue
I've, I've got everything on the one side and all I do is change the status of them. So if I move it to status
four, it won't come back. And if it's a status, two or three,
that determines how frequently it comes back into my deck. But I'll just go through
them as quickly as I can. So, you know, uh, again,
people say writing something out long hand is good for you. And that's one of the things that,
that David, uh, James says, and I'm sure that's true, and I'm, I'm going
to continue with this, uh, this gold list, at least for a while. Uh, I have created, I created four lists
yesterday and four lists today, but I time myself and each list, you know,
if I write 25 words down, it takes me eight minutes to do that for one list. So, you know, if I do four lists,
because that's only 25 words. So if one wanted to get up to a hundred
words a day, that's four times eight. That's 32. That's a half hour. That's a half hour now. Um, I don't know, do I wanna spend
maybe one third of all my available learning time on making these
lists that I'll look at in 14 days? And then I'll have to make another
list with two thirds of them, plus the new words that I'm adding. Pretty soon it won't be,
um, 30 minutes a day. It'll be more than that. So it's probably effective. But is that where I
choose to spend my time? I suspect that I would. The minute I leave those lists and I
go back to reading about, uh, you know, what's happening in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire in the 1850s and reading about it in Czech and learning all those
new words and then listening to it, uh, in my car, the same thing that I
read and am acquiring vocabulary from. I just find that more enjoyable. And so I think they can both be
effective and ultimately what matters is which do you find more enjoyable? One other thing that David James said,
which I thought was very interesting. Uh, but I, I didn't have time to hear
the whole video, but he talks, he has this video where he talks with, uh, a
girl from Manitoba actually who asks him five or seven questions about his system. And one of the questions is,
how do you get from passive vocabulary to active vocabulary? And his first question is, well, why do
you want to activate your vocabulary? I mean, I think that's a
very important question. If you are happy listening and
reading and enjoying the language as I'm doing, yeah, activate one
day I will, but there's no panic. Uh, I have started speaking
with my tutors in Czech. I have, uh, probably had 15 or 20 sessions
with them and I enjoy it and it's good, but there's no panic, there's no pressure. And he says that, you know, if you
have enough of a passive vocabulary, when you are put in a situation where
you need to activate that vocabulary, it will activate within three days. I don't know what basis
he has for saying that. Uh, I expect to go to Prague in October. We'll see if all my passive
vocabulary activates in three days. But I think the big point is when
you need to use the language, when you need to speak more. If you have a large passive
vocabulary, you will be able to speak. It'll come quite quickly, but there again,
it'll be something that you want to do. So if you want to speak early,
If you don't wanna speak early, don't worry about it. If you have, I was speaking to a student
in Japan who is, has a job interview and she wants to improve her spoken English. Okay? Now you have to really focus on improving
your spoken English, and there's things that, that you can do, and you're
motivated to do it now, so that's fine. But, um, again, uh, I guess I
just, I suddenly realized that the, um, I had made some notes. I wonder if I left anything out
that I wanted to talk about. Yeah, there was just the thing that
that, uh, David James speaks about short-term and long-term memory. I don't understand all these things about
short-term and long-term memory, so I just think a lot of these things don't matter. I think the, there's only one rule. I'm more and more convinced of
this, uh, do what you like doing. So in my case, it's listening and
reading to things of interest and occasionally taking a break from it to
review words and, and slowly when I get the urge, occasionally here and there
speaking to people, uh, in the language. Now it is important to find content that
you enjoy, where you enjoy the voice, where you enjoy the subject matter. Uh, you enjoy the way words are used. Uh, and, uh, I've been lucky because
in Russian, lots of stuff available between literature and audio books and
Ekho Moskvy, uh, which now is under some threat.,By the way, in Russia,
it looks like Putin is, is gonna try to, uh, shackle them to some extent. And this, this wonderful material that I
found in, in, uh, on, in Czech and I saw. So this is again, something we have
to do a better job of at LingQ is make people aware of not only all the
good content that our, our members are creating in our library, but also as
they progress, uh, the kind of content that's available from the internet. Now we do list quite a few. Uh, resources, but I'm not sure
everybody knows where to find them. And we were talking about that today and
maybe we have to do a better job there. But anyway, just to
leave you with a thought. If you can find a way to enjoy your
language learning, whatever that way is, that's gonna be the effective way for you. So that's my thought for today
and I kind of went on a bit too long, but there you have it. Look forward to your comments. Thank you for listeninig.
