Learn English like a baby | 1 trick to become fluent

hello and welcome to kangaroo english my name is christian and today is sunday the best day of the week um today i'm going to be answering the question how can you learn english like a baby how can you get fluent like children do in in english and and actually this is one of the great big important questions in linguistics why is it that children are just so good at learning languages i mean think about it as as an adult you have an incredible cognitive advantage right you're better at problem solving you have more general knowledge you um have more cognitive power uh you you're just smarter in every single way than a baby in every single way so why can't you use this power to learn a language well actually the reason and this is probably the surprising reason the reason is that you know too much especially you know too much about language right especially your own language so first let's imagine language from the perspective of a baby you say mama mama mom baby you're making the movements just say mama mama mama mama [Music] so babies don't know anything about language they don't know the difference between nouns and verbs and adjectives and prepositions they don't understand about future tense and past tense all they hear is sound continuous sound this big long noise right and think about it maybe it's a question you've never really thought about how do babies and children how do they know what you're talking about right how do they know how to take a noun a word for a thing how do they know how to take that out of a sentence how do they learn verbs when it's all just joined together right the answer is that they don't so i i want to talk about another language which is very alien not just to people who speak english or another european language but it's alien to almost everybody on the planet okay because there's there's a group of languages that is the way they work is very very very rare okay they're called polysynthetic languages and one of those languages is cherokee which is a language spoken by some native american people in in in the united states in north america and i want to give you an example of a word from that language okay the word is diti yohihi i love saying that word it sounds great okay now ditty yohihi is a word that means lawyer it's a word for lawyer you go to court you know there's the judge you're in the courtroom and standing next to you is your diti yohihi right the person who represents you but what is the actual translation of that word into english like the literal translation well it means a person who argues repeatedly and deliberately and for a reason think about it all of that information right and that's a lot of information all of that information is contained in that one single word five syllables the ten letters how because the way the language works is very different they don't have words okay the way that it works is you have um you know this this kind of base which you manipulate with suffixes and prefixes and and and you manipulate the the phonemes and and and you create this one continuous word with all of this information inside it's incredible okay so to to a baby hearing that language that they will never learn about words because words don't exist not in the same way that we know them right they're never going to learn about verbs the way that we understand them because it doesn't exist they're never going to learn about tenses past and future because it doesn't exist in the same way in in the cherokee language right so really and this is this is the kind of you know controversial or strange way of looking at language you know the way that we have decided to divide language the way that we have decided to categorize language really is is kind of arbitrary you know it's a decision we made to say well these are nouns these are verbs and and we do this and that you know it's it's not necessary to do that to learn a language and if you were trying to learn cherokee you would have to radically change the way that you think about language and a cherokee baby trying to learn english would have to radically change the way that they think about language so what's the solution um what does this tell us about the question is how can you learn a language like um like a child like a baby well um i want to talk about this great piece of research okay from the journal of memory and language uh the paper is called the advantage of starting big learning from unsegmented input facilitates mastery of grammatical gender in an artificial language by noam siegelman and in balan and this is just an example of lots of similar work okay this is not isolated there's lots of work about this subject okay so what they did was they had different groups of people and they wanted to teach them an artificial language they wanted to teach them a language that they invented and this language has grammatical gender like spanish which is a language that i speak and as a native english speaker learning spanish i have a problem with grammatical gender right it's like the masculine feminine of the noun and i always get it wrong you know and and also for me it's difficult to accept that it's necessary you know it's not necessary to know if this is masculine or feminine it doesn't need right so you know i have to adapt to to the way that that that spanish works and the way that most people approach language learning the way that it's taught in a lot of classrooms the way that it's taught in grammar books okay the way that they study your success at language learning in exams the whole system is designed for you to break language into basically words into chunks right so we're like okay we're gonna test you on articles do you know the difference between ah and the we're gonna test you on um your tenses do you know which verb to put in this whole is it present perfect or past perfect or you're right right so most students are accustomed to viewing language in little chunks little pieces right but what they did in this experiment is they didn't they taught adults um chunks whole chunks instead of teaching them that you know mano is the word for hand in spanish and that it's a feminine word so when you think about manner you have to say la no they taught them that this is la mano all together in one chunk and guess what you ready we show that learning from unsegmented input leads to more article noun units and to better learning the findings provide novel evidence for the advantage of learning grammar from multi-word units that's how children learn language because children don't know what words are they learn that later right children learn chunks big long chunks and so your your advantage of knowing more stuff your advantage of understanding the categories of nouns and verbs is actually your huge disadvantage because you focus on the little pieces of language but what you should be doing is pulling back and looking at language in in in chunks right or as they as the name of the paper says starting big um and i'll give you a simple example in english right so in english we have this structure to make equal comparisons okay and the structure is the something the something for example the bigger the better the faster the more dangerous the hungrier the more angry right okay so it's about equal comparison when the first thing goes up the other thing also goes up when the first thing goes down the other thing always goes down where does the meaning come from okay does the meaning come from the article the no does the meaning come from the comparative adjective that you use in that position no the meaning comes from the whole construction put together analyzing the parts of the construction don't help you to really understand understanding is the key here not superficial memorization but real true understanding and understanding that the structure the construction is what gives language the meaning not the individual pieces okay so if if you want to if you want to to get fluent if you want to try to to regain some of that advantage that you have as a smart adult then please stop looking at language as little pieces okay because it's not that's something that you learned to do at school something you learned to do from the way the language learning industry works but it's not it's not the best way okay not the most efficient uh and it won't lead it won't lead to success and just just one final thing okay which is maybe the biggest advantage that children have over adults apart from this is that children have curiosity they're always asking why you know anyone who's had a five-year-old in the house is is very quickly annoyed by why but why why is it like that why why why why that that's how you need to approach your language learning why why it's not enough to know you have to know why and the why questions the the more you ask why the deeper you go is actually where you find the most interesting things you know the most important fundamental parts of the way that language works so please be curious and start big not small i'm christian this is kangaroo english and i'll see you in class [Music] you

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 69,677

Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, linguistics, learn english like baby, learn english like a child, 1 trick to get fluent, how to speak english easily and fast, how to become fluent in english faster, learn language in chunks, learn english like a baby – how to sound native, how children learn, too old to learn a language, learn english like a, learn english like a native

Id: B3Fxur1gDG0

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020