Mind hack: 7 secrets to learn any new language | Steve Kaufmann | Big Think

the sense of of starting with something that is just noise listening to it it's just noise looking at a funny script if you're learning Persian or Arabic or Russian or Chinese and then finding that a few months later you actually understand it my name is Steve Cochran I don't call myself a polyglot but I guess I am one I I have learned bits of 20 languages other than English so I've developed some tips along the way so I tried to sort of organize these so I came up with these seven tips which I think are you know certainly some of the principles that I've learned from other people and I think they can be helpful the brain learns the brain is a learning machine the brain can not do otherwise than learn the brain always learns given stimulus given enough exposure but it learns slowly and one of the biggest factors in language learning is time um how many hours are how much time when you spend a day and how long are you gonna stay with it so we have to spend the time the two fundamental factors in language learning our motivation in time so if you are doing what you'd like to do you're motivated so if you don't like as much as I like reading if someone doesn't like reading maybe they have to find some other way to learn when you choose content to listen to and read find content of interest listen to people whose voice you enjoy if you don't enjoy the voice or the subject matter leave it get on to something else if you are doing things that you enjoy doing and if the process of language learning is enjoyable then you have a positive attitude and you're going to continue many things happen in a language and some of these things we notice and some of the things we don't notice you know for example I could be listening to Russian and not notice how the cases work I may not notice or maybe because it's pointed out I start to notice typically I find in language learning the more we listen the more things we notice and we want to notice now you know I always use insofar as pronunciation for example my father is was from Czechoslovakia so he would read words in English based on how he thought they should be pronounced so in Canada there's a province called Nova Scotia for example we even have a bank of nova scotia and my father can make the sound or could make the sound sure but he would always promote pronounce at Nova Scotia him.t ia is Scott yet he didn't notice he didn't make the effort to notice that in fact it's pronounced Scotia so we have to be a little bit attentive to what's happening in the language so that gradually we can develop better habits every time we notice something a word a phrase the structure we're helping to to put that into our helping the brain you know create these patterns so that eventually we get the proper language habits to me language learning is a matter of acquiring words now words and phrases but phrases consist of words you have to know what words mean the larger your passive vocabulary the more you understand the more you understand the more likely you are to be able to speak even if you only use a small subset of your passive vocabulary the words that you understand but all of this is much more important than grammar grammar if you have if you do a lot of listening and reading which is how you acquire words so if you're motivated to learn words you're gonna do a lot of listening and reading and that's of course what we encourage people to do at Lincoln we track the numbers of words they know and stuff because once you have a lot of words and you've listened to a lot of content the brain starts to sort this stuff out there's research that shows that a toddler one-year-old toddler knows which patterns belong to its native language even though it's not saying anything but they do tests with the brain or whatever and they show 90 percent of the basic structures of a language the toddler has figured it out just through listening so the grammar which attempts to explain you use it here except when it's something else and all kinds of complicated explanations of when you use wood should or could or might or ought to we have trouble you know absorbing these whereas if we listen and read a lot a lot therefore require a lot of words a lot of words enable us to read and listen widely we are going to get the structures we can occasionally look up some of the rules but the first thing is to have enough words so that we can get enough interesting kind of content into our brains so vocabulary over grammar it takes time to learn the language for a long long time everything remains fuzzy foggy you forever don't understand that you know you're listening to something for the tenth time and this still can understand the same part of it you're with some people who are speaking the language you're learning say you're learning Spanish and you're with a bunch of spanish-speaking people and they're all talking a mile a minute and you can't understand and so every time we build up frustrating thoughts feelings of frustration or impatience we're damaging ourselves we're reducing our efficiency you have to be positive you have to give yourself credit for what you have achieved because that's good for the brain makes the brain happy and just be patient it takes time and I have had this feeling like right now I'm trying to learn Arabic and it just seems like sometimes it seems like I'm not getting anywhere but of course I am and I know it from again from looking at my page on link because there are fewer and fewer unknown words fewer and fewer blue words as we call them but you don't necessarily sense that all the time so it's very important to be patient and it gets back to trying to enjoy the process and being impatient is not gonna help you enjoy the process nowadays we were it's it's such a wonderful you know time to be learning languages you know obviously you need some kind of an mp3 player I mean the smartphones today are unbelievable I have on my little iPhone and I can read I can work on link I can listen I can go through flashcards so the amount of stuff I can do in that little device and occasionally I use it as a telephone you know is amazing but by the same token I would include under tools all of the resources that are available on the Internet so audiobooks II Netflix YouTube YouTube is phenomenal because in many languages they have the subtitles and here again at link we have an app we have like a browser extension so that either on my iPad or on the computer I can bring in YouTube videos Netflix movies with the subtitles as text that I can then study and work so there's another tool to includes different apps that you can use invest in the tools so that your language learning becomes more efficient even if you are out of school if you're not mmm self-motivated if you don't leave the classroom wanting to do more wanting to listen more and read more you're not gonna learn so you have to take responsibility for your learning you should decide what you wanna listen to don't let the teacher tell you what you're gonna listen to what you're gonna read you have to search that out teacher can recommend or you know on the internet you get on a different form and people say this is a good source of content or something else is a good source of content but you have to be independent sometimes if I'm searching for something say in on YouTube I'll maybe I'll go to Google Translate make sure I get it correct in Arabic and then I put it in there put it in the search field there at YouTube and I'll get something so you have to take the initiative grammar the same way the idea that the teacher comes in and said okay today we're gonna do the subjunctive well maybe I'm not ready to learn this objective or I'm not interested it's much better if you're going through this content and you keep on coming across this verb form and you're kind of think it's the subjunctive but you're not sure then you google and you search and so you're the one who is searching out the grammar rules and explanations if you're taking the initiative you're gonna learn if you're waiting for someone to push the language at you it's gonna take a lot longer language learning is something we can all do the the sense of achievement we have when we learn another language even if we learn it imperfectly is tremendous we are able to learn about other cultures we ran a we're able to connect with people all over the world or from all over the world we're able to access you know bits of their culture literature movies music all over the world so it's a tremendously positive thing to do and I think people should do more of it and they shouldn't allow themselves to be sort of trapped in the conventional grammar remembering that declension tables the conjugation tables the rules that's the the least effective way of learning and it's the highest frustration way of learning for most people some people like grammar but for most people that's in fact not how the brain works the brain has more trouble with these theoretical explanations and in fact has an easier time gradually getting used to something through massive exposure get smarter faster with new videos daily at 5 a.m. Eastern

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Id: Evbwtef8_-g

Length: 9min 46sec (586 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020