Polyglot Who Speaks 20 Languages Reveals His Formula

[Music] whether it's languages or business you got to connect you got to connect emotion while you're negotiating in the evening when you go out and have dinner with them drink the beer with them and language learning is all about enthusiasm curiosity enthusiasm motivation in fact you need to get the language in you first through massive listening and reading so that then grammar explanations might start to make sense to you you can't start with the grammar this guy's willing to take the time to learn our language maybe he's going to be more detailed about working with us i think the biggest thing about speaking languages is that more opportunities are going to come your way it makes it easier to communicate with people to persuade people to establish relationships with people and we all know that in business communications relationships are extremely important my guest today is a polyglot now for some of you guys i may say i don't know what that means that means he speaks a lot of languages and by the way nearly 20 languages i think he learned russian in his 60s just because he wanted to learn russian in his 60s and today he's in the process of learning farsi and arabic maybe maybe we'll get him to say a few these languages and he's got a system on how he learns languages and it's very unique and we're going to talk about that he's also the founder of link i think him and his son together founded link with that being said my guest today steve kaufman steve thank you so much for being with us on entertainment my my pleasure my pleasure looking forward let me let me ask you so you know i speak four languages and a little bit of german but i speak german because i lived in germany for two years at a refugee camp right i speak farsi because i lived in iran for 10 years i speak armenian because my mom's armenian i speak you know assyrian because my dad's a syrian i speak english because i live in america but i don't have a system necessarily to live in a country and keep learning different languages what got you to be obsessed with wanting to learn different languages well you know the period after the age of 60 sort of after i retired most of my life i was in the lumber business i had a company in lumber uh but then as i'm you know past the age of 60 and i learned nine languages prior to the age of 60 and i had a certain approach which said that there's far too much emphasis on grammar in fact you need to get the language in you first through massive listening and reading so that then grammar explanations might start to make sense to you you can't start with the grammar and so people said well that might work for chinese which and i'll get explained to you why i learned chinese and japanese but people said well that might work for asian languages but it won't work for a complicated language like russian so i said okay we'll give that a try so that's why i started learning russian at the age of 60 using our system using link but sort of the reason i started interlanguages was that when i was say 18 i got very interested in french and you know in montreal which was a bilingual city but in fact it wasn't it was 1 million english speakers 2 million french speakers and they hardly communicated with each other that's no longer the case today but that was the case in the 50s right and so but then i got keen and language learning is all about enthusiasm i mean that's where it starts curiosity enthusiasm motivation and so i eventually ended up going to france i did my university training in france came back to canada i was hired by the canadian government trade commissioner service uh they were going to send someone or train someone in chinese because canada was getting ready to recognize the people's republic of china i volunteered and then i was sent to hong kong to learn mandarin then i lived in japan and of course i then had characters so the japanese was not so difficult to learn and then in my lumber company japan was a major market for us and so japanese was very important for me also we had suppliers in in sweden for example and even though the swedes are very good at english communicating with the mill workers to explain the japanese quality requirements etc just every step along the way languages were very important to me and so i learned them always with a major emphasis on input and yeah if you live with the language of spoken that's great but if you don't you have to create your own language world that so that you can get that immersion steve you said always with a major emphasis on input what do you mean by input listening and reading put simply in other words your brain has to get used to the language uh our brains are pattern discovering machines our brains are not as good at digesting theoretical explanations if i explain to you here's this language it works this way and that way and here's a rule and here's the exception there's nothing for you to tie that to there's no reference whereas if you just expose your brain to a lot of the language a lot of things the brain is going to figure out some things the brain will miss so then you can go back in with a grammar explanation and say it works this way and then you say oh yeah i noticed that because i've listened to so much and i've heard so much and i've read so much that what you are now explaining makes sense but unfortunately typical language instruction starts backwards they begin by trying to explain the language to you before you've had enough of the language in you so that's just a brief intro yeah that's that's helpful so would you say um in your career you said uh you spoke nine languages before i think you said you retired or before you you know uh 60 years old i think you said nine yeah six years old so how did did that help you advance in your career the fact that you spoke multiple languages and if yes how did it help you okay you know whether it's languages or business you got to connect you got to connect emotionally right you can have a contract you can have a spec you can have all kinds of you know details however you're still dealing with people and so in japan which is where i lived for nine years and which was a big part of of building my business uh you know often there were difficult problems quality complaints and we had to recover from having messed up and the japanese are very fussy like they're very fussy right and so you're still you've still got to be able to connect with people while you're negotiating in the evening when you go out and have dinner with them or have you know drink a beer with them or whatever it might be and there's no question that you can connect with people at a much more personal level you know get them to come your way a little better if you are able to speak their language and you understand them better this was not only true in uh in japan but it was even true in sweden where everybody speaks english but we had to get the sawmill workers to buy into japanese quality requirements which were different and of course the swedes like everybody i particularly with with mill workers i've the same in canada you know they're very proud i'm a grader i know what i'm doing this is how we grade it in canada or in sweden that the japanese are wrong if they want that that's wrong that should be the way we do it and so you got to get in there and explain to them somehow that actually no this is a different country they have different cultural requirements blah blah blah and if you can communicate with them even say in sweden in swedish you get a more sympathetic buy-in so so there's an emotional connection when they notice that you took time to want to learn their language and then there is hey if this guy's willing to take the time to learn our language maybe he's going to be more detailed about working with us is is that what you're saying or even hardly they appreciate partly the appreciation that you took the trouble to learn their language so that's a level of respect for their language and also the feeling that maybe he understands us a little better because he understands us in swedish and maybe they understand me a little better because i'm speaking to them in swedish so it just introduces another level of communication in both directions that i've always found helpful i found it helpful in france in germany you know spain wherever if you can use the local language it's you know you hit it off with people makes sense steve why don't you give us some of the languages you speak and give me a phrase maybe you first say it in english so we know what you're saying and then give us okay some of the other languages you speak so we know exactly what you're saying [Music] so that's farsi i'm working on my farsi right now adress saab sub suc farsi them so the next language in terms of my fluency is japanese really so your thoughts is japanese oh japanese yeah and the fourth best is mandarin chinese is what else what have we forgotten in here um yeah i don't know what shall i continue with you know i did some turkish i did some turkish and i've left it because i want to focus on the the arabic script and it takes so long for the brain to get used to a different script so that i've i put the turkish on the on the back burner but i did do a a video on youtube where i speak turkish with my tutor and it's fun kind of focusing on the middle east i should maybe learn armenian because they're pretty important armenians are pretty important in iran for starters and uh and they're starting to have a lot of influence lately you know i don't know about the syrian assyrians by the way out of all these languages you've learned so you said english is first french is second japanese is third mandarin is fourth you said arabic is more difficult than farsi which one's been the easiest to learn which one's been the toughest for you to learn well i think spanish is the easiest because it's written exactly the way it's pronounced uh it shares a lot of vocabulary with french so spanish was easy but you know surprisingly like romanian we were in my lumber business we buy lumber in romania that we sell to the us east coast and our suppliers located our the owner of this you know group of sawmills is located in vienna but i had to go to romania so i took two months to learn up romanian and when i was in romania i was able to converse and 70 of the vocabulary is so similar to italian that i found romanian very very easy very easy yeah and but greek was difficult sorry go ahead oh you know one thing one language that i speak quite well is swedish so now to you the way you're talking to us it's kind of like you know hey you know it's not a big deal you know you can do it it's easy it's this this that to the rest of the world that's kind of watching you uh uh amazed and enamored by your way to learn these languages you gave a little bit of a glimpse about how you learn a language your system input listening reading pattern discovery you talk about what else do you have you know your approach your philosophy your system of learning a new language okay so obviously when you start in a new language you know nothing you know no words nothing zero so you have to get some traction in the language so for example on our uh in our system we have a group we have sort of 60 what we call mini stories and in each mini story and these many stories they use high frequency verbs because verbs are very important if you want to say anything you're going to need verbs and in each story the vocabulary repeats four or five times in the story because we tell the story in a certain tense or in a certain person he and then i or you did will do and then we ask questions not in the sense that we want you to try to remember the story which is a bad idea you know comprehension questions are a bad idea what you want is exposure so we make a statement ask a question about the statement and provide the answer and you're just listening and by dent of listening to these many stories where there's already a lot of repetition within the story and then you repeatedly listen to the story and then you read the story on your ipad or iphone or on your computer and any word you don't know you look up and of course on our system all the words you don't know initially are all highlighted in blue and any blue word is a word you haven't seen before on the system but you click on it and you get the meaning now it's a yellow word and it gradually gets lighter and lighter in yellow and when you know the word it becomes white so this does a number of things you start to see that your page is getting lighter and lighter in color a lot of these words because they repeat in those mini stories that word that has become yellow will show up again in yellow or in white in within that story and also in the next story once you've moved a word or changed the status of the word it stays that way and so initially say three months or so there's a lot of repetitive listening and reading to basic content in order to get sort of a toe hold in the language and then you have to move to authentic content and in the case of farsi for example i found a lady a woman in her 30s in iran and she has created using the same principle of the sort of circling questions 26 episodes on the history of iran in farsi with these questions she's gone and interviewed a bunch of people and we have a course there called the iranians and they just talk about themselves and she's done one on persian food and so this is kind of intermediate difficulty material and then more difficult is podcasts now in the case of farsi there's not a lot of stuff out there but i can go to bbc farsi i can go to fardo which is the american you know radio free europe farsi and so but but in the case of say spanish or english there's an like podcast in english there's an unlimited supply and and so the idea is you want to get to more and more difficult more and more demanding content but always you want a transcript and on our website again as you move to more demanding content we have a web you know browser extension so you can bring in stuff from youtube from netflix from whatever uh podcasts i there's there are automatic transcription sites now where i go so i get the podcast transcribed and then i import these into link and when you import something to link whether from youtube or netflix or something you found and had transcribed the system knows what you know so the system tells you this stuff you brought in has 15 new words these are the new words to you and and so there's a whole bunch of statistics that develop uh flash cards i mean it's hard to describe in in one breath but what it does is the basic process of learning is based on a lot of listening and reading in an organized way so it enables you to use whatever a we have in our libraries which is a lot and b stuff that you can find on the internet so that you can start you know getting this language in you and then you can look up grammar explanations some of our some of our dictionaries like the dictionary use for arabic they have a verb conjugation there so if i click on a verb and i'm not sure what you know form of the verb it is i go to context reversal conjugator and it tells me so there's a whole bunch of resources like the internet is full of resources like this and we kind of bring them together in in one package and ultimately you can talk with one of our tutors if you want to eventually start you know using the language and even there what i do with my farsi tutor my turkish tutor uh all of our lessons like my tutor will give me like 10 or 15 or more phrases that i had trouble with and she'll record them and i keep these as lessons so i have a record going back one year or however long it's been and i can always review the discussions that we had one of the things i realized there is that i make the same mistake every week that's one of the constants in language learning is how we continue to make the same mistakes so when i get these reports from my tutors which is basically a report of our lesson which is a conversation uh most of my lessons are just conversations but of course i make mistakes sure and i struggle to look for words and phrases so my tutor typically sends me a list of 10 or 15 or 20 of these words and phrases and she records them and this then becomes a lesson that i study but i can study it not only immediately after the lesson but six months 12 months later i have all of these conversation reports that i can go back to i'm reminded of that conversation i'm reminded of the mistakes that i've made one of the interesting things is that even when you're corrected you continue to make the same the same mistake again mistakes are a big part of language learning you will make mistakes many many times before you start saying things correctly but you eventually do so yeah by the way i mean listen if there was an information about a business product you just did a phenomenal job sharing what your product does now here's a question about your company yes how well are you guys doing you know how how how well is the business doing okay uh it's started to do well certainly we had a pickup with with the covet we went through a long period where i was financing it uh basically with my lumber business because my main business has been in in lumber uh major activities we bring lumber we used to export a lot to japan now we bring wood in from europe to the us east coast but now it's at a point where it's it's uh self-sufficient it's financially uh you know doing fine and we're continuing to grow to the point where we recently decided that we were going to add you know another few uh developers because we're you know we're constantly trying to improve it we've got this uh link 5.0 coming out and the deadline keeps on receding and receding and we said this is we can't do this we better get some help in there so it's a good problem to have good problems i know the problem personally and it's both a good problem to have and it can be annoying so all right i'm sure you've experienced both no the only reason i asked the question is because um i do believe there is a ton of value in learning new languages i remember i was looking at some stats earlier it said four biggest perks of being bilingual number one higher salary bilinguals make seven thousand dollars more per year and their peers more job opportunities the third one was a little bit confusing but the more i looked at i said okay that could make sense you'll live longer and healthier they said bilinguals showed alzheimer's symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language interesting and then the last one was smartypants children who grew up learning to speak two languages are better at switching between tasks than children or learn to speak only one language what are some benefits you would say of speaking okay obviously if we are learning as an adult it's too late to go back and take advantage of those advantages for children sure i've always i've often said you know i speak all these languages but i think the biggest thing about speaking languages is that more opportunities are going to come your way i think you know in business you know even if you only speak one language you have to perform right like if you're going to be a successful business person you've got to do what you say you're going to do you've got to be creative you've got to provide you know a benefit to your business partners but if you have more languages more potential opportunities are going to come your way that's the big thing i do it's possible like here i am i'm 75 i'm alert i'm you know i'm enjoying life and i attribute that to language learning and wine every evening okay every red wine every every evening my wife makes a gourmet meal every evening balanced lots of veggies a little bit of red wine and keeping active physically but no i think uh the big thing with it i described earlier how it makes it easier to communicate with people to persuade people to establish relationships with people and we all know that in business communications relationships are extremely important so you can have a broader range of communications uh uh better quality of communications it's it's still you can't just rely on your languages whatever business you're in you've got to be good at what you do but but if you speak languages you're going to have more opportunities and i think you can you can power up yeah very cool so link uh founded by you and your son how many languages does your son speak i'm curious okay so my son speaks five okay and of course when we had two boys and when they were young my wife and i my wife speaks five languages we tried to get them to learn at least french in canada and they were very resistant to all of our efforts right but my son mark who works with me on on link he ended up playing professional hockey he he you know he went to yale for four years he did very well he was leading scorer at yale he was in the states to have a thing called the hobie baker award for the best uh you know college hockey player so he was a kobe hobie baker finalist uh in hockey and then he went and played he wasn't very big he went and played in europe and all of a sudden he's you know he's in italy and everyone's speaking italian and he's in austria and everybody's speaking german and switzerland and then japan so he suddenly realized just how beneficial how much more pleasant life is when you you can speak the languages that people around you are speaking so now he speaks five languages but as a kid we couldn't get them we couldn't get you know it's very difficult parents have to be very careful don't push too hard or the kids will just push right back there's no question about that steve i've really enjoyed having you and i think in a world of business where we are ourselves nowadays you know it almost seems like the schools we go to the direction they're taking is hey you got to learn mandarin you got to learn this you got to learn that from your take before we wrap this up and this will be the final topic we'll talk about if you were to say you know i think if there's three languages you ought to learn today or you know somehow encourage your kids to learn today what would you say i mean take english out what would you say are the top three languages today to learn for business you know i think it's very important to let the kids choose the language that they're most interested in once because the most difficult language is the first language so once someone has learned another language it then becomes much easier to learn other languages so i wouldn't force people uh but in terms of importance obviously if you live in the united states spanish i mean it's no question and so spanish is a big one uh obviously potentially chinese but only if you're gonna be doing business there but the big thing is so much of language learning depends on your motivation so if you can at least allow kids to discover a language one that they're interested in it might be it might be you know k-pop and korean or you know it doesn't really matter what it is i would encourage uh kids to get interested in a language and focus on comprehension don't focus on them producing the language correctly focus on them enjoying the language whichever language and once they get started on the the voyage the journey of language learning they will continue well steve uh you really enjoy listening to you where can people find you by the way well uh you can find me on youtube i have a channel there well over 300 000 subscribers and i call myself lingo steve on youtube uh but certainly come to link lingq.com which is where i learn languages and uh i think people would find it you know helpful a pleasant kind of environment everything you need is sort of there so those were the two would be the two places that uh i'm on twitter but lingo steve if you look for lingo steve you're going to find me and welcome to link we're going to put both links below for people to go out there and find you subscribe to his channel go visit his website uh uh to find out more about what they're doing with that being said steve thank you so much for being a guest on value team i enjoyed it very much thank you thank you so if you learn a second language your income is going to increase seven thousand dollars apparently according to gallup right something crazy to be thinking about but it was fascinating listening to him about how he learns a different language 20 of them at the age of 74 75. kirsten know what you took away from it also if you enjoyed the interview there's another interview i did with don miller about storytelling probably one of my favorite interviews of all time that didn't get a lot of views but it's fascinating if you've never seen a click over you to go watch that interview thanks for watching everybody take care [Music] bye

Channel: Valuetainment

Views: 110,763

Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, PAtrick Bet-David interview, Interviewing, PBD interview, Interview Valuetainment, Valuetainment Interview, Steve Kaufmann, Learn any language, Learning languages, How to learn any language

Id: EVq6e5iaSQs

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021