The LAZY way to learn a language (polyglot advice)

you may have found yourself wishing that you could learn a language but thinking that you're too busy meaning that when you do have time you're too tired you feel too lazy and just have way too much stuff to worry about without adding the complication of a foreign language on top of it all and to be honest I'm exactly the same I mean look at all the stuff I have to do I've got to go to the gym I think it's closed today I've got to do this jigsaw puzzle I've got to take my kid to preschool [Applause] get out I've got to watch every Mr Beast video thousands of sticks of real this is important stuff and I've got to say that this video is made possible by surfshark where am I more on that later right now I have to say Shannon Chicos and talk about how to learn languages when you're feeling lazy because I've got to admit that at times I feel like language learning is too much for me I'm very much an all-in kind of person meaning that if I hear that basic fluency in Spanish takes 2 000 hours I start to think okay that's about 12 hours a day for the next six months okay when do we start meanwhile the part of my brain that manages my family my work and my physical health is saying um what and so I'm forced to reconsider my priorities and while it's tempting to think maybe language learning just shouldn't factor in there at all because it takes a really long time and those things take up a lot of my time already instead I decided to think about which of those things could complement each other and here's the really good news because while you may have been given the idea that language learning is this very deliberate act that requires you to sit and study the passive voice and Verve conjugations in the second person imperative my own experience says that all of this deliberate study plays a fairly minor role in truly learning a language even if doing deliberate focused study like that were faster and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that it's not it's not feasible that I could commit more than about 30 minutes a day towards that because it can't be done while I'm doing anything else but what can be done while I'm doing something else is what's called acquiring a language acquiring a language basically means using your brain's natural ability to recognize and interpret patterns to slowly build a robust subconscious understanding of how the language works this process is similar to how a large tree grows that is yes it's a very long and intricate process but no it doesn't really require any outside intervention or even optimization your brain needs to hear the language just as the tree needs sunlight and water but the rest will just kind of happen as long as you give it enough time and so instead of choosing between things I have to do like looking after my physical health and things that I probably should do like learning a language I can choose to do both by say watching a TV series in a target language while lifting weights or listening to an audio book while running and that's where this video sponsor surfsharkvpn comes into play it genuinely baffles me that there are language Learners out there still not using a VPN I would not have the level of Swedish that I do now if it weren't for surf shock in the time that I've been using it surfshark has paid for itself many times over because see all this amazing content that has helped me to learn Swedish is really entertaining and completely free looks great doesn't it but see this that says can only be viewed in Sweden well guess what ah but my favorite thing specifically about surfshark is that even at its very low price One account is good for unlimited devices and where that really works for me is in combination with my audiobook provider which gives me access to amazing content in 11 languages now I don't speak 11 languages so I only listen to these three but because I signed up for a Swedish account from Australia it blocks a lot of books no matter what language they're in but it all opens up instantly when I just use surfshark to connect to Sweden and because we can put it on unlimited devices my family can listen to and watch whatever they want I can listen to whatever I want in any language and that number of devices starts adding up very quickly for example one of mine is this old smartphone that I don't use as a phone I just use it as an audio book player so that's got surfshark on it you can put it on a tablet A Fire TV stick whatever you like and you're not going to reach a device limit and also I know some people don't care about this but personally I love that surfshark has a nice clean interface it connects really quickly and they're always adding handy features and new security features which might not protect regularly interest the language Learner in you but are still very good ideas for anyone who's using the internet and I believe that includes you so yeah surfshark really is my personal recommendation I've actually been wanting to work with them for a while because I've been using it for quite some time now it's very affordable particularly when you use the link in the description which gives you the best price that they currently offer plus three months for free and it tells them that I sent you so that I can keep making these videos for you guys and thanks to surfshark for helping me to make this one and this is where a lot of people including myself in the past start thinking that acquiring a language just sounds like magical homeopathic pixie dusts that works about as well to learn a language as it would to cure a chest infection the rational mind asks if you're just watching a TV series or listening to an audiobook in a language you don't understand surely it just sounds like random noises how is that supposed to help it is a very fair question but it only applies for a very short time now let's skip past that short time for a minute and assume that you can understand fifty percent of the words used in a TV series that you're watching now it's not going to sound like random noises anymore is it the problem that a lot of people have is to assume that that 50 is a distant goal that takes hundreds of hours of study but for a lot of shows and movies 50 would be accounted for by like two or three hundred words and you can learn two or three hundred words in a week and I know you might be thinking what so I'm just supposed to learn 300 words and then just start listening to a bunch of Dutch Spanish German Finnish French Chinese Lebanese not a language polish Czech Swahili Dutch you said that one already and then I'm just going to magically understand the language not magically no but slowly yes I don't want to be too prescriptive here because the details like how long it will take how much focused study you should do etc etc all vary depending on at least three factors but in the end the bulk of what you should be doing comes down to the same thing all trees need water and sunlight all language acquisition needs time spent in the language a lot of time and I think that a lot of people don't give it enough time and therefore write it off as the magical pixie dust their rational mind says if I spend an hour on Spanish vocab and grammar then I know what I've learned in that hour but whenever I try to listen to anything in Spanish at full speed I can't understand anything at all so I know that that's not working so thanks but I'll just keep doing the study the rational mind rarely seems to go so far as to ask so if you've been studying for a hundred hours already and you haven't progressed at all in your comprehension at what point will you comprehend everything perfectly and obviously the answer is never because 10 million times zero is still zero but if you spend an hour listening to Spanish your comprehension at the end of that hour is better right even if only a little bit and now imagine you take that little bit and you multiply it by a thousand even if that little bit in the first hour was a very little bit once you multiply it by a thousand it's gonna be something right and that right there is acquisition it's not magic it's maths a tree might take 20 years to grow from a Seedling into something that looks like a tree but that doesn't mean that it's not growing and thankfully language acquisition doesn't take that long like as long as the tree if you've spent even just a few hours consciously learning your target language but you can't understand it when it's spoken at full speed try listening to it even if only passively for 100 hours that's just over an hour a day for three months now does that sound like a big commitment to you because it doesn't to me and until you've done at least that much I don't think you've really given acquisition a chance and remember I'm not saying that you should never do anything else I'm saying that listening to the language as it is really spoken should account for the bulk of your time spent in the language because not only is it the easiest thing you can do it's also the most effective and the best part is now that I know I have to spend time listening to the language I can get back to being a busy person and also learn languages I can do this jigsaw puzzle is foreign now I understand that I'm being very general in my recommendations because I do tend to get stuck in finicky details a lot so I just wanted to make a video that explains very broadly what you're trying to do if you want to see how I spent time in two very different ways when I first started learning Spanish in this video right here I learned the 1000 most common Spanish words in a single day now I know that sounds really stupid but it's actually a really good video and in this video right here I watched the same film in Spanish 50 times in the space of two months and that's also a really good video I hope you enjoyed this one and until next time

Channel: Days and Words

Views: 29,463

Keywords: dfns, dnsf, dfsn, language days, lamont, language learning, langauge learning, how to learn a language, learn a langauge, language learning vlog, lazy, lazy language routine, lazy language learning, learn a language lazy way, lazy way to learn a language, learn spanish the lazy way, how to learn languages lazy way, lazy polyglot routine

Id: iAREhVvBSgc

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023