Hello Louis, excellent interview and excellent guest. Polar opposite to those smugs who only wait to use their credentials, number of citations and academic background as an excuse to arrogantly dismiss anything they disagree with. I checked your website. I don't speak or learn German but I already new the meaning of german word "haben". On top of it now, I will, if not forever, then for a long time will have an image of a sailor looking for a safe haven for his ship every time I remember or encounter that word, thanks to your mnemonic😂😂 Do you really think this is useful? Would you mind to elaborate on how much you use it (how many words have you learned with the help of mnemonics) and how does it help you when you listen or read to your TL? Would you not agree with Dr. Barcoft that the effects of this technique get in the way of actually acquiring new vocabulary? I would also think that having funny stories and nonsensical associations popping up in my head when reading or listening is not something I want to litter my TL experience with. I also listened to your interview with Dr. Paul Nation. He confirmed what I strongly suspected, when I read on your website, that there are 70+ studies backing up mnemonics. I didn't doubt the number or the effectiveness of the method, but I highly doubted that many if ANY at all were done with language acquisition in mind. Recommending it the way you and Paul Nation do is in my opinion pseudoscientific. In your case also dishonest, if you use it to support your sales. Paul Nation also said, that if he didn't have mnemonics he would have given up on language learning. I mean, WHAT THE F??????????😂😂😂 I understand he might have been exaggerating a bit, but still. I wouldn't expect someone of his caliber to say nonsense like that, even as a joke. Makes me wanna disregard anything he has to say about anything. Maybe he's lost the edge and this is the only way he can remember new words now, I don't know. What do you think?😂
I agree, but also, the future interviews shall only keep getting better because the deeper we go, then the deeper we can go. It creates the illusion of better along the way, but all it is really is progress, no one interview is better than the other, they all contribute to the whole which is what matters, ultimately.
A really excellent interview. This chap is very interesting to listen to, and I like that he asked you questions, as you have valuable insights into SLA. It’s good to hear a nuanced perspective with reference to research, and acknowledging that sometimes the research is inconclusive.
I really love your interview working!! I’m an English and Japanese learner and your videos are very helpful for me. Also I’m a Japanese, I’m glad to know there are people who are who are working to acquire Japanese like you. 🍀
This interaction has me reflecting a bit on how I work with 5 different conversation tutors on Italki and talk with each of them about some of the same or similar things to introduce variation in what I hear from them.
@loistalagrand You are doing a huge favour to the language learning community, with these informative videos with really authoritative guests🎓I really appreciate the PhD kind of guests!
Excelente entrevista,muy útil y formativa para los que estudiamos idiomas en mi caso ingles y alemán.Excelente ponencia del invitado.Gracias por tu trabajo y poder ampliar los conocimientos.
I actually tried to use a lots of different TTS voice while doing the shadowing for one of my lectures in Chinese, and at least according to the reaction of the people here, my Chinese pronunciation improved significantly (my accent has been always rather strong, once I was shooting some TV show in Yunnan, and the locals and colleagues, etc., could understand me just fine, but the yong director always needed help from the others, also because I tend to speak too fast...). And I recently even started to play around with the options to change the spoken style, too (fortunately, there is a lof of quality TTS options available, unfortunately not many for my native Czech), and now comes this video out confirming my assupmtions. Not sure whether it helped me to remember more new words, but I would dare to say, that yes, actually.
Great interview thanks Lois. Something that stood out for me is that deliberate learning can focus on vocabulary/phrases or grammar. Whilst I find grammar interesting, having learned useful phrases in Spanish (thru Anki) that now come to me automatically has been the most useful part of my language learning (from recent experience - two months in Spain). I (like you I think) believe the audio component is the most important and Anki's text to speech feature is a real boon for me. It means I can use one "note" to create two cards but the L2 to L1 is totally audio - there's not text to help me unless I've created my own hint. Thanks again - your channel is distracting me from my Spanish immersion - but in a good way!
The recoding that he's talking about. I always associate my new words with something directly in my life, a thing, a situation, a person, something I've learned about the culture. I want the SOUND of that word to trigger the connecting memory or person or thing. That's easy when you live in the culture - how you do that if you don't live in the culture, particularly if it's a very different culture, I don't know - watch a lot of movies in that culture? And if you have to make up weird and wonderful associations that are not connected to real life, I would question your need to learn that word in the first place. If you can't even associate that with real life, so much so that you have to make up some fantastical extreme association, is it REALLY a word you should be learning right now?? I can answer that. Pretty high changes are is that it's not. If you can't even associate the word with your real life, particularly if you life in the country, you're hardly going to find a place or situation where you'll hear or use that word, and THAT is the key - learning words that you are most likely to hear or use the most frequently, because those are the words that will help to to get most fluent, the fastest. Perhaps you're a beginner trying to learn a word that is just beyond your general capabilities to understand yet. Perhaps it's a word that is just not related to situations or circles you move in. Don't learn words like that. If you can't connect it to your real life, it's probably not a word you should be trying to learn in my opinion... As for keywords. Stay clear of them. They get it the way. You end up hearing the target word and the first that pops up in your head is that d*mned key word!! And it's REALLY hear to get out of that predicament. Been there, done that. Associating your words is situations, or people or things is a MUCH better way, and memories like that are REALLY quick flashes that disappear fast. Keywords don't - they hang around is act like terrible roadblocks to fluency. I started learning my words like that, and it's the thing I most regret, because connection to keywords can almost destroy your road to fluency. This guy is right. Just...don't!! As for flash cards, don't use other people's lists - at ALL! Make your own lists! At least you'll have the context you got the word from. Even words from flashcard lists with an accompanying sentence. They aren't the way to learn. Get your words from a context, a story, a conversation, not some arbitrary list, even if it does come with a sentence, the sentence context might be rare, it might be misleading, it might be wrong. At least the context gives you a lot of information about he the kind of conversation and situation, as well as the grammar. Even then, you should look up the word, find other contexts, google it, find out as much about it as you can before you learn it. Sounds time consuming, right? Well it's a lot MORE time consuming later when you find out that you misunderstood that word and you have to re-aquire it in a completely different context to the one you thought it was because first you have to undo your previous learning then relearn it, which takes a lot longer than that 10 minutes it would have taken to research the word in the first place.
quality of vocabulary: words frequent pairs forms like : verb pull , pull object out of somewhere / object / person. pull the door. idiom: to pull the rabbit out of the hat. pull as doing something extraordinary or deceiving dependent on context. word choice logic: baby blue x infant blue, strong teeth x powerfull teeth. different meaning and uses other then the 1st translation. verb play: to start a process / song/ movie. to play with toys for fun like kids do. he is playing with you, he is fooling you / distracing / not being serious. -- input manipulation: increase frequency. different type of task. improve input more learn-able: audio understanding/discrimination increase with. minimum amoung of different talkers (6-8) same accent vs different accent ( ?) different type of vocalizations (whisper, shouting, happy, mad, different timbers more nasal, child-like, high / low voices...) repetitions 1 talker x6 3 talkers x2 6 talkers x1 -> best results for lexical learning. -- task 1 exposition, retrieving with meaning (like with a picture), 2 exposition. pure repetion without meaning is useless or negative. Creating new phrases is against L2 meaning, becaue the learner will limiti them selfs to their L1 translation 1st meaning. -- topra model? ibi aproach? patterns of retrieval?
I have a terrible memory and have experimented with mnemonics for decades. I've also read much of the research. And I've found a use that I do find effective. I'll select a vocabulary area - such as shopping or the environment or the arts, and set up a list to learn for the week. I study them intentionally, using keywords for anything that's difficult. And then I'll use these mnemonics to practice the words by self-talk for the week, when I'm walking, resting etc, till they are internalised and automated. At that point, the keywords fall away - they are a temporary crutch.
There is more than one type of mnemonic device. I’ve seen a trend lately towards the use of word association in language learning, finding a word that sounds similar to the target word and trying to create a link there with a funny or memorable story. And I think that approach has merit for encoding vocabulary words, but it might be good to mix up the encoding methods. For example you could experiment more with using words in rhyming and alliterative phrases. For example, if you are studying English, it might be easier to remember the word “grumpy,” if it is taught as “a grumpy gorilla” or for punctual, it could be “a punctual penguin.” Just having these pairings might make the word more memorable for encoding. It creates a memorable mental image as well having the alliteration which I think helps make it more memorable as well. It is something that is used with children’s learning material, especially for really young children. Maybe it isn’t used enough in language learning.
Those variabilities making an increase in acquisition makes sense if you just consider that the person will be paying closer attention to the six people because there will be differences in sounds. Just repeating the same speaker 6x requires no special focusing of attention. Your brain switches off quickly because you know what sound to expect. So it boils down to increased concentrated intentional effort to listen well. Your brain will compare what Speaker 1 said with Speaker 2 and so on. All that effort in trying to find similarities and differences will increase retention rates.
My hypothesis is that on top of that, when you listen to several speakers, your brain processes the sound in the way that it differentiates which qualities of the production are meaningful and which are just a semantically irrelevant variation. When we hear another person speaking, we're getting a lot of data, including those that have nothing to do with a specific language, or even with speaking itself, because every human voice has its own physical characteristics other than pronunciation (which is noticable e.g. when someone sings without lyrics). So I guess that if you've heard six people saying the same word, your brain has already partly done the crucial work of identifying important vs unimportant data, looking for something like the lowest common denominator of all the six examples and building first abstract model of the word as a reference that facilitates your recognition of the word in the future. Next time someone says the word, you don't have to process all the specifics of this particular production of the word, it's enough for your brain to recognize what it already knows as a "core sound" and not to waste time on analyzing info that turned out to be irrelevant. Besides, we learn through making memories. My hypothesis is that if we hear the same word from one person in a short time, it counts for our brain as one communicational experience, whereas hearing the same word from six persons, either taking part in the same conversation or in six different conversations in a short period of time, might count as six different experiences. So the word gets encoded in six ways instead of one, because our brain created six memories - six mental access paths to the information, making it easier to retrieve. At least that's my home-made, layman hypothesis 😁
great discussion. I was wondering if you could do an interview related to how the Scandinavian educational system produces students who have better command of the English language than some native-born Americans.
I understand this was about vocabulary, and I would have liked more information about what he was saying about grammar and why this is different from vocab. I didn't understand this as well as I would like.
You can get great language audio input here on youtube with bilingual stories, they will read a sentence of a story in English then read the same sentence in target language. Polyglot Beats on youtube does that well for multiple languages and there other channels for specific languages... its been helping me get passive listening and learning when going on walks... time is by FAR hardest obstacle in language learning - anything that can get us some passive learning is a plus! 😊😊
He tells you what doesn’t work to gain a second language apart from 24/7 input. If you are trying to learn a second language input is going to be extremely slow, it’s impossible to learn a word in context when you do not understand any of the words in the sentence. He is similar to all the rest of the input guys, he excludes beginners learning a new language and assumes everyone is starting at a A2/B1 level. These are good interviews but I wish it was made clear at the start who these videos are aimed at, or at least get your interviewee to state that the advice is aimed at someone that already can read a book and understand 97% of the words and not pretend that the advice is for all language learners, if the video is aimed at someone that can learn new words in context, then those people have already got a grasp of how to learn a new language,so the advice in these videos is probably redundant at this point. I feel Lois understands this point and was trying his hardest to pull the guy back to the question of how does someone learn a language if they are starting from zero but the guy was just not wanting to admit he didn’t have an answer to that question, apart from where he started from with 24/7 input.
Thanks for the interesting and helpful content. Idk if you noticed but there is an echo of your guest's voice coming through your mic. Likely because the volume in your headphones is loud enough to be picked up by the mic. Otherwise it's a software issue
I wonder if the speaker variability has to do with the fact that language is a deeply social thing. If you hear a phrase from six different speakers, you subconsciously attach greater importance to the speech act. You could test this against a group of people that are told that the recordings are from AI speakers, while they are actually recorded by humans. The technology has advanced so far that this would be utterly plausible. If my hypothesis is true, this would result in less retention compared to the group that has been told that these are real speakers. But I assume it would still be greater than if just on person would read it six times because you still would interpret it as something almost like a person.
All totally interesting - as regards the background classical music being helpful, I was told that baroque music has a slower beat than the heartrate (which in turns slows down to match it), which makes learning easier (and apparently calms children down when travelling in a car!) - the Mozart effect. I was wondering whether background music of the nation in the target language would help. Would wearing a "national" article e.g. a beret help? Or even pretending to be a national? Thanks for your work and presentations. Peter Smith
Given that it’s useful to HEAR a target word in 6 unique voices, I wonder if there’s a benefit to REPEATING the target word with your own voice in different tones, speeds etc. sometimes I sing-song a word that I’m having trouble retaining. Anyway, very helpful. I’m grappling with these issues and it’s good to know that some of these “given” learning strategies don’t work that well.
What is the optimal amount of words per week I could learn for reaching substantial results of vocabulary accusation? How much did you study? Thanks you! 🙏
It is very interesting, especially the information about the classical music and the numbers of different speakers that signifficantly increase the retention rate. you might want to have several AI-voices on your anki decks?
Amazing interview! 👏👏👏 It's really nice to know you work with IT as well. I'm from Brazil and I learned English with TVs shows and today I'm working for a company in US remotelly. I can tell English change my life.
Mikel Hyperpolyglot claims that mnemonics work even for large amounts of words - perhaps there is a researcher focusing specifically on the keyword technique?
Could you make a video discussing whether learning a foreign language is faster when you're serving time as a foreign prisoner / inmate? Some possible interviews of some inmates could verify this possible language learning hack.
Don't forget to check out my Anki decks, I'll do a sale at the start of next year: ankicoredecks.com/
Hello Louis, excellent interview and excellent guest. Polar opposite to those smugs who only wait to use their credentials, number of citations and academic background as an excuse to arrogantly dismiss anything they disagree with. I checked your website. I don't speak or learn German but I already new the meaning of german word "haben". On top of it now, I will, if not forever, then for a long time will have an image of a sailor looking for a safe haven for his ship every time I remember or encounter that word, thanks to your mnemonic😂😂 Do you really think this is useful? Would you mind to elaborate on how much you use it (how many words have you learned with the help of mnemonics) and how does it help you when you listen or read to your TL? Would you not agree with Dr. Barcoft that the effects of this technique get in the way of actually acquiring new vocabulary? I would also think that having funny stories and nonsensical associations popping up in my head when reading or listening is not something I want to litter my TL experience with.
I also listened to your interview with Dr. Paul Nation. He confirmed what I strongly suspected, when I read on your website, that there are 70+ studies backing up mnemonics. I didn't doubt the number or the effectiveness of the method, but I highly doubted that many if ANY at all were done with language acquisition in mind. Recommending it the way you and Paul Nation do is in my opinion pseudoscientific. In your case also dishonest, if you use it to support your sales.
Paul Nation also said, that if he didn't have mnemonics he would have given up on language learning. I mean, WHAT THE F??????????😂😂😂
I understand he might have been exaggerating a bit, but still. I wouldn't expect someone of his caliber to say nonsense like that, even as a joke. Makes me wanna disregard anything he has to say about anything. Maybe he's lost the edge and this is the only way he can remember new words now, I don't know. What do you think?😂
This is probably the best interview on this channel.
Thanks!
I think also.
I agree, but also, the future interviews shall only keep getting better because the deeper we go, then the deeper we can go. It creates the illusion of better along the way, but all it is really is progress, no one interview is better than the other, they all contribute to the whole which is what matters, ultimately.
Lois your channel is becoming the number 1 channel for language learners.
Thank U very much
your interviews are very informative.
A really excellent interview. This chap is very interesting to listen to, and I like that he asked you questions, as you have valuable insights into SLA. It’s good to hear a nuanced perspective with reference to research, and acknowledging that sometimes the research is inconclusive.
Glad you enjoyed it!
I really love your interview working!! I’m an English and Japanese learner and your videos are very helpful for me. Also I’m a Japanese, I’m glad to know there are people who are who are working to acquire Japanese like you. 🍀
I just opened your video. Im excited cause you always have great guests and interviews.
This interaction has me reflecting a bit on how I work with 5 different conversation tutors on Italki and talk with each of them about some of the same or similar things to introduce variation in what I hear from them.
great talk. I would like to sugest that Dr Joe Barcroft could return and talk more about the pratical task part of learning.
@loistalagrand You are doing a huge favour to the language learning community, with these informative videos with really authoritative guests🎓I really appreciate the PhD kind of guests!
Very interesting guy, my favorite interview.
33:56 to be honest in the Caribbean region of Colombia we use the word manzana to talk about blocks of houses/buildings, a soda and a bicycle hub. 😂
That was such a wonderful and captivating interview, filled with engaging insights and meaningful conversations!
Great interview. Thank you.
Excelente entrevista,muy útil y formativa para los que estudiamos idiomas en mi caso ingles y alemán.Excelente ponencia del invitado.Gracias por tu trabajo y poder ampliar los conocimientos.
I actually tried to use a lots of different TTS voice while doing the shadowing for one of my lectures in Chinese, and at least according to the reaction of the people here, my Chinese pronunciation improved significantly (my accent has been always rather strong, once I was shooting some TV show in Yunnan, and the locals and colleagues, etc., could understand me just fine, but the yong director always needed help from the others, also because I tend to speak too fast...). And I recently even started to play around with the options to change the spoken style, too (fortunately, there is a lof of quality TTS options available, unfortunately not many for my native Czech), and now comes this video out confirming my assupmtions. Not sure whether it helped me to remember more new words, but I would dare to say, that yes, actually.
Great interview thanks Lois. Something that stood out for me is that deliberate learning can focus on vocabulary/phrases or grammar. Whilst I find grammar interesting, having learned useful phrases in Spanish (thru Anki) that now come to me automatically has been the most useful part of my language learning (from recent experience - two months in Spain). I (like you I think) believe the audio component is the most important and Anki's text to speech feature is a real boon for me. It means I can use one "note" to create two cards but the L2 to L1 is totally audio - there's not text to help me unless I've created my own hint. Thanks again - your channel is distracting me from my Spanish immersion - but in a good way!
Great interview, very helpful
The recoding that he's talking about. I always associate my new words with something directly in my life, a thing, a situation, a person, something I've learned about the culture. I want the SOUND of that word to trigger the connecting memory or person or thing. That's easy when you live in the culture - how you do that if you don't live in the culture, particularly if it's a very different culture, I don't know - watch a lot of movies in that culture? And if you have to make up weird and wonderful associations that are not connected to real life, I would question your need to learn that word in the first place. If you can't even associate that with real life, so much so that you have to make up some fantastical extreme association, is it REALLY a word you should be learning right now?? I can answer that. Pretty high changes are is that it's not. If you can't even associate the word with your real life, particularly if you life in the country, you're hardly going to find a place or situation where you'll hear or use that word, and THAT is the key - learning words that you are most likely to hear or use the most frequently, because those are the words that will help to to get most fluent, the fastest. Perhaps you're a beginner trying to learn a word that is just beyond your general capabilities to understand yet. Perhaps it's a word that is just not related to situations or circles you move in. Don't learn words like that. If you can't connect it to your real life, it's probably not a word you should be trying to learn in my opinion...
As for keywords. Stay clear of them. They get it the way. You end up hearing the target word and the first that pops up in your head is that d*mned key word!! And it's REALLY hear to get out of that predicament. Been there, done that. Associating your words is situations, or people or things is a MUCH better way, and memories like that are REALLY quick flashes that disappear fast. Keywords don't - they hang around is act like terrible roadblocks to fluency. I started learning my words like that, and it's the thing I most regret, because connection to keywords can almost destroy your road to fluency. This guy is right. Just...don't!!
As for flash cards, don't use other people's lists - at ALL! Make your own lists! At least you'll have the context you got the word from. Even words from flashcard lists with an accompanying sentence. They aren't the way to learn. Get your words from a context, a story, a conversation, not some arbitrary list, even if it does come with a sentence, the sentence context might be rare, it might be misleading, it might be wrong. At least the context gives you a lot of information about he the kind of conversation and situation, as well as the grammar. Even then, you should look up the word, find other contexts, google it, find out as much about it as you can before you learn it. Sounds time consuming, right? Well it's a lot MORE time consuming later when you find out that you misunderstood that word and you have to re-aquire it in a completely different context to the one you thought it was because first you have to undo your previous learning then relearn it, which takes a lot longer than that 10 minutes it would have taken to research the word in the first place.
quality of vocabulary:
words frequent pairs forms like : verb pull , pull object out of somewhere / object / person. pull the door.
idiom: to pull the rabbit out of the hat. pull as doing something extraordinary or deceiving dependent on context.
word choice logic: baby blue x infant blue, strong teeth x powerfull teeth.
different meaning and uses other then the 1st translation.
verb play: to start a process / song/ movie. to play with toys for fun like kids do. he is playing with you, he is fooling you / distracing / not being serious.
--
input manipulation:
increase frequency. different type of task.
improve input more learn-able: audio understanding/discrimination increase with.
minimum amoung of different talkers (6-8) same accent vs different accent ( ?)
different type of vocalizations (whisper, shouting, happy, mad, different timbers more nasal, child-like, high / low voices...)
repetitions
1 talker x6
3 talkers x2
6 talkers x1 -> best results for lexical learning.
--
task
1 exposition, retrieving with meaning (like with a picture), 2 exposition.
pure repetion without meaning is useless or negative.
Creating new phrases is against L2 meaning, becaue the learner will limiti them selfs to their L1 translation 1st meaning.
--
topra model? ibi aproach? patterns of retrieval?
At the end of the day, language learning seems to be about training recognition and use of communicative patterns.
I have a terrible memory and have experimented with mnemonics for decades. I've also read much of the research. And I've found a use that I do find effective. I'll select a vocabulary area - such as shopping or the environment or the arts, and set up a list to learn for the week. I study them intentionally, using keywords for anything that's difficult. And then I'll use these mnemonics to practice the words by self-talk for the week, when I'm walking, resting etc, till they are internalised and automated. At that point, the keywords fall away - they are a temporary crutch.
There is more than one type of mnemonic device. I’ve seen a trend lately towards the use of word association in language learning, finding a word that sounds similar to the target word and trying to create a link there with a funny or memorable story. And I think that approach has merit for encoding vocabulary words, but it might be good to mix up the encoding methods. For example you could experiment more with using words in rhyming and alliterative phrases. For example, if you are studying English, it might be easier to remember the word “grumpy,” if it is taught as “a grumpy gorilla” or for punctual, it could be “a punctual penguin.” Just having these pairings might make the word more memorable for encoding. It creates a memorable mental image as well having the alliteration which I think helps make it more memorable as well. It is something that is used with children’s learning material, especially for really young children. Maybe it isn’t used enough in language learning.
I learned two words to define vocabulary: incidental and intentional.
Those variabilities making an increase in acquisition makes sense if you just consider that the person will be paying closer attention to the six people because there will be differences in sounds. Just repeating the same speaker 6x requires no special focusing of attention. Your brain switches off quickly because you know what sound to expect. So it boils down to increased concentrated intentional effort to listen well. Your brain will compare what Speaker 1 said with Speaker 2 and so on. All that effort in trying to find similarities and differences will increase retention rates.
This is interesting, but this doesn't explain why only certain types of variations improve learning.
My hypothesis is that on top of that, when you listen to several speakers, your brain processes the sound in the way that it differentiates which qualities of the production are meaningful and which are just a semantically irrelevant variation. When we hear another person speaking, we're getting a lot of data, including those that have nothing to do with a specific language, or even with speaking itself, because every human voice has its own physical characteristics other than pronunciation (which is noticable e.g. when someone sings without lyrics). So I guess that if you've heard six people saying the same word, your brain has already partly done the crucial work of identifying important vs unimportant data, looking for something like the lowest common denominator of all the six examples and building first abstract model of the word as a reference that facilitates your recognition of the word in the future. Next time someone says the word, you don't have to process all the specifics of this particular production of the word, it's enough for your brain to recognize what it already knows as a "core sound" and not to waste time on analyzing info that turned out to be irrelevant.
Besides, we learn through making memories. My hypothesis is that if we hear the same word from one person in a short time, it counts for our brain as one communicational experience, whereas hearing the same word from six persons, either taking part in the same conversation or in six different conversations in a short period of time, might count as six different experiences. So the word gets encoded in six ways instead of one, because our brain created six memories - six mental access paths to the information, making it easier to retrieve.
At least that's my home-made, layman hypothesis 😁
great discussion. I was wondering if you could do an interview related to how the Scandinavian educational system produces students who have better command of the English language than some native-born Americans.
Incidental vocabulary can be acquired through extensive reading and intentional through intensive reading.
Thank you so much for putting these excellent interviews together! Learning so much about language learning.
I understand this was about vocabulary, and I would have liked more information about what he was saying about grammar and why this is different from vocab. I didn't understand this as well as I would like.
We got deep into flashcard controversy in this one haha. I think he gave a very balanced but frank take.
You can get great language audio input here on youtube with bilingual stories, they will read a sentence of a story in English then read the same sentence in target language. Polyglot Beats on youtube does that well for multiple languages and there other channels for specific languages... its been helping me get passive listening and learning when going on walks... time is by FAR hardest obstacle in language learning - anything that can get us some passive learning is a plus! 😊😊
He tells you what doesn’t work to gain a second language apart from 24/7 input. If you are trying to learn a second language input is going to be extremely slow, it’s impossible to learn a word in context when you do not understand any of the words in the sentence.
He is similar to all the rest of the input guys, he excludes beginners learning a new language and assumes everyone is starting at a A2/B1 level.
These are good interviews but I wish it was made clear at the start who these videos are aimed at, or at least get your interviewee to state that the advice is aimed at someone that already can read a book and understand 97% of the words and not pretend that the advice is for all language learners, if the video is aimed at someone that can learn new words in context, then those people have already got a grasp of how to learn a new language,so the advice in these videos is probably redundant at this point.
I feel Lois understands this point and was trying his hardest to pull the guy back to the question of how does someone learn a language if they are starting from zero but the guy was just not wanting to admit he didn’t have an answer to that question, apart from where he started from with 24/7 input.
Yes, I was looking for concrete next steps but when Loïs would ask for them Dr. Barcroft would talk about his research.
If you are a complete beginner start with Assimil and then proceed with graded readers.
Thanks for the interesting and helpful content. Idk if you noticed but there is an echo of your guest's voice coming through your mic. Likely because the volume in your headphones is loud enough to be picked up by the mic. Otherwise it's a software issue
Thanks for pointing that out - I'll check my equipment to see if I can fix it!
@@loistalagrandyou can also mute the audio track of the non-speaker. It’s more editing work, but can go a long way to “fixing” it in post.
Great and to the point!
I wonder if the speaker variability has to do with the fact that language is a deeply social thing. If you hear a phrase from six different speakers, you subconsciously attach greater importance to the speech act. You could test this against a group of people that are told that the recordings are from AI speakers, while they are actually recorded by humans. The technology has advanced so far that this would be utterly plausible. If my hypothesis is true, this would result in less retention compared to the group that has been told that these are real speakers. But I assume it would still be greater than if just on person would read it six times because you still would interpret it as something almost like a person.
I agree. I think this type of thing is where the power of AI intersects with language learning in very profound ways.
All totally interesting - as regards the background classical music being helpful, I was told that baroque music has a slower beat than the heartrate (which in turns slows down to match it), which makes learning easier (and apparently calms children down when travelling in a car!) - the Mozart effect. I was wondering whether background music of the nation in the target language would help. Would wearing a "national" article e.g. a beret help? Or even pretending to be a national?
Thanks for your work and presentations. Peter Smith
wearing a beret to learn a language is not only necessary but sufficient.
Given that it’s useful to HEAR a target word in 6 unique voices, I wonder if there’s a benefit to REPEATING the target word with your own voice in different tones, speeds etc. sometimes I sing-song a word that I’m having trouble retaining. Anyway, very helpful. I’m grappling with these issues and it’s good to know that some of these “given” learning strategies don’t work that well.
What is the optimal amount of words per week I could learn for reaching substantial results of vocabulary accusation? How much did you study? Thanks you! 🙏
It is very interesting, especially the information about the classical music and the numbers of different speakers that signifficantly increase the retention rate.
you might want to have several AI-voices on your anki decks?
Amazing interview! 👏👏👏
It's really nice to know you work with IT as well.
I'm from Brazil and I learned English with TVs shows and today I'm working for a company in US remotelly. I can tell English change my life.
Mikel Hyperpolyglot claims that mnemonics work even for large amounts of words - perhaps there is a researcher focusing specifically on the keyword technique?
Not to my knowledge. I talked about mnemonics in my interview with Paul Nation, but that's about it.
Could you make a video discussing whether learning a foreign language is faster when you're serving time as a foreign prisoner / inmate? Some possible interviews of some inmates could verify this possible language learning hack.
Finally someone called that nonsense idea of mnemonics for what it is. Waste of time and confusion generating device.
I appreciated that too
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍
This guy has a PhD in non-sensical abstracion....terriblly UNCLEAR.....vague...blah....