For real I kept waiting for him to simulate this by buying a CD, ripping it to his phone and then playing through his car’s audio jack to pretend he had a CD player in his car (assuming he doesn’t have one) but somehow he never did that. There were CD-RWs in 1999 too, if he could find some time capsule of a website with Spanish audio he could download the files and burn his own disc. He can also get a portable CD player and some horrible headphones to listen while on his walks. There was online shopping in 1999 (including Amazon which was selling CDs by that time) so there’s no reason not to order media online, but also used bookstores are packed to bursting with language learning resources and often have CD sections
Zeit Sprachen offers such magazines (they operate in Germany but ship worldwide or an online version). Of course it doesn't come with a CD anymore but a QR access to the audio :))
I remember urgently needing to improve my German listening back in 2001. I borrowed audio books on CD from the Goethe Institut library, and played them on my CD player at home while pacing up and down the room drinking coffee. It was actually quite cosy. Not as efficient as listening to podcasts on your earbuds while doing the shopping, of course ...
Great idea Matt! I have also had this idea (never done it obviously) but I wanted to do it like it was 1940, using this French program that my grandad had on vinyl 😂
This is basically how I study. I am a programmer and the time I spent on computers every day was distressing, so I began learning a language to pull me away from all of that and back into the physical realm. I stay “low tech” unless there’s a tangible benefit to using technology. The result is a nice blend - most of my study time is spent with pen and paper, but I use technology where it enhances or supports my study routine. Sometimes I’ve experimented with incorporating more technology, like ebooks and moving all my notes to my tablet, and I always end up pulling back because I don’t perceive any gain. I don’t want to do the current trendy thing, which seems to be consuming a firehose of content as quickly as possible and not stopping to dig into anything for longer than it takes to tap a word for a translation. I think that works well for people who already spend vast amounts of time watching content or listening to podcasts and that’s awesome. Personally my study time was always intended to be my time to disconnect from the firehose and think deeply and clearly. That’s what I like about it.
Hahaha! Thank you so much. Honestly, I feel like I've got a long way to go but I'm improving every day which I think is the main thing. Thank you for your support! 🙏
TH-cam (and the Internet in general) makes the world of difference for language learning: easy access to listening of native speakers. It's not even a competition (today vs. 1999). And I'm talking from experience))
No one's disputing that. Obviously it's "better" now than it was 25 years ago. The point of this experiment is that the internet is also the most distracting and focus-sapping thing that humans have ever made. Not everything that's "better" produces better results. We also know a lot more about nutrition and health than we did in 1950. But were people in better health then, or now? Well, then, actually.
@daysandwords I tend to disagree: the nature of focus and distraction are the same with or without the Internet. And regarding nutrition: I wouldn't be so sure either.
I would never want to go back to paper dictionaries but the 1999 Collins Intermediate dictionaries included amazing Grammar/Pronunciation information. Super succinct and concise. Just the sort of thing Steve Kaufman recommends for language learners. They alone are worth the cost of the dictionary. I saw an old 1999 Collins Spanish dictionary last night at my local used book store and almost got it for that but I already had several books picked out.
Hardcore TH-camr making English subs for the Spanish. I'm gen X here and occasionally I see younger people wondering if they should do it like "they used to back in the 90's". I always so no - at least not in the way that they think. I literally had a collection of German dictionaries back in the day. They took a while to accumulate as you can imagine and I was young back in the 90's so it was definitely a splurge for me but eventually I ended up with a big Oxford unabridged just like you have. But it started with pocket dictionaries, moving up to medium dictionaries and finally the big one. When I sat down to read I had several dictionaries. The big one, my favorite medium one, and my favorite pocket one, and finally my vocabulary notebook. I had no idea about SRS so I gave up on rote memorization really quickly but I found that keeping a vocabulary notebook made it easier to lookup words because this was the smallest dictionary of them all (words that repeated in the book I was reading but didn't stick the first time). I couldn't afford one on one lessons and meeting natives to speak to was usually too hard (although living in Boston I occasionally did it but it wasn't very often). If I didn't have a passion for reading I never would have made much progress. Podcasts weren't a thing but we actually did have the Internet and at least for German you could listen to a few German radio stations online. I took advantage of that. I also bought a few books on tape in German but that was a huge purchase for me so just a couple over the several years that I studied. But I got a lot of listening done thanks to the Internet. We did have short wave radio (not long wave) but I didn't own one - I think it would have worked if I did buy one but since the Internet was only getting better every year I never bought one. I think the trick is to find a happy medium. You can go hardcore like you did in the video for a challenge but ultimately I don't think anyone wants to go back to paper dictionaries. Paper books maybe, but not paper dictionaries.
To improve your chances of receiving a far away radio station, try it on a cloudy or rainy evening. I forgot the scientific explanation but it worked for me back in the day. Another old time tip: if you were a university student, you could go to the "language lab" and listen to target language recordings by sitting in a little booth and using enormous headphones.
The thing about learning in the 90s is that while you have the downside of limited audio input, you have a shitton of time in your life because all you have is a tv and radio to distract you. (Yeah, gaming and 1gb internet a month is also a thing).
Oh, that was nice to hear about the book Dopamine Nation, I've read the book and I absolutely loved it. I would recommend it to all my friends but they don't speak English! And the book was quite challenging for me because I'm a native Russian speaker
This was a very interesting experiment! Most language learning in 1999 would have involved evening classes and short courses. I attended evening classes in Catalan and Greek at various times. A short course was an option also. Having 1-to-1 tuition as you did would have been a luxury option - probably limited to business people about to be sent overseas. The advantage of group classes was that you could build a small community of interested learners. I like the library option - I'm not sure my local library would have any foreign-language materials but the central library in town probably does. Back in the day I used to listen to French radio, but that was in Kent so they were not too far away to pick up! Other than that, London had a French-language radio station and also Radio Spectrum had various language programmes.
That is so interesting and important Analog has a lot of advantages and a lot less distractions I asked myself how successful people learned medicine, law, math, physics or chemistry before all the apps etc.
A few years prior to 1999, I had a job in a university language lab copying cassette tapes for students to practice their listening and speaking - well, repeating - skills. Think desks with cassette decks and big headphones with microphones. Hardly anyone ever came in….
As a kid in the 90s a lot of my English practice was watching movies on the TV and repeating new words over and over until I got them sort of right. I distinctly remember learning the word 'punishment' this way. And in the 80s my dad taught himself basic English with music, library books and a dictionary.
As much as I love the convenience of italki, I loved in-person classes and tutoring. I would suggested language learning cassettes or CDs, but my guess is that very few of us have the older technology in our cars or homes. This was an interesting experiment! I find myself watching so many videos about language learning methods -- when I could be watching videos in my target language!
Back when I first started learning I realized after a few times of shopping at half price books that they always had casette & cd programs for languages that are extremely cheap $5-20 generally at most. So I went ahead and started learning about cassette players and bought a beautiful walkman off of ebay for about $80 (if you don't go for a walkman you can definitely find them for much cheaper and if you're mechanically inclined you could restore an old one easily) I bought a huge amount of cassettes over the years but really never ended up using them. A large majority of the big companies back then are still around and have evolved their practices, and the lessons on the tapes were quite slow for the most part, and the grand majority have A LOT of english inbetween actual target language audio. I think they're nice to have for posterity's sake, but just about anything you can get on your phone these days is just better. And I don't even use any of those. My learning method is a lot more like the one he showed in this video, but for me, good grammars, and dictionaries are all I need to feel content.
A good trick for that is to make a separate youtube account just for immersion, that way you aren't getting tempted by the youtube algorithm which knows you really well. Days and word has a good video on how to do that.
I have used my phone to learn almost all of the Japanese I've learned over the last few years from Anki, watching TH-cam and TV, to dictionary look ups. I actually own an original Japanese textbook from 1952 I got from a friend of my grandfather who lived in Japan after WWII. I can't imagine learning as much Japanese as I do now without living in the country with just books like that.
This was super cool to watch, Matt. Glad you gave this a try. Not sure I could avoid Dreaming Spanish for a week. Or using Libby on my kindle to read books in Spanish. 😅 You’re the far better man!
Well I hate to break it to you - not sure how old you were in 1999 or even if you were alive then, but I was studying Spanish in middle school and when I did my homework each night I used an online translator ...no it wasn't Google Translate. It was Altavista haha. I always loved language so unlike my classmates I went home and did extra just for fun (didn't get credit for it) I used CDs to study Spanish and I had this cool cd-rom game which felt like modern day apps that had various scenarios in it like Mondly World haha
@@friedchicken892 Fluent is relative. I can watch some adult shows fluently on Netflix in Spanish (depending on the topic) like ¿Quién Mató a Sara? (Who Killed Sarah?) and I can talk in a conversation with natives for hours without tiring on Tandem or iTalki. But then you get to literature.... and there's still tons of words I don't know in young adult books. If Spanish was the only language I was studying I bet I would feel a high mastery while reading young adult or even adult novels, but I study 5 other foreign languages so yeah.
@ I wouldn’t personally study any part of speech separately. You will naturally learn everything you need to know about verbs as you read through stories. That way you are getting a bit of everything - vocabulary, grammar, etc. Just focus on understanding what you read. If it’s too hard to understand, don’t be afraid to pick out something easier to understand. You can come back to the harder book later.
I was 13 in 1999 and 3 years deep in my English plus the passion for learning English was pretty strong as well so I remember vividly what I did outside of my school study. I listened to music while reading, singing and translating lyrics. I watched English speaking TV shows and movies. I would sing songs in English and talk to myself while riding the bike to practice speaking, plus a friend and classmate of mine was passionate too and we sung together and made English our friendship language so we practiced talking together. I used dial-up to print pages to get more material to translate which either was more lyrics or fact pages about different animals. I would read shampoo bottles and instruction manuals and anything else I could get my hands on that had English in it no matter how boring the text was. All this was on top of the 2 hours a week classes and 30-50 words a week homework. I learned so much back then and although my approach as an adult is really laid back it is built on the things that felt like useful and wasted time in hindsight from the analogue days.
"Vos" was the formal and respectful way of addressing someone in Spanish in the past around the 4th/5th century , when the Spanish arrived in Argentina the "vos" stayed while in Spain it evolved to "tu". That's why in Argentina they will still address you as "vos" instead of "tu".
Tu español me ha sorprendido sinceramente Matt!, sobre todo por la conversación que tuviste con la mujer en la mesa, no soy hablante nativo de inglés pero aún así veo videos en ingles (como este) tu sabes para practicar el "listening", me llamo la atención el foco principal del video (osea el tema a tratar en el video en si mismo) y entré. No esperaba que estuvieras aprendiendo mi idioma nativo jasdjaj, estimado sigue asi! vas muy bien enserio de hecho vas en un nivel que yo mismo podria catalogar como "aprendizaje rapido" osea ya posees la capacidad de expresar tus ideas (con ciertas limitaciones claro) y por lo tanto al expresarte con una persona cara a cara y siendo corregido las cosas van surgiendo y vas aprendiendo muchisimo y cuando te des cuenta ya hasta estas pensando en español!, keep pushing your boundaries buddy!.
I’m in my university library ‘cause my English class has been cancelled 😅 and my next class is going to be Spanish. Thank you for your video, I am practicing my listening and comprehension in both languages. Actually I speak Portuguese, as a native. 🎉Nice channel btw.
I've just found your channel and god I like your style and the way you speak. You are not rushing through the video like some bloggers with similar content who seem to be shouting at me 😂, you are slowed down and sort of comforting. Thanks for your work! Cheers from Russia ✨
I have been trying to lean into the concept of removing my phone from my language learning efforts, but not going quite as extreme as your experiment. I have tried to replace phone lookups of words as much as possible with an electric dictionary, and have a 3ds that I play games in my target language as well as try to carry around a book in my target language to fill in those gaps I would otherwise be on my phone. I also would like to get an mp3 player at some point to pick what I’m going to listen to ahead of time instead of having to wade through the algorithm. It’s too easy to switch to my English TH-cam account on the app.
You said really missed listening, and several people have mentioned cassettes. Your local public library probably has language learning CDs, so you wouldn't even have to pay for them. And you could still do it in the car if you could find an old cd walkman.
@@matt_brooks-green Yes, but it seems you mainly found books, not learning CDs. It looked like a very small collection - were you at a neighbourhood branch? Maybe the central branch would be better? However, I have 25+ years as a language teacher, and most people make slow progress on these, unless they are backed up with a robust textbook. I didn't;t rewatch the whole video today, no 🤷♂ please but did you try live radio stations? If there is a Spanish language station in your area, they might broadcast a weekly lesson. Back in the day my friends and I enjoyed this. Overall it sounds like a fun experience.
Great idea and an inspiring journey 👍 I hope you will update us in a month about your long-term-takeaways of this challenge. I'm wondering if it will change your language learning in the long run 🤔
My japanese teacher still uses zero technology (book and CD listening) and bit conversation in class, but unfortunatly if you don’t use YT or other apps and teqnichues, your japanese level soon be stuck and basicly non usable besides controlled speaking situations (in my opinion)
Back then they had Pimsleur cassettes, not sure if they had the CDs back then, so if your commute was 30+ minutes, then you could do a lesson. It was expensive to purchase all 30 units/lessons for a level, but it was an option back then.
3:20 I've been reading one of my childhood favourites, der herr der diebe in it's original German I've been hard pressed since I'm not this week hanging out with German class friends, but yupp
I started learning Spanish in 1999 (freshman year of high school). My local library had lots of books, CD's, VHS's, and DVD's (yes, they did have them in 1999!). There was also a thing back then called "television", which had several channels that were completely in Spanish, like Univision. I also had a paper dictionary that got so much use that it fell apart. I actually prefer to use a physical dictionary, as it is almost as fast anyway.And I would write lists of phrases I wanted to learn in a notebook. It should also be mentioned that the internet DID exist in 1999! There were lots of good websites for learning Spanish even back then! But our dial-up was so slow, I didn't use it that much. Honestly, I think the only thing I was missing out on that we have access now was TH-cam. But if I had that, I probably would have got distracted and not learned as well as I did. Having said all that, though, that is NOT the case for Chinese! I think learning Chinese before digital dictionaries would have been a pain! If I had started in 1999, it would have been much more difficult. The library didn't have as many resources as Spanish, and there were no Chinese channels on TV. I would have to rely almost fully on books and teachers.
Interesting exercise. I’ll be interested to see what you take from this into your Spanish learning journey. As for me, I can’t wait to get to a point where I can read Dune in Spanish!
Well, for learning Spanish and a few other languages there is in my opinion one excellent pre-1999 source (which I personally use): Cortina Method - Spanish in 20 lessons.
I'm a Spanish speaker but from Mexico and I can clearly hear how your voice changes in crazy ways, you sound quite different as if you were older, your voice sounds deeper and without your British accent and instead with a Spanish accent. Now I'm wondering if that's how I sound in English and what accent I take on in German, this video made me aware that our voice can change too much between languages.
I've heard that before. It's not something I'm trying to do, which is weird. I think we all end up with a slightly different voice depending on the language we speak
I used to love the BBC tape sets for learning French back in the 80’s. And in the 90’s although I didn’t think the new course was as good at that point. But you got a set of tapes and later you got CDs and you got a textbook. I doubt any of that stuff is still around but it might be. And Assimil still operate in that way, I think.
Wasn't videoconferencing over ISDN already a thing for the lucky among us in 1999? Or would that come later? So italki could've been considered a surrogate for having that kind of videoconference line. Or were you going for more of the average polyglot experience?
I don't think the average person was using dial up for language learning lessons at the time. Also, if I were to use italki I would have got slated in the comments here too 🤣. My main focus was try and remove distractions from the learning process so hopefully it. was valuable to some people
Wasn't the teacher talking too much? What's more, "puedes argumentar" and "banco de ejercicios" are the most English things I've ever heard someone say in Spanish xD I'm not sure if it's natural Spanish, is it?
Argentinian here, I personally would never ask someone if he/she "puede argumentar". It sounds... technical, like give me the legal reasons, lol. I may use "explicar". "Banco de ejercicios" to me is something that belongs to the gym, banco=bench.
As a native spanish speaker i would use "puedes argumentar" only in technical contexts i dunno, like a discussion about a science topic, in fact i used it a lot before, but anyways the point here is that you can actually use that things in spanish even if that sound too technical, the meaning remains everything (i apologize my english is not the best tbh)
El Poder De Los Hábitos? Sí, está bien. Hay muchos historias para explicar algunas ideas, las cuales, en mi opinión, son innecesarias. Pero lo recomiendo. Hay un audiolibro en castellano, por si no tienes mucho tiempo
I miss the 90s but for language learning it was a dark age you could get dictionaries and audio lessons on tape but getting good media for immersion was really hard. you had to import stuff for a very high cost. and even then things like vs tapes used different standards in different countries like pal or ntsc or even other formats like the laser disc format was popular in japan but not in other countries. video cd was popular in some countries but flopped in others. this was before my time but in north America a lot of people used 8 track instead of cassettes in the 70s. i don't know how there were polyglots back then. they existed for sure but i don't see how i could have done it even in the early days of the internet 99% of the stuff was in English. and if you tried typing symbols like é you could just get ? instead. people worry about English replacing other languages but i think English peaked in dominance between 1990 and 2010. like my friends now often complain about getting video recommendations in random languages they don't understand like Spanish Japanese Hindi Hungarian its annoying. this is why i started learning other languages since it seems like an advantage now while in the 90s i really only needed English and maybe French could have given me minor benefits in my region but i didn't need it .
In 1999 you would have had file sharing services. You could have pulled out a Windows 98 PC and connected to Napster or whatever over dialup (if they still exist).
@@david-stewart I guess we grew up different. My dad was into networking, so we had several PC's throughout the house on a local network in the early 90's. I remember loading large floppies on DOS to play games as a kid. But I think you're right. They probably weren't common.
@tommyhuffman7499 Same we had 4 computers and I used Rosettea stone on a computer...I'm not sure how old I was exactly when I got Rosetta Stone but had computers from probably 1995 on.
Napster? That was more for music. I used eDonkey2000 to download Rosetta Stone like 25 years ago. It looked ugly, but that's true for most software of that time. Why use standard Windows controls if you can make your own that work differently? (Worst was probably WinDVD that came with my DVD drive, also around 2000)
Oh, and don't put that Windows 98 PC directly on the internet, use at least something like NAT that doesn't allow connections from outside. An unpatched Windows 98 has network shares open for all connections including the internet, I was online for 10 minutes and my antivirus found something malicious in the autostart folder.
I learned Chinese in 2002. You have no idea how much I would have loved to have the technology available now.
In 1999 I used CD's ( or even audio cassettes) in my car to listen to the languages I was learning
Came here to say this, we listened to CD’s while driving and it was a lot of fun.
Yeah he missed a trick with this. He should do it again but properly this time
For real I kept waiting for him to simulate this by buying a CD, ripping it to his phone and then playing through his car’s audio jack to pretend he had a CD player in his car (assuming he doesn’t have one) but somehow he never did that. There were CD-RWs in 1999 too, if he could find some time capsule of a website with Spanish audio he could download the files and burn his own disc. He can also get a portable CD player and some horrible headphones to listen while on his walks. There was online shopping in 1999 (including Amazon which was selling CDs by that time) so there’s no reason not to order media online, but also used bookstores are packed to bursting with language learning resources and often have CD sections
I used to listen to music in different languages. You could also get audiobooks on CD.
I had a French subscription that sent me a little magazine and CD every month. It was fantastic. I’m not sure anything like that exists any more.
Zeit Sprachen offers such magazines (they operate in Germany but ship worldwide or an online version). Of course it doesn't come with a CD anymore but a QR access to the audio :))
Do you remember the name of the company? Might find them for resale on ebay.
I'm french and I had this last year to learn Spanish and English ! The company is called Vocable, idk if it's available in other countries tho 😅
@@Bllackstaarr What? No CD? Blasphemy! I will send them a strongly worded fax about this!
I remember urgently needing to improve my German listening back in 2001. I borrowed audio books on CD from the Goethe Institut library, and played them on my CD player at home while pacing up and down the room drinking coffee. It was actually quite cosy. Not as efficient as listening to podcasts on your earbuds while doing the shopping, of course ...
If I had only known the Goethe Institut had a library you could borrow audio books from. I used to take classes there.
Great idea Matt! I have also had this idea (never done it obviously) but I wanted to do it like it was 1940, using this French program that my grandad had on vinyl 😂
Please do
Nice! I bet that’s an interesting listen!
Podcasts with wireless earbuds is something I could never give up, it's a game changer in terms of learning while doing other things.
to be 100% honest with you the wires have never been an issue for me but agreed
This is basically how I study. I am a programmer and the time I spent on computers every day was distressing, so I began learning a language to pull me away from all of that and back into the physical realm. I stay “low tech” unless there’s a tangible benefit to using technology. The result is a nice blend - most of my study time is spent with pen and paper, but I use technology where it enhances or supports my study routine. Sometimes I’ve experimented with incorporating more technology, like ebooks and moving all my notes to my tablet, and I always end up pulling back because I don’t perceive any gain.
I don’t want to do the current trendy thing, which seems to be consuming a firehose of content as quickly as possible and not stopping to dig into anything for longer than it takes to tap a word for a translation. I think that works well for people who already spend vast amounts of time watching content or listening to podcasts and that’s awesome. Personally my study time was always intended to be my time to disconnect from the firehose and think deeply and clearly. That’s what I like about it.
I prefer physical dictionaries and a notebook to study. I really don't know how so many people can stay in front of a computer for so much time😅
in poland as children in 90s we got our exposure by watching cartoons that were exclusively in german on the TV 😂😂
1971 language learning involved a "teach yourself ..." book. Often tape recordings weren't available.
I'm Spanish, and I undoubtedly think that you are so good at Spanish.
You even sound like a Spaniard
Hahaha! Thank you so much. Honestly, I feel like I've got a long way to go but I'm improving every day which I think is the main thing. Thank you for your support! 🙏
TH-cam (and the Internet in general) makes the world of difference for language learning: easy access to listening of native speakers. It's not even a competition (today vs. 1999). And I'm talking from experience))
No one's disputing that. Obviously it's "better" now than it was 25 years ago.
The point of this experiment is that the internet is also the most distracting and focus-sapping thing that humans have ever made.
Not everything that's "better" produces better results. We also know a lot more about nutrition and health than we did in 1950. But were people in better health then, or now? Well, then, actually.
@daysandwords I tend to disagree: the nature of focus and distraction are the same with or without the Internet.
And regarding nutrition: I wouldn't be so sure either.
I was hoping you were going to learn a new language from scratch, but this is neat too.
I would never want to go back to paper dictionaries but the 1999 Collins Intermediate dictionaries included amazing Grammar/Pronunciation information. Super succinct and concise. Just the sort of thing Steve Kaufman recommends for language learners. They alone are worth the cost of the dictionary. I saw an old 1999 Collins Spanish dictionary last night at my local used book store and almost got it for that but I already had several books picked out.
I have the Collins Spanish Dictionary Plus Grammar and agree that it's a great book. Clear grammatical explanation with well-chosen usage examples.
Every gen-x language learner instantly retraumatized. 😅
I remember translating lyrics with the help of a dictionary in the mid-80s. Luckily vinyls usually had a lyric sheet.
@@ClaudiaEhrhardt, however, if the vocabulary was slang, you might very well not get anywhere.
Impossible to pay Urban Dictionary a quick visit.
@@user-nm3ug3zq1y True, but that wasn't the case for the stuff I translated. And back then languages didn't change as fast as these days.
@@ClaudiaEhrhardt, also, you could always ask one of your snail mail pen pals. ;-)
@@user-nm3ug3zq1y Well, the lyrics were in French and I had pen pals in England and Russia. No French ones, same with Spanish.
I love how you selflessly set yourself these challenges for our benefit!
Hardcore TH-camr making English subs for the Spanish. I'm gen X here and occasionally I see younger people wondering if they should do it like "they used to back in the 90's". I always so no - at least not in the way that they think. I literally had a collection of German dictionaries back in the day. They took a while to accumulate as you can imagine and I was young back in the 90's so it was definitely a splurge for me but eventually I ended up with a big Oxford unabridged just like you have. But it started with pocket dictionaries, moving up to medium dictionaries and finally the big one. When I sat down to read I had several dictionaries. The big one, my favorite medium one, and my favorite pocket one, and finally my vocabulary notebook. I had no idea about SRS so I gave up on rote memorization really quickly but I found that keeping a vocabulary notebook made it easier to lookup words because this was the smallest dictionary of them all (words that repeated in the book I was reading but didn't stick the first time). I couldn't afford one on one lessons and meeting natives to speak to was usually too hard (although living in Boston I occasionally did it but it wasn't very often). If I didn't have a passion for reading I never would have made much progress. Podcasts weren't a thing but we actually did have the Internet and at least for German you could listen to a few German radio stations online. I took advantage of that. I also bought a few books on tape in German but that was a huge purchase for me so just a couple over the several years that I studied. But I got a lot of listening done thanks to the Internet. We did have short wave radio (not long wave) but I didn't own one - I think it would have worked if I did buy one but since the Internet was only getting better every year I never bought one.
I think the trick is to find a happy medium. You can go hardcore like you did in the video for a challenge but ultimately I don't think anyone wants to go back to paper dictionaries. Paper books maybe, but not paper dictionaries.
Those subtitles took me soooo long! Yeah the wealth of content we have now is amazing but I don’t think it’s as clear cut as more = better
It's amazing how you managed to use the three expressions during the final lesson. It was very inspiring.
haha, thanks!
To improve your chances of receiving a far away radio station, try it on a cloudy or rainy evening. I forgot the scientific explanation but it worked for me back in the day.
Another old time tip: if you were a university student, you could go to the "language lab" and listen to target language recordings by sitting in a little booth and using enormous headphones.
The thing about learning in the 90s is that while you have the downside of limited audio input, you have a shitton of time in your life because all you have is a tv and radio to distract you. (Yeah, gaming and 1gb internet a month is also a thing).
Oh, that was nice to hear about the book Dopamine Nation, I've read the book and I absolutely loved it. I would recommend it to all my friends but they don't speak English! And the book was quite challenging for me because I'm a native Russian speaker
This was a very interesting experiment! Most language learning in 1999 would have involved evening classes and short courses. I attended evening classes in Catalan and Greek at various times. A short course was an option also. Having 1-to-1 tuition as you did would have been a luxury option - probably limited to business people about to be sent overseas. The advantage of group classes was that you could build a small community of interested learners.
I like the library option - I'm not sure my local library would have any foreign-language materials but the central library in town probably does.
Back in the day I used to listen to French radio, but that was in Kent so they were not too far away to pick up! Other than that, London had a French-language radio station and also Radio Spectrum had various language programmes.
Nice observations at the end. I enjoy paper books. I remember spending a lot of time writing out lists of declensions and conjugations.
That is so interesting and important
Analog has a lot of advantages and a lot less distractions
I asked myself how successful people learned medicine, law, math, physics or chemistry before all the apps etc.
I think we’re all so distracted now that for many people a lack of attention is the norm
2:27 Did the website that you found the teacher on exist in 1999?
Lmao
Was the teacher on the website back then too? 🤦🏼
A few years prior to 1999, I had a job in a university language lab copying cassette tapes for students to practice their listening and speaking - well, repeating - skills. Think desks with cassette decks and big headphones with microphones. Hardly anyone ever came in….
That’s exactly how I listened to university Japanese audio in my late 30s during the late 1990s! 😎
As a kid in the 90s a lot of my English practice was watching movies on the TV and repeating new words over and over until I got them sort of right. I distinctly remember learning the word 'punishment' this way. And in the 80s my dad taught himself basic English with music, library books and a dictionary.
As much as I love the convenience of italki, I loved in-person classes and tutoring. I would suggested language learning cassettes or CDs, but my guess is that very few of us have the older technology in our cars or homes.
This was an interesting experiment! I find myself watching so many videos about language learning methods -- when I could be watching videos in my target language!
Back when I first started learning I realized after a few times of shopping at half price books that they always had casette & cd programs for languages that are extremely cheap $5-20 generally at most. So I went ahead and started learning about cassette players and bought a beautiful walkman off of ebay for about $80 (if you don't go for a walkman you can definitely find them for much cheaper and if you're mechanically inclined you could restore an old one easily)
I bought a huge amount of cassettes over the years but really never ended up using them. A large majority of the big companies back then are still around and have evolved their practices, and the lessons on the tapes were quite slow for the most part, and the grand majority have A LOT of english inbetween actual target language audio.
I think they're nice to have for posterity's sake, but just about anything you can get on your phone these days is just better. And I don't even use any of those.
My learning method is a lot more like the one he showed in this video, but for me, good grammars, and dictionaries are all I need to feel content.
A good trick for that is to make a separate youtube account just for immersion, that way you aren't getting tempted by the youtube algorithm which knows you really well. Days and word has a good video on how to do that.
I have used my phone to learn almost all of the Japanese I've learned over the last few years from Anki, watching TH-cam and TV, to dictionary look ups. I actually own an original Japanese textbook from 1952 I got from a friend of my grandfather who lived in Japan after WWII. I can't imagine learning as much Japanese as I do now without living in the country with just books like that.
1999 would have had to get some casettes to listen in the car. But it was done.
This was super cool to watch, Matt. Glad you gave this a try. Not sure I could avoid Dreaming Spanish for a week. Or using Libby on my kindle to read books in Spanish. 😅
You’re the far better man!
Hahaha. Thanks Jeff!
Well I hate to break it to you - not sure how old you were in 1999 or even if you were alive then, but I was studying Spanish in middle school and when I did my homework each night I used an online translator ...no it wasn't Google Translate. It was Altavista haha. I always loved language so unlike my classmates I went home and did extra just for fun (didn't get credit for it) I used CDs to study Spanish and I had this cool cd-rom game which felt like modern day apps that had various scenarios in it like Mondly World haha
Did you become fluent since you were listening alot?
@@friedchicken892 Fluent is relative. I can watch some adult shows fluently on Netflix in Spanish (depending on the topic) like ¿Quién Mató a Sara? (Who Killed Sarah?) and I can talk in a conversation with natives for hours without tiring on Tandem or iTalki. But then you get to literature.... and there's still tons of words I don't know in young adult books.
If Spanish was the only language I was studying I bet I would feel a high mastery while reading young adult or even adult novels, but I study 5 other foreign languages so yeah.
@@janelle.loves.languages thats awesome what advice would you give for verbs in spansih
@ I wouldn’t personally study any part of speech separately. You will naturally learn everything you need to know about verbs as you read through stories. That way you are getting a bit of everything - vocabulary, grammar, etc.
Just focus on understanding what you read. If it’s too hard to understand, don’t be afraid to pick out something easier to understand. You can come back to the harder book later.
@ Got it.
I was 13 in 1999 and 3 years deep in my English plus the passion for learning English was pretty strong as well so I remember vividly what I did outside of my school study. I listened to music while reading, singing and translating lyrics. I watched English speaking TV shows and movies. I would sing songs in English and talk to myself while riding the bike to practice speaking, plus a friend and classmate of mine was passionate too and we sung together and made English our friendship language so we practiced talking together. I used dial-up to print pages to get more material to translate which either was more lyrics or fact pages about different animals. I would read shampoo bottles and instruction manuals and anything else I could get my hands on that had English in it no matter how boring the text was. All this was on top of the 2 hours a week classes and 30-50 words a week homework. I learned so much back then and although my approach as an adult is really laid back it is built on the things that felt like useful and wasted time in hindsight from the analogue days.
"Vos" was the formal and respectful way of addressing someone in Spanish in the past around the 4th/5th century , when the Spanish arrived in Argentina the "vos" stayed while in Spain it evolved to "tu". That's why in Argentina they will still address you as "vos" instead of "tu".
Loving the concept. I’m learning a language with no Google translate so I feel you. Using dictionary is pain. 😅
Great one I always wonder how I’d fare at information gathering in a less digital world, cool to see your experience
Thanks 🙏
Thanks 🙏
Tu español me ha sorprendido sinceramente Matt!, sobre todo por la conversación que tuviste con la mujer en la mesa, no soy hablante nativo de inglés pero aún así veo videos en ingles (como este) tu sabes para practicar el "listening", me llamo la atención el foco principal del video (osea el tema a tratar en el video en si mismo) y entré. No esperaba que estuvieras aprendiendo mi idioma nativo jasdjaj, estimado sigue asi! vas muy bien enserio de hecho vas en un nivel que yo mismo podria catalogar como "aprendizaje rapido" osea ya posees la capacidad de expresar tus ideas (con ciertas limitaciones claro) y por lo tanto al expresarte con una persona cara a cara y siendo corregido las cosas van surgiendo y vas aprendiendo muchisimo y cuando te des cuenta ya hasta estas pensando en español!, keep pushing your boundaries buddy!.
Jajaja! Gracias! Claro, tengo que mejorar mi habilidad para expresarme, y por supuesto tengo lagunas que tengo que rellenar. Gracias por tu apoyo!
I’m in my university library ‘cause my English class has been cancelled 😅 and my next class is going to be Spanish. Thank you for your video, I am practicing my listening and comprehension in both languages. Actually I speak Portuguese, as a native. 🎉Nice channel btw.
I used a lot of DVDs at that time for language learning. It worked really well actually 🙂
Cool! maybe I’ll buy a DVD player and do the experiment again!
I've just found your channel and god I like your style and the way you speak. You are not rushing through the video like some bloggers with similar content who seem to be shouting at me 😂, you are slowed down and sort of comforting. Thanks for your work! Cheers from Russia ✨
Ah, thank you!
I have been trying to lean into the concept of removing my phone from my language learning efforts, but not going quite as extreme as your experiment. I have tried to replace phone lookups of words as much as possible with an electric dictionary, and have a 3ds that I play games in my target language as well as try to carry around a book in my target language to fill in those gaps I would otherwise be on my phone. I also would like to get an mp3 player at some point to pick what I’m going to listen to ahead of time instead of having to wade through the algorithm. It’s too easy to switch to my English TH-cam account on the app.
You said really missed listening, and several people have mentioned cassettes. Your local public library probably has language learning CDs, so you wouldn't even have to pay for them. And you could still do it in the car if you could find an old cd walkman.
I did go to the library in the video 🤷♂️
@@matt_brooks-green Yes, but it seems you mainly found books, not learning CDs. It looked like a very small collection - were you at a neighbourhood branch? Maybe the central branch would be better? However, I have 25+ years as a language teacher, and most people make slow progress on these, unless they are backed up with a robust textbook. I didn't;t rewatch the whole video today, no 🤷♂ please but did you try live radio stations? If there is a Spanish language station in your area, they might broadcast a weekly lesson. Back in the day my friends and I enjoyed this. Overall it sounds like a fun experience.
Cue the music from The Artist Formerly Known As the Artist Formerly Known as Prince
Great idea and an inspiring journey 👍 I hope you will update us in a month about your long-term-takeaways of this challenge. I'm wondering if it will change your language learning in the long run 🤔
Me too!
My japanese teacher still uses zero technology (book and CD listening) and bit conversation in class, but unfortunatly if you don’t use YT or other apps and teqnichues, your japanese level soon be stuck and basicly non usable besides controlled speaking situations (in my opinion)
The first DVDs came out in the late 1990s so you could have used one.
Back then they had Pimsleur cassettes, not sure if they had the CDs back then, so if your commute was 30+ minutes, then you could do a lesson. It was expensive to purchase all 30 units/lessons for a level, but it was an option back then.
3:20 I've been reading one of my childhood favourites, der herr der diebe in it's original German
I've been hard pressed since I'm not this week hanging out with German class friends, but yupp
I started learning Spanish in 1999 (freshman year of high school). My local library had lots of books, CD's, VHS's, and DVD's (yes, they did have them in 1999!). There was also a thing back then called "television", which had several channels that were completely in Spanish, like Univision. I also had a paper dictionary that got so much use that it fell apart. I actually prefer to use a physical dictionary, as it is almost as fast anyway.And I would write lists of phrases I wanted to learn in a notebook. It should also be mentioned that the internet DID exist in 1999! There were lots of good websites for learning Spanish even back then! But our dial-up was so slow, I didn't use it that much. Honestly, I think the only thing I was missing out on that we have access now was TH-cam. But if I had that, I probably would have got distracted and not learned as well as I did.
Having said all that, though, that is NOT the case for Chinese! I think learning Chinese before digital dictionaries would have been a pain! If I had started in 1999, it would have been much more difficult. The library didn't have as many resources as Spanish, and there were no Chinese channels on TV. I would have to rely almost fully on books and teachers.
Interesting exercise. I’ll be interested to see what you take from this into your Spanish learning journey. As for me, I can’t wait to get to a point where I can read Dune in Spanish!
it will be genuinely interesting to see the effects tbh. good luck with you Spanish!
Awesome 👌
Well, for learning Spanish and a few other languages there is in my opinion one excellent pre-1999 source (which I personally use): Cortina Method - Spanish in 20 lessons.
13:29 what a shot and what a video
Yeah, I didn't see it coming :D
Hahaha! Thanks!
I'm a Spanish speaker but from Mexico and I can clearly hear how your voice changes in crazy ways, you sound quite different as if you were older, your voice sounds deeper and without your British accent and instead with a Spanish accent. Now I'm wondering if that's how I sound in English and what accent I take on in German, this video made me aware that our voice can change too much between languages.
I've heard that before. It's not something I'm trying to do, which is weird. I think we all end up with a slightly different voice depending on the language we speak
i love this video idea
This kinda reminds me of a Will Tennyson video.
Thankfully most US cities have a Spanish speaking radio station
In 2010 I was learning by going to the library and borrowing books in german/ English and trying my best to translated it hahahaha
12:10 doggoooo
I used to love the BBC tape sets for learning French back in the 80’s. And in the 90’s although I didn’t think the new course was as good at that point. But you got a set of tapes and later you got CDs and you got a textbook. I doubt any of that stuff is still around but it might be. And Assimil still operate in that way, I think.
I got Assimil Greek last year and it came with a USB pen for the audio.
Wasn't videoconferencing over ISDN already a thing for the lucky among us in 1999? Or would that come later? So italki could've been considered a surrogate for having that kind of videoconference line. Or were you going for more of the average polyglot experience?
I don't think the average person was using dial up for language learning lessons at the time. Also, if I were to use italki I would have got slated in the comments here too 🤣. My main focus was try and remove distractions from the learning process so hopefully it. was valuable to some people
I’m intrigued…
I was born in 1999 lol 😂
Wasn't the teacher talking too much? What's more, "puedes argumentar" and "banco de ejercicios" are the most English things I've ever heard someone say in Spanish xD I'm not sure if it's natural Spanish, is it?
I had exactly the same thought about the teacher talking way too much 😂
Argentinian here, I personally would never ask someone if he/she "puede argumentar". It sounds... technical, like give me the legal reasons, lol. I may use "explicar". "Banco de ejercicios" to me is something that belongs to the gym, banco=bench.
I agree that she's talking too much, and even interrupting him all the time :(
As a native spanish speaker i would use "puedes argumentar" only in technical contexts i dunno, like a discussion about a science topic, in fact i used it a lot before, but anyways the point here is that you can actually use that things in spanish even if that sound too technical, the meaning remains everything (i apologize my english is not the best tbh)
Tengo el libro "habitos" tambien, es un buen libro? No hago leerlo y estoy curioso si eso es util o interesante?
El Poder De Los Hábitos? Sí, está bien. Hay muchos historias para explicar algunas ideas, las cuales, en mi opinión, son innecesarias. Pero lo recomiendo. Hay un audiolibro en castellano, por si no tienes mucho tiempo
@@matt_brooks-green Gracias por responderme! Pronto lo leeré :)
Great video. I’m going to give this a try.
What type of notebook are you using? I like the black and red aesthetic. They also look to be a size.
The brand is Oxford I think. Good luck!
I miss the 90s but for language learning it was a dark age you could get dictionaries and audio lessons on tape but getting good media for immersion was really hard. you had to import stuff for a very high cost. and even then things like vs tapes used different standards in different countries like pal or ntsc or even other formats like the laser disc format was popular in japan but not in other countries. video cd was popular in some countries but flopped in others. this was before my time but in north America a lot of people used 8 track instead of cassettes in the 70s. i don't know how there were polyglots back then. they existed for sure but i don't see how i could have done it even in the early days of the internet 99% of the stuff was in English. and if you tried typing symbols like é you could just get ? instead.
people worry about English replacing other languages but i think English peaked in dominance between 1990 and 2010. like my friends now often complain about getting video recommendations in random languages they don't understand like Spanish Japanese Hindi Hungarian its annoying. this is why i started learning other languages since it seems like an advantage now while in the 90s i really only needed English and maybe French could have given me minor benefits in my region but i didn't need it .
In 1999 you would have had file sharing services. You could have pulled out a Windows 98 PC and connected to Napster or whatever over dialup (if they still exist).
I would say only maybe 1 in 5 people in 1999 had a PC. I was 14 and had only ever used a computer in school.
@@david-stewart I guess we grew up different. My dad was into networking, so we had several PC's throughout the house on a local network in the early 90's. I remember loading large floppies on DOS to play games as a kid. But I think you're right. They probably weren't common.
@tommyhuffman7499 Same we had 4 computers and I used Rosettea stone on a computer...I'm not sure how old I was exactly when I got Rosetta Stone but had computers from probably 1995 on.
Napster? That was more for music. I used eDonkey2000 to download Rosetta Stone like 25 years ago. It looked ugly, but that's true for most software of that time. Why use standard Windows controls if you can make your own that work differently?
(Worst was probably WinDVD that came with my DVD drive, also around 2000)
Oh, and don't put that Windows 98 PC directly on the internet, use at least something like NAT that doesn't allow connections from outside. An unpatched Windows 98 has network shares open for all connections including the internet, I was online for 10 minutes and my antivirus found something malicious in the autostart folder.
😮