I'm a Spanish native English teacher and I never know how to emphasize to my students enough that the only real way to learn a language it to listen to it a lot, repeat it (even though you might not really understand every single thing you're saying at the moment, also looking it up in any translator helps with that) and try to speak it at every single opportunity. Like, I can stand here for hours teaching you how certain aspects of the grammar work but it's absolutely NOT going to make you speak the language better. Assimilation and shadowing are proven to be the only real way to learn a language and that's exactly how I learned English. No other way.
I learned English in a couple of years without speaking it at all. I just read it a lot with machine translation and dictionary. Many of us don't need to speak a language, just to read it and write it.
I'll just support this with the fact that all the languages I'm actually fluent in (English, Swedish, Estonian in addition to my native) I have not learned by studying them at school. Estonian I've never had a single lesson on and mask as a native as my name does not give away that I'm a foreigner. With the languages I've been taught I always struggle because I'm trying to recap grammar in my head when I'm speaking.
@@greenlitllemanyeah I actually think speaking early is at best not helpful and at worst actually hurts your pronunciation and way of thinking in the language (not in a permanent way)
Completely agree, in fact, I have a theory that if an adult were to use the same method that children do, they'd learn any language much faster than a child does. It takes kids 6 years to learn how to speak it before they learn how to write it, whereas an adult can learn all four skills at once. Being an adult has its advantages.
@zykotek3091 It's true. When I say that it takes them 6 years, I am referring to the acquisition of the mother tongue that, based on that theory, it is suggested to introduce a second language or more when they are fresh out of the womb. What's more, if you don't do it, they are "missing out" on a learning process that only occurs at that age. Which is not entirely a lie, but that doesn't mean that an adult cannot learn with the same method, input. When you mention 5-13, you are already talking about children who have already developed neural connections, but without the resistance that adults have. They learn in less time, as I said before, at that age you can develop all 4 skills at the same time.
I know adults who moved to Australia as adults and now sound 100% Australian and have amazing vocabs. I also know adults who have lived here for 20 years and can barely communicate. I also know people who moved here when they were 11 who still sound a bit, well, Hungarian, since he his Hungarian. Individual differences in talent and circumstances are so wild that statements like "adults learn faster" or "kids learn faster" can never really be proven. Kids have many many advantages. Adults also have some great advantages. It doesn't really matter since we are all the age we are (true story dat) so we might as well just hop to it.
> Being an adult has its advantages. Can we recognize that adults are missing something of value that children have? It takes humongous amounts of labour and thought to get rid of your accent as an adult. Whereas if you're a child you can't help but lose your accent.
@zykotek3091i don't compeletly agree. A child of 5 years old does not speak in the same way a 20 year old does. So a 5 year old that moves to another country learns quicker because they 1) are younger and less afraid to make mistakes (I piss my pants every time I attempt to speak Japanese). 2) they speak in a diffrent way a college student does. English is my second language, but my courses are in English. In a very short time I learned how to write my papers in proper academic English. When I had to do the same in my native language (Dutch) I couldn't, because I had never needed to use nor learn that kind of vocabulairy before.
I appreciate your emphasis on "repetition". Most self-learners feel this sense of burden or "I should know this" when broaching a topic already learned. But nobody counts during multiplication, they just know and that knowing is based off of repetition.
I would argue that in maths, learning the multiplication tables by FIRST counting is actually superior, because you're understanding what it is you're actually doing. In primary school I never listened, I was always getting sat in the corner etc etc. So I never knew the proper techniques to do multiplication... so I always did it the "slow" way of working it out manually, e.g. in year 4, I'd be sitting there tediously working out 87 x 51 by first calculating what 50 x 8 would be, then writing that down somewhere, then adding 8 and multiplying that by 10 and writing that down etc. I would then get in more trouble because I would right the answer but not "show my working"... as if the 2 pages of scribbles wasn't evidence enough, f***. But anyway, fast forward to year 9 and 10 and I was in the 3rd maths class (out of 4 or 5... so not the good one) but then I got called out in front of the school to accept my award of 2nd in the school and 271st in the state or something in the NSW Premier's Maths Challenge... How? The math's challenges, for whatever reason, were far less like what we were taught at school and much more indicative of how good your BRAIN was at maths, not how well you'd memorised the formulas. I am also, even to this day, much faster at adding and multiplying more reasonable figures than most people. I'm not suggesting that kids should never learn their times tables, but simply knowing "9 x 9 is 81" is not as good as knowing that 9 x 10 is 90 and therefore if you just subtract 9, it's obviously 81.
@@daysandwords My story with maths as a kid is somewhat similar to yours, not listening hence not understanding the "proper" method, and nowadays people look at me like I'm some sort of freak for how quick I do maths in my head. I also got in trouble for not showing my working and spent a lot of time crying because I didn't understand what I was being asked to do. And now I don't always work things out, at least consciously, I just see the answer as if I have a subconscious calculator in my head. This only works up to a certain complexity of course, but I did also go through a phase of memorising the 2-36 times tables which I think enabled me to more complex maths than most people without reaching for the calculator. Interesting to see that someone has a similar story resulting in them being faster than than average person, I had never really thought about how that came to be my mum just says I have maths brain :)
@@beaumatthews6411 definitely. like learning anything but at some point the repetition becomes automated and they no longer have to use their cute little fingers 🙃
Man that feeling of realizing you can understand the general concept of text in your target language is so freaking rewarding bcs you’ve invested so much frustrating time on it, doubting whether youll ever be able to learn it.
Summary (notes for self): The general framework for learning a language applies to (virtually) all languages. Have learning goal steps realistic in size that you are satisfied with your progress. Vary your motivation intensity and direction as needed in order to reach the goal. Expose yourself the language as much as possible before you rely on using it. Repeat a short simple language part (recording, text) often to memorise certain basics. Repeat watch a section of a movie or audio book in the language to learn them by heart. Listen as much as possible to immerse yourself in the language. (More time spent = more language learnt). Use translation tools to help learn where helpful. You will need them less and less as you learn.
I remember my grandma had a german cartoon channel and it wasn't even close to my native language, but as a kid I didn't think about not understanding anything, I just watched and didn't care until I started picking up the context and words that connected to the actions that happened in the cartoon. Language in kid cartoons also twnd to be more simple. German spongebob was my teacher. After a certain time I could understand almost 85% of the spoken language but couldn't write it until I picked up german in highschool, and only then I started learning grammar and writing, and was much easier when I already understood the spoken language. Only now I realised that something I did unintentionally as a kid I can use again
Today I actually spoke Spanish not as a language practice, but I actually exchanged some interesting thoughts and stopped thinking about how to say something but I was actually thinking about the things being discussed. That feels like magic when quantity turns into quality.
Another thing to notice about this video is that she is FRENCH, speaking English. It's very rare to to hear a French person speaking English without a distnct accent. Another sign of the success of her method!
This is exactly how I learned English growing up all on my own. I never picked up a vocabulary/grammar book, I never took clases independently, all I did was listen to music and watch shows and movies in English repeatedly. I memorized the sound of the words and then I just picked them up naturally, the same way I learned my mother tongue. I memorized sentences and then played around with them and built new sentences with new words based on what I already knew. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to replicate that process 😢
I think you only need to try it, I did the same with english and in january first I started Italian and I've been doing the same, but as a native spanish speaker the progress was huge and a lot faster compared to english. In June I started German, today I'm not ready to do the same (massive and different input, just repeating basic input).
I'm not sure if you're asking me or to the first comment, but I will answered anyway 😀. Yes, I had English classes at school, the last year of elementary School was the first year, and then I had five years of it in secondary School. However, the classes were very basic and all the teachers' approach was to teach the verb "to be" and have us memorize how to conjugate it. I have to admit that back then, neither my schoolmates nor I had a real interest in English. I started learning by myself around 2013/14 aproximatelly, by watching a professional DOTA 2 player from Sweden. I watched his streams almost daily but without realizing that I was learning. When I finished my studies (I'm a P.E.) I began searching information because of the lack of knowledge I had in phisiology, anatomy and exercise biomechanics. Most of the recent information in those fields comes in English. So, in summary I learned by immersing myself in the language through things I found interesting and motivating to learn. @@Ivenyyy
hii if we are talking about mati, they said the native language was spanish! if we are talking abt the og commenter (alexndre) then they didnt say in the comment :)@@Ivenyyy
This is exactly how i learned english. I watched Friends with no subtitles. All 10 seasons. When I started my english was B1. It was all gibberish at first but then everything got so clear. I only finished the show because i loved it. My english is now C1
This was actually so true for me. 1.5 Years into learning Korean I was probably only High A1 level to low A2 with some "decent" base knowledge of the language itself but was not conversational at all. After adapting my study to ditch grammar and word lists void of any context, I put all my energy into comprehensible input and started using spaced repetition to memorise as many sentences and words in context as I could find and within 10 months I achieved B2 level, able to talk for hours nonstop with my Korean friends about a wide variety of subjects with speed and fluidity. I would even often forget that I was speaking a foreign language because it became so comfortable. But to achieve this level this quickly I must clarify that, alongside this, I was also doing forced conversations with native speakers weekly, something I never did previously, where my goal was to have a conversation using any amount of things I can remember/have been using from my study in the past week and just did my best to express what I was trying to say and understand what was being spoken back to me. This paired with memorising thousands of words and sentences in context, through spaced repetition is just the most killer combo for language learning. I think I could have gone from beginner to "conversationally fluent" (High B2) in about 12-14 months if I had just studied in this way from the very beginning. For easier languages for English speakers like French, doing the methods outlined in this video, you could probably get to conversational fluency in half the time compared to a category 5 language like Korean. For context, I was doing around 2.5 hours of dedicated study per day and probably another 2 - 2.5 hours of consuming both audio and visual Korean content per day. Although the amount of Korean I spoke per week going from A1 to B2 was a non-linear increase (I spoke more and more the more I learned), on average across the 10 months I spoke around 8-10 hours of Korean a week and as a result got pretty good, pretty fast. I literally remember thinking for the longest time that I would never get good at Korean and thought I just didn't have the brain for it, but here I am several years later chilling at C1 level only wishing I had studied this way earlier. If I can do it, anyone can (seriously)
Thank God you're not a college student in Korea. You sound like those language learners who can feign fluency orally but when you look at their writing it's the same linguistic salad: run-on sentences and rambling.
I watched her video probably 3 to 4 times before, and I thought it was SOOO GOOOD!! And now YOU posted a video talking ABOUT HER's and I'm very happy to have the pleasure of following two such good language learning creators!!
Thank you, just thank you. I heard so many times about "you should listen more" but at the same time... I have ignored this advice. I feel like a new period in language learning is beginning in my life
@@Mary-S11search 'how I learnt Norwegian on my own'.. I also saw this a while back and thought it was phenomenal; happy to see this little reminder today.
About step one: my two cents are when I started a new language I watched a few episodes of a children series (those educational ones for children that teach shapes, colours, interactions in situations like "x goes to the libary"). It is something you can understand a whole episode pretty fast and intuitively because they use short sentences and visualise what is being said. Of course rewatching your favourite movie you know by heart in the new language will help as said in the video but at least for me I sometimes need the feeling of satisfaction fully understanding a dialogue and plot even if I'm only at a A1-A2 level at the new language I'm learning.
I agree! I came across Ilys’ video about a month ago, and was quickly stunned by her depth of insight and the practicality of her suggestions! Though she likely shares here a few things, gleaned from others, I strongly sense that the majority of her tips are born of her natural intuition and her ability to quickly profit from her own experience of trial and error, as if feeling her way through the new tongue, trusting her perfect blend of instinct and intellect. Her video distills all of the web’s best language-learning advice into some twenty minutes of pure gold. Anyone committed to learning a foreign language needs to follow her lead. And every poster of language-learning content should be recommending her, passionately!
My Taiwanese roommate (who’d never left the island and had *excellent* English) told me she’d just listen to American radio like it was music when she did her housework.
It's unlikely that 'just listening to American radio' (I guess she means ICRT) explains her English ability. It's the desire behind it to participate in a global American-cosmopolitan world of pop culture, wealth, and modernity separate from the concrete, familial bottom of Taiwan. The incentives to learn English greatly outweigh the incentives for learning any other language.
It doesn’t make sense to me, I’ve been watching Spanish content since I was a child because I wanted to be fluent like my parents but almost three decades later I still don’t understand what is being said.
@@oppa1319 so interesting I ve been watching spanish videos for 2 years and I understand %90 what is being said . I think you had long breaks between your learning process
@@banana53358hi I'd like to learn Spanish too. I used to know a little from school but stopped practicing for a few years, so I'm back to square one... can I ask how else you started to learn Spanish, anything else you did often to improve?
@@banana53358 I heard watching TED talks in Spanish is a good way to learn because the subtitle translation is so accurate. I think I will start doing that, it’s still my dream to become fluent despite making very little progress.
when I moved to Germany I already had a B2 in the language and that was a huge advantage. Some people still struggle with the language after years if they arrive with 0 knowledge and what you mentioned is so true! If people are used to speaking to you in English, they will hardly switch, even if you get better
Hey Laura! Yeah... I think "language interested people" as I call us are always going to have a huge advantage because even the example of myself in Mexico - OK yeah I had learned some Spanish before and Mexico isn't really a place that you can be without speaking Spanish, but I was always going looking FOR people to talk to, books to buy, trying to read the fine print on everything I picked up etc etc., whereas people trying to just live their lives as best they can will try to get around that stuff as much as possible. So someone like yourself... at some point in the conversation, it's going to come up that you speak, what 5 or 6 other languages? So then they're not going to see you as "just another English speaker". It's pretty clear if you've learnt those others, you can learn German too.
You have to insist. Nicely but firmly. No way around it. But yeah I saw so many people give up because the locals would just switch to English to make them more at ease. I've been explaining to locals that this kills confidence and actually hampers all progress, I hope at least some of them won't do it in the future
As someone who moved from Scotland to Germany recently, I am currently experiencing this. I was able to speak a little conversational German before moving, however not much as it was extremely last minute
This make so much sense. I learned english in school for years, but only after I started watching english content (mostly video game montages) I really learned the language. At first I mostly watched for the visuals and I did not understand much of the commentary until one day I suddenly sat there, watched some DayZ gameplay and noticed "Wtf I understand what they are talking about" I will defenitely apply this to my french studies aswell. I always thought I'd have to set a foundation first, but seems like I don't really need to.
I agree! And it's weird because her video was also recommended to me randomly a few days ago, and when I watched it, it all made perfect sense. I've learned a few languages but these days there was something missing from my learning routine and when I watched her video she gave me so many good tips and reminded me of the routines I used to do.
I'm so glad that you found this video! I saw this 4 months ago and absolutely loved it! She seems like such a sweet girl and you're right she has such wonderful advice! I took some of her advice and some of your advice and I have been watching the same movie about 40 times . I understand at a minimum 92% of it now and I don't even have to be looking at the TV or my screen to know what is happening in the movie. I can just tell because I understand so much of it now.
This is such a strong and in-depth response video! Ilys's videos are amazing for me as I've been studying Norwegian for around half a year now; with the surprisingly limited amount of videos surrounding the language online, she's been incredibly helpful with her TH-cam shorts, TikToks, and self-made quizzes through her Instagram stories. I'm glad she's gaining more traction from videos like this. It looks like I can learn just as much from you too in terms of optimizing my learning experience. Subbed!
Great take. I migrated to a spanish speaking country and did everything wrong and spent 5 years struggling to get to grips. I was in a bit of an English speaking bubble not by choice. But now with the benefit of local literature and youtube I am up to speed. Reading is powerful and simply re-reading and reading outloud or using audiobooks is so useful. Ironically, as the experts in this area note, the science has not filtered down either to the classroom or the text book/publisher. I am a language teacher and advocate these methods in my classroom but all my colleagues are still teaching grammar and exercises and think reading is time wasted when they could be teaching rules.
So, in Jack Black style, does that make this video not the best language learning video in the world but a tribute to the best language learning video in the world?
Haha yeah, I thought about doing some joke about that but decided it wasn't quite going to work... then stupidly ended up with the Christopher Nolan one that I thought of like 2 minutes before, which is terrible.
@@daysandwords The Inception reference wasn’t “terrible.” It made sense and is probably more widely known than the Jack Black reference. But the latter just immediately came to mind, so I couldn’t help myself.
@@decluesviews2740No shot that more people get the Nolan joke than would understand a "Tribute." Yes, Inception is a very famous movie. But the fact that Insomnia is a Nolan remake of a Swedish/Norwegian movie is not at all well known. That was the joke, BTW. Inception but in Norway = Insomnia. Curiously it could also have been Tenet.
@@daysandwords Ahhh! The truth is revealed. Honestly, I was proud of myself for recognizing that Dr. Who did the audio book. But now I want to see the original that Inception was based on.
This next content creator asked me not read this, but I wrote and it’s the truth. “I F*%#ing love this language learning video, it’s the best language learning video everrrrrrr. PERIOD!!!!” - tenacious d reference for the uncultured lol
Yeah, statistically most people missed it though. Like there are videos covering the same topic but not nearly as well and with 20x the number of views.
For my high school experience of Spanish, the very best thing that I ever did was learning a double-sided sheet of A4 for the final speaking exam, I always wondered why this worked after I had been swayed by CI theories "I was learning output how could this be good" was my knee jerk response but I think now it really was an input exercise hidden as output practice.
I double majored Latin and Class. Civ., and went on to teach Latin and French for years. When I was learning, writing material was key. If I wrote it, I never forgot it. Eidetic memory? Probably. But later I urged my students to do the same, telling them, “Its muscle memory.” Vocalizing was the second most important learning tool for me. When learning Latin, I sub-vocalized conjugations and declensions all the way to school and all the way home.
Yes, and this is so surprising that the likes of Stephen Krashen just don't see it (unlike their colleague Paul Nation, for example). You acquire by actualizing. In fact, this is how kids do it. They hear the word, repeat it a gazillion times (and get corrected the first few times until they have an adult-like pronunciation) and then, dozens, if not hundreds, of times, sneak it into "conversations" to memorize it by activating it in all sorts of contexts. Adults can somewhat hack around this by writing stuff down
Hmm, I'm gonna say this is an over-simplification. I think Krashen's moniker of "We only acquire the language through comprehending it" is very close, but not the whole story. I think saying "You acquire by actualising." is also not true, and actually further away from reality. For starters, after I took about a year off speaking Swedish and just listened to it for a year, I went back to speaking Swedish and found myself much more fluent... then every now and then I would find myself effortlessly using a word that I didn't know that I knew. After using it I would think "Huh... never really knew that I knew that word... but I know it means X and I think I used it correctly." (And then sometimes I would check with the Swede whom I was talking to, who would confirm that it was the right way to use it.) From that, you'd have to conclude that I'd acquired the word, and since I'd never used it before, you'd have to conclude that I'd acquired it without using it. I'm not saying that no improvements can be made through speaking, or that acquisition can't happen through practice, but I would happily go into battle against the idea that we only acquire by actualising.
Repetition, heavily focus on comprehensible input and slow/unseen acquisition of the language are really golden advices that unfortunately are not that well spread in the language learning community. I remember the first time I heard about input based learning from Matt vs Japan and literally blowing my mind with the results I started getting from it. Not only improved my English, but also my German as well and I'll be forever grateful for creators such as you, Lamont, who also go into the path of sharing genuinely good advice out there. Now, almost 8 years into German and also starting my own language channel, all I have to say is Thank You! 🙂
As a person who speaks 7 languages I totally agree with you. Listening and repetition are the key elements of success. And as for me Anki is a absolute star in that considering you have a deck with audio. I remember when I was leaning Portuguese I didn't even bother to memorize all pronunciation rules. It just flew into my brain with all repetition of words and frases. In fairness, being an audio type person it's relatively easy for me. The same way I've learned some Chinese words and frases having no idea how to spell them 😁 But for some reading and memorizing is their superpower. You just have to find yours and work a bit harder on the others
Yeah, I think a lot of people think of Anki as being like this dry thing... but mine has pictures and audio and sometimes music... different colours... all sorts of stuff! Thanks for your comment!
Funny how you mentioned Portuguese and then spelled phrase as "frase", your level in the language must be preety good. (Or maybe your first lang is also a latin one idk)
@@junior.santana My native language is Russian, and although I'm fluent in English I still make some mistakes. And talking about ph->f, there is a tendency, especially in North America, to spell the sound simpler as it is. So maybe I'm turning American haha
I am currently learning Norwegian and have watched her video several times. She absolutely nails it but it was great getting your take on it. Tusen Takk!
I settled on the same conclusions last year, while spending 4 months solo traveling through Mexico and Colombia. As a native English speaker, I had studied abroad previously, though it had been many years since that Spanish course with very little practice in the meantime. Listen, listen, listen. If I was tired of socialization, I would sit in my hotel room or AirBnB at night and flip through the channels. News stations usually had closed captioning, so I'd use it to my advantage. Sitting there, listening, with a translator app in hand. It really helped to drill in those common phrases, basic grammar, etc. Also, whenever I took an Uber or taxi, I would force myself to engage in conversation with the driver. We're talking WEEKS of stumbling through near-nonsensical conversations until it finally began to flow. Those cab rides were instrumental.
yes, just memorize. I had somebody ask me yesterday why in Spanish you say ' Vamos a buscar un hotel que sea cómodo.' Why is it subjunctive? Who cares? Just memorize it, because that is what Spanish people say.
I speak Spanish and not only that... you can even play with the structure "Vamos a tomar un café que sea --menos fuerte/ menos caliente/ más frío / más barato / más caro ....etc... you can play with that
For that phrase, yes. Here is the principle of subjunctive use in Spanish: irrealis. The sentence is saying 'let's go look for a hotel room that is (hopefully) comfortably.' You want it to be comfortable but until you find it, it is not real. It is abstract, yes, but it will sink in over time. I hope that helps. Note: the imperative in Spanish is also marked as it is command or request. These are moods-,indicative, subjunctive andimperative- as opposed to tense/tiempo. Good luck. I hope it helps.
Exactly, even though I’m someone who wants to learn about my language’s grammar and all (Spanish), for someone who wants to speak, I tell them to just hear the things people naturally say. Don’t try to get everything correct, not even I do!
Cool, brother! I am a Russian speaker myself and my wife is an American so we have been helping each other and I saw how some things in Russian language may be confusing for English speakers. So if you have any questions let me know I’d love to help 😉 P.S. Главное не сдавайся и все получится!
@@CrescerMeditando-h5nYou really don't NEED that though. Her video has perfectly good instructions from which you can pretty much work out what your day should look like. Does it matter if she read a books at 9:30am and then watched TH-cam at 11:00, or vice versa? It wouldn't even help to copy a body builder that closely, but in a language learning context it's entirely pointless.
I spent a lot of just listening to Michel Thomas and Coffee Break podcast, but I didn't improve a lot until I ALSO starting reading. But I ONLY read and then I hit another stopping point. And, it wasn't until I started watching Netflix shows with Language reading to LISTEN and READ at the same time where I saw another big jump. If only I had connected the dots sooner and did it earlier, I would have progressed so much faster. And re-reading and re-watching seems like such as a great idea. She makes a lot of good points!
The way I learned english was not unlike what's explained here. We had english classes in school, but I ALWAYS failed those classes. The only things I knew in english were very basic vocabulary, but I couldn't even properly form a sentence. At some point I saw a german youtuber (I'm german) olay my favourite game, skyrim, in english and thought it sounded SO much better than the german version. So, I started playing the game in english, even though I didn't understand anything. The combination of me knowing parts of the game by heart and listening to the english over and over again made me learn english a thousand times better than school. After my grasp on the language got better, I continued to even play new games in english. Then I started to watch shows and youtube in english as well. And now, years later, basically anything I read, watch and listen to is in english. My grammar still sucks, but I've consumed such an astronomical amount of the language, that I'm even thinking in it most of of the time. My listening and reading comprehension of english far surpasses that of german nowadays. Which is honestly dumb, considering I still live in germany. 😂 Edit: I think its pretty visible in this comment though, that I dont write/speak all that much in english. (compared to german) My understanding of the language is far superior to my execution of it. It sadly doesn't translate 1 to 1. It'd be worse if my understanding wasn't as good though.
I could cry right now from relief that I'm doing the right thing. I literally clicked on this video from rewatching and shadowing My First German Book for the umpteenth time this month. I just listen to it on my way to travel and like you mentioned, I know the first quarter well but I get quite intimidated when it moves onto the next part and realize I have to listen to those now. I also feel quite grateful that the languages I'm trying to learn have infinite organized resources online although it can get overwhelming. One of the things I'm struggling with is sticking to one language though. I'm not travelling anytime soon to the countries of the languages so I don't have a big goal so I find myself often jumping between these different languages and feeling inadequate in all of them. Something else I find difficult even in my own mother tongue and English is learning vocabulary as in in writing form. It's my least favourite part especially because of how time consuming it is and often pushs me away from learning, but I suppose the more I practise, I'll get to it eventually. Thanks for this video!
The concept of another channel with a different audience pointing out a great video with not enough recognition is so great. There are so many good videos on youtube that deserve views and this should be more normalized on the platform.
I have seen it done before but yeah it's certainly not the norm. Unfortunately for me, language learning is so niche that even 70K subs is getting towards a "bigger" channel, so there'd be very little point to me shouting out a channel not to do with language learning, because it would probably have as many views just by being in a more popular niche, e.g. cycling.
I've been learning Japanese for about four and a half months and last week I was listening to a song I've heard probably hundreds of times (maybe only able to pick out a few words here or there without looking at a translation of the lyrics) suddenly heard the line "翼を広げて" and understood it instinctively without having to think about it. I almost cried when it happened. I love SRS systems and I really feel like they're the only way I can get stuff to stick in my brain, but I find it really easy to let my brain just tune something out if I don't understand it, so if I am listening to something for immersion I have to try to focus really hard. But once I started to properly learn the grammar patterns as well as straight vocabulary it made it a lot easier to pick out those patterns while listening.
Ive been learning Japanese for about 6 months as well, Im trying to play games mostly as I dont listen to Japanese music, but its been suuuuuccchhh a struggle
As an English only fluent person leaning Turkish, I searched for Turkish childrens stories on youtube. I figured I learned to read English with childrens books, and could begin at the beginning with Turkish, as well. The delivery of words and meaning go a bit slower with childrens stories. I also watch as much of Turkish movies and shows that are cc in English. It has helped tremendously.
I agree! I came across Ilys’ video about a month ago, and was quickly stunned by her depth of insight and the practicality of her suggestions! Though she likely shares here a few things, gleaned from others, I strongly sense that the majority of her tips are born of her natural intuition and her ability to quickly profit from her own experience of trial and error, as if feeling her way through the new tongue, trusting her perfect blend of instinct and intellect. Her video distills all of the web’s best language-learning advice into some twenty minutes of pure gold. Anyone committed to learning a foreign language needs to follow her lead. And every poster of language-learning content should be recommending her, passionately!
You can also hear her Norwegian accent by the way she ends certain words: she says wik (week), spik (speak). They do this thing with their tongue at the end that blocks the throat, sort of. Listening to the language you are trying to learn does that to you - you subconsciously pick up the pronunciation and accent, as well as develop intuition as to how properly pronounce a word you have never heard.
I agree! I came across Ilys’ video about a month ago, and was quickly stunned by her depth of insight and the practicality of her suggestions! Though she likely shares here a few things, gleaned from others, I strongly sense that the majority of her tips are born of her natural intuition and her ability to quickly profit from her own experience of trial and error, as if feeling her way through the new tongue, trusting her perfect blend of instinct and intellect. Her video distills all of the web’s best language-learning advice into some twenty minutes of pure gold. Anyone committed to learning a foreign language needs to follow her lead. And every poster of language-learning content should be recommending her, passionately!
I agree 100% with everything in this video, I speak Serbian, English and Arabic and the real breakthrough of my learning Arabic was when I got into the Qur'an... I am not muslim but I was treating the Qur'an as an audio book (literally) because it is recited (some would even call it ''singing'' because there's obvious melody involved but whatever) and I would listen to the recitations while reading and it totally transformed how I saw the language - I started to hear Arabic better (to understand where one word ends and another begins) and to understand how the grammar works just from the text even without memorizing tables and conjugations and stuff and even though the vocabulary itself wasn't extremely useful tbh (remember it's a book from the 7th century) I picked up on a ton of useful things along the way - phrases, metaphores, words, expressions and I even started to understand better how Arab muslims saw the world and what was their connection to God (Allah) like and it opened so many doors for me plus it was a lot of fun to learn tajweed (correct way to recite the Qur'an where every letter has to be pronounced perfectly and the length of every syllable is precisely determined etc.) so for anyone struggling to learn Arabic I can't recommend the Qur'an enough because today's Arabic is hugely influenced by dialects and you can rarely find people who use perfect MSA (modern standard arabic) with all the right grammar etc. so it's hard to concentrate when you have an Iraqi guy for example reading the book with obvious influence of his own accent, then an Egyptian lady reading with her own accent etc. These dialects are a nightmare for Arabic learners at first so I suggest to concentrate on audio books in MSA or even better on the Qur'an (which I repeat has to be read in a very specific way, in a perfectly clear and concise manner which eases the learning process a lot since it's more consistent and you don't have different dialectual influences confusing you). All the best and happy learning! :D
Thanks protostar but I actually can't recommend any audio book in particular because I didn't really use other audio books in my studies apart from the Qur'an... Sorry... @@protostar1000
If you meant to ask if I understood the words and the general meaning then yes, but it's very hard to understand every little nuance hidden behind the text, there is A LOT hidden in there and some things (from what I gather) not even native Arabic speakers understand completely and people's interpretations can vary... Of course in the beginning I didn't understand more than 20% but as I read more and learned more my understanding increased@@munaali4811
Good advice. Thank you. Gonna get back to my French. I met a Belgian guy in India who had been a hostel caretaker in Scotland for a few years. Whenever he talked about his time in Scotland he had a full-on, and I mean nearly incomprehensible, Scottish accent but when he spoke of anything else, he had a Belgian accent.
I watched her video 2 or 3 days ago and like with everything I come across I test it out (there's nothing to lose) and yes, I've been doing what she said for Turkish and I started to really understand better and notice real improvement in my understanding and it does feel natural. If anyone is doubting just test it for yourself and see what happens, for me it worked.
The fact that I was able to learn what Korean is supposed to sound like purely from listening to a ton of K-pop and watching a bunch of Korean content over the course of a decade is a testament to the power of constant exposure. I barely know any of the words, but my brain parses Korean as actual language that I simply don't know very well when I hear it, not as gibberish.
Same, for the last ten years i been listening music and watching korean content and i only know a few words and phrases cause i never actually paid much attention to actually learn the language, But listening music and watching tv shows it's how i learnt english so i guess i just need to give it a try
I've been working more seriously on my Spanish lately, and it's really been paying off at work. And definitely some of the things that have worked the best are things like reading the same text over and over and really diving into it deeply. Reading it myself all the way through, then looking up the words and plugging in confusing phrases into Google Translate, then listening to the audiobook, then reading along each sentence WITH the audiobook copying all the intonation. Even though flashcards don't work well independently, they definitely work well in conjunction with other things - no need to completely abandon them or whatever. I'm often reading a book and connecting phrases with my flashcards. Thinking "oh this phrase works well with all these other vocab I learned from my lists" and trying them out. Same with lessons. Each week, I do an hour of a self-paced course and when I go into my reading and listening, I find myself paying much more attention to whatever was covered and reinforcing it while exposing myself to stuff that wasn't covered.
@ThatOneFrenchPancake For my reading? Oh just whatever children's books are available in my local library that have both a physical copy and a digital audiobook copy. Lately I've also added in Spanish storytimes at work (I work at a library) where I try to ask follow-up questions in Spanish to the kids and talk about the book in Spanish. I convince them to participate by asking if they want to help me learn Spanish.
This is such a strong and in-depth response video! Ilys's videos are amazing for me as I've been studying Norwegian for around half a year now; with the surprisingly limited amount of videos surrounding the language online, she's been incredibly helpful with her TH-cam shorts, TikToks, and self-made quizzes through her Instagram stories. I'm glad she's gaining more traction from videos like this. It looks like I can learn just as much from you too in terms of optimizing my learning experience. Subbed!
I agree. I’ve been learning English only by watching YT, Netflix, Anime etc. I still have no idea how some structures work/are named and I still struggle with tenses but I can hold a conversation with my friends on DC for hours on different topics. All my library is in English. Some phrases I know just because I heard them many times. For example “It’s worth it”. I remember that I didn’t even know what “worth” means, all I knew that this phrase declares that something is valuable enough. Listen and read a lot! Stop memorizing and do study session, this method fails most of the times. I’m learning German and still use this method. Reading method: I grab two similar books: one in German, one in English. Firstly I read the first paragraph in English and then in German. It helps me understand phrases, not words.
HHAHA I love when you pointed out that she sometimes can have a Norwegian accent while speaking English. I developed that as well when I was learning and living in Sweden. Now I am back home (The Netherlands) and I lost the Swedish influence again😅
I love this new trend of giving props to other TH-camrs, who deserve it. I’ve seen it a couple of times in the past weeks in different genres and it makes me insanely happy. Good job 👍🏻
wado! I am learning Cherokee and this so applies! We have synchronous online classes with a first language speaker, and this weekend I'll attend an outreach class in Oregon. Like your atsutsu, (boy) I 'read' stories over and over before i could actually read - and now have several children's books in Tsalagi, or with some words in the language. I've ordered language books, Inc a hymnal and listen to hymns on TH-cam. I watch old segments from Osiyo TV - interviews and stories from the nation, ale a word in each episode. And notes notes notes!! I take class notes, and look up words , and practice quoting in Syllabary. I love the rhythms, and cadences of this polysyllabic language! A favorite saying of teacher Ed's parents: *yunaduliha yanadeloqua* - if they want to, they will learn! That's us!! Dogaduliha we (all) want to!
Russian has a lot of clauses for nouns, complex conjugation of verbs. when we as natives learn Russian in school, we actually sort words into clauses not by the rules, but by how we would pronounce them in that context. I think it proves the point that learning clauses like a native child would, by memorizing their usage in specific circumstances and orders, is ultimately better. not from a linguistic point of view when you try to remember a set of rules that natives never remember
The only foreign language I’ve learned to speak fluently is English, and I did so without the intention to be fluent, I simply wanted to read a certain book that hadn’t been translated into my native language😂 Then there was another book, and it went like that
Thank you! I went to see her original video and she has really great insights. I still need to somehow make this work in my target language which has very scarce resources.
I listened to Turkish radio and music all the time when i was learning the language and I was always so happy when i recognized a word that i had learned in school out of all the other words i didn't know. I'm an ESL teachser now and I keep telling my students to just listen to English even if they don't understand and they don't know the value. I feel sad when they don't improve because an hour and a half of classes a day just isn't enough.
I love this video! I actually rewatched it two or three days ago. I recently decided to switch from Swedish to Norwegian (my family's from there) and wanted to write down her resources. Too bad she hasn't continued with the videos because they're really good (though her IG is pretty great too).
I have done the thing with Swedish. I started listening to an audiobook in Swedish. And after listening to it for a lot of hours my ears got used to the sounds of the language and I memorized a lot of words and sentences without knowing the meaning. And then learning the grammar and vocabulary fealt really easy.
This is how i learned English, by immersing myself with a lot of English content, playing video games in English so far is the most helpful for me, i used to play so many choices based games like the walking dead and it helped me learn English by context
Not a hater, think this is fantastic, watched it multiple times, always crack up when I hear her say "pro-noun-ciation." I tested into a level 4 language in the Army language school, and was given Mandarin. After six months of intense, rigorous, time with a native of mainland China, we all walked away speaking the language at a 6th grade level and were illiterate because we were not taught to read and write the language. Within a year, most of us couldn't even speak the language beyond simple greetings that made people's ears hurt. I very much appreciate your videos and approach to the subject of learning new languages as they are rekindling my belief that learning another language in another manner than rote memorization, is very possible.
I have done the thing with Swedish. I started listening to an audiobook in Swedish. And after listening to it for a lot of hours my ears got used to the sounds of the language and I memorized a lot of words and sentences without knowing the meaning. And then learning the grammar and vocabulary fealt really easy.
This video summed up my experience with learning English as a second language. This is exactly the reminder I need as I'm venturing into picking up a few languages. I have got people (acquaintances and complete strangers) 'accusing' me for faking an ABC accent when speaking Cantonese. Next time one of these folks pops up, I'll show them the bit of the video on how one's L2 influences one's L1😂
This is an inspiring video. Ilys (and you) think exactly as I do about language learning. I ran an English language training school in China for over 10 years. When I first came here (I'm still in China), I read Steven Krashen's book, 'The Natural Approach'. He doesn't go into the the details of how a child learns language as much as you and Ilys do though he is quite excellent. The thing that stood out more to me than anything was when she said that the first 1-2 years of a child's life they are only listening. Think about it. They aren't trying to translate. They aren't thinking about grammar structure. And, they aren't even trying to learn. They are just in an immersive environment and passively listening. I'm not saying that active listening isn't good because I believe that it is. But, a child doesn't learn that way. Of course, you can't replicate the perfect environment that a child has in learning their native language. Nonetheless, what you've described here is excellent. I've put Chinese students in Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, UCLA, University of Toronto and other top world colleges. I've followed this approach for many years. It's nice to hear someone else talking about it and affirming these things. Thanks so much!!
I remember the time i was watching anime but not picking many Japanese words because I didn’t know anything about the basics of Japanese grammar. I started watching some basic grammar videos and immediately started to recognize and remember verbs and their conjugations, then, after a while, started to use Anki for kanji. It’s kind of the same way in which i learned English, by just listening to TH-cam tutorials, even though they teach us some basic English at school 🇲🇦, but the focuses were on French, and somehow I turned up knowing English instead 😅 I guess it's just because I listen to content in English, I’m a Arabic & darija native btw
Learning by using something active like video games works too! Especially games that have heavy dialog is great and pretty fun. Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all have excellent foreign language options and if you play a game you already revisited you get a better understanding quickly.
Imo, Anki makes this method of learning so much more efficient. If you both repeat a few texts in your target language, and pluck out all the useful vocabulary from it while you are learning, you can get a lot more for your time by using that spaced repetition to ensure long-term acquisition (you can feasible go through a book, rereading it constantly and making it your goal to understand everything from the first chapter, for example). As an adult language learner, you're smarter than a child; why not use that :P
I had a kid a few months ago, and what I did before he was born was spend a fair amount of time doing is picking the things in Swedish (and a few other languages) that I would be repeating. Every morning when I hit play on the same episode of the show of the day and let it play. The same with a set of audiobooks, radio plays, music playlists, etc. What I am really wondering is when more of it will be comprehensible to my spouse :). (She is loving Bluey despite not understanding any of it yet.)
Be careful with Bluey....my 5 year old figures we should move to Australia, because Australian parents are awesome and get down and play with their kids randomly instead of going to work... It's a trap!!! But yeah, Bluey is great is Swedish as well. We went through a phase where we'd watch an entire season in English, then re-watch it in Swedish to preserve my sanity.
@@hillmanntoby Yeah, I can see that possibility. Gonna have to do a risk analysis! On the other hand, it can be moderately entertaining when the kids come out with some random Australian slang or word and all the Bluey parents chuckle at the non-Bluey parents/adults confused looks.
@hillmanntoby - unfortunately, what they're playing and watching in Bluey is not quite "rugby". It's essentially an Australia only sport called "rugby league" or "NRL" that is basically very commercialised rugby union (which we call rugby... confusing I know)... In fact, thinking about it, there might be a quick reference to a proper rugby match at some point... but yeah the blue/maroon one is definitely "footy" (rugby league).
bro I was like halfway through this video cos it was too much info at once and I kept it in my tabs for like 2 weeks always refusing to click cross on it cos I knew I needed to hear it (I'm learning Spanish not Norwegan). thanks for bringing this back it's like a slap in the face but like a good one
I remember when I used to reread books in German (or other languages). It was before the golden age of language learning and I reread those books because they were the only ones I had 😂.
I did watch her video some time ago and it's good to come back to these great tips, now finally ready to properly apply some of the advice. I need the rest to simmer around my brain for another while, but I know I will get back to them too.
I completely agree!!! Cannot praise this approach enough!! I am a Russian native, English speaking and Italian studying American. I came to the US having some English. I used every minute available to improve my English, listening to radio talk shows all the time I was in my car driving to work and back. I insisted on my colleagues at work correcting my mistakes, wrote memos and asked them to proofread. I have always been into art and music. And now that I am retired, I travel a lot and mostly to Italy - Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Naples. I am studying Italian now. And I am using Pimsleur language learning approach, which is very similar to what you are talking about!
I watched that video and thought the same thing!!!! Its the best video i watched on language learning, and i watched A LOT of japanese learning videos for years I watched her video before going to norway and learned for two months. When i arrived i was close to A2. After a month there, i took an official exam and officially got my a2 certificate!
Norwegian is the simplest and nicest Germanic language to learn. Reasonable phonology, sensible orthography, 10/10, most approachable Germanic language.
What I did once (which helped me *a lot*) was printing a story I wanted to read (first chapters were translated to my language but I wanted to know what happens next) and using multiple highlighters, just highlight all the words I didn't know/recognise, and add a translation above. Everything without a colored background were things I just knew. That meant I could read through the whole chapter without stumbling every two words, so I could actually follow the story. I learned the word "hint" the day I saw it mentioned maybe ten times on one page (and I highlighted it that many times). It also taught me that English actually has natural-sounding, long sentences, not just one or two parts that we learn at school. Now I'm planning to use the same method with German and Harry Potter (since the language of those books is pretty easy). I did notice that without highlighting it is a bit annoying to read since you easily get lost if your language level is too low.
I think sometimes we put off the things that we think are going to be enjoyable or important because we assign them a lot of weight. For example, my favourite TH-camrs tend to be pretty sparse in their uploads, so when I do see a new video by them, I often don't watch it until TH-cam viewing has my full attention.
At one point, instead of translating the phrase in your head, you just know what it means without even trying to explain or translate it No need to make sense of grammar when you already know where everything goes, no need to think of 'is this where I should put 'es' or 's' or is this where I should put 'un' or 'une' ' you just know, it's like an instinct
I've read somewhere a long time ago that adults can't learn as kids do. But now I have a 2.5 yo and it's actually interesting how he improves his language skills. Like, now he's at the point where he knows how to pronounce quite a lot of sounds. He obviously started with repeating words, then he repeated simple phrases after us word by word, then he started to change them a bit, for example, I told him every evening "Mommy loves Mike", then he said to me "Daddy loves Mike", later he started saying "Mike loves mommy". I've also noticed that he tries to apply grammar rules, for example, he knows "dog-dogs", and he'll say "man-mans". At this point our conversation is usually him telling some phrase, that actually makes sense, but has some grammar mistakes or incorrect word order, and I'll say it back but how adults say it. So, my point is, I speak 5 languages, and his steps in learning a language actually make sense to me too. Listen a lot, especially when you have visual hints, then try to repeat some words that you've heard a lot, then try to make simple sentences, and this is the way to fluency, you just need someone to correct you constantly :D
I'm a native German speaker and even though we start English early, all media is dubbed. Therefore I only started listening to English when I discovered the internet as a teenager. I would listen to English every single day for several hours but I was almost never in a position to be able to practice actually speaking English. When I was 19 I started working as an au pair for a British family. By then, I was fluent even though I had barely ever spoken English in my life.
"if you plan to live in another country you should understand the language before you get there especially if people from that country are usually fluent in English" (or something like this) you can scratch the "even if". Just do it. Period. People in Germany generally do not speak English well (although most people do speak it) and if you don't have some language ability when you come here, you will not have a good time. In Sweden, the Netherlands, wherever people speak English well, you've have a hard time breaking out of the English bubble and will hit with the "you've been here 1 1/2 years why do you still not speak our language?". If you try that in Germany you just won't have any friends. Nobody is forced to interact with you and nobody will be in any relationship with you. They're not your friends, your family, your romantic interests, whatever. And if it takes people to speak English 99% of the time to become your friend, a very large chunk of Germans, probably over 90%, are just immediately out. A lot of the complains you see on the Germany subreddit (/r/germany) are a direct result of not being able to be part of society at all due to the lack of language skills. Also, life becomes A LOT more difficult if you can't practice at work. I work in English exclusively because the company I work for was always supposed to target all of the EU from day one so a lot of early hires were because of their native language and potential to expand globally which then resulted in the office language being English which then resulted in a lot of the experts that we managed to hire being "expats". We speak English pretty much always except if we know that everybody in the call is German. HR person from Peru fluent in German? We speak English. Sales dude from Venezuela fluent in German? We speak English. It's just easier than trying to remember who of those 40 people actually speaks German. This means that most people in our company who don't already speak German are lost. They spend 8 hours a day basically practicing English (except for the 1 or so native speaker) and then come home and speak their native language with their spouse or their children or whatever. It turns your day into "desperately trying to find the time to learn this language" when it could be 8 hours of practice that you are forced to do anyway. Like, even just listening to a point that you can tell your colleagues to not speak English with you would be amazing.
Indeed. And it is harder than you think to practice outside work. The waiter in the restaurant, or behind the bar ,or the railway ticket seller is not your teacher. He just wants to get his job done, often has other people to deal with, and doesn't have time to listen to an English person trying to string together a few German words.
Great videos! Truly, both have given me so many ideas I can apply to my French studies 😊Inspired me so much I made a video about it 😁 Hope you have a chance to check it out, I think you’ll enjoy it. If not feel free to roast it lol
![[MV] A leap of faith...ความเชื่อใจครั้งสุดท้าย (From "Petrichor the series")](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/U1piZH2CNXA/mqdefault.jpg)
The sale is BACK ON! Get 3 languages for the price of one, have access to the courses FOREVER!
shorturl.at/hyAX7
I'm a Spanish native English teacher and I never know how to emphasize to my students enough that the only real way to learn a language it to listen to it a lot, repeat it (even though you might not really understand every single thing you're saying at the moment, also looking it up in any translator helps with that) and try to speak it at every single opportunity. Like, I can stand here for hours teaching you how certain aspects of the grammar work but it's absolutely NOT going to make you speak the language better. Assimilation and shadowing are proven to be the only real way to learn a language and that's exactly how I learned English. No other way.
Well, it obviously worked. Your English is excellent! 😳
Mi español no es tan bueno como tu inglés.
I learned English in a couple of years without speaking it at all. I just read it a lot with machine translation and dictionary. Many of us don't need to speak a language, just to read it and write it.
I'll just support this with the fact that all the languages I'm actually fluent in (English, Swedish, Estonian in addition to my native) I have not learned by studying them at school. Estonian I've never had a single lesson on and mask as a native as my name does not give away that I'm a foreigner. With the languages I've been taught I always struggle because I'm trying to recap grammar in my head when I'm speaking.
@@greenlitllemanyeah I actually think speaking early is at best not helpful and at worst actually hurts your pronunciation and way of thinking in the language (not in a permanent way)
Completely agree, in fact, I have a theory that if an adult were to use the same method that children do, they'd learn any language much faster than a child does. It takes kids 6 years to learn how to speak it before they learn how to write it, whereas an adult can learn all four skills at once. Being an adult has its advantages.
@zykotek3091 It's true. When I say that it takes them 6 years, I am referring to the acquisition of the mother tongue that, based on that theory, it is suggested to introduce a second language or more when they are fresh out of the womb. What's more, if you don't do it, they are "missing out" on a learning process that only occurs at that age. Which is not entirely a lie, but that doesn't mean that an adult cannot learn with the same method, input.
When you mention 5-13, you are already talking about children who have already developed neural connections, but without the resistance that adults have. They learn in less time, as I said before, at that age you can develop all 4 skills at the same time.
I know adults who moved to Australia as adults and now sound 100% Australian and have amazing vocabs. I also know adults who have lived here for 20 years and can barely communicate.
I also know people who moved here when they were 11 who still sound a bit, well, Hungarian, since he his Hungarian.
Individual differences in talent and circumstances are so wild that statements like "adults learn faster" or "kids learn faster" can never really be proven. Kids have many many advantages. Adults also have some great advantages.
It doesn't really matter since we are all the age we are (true story dat) so we might as well just hop to it.
@@andreas8201 How did you succeed in learning all these languages?
> Being an adult has its advantages.
Can we recognize that adults are missing something of value that children have? It takes humongous amounts of labour and thought to get rid of your accent as an adult. Whereas if you're a child you can't help but lose your accent.
@zykotek3091i don't compeletly agree. A child of 5 years old does not speak in the same way a 20 year old does. So a 5 year old that moves to another country learns quicker because they 1) are younger and less afraid to make mistakes (I piss my pants every time I attempt to speak Japanese). 2) they speak in a diffrent way a college student does.
English is my second language, but my courses are in English. In a very short time I learned how to write my papers in proper academic English. When I had to do the same in my native language (Dutch) I couldn't, because I had never needed to use nor learn that kind of vocabulairy before.
I appreciate your emphasis on "repetition". Most self-learners feel this sense of burden or "I should know this" when broaching a topic already learned. But nobody counts during multiplication, they just know and that knowing is based off of repetition.
As a math tutor in a center, I assure you, many small children do count :(
I would argue that in maths, learning the multiplication tables by FIRST counting is actually superior, because you're understanding what it is you're actually doing.
In primary school I never listened, I was always getting sat in the corner etc etc. So I never knew the proper techniques to do multiplication... so I always did it the "slow" way of working it out manually, e.g. in year 4, I'd be sitting there tediously working out 87 x 51 by first calculating what 50 x 8 would be, then writing that down somewhere, then adding 8 and multiplying that by 10 and writing that down etc. I would then get in more trouble because I would right the answer but not "show my working"... as if the 2 pages of scribbles wasn't evidence enough, f***.
But anyway, fast forward to year 9 and 10 and I was in the 3rd maths class (out of 4 or 5... so not the good one) but then I got called out in front of the school to accept my award of 2nd in the school and 271st in the state or something in the NSW Premier's Maths Challenge... How?
The math's challenges, for whatever reason, were far less like what we were taught at school and much more indicative of how good your BRAIN was at maths, not how well you'd memorised the formulas. I am also, even to this day, much faster at adding and multiplying more reasonable figures than most people.
I'm not suggesting that kids should never learn their times tables, but simply knowing "9 x 9 is 81" is not as good as knowing that 9 x 10 is 90 and therefore if you just subtract 9, it's obviously 81.
@@daysandwords My story with maths as a kid is somewhat similar to yours, not listening hence not understanding the "proper" method, and nowadays people look at me like I'm some sort of freak for how quick I do maths in my head. I also got in trouble for not showing my working and spent a lot of time crying because I didn't understand what I was being asked to do. And now I don't always work things out, at least consciously, I just see the answer as if I have a subconscious calculator in my head. This only works up to a certain complexity of course, but I did also go through a phase of memorising the 2-36 times tables which I think enabled me to more complex maths than most people without reaching for the calculator. Interesting to see that someone has a similar story resulting in them being faster than than average person, I had never really thought about how that came to be my mum just says I have maths brain :)
@@beaumatthews6411 definitely. like learning anything but at some point the repetition becomes automated and they no longer have to use their cute little fingers 🙃
@@0x2A_ Contrast that with a math major who has trouble calculating prices at the counter for the customers in their head 🥲
Man that feeling of realizing you can understand the general concept of text in your target language is so freaking rewarding bcs you’ve invested so much frustrating time on it, doubting whether youll ever be able to learn it.
Summary (notes for self):
The general framework for learning a language applies to (virtually) all languages.
Have learning goal steps realistic in size that you are satisfied with your progress. Vary your motivation intensity and direction as needed in order to reach the goal.
Expose yourself the language as much as possible before you rely on using it.
Repeat a short simple language part (recording, text) often to memorise certain basics.
Repeat watch a section of a movie or audio book in the language to learn them by heart.
Listen as much as possible to immerse yourself in the language. (More time spent = more language learnt).
Use translation tools to help learn where helpful. You will need them less and less as you learn.
yes
Essentially, you got it. The most major point is to expose yourself to the language a ton.
Thanks 😊
Have fun with the language. Accept that you sound like a noob and speak it anyway. Don't be afraid to screw up.
That you for that. Listening to this, I realised how much I appreciate titled chapters in videos.
I remember my grandma had a german cartoon channel and it wasn't even close to my native language, but as a kid I didn't think about not understanding anything, I just watched and didn't care until I started picking up the context and words that connected to the actions that happened in the cartoon. Language in kid cartoons also twnd to be more simple. German spongebob was my teacher. After a certain time I could understand almost 85% of the spoken language but couldn't write it until I picked up german in highschool, and only then I started learning grammar and writing, and was much easier when I already understood the spoken language. Only now I realised that something I did unintentionally as a kid I can use again
Today I actually spoke Spanish not as a language practice, but I actually exchanged some interesting thoughts and stopped thinking about how to say something but I was actually thinking about the things being discussed. That feels like magic when quantity turns into quality.
Another thing to notice about this video is that she is FRENCH, speaking English. It's very rare to to hear a French person speaking English without a distnct accent. Another sign of the success of her method!
"All French all the time would sound strange"
And I took that personally as a French viewer
Yeah, what did he mean by that? Why did he say that?
@@MisterHowzat I think he just meant that as a joke haha
AFAT
Mdrr
I think he was kidding, it would be true of any language one isn't accustomed to hearing
This is exactly how I learned English growing up all on my own. I never picked up a vocabulary/grammar book, I never took clases independently, all I did was listen to music and watch shows and movies in English repeatedly. I memorized the sound of the words and then I just picked them up naturally, the same way I learned my mother tongue.
I memorized sentences and then played around with them and built new sentences with new words based on what I already knew.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to replicate that process 😢
I think you only need to try it, I did the same with english and in january first I started Italian and I've been doing the same, but as a native spanish speaker the progress was huge and a lot faster compared to english. In June I started German, today I'm not ready to do the same (massive and different input, just repeating basic input).
Hi ! What is your native language ? Didn't you have english classes at school when you were young ?
I'm not sure if you're asking me or to the first comment, but I will answered anyway 😀. Yes, I had English classes at school, the last year of elementary School was the first year, and then I had five years of it in secondary School. However, the classes were very basic and all the teachers' approach was to teach the verb "to be" and have us memorize how to conjugate it. I have to admit that back then, neither my schoolmates nor I had a real interest in English. I started learning by myself around 2013/14 aproximatelly, by watching a professional DOTA 2 player from Sweden. I watched his streams almost daily but without realizing that I was learning. When I finished my studies (I'm a P.E.) I began searching information because of the lack of knowledge I had in phisiology, anatomy and exercise biomechanics. Most of the recent information in those fields comes in English. So, in summary I learned by immersing myself in the language through things I found interesting and motivating to learn. @@Ivenyyy
@@MatiJumps yes sorry I was asking you !
Ok very interesting and can I ask you what is your native language ?
hii if we are talking about mati, they said the native language was spanish! if we are talking abt the og commenter (alexndre) then they didnt say in the comment :)@@Ivenyyy
This is exactly how i learned english. I watched Friends with no subtitles. All 10 seasons. When I started my english was B1. It was all gibberish at first but then everything got so clear. I only finished the show because i loved it. My english is now C1
This was actually so true for me. 1.5 Years into learning Korean I was probably only High A1 level to low A2 with some "decent" base knowledge of the language itself but was not conversational at all. After adapting my study to ditch grammar and word lists void of any context, I put all my energy into comprehensible input and started using spaced repetition to memorise as many sentences and words in context as I could find and within 10 months I achieved B2 level, able to talk for hours nonstop with my Korean friends about a wide variety of subjects with speed and fluidity. I would even often forget that I was speaking a foreign language because it became so comfortable. But to achieve this level this quickly I must clarify that, alongside this, I was also doing forced conversations with native speakers weekly, something I never did previously, where my goal was to have a conversation using any amount of things I can remember/have been using from my study in the past week and just did my best to express what I was trying to say and understand what was being spoken back to me. This paired with memorising thousands of words and sentences in context, through spaced repetition is just the most killer combo for language learning. I think I could have gone from beginner to "conversationally fluent" (High B2) in about 12-14 months if I had just studied in this way from the very beginning. For easier languages for English speakers like French, doing the methods outlined in this video, you could probably get to conversational fluency in half the time compared to a category 5 language like Korean. For context, I was doing around 2.5 hours of dedicated study per day and probably another 2 - 2.5 hours of consuming both audio and visual Korean content per day. Although the amount of Korean I spoke per week going from A1 to B2 was a non-linear increase (I spoke more and more the more I learned), on average across the 10 months I spoke around 8-10 hours of Korean a week and as a result got pretty good, pretty fast. I literally remember thinking for the longest time that I would never get good at Korean and thought I just didn't have the brain for it, but here I am several years later chilling at C1 level only wishing I had studied this way earlier. If I can do it, anyone can (seriously)
Thank God you're not a college student in Korea. You sound like those language learners who can feign fluency orally but when you look at their writing it's the same linguistic salad: run-on sentences and rambling.
@@UnShreddedWhat was the purpose of this comment?
@@UnShredded hahahaa whaaaat
@@UnShredded 😂
what did you use to do in your dedicated study?
I watched her video probably 3 to 4 times before, and I thought it was SOOO GOOOD!!
And now YOU posted a video talking ABOUT HER's and I'm very happy to have the pleasure of following two such good language learning creators!!
Can you please tell me how can I find her video ?
@@Mary-S11 It's linked in the description.
@@daysandwords Oh, thank you so much.🙏🙏
Thank you, just thank you. I heard so many times about "you should listen more" but at the same time... I have ignored this advice. I feel like a new period in language learning is beginning in my life
So true! When I was beginning learning Mandarin, I listened to people speaking Mandarin, and I was subconsciously picking up on the pronunciation
Funnily enough I saw this a couple of months ago and saved it to keep reminding myself. Such a good language learning road map!
How can I find her video? It seems very interesting and helpful.
@@Mary-S11search in youtube “how I learned Norwegian”
@@Mary-S11search 'how I learnt Norwegian on my own'.. I also saw this a while back and thought it was phenomenal; happy to see this little reminder today.
@@analogpark8059 got it! Thank you 🙏 😊
@@Mary-S11it’s in the description
About step one: my two cents are when I started a new language I watched a few episodes of a children series (those educational ones for children that teach shapes, colours, interactions in situations like "x goes to the libary"). It is something you can understand a whole episode pretty fast and intuitively because they use short sentences and visualise what is being said. Of course rewatching your favourite movie you know by heart in the new language will help as said in the video but at least for me I sometimes need the feeling of satisfaction fully understanding a dialogue and plot even if I'm only at a A1-A2 level at the new language I'm learning.
what is/are the series called?
That's such a clever idea, thank you for sharing! I'm going to do that!
I learned a surprising amount of Spanish while watching cartoons.
could you recommend me a Spanish cartoon please? @@jodibraun6383
Great advice
I agree! I came across Ilys’ video about a month ago, and was quickly stunned by her depth of insight and the practicality of her suggestions! Though she likely shares here a few things, gleaned from others, I strongly sense that the majority of her tips are born of her natural intuition and her ability to quickly profit from her own experience of trial and error, as if feeling her way through the new tongue, trusting her perfect blend of instinct and intellect. Her video distills all of the web’s best language-learning advice into some twenty minutes of pure gold. Anyone committed to learning a foreign language needs to follow her lead. And every poster of language-learning content should be recommending her, passionately!
My Taiwanese roommate (who’d never left the island and had *excellent* English) told me she’d just listen to American radio like it was music when she did her housework.
It's unlikely that 'just listening to American radio' (I guess she means ICRT) explains her English ability. It's the desire behind it to participate in a global American-cosmopolitan world of pop culture, wealth, and modernity separate from the concrete, familial bottom of Taiwan. The incentives to learn English greatly outweigh the incentives for learning any other language.
It doesn’t make sense to me, I’ve been watching Spanish content since I was a child because I wanted to be fluent like my parents but almost three decades later I still don’t understand what is being said.
@@oppa1319 so interesting I ve been watching spanish videos for 2 years and I understand %90 what is being said . I think you had long breaks between your learning process
@@banana53358hi I'd like to learn Spanish too. I used to know a little from school but stopped practicing for a few years, so I'm back to square one... can I ask how else you started to learn Spanish, anything else you did often to improve?
@@banana53358 I heard watching TED talks in Spanish is a good way to learn because the subtitle translation is so accurate. I think I will start doing that, it’s still my dream to become fluent despite making very little progress.
when I moved to Germany I already had a B2 in the language and that was a huge advantage. Some people still struggle with the language after years if they arrive with 0 knowledge and what you mentioned is so true! If people are used to speaking to you in English, they will hardly switch, even if you get better
Hey Laura!
Yeah... I think "language interested people" as I call us are always going to have a huge advantage because even the example of myself in Mexico - OK yeah I had learned some Spanish before and Mexico isn't really a place that you can be without speaking Spanish, but I was always going looking FOR people to talk to, books to buy, trying to read the fine print on everything I picked up etc etc., whereas people trying to just live their lives as best they can will try to get around that stuff as much as possible.
So someone like yourself... at some point in the conversation, it's going to come up that you speak, what 5 or 6 other languages? So then they're not going to see you as "just another English speaker". It's pretty clear if you've learnt those others, you can learn German too.
How did you move to Germany if you don’t mind me asking? I want to do the same
@@alexanderfisher8241I think Laura has videos on that. Check out her videos in any case.
You have to insist. Nicely but firmly. No way around it. But yeah I saw so many people give up because the locals would just switch to English to make them more at ease. I've been explaining to locals that this kills confidence and actually hampers all progress, I hope at least some of them won't do it in the future
As someone who moved from Scotland to Germany recently, I am currently experiencing this. I was able to speak a little conversational German before moving, however not much as it was extremely last minute
The algorithm actually recommended this video to me a month or so ago, glad to see her getting some love
This make so much sense. I learned english in school for years, but only after I started watching english content (mostly video game montages) I really learned the language. At first I mostly watched for the visuals and I did not understand much of the commentary until one day I suddenly sat there, watched some DayZ gameplay and noticed "Wtf I understand what they are talking about"
I will defenitely apply this to my french studies aswell. I always thought I'd have to set a foundation first, but seems like I don't really need to.
I agree! And it's weird because her video was also recommended to me randomly a few days ago, and when I watched it, it all made perfect sense. I've learned a few languages but these days there was something missing from my learning routine and when I watched her video she gave me so many good tips and reminded me of the routines I used to do.
I'm so glad that you found this video! I saw this 4 months ago and absolutely loved it! She seems like such a sweet girl and you're right she has such wonderful advice! I took some of her advice and some of your advice and I have been watching the same movie about 40 times . I understand at a minimum 92% of it now and I don't even have to be looking at the TV or my screen to know what is happening in the movie. I can just tell because I understand so much of it now.
This is such a strong and in-depth response video! Ilys's videos are amazing for me as I've been studying Norwegian for around half a year now; with the surprisingly limited amount of videos surrounding the language online, she's been incredibly helpful with her TH-cam shorts, TikToks, and self-made quizzes through her Instagram stories. I'm glad she's gaining more traction from videos like this. It looks like I can learn just as much from you too in terms of optimizing my learning experience. Subbed!
Wow, what a nice comment, takk!
This is exactly how I learned English!
Ofc I had it in school first, but rll watching yt got me fluent in English, I just listened.
Great take. I migrated to a spanish speaking country and did everything wrong and spent 5 years struggling to get to grips. I was in a bit of an English speaking bubble not by choice. But now with the benefit of local literature and youtube I am up to speed. Reading is powerful and simply re-reading and reading outloud or using audiobooks is so useful.
Ironically, as the experts in this area note, the science has not filtered down either to the classroom or the text book/publisher.
I am a language teacher and advocate these methods in my classroom but all my colleagues are still teaching grammar and exercises and think reading is time wasted when they could be teaching rules.
I must have watched that video a dozen times, only for the pleasure of hearing her explaining her learning journey.
So, in Jack Black style, does that make this video not the best language learning video in the world but a tribute to the best language learning video in the world?
Haha yeah, I thought about doing some joke about that but decided it wasn't quite going to work...
then stupidly ended up with the Christopher Nolan one that I thought of like 2 minutes before, which is terrible.
@@daysandwords The Inception reference wasn’t “terrible.” It made sense and is probably more widely known than the Jack Black reference. But the latter just immediately came to mind, so I couldn’t help myself.
@@decluesviews2740No shot that more people get the Nolan joke than would understand a "Tribute." Yes, Inception is a very famous movie. But the fact that Insomnia is a Nolan remake of a Swedish/Norwegian movie is not at all well known. That was the joke, BTW. Inception but in Norway = Insomnia. Curiously it could also have been Tenet.
@@daysandwords Ahhh! The truth is revealed. Honestly, I was proud of myself for recognizing that Dr. Who did the audio book. But now I want to see the original that Inception was based on.
This next content creator asked me not read this, but I wrote and it’s the truth. “I F*%#ing love this language learning video, it’s the best language learning video everrrrrrr. PERIOD!!!!” - tenacious d reference for the uncultured lol
I remember this video in my recommendation section and I didn’t click it for what ever reason I’m definitely watching now!
I didn’t miss it. I had already seen it a while ago. I remember being shocked by how good her accent is.
Yeah, statistically most people missed it though. Like there are videos covering the same topic but not nearly as well and with 20x the number of views.
Yeah I saw it too the week she released it I think.
For my high school experience of Spanish, the very best thing that I ever did was learning a double-sided sheet of A4 for the final speaking exam, I always wondered why this worked after I had been swayed by CI theories "I was learning output how could this be good" was my knee jerk response but I think now it really was an input exercise hidden as output practice.
I double majored Latin and Class. Civ., and went on to teach Latin and French for years. When I was learning, writing material was key. If I wrote it, I never forgot it. Eidetic memory? Probably. But later I urged my students to do the same, telling them, “Its muscle memory.” Vocalizing was the second most important learning tool for me. When learning Latin, I sub-vocalized conjugations and declensions all the way to school and all the way home.
Yes, and this is so surprising that the likes of Stephen Krashen just don't see it (unlike their colleague Paul Nation, for example). You acquire by actualizing. In fact, this is how kids do it. They hear the word, repeat it a gazillion times (and get corrected the first few times until they have an adult-like pronunciation) and then, dozens, if not hundreds, of times, sneak it into "conversations" to memorize it by activating it in all sorts of contexts. Adults can somewhat hack around this by writing stuff down
Hmm, I'm gonna say this is an over-simplification.
I think Krashen's moniker of "We only acquire the language through comprehending it" is very close, but not the whole story. I think saying "You acquire by actualising." is also not true, and actually further away from reality.
For starters, after I took about a year off speaking Swedish and just listened to it for a year, I went back to speaking Swedish and found myself much more fluent... then every now and then I would find myself effortlessly using a word that I didn't know that I knew. After using it I would think "Huh... never really knew that I knew that word... but I know it means X and I think I used it correctly." (And then sometimes I would check with the Swede whom I was talking to, who would confirm that it was the right way to use it.)
From that, you'd have to conclude that I'd acquired the word, and since I'd never used it before, you'd have to conclude that I'd acquired it without using it.
I'm not saying that no improvements can be made through speaking, or that acquisition can't happen through practice, but I would happily go into battle against the idea that we only acquire by actualising.
Repetition, heavily focus on comprehensible input and slow/unseen acquisition of the language are really golden advices that unfortunately are not that well spread in the language learning community. I remember the first time I heard about input based learning from Matt vs Japan and literally blowing my mind with the results I started getting from it. Not only improved my English, but also my German as well and I'll be forever grateful for creators such as you, Lamont, who also go into the path of sharing genuinely good advice out there. Now, almost 8 years into German and also starting my own language channel, all I have to say is Thank You! 🙂
It blew my mind too, and changed my whole perspective on language learning. It’s that good.
As a person who speaks 7 languages I totally agree with you. Listening and repetition are the key elements of success. And as for me Anki is a absolute star in that considering you have a deck with audio. I remember when I was leaning Portuguese I didn't even bother to memorize all pronunciation rules. It just flew into my brain with all repetition of words and frases. In fairness, being an audio type person it's relatively easy for me. The same way I've learned some Chinese words and frases having no idea how to spell them 😁 But for some reading and memorizing is their superpower. You just have to find yours and work a bit harder on the others
Yeah, I think a lot of people think of Anki as being like this dry thing... but mine has pictures and audio and sometimes music... different colours... all sorts of stuff!
Thanks for your comment!
Funny how you mentioned Portuguese and then spelled phrase as "frase", your level in the language must be preety good. (Or maybe your first lang is also a latin one idk)
@@junior.santana My native language is Russian, and although I'm fluent in English I still make some mistakes. And talking about ph->f, there is a tendency, especially in North America, to spell the sound simpler as it is. So maybe I'm turning American haha
@@daysandwords Is this a premium version of anki? or how do I get the audio into the deck?
@@mysli_vsluh interesting, I didn't know that
I am currently learning Norwegian and have watched her video several times. She absolutely nails it but it was great getting your take on it. Tusen Takk!
I settled on the same conclusions last year, while spending 4 months solo traveling through Mexico and Colombia. As a native English speaker, I had studied abroad previously, though it had been many years since that Spanish course with very little practice in the meantime.
Listen, listen, listen. If I was tired of socialization, I would sit in my hotel room or AirBnB at night and flip through the channels. News stations usually had closed captioning, so I'd use it to my advantage. Sitting there, listening, with a translator app in hand. It really helped to drill in those common phrases, basic grammar, etc.
Also, whenever I took an Uber or taxi, I would force myself to engage in conversation with the driver. We're talking WEEKS of stumbling through near-nonsensical conversations until it finally began to flow. Those cab rides were instrumental.
yes, just memorize.
I had somebody ask me yesterday why in Spanish you say ' Vamos a buscar un hotel que sea cómodo.' Why is it subjunctive?
Who cares? Just memorize it, because that is what Spanish people say.
Exactly, just like we native English speakers, we don't care about grammar, we already know how to pronounce the words and what ut means
I speak Spanish and not only that... you can even play with the structure
"Vamos a tomar un café que sea --menos fuerte/ menos caliente/ más frío / más barato / más caro ....etc... you can play with that
For that phrase, yes. Here is the principle of subjunctive use in Spanish: irrealis. The sentence is saying 'let's go look for a hotel room that is (hopefully) comfortably.' You want it to be comfortable but until you find it, it is not real. It is abstract, yes, but it will sink in over time. I hope that helps. Note: the imperative in Spanish is also marked as it is command or request. These are moods-,indicative, subjunctive andimperative- as opposed to tense/tiempo. Good luck. I hope it helps.
Exactly, even though I’m someone who wants to learn about my language’s grammar and all (Spanish), for someone who wants to speak, I tell them to just hear the things people naturally say. Don’t try to get everything correct, not even I do!
@@DaveHawthorne-lk9mzwe still don’t care lol
I’m learning Russian and have watched this exact video of hers almost 10 times! It’s amazing advice. So glad you are covering it! 🙌🏾
Cool, brother! I am a Russian speaker myself and my wife is an American so we have been helping each other and I saw how some things in Russian language may be confusing for English speakers. So if you have any questions let me know I’d love to help 😉
P.S. Главное не сдавайся и все получится!
Me too! 🤜🏼🤛🏼 Let’s keep learning russian! Давай!
I’m trying to break it down to a daily routine and even asked her to share like that.
@@CrescerMeditando-h5nYou really don't NEED that though. Her video has perfectly good instructions from which you can pretty much work out what your day should look like.
Does it matter if she read a books at 9:30am and then watched TH-cam at 11:00, or vice versa?
It wouldn't even help to copy a body builder that closely, but in a language learning context it's entirely pointless.
Я знаю русский в совершенстве. Могу помочь тебе в изучении)
I saw this lady's video when it came out because it was randomly promoted to me. She is amazing and has some great advice.
I spent a lot of just listening to Michel Thomas and Coffee Break podcast, but I didn't improve a lot until I ALSO starting reading. But I ONLY read and then I hit another stopping point. And, it wasn't until I started watching Netflix shows with Language reading to LISTEN and READ at the same time where I saw another big jump.
If only I had connected the dots sooner and did it earlier, I would have progressed so much faster. And re-reading and re-watching seems like such as a great idea. She makes a lot of good points!
Her accent in bokmål Norwegian is absolutely amazing!!!
Problemet er at nesten ingen snakker perfekt bokmål. Alle snakker en dialekt.
The way I learned english was not unlike what's explained here. We had english classes in school, but I ALWAYS failed those classes. The only things I knew in english were very basic vocabulary, but I couldn't even properly form a sentence. At some point I saw a german youtuber (I'm german) olay my favourite game, skyrim, in english and thought it sounded SO much better than the german version. So, I started playing the game in english, even though I didn't understand anything. The combination of me knowing parts of the game by heart and listening to the english over and over again made me learn english a thousand times better than school. After my grasp on the language got better, I continued to even play new games in english. Then I started to watch shows and youtube in english as well. And now, years later, basically anything I read, watch and listen to is in english. My grammar still sucks, but I've consumed such an astronomical amount of the language, that I'm even thinking in it most of of the time. My listening and reading comprehension of english far surpasses that of german nowadays. Which is honestly dumb, considering I still live in germany. 😂
Edit: I think its pretty visible in this comment though, that I dont write/speak all that much in english. (compared to german)
My understanding of the language is far superior to my execution of it. It sadly doesn't translate 1 to 1. It'd be worse if my understanding wasn't as good though.
You wrote really clearly honestly...from your writing (I read quickly) I didn't pick up non-English speaker-even though it's what you said.
I could cry right now from relief that I'm doing the right thing. I literally clicked on this video from rewatching and shadowing My First German Book for the umpteenth time this month. I just listen to it on my way to travel and like you mentioned, I know the first quarter well but I get quite intimidated when it moves onto the next part and realize I have to listen to those now.
I also feel quite grateful that the languages I'm trying to learn have infinite organized resources online although it can get overwhelming.
One of the things I'm struggling with is sticking to one language though. I'm not travelling anytime soon to the countries of the languages so I don't have a big goal so I find myself often jumping between these different languages and feeling inadequate in all of them. Something else I find difficult even in my own mother tongue and English is learning vocabulary as in in writing form. It's my least favourite part especially because of how time consuming it is and often pushs me away from learning, but I suppose the more I practise, I'll get to it eventually.
Thanks for this video!
The concept of another channel with a different audience pointing out a great video with not enough recognition is so great. There are so many good videos on youtube that deserve views and this should be more normalized on the platform.
I have seen it done before but yeah it's certainly not the norm. Unfortunately for me, language learning is so niche that even 70K subs is getting towards a "bigger" channel, so there'd be very little point to me shouting out a channel not to do with language learning, because it would probably have as many views just by being in a more popular niche, e.g. cycling.
I've been learning Japanese for about four and a half months and last week I was listening to a song I've heard probably hundreds of times (maybe only able to pick out a few words here or there without looking at a translation of the lyrics) suddenly heard the line "翼を広げて" and understood it instinctively without having to think about it. I almost cried when it happened.
I love SRS systems and I really feel like they're the only way I can get stuff to stick in my brain, but I find it really easy to let my brain just tune something out if I don't understand it, so if I am listening to something for immersion I have to try to focus really hard. But once I started to properly learn the grammar patterns as well as straight vocabulary it made it a lot easier to pick out those patterns while listening.
Ive been learning Japanese for about 6 months as well, Im trying to play games mostly as I dont listen to Japanese music, but its been suuuuuccchhh a struggle
As an English only fluent person leaning Turkish, I searched for Turkish childrens stories on youtube.
I figured I learned to read English with childrens books, and could begin at the beginning with Turkish, as well.
The delivery of words and meaning go a bit slower with childrens stories.
I also watch as much of Turkish movies and shows that are cc in English.
It has helped tremendously.
I agree! I came across Ilys’ video about a month ago, and was quickly stunned by her depth of insight and the practicality of her suggestions! Though she likely shares here a few things, gleaned from others, I strongly sense that the majority of her tips are born of her natural intuition and her ability to quickly profit from her own experience of trial and error, as if feeling her way through the new tongue, trusting her perfect blend of instinct and intellect. Her video distills all of the web’s best language-learning advice into some twenty minutes of pure gold. Anyone committed to learning a foreign language needs to follow her lead. And every poster of language-learning content should be recommending her, passionately!
You can also hear her Norwegian accent by the way she ends certain words: she says wik (week), spik (speak). They do this thing with their tongue at the end that blocks the throat, sort of. Listening to the language you are trying to learn does that to you - you subconsciously pick up the pronunciation and accent, as well as develop intuition as to how properly pronounce a word you have never heard.
She sounds like she's from Eastern Norway, with the low-high/high-low-high pitch.
I agree! I came across Ilys’ video about a month ago, and was quickly stunned by her depth of insight and the practicality of her suggestions! Though she likely shares here a few things, gleaned from others, I strongly sense that the majority of her tips are born of her natural intuition and her ability to quickly profit from her own experience of trial and error, as if feeling her way through the new tongue, trusting her perfect blend of instinct and intellect. Her video distills all of the web’s best language-learning advice into some twenty minutes of pure gold. Anyone committed to learning a foreign language needs to follow her lead. And every poster of language-learning content should be recommending her, passionately!
I agree 100% with everything in this video, I speak Serbian, English and Arabic and the real breakthrough of my learning Arabic was when I got into the Qur'an... I am not muslim but I was treating the Qur'an as an audio book (literally) because it is recited (some would even call it ''singing'' because there's obvious melody involved but whatever) and I would listen to the recitations while reading and it totally transformed how I saw the language - I started to hear Arabic better (to understand where one word ends and another begins) and to understand how the grammar works just from the text even without memorizing tables and conjugations and stuff and even though the vocabulary itself wasn't extremely useful tbh (remember it's a book from the 7th century) I picked up on a ton of useful things along the way - phrases, metaphores, words, expressions and I even started to understand better how Arab muslims saw the world and what was their connection to God (Allah) like and it opened so many doors for me plus it was a lot of fun to learn tajweed (correct way to recite the Qur'an where every letter has to be pronounced perfectly and the length of every syllable is precisely determined etc.) so for anyone struggling to learn Arabic I can't recommend the Qur'an enough because today's Arabic is hugely influenced by dialects and you can rarely find people who use perfect MSA (modern standard arabic) with all the right grammar etc. so it's hard to concentrate when you have an Iraqi guy for example reading the book with obvious influence of his own accent, then an Egyptian lady reading with her own accent etc. These dialects are a nightmare for Arabic learners at first so I suggest to concentrate on audio books in MSA or even better on the Qur'an (which I repeat has to be read in a very specific way, in a perfectly clear and concise manner which eases the learning process a lot since it's more consistent and you don't have different dialectual influences confusing you). All the best and happy learning! :D
Hi, loved what you wrote. Could you recommend some audio books in MSA? #AskingForAFriend ;)
Thanks protostar but I actually can't recommend any audio book in particular because I didn't really use other audio books in my studies apart from the Qur'an... Sorry... @@protostar1000
that is the probably the smartest way to learn Arabic that I've ever heard. and you're getting exposed to what a billion people listen to every day
Did you understand the Quraan?
If you meant to ask if I understood the words and the general meaning then yes, but it's very hard to understand every little nuance hidden behind the text, there is A LOT hidden in there and some things (from what I gather) not even native Arabic speakers understand completely and people's interpretations can vary... Of course in the beginning I didn't understand more than 20% but as I read more and learned more my understanding increased@@munaali4811
Good advice. Thank you. Gonna get back to my French. I met a Belgian guy in India who had been a hostel caretaker in Scotland for a few years. Whenever he talked about his time in Scotland he had a full-on, and I mean nearly incomprehensible, Scottish accent but when he spoke of anything else, he had a Belgian accent.
I watched her video 2 or 3 days ago and like with everything I come across I test it out (there's nothing to lose) and yes, I've been doing what she said for Turkish and I started to really understand better and notice real improvement in my understanding and it does feel natural. If anyone is doubting just test it for yourself and see what happens, for me it worked.
The fact that I was able to learn what Korean is supposed to sound like purely from listening to a ton of K-pop and watching a bunch of Korean content over the course of a decade is a testament to the power of constant exposure. I barely know any of the words, but my brain parses Korean as actual language that I simply don't know very well when I hear it, not as gibberish.
Same, for the last ten years i been listening music and watching korean content and i only know a few words and phrases cause i never actually paid much attention to actually learn the language, But listening music and watching tv shows it's how i learnt english so i guess i just need to give it a try
Exactly my experience with Japanese.
I had seen her video a few weeks back. I really like her video and hope to see more like it.
I did actually watch this video a few months ago and I loved it, thanks for the reminder to go back and watch it again! ❤
I've been working more seriously on my Spanish lately, and it's really been paying off at work. And definitely some of the things that have worked the best are things like reading the same text over and over and really diving into it deeply. Reading it myself all the way through, then looking up the words and plugging in confusing phrases into Google Translate, then listening to the audiobook, then reading along each sentence WITH the audiobook copying all the intonation. Even though flashcards don't work well independently, they definitely work well in conjunction with other things - no need to completely abandon them or whatever. I'm often reading a book and connecting phrases with my flashcards. Thinking "oh this phrase works well with all these other vocab I learned from my lists" and trying them out. Same with lessons. Each week, I do an hour of a self-paced course and when I go into my reading and listening, I find myself paying much more attention to whatever was covered and reinforcing it while exposing myself to stuff that wasn't covered.
What texts did you use to learn español?
@ThatOneFrenchPancake For my reading? Oh just whatever children's books are available in my local library that have both a physical copy and a digital audiobook copy.
Lately I've also added in Spanish storytimes at work (I work at a library) where I try to ask follow-up questions in Spanish to the kids and talk about the book in Spanish. I convince them to participate by asking if they want to help me learn Spanish.
@@libraryoflilylol199 thanks, i am trying to learn Spanish, too!
This is such a strong and in-depth response video! Ilys's videos are amazing for me as I've been studying Norwegian for around half a year now; with the surprisingly limited amount of videos surrounding the language online, she's been incredibly helpful with her TH-cam shorts, TikToks, and self-made quizzes through her Instagram stories. I'm glad she's gaining more traction from videos like this. It looks like I can learn just as much from you too in terms of optimizing my learning experience. Subbed!
I agree. I’ve been learning English only by watching YT, Netflix, Anime etc. I still have no idea how some structures work/are named and I still struggle with tenses but I can hold a conversation with my friends on DC for hours on different topics. All my library is in English.
Some phrases I know just because I heard them many times. For example “It’s worth it”. I remember that I didn’t even know what “worth” means, all I knew that this phrase declares that something is valuable enough.
Listen and read a lot! Stop memorizing and do study session, this method fails most of the times.
I’m learning German and still use this method.
Reading method: I grab two similar books: one in German, one in English. Firstly I read the first paragraph in English and then in German. It helps me understand phrases, not words.
HHAHA I love when you pointed out that she sometimes can have a Norwegian accent while speaking English. I developed that as well when I was learning and living in Sweden. Now I am back home (The Netherlands) and I lost the Swedish influence again😅
I love this new trend of giving props to other TH-camrs, who deserve it. I’ve seen it a couple of times in the past weeks in different genres and it makes me insanely happy. Good job 👍🏻
wado!
I am learning Cherokee and this so applies!
We have synchronous online classes with a first language speaker, and this weekend I'll attend an outreach class in Oregon.
Like your atsutsu, (boy) I 'read' stories over and over before i could actually read - and now have several children's books in Tsalagi, or with some words in the language. I've ordered language books, Inc a hymnal and listen to hymns on TH-cam.
I watch old segments from Osiyo TV - interviews and stories from the nation, ale a word in each episode.
And notes notes notes!! I take class notes, and look up words , and practice quoting in Syllabary.
I love the rhythms, and cadences of this polysyllabic language! A favorite saying of teacher Ed's parents: *yunaduliha yanadeloqua* - if they want to, they will learn!
That's us!! Dogaduliha we (all) want to!
Russian has a lot of clauses for nouns, complex conjugation of verbs. when we as natives learn Russian in school, we actually sort words into clauses not by the rules, but by how we would pronounce them in that context. I think it proves the point that learning clauses like a native child would, by memorizing their usage in specific circumstances and orders, is ultimately better. not from a linguistic point of view when you try to remember a set of rules that natives never remember
As someone currently learning norwegian. I watched this video at the beggining of my learning process. It is absolutely fantastic
The only foreign language I’ve learned to speak fluently is English, and I did so without the intention to be fluent, I simply wanted to read a certain book that hadn’t been translated into my native language😂 Then there was another book, and it went like that
Thank you!
I went to see her original video and she has really great insights.
I still need to somehow make this work in my target language which has very scarce resources.
Yeah, this video is awesomeeee! The advice on how to use writing on it is pure gold. And sooo practical, one of the best videos indeed
I listened to Turkish radio and music all the time when i was learning the language and I was always so happy when i recognized a word that i had learned in school out of all the other words i didn't know. I'm an ESL teachser now and I keep telling my students to just listen to English even if they don't understand and they don't know the value. I feel sad when they don't improve because an hour and a half of classes a day just isn't enough.
I love this video! I actually rewatched it two or three days ago. I recently decided to switch from Swedish to Norwegian (my family's from there) and wanted to write down her resources. Too bad she hasn't continued with the videos because they're really good (though her IG is pretty great too).
Hairy Maclary was my favourite as a child too, I lit up when you mentioned that.
Thank you for this video and introducing her channel for us. I learn English and I share my lessons which I learned, so this was really helpful.
Me learning German right now, is literally Anki and "Easy German"
After 2 weeks I have already started to see progress in my German classes
I have done the thing with Swedish. I started listening to an audiobook in Swedish. And after listening to it for a lot of hours my ears got used to the sounds of the language and I memorized a lot of words and sentences without knowing the meaning. And then learning the grammar and vocabulary fealt really easy.
This is how i learned English, by immersing myself with a lot of English content, playing video games in English so far is the most helpful for me, i used to play so many choices based games like the walking dead and it helped me learn English by context
Not a hater, think this is fantastic, watched it multiple times, always crack up when I hear her say "pro-noun-ciation."
I tested into a level 4 language in the Army language school, and was given Mandarin. After six months of intense, rigorous, time with a native of mainland China, we all walked away speaking the language at a 6th grade level and were illiterate because we were not taught to read and write the language. Within a year, most of us couldn't even speak the language beyond simple greetings that made people's ears hurt.
I very much appreciate your videos and approach to the subject of learning new languages as they are rekindling my belief that learning another language in another manner than rote memorization, is very possible.
I have done the thing with Swedish. I started listening to an audiobook in Swedish. And after listening to it for a lot of hours my ears got used to the sounds of the language and I memorized a lot of words and sentences without knowing the meaning. And then learning the grammar and vocabulary fealt really easy.
Just det!
This video summed up my experience with learning English as a second language. This is exactly the reminder I need as I'm venturing into picking up a few languages. I have got people (acquaintances and complete strangers) 'accusing' me for faking an ABC accent when speaking Cantonese. Next time one of these folks pops up, I'll show them the bit of the video on how one's L2 influences one's L1😂
This is an inspiring video. Ilys (and you) think exactly as I do about language learning. I ran an English language training school in China for over 10 years. When I first came here (I'm still in China), I read Steven Krashen's book, 'The Natural Approach'. He doesn't go into the the details of how a child learns language as much as you and Ilys do though he is quite excellent. The thing that stood out more to me than anything was when she said that the first 1-2 years of a child's life they are only listening. Think about it. They aren't trying to translate. They aren't thinking about grammar structure. And, they aren't even trying to learn. They are just in an immersive environment and passively listening. I'm not saying that active listening isn't good because I believe that it is. But, a child doesn't learn that way. Of course, you can't replicate the perfect environment that a child has in learning their native language. Nonetheless, what you've described here is excellent. I've put Chinese students in Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, UCLA, University of Toronto and other top world colleges. I've followed this approach for many years. It's nice to hear someone else talking about it and affirming these things. Thanks so much!!
I remember the time i was watching anime but not picking many Japanese words because I didn’t know anything about the basics of Japanese grammar. I started watching some basic grammar videos and immediately started to recognize and remember verbs and their conjugations, then, after a while, started to use Anki for kanji. It’s kind of the same way in which i learned English, by just listening to TH-cam tutorials, even though they teach us some basic English at school 🇲🇦, but the focuses were on French, and somehow I turned up knowing English instead 😅 I guess it's just because I listen to content in English, I’m a Arabic & darija native btw
Learning by using something active like video games works too! Especially games that have heavy dialog is great and pretty fun. Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo all have excellent foreign language options and if you play a game you already revisited you get a better understanding quickly.
Imo, Anki makes this method of learning so much more efficient. If you both repeat a few texts in your target language, and pluck out all the useful vocabulary from it while you are learning, you can get a lot more for your time by using that spaced repetition to ensure long-term acquisition (you can feasible go through a book, rereading it constantly and making it your goal to understand everything from the first chapter, for example). As an adult language learner, you're smarter than a child; why not use that :P
I would agree, but Ilys obviously likes writing things by hand and reading it back etc., so whatever you like to do is also "efficient".
@@daysandwords Fair. Personally, I'm not too fond of handwriting, but it obviously works for some people.
Not seen you in ages. Nice to see you back mate! Missed ya!
I had a kid a few months ago, and what I did before he was born was spend a fair amount of time doing is picking the things in Swedish (and a few other languages) that I would be repeating. Every morning when I hit play on the same episode of the show of the day and let it play. The same with a set of audiobooks, radio plays, music playlists, etc.
What I am really wondering is when more of it will be comprehensible to my spouse :). (She is loving Bluey despite not understanding any of it yet.)
Bluey is universally hilarious haha.
Be careful with Bluey....my 5 year old figures we should move to Australia, because Australian parents are awesome and get down and play with their kids randomly instead of going to work... It's a trap!!!
But yeah, Bluey is great is Swedish as well. We went through a phase where we'd watch an entire season in English, then re-watch it in Swedish to preserve my sanity.
@@berkanathurisa what I am really hoping is this doesn't give him an unexplainable desire to play cricket and rugby later on in life!
@@hillmanntoby Yeah, I can see that possibility. Gonna have to do a risk analysis! On the other hand, it can be moderately entertaining when the kids come out with some random Australian slang or word and all the Bluey parents chuckle at the non-Bluey parents/adults confused looks.
@hillmanntoby - unfortunately, what they're playing and watching in Bluey is not quite "rugby". It's essentially an Australia only sport called "rugby league" or "NRL" that is basically very commercialised rugby union (which we call rugby... confusing I know)... In fact, thinking about it, there might be a quick reference to a proper rugby match at some point... but yeah the blue/maroon one is definitely "footy" (rugby league).
bro I was like halfway through this video cos it was too much info at once and I kept it in my tabs for like 2 weeks always refusing to click cross on it cos I knew I needed to hear it (I'm learning Spanish not Norwegan). thanks for bringing this back it's like a slap in the face but like a good one
I remember when I used to reread books in German (or other languages). It was before the golden age of language learning and I reread those books because they were the only ones I had 😂.
I did watch her video some time ago and it's good to come back to these great tips, now finally ready to properly apply some of the advice. I need the rest to simmer around my brain for another while, but I know I will get back to them too.
1 minute in and I’m leaving to watch the video 👋
Don’t worry I promise I’ll be back 🙂
I completely agree!!! Cannot praise this approach enough!!
I am a Russian native, English speaking and Italian studying American.
I came to the US having some English. I used every minute available to improve my English, listening to radio talk shows all the time I was in my car driving to work and back. I insisted on my colleagues at work correcting my mistakes, wrote memos and asked them to proofread.
I have always been into art and music. And now that I am retired, I travel a lot and mostly to Italy - Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Naples. I am studying Italian now. And I am using Pimsleur language learning approach, which is very similar to what you are talking about!
I love that story about your kid reading in the back seat of the car, very cute and always makes me laugh
I watched that video and thought the same thing!!!! Its the best video i watched on language learning, and i watched A LOT of japanese learning videos for years
I watched her video before going to norway and learned for two months. When i arrived i was close to A2. After a month there, i took an official exam and officially got my a2 certificate!
Norwegian is the simplest and nicest Germanic language to learn. Reasonable phonology, sensible orthography, 10/10, most approachable Germanic language.
What I did once (which helped me *a lot*) was printing a story I wanted to read (first chapters were translated to my language but I wanted to know what happens next) and using multiple highlighters, just highlight all the words I didn't know/recognise, and add a translation above. Everything without a colored background were things I just knew. That meant I could read through the whole chapter without stumbling every two words, so I could actually follow the story. I learned the word "hint" the day I saw it mentioned maybe ten times on one page (and I highlighted it that many times). It also taught me that English actually has natural-sounding, long sentences, not just one or two parts that we learn at school.
Now I'm planning to use the same method with German and Harry Potter (since the language of those books is pretty easy). I did notice that without highlighting it is a bit annoying to read since you easily get lost if your language level is too low.
The sad part is I AM learning Norwegian and I STILL procrastinated on watching it 😅
I think sometimes we put off the things that we think are going to be enjoyable or important because we assign them a lot of weight. For example, my favourite TH-camrs tend to be pretty sparse in their uploads, so when I do see a new video by them, I often don't watch it until TH-cam viewing has my full attention.
At one point, instead of translating the phrase in your head, you just know what it means without even trying to explain or translate it
No need to make sense of grammar when you already know where everything goes, no need to think of 'is this where I should put 'es' or 's' or is this where I should put 'un' or 'une' ' you just know, it's like an instinct
I've read somewhere a long time ago that adults can't learn as kids do. But now I have a 2.5 yo and it's actually interesting how he improves his language skills. Like, now he's at the point where he knows how to pronounce quite a lot of sounds. He obviously started with repeating words, then he repeated simple phrases after us word by word, then he started to change them a bit, for example, I told him every evening "Mommy loves Mike", then he said to me "Daddy loves Mike", later he started saying "Mike loves mommy". I've also noticed that he tries to apply grammar rules, for example, he knows "dog-dogs", and he'll say "man-mans". At this point our conversation is usually him telling some phrase, that actually makes sense, but has some grammar mistakes or incorrect word order, and I'll say it back but how adults say it.
So, my point is, I speak 5 languages, and his steps in learning a language actually make sense to me too. Listen a lot, especially when you have visual hints, then try to repeat some words that you've heard a lot, then try to make simple sentences, and this is the way to fluency, you just need someone to correct you constantly :D
I'm a native German speaker and even though we start English early, all media is dubbed. Therefore I only started listening to English when I discovered the internet as a teenager. I would listen to English every single day for several hours but I was almost never in a position to be able to practice actually speaking English. When I was 19 I started working as an au pair for a British family. By then, I was fluent even though I had barely ever spoken English in my life.
"if you plan to live in another country you should understand the language before you get there especially if people from that country are usually fluent in English" (or something like this) you can scratch the "even if". Just do it. Period. People in Germany generally do not speak English well (although most people do speak it) and if you don't have some language ability when you come here, you will not have a good time. In Sweden, the Netherlands, wherever people speak English well, you've have a hard time breaking out of the English bubble and will hit with the "you've been here 1 1/2 years why do you still not speak our language?". If you try that in Germany you just won't have any friends. Nobody is forced to interact with you and nobody will be in any relationship with you. They're not your friends, your family, your romantic interests, whatever. And if it takes people to speak English 99% of the time to become your friend, a very large chunk of Germans, probably over 90%, are just immediately out. A lot of the complains you see on the Germany subreddit (/r/germany) are a direct result of not being able to be part of society at all due to the lack of language skills.
Also, life becomes A LOT more difficult if you can't practice at work. I work in English exclusively because the company I work for was always supposed to target all of the EU from day one so a lot of early hires were because of their native language and potential to expand globally which then resulted in the office language being English which then resulted in a lot of the experts that we managed to hire being "expats". We speak English pretty much always except if we know that everybody in the call is German. HR person from Peru fluent in German? We speak English. Sales dude from Venezuela fluent in German? We speak English. It's just easier than trying to remember who of those 40 people actually speaks German. This means that most people in our company who don't already speak German are lost. They spend 8 hours a day basically practicing English (except for the 1 or so native speaker) and then come home and speak their native language with their spouse or their children or whatever. It turns your day into "desperately trying to find the time to learn this language" when it could be 8 hours of practice that you are forced to do anyway. Like, even just listening to a point that you can tell your colleagues to not speak English with you would be amazing.
Indeed. And it is harder than you think to practice outside work. The waiter in the restaurant, or behind the bar ,or the railway ticket seller is not your teacher. He just wants to get his job done, often has other people to deal with, and doesn't have time to listen to an English person trying to string together a few German words.
Tack för att du delade med dig av detta! Vilka guldkorn av insikter kring inlärning av språk ❤️
Great videos! Truly, both have given me so many ideas I can apply to my French studies 😊Inspired me so much I made a video about it 😁 Hope you have a chance to check it out, I think you’ll enjoy it. If not feel free to roast it lol
I dunno how I missed this comment! Go and watch this guy's videos people, they're so good!
@@daysandwords I loved the song he did of you speaking Swedish. I want more of that!
@@stevencarr4002It was Spanish but yes, it was hilarious. 😂