@@raina4732It's more expensive than many therapists, BetterHelp doesn't check it's "therapists" backgrounds and some of them aren't certified and I think users' data has been leaked.
@raina4732 there were issues with therapist's qualifications, and data protection as well. There may be more, but it is seen as more of a money maker than actually caring to help people.
@@raina4732 There have been scandals around it including apparent sale of therapy data, listing therapists without their knowledge just to bolster legitimacy, unqualified therapists, and a lot more. They were thoroughly pushed out of the youtube sponsorship game about 5 years ago, they messed up while doing something else, and now are back hoping youtubers have forgotten that betterhelp is scummy
The hind brain stressing makes sense. In my teens when I visited family back in Poland for the first time since baby form, I found out, to my absolute horror, my parents never bothered to correct my 'baby' pronunciations. They thought it was cute. I had been talking to the diaspora like a toddler, and no one said anything! Why!! I overthink everything a lot now.
Some fun sentences in the heavenly languages Norse and Icelandic are... Ek heiti Freyja ok ek em at læra Norrænu því ek elski (elska) hana! (Norse) Hann ǫrninn vissi ekki hvaðan kemr Sólin... (Norse) Ek veit alt er þú veizt ekki! (Norse) Ég hef talað Ensku síðan þegar ég vas (var) tveggja eða triggja ára! En ég get líka talað Hollensku og Norsku og Spænsku og FornNorrænu! Ég get talað Íslensku reiprennandi og ég em (er) ekki með neina hreim! Ef ég gæti lært annað mál, hvað væri það? Það væri auðvitað Danska! Ég em (er) að hugsa að það er mikilvægt að læra að minnsta kosti eitt erlent tungumál, eða flest fallegu tungumálin! Svo ég valdi Íslensku og ég héld áfram að læra hana... Ég læri það í samhengi... (Icelandic) Hvíslaðu að svaninum! En ertu frá hinum hlutanum? Þegar ég segi Ísland, hvað er það fyrsta sem dettur þér í (hug) hugi? Als ik Ijsland zeg, wat is het eerste wat naar boven komt bij jou? (Dutch) Some of the prettiest words in Gothic are namo, þein, hunds, þatist, ik, weis, eis, qen, driusaima, wairþan, ains, sinteina, nist, imma, twais, eisarn, swikn, uhteigo, brunna, faíraþro etc! (The words in these heavenly languages are just so pretty and so poetic and so cool, they are true works of art, so I definitely wish I had learnt them in childhood, and I highly recommend learning them all together, as they are way too pretty not to know and so magical!)
By the way, when it comes to learning languages such as Danish and German that have accents that aren’t easy to imitate and a quite complicated pronunciation, one must also practice a lot things such as accent / glottal stops / pronunciation / sound placement / intonation / sound projection etc, as they have very unusual sound projection and placement and some unusual sounds (like the soft D in Danish, for example) that aren’t easy to figure out how to do - so, I would say Danish and German are the languages with the accents that are the hardest to imitate of all Germanic languages, whereas languages such as Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / Dutch / Norwegian / Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Latin / Italian / Galician / Manx / Esperanto / Gaelic / Latvian / Irish / Slovene etc have some of the accents that are the easiest to imitate and some of the easiest pronunciations that are as easy or almost as easy as the neutral American accent and English pronunciation, so these languages are naturally very easy to pronounce (except for the LL sound in Welsh, which isn’t easy to figure out how to do) with accents that are naturally very easy to imitate, so they don’t require a lot of practice, and, I could sound native in Icelandic and Norse and Dutch etc even at a beginner level or intermediate level, but now I am upper intermediate level in Norse and advanced level in Icelandic and upper advanced level in Dutch, at least vocab-wise, and I even sound very natural in these languages, as it was very easy for me to develop and imitate the right accents, however, I am really struggling with developing the right Danish accent and the right German accent, so I have to practice a lot and hear a lot of spoken Danish and a lot of spoken German!
I don't think that's true. I think knowing even 1000 words you can get talking, in principle, but then you have to build it from there, of course. Before reaching a comfortable B2 level it's always going to be frustrating trying to speak in a new language, it just needs to be pushed through, doggedly, until an ok level is reached.
I think it's important to keep in mind that speaking a language is a skill, not just knowledge. The brain does not learn how to do something if we don't practice it, no matter the amount of theory we know about it.
I teach ESL and this is exactly what I tell my students/learners. I don''t care if you've "studied" the language for (X) years...How long have you been practicing (ie, using) it?
@@adammoore7447Indeed it's about results and there are no medals for the time spent on language learning. In fact I have even felt ashamed to admit when I had started some on-and-off language projects when asked. People often ask "so how long have you been learning...?", but it's a random number that does not have anything to do with success. Imagine gym rats not asking each other "how much do you lift?" but "when did you first get your gym membership?". It does not even get close to "do you train often?"😂
Exactly right. I tell myself that I’m a participant, not a student. It forces me to use the languages, not just study them. I give the same advice to the adults that I tutor.
To be able to say anything in the new languages, one must know over ten thousand words or over fifteen thousand words automatically, so one has to revise / see / hear each word at least thirty times over a longer period of time, which is why one must use the spaced repetition method, and one must also constantly analyze and repeat all sorts of different sentences with different grammatical constructions, to really be able to maintain a natural flow throughout the full sentences, so I recommend focusing mostly on vocab videos and memorizing / analyzing as many lyrics as one can and watching every single video with subtitles in the target languages, and I also recommend learning at least thirty thousand base words automatically in each target language, over the course of five to ten years, to get to a writer level in the target languages in about a decade or so - one can recognize many words after only seeing them a few times in pretty and easy languages such as the Germanic languages and the Celtic languages and the true Latin languages and other pretty languages such as Hungarian and Latvian and Slovene etc, but, to be able to freely use the words and to automatically remember them without having to think about them, one must see each word many times, so one must constantly revise and repeat previously learnt words, while still learning hundreds and thousands of new words every week or every day etc, until each word can be instantly processed and automatically remembered, and, it’s like that in any language, including the first language that one is made to learn, even though most don’t notice that because they aren’t actively trying to learn the first language, but yea, it takes a lot of hard work / revising to learn languages, because there are just so many words that one must learn automatically and permanently! (By the way, I highly recommend learning the prettiest languages ever created Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / English / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish together as they are equally gorgeous and way too pretty not to know, and, I would recommend always choosing wisely, by only choosing the pretty and easy languages with mostly pretty words that have a modern and professional sound or at least a nice sound, for their gorgeous poetic words and cool sound, as opposed to trying to learn a language that doesn’t sound good and that doesn’t have mostly pretty words that is also unnecessarily complicated with odd alphabets or writing systems that aren’t an alphabet and that are impossible characters (because they have more native speakers) etc, as one can learn more than fifteen pretty and easy languages at the same time, as opposed to only learning one or two impossible category 10 languages, choosing wisely being the key to being a successful polyglot and enjoying the learning process, and, by the way, I am learning 25+ of my target languages at the moment and focusing mostly on the Norse languages and Celtic languages, which are the most fun to learn and speak and hear and see!)
Some fun sentences in the heavenly languages Norse and Icelandic are... Ek heiti Freyja ok ek em at læra Norrænu því ek elski (elska) hana! (Norse) Hann ǫrninn vissi ekki hvaðan kemr Sólin... (Norse) Ek veit alt er þú veizt ekki! (Norse) Ég hef talað Ensku síðan þegar ég vas (var) tveggja eða triggja ára! En ég get líka talað Hollensku og Norsku og Spænsku og FornNorrænu! Ég get talað Íslensku reiprennandi og ég em (er) ekki með neina hreim! Ef ég gæti lært annað mál, hvað væri það? Það væri auðvitað Danska! Ég em (er) að hugsa að það er mikilvægt að læra að minnsta kosti eitt erlent tungumál, eða flest fallegu tungumálin! Svo ég valdi Íslensku og ég héld áfram að læra hana... Ég læri það í samhengi... (Icelandic) Hvíslaðu að svaninum! En ertu frá hinum hlutanum? Þegar ég segi Ísland, hvað er það fyrsta sem dettur þér í (hug) hugi? Als ik Ijsland zeg, wat is het eerste wat naar boven komt bij jou? (Dutch) Some of the prettiest words in Gothic are namo, þein, hunds, þatist, ik, weis, eis, qen, driusaima, wairþan, ains, sinteina, nist, imma, twais, eisarn, swikn, uhteigo, brunna, faíraþro etc! (The words in these heavenly languages are just so pretty and so poetic and so cool, they are true works of art, so I definitely wish I had learnt them in childhood, and I highly recommend learning them all together, as they are way too pretty not to know and so magical!)
When people say to 'just engage' there is another very useful dimension to this, providing you can tolerate the pain for a while. One of the worst hurdles is worrying about how other people perceive your efforts, what you 'sound like'. If you start and people actually reply to you that hurdle can be surmounted. Also, when you interact those people feed you both words and patterns for speech. Language at its most basic and everyday is not greatly creative, it is made up of interchangeable blocks and by speaking with people you learn which blocks to use and how to arrange them.
Yes - I think it would be really useful to think about Adele Goldberg's (1995) Contruction Grammar and her notion of the "constructicon" - which relies on the compilation of these formulaic chunks as the foundation for grammar, whether from syntax, morphology, or phonology even.
ANYONE is better off with Krashen's approach. I NEVER encountered someone who says that can understand one of the languages I know well but "can't speak" that passed the following test. So you can understand, right? I send the person a random video with a native speaking that language. They are speaking fast, with slangs, partially in dialect, very relaxed. Then I say., "transcribe to me, please, the first 30 seconds of this vide in English (or Portuguese, since I'm Brazilian). They never can do that. If they CAN, they also can speak the language. The fact is that you can easily be DELUED in believing you understand more of the language than you actually can. Specially if you are basing your judgement in understanding material made for students, not by natives for natives. It all really comes down to: YOU DON'T UNDERTAND ENOUGH of the language to speak the way you are expecting yourself to speak. You cannot say what you cannot understand. That person may exist. but I'm yet to find one.
I even have a special girl for people who say they "can understand" Japanese but they cannot speak. Because I was understanding quite a bit of other videos when I still watched her and it was just gibberish to me. I'll defy ANYONE who say "i can understand Japanese but I can't speak" with y girl.
I learned how to speak Spanish by trying to translate random every sentence I thought and then immediately looking up any word or construction I couldn’t produce. I’m trying to learn a third language (German) now, and it’s bizarre, but every time I try to speak it, I slip back into Spanish haha
haha when I was learning french I'd try to translate every song i really liked (i still have most of them memorized 20 years later T_T) and now that I'm trying to learn Swedish I keep.... trying to slip into french. I feel you!
I'm learning Portuguese for my friends, English is my first language, but they said I spoke it with a French accent 😂 it's funny how we slip into our second languages when speaking a third.
I’m wondering if this works in Romance languages better than in other ones? I’m learning a Slavic language and if I use google translate or even better AI translators like DeepL, most of the time the sentences are translated literally from English, but that is almost never how people would actually say it in the language. My husband is a native speaker and he corrects my sentences 90% of the time, even if I use AI translators. The only reliable thing I’ve found so far is memorizing the sentences I hear natives say in the exact word order. Which is kind of exhausting and frustrating.
There's also the part where irl people don't speak with pauses between every word, but the end of one word flows together with the beginning of the next one.
The largest problem with the alcohol technique is that it works until after the second drink. I found this out the "easy" way in France --- I had couple of glasses of red and my host family noticed that I was speaking much, much better than I had been doing up to then. Of course, the scientific method recommends "observe, form a hypothesis, test." My hypothesis was "if two glasses is effective, four will be twice as nice, six thrice so, etc." The testing was fun but consistently disproved the hypothesis -- multiple experiments were conducted. After two you're loose but consume more and you're incoherent in any language. Also: when in the field, for every 30 minutes you actively engage in conversation, you're going to need a couple of hours to decompress. You will not feel very confident in your abilities the first several hundred decompression sessions, however over time you will achieve fluency, often when you least expect it. Others probably have more efficient methods.
Spot on excellent advice. I think too many TH-cam influencers forget that learning a foreign language often requires a bit of work. When I moved to German speaking Switzerland-already knowing German at the B2 level-I still worked hard. When planning an errand or preparing for a meeting, I would look up vocab and write out some scripts to memorize. The planning and prep is essential. I remember when natives stopped switching to English-when I stopped uh-ing and ah-ing. I still prepare. For instance, I just joined an archery club. What did I do? I watched a boat-load of archery videos in German.
I also moved to Switzerland but with German German. They don't speak German German, they speak Swiss German. And Swiss German is a completely different language, and they will treat you unkindly if you come at them with stupid German German
@@EeeEee-bm5gx Sorry that your experience is less positive than mine. You are totally right. Swiss German is a completely different language. I live totally in Hochdeutsch. Yes, it is not Swiss German, but they understand Hochdeutsch. I've worked hard at learning Baseldiitsch. I have about 50% comprehension. I don't pretend to speak it. I speak Hochdeutsch, they answer in Dialekt. Once I asked a waiter to please speak Hochdeutsch. He said, "Ich spreche doch auf Hochdeutsch."
The algorithm is so good omg. I just got back from my Italian certification exam and I did HORRIBLY in the speaking part. My brain simply shut down and I felt like such an idiot, but this helped a lot :’)
I love watching Twitch streamers in lieu of a language tutor or language exchange partner. The streamer is Doing Something, and that something provides you context for what they're saying. They're constantly using those little "ums" and stuff. They're probably very online, so their speech is probably more Englishy than average. And there's already an existing community of people talking about what's happening on screen in your target language. They're typing conversationally, reading their typos kind of forces you to imagine the voice speaking the words. 15-40 viewers is a pretty good sweet spot where the conversation is fast enough to be active but slow enough to allow you to participate. The streamer will read your messages and sometimes autocorrect your mistakes in grammar or vocabulary. People love getting viewers from foreign countries and they love when you take an interest in their culture. I've met a lot of cool people who speak little or no English on Twitch. I highly recommend searching for streamers who speak your target langauge.
The strategy worked 20 years ago when we didn't have TH-cam or Twitch. We would go into online chat rooms with IRC and MSN messenger. You could read the chats and understand that they mimic spoken speech without the pressure of having to respond immediately.
I took French in elementary and high school in Canada for 11 years total (I didn’t like it so I stopped in gr 12 when I didn’t have to take it any longer). In undergrad I took two semesters of French and learned more in 8 months by FAR than I did in 11 years of school. This is because we had 1 2-hour in-class session per week and another 2-hour “language lab” where we met in small groups and literally just talked (with a TA present to help us out when needed or correct our grammar or pronunciation etc. when needed and explain a few more concepts) but mostly we just talked to each other only in French. It was amazingly helpful. And it was about anything. Our musical interests, what food we liked, sports, cooking, videogames, whatever. Just getting to know the 3-5 other people in your group on a personal level and helping one another out when they got stuck (assuming the TA was helping someone else). That really showed me just how broken the language education system is in schools in Canada. We never needed to speak French. We just wrote tests and watched videos for language comprehension. But speaking is so much more helpful to most everyone.
Another Canadian here, similar public school experience. How is the speaking side so badly overlooked by the school system? Maybe they’ve improved it since we were in school (hoping for my kids’ sake 😆). Your uni experience sounds awesome!
@@seabrookel5037 I think it helped that both the Prof and the TA were from France and were ESL, so they were very "French" about everything (i.e. don't you dare speak English in my class) which really did help haha
I'm from Russia and you got me on social drinking. Every foreign language I can speak, I became capable of speaking only through social drinking plus finding myself in a situation when I didn't have any other common language with the group neither the ability to shut up (which I would have gotten if not booze). Ofc it's not the best way to master your skills, but i don't actually have anything better for switching from "consuming random information in a targeted language but being too afraid to speak it" to "omg I can't help but share a funny story with this lovely people". Ofc, that's only because I'm super lazy and am not really used to normal scientifically approved ways of learning languages (in my country, I would say, not many people are used even to language teachers actually able to speak a language they teach). Anyway, thank you Dr Jones for your engaging and useful videos!
I find that writing things in my target language is helpful for getting better at speaking it. One thing that I've found works well for both expanding my vocabulary and getting better at expressing myself in another language is subscribing to a "word a day" email and then writing at least a sentence in the given language. There are a lot of websites that send out free "word a day" vocabulary emails. You can even keep track of words that you're having trouble remembering and try to incorporate them into your writing on other days. I also think that a big trick to getting better at speaking and listening to a new language is interacting with it as frequently as you can without another language as an intermediary. Use flash cards with only images rather than the translation in your own language, and watch movies and TV shows in the language that you're trying to learn, using subtitles in that language if you need a little extra help, but not using your native language as a crutch. Also, when you encounter a new word, look up the definition in that language rather than the translation in your own language. Some of these things may need to wait until you have a solid foundation, but don't be afraid to leave your comfort zone.
I went to Brussels a few months ago, and I was feeling fairly good about my French, until I actually tried to talk to someone, and then I felt like the only word I knew was "quoi?" because I said it about a thousand times
@@aliceitci call bs on that, being a french speaker from brussels, never have i ever in 39 years heard french and belgian people not understanding one another.
Japanese learner of ~8 years here, love reading/writing, HATE speaking. Super introverted and shy so language exchanges/making friends was a super daunting task and never worked out for me. After over a decade of waiting I'm finally going to Japan and it's been the kick up the backside I needed now there's a clear date I need to be able to confidently speak. I'm still too nervous to meet new people, so I've started talking with a teacher on a weekly basis who I knew already (she taught me Japanese when I first started). It takes the pressure off slightly but every time I go I always feel this sense of dread because speaking is so hard for my brain both mechanically and socially. Outside of the weekly chat, I'm trying to find new ways to practice speaking by myself like shadowing, but your method of saying what you see is really interesting and appealing to me so I'm definitely going to implement that into my study routine as well, thank you.
Anki Cards + being very severe with mistakes + emotional images + maximum speed or it’s wrong. Duly noted. This is actually supercharged spaced repetition.
I just want to caution you on this if you're not already advanced. I tried this as a beginner and the sheer volume of cards you're going to have of you do this and you're still learning vocab (so less than what is considered normal for your Lang, mine is about 20k word and I know about 2k) might make you stop wanting to do them, which is a bigger problem (quitting). Always be sure to not take on more work than you can handle, whole trying to get as close to the top of that as you can reasonably deal with. I had to start being more lenient with myself, and put the higher focus on learning more words, whole doing other things (like talking to friends) go improve my speech, instead of being super strict on just the flashcards. Anyway I hope my ramble makes sense, it's just that being too strict on cards is a mistake I and many of my friends have made
@@1langueen100jours Japanese! Honestly I don't know much about the other non Asian languages, they might be easier, but I think a lot of people accidentally underestimate the compounding effect of srs cards. I am not using Anki, but I know they recentlyish added FSRS, which I think works on a card by card basis? So that might be better? I do everything as cloze, which isn't super useful for FSRS, so I can't confirm.
I've been doing a mix of pimsleur, clozemaster, italki, and harassing my friends who are native speakers every chance I get and it's worked very well in my target languages in the past.
Great video, Dr. J. In my experience (and I'm a bog standard amateur), the key to being able to speak effectively is to wait.., a wee bit; listen, listen, listen...a lot; watch, watch, watch a lot; read, read, read (stuff that interests you)... and THEN speak. Firstly with yourself, around the house, and, as you said, notice the 'holes' as you do so, and then go back and fill them in. Finally, talk with native speakers as much as you can (easy now with the internet...yes, I'm quite old) and when you do so, and this is the CRUCIAL bit, when you do so, don't give a **** about getting it wrong or making an ass of yourself. Admittedly, this is not an easy thing for many folk to do, but you can train yourself. And, in any case, and speaking for myself, I find that being a bit older, for once, is an advantage. Thanks again 👍
I am trying an experiment on myself that maybe other people have tried, but I want to do it anyway. I just treat the language I am studying like it is part of English, my native language. I just speak that language out loud mixed with English when I walk the dog. (I assume the neighbors think I am talking to the dog, which I like to do anyway.) I don't care if I am not perfectly following the rules exactly. I try to use the words a lot this way and I figure once I know the words better, then I can worry about all of the other details. I also study verb conjugations making short sentences in English and the other language like "If I tell you something, then you will be told something by me." I like to study active and passive verb forms this way, but I change who the subjects and objects are. So far, I like doing it. I don't know if it will work. I still forget words, but who knows.
I wonder how similar the grammar has to be for this to work. My study language is *so different* from my native language that it doesn't make sense to do both at the same time.
I don't know if I'm a miracle, my parents did all they could to espose me to English (I'm natively French) when I was little... but I still was the last in English class throughout the equivalents of 6th ot 8th grades... then I discovered that there were interesting English books that were not translated... three months of compulsive reading later (and I don't know how many hours in the dictionary), all that I had failed to understand in the previous three years clicked together, and I became better than the teacher (a substitute who should never have taken the job)... well, I majored in English and am the proud owner of an MA that never served me for anything.
It's simple. You get good at what you practice. I read for hours a day in Greek for 2 years and knew a ton of words but when i would speak i was still pretty slow and made mistakes. Now i'm focusing a little less on reading and more on training my ear to be able to understand people because even if I can say sentences at a decent speed what good is that going to do if I can't keep up with what they say? I don't want to keep saying "slow down"
I do opposite in German all listening no reading. My comprehension after four years is not too bad. I'm able to hear all the words parce the sounds. There's still words I don't know.
@@Branden-vl9sl If you only do listening how do you gain vocab? You have to keep seeing what the words mean for it to stick. Listening is great for ear practice no doubt you need it but reading is also very good as it allows you to go at your own pace and find more vocabulary easier.
@@Hellenicheavymetal I use a srs app to build up my vocabulary. I do read the word in the target language. So I guess that counts as a tiny bit of reading. But the sentence it's within is in my native language english. It also has sound it pronounced the words for you. So you get even more listening practice. I use the subtitles to find words I don't know to look up. Add them to the spaced repetition flash cards. I do read the subtitles to find words so I guess that counts as a little bit of reading. But I don't do it very often and only for a few minutes.
This is like me 40 years of learning spanish, i can understand, i can write, i can follow Spanish youtubers, read spanish articles, pass c2 exams but i cannot really get words out of my mouth quickly nough that my verbal spanish matches what's in my head
Many thanks for the information video! I think the advice is delivered in a very funny way which 100% helps to remember. However, potentially wrapping up with some bullet points or something like that, would be a welcomed addition. Thanks again!
Good advice with the fillers, that's something I learn first to buy time. And constant speaking in my head. Have hypothetical conversations with all the random people you see in the streets, in the train, in the shop etc
Hola languagejones soy un estadounidense que estaba aprendiendo español y chino ahora y nunca nadie comenta en las respuestas en una video. Aunque quiero decir que eres una mejoría recurso para aprendizaje de las idiomas en YT. Gracias hermano.
The way you dissect a topic is fascinating and reminds me of our discussions back in the RS days. Then, you always sum up with concrete strategies anyone can use to produce exceptional results. You basically provide a crash course in how to hack one's learning. Simply awesome every time.
I got lucky living in a dorm for a year in Kyiv while learning Ukrainian. So right in the first week in learning I could have little conversations like everyday just to practice with native speakers. It would start with "what are you cooking?" And then from there it could build up as the weeks and months went by. Now I am reading children's literature and really building a strong vocabulary. I read the BFG in Ukrainian and now I am reading "В Країні Сонячних Зайчиків" or "In the Land of Sunny Rabbits" (a figurative term for sun beams) and doing my own index cards (no photos though, but a lot of the words are now abstract ideas instead of easily drawable emotions and objects).
In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium we have French lessons from when we're 10 years old until the end of high school, but I can't hold a conversation
I talk to myself in the car, talk to my kids as much as possible even though they don't understand, talk to myself around the house about what I am doing, etc. It really helps getting my brain to simply think in my target language (French). Great video.
If you train your writing, you will be good at writing. If you train your speaking, you will be good at speaking. Learning lists of words is necessary but does not by itself allow speaking.
I just want to say that if you don’t NEED to speak, you can spend your time with what you do need to do. If you are learning a language with little possibility of needing to speak it, spend time with what you need. For example, if you love love Anime, maybe you only care about your listening comprehension. 3 years down the line, if you get a chance to go to Japan, you will likely have 3-6 months to switch over to practicing production. I’m an extreme example: Latin. I just care about reading it. There aren’t even any true native speakers to speak to. If I were not also a teacher, O wouldn’t spend much time in production.
I studied Japanese for about three years in college (two in classes and another as a TA and on my own) and then kept watching anime for a lot after that, but despite my general facility with language I never got to where I could skim-read; it always takes a ton of focus. I could probably have held some light conversation at the time, and my teacher said my pronunciation was surprisingly good. I could maybe hold some light conversation now, and could parse my way through writing if I cared to try. By contrast, I put very little time into Spanish. I had studied French both in homeschool and in college, studied Italian on my own and also took a short class, studied a teeny bit of Portuguese, but the most Spanish I got was Musical Spanish, a great CD for learners. And yet I found that skimming Spanish was trivial. It actually bugged the heck out of me that it's so easy for me to skim Spanish and so hard to read Japanese despite the amount of effort I've put into the latter and not the former. And then, of course, I wound up reminding myself that my speaking Spanish sucks, when I recently went to a Mexican deli and wound up trying to ask the clerk some things only to find out she didn't speak English, and I wound up saying things like (as my brain later informed me) "When my mother up" ("arriba" is not "arrives", brain) and "My can read Spanish, but to speak is very weak" (which at least got *that* point across, sigh). Well, hey, my speccing into reading and parsing is what I chose to do, rather than focus for longer on any given language other than Japanese, so oh, well. At least I can still make my way through my favorite Harry Potter scenes in just about any translation I pick up.
Bon… alors… à mon avis… it’s a good video ! Among the key advice : you need to store grammatical, or more simply speech patterns, equally important as individual words. And those fillers to gain a few more milliseconds ! Small comment from a French native speaker : “emmener” is with two Ms, whereas “amener” has only one. I believe the first M in “emmener” is for the sound “an/en” and the second for the actual sound M.
When I was learning English at the age of 14, I was at a point when I could speak the language pretty confidently but I couldn't understand it by listening. The reason is simple - I would always practice speaking with myself, and I got pretty good at it, but I didn't have the internet at the time so I didn't even have an opportunity to listen to it. That is to say that I don't think that listening is objectively easier than speaking, it certainly wasn't for me. They're two separate skills and it really depends on a lot of factors.
I was weirdly pleased to hear that you turned down Better Help as a sponsor. I've heard of them on a lot of different videos. Johnny Harris's video on something or another convinced me to give it a go. It was useless. So, props to you for that. In fact, I'm going to look up Lingoda to help me brush up on my Spanish. So thanks for that. No promises of course - I'm always kinda skint. But I'll give it a look.
I am always hearing about all these interesting platforms etc but hardly any of them have modern Greek and that's my target language. So I'll just continue to sit in the corner on my own 😁
Ah! Your anecdote about figuring things out from knowing part of the phrase reminds me of when I was at some event where people had their Japanese surname on the back of their uniform (in Kanji), and one guy walked by and my brain went through "I know both those kanji" to "small + trees (woods)" to "KO + HAYASHI" to "KO-BAYASHI" (the correct sound shift when combining) to "I just read Kobayashi for the first time out of nowhere and know precisely what it means now." I'd known the name but had never encountered it in print or had any details about the compounds, but my brain was able to piece it together in a few seconds and I was thrilled ^_^
Great video, only thing I disagreed with was the disdain for AI chatbots. I've used one for quite a bit, they work well. I learn a few new words here and there and it helps with me getting sentences out. Thanks for the tips.
Dido. Not sure what paid version he was referring to. ChatGPT works great for me. It's definitely no substitute for a real human, but it's a convenient substitute, because I find speaking with myself to be incredibly difficult. I typically use it for research type conversations, so maybe it's not as good if you want to talk about your day.
I grew up in a mixed race family, my mother's side being Mexican-American. English was the predominant language spoken, with Spanglish used in certain contexts, primarily at my abuela's house. I studied Spanish in high school and college, and continue to read, write, listen to music, watch movies in Spanish, etc. It's a big part of my identity in many ways, but because there is such a disparity between my level of speaking fluency, and how I feel I should sound, I am extremely self-conscious about speaking Spanish and rarely do so unless forced to. It's like a part of me is afraid of being exposed as a fake Mexican. I'm Armenian too, but because I wasn't raised around the language at all, I am much less self-conscious about my struggles with learning to speak Armenian.
Best use for AI in language learning is generating images that illustrate words. Sometimes you want a really specific image to associate with the word, and with something like DALL•E or midjourney, you can.
Hi. I really like your content. I think I've heard at least one TH-cam language expert suggest that high intelligence doesn't contribute to faster or better language learning, and that in fact no one is any better than anyone else in their innate language learning abilities. Could you possibly do a video on this topic?
Most of my language learning has come through solo learning through books, so I’m significantly better at oral production than oral reception. I prioritize learning derivational and inflectional morphology with the limited exposure I get so that I can get the most of what I get. With my great interest in phonetics and phonology, my pronunciation is usually pretty decent, so when I use my weaker languages I preface, my “blank” isn’t too good because I have difficulty understanding, but often time people will think I’m being modest because of my perceived efficacy. Finding aural comprehensible input that is interesting is sometimes difficult. I wanted to know if other self learners experience something similar
I have the opposite problem. I'm very poor at (french) oral production - my pronunciation is fine, but I struggle with vocabulary and sentence construction - but I'm quite good at understanding conversations. I have ADHD, so I prefer podcasts, and I recently discovered a folder of Pimsleur Method recordings on Internet Archive that are definitely not the best thing ever, but are still rather enjoyable to use while cleaning the house or doing anything else. So my dilemma is that French people notice that I understand them, yet they are startled when I refuse to talk in French - because I know I would stumble and make a mess. When I discussed this nervous sensation with my therapist, she tolde me that it's okay to express to new people that I'm having difficulty speaking French right now but that I still want to try. so I can relate to this feeling :,) also this video was quite helpful; I had been waiting for it for a while! good luck, hope we'll all find a way out :)
@@farewellgovinda6724this is me. I can follow at an intermediate level but I can’t respond. I suspect it’s also because I’m a strong conceptual / contextual learner so can comprehend most of the message even where new vocab is introduced, but I don’t have the capability yet to retrieve / construct and equally complete reply
I stopped studying English when I left high school like 25 years ago. I've never taken lessons again, and I've never practiced my speaking abilities either. I just write some comments here and there on TH-cam. Also, I used to chat with some girls in English, but they never corrected me or tutored me; it was all written. All I do is watch content in English all the time. The thing is, without studying or any kind of specific preparation, I recently passed the C1 level exam. It was the longest I've ever spoken in English in my whole life. It was just like 10-15 minutes total, but it felt like much more. I almost blundered because I collapsed for a minute after the 2nd question, but I could recover from that and end it successfully. I don't know how I made it since I literally never speak in English. No one has corrected my accent ever, not even in high school, because at that time, all we did was learn grammar and how to write or read. Can watching content in your target language be all you need, or was I just lucky? Does the brain, even if you don't speak it out loud, correct itself by hearing content on how to speak? I know for sure I sometimes talk to myself in English (if that makes any sense), but I never do it out loud (obviously). But that's all the 'training' I've done in my life... Or is it that the C1 level isn't that challenging?
@@nickpavia9021 It was more about the "can't talk" topic but probably you're right and having an accent isn't something they take into account in those exams.
Studied Spanish in high school, a semester of French, checked into the hotel in Paris. Checked in French, providing my name, etc, ended with por favor. Took ASL, Spanish and German in the same semester in College, started speaking German in Spanish class which garnered a big laugh.
How do you feel about using a language exchange for a sort of reverse crosstalk in which both people speak the language they're learning 100% of the time? My belief is that you can learn comprehension through videos, podcasts, audiobooks, etc., and focus on speech production in a low-stress environment because you don't have to deal with understanding a foreign language spoken in real time. I've had great success learning Spanish with it.
I’ve also read that, in the context of fast anki retrieval, that the context sentences or chunks should strive toward Miller’s law in size (7 words, +-2, for those at home).
I have been learning Korean for almost a year and now at an intermediate level. I started attempting to speak to native speakers very early on, taking classes with a tutor who could speak barely any English. From my experience, it is pretty important to try to speak early on but you must have a realistic expectation of your performance and look at it as nice practice and cool social interaction (with relatively rare languages it is an amazing ice-breaker and I made a bunch of Korean friends in just one year mostly because they initially remembered me as a white dude who for some reason attempted to learn their language). If I could do it all over again, I would definitely spend less money on tutors in my first six months of studying. Most importantly, I would choose a tutor who could speak English at a high level, able to explain grammar and nuance to vocabulary (why one word can be used in a given situation and another is unnatural) to me. I realized that, before you reach at least a pre-intermediate level, it does not really make much sense to expect a lot of utility from speaking practice with a tutor. Now I am studying 90% of the time with a textbook, looking up words and grammar that is not explained in the textbook, using Anki to improve word recognition (I don't think it helps my active vocabulary A LOT; definitely helps, but not very much) and actively employ ChatGPT and HiNative to look up example sentences, meanings, and cultural nuance behind different words, expressions, and grammar structures. I am taking only one hour a week and it feels more beneficial now because I can incorporate many of the words and grammar I learn on my own in a real conversation, improving memorization through practice.
My problem when engaging in L2 production is that I can't compartmentalize well among the languages I know. Hence, when I'm trying to speak French, graammar and vocab from Spanish will leak in. The same happens in German, only the intrusion is French elements. This reflects the order in which I learned these languages: Spanish, French, German.
This explains to me why I can understand Ukrainian, even conduct interviews with Ukrainian speakers on advanced technical topics without needing a translator to tell me what they say, but when I open my mouth, I can't do it myself - I can only produce English and Russian - and a bit of Spanish. It doesn't help that I had been taught Russian as a kid, and that's what my brain turns to for retrieval. Good content, subbed.
As a Canadian, I think the vast majority of us are the same as your friend, which is funny/sad for a country that introduced it to the school curriculum with the ultimate dream of a fluently bilingual nation. How did they drop the ball so badly with speaking? Hoping they’ve fixed it in the 20 years since I graduated.
I literally just finished my very 1st level of Japanese, so in between memorizing the new alphabets and learning the mandatory "Nice to meet you", I don't have enough vocabulary or grammar structures yet, but I'm definitely re-watching this video in the next couple of months.
Preemptive comment: becoming comfortable with making mistakes (not taking yourself seriously). // after 7mins I'm almost certain that this is it xD. Sure, you can be more concrete, but... If you want your audience to retain any information:::::::::: 1 idea. A bit sad that this is... true. Love listening to your videos though. Soothing voice, succinct thoughts and presentation. Being this close to the camera kind of gives away the reading, though. Merci du Canada! Suerte con todo. Edit: ight you did summarize it in the end. Good advice[s] and I'm gladly reminded of why I shared your videos in the past ;)
I find talking to animals a good bridge to learning to speak to humans. All of my languages I started practicing by speaking to dogs, cats, squirrels, birds, rabbits -- whatever non-human happened to be around and willing to put up with my babbling. It gives some more direction about what to say than an inanimate object, and some [non-linguistic] feedback to respond to as they move around and do ... whatever it is they're doing; while also not involving feeling stressed by some human judging you for it. Also -- finding songs in the language and singing along wih them.
After over a year of study using through Buntus Cainte, and visiting various Gaeltachtaí, I can read at B2 level, but my speaking and listening not so much. I havent tested for tbat, but I am at A1 at the highest. I would put myself at A1.
I have the hardest time assimilating languages, but in part because when I had to take them in college, it was because I was forced to, even though my degrees were in English and literature. I understand that language is learned on desire and or need and by need I mean survival
Great video. This really hit home. If I'm doing all this comprehensive input by reading and listening in my target Language and then after 1 year go out and try to speak I 'm basically doing something entirely different from those last 12 months using different parts of my brain that have not been exercised sufficiently. Unfortunately a lot of the learning material in books is geared towards speech yet the written word seems to be dictating how to speak rather than the other way around. I'm doing Colloquial Welsh and just come across an exercise that has so many errors I'm wondering if the errors are a form of ''intuitive learningl", to see if I spot the horn on the rabbit from a newspaper cartoon or the editor had a dinner date with Catherine Zeta-Jones the night before submission.
Maybe add neglecting phonetics of the target language. For example, I found French much easier to understand and process after someone told me the 'é' as in 'café' sounds like the 'i' in English ' fish'.
I do some of that with my reading. I'm reading Maurice Leblanc's L'aiguille creuse (Lupin). I read a good part of it aloud. I try speak the dialogues as close as a person would talk. Sometimes, I read the narrated part very fast, but in a natural speed.
"She's Canadian, but that's ok, she was born that way and we don't judge" - Instant laugh and like. Canadian self-deprecating humour... this is the Way.
What are your thoughts on "preforming" the sentence in your head, then saying it quickly? Also how bad of a habit is it to use filler words like "like" or "yknow" from your native language in your target language?
So as a linguist, why in your in opinion is it that so many language classes fixate on grammar terms and the technical aspects of language at the expense of teaching students to speak? I tried learning two foreign languages in universities located in more than one US state and the story was always the same: Professor speaks in English most of the time and students are barely ever asked to speak let alone have a conversation. Would it be so odd to have classes structured around the end goal of achieving the different CEFR or ACTFL levels?
I noticed, when I lived in Italy, that some of the other students did well in Italian, [I found it easy, oddly enough the pronunciation is similar to Ukrainian]. Other students really struggled, and others were fine on paper, but had the most horrendous accent when they spoke. Part of the issue is that some didnt really care, but others tried and failed. There must be something in how brains are wired. I will have to think on what you said.
Can you do a video on why you think the AI tutor is no bueno? I’ve used it and it’s the only thing so far that’s got me to confidently Get out of my comfort zone and actually speak to “someone” in my target language.
I seem to recall a recent study that measured the "beer goggles" effect in second-language acquition environments. It was only effective for low quantities of alcohol e.g. 1 beer. Probably not sustainable as a learning strategy due to "social alcoholism" as ProfJones has called it.
Was it you that recommended 'mirroring'? Speaking along with something - like for French, listen to RFI's Journal en francais facile with the transcript and try to speak with the recording? If that wasn't you, would that be one way to practice?
You're the second youtuber I heard today alone say that about better health. I've never looked into it or wanted it but now i want to know what's wrong with it lol
Wrong. The visual perception of words is firstly made by the fusiform cortex, which is the area that attempts to identify shape, faces and words. The hypocampus is associated with episodic memory, which can activate sometimes, but not always due to the association to the word. The word representation is mainly stored by the semantic memory.
I'm learning Hungarian and my bf is Hungarian but we always speak in English because my level of speech in Hungarian is poor. Below infant child I think lol. I am having lessons once a week but I just can't recall the words needed for sentences. It's a work in progress, I just hope one day it all clicks.
When you mentioned recognizing "on his father's side" in Persian, it made me wonder how many constructions like that are recent borrows, or have been invented by language users independently, hundreds of years ago, and thousands of miles apart.
So do you have both recognition and production SRS cards? If so, what kind of balance between the two? How do you choose which to use for a given word? Another question: do you fail the production cards if you don't produce the answer in 20ms (or at least very quickly)? Thanks for your videos, you talk so much sense, it's v refreshing.
Great video! Thanks for it! You mentioned kind of babbling to yourself in your target language. As I'm beginning to try to speak in German, do you think it's fine to babble absolute nonsense and even fake words to myself, in hopes that subconsciously there is something real trying to come out of my mouth? For example -- trying to say something and saying the first words that come to my mind. And say I were using a language exchange app as I cannot afford Lingoda at the moment, is it better to speak just as I would speak no matter how bad it is -- or should I verify sentences with ChatGPT? Should I stick to only the vocabulary I know, or is it better to look up words I want to use? Thanks if you get a chance to answer these.
I was wondering if u can help me to understand how someone with photographic memory (or so they claim), studied 3 years of grammar and didnt advance a bit. Their speking rocketed but the rest of the skills didnt.
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Obviously not the main point of the video, but that throwaway line about refusing to endorse BetterHelp made me love you even more.
Same, betterhelp is awful and all the youtubers endorsing them are soulless
@@JunkforcacI’ve seen people promoting it, what is wrong about it?
@@raina4732It's more expensive than many therapists, BetterHelp doesn't check it's "therapists" backgrounds and some of them aren't certified and I think users' data has been leaked.
@raina4732 there were issues with therapist's qualifications, and data protection as well. There may be more, but it is seen as more of a money maker than actually caring to help people.
@@raina4732 There have been scandals around it including apparent sale of therapy data, listing therapists without their knowledge just to bolster legitimacy, unqualified therapists, and a lot more. They were thoroughly pushed out of the youtube sponsorship game about 5 years ago, they messed up while doing something else, and now are back hoping youtubers have forgotten that betterhelp is scummy
The hind brain stressing makes sense.
In my teens when I visited family back in Poland for the first time since baby form, I found out, to my absolute horror, my parents never bothered to correct my 'baby' pronunciations. They thought it was cute. I had been talking to the diaspora like a toddler, and no one said anything! Why!!
I overthink everything a lot now.
That is so awful and also so hilarious. I’m sorry that happened!!!
Some fun sentences in the heavenly languages Norse and Icelandic are...
Ek heiti Freyja ok ek em at læra Norrænu því ek elski (elska) hana! (Norse)
Hann ǫrninn vissi ekki hvaðan kemr Sólin... (Norse)
Ek veit alt er þú veizt ekki! (Norse)
Ég hef talað Ensku síðan þegar ég vas (var) tveggja eða triggja ára!
En ég get líka talað Hollensku og Norsku og Spænsku og FornNorrænu!
Ég get talað Íslensku reiprennandi og ég em (er) ekki með neina hreim!
Ef ég gæti lært annað mál, hvað væri það? Það væri auðvitað Danska!
Ég em (er) að hugsa að það er mikilvægt að læra að minnsta kosti eitt erlent tungumál, eða flest fallegu tungumálin!
Svo ég valdi Íslensku og ég héld áfram að læra hana...
Ég læri það í samhengi... (Icelandic)
Hvíslaðu að svaninum!
En ertu frá hinum hlutanum?
Þegar ég segi Ísland, hvað er það fyrsta sem dettur þér í (hug) hugi?
Als ik Ijsland zeg, wat is het eerste wat naar boven komt bij jou? (Dutch)
Some of the prettiest words in Gothic are namo, þein, hunds, þatist, ik, weis, eis, qen, driusaima, wairþan, ains, sinteina, nist, imma, twais, eisarn, swikn, uhteigo, brunna, faíraþro etc!
(The words in these heavenly languages are just so pretty and so poetic and so cool, they are true works of art, so I definitely wish I had learnt them in childhood, and I highly recommend learning them all together, as they are way too pretty not to know and so magical!)
By the way, when it comes to learning languages such as Danish and German that have accents that aren’t easy to imitate and a quite complicated pronunciation, one must also practice a lot things such as accent / glottal stops / pronunciation / sound placement / intonation / sound projection etc, as they have very unusual sound projection and placement and some unusual sounds (like the soft D in Danish, for example) that aren’t easy to figure out how to do - so, I would say Danish and German are the languages with the accents that are the hardest to imitate of all Germanic languages, whereas languages such as Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / Dutch / Norwegian / Welsh / Breton / Cornish / Latin / Italian / Galician / Manx / Esperanto / Gaelic / Latvian / Irish / Slovene etc have some of the accents that are the easiest to imitate and some of the easiest pronunciations that are as easy or almost as easy as the neutral American accent and English pronunciation, so these languages are naturally very easy to pronounce (except for the LL sound in Welsh, which isn’t easy to figure out how to do) with accents that are naturally very easy to imitate, so they don’t require a lot of practice, and, I could sound native in Icelandic and Norse and Dutch etc even at a beginner level or intermediate level, but now I am upper intermediate level in Norse and advanced level in Icelandic and upper advanced level in Dutch, at least vocab-wise, and I even sound very natural in these languages, as it was very easy for me to develop and imitate the right accents, however, I am really struggling with developing the right Danish accent and the right German accent, so I have to practice a lot and hear a lot of spoken Danish and a lot of spoken German!
I don't think that's true. I think knowing even 1000 words you can get talking, in principle, but then you have to build it from there, of course. Before reaching a comfortable B2 level it's always going to be frustrating trying to speak in a new language, it just needs to be pushed through, doggedly, until an ok level is reached.
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Respect the hell out of rejecting a sponsorship segment from better help
I think it's important to keep in mind that speaking a language is a skill, not just knowledge. The brain does not learn how to do something if we don't practice it, no matter the amount of theory we know about it.
I teach ESL and this is exactly what I tell my students/learners. I don''t care if you've "studied" the language for (X) years...How long have you been practicing (ie, using) it?
@@adammoore7447Indeed it's about results and there are no medals for the time spent on language learning. In fact I have even felt ashamed to admit when I had started some on-and-off language projects when asked. People often ask "so how long have you been learning...?", but it's a random number that does not have anything to do with success. Imagine gym rats not asking each other "how much do you lift?" but "when did you first get your gym membership?". It does not even get close to "do you train often?"😂
Exactly right. I tell myself that I’m a participant, not a student. It forces me to use the languages, not just study them. I give the same advice to the adults that I tutor.
To be able to say anything in the new languages, one must know over ten thousand words or over fifteen thousand words automatically, so one has to revise / see / hear each word at least thirty times over a longer period of time, which is why one must use the spaced repetition method, and one must also constantly analyze and repeat all sorts of different sentences with different grammatical constructions, to really be able to maintain a natural flow throughout the full sentences, so I recommend focusing mostly on vocab videos and memorizing / analyzing as many lyrics as one can and watching every single video with subtitles in the target languages, and I also recommend learning at least thirty thousand base words automatically in each target language, over the course of five to ten years, to get to a writer level in the target languages in about a decade or so - one can recognize many words after only seeing them a few times in pretty and easy languages such as the Germanic languages and the Celtic languages and the true Latin languages and other pretty languages such as Hungarian and Latvian and Slovene etc, but, to be able to freely use the words and to automatically remember them without having to think about them, one must see each word many times, so one must constantly revise and repeat previously learnt words, while still learning hundreds and thousands of new words every week or every day etc, until each word can be instantly processed and automatically remembered, and, it’s like that in any language, including the first language that one is made to learn, even though most don’t notice that because they aren’t actively trying to learn the first language, but yea, it takes a lot of hard work / revising to learn languages, because there are just so many words that one must learn automatically and permanently! (By the way, I highly recommend learning the prettiest languages ever created Norse / Gothic / Icelandic / Faroese / English / Dutch / Norwegian / Danish / Welsh / Breton / Cornish together as they are equally gorgeous and way too pretty not to know, and, I would recommend always choosing wisely, by only choosing the pretty and easy languages with mostly pretty words that have a modern and professional sound or at least a nice sound, for their gorgeous poetic words and cool sound, as opposed to trying to learn a language that doesn’t sound good and that doesn’t have mostly pretty words that is also unnecessarily complicated with odd alphabets or writing systems that aren’t an alphabet and that are impossible characters (because they have more native speakers) etc, as one can learn more than fifteen pretty and easy languages at the same time, as opposed to only learning one or two impossible category 10 languages, choosing wisely being the key to being a successful polyglot and enjoying the learning process, and, by the way, I am learning 25+ of my target languages at the moment and focusing mostly on the Norse languages and Celtic languages, which are the most fun to learn and speak and hear and see!)
Some fun sentences in the heavenly languages Norse and Icelandic are...
Ek heiti Freyja ok ek em at læra Norrænu því ek elski (elska) hana! (Norse)
Hann ǫrninn vissi ekki hvaðan kemr Sólin... (Norse)
Ek veit alt er þú veizt ekki! (Norse)
Ég hef talað Ensku síðan þegar ég vas (var) tveggja eða triggja ára!
En ég get líka talað Hollensku og Norsku og Spænsku og FornNorrænu!
Ég get talað Íslensku reiprennandi og ég em (er) ekki með neina hreim!
Ef ég gæti lært annað mál, hvað væri það? Það væri auðvitað Danska!
Ég em (er) að hugsa að það er mikilvægt að læra að minnsta kosti eitt erlent tungumál, eða flest fallegu tungumálin!
Svo ég valdi Íslensku og ég héld áfram að læra hana...
Ég læri það í samhengi... (Icelandic)
Hvíslaðu að svaninum!
En ertu frá hinum hlutanum?
Þegar ég segi Ísland, hvað er það fyrsta sem dettur þér í (hug) hugi?
Als ik Ijsland zeg, wat is het eerste wat naar boven komt bij jou? (Dutch)
Some of the prettiest words in Gothic are namo, þein, hunds, þatist, ik, weis, eis, qen, driusaima, wairþan, ains, sinteina, nist, imma, twais, eisarn, swikn, uhteigo, brunna, faíraþro etc!
(The words in these heavenly languages are just so pretty and so poetic and so cool, they are true works of art, so I definitely wish I had learnt them in childhood, and I highly recommend learning them all together, as they are way too pretty not to know and so magical!)
When people say to 'just engage' there is another very useful dimension to this, providing you can tolerate the pain for a while. One of the worst hurdles is worrying about how other people perceive your efforts, what you 'sound like'. If you start and people actually reply to you that hurdle can be surmounted. Also, when you interact those people feed you both words and patterns for speech. Language at its most basic and everyday is not greatly creative, it is made up of interchangeable blocks and by speaking with people you learn which blocks to use and how to arrange them.
Yes - I think it would be really useful to think about Adele Goldberg's (1995) Contruction Grammar and her notion of the "constructicon" - which relies on the compilation of these formulaic chunks as the foundation for grammar, whether from syntax, morphology, or phonology even.
ANYONE is better off with Krashen's approach. I NEVER encountered someone who says that can understand one of the languages I know well but "can't speak" that passed the following test. So you can understand, right? I send the person a random video with a native speaking that language. They are speaking fast, with slangs, partially in dialect, very relaxed. Then I say., "transcribe to me, please, the first 30 seconds of this vide in English (or Portuguese, since I'm Brazilian). They never can do that. If they CAN, they also can speak the language. The fact is that you can easily be DELUED in believing you understand more of the language than you actually can. Specially if you are basing your judgement in understanding material made for students, not by natives for natives. It all really comes down to: YOU DON'T UNDERTAND ENOUGH of the language to speak the way you are expecting yourself to speak. You cannot say what you cannot understand. That person may exist. but I'm yet to find one.
I even have a special girl for people who say they "can understand" Japanese but they cannot speak. Because I was understanding quite a bit of other videos when I still watched her and it was just gibberish to me. I'll defy ANYONE who say "i can understand Japanese but I can't speak" with y girl.
I overthink about how my words will be perceived so much that I stumble even in my own native language.
My earbuds were having connective issues when I first clicked on this and I thought the silence was on purpose
LOL
I learned how to speak Spanish by trying to translate random every sentence I thought and then immediately looking up any word or construction I couldn’t produce.
I’m trying to learn a third language (German) now, and it’s bizarre, but every time I try to speak it, I slip back into Spanish haha
haha when I was learning french I'd try to translate every song i really liked (i still have most of them memorized 20 years later T_T) and now that I'm trying to learn Swedish I keep.... trying to slip into french. I feel you!
I think this happens to most people.
I'm learning Portuguese for my friends, English is my first language, but they said I spoke it with a French accent 😂 it's funny how we slip into our second languages when speaking a third.
I DO THE SAME THING OMG
I’m wondering if this works in Romance languages better than in other ones? I’m learning a Slavic language and if I use google translate or even better AI translators like DeepL, most of the time the sentences are translated literally from English, but that is almost never how people would actually say it in the language. My husband is a native speaker and he corrects my sentences 90% of the time, even if I use AI translators. The only reliable thing I’ve found so far is memorizing the sentences I hear natives say in the exact word order. Which is kind of exhausting and frustrating.
Brilliant. And all in less than 15 mins. "Beer goggles for your mouth" cannot be improved upon
There's also the part where irl people don't speak with pauses between every word, but the end of one word flows together with the beginning of the next one.
The largest problem with the alcohol technique is that it works until after the second drink. I found this out the "easy" way in France --- I had couple of glasses of red and my host family noticed that I was speaking much, much better than I had been doing up to then. Of course, the scientific method recommends "observe, form a hypothesis, test." My hypothesis was "if two glasses is effective, four will be twice as nice, six thrice so, etc." The testing was fun but consistently disproved the hypothesis -- multiple experiments were conducted. After two you're loose but consume more and you're incoherent in any language.
Also: when in the field, for every 30 minutes you actively engage in conversation, you're going to need a couple of hours to decompress. You will not feel very confident in your abilities the first several hundred decompression sessions, however over time you will achieve fluency, often when you least expect it. Others probably have more efficient methods.
Spot on excellent advice. I think too many TH-cam influencers forget that learning a foreign language often requires a bit of work. When I moved to German speaking Switzerland-already knowing German at the B2 level-I still worked hard. When planning an errand or preparing for a meeting, I would look up vocab and write out some scripts to memorize. The planning and prep is essential. I remember when natives stopped switching to English-when I stopped uh-ing and ah-ing. I still prepare. For instance, I just joined an archery club. What did I do? I watched a boat-load of archery videos in German.
I also moved to Switzerland but with German German. They don't speak German German, they speak Swiss German. And Swiss German is a completely different language, and they will treat you unkindly if you come at them with stupid German German
@@EeeEee-bm5gx Sorry that your experience is less positive than mine. You are totally right. Swiss German is a completely different language. I live totally in Hochdeutsch. Yes, it is not Swiss German, but they understand Hochdeutsch. I've worked hard at learning Baseldiitsch. I have about 50% comprehension. I don't pretend to speak it. I speak Hochdeutsch, they answer in Dialekt. Once I asked a waiter to please speak Hochdeutsch. He said, "Ich spreche doch auf Hochdeutsch."
The algorithm is so good omg. I just got back from my Italian certification exam and I did HORRIBLY in the speaking part. My brain simply shut down and I felt like such an idiot, but this helped a lot :’)
I love watching Twitch streamers in lieu of a language tutor or language exchange partner. The streamer is Doing Something, and that something provides you context for what they're saying. They're constantly using those little "ums" and stuff. They're probably very online, so their speech is probably more Englishy than average. And there's already an existing community of people talking about what's happening on screen in your target language. They're typing conversationally, reading their typos kind of forces you to imagine the voice speaking the words.
15-40 viewers is a pretty good sweet spot where the conversation is fast enough to be active but slow enough to allow you to participate. The streamer will read your messages and sometimes autocorrect your mistakes in grammar or vocabulary. People love getting viewers from foreign countries and they love when you take an interest in their culture. I've met a lot of cool people who speak little or no English on Twitch. I highly recommend searching for streamers who speak your target langauge.
The strategy worked 20 years ago when we didn't have TH-cam or Twitch. We would go into online chat rooms with IRC and MSN messenger. You could read the chats and understand that they mimic spoken speech without the pressure of having to respond immediately.
I took French in elementary and high school in Canada for 11 years total (I didn’t like it so I stopped in gr 12 when I didn’t have to take it any longer). In undergrad I took two semesters of French and learned more in 8 months by FAR than I did in 11 years of school. This is because we had 1 2-hour in-class session per week and another 2-hour “language lab” where we met in small groups and literally just talked (with a TA present to help us out when needed or correct our grammar or pronunciation etc. when needed and explain a few more concepts) but mostly we just talked to each other only in French. It was amazingly helpful. And it was about anything. Our musical interests, what food we liked, sports, cooking, videogames, whatever. Just getting to know the 3-5 other people in your group on a personal level and helping one another out when they got stuck (assuming the TA was helping someone else). That really showed me just how broken the language education system is in schools in Canada. We never needed to speak French. We just wrote tests and watched videos for language comprehension. But speaking is so much more helpful to most everyone.
Another Canadian here, similar public school experience. How is the speaking side so badly overlooked by the school system? Maybe they’ve improved it since we were in school (hoping for my kids’ sake 😆). Your uni experience sounds awesome!
@@seabrookel5037 I think it helped that both the Prof and the TA were from France and were ESL, so they were very "French" about everything (i.e. don't you dare speak English in my class) which really did help haha
I'm from Russia and you got me on social drinking. Every foreign language I can speak, I became capable of speaking only through social drinking plus finding myself in a situation when I didn't have any other common language with the group neither the ability to shut up (which I would have gotten if not booze). Ofc it's not the best way to master your skills, but i don't actually have anything better for switching from "consuming random information in a targeted language but being too afraid to speak it" to "omg I can't help but share a funny story with this lovely people". Ofc, that's only because I'm super lazy and am not really used to normal scientifically approved ways of learning languages (in my country, I would say, not many people are used even to language teachers actually able to speak a language they teach).
Anyway, thank you Dr Jones for your engaging and useful videos!
Drinking is underrated for getting fluid ah fluent in a language😂
I find that writing things in my target language is helpful for getting better at speaking it. One thing that I've found works well for both expanding my vocabulary and getting better at expressing myself in another language is subscribing to a "word a day" email and then writing at least a sentence in the given language. There are a lot of websites that send out free "word a day" vocabulary emails. You can even keep track of words that you're having trouble remembering and try to incorporate them into your writing on other days. I also think that a big trick to getting better at speaking and listening to a new language is interacting with it as frequently as you can without another language as an intermediary. Use flash cards with only images rather than the translation in your own language, and watch movies and TV shows in the language that you're trying to learn, using subtitles in that language if you need a little extra help, but not using your native language as a crutch. Also, when you encounter a new word, look up the definition in that language rather than the translation in your own language. Some of these things may need to wait until you have a solid foundation, but don't be afraid to leave your comfort zone.
I went to Brussels a few months ago, and I was feeling fairly good about my French, until I actually tried to talk to someone, and then I felt like the only word I knew was "quoi?" because I said it about a thousand times
I mean even French people have trouble understanding Belgian French (or so they said to me) 😅😅
@@aliceitci call bs on that, being a french speaker from brussels, never have i ever in 39 years heard french and belgian people not understanding one another.
😂😂😂 happened to me in all foreign languages I thought I speak, don't despair, it's about the hours you communicate and not being too self conscious🎉
Japanese learner of ~8 years here, love reading/writing, HATE speaking.
Super introverted and shy so language exchanges/making friends was a super daunting task and never worked out for me. After over a decade of waiting I'm finally going to Japan and it's been the kick up the backside I needed now there's a clear date I need to be able to confidently speak.
I'm still too nervous to meet new people, so I've started talking with a teacher on a weekly basis who I knew already (she taught me Japanese when I first started). It takes the pressure off slightly but every time I go I always feel this sense of dread because speaking is so hard for my brain both mechanically and socially. Outside of the weekly chat, I'm trying to find new ways to practice speaking by myself like shadowing, but your method of saying what you see is really interesting and appealing to me so I'm definitely going to implement that into my study routine as well, thank you.
Yeah I don't even want to talk to people in my native language, so a second language is rough.
Idk I don’t think that’s being introverted that’s just social anxiety
@@ongcop_lp Extroverts LOVE small talk, introverts hate it. Has nothing to do with social anxiety, it's just boring.
@@ketugrahagraha3673 that's not true. Liking or disliking small talk has nothing to do by definition with introversion/extraversion.
@@andeggbreaks 🙂
Anki Cards + being very severe with mistakes + emotional images + maximum speed or it’s wrong. Duly noted. This is actually supercharged spaced repetition.
I just want to caution you on this if you're not already advanced. I tried this as a beginner and the sheer volume of cards you're going to have of you do this and you're still learning vocab (so less than what is considered normal for your Lang, mine is about 20k word and I know about 2k) might make you stop wanting to do them, which is a bigger problem (quitting).
Always be sure to not take on more work than you can handle, whole trying to get as close to the top of that as you can reasonably deal with.
I had to start being more lenient with myself, and put the higher focus on learning more words, whole doing other things (like talking to friends) go improve my speech, instead of being super strict on just the flashcards.
Anyway I hope my ramble makes sense, it's just that being too strict on cards is a mistake I and many of my friends have made
@@littlered6340 Thanks for the insights! With which language did you try it? I'll start with Russian's motion verb, myself.
@@1langueen100jours Japanese!
Honestly I don't know much about the other non Asian languages, they might be easier, but I think a lot of people accidentally underestimate the compounding effect of srs cards.
I am not using Anki, but I know they recentlyish added FSRS, which I think works on a card by card basis? So that might be better? I do everything as cloze, which isn't super useful for FSRS, so I can't confirm.
I've been doing a mix of pimsleur, clozemaster, italki, and harassing my friends who are native speakers every chance I get and it's worked very well in my target languages in the past.
Pimsleur helps so much! Game changer for me! I also use HelloTalk.
Me too!! But i don't have friends in my target language!
@lechonk1122 time to peruse the internet for native speakers my friend
Great video, Dr. J. In my experience (and I'm a bog standard amateur), the key to being able to speak effectively is to wait.., a wee bit; listen, listen, listen...a lot; watch, watch, watch a lot; read, read, read (stuff that interests you)... and THEN speak. Firstly with yourself, around the house, and, as you said, notice the 'holes' as you do so, and then go back and fill them in. Finally, talk with native speakers as much as you can (easy now with the internet...yes, I'm quite old) and when you do so, and this is the CRUCIAL bit, when you do so, don't give a **** about getting it wrong or making an ass of yourself. Admittedly, this is not an easy thing for many folk to do, but you can train yourself. And, in any case, and speaking for myself, I find that being a bit older, for once, is an advantage. Thanks again 👍
Algorithm leave a comment followers numbers engagement viewership analytics channel growth statistics, if I’m being completely honest
Same, bro, same
You are so real for that
Grammatically incoherent much?…
@@JohnM...I think that's the joke.
👍🏼
Glad I found you. Love your channel and takes on basically everything I’ve seen so far. Keep up the good work!
Thank you!
You're a good guy, Dr. Jones
So glad to discover this channel.
I am trying an experiment on myself that maybe other people have tried, but I want to do it anyway. I just treat the language I am studying like it is part of English, my native language. I just speak that language out loud mixed with English when I walk the dog. (I assume the neighbors think I am talking to the dog, which I like to do anyway.) I don't care if I am not perfectly following the rules exactly. I try to use the words a lot this way and I figure once I know the words better, then I can worry about all of the other details.
I also study verb conjugations making short sentences in English and the other language like "If I tell you something, then you will be told something by me." I like to study active and passive verb forms this way, but I change who the subjects and objects are. So far, I like doing it. I don't know if it will work. I still forget words, but who knows.
This is a version of “interlanguage” that definitely helps. I don’t know the research on it, but I should look into that and make another video!
I wonder how similar the grammar has to be for this to work. My study language is *so different* from my native language that it doesn't make sense to do both at the same time.
Always interesting and informative, thanks
I don't know if I'm a miracle, my parents did all they could to espose me to English (I'm natively French) when I was little... but I still was the last in English class throughout the equivalents of 6th ot 8th grades... then I discovered that there were interesting English books that were not translated... three months of compulsive reading later (and I don't know how many hours in the dictionary), all that I had failed to understand in the previous three years clicked together, and I became better than the teacher (a substitute who should never have taken the job)... well, I majored in English and am the proud owner of an MA that never served me for anything.
It's simple. You get good at what you practice. I read for hours a day in Greek for 2 years and knew a ton of words but when i would speak i was still pretty slow and made mistakes. Now i'm focusing a little less on reading and more on training my ear to be able to understand people because even if I can say sentences at a decent speed what good is that going to do if I can't keep up with what they say? I don't want to keep saying "slow down"
I do opposite in German all listening no reading. My comprehension after four years is not too bad. I'm able to hear all the words parce the sounds. There's still words I don't know.
@@Branden-vl9sl If you only do listening how do you gain vocab? You have to keep seeing what the words mean for it to stick. Listening is great for ear practice no doubt you need it but reading is also very good as it allows you to go at your own pace and find more vocabulary easier.
@@Hellenicheavymetal I use a srs app to build up my vocabulary. I do read the word in the target language. So I guess that counts as a tiny bit of reading. But the sentence it's within is in my native language english. It also has sound it pronounced the words for you. So you get even more listening practice. I use the subtitles to find words I don't know to look up. Add them to the spaced repetition flash cards. I do read the subtitles to find words so I guess that counts as a little bit of reading. But I don't do it very often and only for a few minutes.
This is like me 40 years of learning spanish, i can understand, i can write, i can follow Spanish youtubers, read spanish articles, pass c2 exams but i cannot really get words out of my mouth quickly nough that my verbal spanish matches what's in my head
You need to do shadowing and actual output practice.
You said that the sponsor is a perfect match as I looked down to see an ad for Hinge. Then, Lingoda was revealed.
My Ad was for plimsuer 😅
Great vid as always! Could you make a playlist for all your language learning tips vids?
Many thanks for the information video! I think the advice is delivered in a very funny way which 100% helps to remember. However, potentially wrapping up with some bullet points or something like that, would be a welcomed addition. Thanks again!
Quite impressed how you can verbalise so skilfully what I’ve been thinking for so long. Obrigado pelo sei video.
Good advice with the fillers, that's something I learn first to buy time. And constant speaking in my head. Have hypothetical conversations with all the random people you see in the streets, in the train, in the shop etc
Thank you so much!
Thank you!
Hola languagejones soy un estadounidense que estaba aprendiendo español y chino ahora y nunca nadie comenta en las respuestas en una video. Aunque quiero decir que eres una mejoría recurso para aprendizaje de las idiomas en YT. Gracias hermano.
I am thankful for people like you
The way you dissect a topic is fascinating and reminds me of our discussions back in the RS days.
Then, you always sum up with concrete strategies anyone can use to produce exceptional results.
You basically provide a crash course in how to hack one's learning.
Simply awesome every time.
I got lucky living in a dorm for a year in Kyiv while learning Ukrainian. So right in the first week in learning I could have little conversations like everyday just to practice with native speakers. It would start with "what are you cooking?" And then from there it could build up as the weeks and months went by. Now I am reading children's literature and really building a strong vocabulary. I read the BFG in Ukrainian and now I am reading "В Країні Сонячних Зайчиків" or "In the Land of Sunny Rabbits" (a figurative term for sun beams) and doing my own index cards (no photos though, but a lot of the words are now abstract ideas instead of easily drawable emotions and objects).
In the Dutch speaking part of Belgium we have French lessons from when we're 10 years old until the end of high school, but I can't hold a conversation
What teleprompter software do you use to get your speech so perfect?
I talk to myself in the car, talk to my kids as much as possible even though they don't understand, talk to myself around the house about what I am doing, etc. It really helps getting my brain to simply think in my target language (French). Great video.
Beer googles for your mouth is possibly the best way to put that! Love your content brother, keep up the strong work.
If you train your writing, you will be good at writing. If you train your speaking, you will be good at speaking. Learning lists of words is necessary but does not by itself allow speaking.
Can confirm. I’m a far better writer than speaker even in my FIRST language. :)
Tbh i would just talk to myself in private, starting out with small little phrases, but as i got better i started to have more options
I just want to say that if you don’t NEED to speak, you can spend your time with what you do need to do.
If you are learning a language with little possibility of needing to speak it, spend time with what you need. For example, if you love love Anime, maybe you only care about your listening comprehension. 3 years down the line, if you get a chance to go to Japan, you will likely have 3-6 months to switch over to practicing production.
I’m an extreme example: Latin. I just care about reading it. There aren’t even any true native speakers to speak to. If I were not also a teacher, O wouldn’t spend much time in production.
I studied Japanese for about three years in college (two in classes and another as a TA and on my own) and then kept watching anime for a lot after that, but despite my general facility with language I never got to where I could skim-read; it always takes a ton of focus. I could probably have held some light conversation at the time, and my teacher said my pronunciation was surprisingly good. I could maybe hold some light conversation now, and could parse my way through writing if I cared to try.
By contrast, I put very little time into Spanish. I had studied French both in homeschool and in college, studied Italian on my own and also took a short class, studied a teeny bit of Portuguese, but the most Spanish I got was Musical Spanish, a great CD for learners. And yet I found that skimming Spanish was trivial. It actually bugged the heck out of me that it's so easy for me to skim Spanish and so hard to read Japanese despite the amount of effort I've put into the latter and not the former.
And then, of course, I wound up reminding myself that my speaking Spanish sucks, when I recently went to a Mexican deli and wound up trying to ask the clerk some things only to find out she didn't speak English, and I wound up saying things like (as my brain later informed me) "When my mother up" ("arriba" is not "arrives", brain) and "My can read Spanish, but to speak is very weak" (which at least got *that* point across, sigh).
Well, hey, my speccing into reading and parsing is what I chose to do, rather than focus for longer on any given language other than Japanese, so oh, well. At least I can still make my way through my favorite Harry Potter scenes in just about any translation I pick up.
Thank you!!!
Bon… alors… à mon avis… it’s a good video ! Among the key advice : you need to store grammatical, or more simply speech patterns, equally important as individual words. And those fillers to gain a few more milliseconds ! Small comment from a French native speaker : “emmener” is with two Ms, whereas “amener” has only one. I believe the first M in “emmener” is for the sound “an/en” and the second for the actual sound M.
I found anki decks not really working for me. I hate learning words in isolation. it's really just repetitive memory that often fails me.
When I was learning English at the age of 14, I was at a point when I could speak the language pretty confidently but I couldn't understand it by listening. The reason is simple - I would always practice speaking with myself, and I got pretty good at it, but I didn't have the internet at the time so I didn't even have an opportunity to listen to it. That is to say that I don't think that listening is objectively easier than speaking, it certainly wasn't for me. They're two separate skills and it really depends on a lot of factors.
I was weirdly pleased to hear that you turned down Better Help as a sponsor. I've heard of them on a lot of different videos. Johnny Harris's video on something or another convinced me to give it a go. It was useless. So, props to you for that. In fact, I'm going to look up Lingoda to help me brush up on my Spanish. So thanks for that. No promises of course - I'm always kinda skint. But I'll give it a look.
I am always hearing about all these interesting platforms etc but hardly any of them have modern Greek and that's my target language. So I'll just continue to sit in the corner on my own 😁
❤😂 that intro
Ah! Your anecdote about figuring things out from knowing part of the phrase reminds me of when I was at some event where people had their Japanese surname on the back of their uniform (in Kanji), and one guy walked by and my brain went through "I know both those kanji" to "small + trees (woods)" to "KO + HAYASHI" to "KO-BAYASHI" (the correct sound shift when combining) to "I just read Kobayashi for the first time out of nowhere and know precisely what it means now." I'd known the name but had never encountered it in print or had any details about the compounds, but my brain was able to piece it together in a few seconds and I was thrilled ^_^
Great video, only thing I disagreed with was the disdain for AI chatbots. I've used one for quite a bit, they work well. I learn a few new words here and there and it helps with me getting sentences out. Thanks for the tips.
Dido. Not sure what paid version he was referring to. ChatGPT works great for me. It's definitely no substitute for a real human, but it's a convenient substitute, because I find speaking with myself to be incredibly difficult. I typically use it for research type conversations, so maybe it's not as good if you want to talk about your day.
@@tommyhuffman7499 he’s likely talking about teacher ai, xiaoma’s program. That’s the one i use. I enjoy it.
I grew up in a mixed race family, my mother's side being Mexican-American. English was the predominant language spoken, with Spanglish used in certain contexts, primarily at my abuela's house. I studied Spanish in high school and college, and continue to read, write, listen to music, watch movies in Spanish, etc. It's a big part of my identity in many ways, but because there is such a disparity between my level of speaking fluency, and how I feel I should sound, I am extremely self-conscious about speaking Spanish and rarely do so unless forced to. It's like a part of me is afraid of being exposed as a fake Mexican. I'm Armenian too, but because I wasn't raised around the language at all, I am much less self-conscious about my struggles with learning to speak Armenian.
Thank you very much for this. Have been studying Korean hard for 5 years and find speaking so tough.
Best use for AI in language learning is generating images that illustrate words. Sometimes you want a really specific image to associate with the word, and with something like DALL•E or midjourney, you can.
Hi. I really like your content. I think I've heard at least one TH-cam language expert suggest that high intelligence doesn't contribute to faster or better language learning, and that in fact no one is any better than anyone else in their innate language learning abilities. Could you possibly do a video on this topic?
Most of my language learning has come through solo learning through books, so I’m significantly better at oral production than oral reception. I prioritize learning derivational and inflectional morphology with the limited exposure I get so that I can get the most of what I get. With my great interest in phonetics and phonology, my pronunciation is usually pretty decent, so when I use my weaker languages I preface, my “blank” isn’t too good because I have difficulty understanding, but often time people will think I’m being modest because of my perceived efficacy. Finding aural comprehensible input that is interesting is sometimes difficult.
I wanted to know if other self learners experience something similar
You’re describing my life
I have the opposite problem. I'm very poor at (french) oral production - my pronunciation is fine, but I struggle with vocabulary and sentence construction - but I'm quite good at understanding conversations. I have ADHD, so I prefer podcasts, and I recently discovered a folder of Pimsleur Method recordings on Internet Archive that are definitely not the best thing ever, but are still rather enjoyable to use while cleaning the house or doing anything else. So my dilemma is that French people notice that I understand them, yet they are startled when I refuse to talk in French - because I know I would stumble and make a mess.
When I discussed this nervous sensation with my therapist, she tolde me that it's okay to express to new people that I'm having difficulty speaking French right now but that I still want to try.
so I can relate to this feeling :,) also this video was quite helpful; I had been waiting for it for a while!
good luck, hope we'll all find a way out :)
@@farewellgovinda6724this is me. I can follow at an intermediate level but I can’t respond. I suspect it’s also because I’m a strong conceptual / contextual learner so can comprehend most of the message even where new vocab is introduced, but I don’t have the capability yet to retrieve / construct and equally complete reply
Are there any Anki decks you recommend for French sentences?
This is helpful; thanks.
I stopped studying English when I left high school like 25 years ago. I've never taken lessons again, and I've never practiced my speaking abilities either. I just write some comments here and there on TH-cam. Also, I used to chat with some girls in English, but they never corrected me or tutored me; it was all written. All I do is watch content in English all the time. The thing is, without studying or any kind of specific preparation, I recently passed the C1 level exam. It was the longest I've ever spoken in English in my whole life. It was just like 10-15 minutes total, but it felt like much more. I almost blundered because I collapsed for a minute after the 2nd question, but I could recover from that and end it successfully. I don't know how I made it since I literally never speak in English. No one has corrected my accent ever, not even in high school, because at that time, all we did was learn grammar and how to write or read. Can watching content in your target language be all you need, or was I just lucky? Does the brain, even if you don't speak it out loud, correct itself by hearing content on how to speak? I know for sure I sometimes talk to myself in English (if that makes any sense), but I never do it out loud (obviously). But that's all the 'training' I've done in my life... Or is it that the C1 level isn't that challenging?
I don't think having an accent is counted against you in those exams unless it is so heavy that you are incomprehensible.
@@nickpavia9021 It was more about the "can't talk" topic but probably you're right and having an accent isn't something they take into account in those exams.
Studied Spanish in high school, a semester of French, checked into the hotel in Paris. Checked in French, providing my name, etc, ended with por favor. Took ASL, Spanish and German in the same semester in College, started speaking German in Spanish class which garnered a big laugh.
Thank you for investigating Better Help and rejecting it. It can very well cause more harm than help.
"Leap Talk," "Spring Say," "Hop Rap..." I'm sure it's obvious, but I have no idea what you're referring to.
How do you feel about using a language exchange for a sort of reverse crosstalk in which both people speak the language they're learning 100% of the time?
My belief is that you can learn comprehension through videos, podcasts, audiobooks, etc., and focus on speech production in a low-stress environment because you don't have to deal with understanding a foreign language spoken in real time. I've had great success learning Spanish with it.
I’ve also read that, in the context of fast anki retrieval, that the context sentences or chunks should strive toward Miller’s law in size (7 words, +-2, for those at home).
I have been learning Korean for almost a year and now at an intermediate level. I started attempting to speak to native speakers very early on, taking classes with a tutor who could speak barely any English. From my experience, it is pretty important to try to speak early on but you must have a realistic expectation of your performance and look at it as nice practice and cool social interaction (with relatively rare languages it is an amazing ice-breaker and I made a bunch of Korean friends in just one year mostly because they initially remembered me as a white dude who for some reason attempted to learn their language).
If I could do it all over again, I would definitely spend less money on tutors in my first six months of studying. Most importantly, I would choose a tutor who could speak English at a high level, able to explain grammar and nuance to vocabulary (why one word can be used in a given situation and another is unnatural) to me. I realized that, before you reach at least a pre-intermediate level, it does not really make much sense to expect a lot of utility from speaking practice with a tutor.
Now I am studying 90% of the time with a textbook, looking up words and grammar that is not explained in the textbook, using Anki to improve word recognition (I don't think it helps my active vocabulary A LOT; definitely helps, but not very much) and actively employ ChatGPT and HiNative to look up example sentences, meanings, and cultural nuance behind different words, expressions, and grammar structures. I am taking only one hour a week and it feels more beneficial now because I can incorporate many of the words and grammar I learn on my own in a real conversation, improving memorization through practice.
My problem when engaging in L2 production is that I can't compartmentalize well among the languages I know. Hence, when I'm trying to speak French, graammar and vocab from Spanish will leak in. The same happens in German, only the intrusion is French elements. This reflects the order in which I learned these languages: Spanish, French, German.
For the algorithm!!!! שבת שלום ומבורך, אחי
This explains to me why I can understand Ukrainian, even conduct interviews with Ukrainian speakers on advanced technical topics without needing a translator to tell me what they say, but when I open my mouth, I can't do it myself - I can only produce English and Russian - and a bit of Spanish. It doesn't help that I had been taught Russian as a kid, and that's what my brain turns to for retrieval.
Good content, subbed.
As a Canadian, I think the vast majority of us are the same as your friend, which is funny/sad for a country that introduced it to the school curriculum with the ultimate dream of a fluently bilingual nation. How did they drop the ball so badly with speaking? Hoping they’ve fixed it in the 20 years since I graduated.
I literally just finished my very 1st level of Japanese, so in between memorizing the new alphabets and learning the mandatory "Nice to meet you", I don't have enough vocabulary or grammar structures yet, but I'm definitely re-watching this video in the next couple of months.
Preemptive comment: becoming comfortable with making mistakes (not taking yourself seriously). // after 7mins I'm almost certain that this is it xD. Sure, you can be more concrete, but... If you want your audience to retain any information:::::::::: 1 idea. A bit sad that this is... true. Love listening to your videos though. Soothing voice, succinct thoughts and presentation. Being this close to the camera kind of gives away the reading, though. Merci du Canada! Suerte con todo. Edit: ight you did summarize it in the end. Good advice[s] and I'm gladly reminded of why I shared your videos in the past ;)
I find talking to animals a good bridge to learning to speak to humans.
All of my languages I started practicing by speaking to dogs, cats, squirrels, birds, rabbits -- whatever non-human happened to be around and willing to put up with my babbling.
It gives some more direction about what to say than an inanimate object, and some [non-linguistic] feedback to respond to as they move around and do ... whatever it is they're doing; while also not involving feeling stressed by some human judging you for it.
Also -- finding songs in the language and singing along wih them.
After over a year of study using through Buntus Cainte, and visiting various Gaeltachtaí, I can read at B2 level, but my speaking and listening not so much. I havent tested for tbat, but I am at A1 at the highest. I would put myself at A1.
I have the hardest time assimilating languages, but in part because when I had to take them in college, it was because I was forced to, even though my degrees were in English and literature. I understand that language is learned on desire and or need and by need I mean survival
Very helpful. Thank you!
Great video. This really hit home. If I'm doing all this comprehensive input by reading and listening in my target Language and then after 1 year go out and try to speak I 'm basically doing something entirely different from those last 12 months using different parts of my brain that have not been exercised sufficiently. Unfortunately a lot of the learning material in books is geared towards speech yet the written word seems to be dictating how to speak rather than the other way around. I'm doing Colloquial Welsh and just come across an exercise that has so many errors I'm wondering if the errors are a form of ''intuitive learningl", to see if I spot the horn on the rabbit from a newspaper cartoon or the editor had a dinner date with Catherine Zeta-Jones the night before submission.
Maybe add neglecting phonetics of the target language. For example, I found French much easier to understand and process after someone told me the 'é' as in 'café' sounds like the 'i' in English ' fish'.
I do some of that with my reading. I'm reading Maurice Leblanc's L'aiguille creuse (Lupin). I read a good part of it aloud. I try speak the dialogues as close as a person would talk. Sometimes, I read the narrated part very fast, but in a natural speed.
Haha imagine just bringing a little remote control around with you and pausing all the Germans mid sentence, that would be so useful
"She's Canadian, but that's ok, she was born that way and we don't judge" - Instant laugh and like. Canadian self-deprecating humour... this is the Way.
What are your thoughts on "preforming" the sentence in your head, then saying it quickly?
Also how bad of a habit is it to use filler words like "like" or "yknow" from your native language in your target language?
So as a linguist, why in your in opinion is it that so many language classes fixate on grammar terms and the technical aspects of language at the expense of teaching students to speak?
I tried learning two foreign languages in universities located in more than one US state and the story was always the same: Professor speaks in English most of the time and students are barely ever asked to speak let alone have a conversation.
Would it be so odd to have classes structured around the end goal of achieving the different CEFR or ACTFL levels?
I noticed, when I lived in Italy, that some of the other students did well in Italian, [I found it easy, oddly enough the pronunciation is similar to Ukrainian]. Other students really struggled, and others were fine on paper, but had the most horrendous accent when they spoke. Part of the issue is that some didnt really care, but others tried and failed. There must be something in how brains are wired. I will have to think on what you said.
Can you do a video on why you think the AI tutor is no bueno? I’ve used it and it’s the only thing so far that’s got me to confidently
Get out of my comfort zone and actually speak to “someone” in my target language.
I seem to recall a recent study that measured the "beer goggles" effect in second-language acquition environments. It was only effective for low quantities of alcohol e.g. 1 beer. Probably not sustainable as a learning strategy due to "social alcoholism" as ProfJones has called it.
Was it you that recommended 'mirroring'? Speaking along with something - like for French, listen to RFI's Journal en francais facile with the transcript and try to speak with the recording? If that wasn't you, would that be one way to practice?
You're the second youtuber I heard today alone say that about better health. I've never looked into it or wanted it but now i want to know what's wrong with it lol
Wrong. The visual perception of words is firstly made by the fusiform cortex, which is the area that attempts to identify shape, faces and words. The hypocampus is associated with episodic memory, which can activate sometimes, but not always due to the association to the word. The word representation is mainly stored by the semantic memory.
I'm learning Hungarian and my bf is Hungarian but we always speak in English because my level of speech in Hungarian is poor. Below infant child I think lol. I am having lessons once a week but I just can't recall the words needed for sentences. It's a work in progress, I just hope one day it all clicks.
When you mentioned recognizing "on his father's side" in Persian, it made me wonder how many constructions like that are recent borrows, or have been invented by language users independently, hundreds of years ago, and thousands of miles apart.
So do you have both recognition and production SRS cards? If so, what kind of balance between the two? How do you choose which to use for a given word?
Another question: do you fail the production cards if you don't produce the answer in 20ms (or at least very quickly)?
Thanks for your videos, you talk so much sense, it's v refreshing.
Great video! Thanks for it!
You mentioned kind of babbling to yourself in your target language. As I'm beginning to try to speak in German, do you think it's fine to babble absolute nonsense and even fake words to myself, in hopes that subconsciously there is something real trying to come out of my mouth? For example -- trying to say something and saying the first words that come to my mind.
And say I were using a language exchange app as I cannot afford Lingoda at the moment, is it better to speak just as I would speak no matter how bad it is -- or should I verify sentences with ChatGPT? Should I stick to only the vocabulary I know, or is it better to look up words I want to use?
Thanks if you get a chance to answer these.
I was wondering if u can help me to understand how someone with photographic memory (or so they claim), studied 3 years of grammar and didnt advance a bit. Their speking rocketed but the rest of the skills didnt.
Something about their story is not adding up!