Hi everyone, my name is Noah.
and I’m very excited to be here today
to interview Michael Campbell
who is the founder of Glossika
a language learning platform.
I’m especially excited for this opportunity
as I've been a Glossika user for ten years.
and It’s really help with my journey to learn mandarin.
Let’s do a little segment first in Chinese
and see how well your Chinese is come along.
We know how long you’ve been learning mandarin.
It’s really great we have the opportunity to do this interview in Taipei today.
I would like to know how you learn mandarin?
How long did you spend on it?
and where did you learn it?
Ten years ago,
I studied language in the U.S
It requires students to learn two languages.
First is Spanish,
and I’ve learned it for two years.
After two years,
I was thinking about learning a second language.
At the time, I felt like maybe I could learn Chinese.
Since Chinese is completely different from English.
It’s a new challenge to learn Chinese words,
grammars, and tones.
Yes, it’s full of challenges.
Yes, as a beginner,
it’s really difficult.
Should I begin with learning words?
There are so many words that I don’t know how to start.
Your Chinese seems quite fluent now.
If you throw back,
you've learned Spanish,
compare to Chinese, isn't Spanish more similar to English?
Yes, it is.
They are quite similar
while Chinese is really different.
I've been in Taiwan for eight years
After I graduated from my university,
I think I should keep learning Chinese.
So, I wish I could put myself in an environment which everybody speaks Mandarin.
You are right. The environment is very important.
Yes, it is.
So, Michael, I am also curious,
how did you take an interest in learning Chinese in the beginning?
You know, like yourself.
I think it came down to the same thing.
I’ve always had a tendency to...
wanna learn at least understand many different kinds of languages.
And I thought, well,
I did look at Japanese and Korean,
and some languages in the beginning.
And then, I thought, well,
All these languages tend to borrow a lot from Chinese.
Maybe I should just learn Chinese first.
And then I can pick up other languages later.
Much easier.
So, that’s what I decided to do.
And then you know,
not to downplay my interest in western languages as well.
Of course, I had a strong interest there as well.
It’s just that,
I thought well...
Really in life,
I should focus on the things that are harder,
that might take more time.
I can come back and learn other things later.
If… you know,
If things work out well, you know.
It would be easier.
Hmm, that’s really a good point
about how Chinese is also very similar to these other languages that took parts Chinese.
You are a polyglot.
You know many languages.
And something like that,
to me,
it’s mind-boggling for someone that speaks two languages fluently.
And I’m especially curious
how did you become fascinated by languages in general initially?
Well,I always had a fascination
growing up, being surrounded by different cultures and languages.
So, I think that curiosity just continues to grow.
I was really interested in just being able to understand more.
What people are saying
and when I heard different languages with different accents,
it was just kind of drawn to it.
I was like, oh, this is interesting.
It’s kind of interesting how they are speaking, you know.
I know a lot of people are out there,
they want to learn a language.
They have no idea how to get started.
and I am wondering if you have any tips or ideas to share from your experiences.
How to get started learning a new language?
How to get start learning a new language
really comes down to your personal interests,
and your personal motivations.
I mean, why do you wanna do it?
You must have some specific reason,
why you are attracted to a specific country or culture or language.
Maybe it’s because of the people that you know.
So I will start with that.
What are your motivations?
The second thing is,
you have to consider that
if you have choices,
Like, do I want to learn A or B.
Or do I wanna learn A,B,C,D,or E
You know, which one of these.
And if you have a choice,
Then I would say focus on where your long-term goals are.
And then take a look at the structure of language,
Because the structure of the language can often determine your success rate.
I would tend to say the most difficult language
now I heard a lot of other people say this as well is that
is the first language that you learn.
So, it’s like a musical instrument.
If you attend some sort of band class in school.
You kind of feel miserably at that instrument
Then, you pick it up later in your life,
you may find a lot of success with it.
I think the same is true with languages.
You know, I might have felt miserably with French
and I just never came back to it later in life.
But, when I went on to learn Chinese or other languages
I found a lot of success.
So, I think, you know,
dabble a little bit.
Maybe you have already done your first language in school.
so, that’s a good starting point.
And then, you know, so, that’s a good starting point.
And then, you know,
maybe after school,
after you graduate,
you may find an interest in something else.
It might be because of your working environment,
you have a specific attraction toward one thing or another.
Go for it!
The other thing is to get started with the language,
you have to understand that
because of the different structures and the train of thought
the order of how things are expressed
that could really affect your success rate.
So you know, vocabulary and pronunciation aside.
A lot of that is gonna determine how successful… how fluent you can get in the language.
Wow, that’s really an incredible answer.
I know it really relates to my learning of Chinese as well.
Starting to learn it seems like an incredible difficulty.
But now looking back, I wanna to learn another language.
I think it wouldn’t be as difficult.
If you are driving for the first time,
you are just learning how to drive
and then somebody is having a conversation with you in the car
You just like "Don’t talk to me."
I am trying to focus on doing this one thing
Because it’s not completely automated yet, right?
but overtime, you can very easily have conversations
turn on the radio,
have conversations between people
and listen to the radio at the same time and drive.
Suddenly, you do all these multiple things at the same time,
but now put somebody in the car and speak in Spanish to you,
and then Chinese or French
You gotta have the same entanglement.
Right? You are like,
Wait a minute,
I am trying to drive.
All of a sudden,
your first original skill of driving seems to become more difficult.
If you go to the gym,
they said you shred yourself,
you shred your muscles
and so you gotta do that with your brain
when you are jumping between languages.
and the more you do that,
the more you practice that.
Things start to become a lot more mellow, you know.
You don’t have the problem with freezing up.
i think freezing up can happen,
when you don’t have a lot of real-world experiences in a language
that sort of culture fluency.
But you can actually train yourself to become... you know
pronunciation and sort of sentence level of fluency.
sure
I really like that idea.
You are training yourself with all these different languages at the same time.
Yeah. At first, your brain...
I don’t know what’s going on
And then it’s just like
working out at the gym,
and eventually start to pick it up
and you get used to it.
Just like we have all the Glossika website,
You do reps in your language.
How many reps have you done in a particular language?
Then, you know, we don’t have a grading system
or you got hundred percent on French or Spanish.
But it's like... Did you do five thousand reps or ten thousand reps?
How many reps have you done in a language?
and I think that's very telling.
and it's not just pass of reps
It's like... Have you actually
said that sentence out loud?
Have you covered up the text and able to say it from memory?
Even short-term memory.
I think that’s a very very important skill to train.
There’s so many, many, many barriers and obstacles
that can just force you to quit at any time.
You just like, ah... this is enough.
But I think that if you just set up the time everyday
whether you are a morning person
I am gonna do this every morning from 6 to 6:30 a.m
or I am gonna do this every evening
from 9 to 9:30 p.m.
You just set aside the time.
It’s just like your Chinese.
I mean, you're gonna be so frustrated
but you just have to keep doing it everyday.
I'll put the book in the bathroom
Everyday, I go to the bathroom
maybe next month I will say
I don’t wanna do that language.
I will put another language book in the bathroom, you know.
So, when I started learning Chinese,
I started using Glossika within six months of learning Chinese.
Okay
I never found any system like this before.
It took my language skills... my speaking skill to a level
but I didn’t think it's possible
I was starting to actually use Chinese.
So, I’m wondering,
how did you come up with the idea for Glossika in the first place?
A lot of people have mixed reviews on this
I think that if you just started out a new language,
especially when you are jumping across language families of what you’ve done.
and to a new language family that you don’t have any experience with.
I think that Glossika is not really intended to be for the absolute beginner.
It's like you should at least have something
that you already knew about this language.
So, I remember,
I started using Glossika
I would just go to the golf course near my house
So I’m just repeating sentences over and over again very loudly
Like "the weather is nice today"
"My sister is a nurse"
These sorts of stuff.
I felt like my speaking was improving.
I didn’t necessarily have the opportunity to speak it though.
I remember one day I met a Taiwanese person back at my university
and she told me she was just getting over a cold.
and I immediately... in Chinese it’s like,
Every time the seasons change, it's easy to get sick.
It's Glossika's sentence about
Every time the seasons change, it's easy to get sick.
and she was looking at me and said like,
Are you Taiwanese?
You sound Taiwanese.
I was like, Wow! The system works.
I was…
It blew my mind.
It sounds something immediately that you could pursue.
and the most ridiculous thing was like
I don’t even think.
I mean like, I did think.
It was just like, that sentence.
You can say the whole sentence
Yeah, and it rolls off your tongue?
And...
I mean, even we are not fluent yet,
in a language we have
Let's say, ”You got the set of twenty phrases you can say really really well.”
you can pass for just like... you know,
you can make a video of just going down to the restaurant and ordering food
And say "Hey look, I can speak this language."
And I think that works for some people.
And...
It's kinda fun
Because it gives you a little bit of rush
Dopamine rush.
Sure
And then, people are like "wow! cool!"
But, if you wanna go deeper,
I think it really requires tens of thousands of reps.
Thousands of sentences.
And make sure that all the sentences have different kind of structure to them.
When we developed Glossika,
One of the things that I wanted to focused specifically on,
was... what we called "syntactic structure"
Okay
The sentence structure
What order all of these things appear in that language
So you have things like
You have a theme, which is usually an object.
It's usually the object that you are manipulating in the sentence.
the light in the bedroom
What can you do to the light?
You can turn the light on
and you can turn the light off
and those actual words,
on and off
are very abstract in very language
It's not how you say them
That's just English
In some languages they're gonna say
Make the light shine
You know, so, these are kinds of things you have to be aware of
when you are learning a language
You can't use the verbatim of the words on and off
That's why I said translation has to be...
You have the glass
What are the underlying meanings
And it's a very easy example to show
So I hope that this has been very motivating for all of our listeners as well.
Absolutely, I know it's being very inspiring for me as well
especially this idea pushing past your boundaries and not setting limits on yourself.
Learning foreign languages is a lesson in respect.
It,s a lesson in becoming aware of...um
It's respecting other cultures
It's understanding other cultures
being aware of other people's existence
of their human... their human identity here on earth.
I'm personally inspired right now to go out there
and start learning a smaller language.
yeah
And, anyway,
Michael, thank you so much for taking the time today to talk to me and do this interview.
Yeah thank you very much
I know I got a lot out of it as someone who's been using Glossika a very long time Yeah thank you very much
I know I got a lot out of it as someone who's been using Glossika a very long time
It's nice to get into the head of the founder
Thank you very much for being here
Thank you very much.
Hope we can do this again sometime Thank you very much.
Hope we can do this again sometime
Yeah great!
Hi, I created Glossika to help you learn a language faster
Be sure to check out our website and download some of the free resources we have available.
And you can also sign up and try learning some languages for yourself.
You can also download the app that we are available in the app store.
Thanks for watching