(rich tango music)
(audience applause)
- So, I want to start off by telling the story
that got me started in all this.
Basically, I had just graduated and I moved to Spain.
I went to this dinner.
There was an international exchange group.
People from all around the world.
And I sit beside this guy from Brazil.
Very interesting guy.
He gave me the most impressive multilingual show
I'd even seen in my life.
Basically, another Brazilian came in.
He turned to him and he said something like,
(speaking in a foreign language)
And he turned immediately straight over
to this French girl who was chatting him up
because he was a good-looking guy.
He's like,
(speaking in a foreign language)
And then he turned directly to the organiser,
the Spaniard, and he's like,
(speaking in a foreign language)
And then he turned back to me and he says
with a very strong American accent--
Actually, I can't do American accents.
Sorry.
(audience laughs)
I asked him,
"How did you do this?
"How are you speaking all these languages?"
Because I was actually--
I could only speak English.
This is eight years ago.
I had grown up thinking I just don't have...
I just can't do it.
It's not possible because I took German
and Irish or Gaeilge in school.
I did very badly at them.
So I kind of figured I don't have the language talent,
the language gene, you know.
I figured I knew everything about genetics
even though I didn't study it.
I figured I was sure I don't have the language gene.
I had plenty of other excuses or reasons
that many people can relate to.
I didn't really have the time
or the resources.
And I was too old.
Even though I was 21, I figured that's it.
I'm too old because I'm past the age.
It's like I heard--
Somebody told me that 14 is this cutoff age
that you can't learn a language anymore.
I was sure of that.
I figured you have to learn it as a child.
That's it.
So these are reasons most people have.
I had an extra reason.
It was that I actually was sick when I was growing up
and I had to go to speech therapy.
I actually had trouble learning English
and I still kind of stumble
and pronounce things incorrectly at times.
Most of the things you're hearing me
pronouncing incorrectly now is actually
my Irish accent.
Don't worry about that.
I was sure.
I was a hundred percent sure.
It's not possible.
I asked this guy,
"How are you doing this?
"How are you speaking all these languages?"
And he just said,
"I don't know.
"I'm just trying to speak them.
"Going up to the person and using the language."
And I said,
"No, no. It can't be that simple."
I challenged myself.
I thought, "I'm going to do this.
"I want to learn Spanish."
You know?
Because I'd just moved to Spain and I decided
instead of just having a quick internship
where I just speak in English because
I'd just graduated as an electronic engineer.
So I was just all like right-left brain.
I was good at mathematics.
Bad at languages.
But I figured, no, I can figure this out.
I can find a way to learn this language.
So I dived into everything I could think of.
I went to a course that was very expensive.
There was just three or four other people
in the classroom.
Went to that for several weeks.
Didn't work.
I started studying a lot of books.
Didn't work.
I got some CD courses, some software.
It didn't work.
I tried to read a book.
My first choice was not particularly clever, I think.
It was "El Señor de los Anillos".
The Lord of the Rings.
I thought, "I'll read this. I'll read this in Spanish."
I had my dictionary which I would consult
every second word, basically.
I made it to two pages and then I thought,
"Okay. I'm not going to keep this up."
After six months living in Spain,
I couldn't speak Spanish.
So, if anything, this just convinced me even more
that I don't have this thing.
This magic language gene that people are just born with.
And then I had an epiphany.
This is what I want to share with people.
This is where I'm trying to convince the world
it's not actually about language talent.
I really feel language talent is irrelevant.
Some people might do it a bit better
but that doesn't matter for you.
What I did was I started to speak Spanish.
I don't know if that makes sense right now
but hopefully it will.
The problem was, for six whole months,
I had been studying Spanish.
I'd been studying it so much that
it was making it harder for myself.
I kept seeing all these subjunctives
and definite articles and things that
were just confusing me.
After all the studying,
I was nowhere further.
I didn't really know any words.
Six months and I was still at the stage
of just saying, "Hola. Gracias. Por Favour. Adios."
You know?
Just running off like that.
I just decided I'm going to start speaking the language.
I'm going to get all of these excuses
and ignore them.
That I'm not ready and I need to work more
or I'm not intelligent enough to learn a language.
I just started speaking it and everything changed.
Very soon after that, I was gaining momentum.
A couple of weeks later, I realised I'm actually
doing everything in Spanish.
I'm living my life through this language.
Eventually, I reach the stage where my level
was pretty good.
The thing is you will find people who kind of
would retort that, saying how it's not so possible
for them.
They always have many reasons why they can't
just start speaking.
Hopefully, I can go through a list of the most famous ones
and see if I can convince you that it's not quite...
I really feel anybody can learn a language.
One thing people might say is that they
just don't have the words.
You start learning a language,
you've got no words.
How can you have conversations with somebody?
But, actually, if you're learning a Latin language
like Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese,
what people don't realise is that they've got,
maybe, tens of thousands of words before they even start.
I think like in 1066, the French Normans got into England
and they hung around for a few centuries.
You had like two layers of society.
You had the poor peasants who would speak
the old Germanic English.
And you had the rich noblemen who would speak
something closer to French.
Eventually, these things merged.
So in English, we've got a lot of French vocabulary
which actually happens to be very similar or the same
in Spanish and Italian and French and Portuguese
and so on.
If you learn some of these words,
you get a headstart.
You can figure out without have to learn the language
how you might say these things.
So if you remember the different strata,
the different levels of formality.
Let's say I wanted to say the word "country"
in like Spanish and I forget what it is.
I forget or I don't even know.
I've never come across the word.
Well, how about I try to rephrase that in English.
Can I go back to English?
Instead of country, what's another way to say country?
I could say "nation".
It means almost the same thing.
It's not exactly the same thing.
It's close enough.
Nation is just "nación".
Or "nation or whatever is might be
in the corresponding language.
Or you might think if somebody's knocking on the door,
you can say, "Come in."
And that's fine.
Or you could also say, "Enter."
And "Enter" is from the old kind of French version.
You've got "entrar", "entrer" and so on.
So you've already got some words
but let's say you're going to something far away,
an Asian language.
Middle-Eastern language.
It's not possible nowadays to start a language from zero,
from scratch.
It's not possible because you always have something.
Human beings are interacting all the time.
You have maybe brand names or you've got technology
that uses the same words.
So it would be very hard to find a language
where at least one or all of Coca-Cola,
internet, Obama, where these words would
not be pretty much the same.
(audience laughs)
You know?
And this is pretty universal.
If you can thinks of this and kind of maybe...
I've used brand names to explain myself
and get a point across initially with people.
When you've got this vocabulary,
you can really start getting into learning
the words that obviously have nothing to do
with what's you've come across before.
You can try some memory techniques.
I've got a very bad memory.
I really feel that I've got censorship
in my brain whenever somebody tells me their name.
It's like, you know, "Nice to meet you. I'm beep."
(audience laughs)
I forget it immediately.
I don't have a good memory but, despite that,
I would learn words quickly because I'd try
to make it more fun.
I'd think to myself, when I was learning Spanish,
I took the word for "beach" and I saw it "playa".
I thought, okay.
Well, "playa" kind of looks a bit like
the English word, "player".
So I thought, well, imagine this.
When I think of a player, I think of this of like
a cheesy pickup artist.
And imagine this super over-confident guy
walking down a beach in Spain and trying
to pick up girls and getting a slap in the face.
You know, a very visual image.
From then, I remembered if I see the word, "playa",
that sounds like "player",
then the guy was on the beach.
And it works the reverse as well.
You think of beach, you associate the player
and you go backwards.
So you can learn words very quickly if you learn them
with an association.
It doesn't matter how bad your memory is.
And you can learn phrases.
I like to maybe introduce a bit of music
because I think it's a good place to start
with languages when you get some basic phrases of like,
"Where is the bathroom?", and so on,
things like this.
What I would do if I was learning Italian,
I took, "Where's the bathroom?"
(speaking in a foreign language)
And I thought, I don't know,
I'll take the Big Ben chime.
I sang to myself a couple of times.
(sings in a foreign language)
And I kept doing that and after a couple of times,
it stuck.
And this is despite the bad memory I have.
Words are not a problem.
You can learn a language if you have no words
in it yet.
You have to accept that, actually,
you do have a lot of words.
Thousands if not tens of thousands.
A problem always tell me is grammar.
Now when you learn a language in school
which many of us do,
most of it is grammar.
I have learned German in school and, for me,
German was just "Der/Die/Das" tables
of complicated structures and it
just totally intimidated me.
And this is not a language.
This is not a language.
This is a list of rules that are as good
as mathematics or something like that.
It doesn't work.
The thing about language is language
is a means of communication.
When you try to put it in a box of grammar,
then you're not allowing yourself the freedom
to communicate freely.
I actually like grammar.
I'm not anti-grammar.
I'm not going to say to burn all
the grammar books or whatever.
But what I've found is a lot more effective
is if you embrace speaking and speaking wrongly.
I encourage people to speak with
as many mistakes as possible.
I aim to make at least a hundred mistakes a day
if I'm learning a language.
Then I know I'm getting somewhere
because I'm using it with people.
And I know my grammar is bad at first
but something very interesting happens.
I hated grammar in school.
I took grammar in English,
grammar in Irish Gaeilge,
and grammar in German.
I hated it. It was so boring.
But now, I love grammar
because what happens is I put it aside.
I don't leave it away forever.
I put it aside.
I embrace the language.
I start learning some phrases.
I start meeting some people
and I start using it.
And then, after a couple of months of that,
when I feel the language is a part of me,
where I can communicate and use it with human beings,
I go back to grammar and it's actually very interesting.
It's like an explanation of the story.
It's like, "Ah, that's why they say it that way.
"It's really cool."
Grammar can be very nice if you treat it like that.
Another one is money.
People say I don't have the money.
I've got to go to buy this expensive software.
I have to go to this course I heard about.
I actually find all of these, what they have in common,
is more like the placebo effect.
That you've spent so much money that perhaps
you're going to put in more work because of that.
I think there are components of so many courses
that kind of, unless it's an immersion course,
they miss out a lot on what they really need to discuss.
People guess at what they want.
A few people do get success out of these courses
because they spend so much money.
They hold themselves kind of liable for that.
Something I find is a lot more effective
is if you're just public about it.
I think the reason I did learn Spanish
that first time is because I told everybody.
I didn't just promise myself.
I didn't like make a New Year's resolution:
Speak Spanish someday.
There's seven days in a week and someday
is not one of them.
You need to start now.
I started and I told everybody.
I told all my friends, my family, everybody.
Because I was liable.
I felt responsible.
I had to deliver, otherwise, I'd feel embarrassed.
That's way more powerful than,
"I spent the money so I feel I have to use it."
So money isn't the issue.
You can do all of this for free.
You can meet people for free without having
to travel to a foreign country.
There's such good connexions now.
A lot of social networking sites let you
search per language or,
if there's nobody in your town,
you can actually talk to them over Skype.
So you can learn any language this way.
And another thing I think is very--
I think the biggest thing for people
is that they feel they're going to frustrate
the person they're speaking to.
That's the biggest problem I hear.
You're going to talk to this person
and they're going to get angry.
"You're butchering my language.
"How dare you?"
It doesn't work like that.
I kind of feel this is ironic when I hear people
tell me this.
That they're going to annoy the person they're speaking to.
Well, actually, most people I've talked to
who are kind of considering learning a language,
I see a lot of frustration in their eyes
just from the fact that they don't speak it yet.
I've actually met people here who are
in San Antonio and they are surrounding by Spanish speakers
and they can never communicate with them.
They feel so frustrated by this.
And this is a lifelong amount of frustration
that I feel is so much bigger than any kind of a...
You know, talking to somebody,
that they might kind of roll their eyes or whatever.
But that doesn't happen.
It's actually, among non-English speakers,
I find all around the world,
when you try to speak the language with them,
they're so overjoyed.
They're like, "Wow. He's trying to learn my language.
"He's not expecting everyone in the world
"to speak English."
You actually get encouragement.
People keep telling you,
"You're doing a great job."
Even though you're aware your grammar is bad.
You're using the same ten words over and over again
for the first few days.
But that's fine because you're starting
to communicate with people.
This is the thing that's missing
is this idea of communication.
A language is not this kind of thing
that you test for and that you can either
be right or wrong.
It's not a black or white thing.
It's how human beings talk to one another
and there's no wrong way of doing that.
If your words are a little strange
or you forget to conjugate your verbs or whatever,
people will always understand you.
I'm sure you've heard people speaking English
to you that was a little broken.
You always understand it.
So I think the problem people have with the frustration
is they feel that the whole world will end
if they try to speak the language.
If they go up to this person and try to speak it,
the world will end.
I actually think the opposite.
I think a whole new world will begin
if you try and speak a new language with people.
I really hope that you'll give it a try.
Thank you very much.
(audience applauds)