Hello, Steve Kaufmann here again.
And today I have the pleasure of speaking with Will John, uh, someone that I
spoke to about a year ago, you may remember, uh, and then we're going to
talk about a variety of things having to do with language and maybe sports.
But first, remember if you enjoy these videos, please subscribe,
click on the bell for notifications.
And if you follow me on a podcast service, please leave a comment.
I do appreciate it.
Uh, Will, you were, when we last spoke, you were a soccer player
with an interest in languages.
Maybe you can update us on what you've been doing.
Yeah.
So, uh, I'm still soccer player with a massive interest in languages.
Uh, but this time around, uh, we started a project called Goluremi Languages,
where essentially we just walk around the street and kind of surprise people
uh, with our language ability and, uh, the idea behind the channel is to display
everything that we've learned and also to talk about the methods that we use
in order to actually make this happen.
And, uh, we share a lot of similarities uh, you and I have both been influenced,
uh, quite heavily, as a matter of fact, it was actually pretty much well over a
year that we, we talked, you introduced the name, Stephen Krashen to me.
I had already been using comprehensible input to some, some degree
without even knowing who he was.
And since then I've spoken to him and all this stuff.
So we have a lot of similarities in our methods, but, uh, that's,
that's, that's what's going on.
So now we've got this Goluremi Language YouTube channel and TikTok that's
kind of taken off and it's given us a chance to, you know, to, to step
outside of the world of footballers.
Uh, briefly you played soccer, professional soccer in a number of
countries, just update my listeners.
Yeah.
So, uh, you know, I was, uh, I'm from Kansas City in, in the US and I
started my career playing in the MLS.
So I played for the Chicago Fire.
Uh, and then I played two years in my hometown, I was born in Kansas
City before moving to Europe, playing in the Danish Super League.
Uh, so I played there and I played in Serbia.
I played, uh, back in Finland for a couple of years, um, Croatia where I play now.
Uh, so yeah, it's, it's been an interesting journey.
You know, I can't resist speaking to an American about soccer, I can resist
reminding you that Canada beat the US.
Oh my gosh!
Yes.
Sorry, I just wanted to sneak that in there.
You won't remember.
You'll remember in our, in our first interview, I'm almost certain
that we talked about soccer.
We talked about Canada and I said Canada was on the up.
And you were like, oh, that's surprising.
And here we have proof of this now in this two-zero win.
So Canada's a dark horse.
Without Alphonso, without their star player.
Exactly.
It's a team...
it is.
It is.
You guys are coming up.
All right.
Anyway, leaving that because I'm sure that the Americans will be back.
So we crow while we can crow.
Uh, your interest in languages, is this as a result of you traveling and being...
because the average person from Kansas City, let's say probably doesn't see a
tremendous need for learning languages.
Yeah.
So what was it about your background that made you interested?
The traveling is not a part of it.
Everyone assumes that because, uh, I traveled around, I learn all these
languages when I was in the country.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Of course.
Yes.
When I played in Croatia, when I played in Denmark, I did learn those languages
there, but, uh, I spent three or four days in Italy and I speak Italian.
Uh, I learned French before ever living or playing in a French speaking country.
Um, German is the same.
The catalyst for my language learning is my mother, uh, who
is unfortunately passed away.
But she decided at a young age that it would be better for me to
come home and not watch, I don't know, Pokemon or whatever it was
that I wanted to watch as a kid.
And she said, Nope, you're watching this.
And this was comprehensible input, as it turns out, uh, for kids to
learn Spanish as a second language.
And so I, without knowing it by the time I was around somewhere between 10 and
13, had a pretty good grip on Spanish.
And, uh, that got me to realize that I had learned the language without much
effort at all, as you know, from this, uh, the, the method and the way that, you
know, you guys do do things over at LingQ.
You're not really forcing too much, you know, you don't stress
people to speak and do all this.
So, so that was a huge factor.
And then the book I read the book The Count of Monte Cristo
and that basically sent me...
have you read it, read that book by chance?
A long time ago.
In English.
Yeah.
Sure.
Well, the character just struck me as a 16 year old that he had this ability to
travel around the world that he took all this time and he learned these languages
while he was in prison and all this stuff.
And then he had this ability to just travel and do everything.
I really, it struck me and that's, that's the real reason why I can do this.
I'd like to get back to the whole subject of motivation because it's
such a big part of language learning.
But first, uh, I'm curious to know, you know, it's been more than a
year since we last spoke and you've now launched your YouTube channel.
You've got some videos that have gone viral.
Can you update us on what you've been doing?
Yeah.
So, uh, we, we stopped I think it was at the end, it might've even been just
off air in the last, uh, you asked, you know ... and I said, uh, in English, "no",
because I just got into Sweden and, uh, so yeah, I, uh, I learned Swedish, you know,
uh, at a comfortable level now that I can communicate and now it's been, been great.
Uh, you know, the motivation and it's so interesting for all the people
out there that are trying to learn it's it's regardless of the language.
And it's just something that I just, I like to hammer into people who are here
that have just started their language journey or are about to, you will
be super motivated at the beginning.
You will gain, uh, quite a bit at the beginning.
Thanks to...
you will hit a dip.
It is guaranteed.
You might not hit it in 10 days.
You might not hit it in a week, but it will come.
You will stall at some point.
And you've just got to push through that.
Uh, you might even need to take a break.
Uh, I'm not saying to quit, uh, you know, if you've lost all passion
for it, then it might not have been the best choice, but if you're still
interested in it, that dip part right there is the, is the turning point.
Because if you can get through the dip and stick to it and keep your
passive listening up and a little active listening and a little bit
active speaking, stuff like that, you generally start this exponential jump up.
Uh, if you know, if you're following the method, correctly.
So, um, yeah, you know, uh, I would say just to be aware of
that, because motivation will wane, uh, you know, when you pop into a
conversation that you feel as, oh my God, I can't understand anything.
What am I doing with my life?
You know?
So then, so, uh, and so you're motivated obviously to learn languages.
You're also motivated to help people learn languages.
I can sense your enthusiasm, passion, and so forth and how, oh, so what
are you actually, what are the kinds of activities that you have gotten.
yourself involved in?
In language learning?
Hmm.
Oh gosh.
Yeah.
You do said something about you're on YouTube...
oh, gosh.
Yes.
So, uh, so right now we filmed...
Goluremi Languages.
Yes.
Go check it out.
So Goluremi is the name of our, obviously we have a, we have a rather large,
uh, soccer, YouTube channel and soccer company named Goluremi, my middle
name is Oluremi, and we just put the word G for goal the Spanish word goal.
We mashed that together.
Goal!
Exactly.
And, um, yeah, so we have filmed videos, uh, language videos,
in I believe Sweden in Croatia.
We just did one in New York where we spoke to, uh, we went to Little Italy
and just wanted to find out if the people there could speak Italian and that video,
it's been popped all over places and we're going to, we've just been asked
to be a part of a documentary now from, from that video and all this stuff.
So, uh, you know, we've had some, some guys and that's obviously our goal
is to, is to reach people like you as well to kind of give people a good
base of language learning understanding to tackle it from different ways.
I mean, I think one of the things that you see in this is that many of
the successful polyglots, uh, like you, they have certain different
methods, but they, they all have a few things that are just, they have to...
Luca Lampariello uses this, but Steve also uses this.
They might differ on a few little things, but it's just clear that
there's a pattern there and we want to kind of point that out for people.
So that's, that's the goal of the channel and that's what you'll find there.
And that's kind of just, what we've been up to is, is, is, uh, speaking
to people in the, in these different languages, shocking them, doing some
of these old videos that you've seen online, where you kind of shock people.
Those are always fun.
The reaction's great.
And then the other goal is to simply educate people on the best methods,
because it is truly, probably still plural, even though there's a lot of
similarities and, uh, you know, making it simple for people to do that.
That's it.
That's what we're about.
You know, you mentioned the dip.
That's interesting because one of the reasons for that dip is that when we
start into a new language, we achieve a fair amount of success initially from
knowing nothing about the language, not understanding anything, all of a
sudden we can understand something.
We can say something we're very impressed with ourselves.
But then the reality is that a word frequency declines very, very
quickly so that, uh, the initial few months we're meeting the
same words over and over again.
And then suddenly as we start to hit words that don't appear that often it's
harder and harder to remember them.
And that's where it's, I think so important to get into content of interest.
You can actually get to something that you're actually interested
in hearing about it, reading it.
Then that sort of the interesting nature of the content will keep you going,
because I have not found that, like after the, I consider it more of a plateau, not
like you have a sudden dip and then all of a sudden you take off again and it, you
settle into a sort of a, a long distance.
You start off sprinting then pretty soon you realize this is a long distance.
It's a 50 kilometer.
This is the 90 kilometer Vasaloppet in Sweden.
It's a long road anyway.
But I agree with you that the successful language learners were...
polyglot is a bit intimidating.
Most English speakers don't even know the word, uh, but successful language
learners have many, many things in common.
What are some of the main things in common that you have found?
It's a really good question.
So what we have found so far, and obviously we haven't made the
exhaustive, uh, list yet, but what...
it's clear a good understanding of why they're starting to learn the
language they chose, even if they want to learn many languages they
generally, the successful ones, the ones that, and by successful,
I mean that they are relative...
a relatively short amount of time is used to learn the language: one
year, six months, uh, you know, this, something like this, not like 10 years
to learn one, one new language, uh, they choose, they choose that language
out of, out of an absolute huge desire.
They focus then on one language for the most part.
Now it's not that most polyglots do choose uh, don't, don't study more than one
language, but what tends to happen is, uh, one becomes more of a focus, one language
kind of rules out in the brain, uh, you know, and, uh, it, it, it seems that
they have a main, they have a main focus.
It, uh, you know, you might end up dreaming in this
and doing things like that.
The other is the frequency.
Like you, we've kind of touched on, but it's every day, regardless of if it's
five minutes and people just cannot quite yet understand the importance of
this, but the exposure that you have in your mother tongue is enormous.
And you got it every day when you were a kid, whether you
liked it or not, uh, because you didn't control your environment.
And if you're looking to learn another, uh, language you
cannot have these massive gaps.
That's something that all polyglots has do not have in their success.
They do not have like a six to seven day, you know, just to stop in the
middle of their, their, their learning.
It's a constant every day thing.
Uh, comprehensible input as we've kind of spoken about.
And for the people that Steve can probably explain it much better than I can, uh, but
comprehensible input, uh, is a...And the way that I describe it as most polyglots,
if they don't know about it early on, they will stumble on and find it.
They will stumble their way to it, through all the methods, maybe the
apps and the extensive grammar research that they make us do in all schools
and stuff, which doesn't tend to, you know, have a great success rate.
Uh, those are, those are the, the key factors, um, that is
more or less what we found.
Everything else outside of that is a bit supplemental.
Um, so being able to focus, being able to concen...
obviously there's things like concentration.
You can, I've talked about meditation with some guys.
I know they do it before they study.
And that's something that I'm huge into deep work, you know, being able to shut
off your phone, being able to...these, these sort of things will amplify
your, your, your ability to learn.
And, uh, they shouldn't necessarily be taken seriously
because the best guys do do that.
And I think, uh, that's, that's something that can't be taken for granted, you know,
um, in the whole, in the whole, right.
And of course the trigger is motivation and the motivation can be, as you say, it
can be, you know, focused on one language, but I don't want to discount the people
who are just curious about languages and who study a lot of languages.
And I, I mean, the stereotype is that someone from the Heartland of north
America is not going to be interested in languages and I can't help but...
when we talk about people who dabble in a lot of languages, curious, who work
curious about a lot of languages, I can't help, but remember Moses McCormick.
I don't know if you're familiar...
We, sorry to interject.
And I, I should just, I just want to put this in here because
it's actually kind of tragic.
I mean, obviously we all know Moses' story, but Moses and I before
obviously Goluremi Language got started just, uh, just recently Moses
and I had had been in an exchange.
We'd been in a constant exchange because he was not too far from
me when I was always in the US.
And we continually, we continually kind of pushed it back.
We keep, we kept delaying it because it was just like, oh, I come home every
six months I come home, you know, I'll, I'll be home we'll be able to do it and
we'll do this cool level up together.
You know, these two African-American guys, he speaks a lot of Asian languages.
I speak some Eastern European languages and it would just blow up the
internet with this cool, cool thing.
And we kept delaying it.
We kept delaying.
And then I woke up one day and he had passed away.
Wow.
It is extremely tragic.
And aside from his, see, what, what impressed me with him was first
of all, he was a very generous person, generous with his time.
And he was, uh, he had a very gentle storytelling, casual approach,
which I found very effective.
But the big thing about him, I think from a, the point of view of
language learners is his curiosity.
So he wasn't learning a language because he had a girlfriend, can
I get a job or work for a company.
He was genuinely curious in languages and I think successful language learners.
They have to have curiosity.
If you aren't curious about another language, how it works in other
culture, it's difficult to drum up.
Even if you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever it
is, you have to be curious.
And, and the other thing about him is he comes from, he came
from a background, like it's not like he went to a prep school.
No, I mean, I gather, he grew up, what's known in the states
as the projects or something.
So it's not like a tremendously stimulating environment.
And so I don't know what stimula...
what's got him going with, you know, but obviously you can be in any situation,
if you have that level of curiosity.
Uh, and, and you are disciplined enough to, you know, commit the time necessary.
You can learn, focus on one language and focus on a number of languages,
but it's got to start with curiousity.
So I think that's a big part of it.
For sure.
Yeah.
No, I mean, by no means I would want to deter anyone from
studying more than one language.
I mean, I do, I do do that now, especially this, you know, Moses had
such an incredible ability to draw on his knowledge and just to kind of
get these things to stick for him.
He may not have had, you know, an in-depth knowledge of Macedonian for instance, But
he spent enough time in that, that he...
He didn't pretend.
No, by no means.
And it doesn't matter.
And I hope that that, people get that point too.
Right.
That's not the point here of, I mean, I I've hardly rarely have seen any, any,
any, uh, successful language learner that says that you have to speak perfectly.
Otherwise don't do it.
Don't start.
And I think a lot of people have that issue.
They have that block and it's a, it stops people from, from speaking or
from trying and, and stuff like that.
So, yeah, no, if you're, if your goal is, I'm just interested in kind of just
connecting with people, because honestly, if you can just learn two words in another
language and it's a random language and you meet these people and you say the
word it's over, you guys are best friends.
If you just spoke a little Swahili to the guy, you know,
you've, I'm sure you've had that.
Oh, yeah.
So what I would suggest now, because we're also going to do an interview
here for Will's channel and we're going to leave a link to Will's
channel in the description box.
And in that interview, Will's going to ask me a bunch of questions.
I'm not quite sure what, but one of the things we're going to do is
to speak in different languages.
So if you want to hear us speak in different languages, I suggest that
you mosey on over to Will's channel for the continuation of this discussion.
And we'll just end it here, but thank you very much for coming on, on my channel.
And we'll be following.
Thanks a lot.
Good to be back.