Steve Kaufmann here.
Um, today, you know, I'm going to, first of all, I wanna say that I did, um, a, a
webcam interview with Luca, the wonderful Italian polyglot, and, uh, we are going
to put it up here at my YouTube channel.
But I'm waiting until I'm away because while I'm away, I can't do any videos.
I'm gonna be in Australia and New Zealand.
And so, uh, Alex is gonna put up some pictures and, uh, I think
we went, Luca and I went at it for about 40 minutes or so.
So it's gonna be 10, at least a four, uh, sessions.
So that's when you'll be seeing those interviews that I did with,
with Luca, just so that there's not a blank for a whole month.
Um, you know, I want to talk about today the subject of language learning
um, something that's kind of been running around in my mind and this is
what I would call the fundamental...
this, I, I come up with all these things that are the key to language learning.
And I may have used this before, I don't know, but it suddenly dawned
on me that, you know, the most important thing is, is it fun?
Do you enjoy doing it?
You know, uh, and, and I mentioned this, you know, in my seven secrets to
language learning, I think the first one was spend the time and the second
was to do things that you enjoy doing.
But the subject came up because, uh, at a forum at LingQ, someone mentioned the
gold list, which is a, a form of, of sort of handwritten, spaced repetition,
devised by David James, who's a wonderful polyglot, uh, Englishman, who lives
in Poland and speaks, I don't know however many languages, and speaks at
least five of them very, very fluently, including Russian, german, I believe,
and, and I'm not sure which others.
And he has a, a, a variety of persona at YouTube, one of which is Victor Huliganov.
So you can easily find him.
And, uh, he has a lot of useful, uh, information on language learning, and
I've watched some of his stuff and I agree with a lot of what he says.
And he has devised this system, which he calls the gold list.
And the gold list consists essentially of the following, and that is to, to, uh,
uh, maintain lists of words and phrases to write them out longhand, uh, in writing.
Therefore, to write the target language, uh, down one side and the
translated meaning on the other side.
Typically have a list of 25 or 30 of such words, and I might get this wrong,
your best to go off and see one of his videos are Google for gold list.
But, um, the idea is that you write these out and then forget about them
for 14 days, that the mere, uh, fact of writing them down is good for you and
then puts them somewhere in your brain.
Uh, if you look at them 14 days later, you will probably
remember about a third of them.
So then you take the remaining two thirds and, uh, create another list with these.
Uh, and then you look at it 14 days later.
And so what's interesting in all of this is a, that you're writing,
which is I think, a good thing to do, b, they're, you're not deliberately
trying to learn it, cram it.
And this is one of the points where I very much agree with David James, and that
is that a lot of our deliberate learning activity, forcing ourselves to learn
a declension table or a grammar rule.
Even answering questions or any of this stuff that's hard work uh, it basically
just puts things into our short-term memory and that's, that's what they do
in, in French classes here in Canada.
And that's why kids graduate and can't speak French, even though
they passed their French every year.
Some of them did quite well in French, but they were cramming
stuff into their short term memory.
And now, uh, 10 or 20 years after graduating, they don't
remember a thing, or very little.
Uh, so his thing is just write them down, look at them two weeks later.
So I decided that I would try to do this.
Uh, I would try, I said I would do this for my reading that I do away from LingQ
away from the computer in Czech, and also with some of the words that I can
just, you know, take a random vocabulary list from our vocab section, or take a
tagged list of connector words in Czech.
Or, you know, date of case or whatever I wanna do and start writing them out.
So I've started doing this and so then there was much discussion at our forum at
LingQ about what's effective in language we're learning and what's not effective.
And some people thought that the gold list was a good idea and some people
thought it wasn't a good idea and some people said, yeah, I've been doing
it and you know, basically it works.
And that kind of basically something clicked in my brain and I, I realized
that most things uh, Anki works.
Uh, you know, Super Memo works.
You know, these flashcard SRS systems work.
Um, probably Benny's, uh, you know, go out and walk around and talk to people works
at least for him or some of the time.
I don't know.
So everything can work if you enjoy doing it.
But there's no point in telling someone who doesn't like to do flashcards that
he should do flashcards because it works.
Because any evaluation of how well things work is, is necessarily subjective.
We think it works becasue we do it and we're improving so it must work.
Does it work better than something else?
Well, somebody else is doing something else.
So, you know, how do you evaluate?
The, the big thing is, do you want to spend your time?
Becasue in language, unless you've got unlimited time to spend on language
learning, most of us have a limited amount of time, unless you're a full-time
language learner as I was with Chinese back 40 odd years ago, most of the time
you've got an hour or so a day to spend, so where do you wanna spend your time?
And that to me becomes the most important criterion.
So now I've been going at this gold list thing and I quickly discovered that I was
not at all interested in creating a list of words that I didn't know the meaning
of in my reading away from the computer because it distracted me from reading.
I didn't wanna do it.
Even if there's 15 words on the page that I don't understand, I'd rather
just read through and have an imperfect understanding of what I'm reading,
rather than each time being distracted from my reading and have to write this
down and either then or subsequently looking the word up in a dictionary.
That's just, I don't wanna do it.
So if I don't want to do it by definition, my new definition, it's not
effective because I don't wanna do it.
So how long would I keep doing something that I don't want to do?
And even if you're in school and the teacher's gonna force you to do something,
I don't think things that you are forced to do are gonna be that effective.
I notice, for example, you know, another subject comes up is how
often should you listen to content?
I find it boring to listen to the same thing over and over again.
Is it effective to listen over and over again or should you be constantly
going out, going on to new stuff?
Again, it depends on what you like to do.
If it's interesting content and if it's a nice voice such as this Czech
material that I found here, uh, history, I can listen over and over again.
Whereas the news from Radio Prague, I can only listen to it
once because it's read in a very dead pan voice by the newscaster.
I, I cannot listen to it more than once.
So, but both are effective, you know, getting a new article from
Radio Prague on what's happening in Czech Republic, politically,
whatever it's adding to my vocabulary.
By the same token, listening more than once to this other material, which is
really making me, you know, familiar with alignment, that's effective too.
So again, it's whatever you find fun.
That's, it's kind of easy.
And so when you look at all of the research that's done by, uh, you
know, second language acquisition experts, and they study the effect of
studying word lists or doing this or doing that, it really doesn't matter.
The only thing is, if, if you're a teacher, how, what can you find that
the, that the student actually likes?
Some people, I, I must say some of the time I like flipping through my,
my flashcards, uh, but I own, I now do them the easiest way possible.
In other words, I put on the flashcard the term, it's the new word, the
translation into English and the captured phrase, phrase from LingQ.
And I just go through them, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing.
I don't want to rack my brain to try and think what the meaning is.
I would rather just expose myself to the flashcards.
It's a break from reading.
It's something I can do while I'm waiting somewhere.
I just open up my, uh, you know, my iPhone or whatever, and I, and
I just go through the flashcards.
And I don't look to the other side becasue I've, I've got everything on the one side
and all I do is change the status of them.
So if I move it to status four, it won't come back.
And if it's a status, two or three, that determines how frequently
it comes back into my deck.
But I'll just go through them as quickly as I can.
So, you know, uh, again, people say writing something
out long hand is good for you.
And that's one of the things that, that David, uh, James says, and I'm
sure that's true, and I'm, I'm going to continue with this, uh, this
gold list, at least for a while.
Uh, I have created, I created four lists yesterday and four lists today, but I
time myself and each list, you know, if I write 25 words down, it takes me
eight minutes to do that for one list.
So, you know, if I do four lists, because that's only 25 words.
So if one wanted to get up to a hundred words a day, that's four times eight.
That's 32.
That's a half hour.
That's a half hour now.
Um, I don't know, do I wanna spend maybe one third of all my available
learning time on making these lists that I'll look at in 14 days?
And then I'll have to make another list with two thirds of them, plus
the new words that I'm adding.
Pretty soon it won't be, um, 30 minutes a day.
It'll be more than that.
So it's probably effective.
But is that where I choose to spend my time?
I suspect that I would.
The minute I leave those lists and I go back to reading about, uh, you know,
what's happening in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1850s and reading about
it in Czech and learning all those new words and then listening to it,
uh, in my car, the same thing that I read and am acquiring vocabulary from.
I just find that more enjoyable.
And so I think they can both be effective and ultimately what matters
is which do you find more enjoyable?
One other thing that David James said, which I thought was very interesting.
Uh, but I, I didn't have time to hear the whole video, but he talks, he has
this video where he talks with, uh, a girl from Manitoba actually who asks him
five or seven questions about his system.
And one of the questions is, how do you get from passive
vocabulary to active vocabulary?
And his first question is, well, why do you want to activate your vocabulary?
I mean, I think that's a very important question.
If you are happy listening and reading and enjoying the language
as I'm doing, yeah, activate one day I will, but there's no panic.
Uh, I have started speaking with my tutors in Czech.
I have, uh, probably had 15 or 20 sessions with them and I enjoy it and it's good,
but there's no panic, there's no pressure.
And he says that, you know, if you have enough of a passive vocabulary,
when you are put in a situation where you need to activate that vocabulary,
it will activate within three days.
I don't know what basis he has for saying that.
Uh, I expect to go to Prague in October.
We'll see if all my passive vocabulary activates in three days.
But I think the big point is when you need to use the language,
when you need to speak more.
If you have a large passive vocabulary, you will be able to speak.
It'll come quite quickly, but there again, it'll be something that you want to do.
So if you want to speak early, If you don't wanna speak
early, don't worry about it.
If you have, I was speaking to a student in Japan who is, has a job interview and
she wants to improve her spoken English.
Okay?
Now you have to really focus on improving your spoken English, and there's things
that, that you can do, and you're motivated to do it now, so that's fine.
But, um, again, uh, I guess I just, I suddenly realized that
the, um, I had made some notes.
I wonder if I left anything out that I wanted to talk about.
Yeah, there was just the thing that that, uh, David James speaks about
short-term and long-term memory.
I don't understand all these things about short-term and long-term memory, so I just
think a lot of these things don't matter.
I think the, there's only one rule.
I'm more and more convinced of this, uh, do what you like doing.
So in my case, it's listening and reading to things of interest and
occasionally taking a break from it to review words and, and slowly when I get
the urge, occasionally here and there speaking to people, uh, in the language.
Now it is important to find content that you enjoy, where you enjoy the voice,
where you enjoy the subject matter.
Uh, you enjoy the way words are used.
Uh, and, uh, I've been lucky because in Russian, lots of stuff available
between literature and audio books and Ekho Moskvy, uh, which now is under
some threat.,By the way, in Russia, it looks like Putin is, is gonna try
to, uh, shackle them to some extent.
And this, this wonderful material that I found in, in, uh, on, in Czech and I saw.
So this is again, something we have to do a better job of at LingQ is
make people aware of not only all the good content that our, our members are
creating in our library, but also as they progress, uh, the kind of content
that's available from the internet.
Now we do list quite a few.
Uh, resources, but I'm not sure everybody knows where to find them.
And we were talking about that today and maybe we have to do a better job there.
But anyway, just to leave you with a thought.
If you can find a way to enjoy your language learning, whatever that way is,
that's gonna be the effective way for you.
So that's my thought for today and I kind of went on a bit too
long, but there you have it.
Look forward to your comments.
Thank you for listeninig.