But when I get asked that question again, what's the best way to go
about learning a new language?
You know, what do you do in your first month?
Right.
I often tell people that you can do a lot worse than just grab a
textbook and just flick through it.
You know, just read...
just quickly look at the grammar points.
Don't do any of it.
Don't start studying, but just look through, see what the grammar points are.
Put it on the map because once you've got that, um, general awareness of the
kind of key rocks grammaticaly, the rocks of meaning if you like, the way
meaning is expressed in the language.
Once you have an awareness of that territory, then that,
that really does I think...
it is very helpful.
And then you just put flesh on the bone after that, as you, as
you carry on and, and, um, and, and actually consume content.
And that tends to sort of repeat that pattern.
In other words, there's this Sufi saying, you can only learn what you already know.
And we all had the experience that we don't notice anything until all
of a sudden something is pointed out to us and we notice it everywhere.
And so to that extent, I think some initial overview of the
grammar helps us notice things that we might otherwise not notice.
Uh, It's not enough.
So I do think as I...
getting back to my earlier point, that I would like to see, uh, audio books
of say Portuguese grammar or Japanese grammar or whatever it might be with lots
of examples, no quizzes, no exercises.
I am totally against any form of quiz or exercise.
It's all about exposure, but when a certain concept is introduced,
then there should be 10 examples.
So we get a concentrated dose of whatever, you know, two
forms of past tense or whatever.
It might be an explanation, 10 examples, all in the target
language, all with audio.
And you can listen to that and it's divided up into, uh, you know,
chapters, verbs, nouns, whatever it might be, adjectives, conjunctions,
and you can be listening to this sort of explanation of the language in the
target language with lots of examples.
So it's meaningful by that time you're curious.
Now you want to get better at this.
But you want it in the target language.
It's meaningful input.
It's meaningful to me.
I listen to it.
It's just a thought.
I think that the grammar right now is sort of focused on trying to
teach the grammar to people who don't yet have much experience with the
language and expecting them then to write this test and get it right.
My view is until they've had enough experience with the language,
they're not going to get it right.
Or they might get it right and then get it wrong and then get it right.
Uh, it's not by doing exercises that they're going to be better.
On the other hand, someone who is already at this B1 B2 level, give
them something that they can treat as meaningful input, comprehensible
input, and sort of start to refine their, their accuracy in the language.
And that's why we always get these examples of students who will say,
you know, why is it that's I, uh, I always, whenever I'm talking with my
tutor in a, in a lesson or I'd never have any problem and I can always get
the answers right in my textbook, but then when I'm out on my own, it's like
I freeze up and I, and I can't get anything meaningful out of my mouth.
It's it's it's for that, it's for that exact reason.
Um, so you were talking about, I guess having a huge arsenal of examples.
So you're, you're talking about having the explanation and then just pages
of examples in the target language?
No, 10 is enough because let's say there's 50 points or a hundred
points that you want to cover.
You're not going to cover every possible situation in the language, but 50, or...
I bought a book once on Russian called 52 Patterns in the
Russian Language, it was great.
That's how it was structured.
And what would have been good there would have been an audio book to acompany it.
So there's X number of patterns in the language that if you have these
patterns, you can speak the language...
Do you find that meaningful input for you?
Because you described that as input that's meaningful for you.
And I'm curious about that because I I've used programs like this in the past where
it's just a huge numbers of examples and sentences one after the other.
And I just get, I find myself getting bored very quickly, precisely
because I don't find it meaningful.
And it's one of those things where, you know, this is the danger
between pedagogy and just content.
Isn't it?
Because, because with content, you, you know, you're going to win in the end,
you know, you'll get there in the end.
And then with the pedagogy you've got a leg up.
You can explain it more, but then how do you stay motivated?
It's got to find that balance in between.
And I always...
Well, you know...
yeah.
So, I mean, it's going to be a part of your strategy.
It's not the main thing.
The main thing is listening to content that is inherently more compelling,
but I can listen to my Persian podcasts and there, there are patterns there
that, you know, I know what they mean but I'm not sufficiently aware of them
so that when I speak with my person tutor, I can use them correctly.
And I have the feeling of...
certainly I try to focus in I'll...
I, I have a book in I'll go through and see some of these grammar points.
I have the feeling that it helps me notice these things so that eventually
when I speak, I got them right more often than I'm getting them right now.
So, yeah, there's always the danger, whatever you're doing you
don't know if it's doing any good.
You're flipping through flashcards.
Am I learning something?
I don't know.
I'm reading the dictionary.
Am I Learning something?
I don't know.
We don't know, but I have the feeling that I would listen to it.
I would listen to it.
And certainly the Russian book helped me with my Russian patterns.
Um, so it's just, it's a minor point.
It's not the main, the main thing, I agree with you, is still stories.
But um...
Let me ask you this Steve, what have you, what have you, you know, it's
been a couple of years since the, since the pandemic now and I can,
I assume if it, can, I assume that you've your language learning is
accelerated during the pandemic, or do you, did you find yourself doing more?
Not Really?
Um, no.
I mean, uh, uh, I would say about the same I put in my hour, hour and a half.
Um, you know, in the evenings or whatever, I listen while I'm washing the dishes.
I wouldn't say it's accelerated.
What have you, what have you learned in the last two years
about, about language learning?
What, is there anything that surprised you or that has, that you've come to
believe in the last couple of years?
Yeah, I think that, uh, I spend an awful lot of time generating meaningful content.
And so the, if to the extent that we can make that easier for people uh,
we save ourselves a lot of time, the amount of time that I go to YouTube and
I put, you know, podcast on history and Arabic, uh, put it in Arabic and look for
something and don't find anything useful.
Uh, so I th...no, that might be because I'm into Arabic and Persian, but, uh,
and then I look at, uh, you know, uh, again, Sahra who lives in Iran, she's
put together this sort of 26 part stories on the history of Iran, each story then
followed by these certain questions.
Uh, phenomenal stuff.
If I had something like that on the history of Egypt, on the history of, um,
the Levant, you know, to me, content is the big thing, making content better.
Granted I've been in sort of languages where there is less content available
than say English, Spanish, whatever.
So content, because fundamentally it's still 80% compelling input,
a certain amount of time spent with the nuts and bolts of the
language to help you notice that.
And then when you have the opportunity to use it.
So I'm not a believer in talking your way to fluency.
I think you build up your potential in the language, and then when you get
the opportunity, you go for it without worrying about the mistakes you can have.
So none of that has changed.
It's just that there's this explosion of available content
and how do we best access it?
How do we make it easier for people to find it?
That was a big part of what we did at LingQ with our new 5.0 is to try, you
know, you've got now the format that Netflix uses or Spotify uses to make
our library look a bit more like that.
So people can find what they're looking for.
Content is key.
That's, that's my big sort of take away from the past two years.
Yeah, I, I, I, I do.
It's interesting.
You say that the amount of time that you spend looking for content, because
it's often the same, the same...
I find a similar thing happening, and I think this is, this is an area
where for any, you know, budding entrepreneurs listening, uh, I think
this is an area where there's still a great deal of work to be done.
Is it aggregating, aggregating, compelling content, which is organized by level
in some meaningful way in different languages into, into, into one place.
Because I think there's lots of, it's easy to find stuff that's, that's,
that's, that's graded by level.
Um, and it's easy to find stuff that's compelling.
It's extremely difficult to find, to find stuff that is both of those things.
And I guess, I guess that's because we are all such individuals and we're all,
you know, we all have, uh, the, the, the kinds of information that we'd like
to surround ourselves with the kind of types of concept that we like to, that
we like to, um, to, to, to consume.
But I think something, something along those lines that matches the breadth
of the whole internet, you know, where we could do where content could somehow
be, be bought in from any source and filtered by interests, filtered by,
but by level, I, I think that would be.
Uh, yeah, perhaps it's not possible, perhaps is asking too much, you
know, I still find that 99% of things I ever try and watch on Netflix,
I turn off within 20 seconds.
So maybe it's, it's, it's, it's wishful thinking, but, but that is that single
source of, um, of, of compelling, high quality, properly graded language
content would be certainly for me would be, uh, a real, um, a real holy grail.
Yeah, I think that a number of things I agree with you, and of course, um,
lots of different people are going to put out all kinds of different content.
People's tastes are different.
And some way of being able to find what suits your level, tastes, whatever.
There are ways of making stuff more accessible, like, uh, you know, at
LingQ we have the sort of translation interspersed with the text, so you
can turn that off or turn that on.
So even though it might be difficult for you, even though you might find
it, you know, you know, like quite a chore to look up every word,
but if you've got the translation interspersed, it kind of helps you along.
Uh, you can go sentence by sentence, which helps you along.
So all of these things, I fact, I think that link kind of helps you
to deal with more difficult texts.
You know, historically people have said you can't deal with content
that has more than 5% new words.
This is Paul Nation of New Zealand was, you know, n+1 or whatever, trying to
limit the amount of new words there so that you're constantly able to infer the
meaning and you can read more comfortably.
And I think that's the big advantage of being, you know, using a
digital text and, or a system like LingQ because you can deal with
stuff that has 10, 15% new words.
Um, the other thing is that, um, what was I going to say?
Yeah, Netflix obviously is there's a lot of stuff that's
very silly there on Netflix.
But, um, some of these cartoon texts are, are, are tremendous.
And so it's, it's really up to the individual to find what he wants.
And again, we try at LingQ to if people like certain texts, more than other
texts and this whole idea of relating it to stuff that you looked at before.
So if you're interested in history, you'll see more history stuff suggested
at you so that you can start to get closer to people's interests.
Um, we do try to have a thing in there about, you know, you, you sort of
self-assess yourself at a certain level.
So theoretically things at that level are being suggested to you.
Um, maybe so, um, you know, obviously someone who said I'm low or intermediate,
they're more likely to find your content, let's say then, uh, political podcasts.
So there are ways that different platforms can help people find stuff that's at their
level and at their level of difficulty.
However, I still think at link we're just scratching the surface of what's available
in all these different languages.
And there's a lot of change coming down the road as well because Google,
for example, are now moving into areas of kind of instantaneous translation.
So it, so, so they can actually listen to, and you see this on YouTube with
multi-lingual subtitles and things like that, whereby somebody can, you know,
be talking live, imagine we were doing this on a live stream and then Google
will be live translating that into, you know, whatever other language and
that's, I mean, it's, it's still, it's still not great, but it's a hell of a lot
better than it was even a few years ago.
And so I think there are things coming down the track in the next and
the next five, 10 years, which, you know, even if translation, machine
translation never gets to a place where it's good enough, which I
think, you know, I I'm skeptical over.
I think that the, the, the technology that it will enable for creators around
the world and people to just start to make things I think is super exciting.
And, um, yeah, I'm very, I, you know, I'm kind of a technology
skeptic in general when it comes to language learning, but I've recently
become a little bit more excited.
So I'm kind of, I'm interested to see what the next few years will hold.
Well, I think as, for example, if you want to know how to say something in
your target language, you can write it all up in, in your native language and
put it on Google Translate and you've got a pretty good idea of, uh, how
to say that in the target language.
Uh, now unfortunately text to speech is kind of hard to listen to.
So I don't think you could be regularly listening to that kind of stuff.
But if you were trying to zoom in on a certain kind of, sort of
terminology, you could write it all up in your native language, get it
translated, and you can study that and acquire those terms, uh, also when
it comes to, um, modern technology, I use automatic transcription a lot.
I will go into podcasts in Arabic and in Farsi and I put them on Happyscribe
and I get back like, uh, particularly in Persian, it's so accurate.
The only thing missing is, is good punctuation, but it's very accurate.
There's the odd word that doesn't make sense.
But 98% of it makes sense.
So I don't have a transcript for whether it'd be podcasts in Arabic or in Farsi.
And I just go to happy trends, happy scribe.
And I have texts and I import the MP3 file into LingQ.
I import the text into LingQ and I'm away and I'm learning and, uh, it's it's
events that are happening every day.
So I'm quite familiar with these events.
So there again, I'm using technology.
Yeah.
And when I think thinking back to how things have changed, I bought some books
on sort of media Persian or media Arabic.
And so they'll have, and the book was written five years ago.
And there you have, you know, newspaper articles from 2015.
Well, I don't need newspaper articles from 2015.
I can listen to a podcast yesterday and have it transcribed.
So there's no need for that.
Uh, one other thing that I find very annoying is like, I have these wonderful
textbooks on Egyptian Arabic, lots of content, lots of material, and I
can get the audio from their website, but I can't get the digital text.
So it's full of vocabulary that I don't know, I can't import that into LingQ.
Uh, it just seems to me that, uh, you know, once I bought the book,
I should be able to get the text so that I can more easily look up words.
A lot of publishers make the audio available, so that's good.
But, uh, another thing that bugs me is they make, they divide the
audio up into 30 seconds snippets, which is a hell of a job if you
want to listen to something, right?
I want to listen to five minutes at a time, not 30 seconds.
Anyway, that's all personal peeves.
But yeah, we could go on for quite a while here.
Yeah.
Well, let's say...
we need to, we need to have, you know what we need?
We need a, we need our version of the state of the union.
Every year, it picks up this state of a state of language,
language technology.Just keep it on an annual basis.
Yeah, I think though what you're doing is very valuable, uh, stories
and you're providing a little more of the sort of pedagogical support,
which we don't really do at LingQ.
Although we do have grammars for most of the languages if
people want to consult them.
Uh, but the main issue is to have stories that are, uh, More comprehensible,
because if people understand, they have a sense of achievement,
they're encouraged to continue.
A lot of people, they run into something that's too difficult
and they're discouraged.
Uh, the other thing of course, that's very important is, uh, I haven't
because I have an Arabic book and I can't really read it yet, but the
audio has, the audio is so important.
Uh, most textbooks are narrated by people who are very bored and if they're bored,
then the person listening is bored.
And so it's so important to make the narration lively.
Uh, and so that's again where authentic material on YouTube is more
lively and therefore inherently more interesting for people to listen to.
And I think where there's a greater resonance, then we learn better.
And if it's boring, uh, we don't learn.
Yeah.
And that's, that is also one of the great consequences I think, of the general
shift in, in influence, away from the big publishers and towards individuals.
I think it's a very, very good, good change because although it, although
it means that the quality isn't necessarily always there, um, what
it does mean is that you now get to engage with passionate individuals who
are creating content from the heart.
And that is something, you know, there's a reason that that publishers are
partnering with the likes of, of me and, and, uh, and Benny, for example, it's
just like, there's, there's a kind of energy and drive and, and, uh, innovation.
Right.
Which, which is symptomatic of the, of the, the shift away from, from, from the
corporation to the individual creator.
And that's, I think that's, that's a really fantastic development and, and
yeah, looking forward to seeing more.
So we should then do an annual review of the state of language learning.
The state of language learning.
That's it.
Yeah.
22nd of March every year.
We'll yeah...
Right.
So we've gone on for quite a while here.
It's been great.
I could go and I know you could go on for another hour, but maybe
we should, uh, stop it here.
And, uh, we'll commit to doing this, uh, again, uh, the first of spring.
Okay.
Sounds good.
Thanks so much, Steve.
It's been a real pleasure.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye.