[Music]
whether it's languages or business
you got to connect you got to connect
emotion while you're negotiating
in the evening when you go out and have
dinner with them drink the beer with
them
and language learning is all about
enthusiasm curiosity enthusiasm
motivation
in fact you need to get the language in
you first through massive listening and
reading
so that then grammar explanations might
start to make sense to you you can't
start with the grammar
this guy's willing to take the time to
learn our language maybe he's going to
be more detailed about working with us
i think the biggest thing about speaking
languages is that more opportunities are
going to come your way
it makes it easier to communicate with
people to persuade people to establish
relationships with people
and we all know that in business
communications relationships are
extremely important
my guest today is a polyglot now for
some of you guys i may say i don't know
what that means that means he speaks a
lot of languages and by the way
nearly 20 languages i think he learned
russian in his 60s just because he
wanted to learn russian
in his 60s and today he's in the process
of learning
farsi and arabic maybe maybe we'll get
him to say a few these languages and
he's got a system on how he learns
languages
and it's very unique and we're going to
talk about that he's also the founder of
link i think him and his son together
founded link with that being said my
guest today steve kaufman steve thank
you so much for being with us on
entertainment my my pleasure my pleasure
looking forward
let me let me ask you so you know i
speak four languages and a little bit of
german but i
speak german because i lived in germany
for two years at a refugee camp right
i speak farsi because i lived in iran
for 10 years i speak
armenian because my mom's armenian i
speak you know assyrian because my dad's
a syrian i speak english because i live
in america but i don't have a
system necessarily to live in a country
and keep learning different languages
what got you to be obsessed with wanting
to learn different languages
well you know the period after the age
of 60 sort of after i retired most of my
life i was in the lumber business i had
a company in lumber
uh but then as i'm you know past the age
of 60 and i learned nine languages
prior to the age of 60 and i had a
certain approach which said that
there's far too much emphasis on grammar
in fact you need to get the language
in you first through massive listening
and reading so that
then grammar explanations might start to
make sense to you you can't start with
the grammar
and so people said well that might work
for chinese which and i'll get
explained to you why i learned chinese
and japanese but people said well that
might work for asian languages but it
won't work for a complicated language
like russian
so i said okay we'll give that a try so
that's why i started learning russian
at the age of 60 using our system using
link
but sort of the reason i started
interlanguages was
that when i was say 18 i got very
interested in french
and you know in montreal which was a
bilingual city but in fact it wasn't it
was
1 million english speakers 2 million
french speakers and they hardly
communicated with each other
that's no longer the case today but that
was the case in the 50s right
and so but then i got keen and language
learning is all about enthusiasm i mean
that's where it starts
curiosity enthusiasm motivation
and so i eventually ended up going to
france i
did my university training in france
came back to canada
i was hired by the canadian government
trade commissioner service
uh they were going to send someone or
train someone in chinese because canada
was getting ready to recognize the
people's republic of china
i volunteered and then i was sent to
hong kong to learn mandarin
then i lived in japan and of course i
then had characters so the japanese was
not so
difficult to learn and then in my lumber
company
japan was a major market for us and so
japanese was very important for me
also we had suppliers in in sweden for
example and even though the swedes are
very good at english
communicating with the mill workers to
explain the japanese quality
requirements etc
just every step along the way languages
were very important to me and so i
learned them
always with a major emphasis on input
and yeah if you live with the language
of spoken that's great
but if you don't you have to create your
own language world that so that you can
get that
immersion steve you said always with a
major emphasis on
input what do you mean by input
listening and reading
put simply in other words your brain has
to get used to the language
uh our brains are pattern
discovering machines our brains are not
as good
at digesting theoretical explanations
if i explain to you here's this language
it works this way and that way and
here's a rule and here's the exception
there's nothing for you to tie that to
there's no reference
whereas if you just expose your brain to
a lot of the language
a lot of things the brain is going to
figure out some things the brain will
miss
so then you can go back in with a
grammar explanation and say
it works this way and then you say oh
yeah i noticed that
because i've listened to so much and
i've heard so much and i've read so much
that what you are now explaining makes
sense but unfortunately
typical language instruction starts
backwards they begin by trying to
explain
the language to you before you've had
enough of the language
in you so that's just a brief intro yeah
that's that's helpful so would you say
um in your career you said uh you spoke
nine languages before i think you said
you retired or before you you know uh
60 years old i think you said nine yeah
six years old
so how did did that help you advance
in your career the fact that you spoke
multiple languages and if yes
how did it help you okay you know
whether it's languages or business you
got to connect you got to connect
emotionally right you can have a
contract you can have a spec
you can have all kinds of you know
details however you're still dealing
with people
and so in japan which is where i lived
for nine years and which was a big part
of of building my business
uh you know often there were difficult
problems
quality complaints and we had to recover
from having messed up
and the japanese are very fussy like
they're very fussy right
and so you're still you've still got to
be able to connect with people
while you're negotiating in the evening
when you go out and have
dinner with them or have you know drink
a beer with them or whatever it might be
and there's no question that you can
connect with people
at a much more personal level
you know get them to come your way a
little better if you are able to speak
their language and you understand them
better
this was not only true in uh in japan
but it was even true in sweden where
everybody speaks english
but we had to get the sawmill workers to
buy
into japanese quality requirements which
were different
and of course the swedes like everybody
i particularly with with
mill workers i've the same in canada you
know they're very proud i'm a grader i
know what i'm doing
this is how we grade it in canada or in
sweden that the japanese are wrong
if they want that that's wrong that
should be the way we do it
and so you got to get in there and
explain to them somehow that actually no
this is a different country they have
different cultural requirements blah
blah blah and if you can communicate
with them
even say in sweden in swedish you get a
more sympathetic
buy-in so so there's an emotional
connection when they
notice that you took time to want to
learn their language and then there
is hey if this guy's willing to take the
time to learn our language maybe he's
going to be more detailed about working
with us
is is that what you're saying or even
hardly they appreciate
partly the appreciation that you took
the trouble
to learn their language so that's a
level of respect for their language
and also the feeling that maybe he
understands us
a little better because he understands
us in swedish and maybe they understand
me a little better because i'm speaking
to them in swedish
so it just introduces another level of
communication in both directions
that i've always found helpful i found
it helpful in france
in germany you know spain wherever
if you can use the local language it's
you know you hit it off with people
makes sense steve why don't you give us
some of the languages you speak and give
me a phrase maybe you first say it in
english so we know what you're saying
and then give us okay some of the other
languages you speak so we know exactly
what you're saying
[Music]
so that's farsi i'm working on my farsi
right now adress
saab sub suc farsi them
so the next language in terms of my
fluency is japanese
really so your thoughts is japanese oh
japanese yeah
and the fourth best is mandarin chinese
is
what else what have we forgotten in here
um
yeah i don't know what shall i continue
with you know i did some turkish
i did some turkish and i've left it
because i want to focus on the the
arabic script
and it takes so long for the brain to
get used to a different script
so that i've i put the turkish on the on
the back burner but i did do a a video
on youtube where i speak turkish with my
tutor
and it's fun kind of focusing on the
middle east i should maybe learn
armenian because
they're pretty important armenians are
pretty important in iran
for starters and uh and they're starting
to have a lot of influence lately you
know i don't know about the syrian
assyrians
by the way out of all these languages
you've learned so you said english is
first french is second
japanese is third mandarin is fourth you
said arabic is more difficult than farsi
which one's been the easiest to learn
which one's been the toughest for you to
learn
well i think spanish is the easiest
because it's written exactly the way
it's pronounced
uh it shares a lot of vocabulary with
french
so spanish was easy but you know
surprisingly like romanian
we were in my lumber business we buy
lumber in romania that we sell to the us
east coast
and our suppliers located our the owner
of this
you know group of sawmills is located in
vienna
but i had to go to romania so i took two
months to learn up romanian and when i
was in romania
i was able to converse and 70 of the
vocabulary is so similar to italian
that i found romanian very very easy
very easy
yeah and but greek was difficult sorry
go ahead
oh you know one thing one language that
i speak quite well is swedish
so now to you the way you're talking to
us it's kind of like you know hey
you know it's not a big deal you know
you can do it it's easy it's this this
that to the rest of the world that's
kind of watching you
uh uh amazed and enamored by your way to
learn these languages
you gave a little bit of a glimpse about
how you learn a language your system
input listening reading pattern
discovery you talk about what else do
you have
you know your approach your philosophy
your system of learning
a new language okay so
obviously when you start in a new
language you know nothing
you know no words nothing zero so you
have to get some traction in the
language
so for example on our uh in our system
we have a group we have sort of 60 what
we call mini stories and in each mini
story
and these many stories they use high
frequency verbs
because verbs are very important if you
want to say anything you're going to
need verbs
and in each story the vocabulary repeats
four or five times in the story because
we tell the story
in a certain tense or in a certain
person he
and then i or you did
will do and then we ask questions
not in the sense that we want you to try
to remember the story which is a bad
idea
you know comprehension questions are a
bad idea what you want is exposure so we
make a statement ask a question about
the statement and provide the answer and
you're just listening
and by dent of listening to these many
stories
where there's already a lot of
repetition within the story
and then you repeatedly listen to the
story and then you read the story
on your ipad or iphone or on your
computer
and any word you don't know you look up
and of course on our system all the
words you don't know initially are all
highlighted in blue
and any blue word is a word you haven't
seen before on the system
but you click on it and you get the
meaning now it's a yellow word
and it gradually gets lighter and
lighter in yellow and when you know the
word it becomes
white so this does a number of things
you start to see
that your page is getting lighter and
lighter in color
a lot of these words because they repeat
in those mini stories that word that has
become yellow will show up
again in yellow or in white in
within that story and also in the next
story once you've moved a word or
changed the status of the word
it stays that way and so initially say
three months or so there's a lot of
repetitive listening
and reading to basic content in order to
get sort of a toe hold in the language
and then you have to move to authentic
content
and in the case of farsi for example i
found a
lady a woman in her 30s in iran
and she has created using the same
principle of the sort of circling
questions 26 episodes on the history of
iran
in farsi with these questions she's gone
and interviewed a bunch of people and we
have a course there called
the iranians and they just talk about
themselves and she's done one on persian
food
and so this is kind of intermediate
difficulty material and then
more difficult is podcasts now in the
case of farsi there's not a lot of stuff
out there
but i can go to bbc farsi i can go to
fardo which is the
american you know radio free europe
farsi
and so but but in the case of say
spanish or english there's an
like podcast in english there's an
unlimited supply
and and so the idea is you want to get
to more and more difficult more and more
demanding content
but always you want a transcript and on
our website again
as you move to more demanding content we
have a web you know browser extension so
you can bring in
stuff from youtube from netflix from
whatever
uh podcasts i there's there are
automatic transcription sites now where
i go
so i get the podcast transcribed and
then i import these
into link and when you import something
to link whether from youtube or netflix
or something you found
and had transcribed the system knows
what you know
so the system tells you this stuff you
brought in has 15
new words these are the new words to you
and and so there's a whole bunch of
statistics that develop
uh flash cards i mean it's hard to
describe in
in one breath but what it does is the
basic process of learning
is based on a lot of listening and
reading in an organized
way so it enables you to use
whatever a we have in our libraries
which is a lot and b
stuff that you can find on the internet
so that you can start
you know getting this language in you
and then you can look up grammar
explanations
some of our some of our dictionaries
like the dictionary use for arabic
they have a verb conjugation there so if
i click on a verb and i'm not sure what
you know form of the verb it is i go to
context reversal conjugator and it tells
me so there's a whole bunch of resources
like the internet is full of resources
like this
and we kind of bring them together in in
one package and ultimately
you can talk with one of our tutors if
you want to eventually start
you know using the language and even
there what i do with my farsi tutor my
turkish tutor
uh all of our lessons like my tutor will
give me like 10 or 15 or
more phrases that i had trouble with and
she'll record them
and i keep these as lessons so i have a
record going back one year
or however long it's been and i can
always review the discussions that
we had one of the things i realized
there is that i make the same mistake
every week
that's one of the constants in language
learning is how we continue to make
the same mistakes so when i get these
reports
from my tutors which is basically a
report of our lesson which is
a conversation uh most of my lessons are
just conversations
but of course i make mistakes sure and i
struggle to look for words and phrases
so my tutor typically sends me a list of
10 or 15 or 20 of these words and
phrases
and she records them and this then
becomes a lesson that i study
but i can study it not only immediately
after the lesson but
six months 12 months later i have all of
these
conversation reports that i can go back
to i'm reminded of that conversation
i'm reminded of the mistakes that i've
made one of the interesting things is
that even when you're corrected
you continue to make the same the same
mistake again mistakes are a big part of
language learning you will make mistakes
many many times before you start saying
things
correctly but you eventually do so yeah
by the way i mean listen if there
was an information about a business
product you just did a phenomenal job
sharing what your product does
now here's a question about your company
yes how well are you guys doing
you know how how how well is the
business doing
okay uh it's started to do well
certainly we had a pickup with
with the covet we went through a long
period
where i was financing it uh basically
with my lumber business because my main
business has been in
in lumber uh major activities we bring
lumber
we used to export a lot to japan now we
bring wood in from europe to the us east
coast
but now it's at a point where it's it's
uh self-sufficient it's
financially uh you know doing fine and
we're continuing to grow
to the point where we recently decided
that we were going to add
you know another few uh developers
because we're you know we're constantly
trying to improve it
we've got this uh link 5.0 coming out
and the deadline keeps on receding and
receding and we said this is we can't do
this
we better get some help in there so it's
a good problem to have
good problems i know the problem
personally and it's both a good problem
to have and it can be annoying so
all right i'm sure you've experienced
both no the only reason i asked the
question is because
um i do believe there is a ton of value
in learning new languages i remember i
was
looking at some stats earlier it said
four biggest perks of being bilingual
number one higher salary bilinguals make
seven thousand dollars more
per year and their peers more job
opportunities the third one was a little
bit confusing but the more i looked at i
said okay that could make sense
you'll live longer and healthier they
said bilinguals showed alzheimer's
symptoms
five or six years later than those who
spoke only one language
interesting and then the last one was
smartypants
children who grew up learning to speak
two languages are better at switching
between tasks than children
or learn to speak only one language what
are some benefits you would say
of speaking okay obviously if we are
learning as an adult it's too late to go
back and
take advantage of those advantages for
children
sure i've always i've often said you
know i speak all these languages
but i think the biggest thing about
speaking languages is that more
opportunities are going to come your way
i think you know in business you know
even if you only speak one language you
have to perform right like if you're
going to be a successful business
person you've got to do what you say
you're going to do you've got to be
creative you've got to provide you know
a benefit to
your business partners but if you have
more languages
more potential opportunities are going
to come your way
that's the big thing i do it's possible
like here i am i'm 75
i'm alert i'm you know i'm enjoying life
and i attribute that to language
learning and wine every evening okay
every red wine every every evening my
wife makes a gourmet meal every evening
balanced lots of veggies a little bit of
red wine and keeping active physically
but
no i think uh the big thing with it i
described earlier how it makes it
easier to communicate with people to
persuade people to establish
relationships with people
and we all know that in business
communications relationships are
extremely important
so you can have a broader range of
communications
uh uh better quality of communications
it's it's still
you can't just rely on your languages
whatever business you're in you've got
to be good at what you do
but but if you speak languages you're
going to have more opportunities and i
think you can you can power up
yeah very cool so link uh founded by you
and your son how many languages does
your son speak i'm curious
okay so my son speaks five okay and of
course when we had two boys
and when they were young my wife and i
my wife speaks five languages
we tried to get them to learn at least
french in canada
and they were very resistant to all of
our efforts right
but my son mark who works with me on on
link
he ended up playing professional hockey
he he you know he went to yale for four
years
he did very well he was leading scorer
at yale he was
in the states to have a thing called the
hobie baker award for the best uh
you know college hockey player so he was
a kobe hobie baker finalist
uh in hockey and then he went and played
he wasn't very big he went and played in
europe
and all of a sudden he's you know he's
in italy and everyone's speaking italian
and he's in austria and everybody's
speaking german and switzerland and then
japan so
he suddenly realized just how beneficial
how much more pleasant life is when you
you can speak the languages
that people around you are speaking so
now he speaks five languages
but as a kid we couldn't get them we
couldn't get you know it's very
difficult parents have to be very
careful don't push too hard
or the kids will just push right back
there's no question about that steve
i've really enjoyed having you and i
think
in a world of business where we are
ourselves nowadays you know
it almost seems like the schools we go
to the direction they're taking is hey
you got to learn mandarin you got to
learn this you got to learn that from
your
take before we wrap this up and this
will be the final topic we'll talk about
if you were to say you know i think if
there's three languages
you ought to learn today or you know
somehow
encourage your kids to learn today what
would you say i mean take english out
what would you say are the top three
languages today to learn for business
you know i think it's very important to
let the kids choose the language that
they're most interested in
once because the most difficult language
is the first language
so once someone has learned another
language it then becomes much
easier to learn other languages so i
wouldn't force people uh
but in terms of importance obviously if
you live in the united states
spanish i mean it's no question and so
spanish is a big one
uh obviously potentially chinese but
only if you're gonna be doing
business there but the big thing is so
much of language learning depends on
your motivation
so if you can at least allow kids to
discover a language one that they're
interested in it might be
it might be you know k-pop and korean or
you know it doesn't really matter what
it is
i would encourage uh kids to get
interested in a language
and focus on comprehension don't focus
on them producing the language correctly
focus on them enjoying the language
whichever language
and once they get started on the the
voyage the journey of language learning
they will continue
well steve uh you really enjoy listening
to you where can people find you by the
way
well uh you can find me on youtube i
have a channel there
well over 300 000 subscribers and i call
myself lingo
steve on youtube uh but certainly come
to link lingq.com
which is where i learn languages and uh
i think people would find it
you know helpful a pleasant kind of
environment everything you need is sort
of there
so those were the two would be the two
places that uh i'm on twitter but lingo
steve if you look for lingo steve you're
going to find me
and welcome to link we're going to put
both links below for people to go out
there and find you subscribe to his
channel
go visit his website uh uh to find out
more about what they're doing with that
being said steve thank you so much for
being a guest
on value team i enjoyed it very much
thank you
thank you so if you learn a second
language your income is going to
increase seven thousand dollars
apparently according to gallup right
something crazy to be thinking about
but it was fascinating listening to him
about how he
learns a different language 20 of them
at the age of 74 75.
kirsten know what you took away from it
also if you enjoyed the interview
there's another interview i did with don
miller
about storytelling probably one of my
favorite interviews of all time
that didn't get a lot of views but it's
fascinating if you've never seen a click
over you to go watch that interview
thanks for watching everybody take care
[Music]
bye