How to become properly FLUENT in a foreign language

Today I chat with the man himself, Luca Lampariello, who speaks 15 foreign languages.
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[@daysandwords]

Check out my answers to Luca's questions on his channel! kzbin.info/www/bejne/a5C3Yaych9urY7c&ab_channel=LucaLampariello

[@DNA350ppm]

With enthusiasm! Thank you to you both.

[@rebekahblesi7526]

“Learning languages is an act of love.” That’s it right there, what I haven’t been properly able to express until now.

[@MrLuke123]

it is

[@joachim1006]

Interesting conversation. Luca's English is mind-blowing. Also, the questions were excellent, I've never heard Luca talk about these topics

[@bofbob1]

Great discussion. You're a great interviewer btw. Not to cast aspersions on anyone, but with a lot of these big-name polyglots, when you rummage around from one interview to the next, it's often just more of the same. And I think that's just a reflection of the fact that people keep on asking them the same questions. But you have a way of asking either something completely different or asking some of the regular questions but under a novel angle. It makes for interesting stuff!

[@daysandwords]

Thank you. I actually felt my questions were a bit plainer than I'd have liked them to be ideally, in this one, but yeah generally asking things that others haven't already is something I aim for.

[@DNA350ppm]

Even the comments here are interesting to me, when they teach me something. Like "aspersions", which is a loan-word that we don't have in Swedish, not to my knowledge. It sounds like derived from Latin "aspera" - so let me cite "per aspera ad astra", that's true about language learning, too. It's stunning how much Latin there is in English, though curiously pronounced. I never stop marvelling at it. It must be easy for English speakers to read Italian!?

[@DNA350ppm]

@@daysandwords Plain is good! With open minds, we need to go back to basics for fresh starts, that is for certain a creative approach. I agree with PeRK here. Lamont, your content is often very inventive, and never boring! My thanks is a hope to add to the algorithm for your channel, by small talk in the comments' sections.

[@bofbob1]

​@@DNA350ppm Pretty much only used in the idiom "to cast aspersions". To cast aspersions means to hurl asparagus at someone. I think. Maybe. OK definitely not. But it should. Coz it would be a lot of funnier that way. ^^

[@DNA350ppm]

@@bofbob1 Well, I did look it up - my go to is Merriam-Websters. But if I ever see that expression again, I will think of your asparagus! :-D Thanks a lot! Keep them coming!

[@jamestandy8594]

[Questions paraphrased] 0:19 [Introduction] [Lamont's questions] 0:52 What is the worst language learning advice that you've heard? 3:08 [Lamont follows up about his experience with speak early approach] 3:40 On a scale from "speak basics of 50 languages" to "speak one language really well," you're known for speaking several languages well - where would you put yourself on that scale? [Love the point about language learning to make your life better and not to check boxes] 8:19 How do you choose your next language? [Morphs into a specific question about why he learned Danish] [Social media questions begin] 11:31 Can both of you share one of your more memorable experiences learning Swedish? 17:18 [sidenote: info on what makes Danish unique] 18:35 How can we improve our own mother language if we have been surrounded by a B2+ environment? How can we get to mastery in all aspects? [Also applies to learning a foreign language at a high level] 29:14 [Commentary on nature vs. nurture and developing an ear for sounds through practice] 30:35 Is it possible to speak a language well without talking to native speakers? [31:27 if anyone has the link to the Arrival video, it sounds cool] 36:39 [Luca follows up with good advice for people moving to another country, regardless of fluency in the language] 38:00 [Conclusion]

[@kays3956]

thank u, thank u, thank u

[@gshsingt8856]

thabk you so kuch

[@MTimWeaver]

My language moment came when I was on a business trip in South America and, after some drinks with friends there, called a good friend back in the US to say hello. After about 5-10 minutes of telling her about the trip, she said, "it sounds like you're having a great time, but could you please speak English?" I paused for a moment and asked, "Wait...I wasn't?" Apparently, I had been talking to her in Spanish the whole time. She gave me grief for weeks after I got home. But for me, that was when I realized my Spanish wasn't as bad as I thought it was (I started learning it about 6 years before that, but didn't use it regularly for the 4 years between when I finished my course of study and that time)

[@CouchPolyglot]

I really identify with this: "I want to speak as many languages as I can well enough so that I can enjoy them" For me, once I have reached a B1-B2 level, for most languages that is enough, I do not need to have a perfect level, I feel like with this level I can do 95% of things 😊. If I move to a new place though, then I would try to get a higher level (e.g. in German I have a C1+ level, but I feel it is necessary because I live in Germany)

[@daysandwords]

Yeah, I think "95% of things" is a BIG stretch at B1. I mean I agree with the sentiment but I think a lot of people have a few problems: 1. They think that B1 or B2 covers a lot more situations than it actually does and 2. They overestimate their own level anyway. I'm not saying you do this, but I've heard "Swedish speakers" who claim C1 and I honestly would barely rate them as B1. At C1 it shouldn't be too difficult to do a degree completely in that language, and they still only know one word for most things, and would still need a bilingual dictionary to look words up. In short, along with Steve Kaufmann, I think B1 is barely a noticable improvement on A2, and I think it's really only B2+ that I would count as "enough that I can enjoy them". That's just me. Personally I don't enjoy saying "...um, like... yeah so the... RIVER... that's the word, yeah the river was... um... you know, it had water, too much water..." Other person: "It was overflowing?" Me: "I guess so. What was that word you used?"

[@CouchPolyglot]

@@daysandwords well, it depends on what it means to have a B2: e.g. when I first moved to Germany, I had an "academy B2", so theoretically I had the level, but I had never actually spoken to anyone outside of class. For my first conversations, my B2 was clearly not enough. After a few weeks of practice, it was though. The same happened to me in French: after passing my DELF B2 exam I struggled even in basic conversations, after getting a tandem and getting some speaking practice, I would still not consider myself "more than B2", but can actually handle most situations I would say. But yeah B1-B2 was maybe too optimistic, it would be more accurate to say "B2 with real-life practice" :) Sometimes it is also difficult to say what your level is, for instance in Italian I understand 99% and can watch even comedy shows, but when speaking I am maybe at B1 and I might even make beginner mistakes... Anyway, complex topic, but thanks for your answer, it made me reflect more :)

[@sikamaru666]

I've seen plenty of polyglot interviews and if you know already that person (and if you're into the language learning youtube you'll definitely know them) it can be kind of boring cause you already know his method and stances on the basic stuff, but you've managed to actually keep things fresh by asking original questions. I guess, is content best suited for people that are intermediate or above in Luca Lampariello's content. I don't think interactions with foreigners actually need to be positive for them to be an useful language learning experience. I wonder if eventually there will be a polyglot that will recommend arguing politics on the internet as a good tool to build up fluency (worked for me at least).

[@bjornsoderstrom2152]

IMO, learning grammar helps you understand some theoretical concepts and that in turn makes you start noticing patterns in other languages. It is as if you already know parts of what you are trying to learn, which more quickly gets you into a territory of 80 % new material, instead of 100 %, which is a huge difference. Those first 20 % are so hard to push past, and it makes it a lot more fun when you can skip that first heavy grind.

[@seramer8752]

Hvordan lärer man grammatikk om ikke gjennom input? Seriös fråga.

[@bjornsoderstrom2152]

@@seramer8752 I can only speak for myself, but we did it in school. When you realize you need it to avoid making mistakes, you start paying attention. Eventually, you train your ear and that takes over as the main tool. Before that, you need conscious grammar.

[@melaniegrace7707]

You guys are not only helpful but just really authentic. You are appreciated!

[@LucaLampariello]

Thanks for the kind words Melanie! =)

[@DNA350ppm]

I think Luca has so many points, as has Lamont regularly, too. You can always improve! I was already able to study philosophy at a German University, when I got a comment that made me both blush and - at first - protest vehemently. A friend said that I sounded like a Circus Director, when I said simple things like "Danke schön!" He said that I pronounced it "Danke schen!" rhyming with "men, hen, ten". Of course a native speaker hears what he hears. No idea to protest. My mistake was that I used the Swedish ö in "bröd", instead of the German ö, which is closer to the Swedish ö in "smör" - but I had never reflected on that. I corrected my pronunciation, of course, and I got a lot more compliments on my German.

[@desiderataification]

Luca is more eloquent in English than most native speakers 🙌

[@shiva_689]

Yeah, although I think that while it's an impressive feat it's not all that surprising considering his overall attitude towards it. He said he's still trying to improve his English each and every day, how many native speakers take that sort of stance towards their own language? I think that's very rare. As a non-native speaker I can relate to it though, I feel the same impulse to want to master each and every aspect of the language. Native speakers might be more likely to assume that they've already mastered the language whereas non-native speakers may tend to feel like there's always something else they can improve, always another word they can add to their vocabulary perhaps in an effort to compensate for the fact that they aren't native speakers. I, for one, certainly find the idea of expunging anything that could hint at me not being a native speaker quite appealing.

[@electricant55]

No shit, almost like that has nothing to do with your language skills and everything with your interpersonal talents

[@yoru900]

I just finished both videos and really enjoyed them, can't wait for more interview videos

[@jennifermckeithen1498]

Lots of great information! Thanks for sharing!

[@havvaalexander9520]

Excellent conversation. Thank you!

[@cesar.sandovalcolon]

This was such a good interview!!

[@lilmamajaiteh]

Omg my two favorite language guys !!

[@yourfirstsecondlanguage4782]

2 minutes in and I’m loving this conversation already

[@infinitydude2720]

I needed this... two great language learning youtubers in the same vid giving advice...

[@wrightjustin23]

I would be shocked if Matt’s Japanese is better than Luca’s English, and it’s probably not as good as Luca’s English, just based on how much Luca interacts with English and the number of years under his belt. I’m not knocking Matt’s Japanese, which by all accounts is amazing, but Luca is about as strong as a non-native speaker can be. He’s better than most natives, in nearly every respect. I’m not sure how good Luca is in his other languages, as I only know Mandarin as a second language, but it seems he is one of the stronger polyglots, if not the strongest, in terms of both the number of languages he knows and the level of proficiency he has in them.

[@athenagreen5390]

Well, yes and no. I don't speak Japanese fluently, yet, but Matt has said that he has been mistaken as a native speaker. Luca has a pretty strong accent and makes multiple mistakes, granted, they are minor mistakes. A lot of people don't like Matt because he's super arrogant, but don't use that to say that Luca's English is better than 'most natives', because it isn't native level.

[@videogamerka0009]

I can rate his Polish and it's fine

[@athenagreen5390]

@@wrightjustin23 I am pretty sure Matt lived in Japan at some point... but has only spoken Japanese for 2 hours, you say? Luca speaks english fluently, sure, but it isn't native level and any native english speak will immediately know. He lives in Italy, he studies other languages. Matt only studies Japanese (recently dabbles in Mandarin, I think), and he worked his ass off to get his Japanese to that level for years. Just because your job involves speaking a language, doesn't make you good at it. Just because you can compete with natives, doesn't make you better than them at their own language. And your quite stupid comparison that "some native speakers can't graduate high school" has nothing to do with language skills. There are so many factors as to why students cannot graduate and it has nothing to do with their English. English speaking high school students are already fluent in English... They have been immersed in English their entire life. Again, you cannot compare Matt's Japanese and Luca's English. Look at Hasan Piker. He is Turkish, but you cannot tell. He is a twitch streamer who uses English for his job. He immerses in English, despite not being a native speaker, you can barely tell. But, you don't like Matt. I can understand that. I don't like him either, but his Japanese is probably better than Luca's English, because Luca's English is average at best. And, he knows his English isn't native level, that is why he is constantly trying to improve it...

[@wrightjustin23]

@@athenagreen5390 Matt lived in Japan for 6 months during his high school years. He immersed, hardcore, about 6 hours a day, plus whatever passive immersion he managed to get in-he did this about 5 years. In that time, he reached a point where he had read around 50 books, and he could understand virtually any audiovisual media he decided to consume, without subtitles. He also maintained relationships with Japanese people during his college years, where he got quite a bit of speaking practice, though it’s not clear how much. Since then, he hasn’t spent much time actively trying to get better, but of course he still consumes Japanese media, given that his girlfriend is Japanese. Obviously, I am familiar with him and am quite a fan, but it doesn’t stop me from being objective, as it clearly does with other “fans.” My comment about having only 2 hours of Japanese is a comment on what he has shown to the public, on KZbin, which would have been obvious to you had you actually given my comment any real consideration. I can almost guarantee that if Matt had hundreds or thousands of hours of him casually speaking Japanese, natives would probably be able to tell he wasn’t a native. Instead, he has a few hours of him actually speaking the language. I’m sure he is awesome, as I’ve already said, but it isn’t as if we have a large body of work to examine, as we do with people like Luca. As for videos of him surprising natives, this doesn’t mean he is able to do this all of the time, and it is possible for many people who are advanced enough, and even some who aren’t. I have very good pronunciation in Mandarin and have tricked people myself, despite not being at Matt’s level. Frankly, pronunciation is the least important aspect of language learning, so it really doesn’t matter if Matt has a better accent, which has not been established, in the slightest. Actually, it does. If Luca can conduct presentations on high-level topics in English, can write well enough to acquire a degree, run a business using the language, etc., then yes, it does mean he is better than natives at using the language in those contexts. He is not running an auto shop ffs, he is engaging in public speaking! His job is to communicate with people lol. Also, if a person isn’t very intellectually capable, it actually does inhibit their ability to master their own language. I’m not saying there aren’t other reasons for not getting an education, but if he is able to learn, in English, more effectively than some natives, then he is better than some natives, and he’s likely better than the average native speaker. As for how hard Matt worked, do you think he is the only person who has immersed in a foreign language at a hardcore level? Luca just said he uses the language, right now, about 4-5 hours a day! This is on top of all the years he’s been reading English, listening to people speak English, reading books, etc. In thirty years, there is no telling how much input he has had, not to mention how much he has used the language. Finally, even if Matt has a better accent than Luca, all things being equal, it does not mean his language skills are superior. Of course, this has not been established, whatsoever. You are obviously pretending to be a casual fan of Matt when in fact you are a rabid follower, and you are having a temper tantrum because someone has placed another above your lord and savior 😂😂😂 Matt is awesome, watch his content, but ffs don’t let yourself act like this lol.

[@athenagreen5390]

@@wrightjustin23 lmao what? Stop repeating your bullshit points. You are calling me a fan of Matt when I don't even like the guy. He has gotten his Japanese to such a high level that he doesn't remembrr how hard it is to start learning a second language. That is why I am here and not on his channel, ffs. You say I am having a temper tantrum, but I am just having a discussion. Why are you getting defensive? Luca's English is average, it isn't a hard concept. And again. Your comparison to high school students had nothing to do with language ability. You are silly and clearly like Matt, since you too are arrogant and have a superiority complex. I agree that Luca is a stronger polyglot. Stronger than most of the other big names, if not all of them. Second strongest might be Steve Kaufmann, though it depends on what you value. Matt is on a different path, the path that Lamont has taken. And it is sucessful. But you clearly don't watch Lamont enough to know that using the language does not improve the language. Listening, reading, in some cases, writing, but speaking incorrectly, speaking with an accent, does not actively improve your skills. He knows that, I know that, Matt knows that, but if you are such a big fan, why don't you know that? I don't have much time to respond but I will continue this later.

[@attesmatte]

Absolutely loved this conversation! Also, I CAN'T WAIT for you to come to Sweden, it will be such an adventure for you and your family! 😀

[@daysandwords]

Skulle ha haft biljetter redan nu om det inte var för vår dumma regering som stängde gränsen tills juni 2022 så att vi inte kunde köpa dem men nu när de har öppnat gränsen igen här priset tredubblats. 😔

[@attesmatte]

@@daysandwords Va?!? 😳 🤬 Va förbannad jag blir! 🤬 Tänk om ni hade kunnat bo här under pandemin, vi har haft en otroligt avslappnad inställning jämfört med typ alla andra länder verkar det som. 😜 Störtskönt! 😁 Just nu märker jag knappt av pandemin längre, förutom att de allra flesta affärer har handsprit vid ingången. 👍

[@daysandwords]

Och dessutom, var det inget RIKTIGT problem utan bara ett problem med att de SA nåt som inte ens visade sig, liksom. Alltså nu KAN vi resa. Och vi kunde ha bokat biljetter då, också. Men om vi hade gjort det skulle alla ha sagt att vi var galna därför att regeringen var så "säker" att vi inte skulle kunna resa och så skulle vi bara ha "slössat bort pengar". Men jag var nästan säker att "pandemin" inte skulle finnas på det sättet vid maj 2022. Och det hade jag rätt i. Men nu är det bara att sluta bli arg och börja tjäna fler pengar för att resa dit i alla fall. 😂

[@attesmatte]

@@daysandwords Kan det ha varit så att dom blev skraja över Delta-varianten? För den tog ju verkligen om i USA, men det var ju för att folk inte vaccinerat sig där, och då får man ju skylla sig själv kan jag tycka. 😜 Men men... Jag hoppas att ni har möjlighet att åka så fort som möjligt i alla fall! 😁 Och om ni kommer i maj/juni så MÅSTE ni komma upp norröver så ni får uppleva våra ljusa nätter! 😍

[@toolworks]

Usually when people say "This guy is more fluent than natives", it's bullshit, but in Luca's case I think it might actually be true.

[@daysandwords]

I wouldn't actually say he's more fluent than natives. I would say that he's often more eloquent but he does speak a tiny bit more slowly and "over pronounces" some words and stuff. It's not necessarily a bad thing (especially the more eloquent part), but I'd imagine that if you took a sample of his speech for a whole day, he'd say fewer syllables per second than a lot of natives, albeit saying more interesting and wiser things than a lot of them.

[@Komatik_]

@@daysandwords Native speech is often messier than what we foreigners learn. Even if we speak fluently and pronounce well, we commonly end up sounding a bit bookish or posh.

[@MrBPM75]

I took his zoom private coaching in 2015. He is awesome!!

[@RobertKaucher]

Yesterday I was in a meeting speaking in English, my native language, and I said, "This is used soltanto for getting..." And I just stopped talking and felt my face go bright red, "OK, let me say that again in English this time." When you speak more than two languages well you are going to get them confused to some degree. It just happens in casual speech. Even in our native languages we sometimes just say the wrong thing. And when you speak multiple, the probability of that happening just goes up. Every monolingual knows what it is like to be speaking and just not be able to remember a word you want to use. It happens. Now put another or even two or more languages on top of that. Your brain is 1300 grams of electric meat. It's amazing that it works at all. But one thing that is an absolute myth is that speaking two closely related languages will confuse you. Speaking two closely related languages **when you speak one of them poorly** will confuse you. I have learned 4 Romance languages. When I keep both Italian and Portuguese up, I do not confuse them. When I try to speak the other two, I rely on PT and IT. Sometimes I'll say the wrong word in Portuguese or Italian, but as you see, I can do that in English. When you are below a B2 in your active skills in one language, you will leverage the skill in the stronger language to help you. But the weaker language is NOT going to impact your stronger language meaningfully. The key there is meaningfully.

[@bofbob1]

Right. I share the same experience in that I haven't noticed any significant difference in cross-language interference based on how close/distant the languages are. On the research front, I don't think it's consensus or anything, but it seems fairly solid now that distance doesn't change anything for either lexical interference or phonological interference. Where I'm less certain though is morphological/syntactic interference. This isn't a great argument because really I'm just going off of what I find common-sensical, but it would make sense to me that there are more cases of interference when those morphological/syntactic differences are relatively small. Dunno, like if your L1 is French, when speaking Spanish it would be quite easy to say "intentar de hacer algo" by analogy to "essayer de faire quelque chose" (so, adding "de" in Spanish when there shouldn't be one), in a way that just wouldn't happen if you were speaking, say, Japanese, where the volitional + とする to express that same idea is just too different for there to be much chance of interference. You may be right though that even if there is more interference, it's just when you speak one of those languages poorly.

[@DNA350ppm]

By very "closely related" about Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, is meant something as close as Scottish English and Yorkshire English; or as close as the different German varieties that are spoken in university level education in Berlin, Vienna, and Basel - in the Scandinavian cases these varieties are formalized as different languages, not as just dialects. Someone had translated sommerfugl (Danish) as sommarfluga (not Swedish) - and that is wrong, it is "fjäril" in Swedish. But sommerkjole is sommarkjol (summerskirt). Most words are that close. As we don't have a common standard version, we point out translation mistakes like that. We have problems with forms and sentences, too - but it doesn't take a long stay or much reading to be able to understand respectively. Compare: Danish: Besøg et af Danmarks mest fascinerende naturfænomener! Swedish: Besök ett av Danmarks mest fascinerande naturfenomen!

[@JV-km9xk]

Oh so no wonder I keep resorting to Italian whenever I was studying French and Spanish. I didn't know about this strong-weak language leverage. Interesting to know.

[@daysandwords]

@@DNA350ppm Yeah I agree, to the point that if I DID ever learn Danish, I would think of it as like speaking Swedish with an accent. I find that even watching Danish TV shows can make me think weird things and I'm more likely to use "icke", even if it's semi-correctly, like "Jag är icke-svensk". I also agree with Robert though, that this is not a meaningful impact. But the accent thing could well be a "problem". I am experimenting a bit now with another language and I find that my mouth is much more ready to make Swedish "shapes". Obviously that won't be an ongoing issue, but it might be if I wanted to learn Danish to C1.

[@DNA350ppm]

@@daysandwords If you read Isak Dinesen - do you notice influence from a foregin language in her English (a Danish influence, then)? She wrote thinking of her English lover (Denys Finch Hatton) and she used English in the Kenyan society she was a member of, but patterns die hard. Later in life she used her legal name: Karen Blixen, when she wrote her fascinating stories. Joseph Conrad and Theodor Kallifatides are two other bilingual authors that I admire. Thomas Warburton is a translator (and writer) whose Swedish I can highly recommend. His memoirs are on my"to read" list. Reading both a good translation and the original is a way to get to enjoy the original deeper, IMHO.

[@WendySpeaksItalian]

I dunno what was happening at 29:48 but it was hilarious! Wonderful advice from both of you, as always. And as many others (including Luca) have said, Lamont asked some great questions.

[@daysandwords]

It was an accident where I must have accidentally deleted a keyframe (an editing thing that sets the motion in place or stops it), but it gave my family and I a good laugh.

[@WendySpeaksItalian]

@@daysandwords So does that mean you went back and refilmed that section later? Because you wouldn't have known it was happening at the time of the interview, right? I'm totally clueless about editing, which is why my videos are all single takes LOL.

[@daysandwords]

No no, so, Luca's picture was not gradually moving over to the right when we spoke for real. It's not that I wasn't aware, it's that it wasn't a thing at all, because Luca's recording was actually taken from his phone. So you're actually watching two different recordings. I just HAPPENED to lean to my right to look at what the next question was on my monitor (I have a big monitor and Luca's Skype call was on the left, and my questions list was on the right), so it looks like I'm suddenly "peek-a-booing" from behind Luca's picture, but that was a coincidence of an editing error and my movement.

[@WendySpeaksItalian]

@@daysandwords Amazing coincidence!

[@LearnEnglishwithCamille]

Wow! Great interview. I love Luca!!

[@KFrench1123]

This was a fantastic interview and I’d like to say the editing was great too

[@daysandwords]

Haha, even that little slip up at the 29 minute mark

[@KFrench1123]

Well I think I left that comment at around the 27 minute mark lol… but still, very good 👍🏻👍🏻

[@vitaediscimus8932]

I was forced to learn subject-verb-predicate type of old fashioned structures in primary school, which helped me immensely when I learned German. Great points Luca made on the verbose vs concise styles! Writing is a form of speech ….. email writing is one of the useful forms of improving active language capacities

[@kirklingthegypsy8068]

29:47 geez mate, you fkn scared me

[@daysandwords]

Hhahahaha oh man I did not realise that this framing problem had occurred. I swear it wasn't like that in the editing timeline, but on export something weird must have happened (Luca's picture wasn't supposed to slowly move over like that), and I didn't check the entire video after export.

[@kirklingthegypsy8068]

@@daysandwords LOL nah bro, it just made the video better

[@DNA350ppm]

In Sweden people don't pick up much grammar in school. I could tell unbelievable anecdotes from university level language education! Suffice it to say that the grammar difference between jag/mig and de/dem is often unclear, even between nouns and verbs - you know "verbs are words for things you do", so a "football match" (fotbollsmatch) is a verb - oups! Sleeping (sova) is doing nothing, so it's no verb - oups! It's easy to make mistakes, and I make many, but in principle, thanks to putting in an effort to understand grammar - I do understand and can explain the difference between its/it's, if my listener has the patience. I think grammar is very helpful if you want to speak/write a foreign language (almost) like a well-educated native.

[@Komatik_]

Excellent questions once again.

[@JaneHasGame]

Thanks for posting. When I started linguistics in university we had to study grammar in our own language first. Unfortunately, it wasn't taught thoroughly in high school or elementary. That was a long time ago and things may have changed. Enjoyed your interview.

[@AbsolutelyAbsolute]

Inspiring, I'll save this and watch it again.

[@byronwilliams7977]

Great questions!

[@kayjones6498]

Wow 🤩 C’était un très bon entretien 😻 Merci à vous 😘🥰💞🙌🙌🙌

[@SpaceCityTuan]

I like the idea of getting better at your native language to allow you to be able to expand yourself in the target language. There comes the time when you will need to push yourself and I am interested in that part.

[@maletu]

Yup: virtually no grammar instruction grade school/jr. high/high school. First contact with meaningful grammar was high school Spanish. It was a real eye-opener!

[@adelabilanovic8421]

I have been waiting this for too long...🤩🤩🤩🤩

[@thedavidguy01]

I'm not sure when American schools stopped teaching explicit grammar and syntactical analysis. I know my son wasn't taught them, but my generation was certainly taught them. We spent a lot of time in Middle school (it was called Junior High School) doing syntactical analysis. I don't know if having that background has made me a better language learner, but it certainly makes understanding the grammar of the languages that I'm learning much easier. When I was told that in French the past participle of a verb in passé composé that takes "avoir" has to agree with the direct object if the direct object precedes the verb, I knew what that meant. Whether understanding that grammar translates into better language production is a different question.

[@phoenixknight8837]

Very helpful!

[@Stephanie-gv8rh]

Really interesting interview. 🙌

[@daysandwords]

Thanks for listening Stephanie!

[@beorlingo]

Thank you, Lamont (and Luca)!

[@vascoguerreiro6632]

Really nice video!

[@HebaHosni]

Learning a language is an act of love, wow!

[@larry_the]

Great video.

[@francegamble1]

I remember being so confident in my Japanese until the day I landed in Japan. I could read it. I could speak it. Yet, I trembled and stayed away. Wish I had done more.

[@emel3925]

Yessss! This is the first I’m hearing that Luca is learning Serbian next. I just started it and it’s been more difficult than Hungarian for me, I’m curious to see how his experience with it goes.

[@daysandwords]

Yeah it was news to me too, and I have toyed with the idea of Serbian being my third foreign language.

[@emel3925]

@@daysandwords That would be so awesome, I haven’t been able to find many youtubers learning it! It’s such a cool language though, I hope it gets more “popular”. I think it’s the perfect slavic language for anyone who’s interested in learning cyrillic but would like latin alphabet training wheels 🙋‍♀️😂

[@daysandwords]

@@emel3925 I completely agree but I've also been suuuuper tempted by another very underrated language lately.

[@emel3925]

@@daysandwords Oooh, I’m curious now! There are definitely tons of interesting underrated languages out there, I’ll look out for if you ever make a video about it 😄

[@stevencarr4002]

@@emel3925 It only takes 1 hour or so to learn the Cyrillic alphabet. There is actually more than one, because different Slavic languages add other letters. Not so long ago, Serbo-Croatian was considered 1 language, so learninf Serbian is basically learning Croatian, but in a different alphabet.

[@seramer8752]

Fantastisk samtale gutter! Helt ypperlig materiale!

[@explosiveboat5710]

This was an excellent interview, as usual. You really have a way of getting in-depth, comprehensive answers from the people you interview. On an unrelated sidenote, what the hell was going on with the sliding image starting at around 29:15?

[@daysandwords]

Haha it was an editing mistake that and I obviously didn't check the final export closely enough - there are other comments about this too, where I explain more in depth what happened.

[@andrewcoates4952]

I’ve literally just returned from Denmark today after a month of working there and the only person I personally encountered that couldn’t speak English was a barber 🤷‍♂️

[@daysandwords]

Haha, proof that output does very little. I know Scandinavians who have DIFFICULTY with English moreso than not speaking it. For example, I would say that my current level of Swedish is better than about 20% of Swedish adults' English. Which is to say that with 80% of them it's easier or the same to communicate in English (although it depends if we're talking about tax or breakfast). For the lowest 10% of them, English would certainly put some strain on the conversation. A barber who just straight up doesn't speak English would probably be in the lowest 1%... But then there are other questions like immigration. There are lot of migrants who speak say, Arabic and Danish (or Swedish) and then their English is the weakest language. I've met a Norwegian girl (18 years or so) who was a Spanish native speaker and MUCH preferred to speak Norwegian with me rather than English.

[@a.r.4707]

@@daysandwords Or there are so many immigrants from former Yugoslavia in Sweden who don't speak English well but they all speak Swedish.

[@littlered6340]

It's interesting because I think most American schools do teach how to deconstruct and english sentence, I rememeber doing drills on it, but most of the people I went to school with didn't really take it in. I'm learning Japanese, and when I try to explain things to my friends, it's easy, but when I explain to other people, if can be more difficult because they don't actually know, like, what an article is or even how some simple concepts exist and how they could be interpreted differently in different cultures/languages. For example, Japanese has 自動詞 and 他動詞 and most people assume they map directly to transitive and intransitive verbs in English, but they don't because they are (literally) "self move" and "other move". Instead of trying to make the verb "fit" I just don't treat them as needing to map in the first place, but a lot of people who don't know the parts of language have a harder time dissecting those parts as well a harder time recognizing their own bias because they don't truly understand the concepts. It's interesting.

[@JV-km9xk]

Yo is it a sign that I am reaching fluency if I had a dream where I was talking in my target language? In my dream, I went to a store and I asked two Italian retailer workers where the food was. I could understand what they were saying and I could spontaneously make up sentences in response with all the vocabulary I had in my subconscious.

[@daysandwords]

I would say yes, but the thing is, dreams are very good at filling in things. So we can't really know these things for sure, but often when we dream and someone "says" something, what really happened is that we just filled in the mental meaning of what that person "said". So I do dream in Swedish regularly, but in reality that could actually be that my brain says "There's a cat, and now the cat owns a shop, and now the cat is your brother, and then you say something to him... and what you said was "Men du kan inte vara en sån där katt, eller?" " - And let's imagine I wake up at that point and think "Oh that dream was in Swedish!" Well, no it wasn't. I just thought one thing in Swedish and the rest was just random mental pictures which is what dreams pretty much are.

[@JV-km9xk]

@@daysandwords I guess. A bit of progress is progress nonetheless. Still working that advice you said on relearning material and now, I just zipped by it in only two days. It originally took me around a week to finish because my listening was poor. Thanks!

[@JohnBrute]

Around 28:00, Luca talks about receiving corrections in language learning. I'm curious about what your opinion is on the etiquettes of correcting someone and being corrected by someone. I ask because (a) you posted a video not too long about about getting corrected over the use of "basketballer," (b) I know someone who comes across as very condescending whenever she corrects others, which is often, and in my opinion, is more of a discourager than a motivator, and (c) because Stephen Krashen says that corrections don't work. And so I'm interested in your thoughts regarding giving and receiving corrections.

[@shiva_689]

I second this, that would be an interesting topic to cover in a video

[@deadgamer21]

Ngl I just beat myself with the fluency whip, If I mess up I give my self one hundred lashes and a salt water bath

[@DNA350ppm]

For a native Swedish speaker, Danish is really hard to speak and write correctly. Few people have the brains to keep them apart. To understand is easy, especially written Danish is easy to understand with a little training, and many dialects are not that hard. I want to mention "snakke Nordisk" - there is much formal and informal Nordic collaboration, and sometimes people meeting in such contexts resort to English, but often it is enough to just adapt a little, that is, speak more slowly and clearly, imitate Finland-Swedish, which all understand the best (even the Finns), avoid certain well-known confusing words (not to talk about "roligt"), and to stick to a vocabulary that is common to the field discussed, and not to try to speak fancy and jokingly. Matter of factishly is the key. As always, poetry is hardest to interpret, hard-core science easiest.

[@hillmanntoby]

I have gotten both Swedish & Norwegian to a high level, but to this day it is still hard. I choose to not worry about it, but somewhere in my head there's something saying, "It's just svorsk." Spelling is not actually a problem for me EXCEPT on my phone. I have autocorrect for both installed and sometimes (read: often) I do not catch the misspellings it creates. Danish I can read very well, and understand okay, but I would want to be much further along in my svorsk before even considering trying to output Danish. Rolig doesn't give me problems honestly, but rar trips me up anytime someone says it in Swedish.

[@DNA350ppm]

@@hillmanntoby What I meant was, when you have a conversation with people you don't know very well and you "snakker Nordisk med dem", you know that you should better avoid "rolig, rar, anledning, straks, semester" and a bunch of other words, because you don't know how the one who listens to you will understand it - it doesn't mean that you can't learn their meaning in all Nordic languages, for example when listening to news and speeches. And in conversations you hopefully make sure that you get it right and that speaker and listener(s) mean the same concept. I use "snakke Nordisk" a little broader than "snakke Skandinavisk", because it should be intelligible to all who use Danish, Swedish or Norwegian as a second or third language, these might include (from west to east): Greenlanders, Icelanders, Sami-speakers, Finns... but also many smaller language groups within the Nordic countries.

[@hillmanntoby]

@@DNA350ppm Interesting, that it is a good point about the people that have a Scandinavian language as a 2nd/3rd language! I definitely conflate(d) snakker Nordisk to really focusing on Norwegian, Swedish and Danish as there isn't really any mutual comprehensibility between say Swedish and North Sami, but to your point it's certainly possible (likely even) that a North Sami speaker speaks Norwegian or Swedish as an L2, and more deliberate or mindful speech will help anyone understand.

[@annak4891]

jag älskar din kanal! Dina frågor medan intervjuer är alltid olika än de i andra människors videor. Jag gillar mycket Luca Lampariello, jag tycker att han är en utmärkt person och jag lärde mig mycket från honom om hur kan man lära sig ett nytt språk. Du lär sig svenska, han lär sig svenska och min landens språk, jag menar polska självklart och jag kan polska och lär mig svenska och engelska (okej, jag förbättrar mitt språk - men jag håller med Luca, jag har alltid många problem när skulle jag andvända engelska skrivning):D jag vill gärna rekommendera dig en av mina ny favorit YT person - hon heter Lea Wallin. Hon är en ganska ung kvinna och hon berättar om olika historier, alla av de handlar om kriminala faller vilka hände i USA eller i Sverige. Jag vet inte om du tycker sådana videor men jag bästamde mig för att skriva om hennes kanal på grund av att öva lite svenska skrivning. :D ah, jag glömde nästan att skriva hennes kanals namn - så det är Mord Knalen. Jag hoppas att du kan rekommendera mig också andra inressanta kanaler i vilka de pratar lätt svenska, här eller i en av dina nya videor. Tusen tack till dig och vi ses nästa gång!

[@beorlingo]

Hej Anna! Friska tag, kör så det ryker!

[@Tomanita]

Great interview! You asked some interesting questions😃 It was nice to hear about your experiences. I also didn't realize for a long time that native English speakers don't learn their Grammar at school the way we do with our native language (German in my case). It can be annoying, pretty much every child hates it😄 But I still think it's beneficial. It's cool that Luca wants to learn Serbian next. I was surprised to hear that.

[@daysandwords]

I almost messaged you that news haha. That was news to me too and yeah it's very cool. We do learn some grammar... My 10 year old is doing some at the moment but it's pretty minimal.

[@k.5425]

We do learn grammar though. But maybe it's not as intense as in Germany. Dunno

[@Tomanita]

@@k.5425 Yes, I'm sure you learn to use your grammar correctly. Something I often hear is that English native speakers learn their Grammar naturally, that's why I said that. For German, children learn to identify what type of word they have in front of them. For example, they get a sentence and have to say what the subject, objects, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. are. We also learn about the grammatical mood (e.g. the subjunctive) and obviously tenses and cases.

[@daysandwords]

@@Tomanita Well in German there is also grammar marking built in with the capital letters for nouns. I mean we do learn this stuff in English/in Australia but it's often fairly surface level. The average Australian could tell you which one the noun/adjective/verb is in a sentence but they'd start getting hesitant if you told them to put something in a passive voice or to express the same meaning without using a negation or something.

[@sharonoddlyenough]

I finally signed up for italki through your link. Now I have to find the courage to talk to someone

[@daysandwords]

This is in Swedish, yeah?

[@sharonoddlyenough]

@@daysandwords yep. Thankfully I'm on my winter break, so I can do some immersion and build up my confidence

[@pawelzabicki7785]

It's incredible that you are fluent in all of those languages, and that there are, as I assume, in your long-term memory.

[@DNA350ppm]

Your both Englishes are music to my ears!

[@daysandwords]

If you told me that Luca had one American parent and one European, I'd believe you. If you told me that he had been born and raised in America by two Americans, I would think there were some oddities in his speech, if I'm honest. I say this with every bit of love to Luca - he speaks 14+ languages so this isn't an insult of any kind, but one place where it's noticable, is, for example "Australia". Americans don't say it like that, and he himself mentioned the "articlate / articulATE" thing. That's very intuitive to a native speaker. If someone used it incorrectly, a little bell would sound in my head. But yes, his English is what I call "to the point of unreasonable doubt", that is, where it would be unreasonable to assume, on that evidence alone, that he was not native. Certainly it's miles better than most Italians (and I say that with all love for the way other Italians talk). P.S. "Your both Englishes" kind of doesn't work. There is no neat way to structure that, but we would probably say "Both of you have English that is music to my ears!" or maaaybe "Both your English is music to my ears", but that second one gives us a bit of a problem as well.

[@DNA350ppm]

@@daysandwords Thank you for giving me feed-back! I thought I made a funny point by inflecting English with a plural ending, but I now understand that it didn't work. That's one of my criteria for having reached a certain level of language skill, that joking works. (I do improve my English by following you, and taking part in the comment section! Like Luca said: writing, and trying to get to a non-trivial level, gives more training than everyday-talk.) But it certainly was no joke that you both speak English in a way that sounds like music to my ears. Now I also notice that the preposition is "to" in English - in Swedish we use "i" - det är som musik i mina öron. Intressant musik, på många plan. Looking forward to more videos of all kinds!

[@MTimWeaver]

@@daysandwords I'm American and I concur. When I first heard Luca speak, I couldn't peg him at all for NOT having grown up around English. It's very, very good. Yes, he's got an accent, but your hypothetical one American and one European parent nails it.

[@DNA350ppm]

@@MTimWeaver We in Scandinavia joke about our Mid-Atlantic English -formally we are taught RP, but in everyday life we are much more familiar with American accents and the vocabulary in popular culture. Movies are not dubbed, and many don't need subtitles to understand, either. We get involuntary listening practice all the time, it is just there, effortlessly. So without shame we mix the influences. Regrettably the influence also messes our beloved Swedish up. My latest pet peeve is "på tårna" in the wrong sense - på tårna meant an attitude of submissiveness, as a servant that couldn't relax at all, being on the master's beck and call all the time. Something very bad in other words. Now "på tårna" almost means to be ready to defeat somebody with a knock-out, or something. A first step to winning at least. Nothing submissive at all, and sports commentators love the expression.

[@evaphillips2102]

@@daysandwords How about “The way you both speak English is music to my ears”

[@yunesbb]

Hey man! As someone who's learning swedish, I absolutely love your channel and it helped me A LOT. I would like to know what's your opinion on Pimsleur's method?

[@daysandwords]

The method itself might be OK but the material is laughable. I tried it and listened to two guys have a 5 minute conversation about the size of their kitchen in square metres. Who the heck even does that? I have been meaning to review Pimsleur for ages but honestly I find it so unlikely to be genuinely helpful that I can't bring myself to do it.

[@amerikanskdansker8771]

Det glæder mig at høre i taler om Dansk! 😃🇩🇰🇩🇰🇩🇰

[@thaingo7709]

love

[@martinezcolonh]

If they don't say Lucca is Italian; just by watching the video I would have thought him to be American. He does sound American when he speak English. Great interview; really good questions and advice.

[@autentyk5735]

Lamont, in which of your videos did you talk about using the Michel Thomas' course to jumpstart your French journey? You gave a few brief examples of how his course works. I can't find it. You're still brilliant! Tack ska du ha!

[@daysandwords]

Um, I'm not sure I've ever talked about that actually. I listened to the French course just to see what I thought of the method and I ended up listening so often so that I just started learning French.

[@anitawaters4745]

I found the 5 levels of Pimsleur very very useful when I started my French journey! I listened to michel Thomas but wasn’t a fan.

[@YogaBlissDance]

AT 20:17 yes in U.S. we don't learn much grammar and grammatical terms..yeah I know the language well, Native level. But I cannot tell you things like "adverbs, prepositions etc...." it's all pretty vague. Like most Native Speakers I can tell you if a sentence is clear and written correctly- but the terms to speak about language are not clear. At 23:00 and forward, you are a scientist of language learning...impressive. 28:38 Rose-ah-velt.

[@slimytoad1447]

Luca's english is so fluent he speaks beautiful english far better than many english people

[@cigh7445]

I have a question, at about 25:00 or 25:30 Lucas talked about the difference between the verbose Romance way of writing and the very concise Anglo-Saxon way of writing. Does British literature also have a very concise style in comparison to Romance literature? If you read some of the greats of British literature, Dickens, Wilde (I know he was technically Irish but his writing lineage was British as opposed to that of the Gaelic writers like Seathrún Céitinn and Aodhagán Ó Rathaille), they had pretty verbose writing styles compared to say, Ernest Hemingway who was hugely influential in shaping the 'style' of American literature where everything had to be concise with all the filler removed. My question in short is, is English language literature generally less verbose than Romance literature, or is it only less verbose in the American tradition (which I suppose could have influenced the rest of the English language world by now)?

[@whiteninjaplus5]

Anglo Englo English

[@bofbob1]

I think it's mostly a 20th century development. English-speaking authors prior to that don't strike me as any less verbose than their Romance counterparts (on average, since of course there's a lot of variety based on individual style). If you look at the big usage guides that have informed teaching over the last century, I think you'll find that both the American and British guides share a preference for concision. Both Strunk & White (US) and Fowler (UK) shared that preference for direct, non-convoluted prose. In French, the big one is probably Grévisse and his "Le Bon Usage". It does cover things like redundancy, tautology and pleonasm, but there's nothing in terms of preferring a tight and direct style at the syntactic level.

[@williambudd2850]

Properly fluent??? I’ll take any kind of fluency.

[@kas8131]

What is the video about Arrival that Luca mentioned?

[@LucaLampariello]

Hi Andrés! Here it is: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r3TThp9tpauCeKc&ab_channel=LogosMadeFlesh

[@sicko_the_ew]

The easiest way is to have to learn some language as a kid, then have to use it in life thereafter. With us, that was Afrikaans, and by the time my little brother started the languages, an African language (I mean going back earlier than 300 years) too. "School Afrikaans" was the same thing over and over again, from what I can remember. By the time you were finished with primary school, every year of high school had the same grammar, not very much deeper books, and no "programmed use". You learned real Afrikaans from Afrikaans friends, or from TV. (There was one TV channel at the time, and English and Afrikaans alternated between early and late slots. So if you wanted to know the news, you had to know some Afrikaans.) So there's what happens when you have a government that works quite hard on making everybody know some language. Their results were quite spotty, but there are patterns. In Durban, which doesn't have many Afrikaans speakers, years and years of schooling (and passing exams) left many incapable of speaking Afrikaans. (And the same applied to English for very Afrikaans areas.) So just diving in, and using the language to achieve something other than learning the language becomes the most important thing, once issues such as basic grammar and vocab have been covered. Back in the day there was also conscription into an army that was unilingual: Afrikaans, only. That put even the Durbanites through 2 years of compulsory Afrikaans. It probably improved most of their Afrikaans, but English accents didn't change. (I think to change your accent you need to have some level of "wish to join in" driving you, to make the process automatic. And if it's not automatic, there's always something of an accent - which we should just deem Cool, but that's another issue.) I suppose, then, from my experience as one of the reagents in that experiment, I'd opine that lots of input isn't enough, lots of using a language isn't enough, and wanting to get on with people works fantastically. My Afrikaans is still very bookish, though. (I have an Afrikaans mate who calls it "high" Afrikaans - like the speak in Church - but he's just being nice). It was probably less bookish (just because I said "fok" a lot) when I was working for King Rat. (My army mates were "rof". There were "skollies" - which is also an English word in some places. For instance they decided they liked the unit's ambulance, so when it came in for a service, it never went back to the medics; it was used for things like collecting whole forest worth of firewood to first nearly set fire to the workshop with (a fire's not a fire if you don't start it with lots of petrol), and then cook lots of stolen meat ... I'm losing the track here. Hang with the "rof okes" and you end up speaking rof Afrikaans. That was the point. (The other point being that in situations of quotidian biligualism, languages tend to start to merge. Even today there are English words for things that I struggle to remember, because it's habitual to use the Afrikaans ones.) There's one final point about my own personal experience of becoming bilingual in Afrikaans. I worked for a few years as a prosecutor in courts that were often Afrikaans. From a language learning point of view I suppose all that does is make your language use bookish. (But I am bookish, so maybe it's just my nature oozing through.) Now for the last 10 years or more, I've very seldom had any cause to speak Afrikaans. So what effect can that have on someone who at times has been fluent (as in having people say, "Where did you learn to speak such good English?" when switching, and surprising them by claiming to be English)... oh ..? I'm not so sure. It always feels almost physically difficult to restart the Afrikaans when I do, but then after a certain amount of time (sometimes quite quickly), it just starts to flow. It flows directly from its own place in my heart. No translating. Some kind of compound Afrikaans persona takes over the "me" of me, and there we go, praating the taal, as some say. Let it go on longer and I start to think in Afrikaans sometimes. Longer, and I start having difficulties thinking in English. But it always feels like you can lose it. And I'm pretty sure my Afrikaans is not what it used to be. And it also always feels (at some point) that this is like riding a bicycle. What you learn (fully, I mean) in a language is yours forever. Isn't that a nice thought? Sorry that went on so long. But it's just a longish story (apart from the irrelevant bits).

[@byronwilliams7977]

@Luca ARRIVAL time and language acquisition, can you drop a link to the video.

[@daysandwords]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/r3TThp9tpauCeKc&

[@AgentH53]

16:54 Danish with a Swedish accent is basically Norwegian.

[@cesar.sandovalcolon]

I saw you sneaking through Luca's door behind him 29:47

[@daysandwords]

That was an editing error that at first I was so embarrassed about (some of the other language KZbinrs consider me the editing master haha), but then my son and I laughed so hard when we saw that bit where I pop out from behind Luca haha.

[@stevencarr4002]

I did a double-take when I saw that. What's going on? I thought.

[@kassaynikolett2968]

I just loved that part. :-)

[@senorsmile]

Now we need an interview all in Swedish, because reasons (no english, all swedish all the time...)

[@Sourcoolness]

Omg I thought there was a smudge-mark or leak on my phone screen!

[@daysandwords]

Haha - was that from my half of the video? Sorry!

[@Sourcoolness]

@@daysandwords No no there's some unusual art on Luca's wall behind him.

[@coconutpineapple2489]

You can learn foreign languages on your own. You can grow by interacting with others.

[@BryanAJParry]

Absolutely! My Spanish-speaking students always think good writing is about long and hard-to-parse sentences with an airy-fairy quality. It's not like that in English. Frankly, I don't even think It's really like that in Spanish; good expression is good expression, whatever the language.

[@bofbob1]

Dunno. As an early French/English bilingual, I still feel quite often that an English author translated to French sounds childish and that a French author translated to English sounds arrogant or wishy-washy. Not all the time of course, but it happens often enough. It's more obvious in non-fiction, where English now seems to lean towards being less ornate and more to-the-point. A fairly recent development, since you only have to go back about 100-150 years to find English non-fiction that is just as ornate as its Romance counterparts today. As a personal anecdote, while I learned both French and English early on, French was my dominant language and culturally I was definitely more French than American (my parents hail from the US but most of my childhood was spent in France). This translated into how I'd write. Back in the day, one of my university professors from the UK told me, upon correcting an essay of mine: "It was good, but your English is at best Victorian, and at worst Biblical." Apparently I could pass as a native speaker, just not a native speaker from this century. lol ^^

[@daysandwords]

"Biblical." So... Your English must have been terrible if it was actually Greek or Hebrew. 😂

[@bofbob1]

@@daysandwords lol ^^

[@BryanAJParry]

@@bofbob1 Interesting post. But remember that a hundred plus years ago, clear expression was less common; texts were usually written for a specialist audience and were often a bit opaque.

[@matteosposato9448]

It is absolutely like that with Italian, and this is one of the reasons why I came to appreciate the English language lately. I know Spanish but don't hold so much meta-knowledge of it to make such a strong statement as the one above. However I would be quite confident to say that Spanish, on this gradient, lies somewhere much closer to Italian than English. Anyway, may I fundamentally disagree with "good expression is good expression, whatever the language". There are so many things beyond language that shape language itself and its conceptions; I suggest to view them with an abundant dose of relativism

[@andrewjgrimm]

19:00 I’ve had a suspicion that people who understand their own language have a better grasp of other languages (and vice versa) - but how can you evaluate your understanding of your native language as an adult? (For a native speaker of Spanish)

[@daysandwords]

There are tests online for that kind of thing, but I'm not really sure, more specifically than that. Your vocabulary is part of it. Adults who regularly read tend to have a vocabulary about 10,000-30,000 words higher than people who don't read.

[@slimytoad1447]

Luca you need an introduction?? Really? I doubt it. You're the best

[@azman6568]

@14:05 can someone tell me how to spell the film or provide a link please. Tusen Takk

[@daysandwords]

Force Majeure

[@unshapingtheearth7916]

I literally thought this guy was a native English speaker.

[@daysandwords]

Interesting. I never took Luca as a native speaker but I know some people do. Might I ask where you're from?

[@clairejoy1053]

29:46 is hilarious

[@thirdworldpolyglot2095]

🤩💘

[@narsplace]

In Australia many immigrants are monolingual too.

[@daysandwords]

Yeah that is true, but when I said "Australia is one of the most monolingual countries in the world", I was aware that it could sound like I meant that we all just speak English. The fact that we have a lot of immigration, even if those people then do only speak their native language, doesn't change the fact that I needed to make that distinction. I would say that more than 50% of them speak decent English.

[@jellyfox3368]

May I ask for some clarification as to why you think speaking early isn't a good idea? I don't know enough to form an opinion about it but I am curious as to why you think its a bad idea so I can learn from you. EDIT: Also Im sorry if this is an obvious question that you have answered in a different video I am very new to this channel, but if not speaking, what resources do you use to learn?

[@daysandwords]

Yeah I did a 3 video series that addressed this in response to another video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r3OrnqiFnpqqrZo

[@jellyfox3368]

@@daysandwords Thanks! I will take a look!

[@p81286]

Could anyone tell me the name of the movie they talk about at 14:07?

[@daysandwords]

Force Majeur

[@DaniLangTalk]

29:47 😂😂😂😂

[@thinking-ape6483]

For some reason I thought you were an anaesthesiologist. Not sure why I thought that.

[@daysandwords]

I have a friend who is an anaesthetist (we don't have anaesthesiologists in Australia, anaesthetists do that job instead).

[@thinking-ape6483]

@@daysandwords Hmm. Well you are still glorious in my eyes regardless. May you be spared the wrath of the drop bears!

[@daysandwords]

@@thinking-ape6483 My anaesthetist friend is truly amazing. Ask him anything about the body or why X response happens and he can tell all the research on it and more impressively, tie it to something you've already understood, so it's easier to remember.

[@mendamend]

Have you ever been to Sweden or finland lamont?

[@daysandwords]

No, the initial plan was to go to Denmark, Sweden and Finland around the end of 2017 but we just couldn't at that time and then it's been a bunch more "couldn't", and now we have an 18 month old and that just makes travelling more of a pain than a pleasure. We will get there eventually.

[@alwayslearning7672]

So Swedish/Norwegian is like Czech/Slovak...mutually intelligible?

[@daysandwords]

I don't know much about Czech or Slovak except that they used to be one country, so I would assume so, yes. I would actually assume that those two are even more similar than Swedish and Norwegian. Norwegian can be tricky to understand, especially for people like me who have rarely been exposed to it (and whose Swedish is only good but not nearly at native level) but yes they are similar enough that Swedish people who visit Norway generally just speak Swedish to the locals, they don't use much English, although they might occasionally. The same with Danish except that there's even more English involved because that is definitely hard to understand. I would say that Norwegian is similar enough that when a Swede says "I speak Norwegian", it's a bit like an English person saying "I speak Scottish". A "wee" and a "bairn" here and there, roll the Rs, change the vowels and boom, yerr a t'rew Scot.

[@alwayslearning7672]

@@daysandwords Thanks for that.Good to know. Slovaks and Czechs speak in their respective languages and fully understand each other.On paper, almost identical! They were two regions in one country so I'm guessing that they're like two dialects of the same language. If you learn one you can have the other one for free!😉

[@bigtombowski]

29:47 - 29:49 I fukin lol'd my bolox off lol

[@daysandwords]

😆Legit one of the only true editing errors I've ever let through on my channel. I remember the first person who saw it and was like "Dude, you scared me!" and I went and watched and was like "What the heck did I do..." haha. Keyframe issue.

[@bigtombowski]

@@daysandwords it's a beautiful moment

[@doubledaredangames]

19:30 Absolutely not. I had to go back and watch schoolhouse rock because I was never properly taught what a predicate was.

[@TheFiestyhick]

Yes, but peanut butter and jelly is good, not sure why you don't agree

[@daysandwords]

What???

[@naimatt7977]

The second

[@a.r.4707]

Danes they speak like they have a hot potato in their mouth😆.

[@rafalkaminski6389]

Paper is better

[@pauldavies9360]

Eloquent English speakers: Richard Burton Christopher Hitchens

[@tripjj8662]

First

[@zoushuu]

damn

[@religdeb]

Congratz

[@jimka385]

From a native swedish speaker point of view. A swede has basically no chance to understand spoken norwegian. Written norwegian we may be able to parse out, but not when it's spoken. The only way we can understand norwegians is if they speak 'skavlan svenska/danska' :). A norwegian, for the most part will be able to understand swedish. But this isn't because the languages are similar to each other, it has more to do with that they get exposed to swedish when growing up (Astrid Lindgren and other 'classical' works. I hear SVT is even broadcasted in Norway.). When it comes to danish, it's even worse for swedish speakers, it's basically just ghiberish to us :D

[@daysandwords]

Va??? Du skojar väl. Jag har MYCKET bevis att svenskar klarar sig med norska utan alltför mycket ansträngning. Först och främst, jag förstår norska okej. Inte perfekt alltså, men jag är ju långtifrån svensk. För det andra så har jag en norsk vän som brukade vara min granne och när jag började lära mig svenska frågade jag honom om hela situationen med språk i Sverige och sånt och han sa att när han är i Sverige så använder han mest norska men som han uttyckte sig "Everyone can immediately tell I'm Norwegian, but that's fine" och för tredje så har varit på fester där det fanns normänn, danskar och mest svenskar och alla pratade mest sina egna språk. Danska var svårt för "oss", det kan jag hålla med om, men jag tror inte att normännen behövde använda engelska oftare än ett fåtal gånger. Ärligt talat så vet jag inte vilken typ av svenska du pratar som modersmål om du inte kan förstå norska.

[@jimka385]

@@daysandwords Om jag gav dig intrycket att jag försökte prata ner dina kunskaper och erfarenheter kring Sverige och svenska så får jag be om ursäkt. Men när det gäller norska så kommer inte den genomsnittliga svenskan att förstå språket. När det gäller din norska vän så skulle jag gissa på att han rörde sig i kretsar med personer som är mera van att höra norska, eller så tonar han ner sin norska tills att den närmar sig 'Skavlan-svenska/norska' (Skavlan är en populär norsk talkshow som sänds (eller har sänts i Sverige). Ang. festen som du var på och din beskrivning på att det fanns både norrmän, svenskar och danskar där så låter det som att du var i en kontext eller ett sammanhang där dom flesta är vana vid alla tre språken, att dom då förstår varandra överraskar mig inte. Det stämmer att norrmän inte behöver använda engelska för att bli förstådda i sverige, men dom omformulerar mer ofta än inte det språk som dom använder när dom kommunicerar med svenskar, så att det blir lättare för svenskar att förstå vad dom säger. Den 'typ' av svenska som jag pratar är rikssvenska (standard swedish), med lite inflytelse från östgötska (dialect in the municipality of Östergötland). För att en svensk ska kunna förstå norska så behöver han/hon utsätta sig för språket under en period av någon vecka till ett par månader, beroende på person. Om jag får spekulera så skulle jag gissa på att en svensk kan troligtvis bli flytande i norska inom ramen av ett halvår till ett år. Jag vill också tillägga att jag tycker att din svenska är riktigt bra!

[@kattfan]

@@jimka385 Jag förstår norska ganska problemfritt, så länge personen pratar någon av de östnorska dialekterna. Jag kan ha en konversation med en person från till exempel Oslo utan problem. När jag var där så pratade jag inte Engelska en enda gång. Vissa ord som skiljer sig från svenskan lär man sig ganska snabbt om man exponerar sig för norska filmer/serier ibland. De dialekter som pratas i västnorge kan dock vara lite svåra att förstå, men annars kan vi förstå varandra bra på en grundläggande nivå. Så jag kan inte riktigt relatera till det du skrev 😅