This KILLS Language Learning

[@coolbrotherf127]

The biggest killer I see is people using "I'm taking a language class" or "I'm studying with Duolingo" as a disguise for not actually doing anything to progress their knowledge. I know I was guilty of that years ago trying to learn German in college. I'd do everything but actually study the language. Eventually I had to take personal responsibility and make myself actually do something active and productive.

[@philipdavis7521]

I look back with amazement at how naive I was when I dabbled in Mandarin and Japanese years ago. I didn't give any thought at all to how long it would take. I just sort of assumed that if I finished an evening course and then visited China somehow it would all come together (spoiler alert: It didn't). There is of course an inbuilt bias in the language learning business to raise expectations (and implicitly blame the learner when they fail).

[@matt_brooks-green]

I didn't appreciate the sheer amount of material required when getting input. Not many courses (if any) have enough content...

[@osoperezoso2608]

I'm right there with you. I've been using Pablos version of CI and I'll never use anything else. I'm at 800 hours of Spanish input and I'm still enjoying the process.

[@MisterGames]

Funny, what Pablo does is similar to tprs and the ALG method and interestingly another Dr Brown not of ALG fame who teaches language, did a video of himself learning Arabic by having people describe pictures to him. Poly glot a lot is his channel. The video he did about it has people doing pretty much the same as ALG. Their better results speak for themselves... Kids spend a year just listening. Nature is showing us how to do it. We need more of what Pablo is doing, in other languages!

[@lyralea2457]

Fantastic advice :) Expectations can be pesky! It's as if no matter how long you manage to keep them at bay and focus your goals on amount of input rather than amount of progress, every now and then they appear to say "shouldn't you be able to do X by now?" But I love the "you do you" approach to language learning. Your videos are so good for getting me to chill with a book and a cup of tea and enjoy learning again, and stop overthinking it.

[@matt_brooks-green]

Thank you so much LyraLea. Honestly, I've given up trying to feel like I should be doing a certain thing or optimising my learning. I am an adult and I want to drink a tea and read a book or listen to a nice podcast. I'm old enough to not care whether other people think it's a good way of learning or not. It's definitely sustainable over the long term!

[@valritamorris1376]

Hi, I'm learning Spanish. I started reading Spanish stories on the kindle app. I find it easier to read this way than reading a book right now. For me, the advantage of using the app is that when you touch a word or sentence, the meaning is automatically generated. I've learned so much sentence structure and vocabulary this way.

[@christinehydon4436]

Yet another fabulous video, Matt. Thank you so much for your time. Please may I ask you where you purchased your audio books from?

[@matt_brooks-green]

Thank you Christine! I tend to buy audiobooks through Apple Books, simply because it is on my phone and convenient I don't really know what the 'best' way would be

[@kimzierap]

Vi el podcast “conversación en español” de Joel Zárate. Me encanta Joel. Ha hecho recursos muy excelentes. Gracias por su consejo. También estoy aprendiendo español.

[@matt_brooks-green]

Thanks Kimberly. Yeah, really enjoying the podcast. It's great content! Good luck!

[@sohambrahme8175]

Language is a long learning process. In India we learn languages from 6 years that is 1st std in school till 17 years that is 12th std. here languages mean Hindi or English or both. Fun story i never learned to speak hindi after i went and learned in school, i actually learned the whole language just by watching a cartoon called Doraemon ( A Japanese cartoon ). After watching that I could fluently speak Hindi . I was 5-6 years old back then.

[@philipdavis7521]

Slightly off-topic, but there was a little BTL discussion after your last video on J. Marvin Brown and I read the short version of his book out of curiosity. Its really interesting and a great read. I really do think we have language teaching entirely backwards. So many courses start with 'teaching the basics' and leaving immersion as some sort of final polish to everything you've learned, when it should be the opposite.

[@matt_brooks-green]

Totally. I had a teacher try and teach me Spanish grammar on day one which was very painful. It has made me see the benefit of delayed output. I can't understand the grammar if I don't know any Spanish!

[@Komatik_]

One thing language courses at school did right was that they tried to abandon Finnish as soon as possible and just teach and operate in the target language as completely as humanly possible.

[@bonnyvondolores2647]

GRACIAS! I do alittle -sometimes alot- everyday. For the last 2 years, I’ve spent 4-6 months in Mexico, and presently in Oaxaca city. I must speak spanish here… or at least attempt to say what I need in the most basic present tense way. Mexicanos are kind and patient and curious to interact with me…. with everybody! Its been humbling..but as you say… different methods can make it “fun”… I’ve taken one-on-one spanish, Duolingo most days, watching a movie in spanish, flash cards, listening, reading, and I now have Mexicano friends - who speak spanish-english with me… its an on-going practice…. and I like your take on it.

[@matt_brooks-green]

Good luck! You’ll get there!!!

[@alagunoff]

Thanks

[@LearnEnglishwithNetflix]

Epic! Even with the right method the time investment is massive.

[@英語わかりません]

Japanese and chinese is a full time job for 2 years to get semi competent in the language. 5000ish hours or so. Chances are that you don't have time for it, which is why the vast majority quit.

[@matt_brooks-green]

Yep, but if people understood from the beginning that they need to be able to do it long term I think they could manage their expectations better

[@Komatik_]

The characters (and the Japanese take on them being even more fucked up than Mandarin/Cantonese) don't help. When you're learning an European language, what you read and what you hear are connected pretty well, even with a messed up orthography like French. Korean and Vietnamese let you get away with an alphabet, so these more leisurely methods should - logically speaking, at least - work much better. Still a ton of work because of the lack of shared vocabulary and unusual sentence structure, but much easier to eg. immerse and use subtitles to check what you hear and the reverse when you can read instead of being illiterate.

[@英語わかりません]

@@Komatik_ Yes. I dont even recommend Chinese or japanese to normal people and ive studied japanese for 6000 hours for the past 3 years. Am I fluent? Not even close. With fluent its damn near native by my standards and not even close. Im fairly competent but dont underestimate the amount of time it takes. Its not a language to learn to flex, its a calling or obsession more than anything. Its not for normal people. I can watch dramas without subs fairly comfortably but there are plenty of times I have to go back and check what just happened, especially if the audio is crap. So dont recommend it, but if you do it anyway It might be for you. You will know its for you if you enjoy learning it and dont think about taking breaks ever, its quite a commitment. You have to have a screw loose or live in the country so you have to otherwise you wont.

[@Komatik_]

@@英語わかりません It's comical how much easier Japanese would be to get into if they just wrote phonetically. So much good entertainment of all levels of complexity and it's ultimately not that hard to listen to compared to eg. tonal languages or Korean. But for some reason nobody gave kanji a sword and asked them to seppuku. It's nuts that Koreans adjusted even their mixed script to be more sensible (only using characters for Chinese loans and writing native words in hangeul) > You will know its for you if you enjoy learning it and dont think about taking breaks ever, its quite a commitment. I don't know if I have an obsessive dedication to it, just a bunch of passively absorbed vocab from anime. Has me in a silly place where listening to Japanese feels easy but reading is frustrating, and Korean is the opposite: Reading is easy but I just have no vocab to go on, it's all from scratch.

[@jasonjames6870]

It's took me year's to get to b2 in German and I still don't feel fluent enough

[@williamadams7136]

So many languages I want to learn but so little time. :( I learnt how to trill the Spanish R but I haven't started inputting yet!

[@matt_brooks-green]

Hahaha. Yep!

[@dallassukerkin6878]

It is something that has always puzzled me - language learning is a difficult and long process, harder, I would say, than doing a degree in some subject or other ... and yet, outside a certain circle, it garners almost no kudos at all. I have degrees in economics, history, computer science and engineering but if I were to add, say, fluent in French to that list, no one would equate it to the academic qualifications. But learning French (or actually Finnish in my case) is a *much* more difficult process.

[@Komatik_]

Hys, suomi on helppoa ja säännöllistä.

[@dallassukerkin6878]

@@Komatik_ ROFL Well, it does tend to follow it's rules, yes ... but having 20392 verb tenses seems a bit excessive :D

[@Komatik_]

@@dallassukerkin6878 Cease this slander, we have only 14 😠

[@dallassukerkin6878]

@@Komatik_ :grins:

[@kapoioBCS]

I have gain a huge amount of experience through exposure, i.e. listening podcast, reading books and articles and watching tv series in my TL (Swedish) but even though I seem to understand very well input, I cannot produce output 😢, does any have any tips? I don’t have the money for italkie and I don’t have anyone to practice with..

[@Daviddaze]

Try shadowing. Find a swedish video where you like rhe accent and practice the sentences. Starr, stop listen practice over& over.

[@matt_brooks-green]

I don't use it but many people swear by Hello Talk as a language exchange

[@ronlugbill1400]

Do a lot of language exchanges. It is free. Hello Talk is ok but most people on it are not that serious. I use Mixxer for language exchanges. More serious partners there. Set up weekly language exchanges with people. Do it several times a week on a set schedule for best results. Half an hour in Swedish and half an hour in English. Good luck.

[@aSnailCyclopsNamedSteve]

KZbin recommended this as your next video to watch. So here I am. I guess you mean expectations kill language learning. The writing could be a little clearer. Ok, I can go with hundreds of hours to learn a language; that's what I spent learning Lithuanian. But I finally knew what I was doing, sort of. I think it can be learned in around 100-200 hours if properly structured. I am starting to assemble that material. To be more specific, we (my high school class) spent two years struggling with Latin grammar. Third year, grammar instruction complete, we moved to intermediate Latin and realised we knew nothing, absolutely nothing. So our new teacher taught us grammar in less than an hour. Because of that, I taught my daughter Latin grammar in a matter of a few hours overall. So what exactly was wrong with my expectations after 2 years of study and pain? I took German at university. Classes were conducted in German. I read Goethe in the original. My degree was in partially in German. But I could never read a German newspaper. What exactly is wrong with the expectation that with such qualifications, I should be able to read a simple newspaper? So if you are talking about the expectation that there should be some visible sign of accomplishment after considerable effort has been applied, I would say that was a fair expectation. If I pay 80 USD for an item but only an empty box arrives in the post, I think my expectations of receiving more were justified and I have the right to feel let down. So, if after several hundred hours of language learning, I can only read phrasebooks and first grade readers, are my expectations or the material at fault?

[@lisanidog8178]

People who want to learn a language then do it! Stop the excuses! You want to learn a language you FIND the time or don’t bother! You didn’t learn your native language in days or weeks you won’t in a foreign language. It’s a marathon not a sprint. If it means you learn a word a day and remember it great. There’s so many resources on line. Adult videos teaching, Spanish for Children, songs in Spanish, dictionaries. Actual classes. AI language moduals. You do what helps you NOT what works for others as we all learn differently, at different paces. If repetition helps you do it. If pictures and Spanish words help do it, if games in your chosen language helps do it. Some are more visual, some are verbal. I’m both. Learning languages are fun just to learn. You don’t need to take a trip. You can talk to yourself, you can see comments in Spanish and see if you can figure them out before you push the translate button.

[@mmscannadinari]

Nice Orient Bambino ;)

[@IntelligentAtheism]

If you already speak English, you don't really need to learn any other language 😊👍

[@abhinavchauhan7864]

Are you british?

[@matt_brooks-green]

Yep!

[@abhinavchauhan7864]

@@matt_brooks-green thanks for the respond

[@nadinchen2391]

Could you give me an advice: What are good podcast, youtubers for an beginner in mandarin chinese?

[@matt_brooks-green]

Try - Acquire Mandarin, Comprehensible Chinese, Blabla Chinese, Comprehensible Mandarin

[@dg7438]

I haven't watched the whole video yet, but I wonder if it's good, for say to try to memorize the 625 words from Fluent Forever, and using mnemonics as a beginner baseline for quicker word recognition.

[@matt_brooks-green]

Personally I think you'd pick the most common words up very quickly anyway but each to their own. I hate flashcards but I know they can be powerful