Will John, Professional Soccer Player and Language Enthusiast

[@Hackbridge1963]

Well for me, this has been one of the best videos about how someone has learnt a foreign language. I hope to stumble and trip my way through learning languages also. Thank you!

[@ConnorWidmaier]

He may speak with the most neutral American accent that I’ve ever heard

[@justakathings]

That’s what I thought haha (he had the least “black” or “African American” accent (sorry, idk what the best way to call it is))

[@meriez2892]

@@justakathings that’s racist. Just say his accent is neutral.

[@justakathings]

@@meriez2892 I don’t think so at all, different races or ethnicities have different accents, sorry if it made you uncomfortable but it’s just fact

[@JayPleezer304]

@@justakathings as an american black dude...your're not wrong

[@johncoloma9574]

Sounds like he’s from Kansas City…🤷‍♂️

[@germanlondono8700]

I loved the fact that Will talked about meditation, mindfulness. It's an important topic that will help us a lot in our quest of learning languages and also in life in general. I've tried but always fail to keep it as a routine, but I know it will change my life if I do it consistently. If we learn that, we would be able to learn more quickly.

[@the_flushjackson]

Well I guess I'm a huge Will John fan now. Great conversation! I'll be subscribing and hitting up that podcast.

[@Ian-uu3dz]

Great video! I’ve been watching Will John’s videos for a while and never knew he was polyglot.

[@JonandEva]

Great video. Thanks, Steve!

[@erikpavlusik6214]

I wish him all the best, he is very open minded

[@WorkLifeJapan]

pro athlete... polyglot.... what am even doing with my life.

[@lynntfuzz]

And Podcaster and KZbinr. And why is it taking me 35 years to learn German?

[@coconutpineapple2489]

Pro athletes visit many countries. They have opportunities to have conversation in foreign language. They have money to take lessons. That is a virtuous cycle.

[@tomatrix7525]

Will’s a very interesting man! Would love to hear drom him here again

[@mkkaufman]

Love your videos, have been watching for years! I wish you had a long-form podcast too..!!

[@sergeipetrov5572]

Thank you!

[@feridememmedova7131]

Great video! !Hi from Azerbaijan Baku

[@gabrielgads]

Great guest!

[@aolanikunisan]

Just yesterday I watched a collab Will did with Stefan where they spoke Swedish and Danish to each other and now this!

[@sulandelemere]

Great all round talent very inspiring!

[@namisanws2340]

that is great cause alot of futebol players go to many countrys and even don't learn to speak

[@luamfernandez6031]

When you notice a pattern in a language does it mean that you you'll be able to use it? Or does it help when you're listening or reading to internalize this pattern and only then be able to use it?

[@aylavdilleri7829]

He seems like a really cool guy

[@luamfernandez6031]

Steve, I would like an advice from you, I've been learning English for 3 months and I often like to study English watching series, I can understand roughly 93% with the subtitles without stopping, but without the subtitles the percentage decreases to nearly 85%. Is there something specific I can do? Or should I just keep training my listening?

[@Thelinguist]

Just keep going and do a lot of reading.

[@acesul8811]

It's interesting that Steve learns languages best while out running. I'm the complete opposite. Running is my creative time, where I come up with my ideas. If I try to learn anything, even if it's in English my brain turns into a sieve.

[@jonathangamble]

Hey Steve, was just thinking it would be cool to have a place on LingQ where you could request natives to read your content... could get people to add a lot of content for free! They could be recorded within LingQ instead, sort of like Busuu does, instead of just making requests. Just an idea!

[@meraj5074]

Cool !! I really love him ❤👑 Which languages will he learn then ?

[@SilvioGerinaud]

Incredible how they can learn so much languages

[@jeanp.5929]

if you travel, you have a lot of advantages over people that don't. The immersiveness of being in another country is huge in training your mind to absorb a new language.

[@coconutpineapple2489]

If you can speak English, Spanish and French are easy to learn because of similar words and word order. If you can speak Chinese, it's easy to learn Japanese and Korean. The key is to get completely fluent in just one foreign language first. If you already speak one foreign language fluently, you can learn two languages at the same time.

[@tomatrix7525]

Steve, nothing to do with lamguage learning but, ‘Football’ only means soccer in the UK. Ireland (English speaking) still call it soccer. Football here refers to ‘Gaa football’ (Our national sport, only played here, with perhaps small clubs in other areas such as US and Australia I think) If you want to learn more look up Irish GAA

[@lilyanna3009]

I can speak 3 langauges and want to learn more. But I am worried that if I put too much time in new languages that I will have no time in practising the 3 languages that I already can. I would like to have my 3 langauges to reach advanced or professionally level. Do you have any commment? Thank you.

[@skipinkoreaable]

Many very accomplished people have already said a lot on this topic. I believe you already know the answer to your question. If you want to truly excel in a few languages it will take a lot of time and focus. If you spread yourself over more languages it will enrich your life and teach you many things, but it will be much harder to reach/maintain a superbly high level in everything. What you do will depend on your goals, but a reasonable compromise might be to aim very high for a few, and aim much lower for some others if they still pull you in. If the true goal is perfection in your main 3, you may need to focus solely on those, but that isn't really the mindset of Steve Kaufmann (and maybe not of the man he's interviewing here), and these guys are of course awesome and have found learning multiple languages very rewarding. There are some amazing learners like Luca Lampariello with a very impressive level of ability in a surprisingly large number of languages, so I would shy away from commenting about what you can or can't do, but people like Luca usually make incredible investments and have phenomenal motivation. In my own learning I have a few languages that I work on very consistently and some others that I'm much less consistent with. That works for me.

[@bhutchin1996]

It depends. When I was learning Portuguese and later used it professionally, I put Spanish on the back burner. Putting Spanish aside for some years wasn't a mistake because I learned so many new words in Spanish thanks to having learned them in Portuguese first. The more time you spend with a language, the higher the probability that you will reach your goals in/with it. I imagine that your first language is German, Dutch or a North Germanic one. If you learn a Romance language, you'll see some similarities there too. For example, 'gratis' means free (but pronounced differently) in both Spanish and Norwegian. If you have Netflix, you can keep up with the language(s) you've been learning and even improve. For me, the series 'Hjem til jul' was easier to understand than 'Ragnarok', the series I'm watching now, on a vocabulary and accent level. In 2017 I spent a few months in Colombia and learned a bit about how they speak Spanish. On the other hand, I haven't been to Argentina or Chile yet, so learning their way of speaking and using vocabulary wouldn't make sense unless I was planning to spend time in either country.

[@masonbradford7026]

Does anyone have an idea how I should go about learning 2 languages on LingQ. I have Italian at 900 words and German at 750. I’m More skilled in Italian as I grew up in an Italian family.

[@markchavez9458]

Hey mason what’s your name on LingQ?! I’ll add you. I’m also trying to learn two languages at the same time.

[@lukdhguirg7121]

За Нефтчи играл?

[@skysea6190]

Puedes hablar el video en español?por favor

[@KatekyoKen]

In Dutch saying 21 is een-en-twintig (one and twenty) I guess we have that in common with danish haha.

[@Helga2408]

Shilo Garcons Not only Dutch and Danish have this phenomenon in common, also German. You say einundzwanzig as well (one and twenty). In Norwegian, you hear it sometimes as well but it isn’t obligatory, namely: en og tyve/en og tjue (one and twenty). Greetings from a Bulgarian minipolyglot.

[@sternadms8738]

In slovenia we also count this way

[@muhilan8540]

I love the Count of Monte Cristo

[@trevkyleaa]

The Danish counting system only makes sense if you know what «snes» means 😅 «Snes» is an old way of weighing fish in the markets. «Snes» = 20 so «tres» being (60) would be, 3 x 20 (3 x snes). «halv tres» is where it get’s difficult though... 3 x «snes» - 10 (half «snes») = 50. Probably still doesn’t make sense. I’m a Norwegian speaker and this is how I grasp this particular Danish concept.

[@bhutchin1996]

I always thought the Danish country system resembled German's, but there could be leftover vigesimal counting (as there is in French of France) from ancient Celtic times.

[@mr.sushi2221]

Omg a footballer, hype!

[@seyitan7324]

You might not see this but im trying to understand how to learn a language through listening and reading when you dont know a single word of it. The language im learning is Finnish and i dont know where to start or find content to read or listen :(

[@a.r.4707]

Sëyitãn: Did you do any textbooks before like colloquial Finnish? You can find that online if you are interested. Then you might find some FSI course for Finnish as well.

[@EasyFinnish]

Wow! Steve, this is level up 100% I've always thought about this do football players learn a lot of languages because of living in different countries and I see they probably do. What team he played in Finland? Would be nice to know :)

[@T3m33p]

He played for RoPS

[@a.r.4707]

I reckon that he didn't learn Finnish though when it wasn't listed among his languages.

[@gamingwithpurg3anarchy157]

He's from Nigeria and he talks whiter than me and I'm dang near translucent. It just shows you how black Americans are just different (not all of course..) but some speak ebonics.. some are just ghetto.. yet around the world others just sound normal they don't try to sound trashy saying "finna" and things of that course.

[@2ndround44thpick]

Kc stand up!!!!

[@M_SC]

You two have oddly similar voices!

[@mr_guy_ittidecharchoti]

You don’t mean accent right haha

[@michaelrespicio5683]

It's nice to have a common interest with someone else but if that's the only thing, in this case, languages, doesn't talking about this with everyone get kind of old after a while? Seems more like a one-time subject. You talk about languages and how you learn them, but then what will you talk about next time if there even is one? Maybe life, but if your life is all about language learning, people may not want to retain future contact if it's apparent you don't really have a life, not one worth sharing anyway. Also how do you know what proper Danish pronunciation is if you don't speak it yourself and it's apparently different than Swedish and Norwegian. It's like if you tried to pronounce Lithuanian words like mergaitė or vyrai, or Icelandic like sæll or mjög gott, you may pronounce them incorrectly, but I can since most people fail to appreciate these fascinating languages. Even if you did learn Lithuanian, what will you talk about with a native speaker? Languages? It's as if you just learn languages for one-time encounters instead of developing quality relationships with natives for future contact. That said, who cares about the number of native speakers?

[@bhutchin1996]

That's the impression I get from Esperanto. Sure, one can say so much more in that language, but with some speakers, it's just about the language itself, and to me that's boring. *Ĉu ni povus parli pri io ajn, kio ne estas Esperanto? Bonvolu!* I agree that Icelandic and Lithuanian are fascinating, but so many languages, so little time.

[@jakewood5475]

Azerbaijan sounds like Chinese...

[@lauri6226]

What about Finnish 🤦🏽‍♂️

[@eddieliusa]

You guys should’ve spoke in different languages