Are Harvard and MIT spearheading change in university education or is it Stanford? Could it be LingQ one day?

Read this article for an interesting dicussion about the changes that are already taking place in university education.

I foresee the day when university courses, in different languages, will be offered at LingQ, with full audio, video, transcripts and other resources, enabling students to learn from the leading professors in the world, and learning languages as they go.

Only the best courses should prosper. The "dog" courses all too offered at your local university, and which are taken only to obtain credits towards a degree, should go by the wayside. This will improve the quality of university education, increase assessibilty to far more students and lower the cost to everyone.

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Global TV's program on polyglots was a bit of a disappointment in that it did not point out that anyone can learn another language, and another and another. Here is my video on the subject.

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Tune in at 7 pm tomorrow, Saturday night, if you are interested. Global Television did a program about polyglots. I was a small part of that program.

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Language learning is a personal activity. I do it for myself. I learn the language for my own reasons and in my own ways. I focus my efforts on those aspects of the language that interest me the most.

Confidence, strong motivation and a positive attitude towards the language I am learning are preconditions for success. To make meaningful progress in the language I need to spend enough time with the language, listening to it, reading, it, using it. I try to be attentive, observing and noticing the language, how it sounds and how it functions.

I spend most of my time on input, listening and reading. This gives me the words I need, and a feeling for the language. This will ensure that my output  acivities will progres quickly, when I get the chance to use the language. Input activities are easy and inexpensive to arrange.

Some people focus on grammar. I find that the core grammar I need to learn is actually a relatively small number of rules and patterns that repeat over and over in the language. At first, however, it seems overwhelming. With enough input, and regular review, however, it all becomes clearer and clearer. 

Some people aspire to sound like a native. I try to notice how the native speaker pronounces. When I speak, I imitate this pronunciation as much as I can. I know I will not sound like a native. This does not matter to me. I think it is more important to have a good command of the words and phrases of the language, so that I can express myself accurately on a variety of subjects. That is why the input activity is so important.

In the end, we need to decide what we want from our language learning, and pursure it for our own reasons. I think we are all capable of doing this, and enjoying it.

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We tend to learn better if we struggle a bit on our own, according to this article. 

"Trying to figure something out on your own before getting help actually produces better results than having guidance from the beginning" says the byline to the article. I agree, and this has application to language learning. 

I think we learn a language better if we train ourselves to notice what is happening in the language, if we discover the way the language works through struggling to understand. Very often the neat and tidy rules that describe what what should happen in the language go in one ear and out the other. After we have struggled with the language, and perhaps been confounded and confused by some of the structures, and perhaps noticed others, it becomes easier to understand the explanations, most of which are readily available these days in books and on the internet.

Once we have enough words to express our thoughts, we need to speak and write, to confront our weaknesses. As to when we start doing that, I think that depends on our availability of time, and our opportunities, and of course our personal likes and dislikes. I do think I should write more, though. I need to flounder a little more in my Czech, but I cannot resist just going back to reading things that interest me in the language.

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Thanks to Susanna Zaraysky who sent me this.  Time reviews a book, in an article called "How to speak like a native", about achieving native fluency, which basically seems to concur that this is a futile goal, and which debunks the accent reduction industry at the same time. I think we can get close, if we pay attention, but close is all we should aim for. Some will get closer than others. 

I spoke to a lady here in Vancouver, yesterday, who has lived here for 40 years and speaks excellent but heavily accented English. Could she improve? I think so if it really mattered to her. If she really tried to notice the difference between her accent and some model of how she would like to speak. But she has to want to do this, has to choose a model, and has to learn to notice the differences.

Having a model, wanting to speak like that person, listening and repeating, these are all useful activities. Learning the IPA, looking at diagrams of your mouth, and comparing your results to some graph of the sound waves, are, in my view, much much less useful.

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Check out this video of an American speaking excellent Spanish, and I mean excellent. His name is Richard Vaughan, of the Vaughan language schools in Spain. (He should plug LingQ for me since I am plugging Vaughan, but then I was just so impressed with his Spanish.-:)

Would his Spanish be more impressive if he sounded just like a native? I don't think so. He has total mastery. This is the ultimate goal of language learning. Pursuing the goal of actually sounding like a native is unnecessary, a distraction from the real task of language learning, and highly unlikely to succeed. I have seen people pursue this goal and end up sounding like caricatures, while not achieving the language mastery that Vaughan has achieved. Here is a video I just did on the subject.

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In October I will in Prague for five days. I hope to have a high degree of mostly passive vocabulary and familiarity with Czech and convert this to active fluency in five days. This is in line with ideas expressed by the great online polyglot Viktor Huliganov, about how quickly passive language knowledge can be converted into active fluency. Here is a video on the subject. There will be the occasional post as I approach the moment of truth.

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Well I flew down to Toronto, just under five hours in the air. Slept poorly in a stuffy hotel room. Went through a fire drill in the middle of the night, just to keep me on my toes. But then, as is almost always the case, things looked a lot better in the morning.

First of all the sun was shining, which made Toronto look better. I could even make out Lake Ontario in the distance.

Then I had a long brunch with my brother Tom, whose birthday was the day before. Lots of laughs for sure.

Then at 12 noon, I met up with my fellow participants in the television program, Alexandre and Keith. Alexandre is a Quebecois who lives in Winnipeg, and Keith was also from Vancouver. We were driven to the "distillery district" where the studio was located,  comfortable looking, red brick, gentrified warehouse or factory district, with lost of people idling around, basking in the sun and eating lunch or sipping coffee.

In all we were five, two more, Axel and James, were from Toronto. We were all speakers of many languages, and we discussed language learning in front of the cameras for over two hours. I think five minutes will survive in the final program. I guess we agreed on many things, but I think I disagreed with everyone of our participants on at least something. Maybe it is just my nature.

After the program, it was another 5 hours back to Vancouver. The next day I played with my Old Timer's hockey team and we won our tournament. That evening we celebrated my granddaughter's birthday. A busy weekend.

The program will air on May 5 at 7 pm in Canada, across the country on Global Television's 16 x 9 program.

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I just arrived in Toronto, courtesy of Global Television. I had to give up my Easter Weekend, and I had to miss two games in an old-timers' hockey tournament. I am going to take part in a televions program about people who speak many languages. it will air in May apparently.I fly back tomorrow afternoon, and will play the final game of our hockey tournament if we are in the final. (We lost the first game).

The hotel I am staying here in Toronto, the Delta Chelsea, is sort of like an old coquette with a facelift. The rooms are musty. We just had a fire alarm. The alarm went off for about three minutes before any information was provided on the public address system. People on the three floors above me were told to vacate the hotel by the stairs. Five minutes later everything was all right. They got to go back by the elevators.

I look out the window and see concrete towers and large neon signs. At home I look at the ocean, mountains, and forests.

I checked the door to see where the fire escape is, while te fire alarm was on. I noticed the that official rate for the room is $580 per night. Crazy. I usually pay around $100-150 per night in most places in the world, including Beijing, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland on recent trips. In Shanghai I did not arrange my hotel, the Alberta government did, (I was with a delegation) and that cost me $300 a night. Crazy. I wonder what Global Television is paying.

Anyway, I will try to stay on Vancouver time, so I will read my Russian history book till about one and then turn out the lights.

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I finally got the sound right and the first of our discussions is now up.

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The paper by Canadian researchers, published Thursday, suggests bilingual people have higher cognitive reserves as they get older. Higher cognitive reserve is associated with a lower risk of Alzheimer's and other memory-destroying dementias.

Global Television is looking for Canadians who speak at least 6 languages for a TV program. Please let me know if you qualify or contact Michael Elard . He is the author of the book Babel No More, which I reviewed a while back.

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After my recent post about Esperanto, I received a number of comments, many from irate Esperanto enthusiasts, berating me for not considering Esperanto an important language to learn.

This has caused me to reflect on my motivation for learning languages. Remember, motivation is 70% of the battle in language learning. I am motivated mostly to discover a new culture and language and group of people . As soon as I get past the beginner texts, I dive into the following, using LingQ, and a variety of sources, books and audio books and material I can find on the web..

1) I enjoy histories of the country, which I read and listen to in the language. I have done this for all the languages I have learned, and most recently for Russian and Czech.

2) I read newspapers online and listen to radio programs and podcasts, with transcripts where possible,  to get a flavour of the contemporary scene, issues and concerns, in the country where the language is spoken.

3) I like literature, especially 19th century literature, for which audio and text is largely available free of charge for import into LingQ.

Once I have developed a sufficient level of familiarity with the language and the country, I want to go there and experience it first hand. This is my reward, and a dream like experience, as was recently the case in Russia and will be the case in October in Prague.

4) In many cases I have done business in the languages I have learned, which has enabled me to make friends, and to achieve a degree of success that would otherwise not be possible. It is also satisfying to use th language in this practical way.

Essentially none of this would be possible with Esperanto. I could read the literature, history or newspapers of no country. I could not travel and use the language unless I went to a dedicated meet up of Esperanto speakers, where I might find some of the people who have called me arrogant, nonsensical, illogical and prejudiced in commenting on my previous post here.

But then I would not travel just to meet up with non-native speakers of any other language, so I don't think I would do so for Esperanto. But I accept that others would do so and enjoy it. I respect their interest in this undoubtedly intellectually satisfying activity. I respect their motives. I would hope that they would also respect and understand my reasons for not wanting to join them.

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A former Mayor of Vancouver has launched a program called "greeting fluency" in which he wants to encourage people in Vancouver to learn to greet one another in different languages. Being able to say "hello" and "how are you", without any chance of understanding the response, and without really knowing how you sound, strikes me as a gimmick, that has nothing to do with fluency.

In my view, the most important aspect of fluency is being able to understand what is being said. I have worked with, and done business with, people who spoke English as a foreign language. I would far rather deal with someone who stumbled in expressing him or herself, but obviously understood exactly what I wanted to say. Similarly,I am far more uncomfortable when I don't understand someone in a foreign language than when I make mistakes or struggle to find the best words or phrases.

Fluency is comfort in the language. There is no fluency without strong comprehension skills. "Greeting fluency" is largely meaningless from a language learning perspective. It might, however, inititiate someone into the world of language learning, generate an interest in a different language and culture, in getting to know people from a different milieu through language. So it might still have some benefits. However, mostly it just seems like the kind of thing that politicians do.

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The Economist is running a poll on the most important language to learn. Esperanto is on top. More than anything this shows how skewed this kind of internet polling can be. If you asked 100 random people on the street I doubt if many would know what Esperanto is.

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I finally returned from my trip to the Cook Islands, New Zealand and Australia. I loved the layed back tropical paradise atmosphere of Roratonga, the green and clean nature of New Zealand, and the energy and optimism of Australia, and friendly people everywhere. But more than that, I was impressed by all the excellent and enthusiastic linguists (in the sense of competent speakers of many languages) that I met. Here are some more pictures. I also met with Cooper in Brisbane at the University of Queensland but it was raining and we were rushed, so no picture, sorry!

Here are some pictures, first of all, of Sydney linguists Alexis on the right, and Roy. Alexis speaks French and English flawlessly, being himself from New Caledonia. Roy is a programmer and speaks French, as well as Arabic, some Tagalog, and Aussie English of course, and is working on other languages including Indonesian if I remember correctly. He may correct me here.

Next are Andrew (in the middle) and Robert, both into multiple languages as well as computer programming. Robert in particular has an ability that stretches from Mandarin and Cantonese to Russian, Ukrainian, German and a few more, while Andrew is fluent in French and Chinese at least. We had a lively dinner with my wife Carmen in a Chinese restaurant in Sydney's Chinatown.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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My wife and I are loving our first visit to the Southern Hemisphere. Our first stop was Rarotonga in the Cook Islands. Rarotonga is only 10 hours from Los Angeles. A delightful little island, 32 km in circumference. There are two bus routes, clockwise and counterclockwise. We rented a scooter. The speed limit is 50 km if you wear a helmet and 40 km if you don't. We didn't. No one is in a hurry. The weather is warm and nice, and it occasionally rains. If you keep driving on the scooter, it will stop. Snorkeling, turquoise water and beaches all around, lots of fish to eat and friendly people with a fascinating culture. What more do you need?

See the full gallery on Posterous

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