Motivation

    Experienced language learners accept uncertainty, yet they keep going. They accept that they don’t fully understand.   In the above video I refer to two kinds of comprehension, listening comprehension and reading comprehension, but in this post I will simply refer to them as language comprehension.     Language comprehension is the most […]

I want to talk about history. Why history? Because history fascinates me. I realize that people watch my videos either because they're working on improving their English or because they find my videos in some way motivating and encouraging and therefore encourages them to continue with learning languages, which in turn motivates me to make more videos.

As people who speak multiple languages, polyglots like to use those languages; we like to see how we do. But there is an element of performance. Are you better than me? Am I better than you? For some people that’s fine. I think a lot of us are very happy, in fact, when we hear somebody speak better than we do.

What are the main problems that I see amongst language learners? First of all, most people don't realize how long it takes to learn a language. So people get frustrated. They get particularly frustrated when they get to that first level where all of a sudden they know a bunch of words and they realize just how little they know of the whole language.

The myth is that there exists a battle in language learning: introverts vs. extroverts, and that extroverts are the better language learners. I do not believe at all that you need to be an extrovert to learn a language. Language learning comes down to the three keys: number one, attitude. You have to be interested in the language. You have to like the language. You have to believe you’re [...]

If you can get stuff done in the morning, first thing that kind of sets you up for the day so that even if it's not a very active day, from a language learning point of view, at least you've taken that first step. So typically what I do in the morning is I might, first of all, review a couple of lessons on my iPad from the day before in whichever language I'm learning. Nowadays it's either [...]

Let me share a little bit about what I would like to see in the year 2021. First of all, in so far as learning languages, I'm going to continue with Persian and Arabic. And at some point I will refresh and try to get back into Turkish.

I've started reading about the history of Iran. Also at LingQ we have Sahra in Iran who has created a series of 26 episodes which I'm now going through. I've gone to episode seven of the history of Iran with circling questions. 

I may not be aware of having changed, but then if I go back to when I started with Arabic, it was just noise to me. The writing system was meaningless to me, and now I'm able to read, I'm able to hear and understand a lot. So there is this gradual, almost imperceptible change.