***   This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel.   Studying English? Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ.   Hi there, Steve Kaufmann…

  ***   This post is a transcript of a video on my YouTube channel. Studying English? Here’s the transcript as a lesson to study on LingQ.   It doesn’t really matter…

I often get asked the question, how do I maintain my languages? You know, I’ve learned so many languages, more or less up to 21. I don’t know them all equally well, obviously. So how do I maintain them?

So how do we get to good pronunciation in the language? Well, I think there are three elements. One is the attitude towards the pronunciation and I’ll explain that. The second thing is the most important things that we can do that will give us good pronunciation and the third thing is remedial things. If we have what we consider to be poor pronunciation, what can we do?

A lot of this content, as in the case of our mini stories, has a lot of high-frequency verbs. You’re certainly going to come across the high-frequency words and verbs often and, therefore, it’s easier to get to know them. As you listen to this stuff whereas when you started everything was just noise and you think you’ll never learn this language, particularly if it’s written in a different script like the Arabic script, but with time all of a sudden you start to understand things. 

I’m driving up here with my wife and we’re listening to a podcast about the Byzantine Empire. So I’m enjoying the drive. I’m enjoying listening to the Byzantine Empire podcast. Why am I listening to a podcast about the Byzantine Empire? Because I’ve been learning Arabic, Persian and Turkish, so I’m kind of exploring that part of the world. I’ve read books now on the history of Persia or of Iran, on the history of Arabic countries prior to Islam, post Islam, the Colonial period and, low and behold, I read a book on the Byzantine Empire, which is something we learned so little about.

  Today, I’m going to talk about speaking like a native, sounding like a native, because it’s a discussion that showed up sort of in response to my latest video, which I…

  Some people will say, geez Steve, you used to say you should focus entirely on one language. I did used to say that, but a number of things have changed.  …