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Hi there. Steve Kaufmann here again, answering some of the questions that you have written on my YouTube channel. I apologize for this light shinning of my gray hair or white hair, but if I don’t put the light on then it’s too dark in here. Hopefully, that doesn’t disturb you. The first question was:

What is your motivation to learn new languages?

This came from a person in Spain. Another person asked something about, why are you learning Ukrainian, I think? The motivation can be anything. Right now, the motivation to learn Polish is because I speak other Slavic languages or have learnt them and studied them, so I’m curious to see how Polish works. And, of course, every time you learn a new language you learn so much about the country.

People ask me, what about Arabic or Hebrew? Yes, I’m motivated to learn those, particularly Arabic because there’s so much history behind that language and because so many people in the world speak it. So a lot of my motivation is cultural, interest in the country. I want to learn about different people and different cultures in different parts of the world.

The next question was:

How do you keep a language fresh in your mind? How do you not lose vocabulary?

In my experience, if I learn a language through massive listening and reading, massive exposure to the language, I tend not to lose it, but the way I refresh it is that I just do more of the same, listening and reading. Now that I have LingQ it’s particularly good. I can go in and do some Chinese, for example. In fact, I think the person who asked this question was afraid they were losing their Chinese vocabulary. I’ll go through and maybe find something on the Internet or I might just get an audio book. I’ll find the eBook, bring it in and listen and then read and save words that I need. I find that that very quickly refreshes my grasp of that language.

The next question was:

How do you study grammar? Someone specifically asked about all of the – in German. How do I study it?

Well, historically, what I did was I would do a lot of listening and reading and occasionally refer to grammar explanations in the hope that that helped me notice it and, therefore, get used to it. Now I’m kind of interested in this whole approach that I’ve mentioned before, Piotr’s 100 stories where he tells the same story and then asks so many different questions that you are, in fact, reviewing the different structures using very limited vocabulary covering the same ground over and over again with different questions and different answers. That may just be more efficient than trying to remember tables, which I’ve always found very difficult to do.

Another person asks:

How do you find stuff to write about?

It’s difficult. If you’re in a school or in a classroom you are assigned writing. If you have to motivate yourself to write it’s more difficult. What you can try doing is something that Luca does, Luca, who is a very accomplished polyglot. He transfers from the target language into his own language and then back into the target language. So you grab a sentence of something you’re reading, translate it back into your own language and then try to write it again in the target language.

Another person asked:

Polyglots, they claim to speak many languages, but how many languages can they really speak well?

Well, if you listen to Richard Simcott or Luca, to name two specifically, I would say they speak extremely well in at least half a dozen languages. In my own case, certainly it’s true that my strongest three or four are stronger, the next three are okay and as you work your way down then I don’t speak them so well. I think, inevitably, anyone who is a polyglot is going to have a handful of languages that they speak very well, another handful that they speak okay and others that they don’t speak so well. However, it’s possible that there are polyglots out there who devote more time to it and who can actually maintain a high level in more than a handful of languages.

A question I get all the time is:

How do you spend your time? How much time do you spend?

I’m down here in Palm Springs now. We’re down here because my wife likes to play golf. I prefer to play hockey in the winter. If it were me, I would still be up in Vancouver. So we play golf most days and then there are other chores and stuff, but I think I put in an hour or two a day with my language. A good hour of that is listening.

I recently had to go to three stores to buy stuff. I went to Home Depot and then I went to Walmart and Target buying different things for the house here and the whole time I’m in the car I’m listening. I also sat down with my iPad and did some of Piotr’s stories for a good half hour. I also in the evening will sometimes go through my Polish history creating links. When I do the dishes and clean up I’m listening. So I think I get in an hour to two hours a day and that’s how I manage to do it, by combining it with other activities.

Am I interested in Dutch?

Sure. We have Dutch at LingQ (and a free Dutch grammar guide too), but the difficulty is I’m interested in Dutch, I’m interested in Arabic and I’m interested in Turkish. I can only do one at a time, so one day maybe. I have done some lessons of Dutch at LingQ and it doesn’t strike me as being very difficult.

The question was:

What do you find difficult with Korean?

I’ve gone over this before. The difficulty is finding interesting content that’s not too difficult. When you look in the online dictionary, it seems that a lot of words mean the same thing. Of course it’s written in Hangul, it’s not written in the Latin alphabet. It always makes it a little more difficult when you’re reading in an alphabet or a writing system that you haven’t been using all your life. So those are some of things. I don’t really know why. I have just found Korean to be difficult, but I am continuing.

Another question was from a person studying Chinese:

Should I learn to write from the beginning?

Absolutely, especially the hiragana and katakana. I recommend for Asian languages, learn to write the characters, if they have characters.

Finally, there was a question:

How do I develop my academic English or my ability to write in an academic way?

To me, there’s no difference between say English, Business English, Academic English, any other kind of English. You have to go and find interesting content on the kinds of subjects that you want to develop an ability to write and speak in. So Academic English, if your field is medicine, chemistry or physics you go find on the Internet or whatever source you have, content. Ideally, both audio and text if you can find it and you just read lots of that. I would recommend doing it at LingQ where you can save key phrases, the kind of phrasing that people in your field are using and you just acquire the vocabulary and the phrasing of people in that field.

There’s nothing special about Academic English versus Business English or any other kind of specialized jargon and specialized terminology. You just have to acquire it and make it, first of all, part of vocabulary that you understand and, ultimately, vocabulary that you can use.

So there you have it. I apologize for the light. One thing I am going to talk about in my next video is Mark Zuckerberg, who made a 20-minute presentation in Chinese in Beijing. I was quite impressed and I’m going to give him suggestions on what he could do to be even better, but that will be in the next video.

Thank you for listening, bye for now.

 

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