[0:00]Imagine this, you have decided you're going to learn a new language. You look up all of these amazing people online and see how they've learned this language really fast. And then you feel like, okay, I I need to learn this language within three, four, five months. And once you start learning, there being a beginner from knowing nothing, to knowing something, to knowing a lot, that that curve is really, really high, right? From knowing zero to knowing at least how to introduce yourself. After that, once you're past beginner, once you're past intermediate, you start to plateau. That is where you need focus and discipline. The language is not going to be fun the whole time. You are going to get tired, discouraged, frustrated. A lot of people ask me, do you ever feel, you know, frustrated in your language learning? Do you ever want to give up? Yes, all the time, you know? It's not just a honeymoon journey. But what you need to do when you feel like I'm not making progress is really to have focus and discipline. If setting a language learning schedule is the way for you to go, by all means, do it. If you need to change up your routine, try that. If you want to pause on that language and learn another one, it's okay. Remember why you're doing this. You are learning a language for the point of communication and for yourself. You're not out there to prove yourself to the world. This language learning is a very, very personal journey. Another thing I want to touch on about focus is within specific study sessions. People spend so much time making their notes look so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing for their Instagram posts that they're not actually getting a lot of studying done. I've seen this in myself, study groups and people have admitted it online. And that is a really negative thing. You are wasting precious time that you could spend learning new words and grammar structures. Not everything you do needs to be posted online, not everything you do needs to be beautiful. Just do it, learn more and surprise people with your progress later. And point number five is faith. I just wrote faith because it's another F, but this is also like belief in yourself. Believe that language learning is possible. It is possible to learn a language at an older age. It is possible to learn two, three, four languages at the same time. It is possible to get a native sounding accent over time. Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it, just have faith in yourself. I'd be really interested to hear you guys discuss this topic at length and ask Lindy how she handles learning multiple languages at the same time. You cannot unfortunately discuss that at length, but I'm pretty sure that Lindy can give a concise answer. I think people often interpret polygon as someone who is learning multiple languages all at once from the same level like beginner you're starting 12 languages and you're learning them all. Absolutely not. I started with English was my first foreign language actually. Then I slowly learned French at school and then Arabic became a school subject and only in like my grade 10 year of high school I started learning Korean. It's been 10 years for Korean, halfway through Korean I started learning Japanese, halfway through learning Japanese it was Chinese and thereafter little things like Vietnamese, Spanish, Hungarian and Tagalog came along. So it has been like 20-ish years of language learning where I'm slowly building up languages on each other. None of my languages are completely beginner starting at the same time. It's always a little bit like stacking and focusing maybe years or months on one language before I learn another language. It's really a lifelong thing. I think people who kind of become interested in the polyglot world, they they might be starting at one or two languages and their goal is to become a polyglot and you think you need to learn all these languages at once. But you don't realize that you need to slow down a little and consider how many years and how many months it takes really to to learn a language. The other thing that you were mentioning is kind of like the system I have, so I choose maybe one or two focus languages for a set period of months or weeks and then I um integrated it into my day. So I might do Vietnamese and Hungarian lessons twice a week for three months and then for the next set of three months I might be focusing on another language. So it's really just prioritizing and none of my languages really are starting from zero at the same time. Fantastic answer. Uh, but Lindy, I wanted to ask you, uh, do you have some, does your method, do you have a fixed path towards language learning towards every single language you learn? When you learn from scratch and do you think that the structure or the idiosyncrasies or some features of certain languages kind of dictate or make you tweak the method or the methodology that you have already adopted? Um, I think for my languages, I have a general timeline or mindset that I use for every language, so knowing that I need to start with the basic greetings and then the sentence structure and filling in, kind of having one sentence structure that I say, for instance, I like verb and then I like verb with someone, and I like verb with someone in place. So I create these little sentences for myself at the very beginning of a language. So in terms of knowing what I want to learn by when, my structure is the same, but like you said the idiosyncrasies or the grammar of a language does dictate a different approach. Especially the word order, uh, so it's a lot easier for me to to understand languages that are similar to languages I've learned, otherwise. Whereas with Hungarian for instance that has quite a flexible word order, it might give um, I might require a lot more time to understand the complex grammar and the word order of that. So it means that the there's no cookie cutter technique because it depends on a lot of factors. Uh as well if you're learning a language that has a different writing system, for instance, Mandarin Chinese, you're going to have to dedicate if you want, a lot of time to learning how to read and write these characters. It's not just an alphabet you can learn once and then you can read even if you don't know the meaning. If you don't know how to read it and you don't know the meaning, . So, definitely a different approach according to the script of the language and the grammar. If you already understand the sentence structure and the grammar, there's no need to dedicate a lot of time reviewing grammar notes when you already understand it. So, uh, it depends on how difficult the language is and how similar it is to languages you've learned before. asking, how long did it take you to actually be able to express yourself freely in Korean? Fantastic question. Again, as I always say, it depends. So, I, it depends on what you consider freely express. For me, I would say the turning point was really around the two and a half year mark. This might sound really long for some people, but that was really where I remember there was this distinct moment where I was like, oh my goodness, I understood everything this person said. And without needing to think, what's the word or translate in my head, I was able to just have it flow. It could be much faster for you if you're immersing yourself a lot more, and it could also be very slow if you are not practicing Korean. So don't use my example of two and a half years as like, okay, bye, two and a half years I need to be comfortable to speak. You could research in like nine months or five years. Again, it depends. But I remember I was at a Korean festival, it was like a food festival. Somebody was asking me about like how long I've been learning Korean, why I'm interested in it. Of course, these are topics that I was able to talk about easily, talking about why I'm learning Korean. It was something I've been practicing a lot, like people would always ask me like, why are you learning Korean? And I've been able to answer that question so many times, I. These kinds of phrases, I've been using a lot. Number one, because the topic was easy for me, talking about why I'm learning Korean. I was able to feel really fluent. If somebody was asking me about politics or history in Korean, even now, at my level after learning for a decade, I would be like, ooh, I don't really know the words. So can you really say that I can express my thoughts freely in Korean? Yes, for some topics, but for other topics, not so much. And that's the beauty of learning a language, there's always going to be more and more that you can learn. things that make it difficult for you to start learning and reasons why people fail to learn or struggle to continue. I'm going to start by talking about the perception that people have of multilinguals or successful language learners. When I see people just starting out in language learning, talking to people who have learned a few languages, something that often comes up are questions like, how did you learn all of these languages? And then they go and say, you must have some kind of magic talent, you were born this way. But people don't actually realize it's not luck or or talent or magic to speak multiple languages. It's really time, effort, skill, motivation, discipline, consistency, community, immersion, all of these factors that contribute to successfully being able to learn a language. And then the next obstacle to progressing towards fluency is people learning unnecessary things at the wrong time when learning a language. If you're just starting out and you don't know much, let's say you're reading a piece of text or watching a video. There are going to be so many new words that you don't know, and you you might feel like, I have to write them all down. I have to make flash cards of all of these, I have to know everything because I don't understand anything. No, you don't need to learn every single new word there is because you might not use them immediately. Rather learn through natural daily conversations.
[10:04]Another thing I'll say that you should be wary of is not over planning your language timeline and the resources you use. And something that always comes up is I think people are always looking for the best method to learn a language, and they over plan, they think so hard and they're not actually starting to learn a language right away. Now, the reason I think this happens is that on YouTube, on forums online, we are so overwhelmed and bombarded by information of people saying this is the best way to learn a language. This is the fastest way to learn. And we think that it's kind of impossible to start learning a language if we haven't perfected our method and our schedule. About 10 years ago when I started learning Korean, this wasn't really the case. We didn't have didn't Instagram exist back then? If Instagram existed, it was like, there was no language community there. So I just sort of went into it kind of blindly and I still managed to learn Korean to a pretty decent level. But now I think we we're trying so hard to find the perfect method instead of actually just starting. Again, like I always say when I started Korean, Japanese, 10 or eight years ago, I didn't have a lot of resources. In South Africa, we had like two Japanese textbooks in the entire store. If I had gone and been like, oh my gosh, which textbook do I need? What's the best method, what's the fastest way to learn, I would have been wasting time instead of starting with the little that I did have. So I just use like one textbook, um, I had one person I could talk to, and I built it up from there. I recommend you not to over plan, not to think, oh, what is the best way to learn. Just start, start with what you have. So I've spoken about chunking before, but it's an awesome habit you can adapt to look at how you learn vocabulary differently. My next habit is to simplify. My friend Jonathan Seabolt from Seabolt speaks on YouTube, he made a video about deleting all his language apps, which is a crazy idea, but I totally understand where he's coming from. There's just too much out there and sometimes it's good to just pick one thing to stick with. I have found that I've been deleting language apps over the years, um, when once I find one that really works for me. So I've cleaned up my phone a lot.
[12:44]So even though I have a bunch of Korean textbooks, when I'm focusing on preparing for something, I try and use just one textbook and complete that to the full. Uh for Spanish right now, what I'm just doing is working through some articles on design and after that I'm going to start with some textbooks. There are definitely ways that are not going to be effective in your language learning journey. I mean, if you're just starting out and you do a Google search on how to learn a language, probably one of the first things you're going to see is Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. While these are pieces of software that can be beneficial and helpful to your language learning journey, you should not use these things thinking that you're going to get fluent just by interacting with this. Language learning comes from hearing the language, by interacting with native speakers, by reading content, by writing journals, by practicing your speaking. Just by using one app, you're not going to get to a level where you want to be at, which is essentially fluid. What I mean by there's a wrong way to learn a language is there's a wrong way to approach the method that you already have. If you are dead set focused on just learning vocabulary, for instance, and you're ignoring grammar, you're not practicing your speaking, you're not getting a holistic approach to language learning, then you are not going to improve as fast as you could be. Language learning is all about the input. You need to get comprehensible input. So something I do when I'm learning a language is I try and apply it to my job, which is a UI UX designer. So I'm always looking up articles in Spanish or listening to design podcasts that can help me improve my vocabulary in spheres that are relevant to my life and of course, bound to be words that I'm going to use a lot. So I just Googled it and comprehensible input is a hypothesis that says comprehensible input is language input that can be understood by listeners despite them not understanding all the words and structures in it. So this goes back to the question I received on Tumblr, which is, I've been watching children's cartoons lately because I find them entertaining and easy to understand and learn. Given that I'm a complete beginner, but a friend always says that that's a dumb idea. First of all, that's not a nice thing of your friend to say, because clearly, this person is finding that by watching cartoons they are able to learn because they are getting comprehensible input. Don't let cartoons be the only way you're learning this language. Remember to take from a whole bunch of different sources, have a vocabulary book or some, you know, app to learn vocab on, have some way that you can learn grammar, but keep getting this comprehensible input where you can hear the words that popped up. Something I do is I don't review my notes a lot. I don't go over old vocab words and try and memorize. I kind of just hope that by all the input I'm getting from the language, that those words will pop up somewhere. So the more exposure you get to the language, the more you can solidify these words and grammar structures that you have at least learned once or twice. Something else I want to touch on is your mindset about language learning. I've made a video about this, which I think will be very helpful for you, because a lot of how we learn a language is how we think about learning. If you're constantly focusing about, I'm so scared to make mistakes. I'm so scared to be speaking to native speakers. You are adopting this mindset of fear and you're going to associate language learning with something that is very scary and intimidating. It's okay, it takes a while for us to get over that hurdle of fear. But once we change our mindset, the way we learn languages is going to improve. watching this video about a guy's weight loss journey, and at the end of the video, it said something like, since success is definite, what would you do or now that you know success is a definite thing, what will you do to get there? So also, change your mindset about how you think about language learning. You will succeed if you put in this input. Research some language learning techniques which are applicable to your situation and your learning style, but the most important thing is just being consistent, having a positive mindset and getting comprehensible input. So if that means watching cartoons, that's okay, at least you are hearing the language. We can look at tracking your language process in two ways. The first one is your actual progression from beginner to advanced onwards, and the second aspect of tracking language learning is actually what are you doing to study this language? What kind of immersion are you incorporating into your language learning, what kind of tools are you using? Tracking your language learning activities and progress, why is this important? Well, for one, it gives you a visual representation of how much time or effort you've actually been spending on your languages. If you are creating a plan to study for an exam, for instance, it's a nice way to see how far you still have to go and to look back on how much you've done. Now, it's up to you whether you want to track the amount of hours you spend. There are people who have Excel spreadsheets where they log exactly how many up to the minutes they've spent on language learning. If this works for you, great. Uh, I don't really see the benefit in tracking uh minutes because it puts a lot of pressure on my language learning. Otherwise, if you just want to see what activities you're doing, you can use a general calendar view. So I can show you a little bit more of how I use this notebook. It's just a calendar, a small year planner from Muji, but you can use a blank notebook. Uh so I have a monthly view here where I track what lessons I have in which language. Uh I also track my books uh in general, like what books I'm reading when. And I have also set a goal for myself to write diary entries in my two focus languages uh every Sunday. So I just indicate those with these uh, with these three lines. I have an indicator on the side here for the languages I'm learning. Uh, and I just add them in once I do them. So I'm not writing all my list of languages, um, but just Korean because I've done something in Korean, I watched a movie. Uh Spanish is this red dot, so these are when I'm taking Spanish lessons or using busu. Then I've got my diary entries here. I write them on Sundays, uh sometimes I'm a little late so this one's on Tuesday. I've just indicated what I've did when I don't do something, I put it in there as well. And then my little essays, I do get corrections and I write them in it in my language learning notebook. I also just indicate what languages I've actually um touched on this week. So if you've set up a language learning journal where you're tracking what you do, you can see that maybe you planned on watching videos and listening to podcast and reading books, but you're actually only watching videos. Then you can adjust your plan going forward. It's okay if you're not doing what you originally intended to do, the point of tracking your progress is to see either where you need to be a bit more strict on yourself, or where you just need to let things go. It's okay if you're not following your original plan. I do want to emphasize looking at the amount of time you spend learning a language is not going to make you fluent. It's what you do with the language in that allocated time, that is really important. But for me, as a visual person who loves data, I like to track my language learning. Um, I use an app to time where my time goes. And it's sort of a a different way instead of saying, I want to do 10 hours of Hungarian this week. I just say, I love Hungarian, I'm going to learn Hungarian, let's see how much time I actually do spend on it. And then I adjust my plans accordingly to maybe how I feel, um, what new languages are exciting to me and so forth.
[22:33]Uh and then here's just a messy page for my notebook. Um at the end of a quarter, I will evaluate my goals, see how it went, um count how many hours I've done, um on Italki, uh learning a language. I'll write a little report of how my language learning went, and sometimes I might even write that report in a different language like in French. So that's a way to practice my learning, plus also, um, be more mindful and analyze how my language learning has gone. This thinking comes from what uh what I do at work. So I'm a product designer and we work in the agile methodology. That means we have sprints. One sprint is two weeks and we have a certain number of sprints within a quarter to complete features that lead to an eventual goal. And it is called Agile because you can go back and change things and say, actually, this is taking longer than we thought or this we tried it, we released it and users don't like it, so we're going to roll it back and adjust. You don't plan for the entire year and do something and then have it fail at the end. So it's okay to have little failures and learnings along the way so that you can adjust every single sprint. But what I'm getting at is that if you are tracking your progress in little increments, you can make changes accordingly. That is also why I made my language learning plan in quarters and not for the entire year.
