And here’s the trailer for The 4-Hour Chef:
]]>Click the arrow below to play the episode. If you don’t see the audio player controls, your device doesn’t support Adobe Flash or you need to install the Flash plugin in your browser. If viewing this on a mobile device, just click the download button below to stream the podcast.
To download the MP3, right click on the button (or “Control+Click” on a Mac) and select “Save As” or “Save Linked File As”.
| Download |
For information about Jason and English Out There, check out his site and podcast:
EnglishOutThere.com Languages Out There Podcast]]>
Few learners are probably aware this sub-concious process goes on at all, but Arkady’s extensive experience learning languages, interpreting, and experimenting on himself and other learners have proven that it does indeed occur. As he points out in our interview, even many seemingly successful foreign language learners still translate to and from their native language, but can just do so at such a rate that they can’t perceive the process.
It is no secret that the vast majority of adult foreign language learners fail to ever reach fluency in their target tongues, and there are many theories behind this abysmal success rate. In Arkady’s view, there is one primary root cause: 95% of adults are “foreign language incapable”, unable to learn foreign languages easily (if at all) through traditional or even modern methods because their brains adopted logical (as opposed to visual) thinking as they matured into adults.
As the name implies, Language Bridge attempts to create a “bridge” over this logical-thinking barrier, turning off sub-conscious translation to and from one’s native language, while also fostering visual thinking in learners who have long since lost such an ability.
Language Bridge is currently available in the following versions, each available free for 6 months:
Click the arrow below to play the episode. If you don’t see the audio player controls, your device doesn’t support Adobe Flash or you need to install the Flash plugin in your browser. If viewing this on a mobile device, just click the download button below to stream the podcast.
To download the MP3, right click on the button (or “Control+Click” on a Mac) and select “Save As” or “Save Linked File As”.
| Download |
John Fotheringham: [0:06] This is Episode seven of the Foreign Language Mastery podcast. I’m your host, John Fotheringham. In today’s show I interview Arkady Zilberman, the creator of Language Bridge. For a transcript of this episode and more tips, tools, and tech for learning any language, go to languagemastery.com. Here is the phone interview originally recorded February 8th, 2011.
John: [0:33] Hello there.
Arkady Zilberman: [0:34] Hi.
John: [0:36] Good to talk to you again.
Arkady: [0:37] Thank you John.
John: [0:38] How have you been?
Arkady: [0:40] Oh, good. Working a lot on my method now and I published a few articles, prepared presentation for a round table discussion and there is good news, I have now found an investor and a marketing group.
John: [0:57] Oh, congratulations. Fantastic.
Arkady: [0:59] Yeah. So it’s moving, it’s moving.
John: [1:00] Yes.
Arkady: [1:02] I have also decided that we will now offer all versions of Language Bridge software free for six months so that both the students and teachers will have more options to try it and I hope that in this way I will get more testimonials. By the way, yesterday on that Kirsten’s blog, one user of Language Bridge has published his testimonial. His name is Mick and it’s a fantastic testimonial. I never met him, but he has given that his description of his experience and it’s a very unique testimonial because he used both, Pimsleur method and the Language Bridge method.
John: [1:59] I think it’s wonderful you were able to do the interview with Kirsten because I think she has a pretty established reputation now in the industry and I think she can help bring your work into the ears and lives of more people.
Arkady: [2:17] Yes, that is very helpful I understand, but however of course I also understand that there are problems because the linguists would prefer to use the methods which they know and it’s normal.
John: [2:35] Right. Let’s use that as our jump?off point then. Comparing Language Bridge with “the methods that a linguist would know.”
Arkady: [2:45] It’s different in that I think that cross?translation is the main barrier in learning a language. Here cross?translation is a very interesting term because as I describe it, it actually has nothing to do with translation.
John: [3:09] Right. We should add that you’re formerly a simultaneous interpreter. I think it’s important for the listeners to understand that you have that background.
Arkady: [3:20] Yes, actually I have a degree in science and I worked for nearly 20 years as a simultaneous interpreter in the former Soviet Union and during my work I made hundreds if not thousands of experiments and I have found that simultaneous translation is actually not using two languages, but using one language at a time. It sounds strange, but that was the foundation of the Language Bridge. [4:02] In other words, on your blog you have a guest post by Antonio and I remember it starts with, “Is your native language a help or a hindrance?” Now, answering your question I will most definitely say that it is a hindrance and here I will also say that although the statistics is that only five percent of people successfully learn a foreign language, only five percent.
[4:39] If this statistic is confirmed, for example, by the founder of Total Physical Response System, Dr. James Asher. And I was trying to find an answer to this question, why it is so that some people very easily learn a foreign language and most have great difficulty in it.
[5:07] I came to the conclusion that it’s because our native language becomes a barrier, especially in adults. In other words, we try to add a foreign language to the native language and that’s why actually when we learn a foreign language we use bilingual information that is we use two languages. Necessarily we use native language and we actually learn foreign words as a translation to and from the native language.
[5:45] We try to add, to say, English to a native language. In my case, my native language is Russian, so when I thought that if any Russian tried to learn a foreign language most of them try to add English to Russian and that wouldn’t work.
[6:04] It works only in very rare cases, only five percent. 95% have great difficulties. It’s interesting that I first noted it and I called it cross?translation, actually its subconscious activity when learning a foreign language you always use, maybe without even special efforts, it’s just subconscious, you don’t notice it. Here I can give you one example.
[6:38] Rosetta Stone, a very famous program, a great program, and they start showing you some pictures, to say, a horse, a table, and anything. And they then give the word for the picture and the word in English.
[7:01] The assumption was that if you exclude the native language from the learning process that you can learn as a child in my opinion it’s strong. I think it’s impossible because subconsciously, most people will subconsciously first see this word ‘table’ in their native language. In my case in Russian I will see that it is “stohl” and then they will see it as a table. This is very hard alleviate. We actually do have a special tool to solve this problem and at this point I want to mention the great book and video by Norman Doidge.
[7:59] He is a psychologist and a medical researcher and in his book he studied all scientists work for the last 50 years. Following them, he actually came to the conclusion that adults have great difficulties in learning a foreign language because of, as he calls it, “tyranny of the mother tongue”.
John: [8:31] Yes. I love that quote.
Arkady: [8:33] Yes. Actually that explains, I didn’t formulate it that way. I knew for many years and I tried to explain it to linguists. It’s very hard, by the way, to a linguist to understand it. It may be very hard for you, because linguists never had that problem.
John: [8:58] Well, see, this is actually one thing I think we disagree on, because my background is in linguistics, but most linguists that I know don’t actually speak a foreign language. I think the definition of “linguist” is very broad. You have a degree in linguistics, you’re a linguist, or are you someone who speaks one or many foreign languages, then you’re a linguist. [9:22] So, I think your definition right now you’re talking about is for the latter. Someone who has learned one or many foreign languages well. For that person, they might not understand why others have a hard time, is that correct?
Arkady: [9:37] Not quite. As a linguist I may call… let’s broaden that term and just tell any English teacher or foreign language, actually, teacher or those linguists who write books on the lessons, programs for learning a foreign language, because they never encountered that problem, it’s very hard for them to understand. They think that the cross?translation cannot be sold and so let’s forget about it. [10:19] That’s, well, the normal condition for any student, to overcome his native mother tongue tyranny. But then, if we agree on that, we may mention that briefly that in the history there were a few methods, which overcome this impediment and I mentioned in those articles on Kirsten’s blog that Callan method is one method, then the Crazy English if you know about that one from China.
John: [10:59] That was one that wanted to also talk about. My experience with the Crazy English method, I’m actually quite skeptical because it actually doesn’t seem to fit with other things you’ve said in that you talk about how the listen and repeat after me method is going to become extinct because it obviously does not work. I don’t see how that’s different from Crazy English. From what I’ve seen there’s a guy on the stage and he’s yelling out phrases and then the whole audience is just repeating after him.
Arkady: [11:28] Well, yeah, it’s very different and here’s why. First of all, it’s not learning its rehearsing. Someone had given a very good term. It’s not learning English. When you repeat in a crowd at that time, because you’re all together and you repeat at the same time, it’s very unusual activity and because of that your subconscious cross translation to and from your native tongue is turned off. [12:02] But neither the founder of Callan method nor Mr. Li, the founder of the Crazy English, didn’t know actually how it works. They came to it from the practical point of view. It works. So they have quite a number of followers, but of course it’s not the method which would be recommended to learn English in the stadium.
John: [12:30] I see. So your point is that that method turns off cross translation…
Arkady: [12:33] Yes.
John: [12:34] But it’s not enough. It’s not a complete way that you would recommend of actually going about it.
Arkady: [12:39] Yeah, of course. First of all, it cannot be used as a basis for the blended learning because there is another very important term and I think that in the future the blended learning when we have to help to learn English in china to 350 million people, young adult learners, then the blended learning probably is the only alternative. [13:08] The blended learning means that you have to use software with prerecorded lessons which a learner can use at home 24/7 anytime, anywhere and he will have also an option to sign up for some public classes maybe or if he can afford for private lessons. But most of them will use public lessons where they can ask questions, where they can solve their problems, where they can be tested and get the feedback of the results of their self?testing.
[13:50] So the blended learning, I think, is also the only alternative in my point for the future of meeting the demand, the gigantic demand, in learning English, which in that article is described as English mania. Probably you know of that term also.
John: [14:10] In my experience as a teacher I made every effort to try to deemphasize my role and deemphasize the importance of a teacher, emphasize the importance of the individual learner’s motivation, attitude, and choice of materials that they are interested in, which I think is something we agree on, but they were not sold. [14:30] It was very difficult to convince the learners that they actually don’t need a teacher or at least that a teacher cannot force the language into their brains. Only their brain can do that at a subconscious level.
[14:44] I think that that’s actually, in terms of perception, in terms of marketing that’s a major hurdle that I think all of us still have to overcome in addressing especially the Chinese market.
Arkady: [14:57] I totally agree with you, however, I think that first of all we have to select one point and maybe to direct students to that point. The point is, which we just briefly mentioned before, that we have to answer the question, “What is the main barrier?” [15:17] We have to explain the conventional…by the way, your presentation about the conventional methods, that is a great, great presentation. However, we should first solve that problem and the problem is we have to explain it, maybe demonstrate it, and then to give the tool that we must probably explain a little bit more.
[15:49] When we talk about simultaneous repetition it’s not clear enough because actually the essence here not in simultaneous repetition. The essence is that we use three actions at the same time.
[16:09] So a learner reads to say the text on the screen, the learner hears in their headset, necessarily in their headset, and repeats at the same time. By performing three actions at the same time the tyranny of the mother tongue is silenced. It is turned on automatically. There is no way and I determined it just experimentally. And thousands and thousands of customers already learned English now, especially most of them are in Russia, but now I try to bring this method to other countries, especially to China.
[16:51] That’s why I have already produced a software which I, at this point, even offer for free. This software is localized into Chinese, it’s localized into Spanish, into Russian, and one teacher actually localized it into a Czech language.
[17:11] So if you use those three actions at the same time the subconscious cross translation would be turned off. That is the main point and to explain that maybe that will change the attitude of Chinese learners because they know 4,000 words. Actually, every college graduate knows 4,500 words and he cannot speak English.
John: [17:38] Actually, they’ve memorized the translation of those words.
Arkady: [17:43] Exactly.
John: [17:44] They can see it on a piece of paper and know what it means, but if they hear the same word they won’t know what it is.
Arkady: [17:50] Exactly. So that should give a starting point.
John: [17:55] So I guess one of my curiosities would be from turning off cross translation and getting those three…well there is actually two forms of input and one form of output all done simultaneously, from that stage to actually understanding the meaning of what you’re saying or hearing. That’s something that I’d really like to understand in a more cognitive, linguistic sense.
Arkady: [18:20] I will explain how it is accomplished. First of all, when you do all three of those actions at the same time, and you are very clearly described it’s two inputs and one output, that actually activates your both right and left brain. Why you don’t have any problems because the program is localized. That means that everything what is there is in two languages. And although I say that we have to separate languages and your native language, mother tongue is there, but it is used, I would say in a different mode. [19:07] For example, if you start a new lesson you can read with your eyes in your mother tongue and imagine the situation because you do not pronounce the word. Actually when in the class I always even recommend to keep your tongue between your teeth like this so that you cannot pronounce the word.
[19:34] By the way, that opens your visualization again. You visualize the text. You do not read it or remember it. Then you immediately go to the next reel where you see the same text in English and you read it, you listen to it, and you repeat it. So you know what it’s about because you were introduced to the images of the lesson in your native tongue.
John: [20:04] Right. So the context is clear, but then once you actually get into the drills the idea is you’re not going to be translating word for word. You’re trying to build that new language center by using your mouth, your ears, and your eyes.
Arkady: [20:18] Exactly. Exactly. More than that. There is one great additional tool built into the software. Whenever you have a problem with the word or with the meaning of the word you can click on it with your right mouse button and translation into the mother tongue will appear, but only for 10 seconds. [20:42] So you will see it and the time is enough to create the image and because you hear this word and you continue pronouncing the whole sentence you even don’t notice that you got the image not the translation. You don’t remember translation. You don’t see it. You don’t work in it. It is given to open your…actually to activate your visual capability again and many learners have noticed that their even memory was improved because their visual capacity was returned back.
John: [21:22] Interesting.
Arkady: [21:23] So there’s no problem in understanding. That’s, again, a difficult part to understand because some teachers in those comments and everywhere they see a contradiction here. That I say that we have to silence the mother tongue and at the same time I give everything in two languages. [21:47] There’s no contradiction at all. I give it in a totally different environment, totally different application.
John: [21:54] Right. That’s something that I think needs to be very clear to the end user and to the teacher. There is two purposes here of the native language and the target. The native is there only for creating that mental context.
Arkady: [22:07] Exactly. Yeah, John, but we have to maybe go into some details and everything. We have to write about, we have to explain it, because even to a linguist first it’s hard to understand because it’s so different from what we use now. When you will read that testimonial of Mick’s, and it’s interesting he mentioned that he noted that sometimes while repeating after the speaker, he was one or two words ahead of it. [22:43] That is a very interesting observation made by many, many learners. Because when it becomes automatic, when the speech center of the target language, in this case English language, is formed and you see or hear the image, you are in the visual mode. The word appears on the tip of your tongue as if by itself.
John: [23:08] Right.
Arkady: [23:09] He was surprised. He couldn’t even understand where it comes from. I want to explain to him, to you, to everybody it comes from the language speech center in the brain, which is formed as a result of a three?action approach…
John: [23:27] Right.
Arkady: [23:28] …three actions at the same time.
John: [23:30] Linguistically speaking, it would also be called spreading.
Arkady: [23:33] There are two different types of spreading. One spreading you are talking about is actually the case when you still have both, your native language and your target language. Still the spreading can work there. Because there are many, many students who are learners who actually speak from this, I would call, “two?language center.” Because, there is no such thing, but it seems to them that they speak because they translate quickly enough.
John: [24:12] Right.
Arkady: [24:13] But it takes a lot of brain power…
John: [24:15] Yes.
Arkady: [24:16] …and very few can do it. Most fail and they just stop learning a foreign language because they cannot do it. [24:23] Now, the spreading when you have separate languages, when you actually do a new language speech center in the brain…by the way, it starts working even when you know 300 words. I just experimentally determined it, by many hundreds of students who have noted that after about seven or eight lessons they already feel that some of their expressions come to them automatically. So you don’t need much effort to pronounce something which you feel.
John: [25:07] I think even a lot of language enthusiasts, teachers, linguists or even our basic same camp we’re all on the same side of basically saying that the traditional way doesn’t work. But even on this side of the wall there are still, obviously, many subdivisions. [25:25] I think one of those major subdivisions is listen first, speak later, or speak as soon as possible. But I think, that as your method has proved and as many others out there have proved, the disadvantage of speaking soon has been highly exaggerated.
Arkady: [laughs] [25:41] Not only exaggerated, but it’s not quite true because…I think you were one of the first who mentioned that one of the main reasons of the conventional methods didn’t produce desired results is because they considered foreign languages as information…
John: [26:06] Yes.
Arkady: [26:07] …although it is a skill.
John: [26:08] Yes.
Arkady: [26:09] But if it is information, and you base all your research on this assumption that it is information, then we have a lot of problems here. I would like here to mention one of the most, I would say, scientifically based methods in the world, and that is the Pimsleur method. You very correctly describe it that it was introduced in 1967 in a most scientifically based paper. [26:46] But, the Pimsleur method, a very scientific method, was correct because at that time there was only one theory, one assumption that a foreign language is information. If you consider it as information, his method is right.
[27:09] But if you consider it that it is a skill, and you have to separate…you have to salvage his mother tongue, and you can actually very quickly, in a few months, you can start forming a new language speech center, and you can learn a language in less than a year and be absolutely proficient in it. Then his method becomes obsolete.
[27:36] It doesn’t meet the current level of knowledge. A foreign language is a skill. If you learn it as a skill, then his famous graduated interval recall theory is not applicable any more. It’s not information.
John: [27:56] Right.
Arkady: [27:57] If you remember, once again, that learner Mick he said he was keeping learning Pimsleur three times in a row; all three levels, and he was keeping forgetting it. Why, because as information, especially bilingual information, it’s our protective mechanism. We are doomed to forget everything while in 30 days 90 percent of information is lost. Especially information which was not used. So that is the catch?22.
John: [28:34] I think that’s why so many of these people continue to be frustrated. Despite so much effort, they still fail.
Arkady: [28:43] Exactly.
John: [28:44] What is it they’re failing at? They’re failing at a mission impossible, which is…
Arkady: [28:49] Yes.
John: [28:50] …memorize an almost infinite number of facts…
Arkady: [28:53] Yes.
John: [28:54] …about an organic system which is not fact based.
Arkady: [28:57] You know that Chinese learners are very motivated. They are very capable. They are learning English maybe four hours a day and still no result because the system is wrong. Now, why it is wrong is because you can memorize words, and they do memorize words, but speech is a subconscious process where memory doesn’t play practically any role.
John: [29:27] Right.
Arkady: [29:28] We confuse two different processes. When we speak, we do not…how to say a subconscious process…
John: [29:37] Yep.
Arkady: [29:38] …we do not recall words. We do not use memory. The words appear on the tip of our tongue called forward, if you will, by the image, by the feeling, by association. We speak in chunks. Another interesting point that in language we do not learn words at all. A separately taken word doesn’t have any meaning. We learn by chunks, by sentences.
John: [30:12] Absolutely. An attempt to memorize English or any language through linear memorization of individual words is doomed to failure.
Arkady: [30:20] Yes, but, nevertheless, that’s all of what we do, and that’s very strange. And actually to me, it’s very painful even to observe it because it seems to me so illogical.
John: [30:34] It’s illogical from the point of view of what works to learn a language. It’s very logical from the point of view of what’s easiest to teach and test in a formal setting. [laughs]
Arkady: [laughs] [30:47] Yes, I understand it.
John: [30:49] I think the only thing that ultimately will work is to show people that it does work. I think the comment you had from Mick…
Arkady: [30:55] Yes.
John: [30:56] …that’s exactly what you’re forgetting, it’s people that have actually used it and said, “Wow, it actually works.”
Arkady: [31:04] John, I have hundreds and hundreds of such testimonials. Some of them are on the website. What is interesting that I received actually, in the form of a testimonial, a whole essay from one of the Chinese learner. He told me that he came to Canada to continue his education. When he came here, after being the best student in China, after having the highest score in all those certificates which are necessary to graduate, he came to Toronto to find out that he doesn’t understand English and he cannot speak English. [laughs]
John: [31:59] Yep.
Arkady: [32:01] And he was shocked.
John: [32:03] Yeah.
Arkady: [32:04] He started to look for the cure. He was lucky. He found Language Bridge. He started using it. It helped him, and in response, he sent me his testimonial. What’s also interesting is in his essay he described that actually simultaneous repetition was used for centuries in Asian culture for different things. Not only for martial arts…
John: [32:33] Yeah.
Arkady: [32:34] …for learning music, for learning mathematics, for learning how to sing. For many, many things it was used there for centuries. So they’re very well familiar with it. Somehow, in our culture we never came to this. I came across it by pure chance because I worked as a simultaneous interpreter. That’s why I came to it. But actually this approach has a lot of history behind it. It has a lot of logical explanation and rationality, I would say. It is a scientific approach.
John: [33:18] It’s a human approach, I would also say, in that it mimics how we actually learn all of our physical skills.
Arkady: [33:28] Exactly.
John: [33:29] You mentioned martial arts, and I often use that analogy. Can you imagine trying to teach somebody how to perform a certain movement by explaining you need to bend your elbow at 45 degrees…
Arkady: [laughs] [33:41]
John: [33:42] …and apply 24 kilograms of force, and shift the weight from your… But that’s exactly how we try to teach a language. It’s absurd.
Arkady: [33:51] Yes, yes, and you know what? Actually, I have used a few times this phrase, that when you start learning and teaching by Language Bridge, then all your students become language?capable again. And here, let’s come to that point again and maybe elaborate on that a little bit more. That you were going ask me about that…
John: [34:16] Yes.
Arkady: [34:17] I just remind you about that 95?5 percent ratio. What is that?
John: [34:21] That’s one thing you bring up often, is that 95 percent of adults are “foreign language incapable.” And I think my key point, and this is something that much of foreign language mastery is about, is that, yes indeed, obviously, 95 percent, or I would even say higher in many populations, percent of adults fail to learn a foreign language to fluency. Absolutely, there’s no argument there. [34:51] However, why is that the case? I think that’s where we might slightly differ in our views. I do agree that cross?translation is a huge part of it, no doubt. But I think I ascribe attitude, motivation, and what materials you use as also very large percentages of that. And a lot of this is, of course, experience. A lot of it is anecdotal. But some of it is scientific, but it’s hard to nail down any of the effective factors in language learning scientifically. I mean, is the only way to… [overlapping discussion]
Arkady: [35:30] No, no, John, I cannot agree with this, and here is why. If you talk about motivation, then you cannot find more motivated people than Chinese learners…
John: [35:42] Well, motivation…
Arkady: [35:43] …and they have the greatest difficulties.
John: [35:45] Absolutely. But when I say attitude, I don’t just mean only motivation. I don’t think those are synonymous. I think motivation is one subset of attitude. But when I talk about attitude, I mean attitude towards language learning, attitude towards one’s self?identity, attitude in terms of, do you think you can actually learn a foreign language? [36:04] I want to put China aside for a moment, because I think they are, absolutely, they are very motivated. I’m talking more about North American learners of Japanese, or North American learners of Chinese or other languages. And I think across the board, most of them do believe, A, languages are hard. They think that they cannot learn a foreign language, which is a big part of the support of saying that they’re language?incapable. I think a lot of that’s a self?fulfilling prophecy, where you say, “Oh, I can’t do this,” and then, of course you can’t.
[36:35] But I think we’re parsing hairs here. We agree that no doubt, 95 percent of people fail. Whether that’s because it’s attitude, or because it’s method only, who knows? I think we could probably argue all day about it. I’m more interested in the solution.
Arkady: [36:49] And John, OK, I heard what you said, but let me give my point. And maybe if you will just listen and try to use more intuition than your past experience, just intuition and logic, maybe you will see it from a different angle. [37:13] I don’t believe that attitude and motivation is a very…it is important, but not crucial. It’s not of paramount importance, because they failed, and that is a statistical fact. And we already know that one of the main reasons is their subconscious cross?translation, or the tyranny of their mother tongue.
[37:37] Now, there’s another explanation, and maybe it will make it more easier to digest this new approach. Most people, adults especially, at the age of 18, and they become logical. What that means is, because we learn so many subjects in school , because we learn everything, we think everything, and because the ego at this point becomes our controller, everything compare to the past, to our past experience. And whatever comes into our field of vision, we evaluate according to our own experience. And so, we become very, very logical.
[38:28] Now, it’s just statistical fact that five percent of people remain visual. I cannot find explanation to this, but that is their nature, maybe their human nature, or that probability theory and the distribution curve. Those people who are very visual, they can learn a foreign language by any methods. That’s why you are a linguist, I am a self?made linguist, because we both are visual.
[39:07] We can learn, and I can learn any language in a very short time, because I am visual. And I actually determined it experimentally, because when I do simultaneous repetition, do you know what happens? I see what the speaker is telling me. I see it, I don’t hear it.
[39:32] And I can give you one case, and it looks like it was a practical case, like, anecdote. I knew very little German at that time, and there was a mistake in the program. And one of the lecturers turned out to be German instead of English. And I started to translate simultaneously from German into Russian, and I practically didn’t notice the difference, because it doesn’t matter to me.
[40:04] I don’t hear the words, I see the images. And I translated it, and then I started to think how it happened. I don’t hear the words, I see the image. So, those five percent are lucky people who somehow preserve that ability, and they can learn any language.
[40:30] Now, what happens? And that’s why I disagree with your approach, and it was a lot of published scientific articles about that…again, it’s because when their languages were information. Now, when it is more a skill, we do not have really research in this field. Because if you consider it as a skill, if you use a method similar to Language Bridge, when you turn off, you silence the mother tongue, then you become visual again.
And that is why a few times I have written about it, explained it in my lectures, in my [indecipherable 41: [41:07] 19] I.Q. classes, that this method restores your language capability. Any learner who follows the Language Bridge instructions becomes visual again. He becomes language?capable again. He can learn. Anybody can learn a language. And of course, motivation and attitude is important, but it is not a deciding factor.
John: [41:43] The point you make where anybody, regardless of their attitude, if they actually do this method will learn, I think that’s a key point.
Arkady: [41:51] Exactly, yes.
John: [41:53] I think, though, back to my point, to get somebody to spend the time to do it in the first place, that’s one of the first obstacles. That absolutely is going to be attitudinal. They have to be motivated, and they have to want to do it, and they have to believe it’s going to work, and I think that…
Arkady: [42:10] Yes, John, yes I understand. You are absolutely right, but you know what? And it would be difficult, but we should remember that any chain reaction of dramatic change in any field requires only four or five percent of a sample to believe. And the more we get such testimonials, and we’ll get them in hundreds and thousands, the more it will become popular. Besides, the Language Bridge software is organized in a very special way, and a very unusual way. You would never find such features, I will briefly now name them here, in any other software program. [42:58] For example, you can print out any lesson or any drill. You can transfer it to any mp3 player, and you can work on it not necessarily on a computer. You can work on it on your mp3 player, on a phone, anywhere, anytime. And besides, if you understand the fundamentals of it, you can actually take a lot of free resources on Internet. There are thousands, millions of free resources they are underused. Why? Because, students, learners, they don’t believe that they can do it.
[43:41] Now, we have to show it. We have to explain them why they could not, and why they can now. That’s what I try to show to you. And if I will be successful to show it to you, then maybe together we’ll be successful to show it to somebody else. That’s the chain reaction.
John: [44:03] Yes, I’m converted [laughs] .
Arkady: [44:05] Oh, great!
John: [44:07] I have no doubt in the efficacy. I think when you’re 99 percent agreed with somebody, then it’s interesting to talk about the one percent you disagree.
Arkady: [44:15] Yes, yes, and that’s a great pleasure, John, and that’s why I am very grateful now for this interview with you. Because I found that since you created that presentation about the conventional methods, and you are looking for something new, that’s why I was sure that you will be interested in this approach.
John: [44:38] I am indeed. Well, thank you for getting in touch and being patient with me getting back to you. And I look forward to talking again.
Arkady: [44:47] Thank you very much, thank you.
John: [44:49] All right, good luck. [music]
John: [44:55] For a transcript of this episode, and more tips, tools, and tech for learning any language, go to languagemastery.com.
For more information about Arkady and Language Bridge, visit his site and check out his 3-part article series on Kirsten Winkler’s blog:
Language Bridge KirstenWinkler.com]]>
Click the arrow below to play the episode. If you don’t see the audio player controls, your device doesn’t support Adobe Flash or you need to install the Flash plugin in your browser. If viewing this on a mobile device, just click the download button below to stream the podcast.
To download the MP3, right click on the button (or “Control+Click” on a Mac) and select “Save As” or “Save Linked File As”.
| Download |
John: This is episode five of the Foreign Language Mastery podcast. I’m your host John Fotheringham. In today’s show I interview Randy “The Yearlyglot” from yearlyglot.com. To read a transcript of this episode and to find tips, tools and tech for mastering any foreign language, go to languagemastery.com. Here is the phone interview, originally recorded June 6, 2010.
John: Maybe we can start out…just tell me a little bit more about how you got started in language learning and what languages you’ve learned so far. And then I’ll be asking you a bit more about your Yearlyglot project.
Randy: Maybe I should have prepared a little bit so that I would have some canned answers, but that’s all right.
John: I like the uncanned answers better. The real deal.
Randy: [01:03] Nice. I guess my whole life I’ve always been interested in language just in general. I don’t really have a good explanation for why. I started all the way back in kindergarten. My kindergarten teacher actually taught us Spanish words at the end of every day.One new Spanish word. So that might actually be the thing that got me going in this direction. By middle school I was taking Spanish classes. In high school I was taking German classes and French classes. One of my best friends in high school was a Filipino guy who have some trouble with the English language because he and his family had just moved here. He and I took up a pretty close friendship just on a principal that he asked for some help on the first day and I gave it to him. So in addition in everything else he taught me a lot of Filipino Tagalog…
[02:06] I just sort of picked up on everything every time it was put in front of me. I would have never taken the German and French classes except for the school didn’t offer anything past Spanish II. It was weird. I just wanted to keep doing language and I ran out of Spanish so I switched to German and then I met this Filipino guy and then learned some French and before you know it I’m like, wow, it’s not so hard. I want to learn every language.
John: Right. It is addictive that’s for sure. So the whole yearlyglot idea of learning any language in one year or less is that something you do help more recently or is that something can always gone towards…
Randy: That actually is a very recent development. It comes from the back of learning Russian pretty much fluently in one year. After everybody told me it would take six, seven, eight years of study. I still don’t claim to be an expert, but I put in some time and did the work and after one year I’m pretty fluent in Russian for a guy who only been learning for a year.
[03:09] Everybody says it is one of the hardest language which is if I con do it with that I should be able to do with anything. I don’t see why anybody else couldn’t do it especially with the easier language. Something like a Romance language that’s so close to English anyways. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to learn that in a year. But it proves that you can do that a lot of times in three months.
John: I often say, if you do things right there’s no reason you can’t…at least get to a modicum of fluency in six months. I think that is a good, realistic target. I think six years is ridiculous but that gets to the issue which is, if you do it the old academics in the classroom will take six years.
Randy: Right.
John: That’s maybe the next question I have for you is, how exactly do you go about learning the language that you could do it in under a year?
Randy: I never really formalized a learning method until the last third writing in the blog and now I’m starting to get it really in front of me and seen it all.
[04:05] If I move this over here it would work better and that sort of thing. Actually I’m starting to see a lot of logic behind some of the more commercial products like you think of the Rosetta Stone or something like that and all of us in the community kind of ridicule Rosetta Stone but there are some things they do right. I think particularly the order in which you go about things you start of with some really basic stuff and then you just build on that. I think if you see returns quickly you get encouraged. I guess that’s my biggest thing is if you can get encouraged you will keep doing it.So I try to do things at…if I can learn how to say, “Where is…” and then I can learn how to say, “Thank you”. And then I can learn how to say, “Excuse me”. I can immediately turn those three things into excuse me, where is whatever. Thank you. And now I actually had small connection at the cause of just learning three things.
John: [05:03] Right.
Randy: So I think that that’s really what I tried. I try to find a minimum amount of learning that you can get the maximum usage out of and I actually turn it into practical example sentence because I know those sort of things. Like I said, if you get really encouraged by what you’re learning you’ll feel more momentum and you’ll keep going.
John: How do you feel about the whole input versus output debate? I mean full disclosure. I’m definitely of the input camp. Though I’ve lived abroad for most of the last decade. It’s not practical for those that are going to be moving to Japan tomorrow. To spend six months on listening and reading input.
Randy: And by the same token, it’s also not practical for those who are not going to move to expect to do a lot of output either. I think that the input versus output debate is mostly…it feels to me mostly like a constructive disagreement sort of manufactured for the sake of ratings or clicks or whatever. Anyway, because really you need both.
[06:13] It might serve you better to have more output if you’re in person and it might serve you better to have more input. But at the end if you don’t do both you’re not going to learn. So I think that the debate itself is kind of silly. It’s entertaining but if it lost the entertainment value a long time ago for me.
John: I have my opinions but I really wanted just share the opinions of others that…what’s worth for them? Because obviously everyone’s different. and what it’s works for me won’t necessarily work for everybody. Although I do think 90% of the things probably work for everybody and it’s that extra 10% that is different. And that’s why you need to present a variety of method.
Randy: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like the parade of principle of 80/20. Everybody can benefit from that 80.
John: I think we’ve read the same book. So back to then, what’s worth for you? So you’ve build on the basics which makes sense. What other do’s and don’ts can you share? I know there’s a lot.
Randy: [07:13] My biggest don’t. I love to ramble on and on about don’ts. Maybe it’s a little too negative but…
John: The first post I put on my language blog was the top 10 not to do list items in in the language.
Randy: I think that my biggest don’t is don’t put too much pressure on yourself. People worry about how far back they are in the book or how much chapters they’ve done or how many words they know. It becomes so stressful that you’re actually…you lower the quality of your learning for the sake of getting more quantity. For me that’s the biggest don’t. It’s easy to over stress yourself. It’s all about staying positive. Anybody who has a positive attitude can succeed.
[08:04] I look at people…here in Chicago, it’s very diverse. It’s a very…like a world community. And I’m everyday, surrounded by people speaking hundreds of different languages. And what’s interesting to me is that when they speak to me they don’t speak correctly or properly. But they’re not afraid to do it.
John: Right.
Randy: And I think about people I know who are like, “Oh, I’m trying to learn Spanish.” or “I’m trying to learn this.” And you’ll never hear them actually do it. They never tried. They just say they’re trying. I’m on the bus with somebody who is asking for directions and they’re butchering English but they’re not afraid to do it.
John: Right.
Randy: That’s so important.
John: The fear of the pain of doing something I think that turns so many people off of whether it’s a language, whether it’s getting in shape. It’s all the same. It’s using the fear of the task is worsening the actual task itself.
Randy: [09:02] Absolutely. The anticipation of, “Oh, it’s going to be so much work.” But…I was watching an interview with Will Smith recently and he was talking about his dad have a shop and broke down the brick wall and then asked his sons to rebuild the brick wall. And the kid suppose to say, “Oh, it’s impossible. That would take forever.”
[09:23] Then his dad said, “I don’t care how you do it. Don’t think about building the whole wall. Just lay one brick and just make sure every time that you lay that brick perfectly you don’t care about anything else. And day by day and brick by brick after several weeks or months or he didn’t really say how long but had rebuild the brick wall of the shop.
[09:44] That’s so motivational. When you think of building things…don’t think of how far you have to go or how long or how far the journey is. You just think about doing each step the best you can. Eventually you’ll look back and you’re surprised at how much you’ve done and how easy it’s become.
John: [10:04] Right. That’s really a good metaphor. I like that. Great.
Randy: Specially with languages because there is a lot of work. We’ll be fooling ourselves to say, “Oh yeah. Anybody can do it in a week or two.” There is a lot but you can do those things that keeps you motivated. And then you can look back and say, “Holy cow! That whole journey was fun and it wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.”
[10:26] I really like the metaphor you drew to working out. That particularly, for me, has always been one my favorite analogies from pretty much anything difficult in life. Because I go to the gym every morning. I weight train in the morning before I work.
[10:40] Everyday I go in there and I have to push up a weigh. And I have a goal in mind…every time I go I try to push five more pounds than the last time. I don’t always succeeded doing it. But week by week I am pushing more weight every time than I was a week before.
[11:02] You look at that long-term goal of, I want to bench-press 250 pounds or I want to squat for 100 pounds and you think, “Oh my god. That’s far off and impossible.” But each week you look back and say, “Wow, I remember when I could only do 160.” Overtime, you watch yourself change and you watch your strength grow and what it does more than anything else in my opinion is it makes your mind strong. And when your mind is strong you believe you can do anything. And once your mind is strong there’s nothing that can stop you. It might be days or weeks or months but there’s no task you won’t attack. That’s the attitude I like to have.
John: Time plus effort.
Randy: Absolutely.
John: It is in the language matter that my main interest is martial arts. And I just like to share with people that the word Kung Fu did actually means skill through effort or skill through…
Randy: Nice.
John: And it’s such a good analogy. The language. It’s just doing it day in day out and eventually you’ll get better.
[12:02] You can’t not get better. One of the reason so many people fail is because they’re just not doing it ultimately. Sitting in a classroom is not doing it. Even watching a movie. You put in a foreign language movie. That’s not actually doing it. You must reactively doing it.
Randy: Right. Classroom. That’s a really great topic for me to go on and on about. I think that, like I was saying, about the weight training and stuff and about your mind being strong.
[12:36] When you talk about signing in for a class that’s always the really the cop out I think. You want to do something or you say you want to do something so you sign up for the class and that becomes like the token effort of saying, “Hey, I tried.” But the lessons are always so far apart and so short and even worse they’re retarded by the fact that you have to teach a whole group. Not just one person.
[13:02] You’re not even putting up a fraction of the effort. You will do spending that same time on your own with a book once a week. The worst thing about the classroom is that if you don’t do it you can blame the teacher. “Oh, I tried but the teacher was no good.
[13:19] The class was no good. It was too far away or it was too expensive” or whatever. But you don’t take any responsibility when you sign up for a class the way that you would if you just grab a book and just start reading it. Or grab a CD and start listening to it.
John: OK. Any other tips that you would like to add or any don’ts?
Randy: Well, there was one thing that sparks something in my mind that you said a moment ago too about a lot of people aren’t trying, you know, it’s a lot of work. And it reminded me of something else that…recently I just really started thinking about this is that everything is work.
[14:01] Any skill…anything that you do well is the product of hours and hours and hours of practice and work. Some people may have a talent in whatever. You can’t teach talent. But nobody becomes successful on talent alone. You have to have the skill. When it comes to anything in life…but language is a great example of this. It really feels to me like people give up too early. And even at the easiest phase all you have to do is just correct that book or talk to that tutor or put on that CD or whatever it is that you do to study instead of turning on the TV And it’s so easy, effortless to keep doing. Once you do something, you know, it’s a have. It’s effortless to keep doing that. It’s actually more work for you to stop and go turn on that TV and ignore your language time. Sometimes I found it astounding that people actually give up. That means you;re making a choice to quit.
[15:08] Just like my gym metaphor. Again, if I get sick and I don’t want to go in the gym because I’m not feeling well or something. I automatically start to miss it and after a day or two I’m like, I want to go in earlier and try to make up for all that time. There is a point like if you miss a lot of time like a few weeks or something.
[15:29] There is a point where that habit starts to fall off and then you have to do the work of rebuilding it. And the same thing is with everything certainly with languages. I just think that over all unless there’s like a death in the family or something. There is no thing that can stop me from spending an hour or a day learning something about languages or whatever because that’s what I want. How could I stop? I would have to make a conscious decision to actually stop.
John: That leads to another…I think the important point is it does take time. It does take consistency. But I also think that people overestimate how many hours a day it will take. They’re so used to sitting in a classroom for two to three hours.
[16:10] And realistically I don’t usually study or more than 15 or 30 minutes of the time. I just try to do that three times a day everyday. That’s much, much more powerful than doing four hours a week but all at once.
Randy: Yeah. If you over burden your mind it starts to fight back against you. I do the same thing. I wake up in the morning and I browse a vocabulary list or I look at something or just read a blog entry or something for fifteen minutes.
[16:41] And then I head off to the gym. Go to work. On the ride home from work I spend 15, 30 minutes. However long it is depending on the traffic that day. look at some phrase list. So whatever I’m doing that particular day and again once a night. So yeah, probably about the same as you. Three times a day for maybe 15 to 30 minutes.
John: [17:01] As you said listening the way they work out on their way home. It’s just making that a habit. It’s, I’m going to do the dishes. Pop in the iPod. In line at the store, OK, put in the iPod. Every chance that you’re not doing something that requires your 100% attention. That can become another learning opportunity.It doesn’t have to be sitting down on a desk.
Randy: And I would even go so far as to say that like a lot of times when people like us use that analogy, you know, we say five minutes at the supermarket line or 15 minutes on the train. I think that listeners or readers sometimes get the impression that we’re saying, “You should do that every time.” And really, that’s not the case. All you need to do is just make use of one of those times over the course of your day.
[17:51] And you’re already doing something. I don’t spend every five minute line wait reading something about languages and I don’t spend every cab ride or every train ride to rhyme the study of vocabulary. I just do sometimes. But it’s enough times.
John: [18:08] That’s a good point and that goes back the fear of doing it often prevents people from starting.
Randy: It can sound really scary when you hear people talk about it or you read some of these language hacking tips. All of these stuff, we’re all trying to help people. That’s why we’re all here. All of us are trying to help people to see that it’s easy. And sometimes there’s so many tips that people get overwhelmed and they think it’s going to be too hard.
John: I think in it’s aggregate though it’s doing a service. I think so many people do things so far their own way. And gets so fed up and they look it up this whole foreign language phobia and this belief that, “I’m just not going to learn any language which is like you’ll never learn.” I mean, almost everybody I know is that way.
[19:00] It’s that sort of the norm is, “I’m not good at languages.” And so I think it’s a lot of us. A lot of voices. A lot of echoes to…hopefully, eventually get to…not everybody but at least those that want to learn. Which I just hope that enough of our voices reach them. That they can shake themselves out of these belief that they can’t do it.
Randy: [19:22] Absolutely. And I think most of us probably all have similar stories about struggling with their first one or in my own personal struggle. This is going to sound funny from a guy who tells people it’s easy to learn languages. But I actually have such a hard time hearing that sometimes I don’t even understand English. I’m constantly asking people to repeat themselves and, you know, not understanding things that are said. And then you try to translate that into learning a foreign language. And it becomes a real challenge.
[20:01] So it’s one of those things where even though I’m telling you…I’m telling telling anybody who will listen. I can learn a new language every year. I’m totally not talking about the challenging part that anybody else who does this is going to have an easier time than I am.
John: Very good. What is your current language project and what is the next one you think?
Randy: The current language project is Italian. Although it’s never just one thing. I’m planning a trip to Lithuania in a few months. I allow myself the weekends to stray from Italian.
[20:42] So every weekend I’m learning a little bit of Lithuanian in anticipation of this trip but during the week I stay focused on Italian. But I haven’t selected my language for next year and even if I have I wouldn’t admit it to anyone but I do know that I’m starting to narrow in on one of maybe three. I’m very, very interested in Turkish. I’m living pretty close to Canada and I think that if I didn’t take advantage of French that would be foolish. The third one possibly Arabic.
[21:21] So, I’m not really sure. I haven’t chosen yet but I think that right now I’m teetering between those three. I could come out as a surprise and just pick something totally unexpected too.
John: All right. We’ll just make a wrap up. If there’s only one thing you want listeners to hear about language learning what would it be?
Randy: [21:38] When you showed somebody you’ve spent even the smallest amount of time to learn about them specially if you’re American. Because we have a stigma to overcoming the world. If you show people that you have spent even smallest amount of time taking an interest in their language and in their culture it’s so well-received that…it makes such a big difference on the way that you’re perceived and the way that your whole dealings with that person go. I was just recently at the bar watching a hockey game. Go Blackhawks. I hope they win the Stanley Cup.
John: [22:12] Now you’re speaking foreign language to me. I don’t speak hockey. I’m sorry.
Randy: That’s all right. A patron who had no place to sit was standing near my table and I started a talking to her. And I picked up on her a Russian accent. On a whim I’m assuming that I’m right because there are a lot of Polish people in this town too.
[22:35] I said something to her in Russian and she immediately became my best friend for the rest of the night. I saw half a dozen…maybe a dozen guys come in and try to hit on her over the night and she blew them all off. It’s so interesting the way those little language niceties can change the way you’re perceived.
John: And there’s a motivation for you right there. I mean if you’re struggling just stay motivated in the language. look no further than that. It just opens up so many doors that really cannot be opened in another way. It’s a pleasure talking to you, Randy.
Randy: [23:08] Absolutely. Yeah. Have a great day, John.
John: You too. Thanks so much, Randy.
Randy: Take care.
John: Bye bye.
Randy: Bye.
John: For Show notes and the transcript of this episode go to languagemastery.com. and if you’ve enjoyed the show please take a minute to rate us in iTunes.
To learn more about Randy, visit his website:
Fluent Every Year]]>
To learn more about LiveMocha, check out my review of the site’s pros and cons.
Click the arrow below to play the episode. If you don’t see the audio player controls, your device doesn’t support Adobe Flash or you need to install the Flash plugin in your browser. If viewing this on a mobile device, just click the download button below to stream the podcast.
To download the MP3, right click on the button (or “Control+Click” on a Mac) and select “Save As” or “Save Linked File As”.
| Download |
John Fotheringham: This is episode 4 of the Foreign Language Mastery podcast. I’m your host, John Fotheringham. In today’s show I interviewed Clint Schmidt, vice president of marketing and product at Livemocha. For show notes and transcripts go to languagemastery.com. Here is the phone interview originally recorded on May 12, 2010.So why don’t we start out, maybe you can just give my listeners a brief overview of Livemocha, what it’s like, how it’s different from other sites? And then I’ll go on to some specific questions then.
Clint Schmidt: Sure. Livemocha is the world’s largest online language learning community with free and paid online language courses in 35 languages and more than 500 million members from over 200 countries around the world. Livemocha is growing very rapidly and really quite virally around the world. A lot of them are word of mouth and recommendations from Livemocha members.
[01:15] I think people are enthusiastic about Livemocha because it’s really different from alternative or conventional language learning approaches. We studied some traditional self-study language products to understand why they were still ineffective. And we identified two critical elements that were lacking; sustained motivation and opportunities to practice the language with another person. And we created Livemocha to deliver both of those elements and to make language learning more fun and more effective and more social.So each of our structured online courses include speaking and writing exercises that are reviewed by native speakers of the language that you’re learning. And those folks provide helpful tips for you to improve your language skills. And in returning the favor, you can help them learn your native language. So it’s a community-driven learning and it’s all based on reciprocity. And it’s really exciting and it’s a very distinctive way to learn.
John: [02:36] You have actually done a few of the corrections already on the site, a couple of people pops up on the screen, “Would you like to correct so-on-so’s writing sample?” So you mentioned about motivation being one of the biggest problems with traditional language learning which is absolutely true. How specifically does Livemocha keep you motivated?
Clint: Part of the motivation problem we found is that it’s just boring to use some of the more traditional self-study methods. They give you a book. They trust that you’re going to read the book and then you’re going to memorize it and then you’re going to talk to yourself out loud in your room, in the closet or in your car. Wherever it is, you’re just going to talk to yourself and that gets boring. It’s like homework without the teacher. You know if the teacher is not going to review it you don’t do it.
[03:30] A couple of things that are motivating about Livemocha; number 1 you know somebody is going to review your spoken and written French or your spoken and written Russian right there. Somebody who is actually going to be there to review it. So you want to do a good job. It motivates you to do your best work if you know that somebody else will review it. But it’s also motivating in another important way in that you’re actually working with real people. And these people are helping you over the course of time repeatedly, make your way to the lessons. Perhaps you’re helping them as well to learn your native language. And you start to develop a bit of a rapport with people. And that rapport brings the social element back to language learning. Imagine that being social as part of language learning.It helps keep people engaged. It helps keep people excited. It helps make it fun and bring a real person and a real character and a real interaction into the equation. And it doesn’t make it so brutally boring to go back and pick up that book again. Instead it’s fun, interactive exercises with people there to help you along. We started to change the whole approach to make motivation no longer an issue.
John: [04:45] Now how do you guys account for quality control for tutors and for things like that? It’s obviously crowd source. It’s anyone who wants to help can help. But if you get a case where there is a tutor who is giving blatantly bad advice or is being offensive or whatever, do you have a means to control that?
Clint: Absolutely. So I get into that in a couple of ways. First the easiest to give is that if somebody says anything inappropriate or just not very nice perhaps, you can easily block any user on Livemocha. When you do that you will never see that person on Livemocha again anywhere. They won’t appear to you in the community. In fact if a specific member of Livemocha is blocked by many others, we automatically remove them from the community entirely. And so it’s a self-policing community in our way if people who aren’t productive or aren’t being helpful, they’re just removed naturally.
[05:51] Now with regard to the specific feedback that you get, yes, some people are more helpful than others. Some people will just say, “Yeah, good job;” other people will say, “You know, that was a good job but actually we pronounce this word a little bit different. You need to roll your R a little bit more this way.” It’s a good greater level of depth if you will to instruct you. And what we find is that the people who give that greater level of depth tend to attract a lot of language partners to help them because you’re rewarded by your students, so to speak, who can rate you as being particularly helpful.
John: OK. The next question is how do you sort of rise up or go down in the ranks of tutoring. So your actual feedback you give to your students will be rated?
Clint: [06:44] That’s right. Your students will rate the helpfulness or not of the review that you give to them. And so on Livemocha we keep track of both the quantity of the help you give others and the quality based on student ratings.
John: And then that shows up in your points? Is that translated to…?
Clint: It shows up in your points. It shows up on your profile. It’s visible to the rest of the community. So if you’re choosing somebody on Livemocha to be your language partner and ask them to review your speaking and writing exercises, you’re going to choose somebody who has done a lot of work for others and who’s particularly helpful. You’ll invite them to help you. But you’ll also be very keen to help them because you want them to reciprocate.
[07:32] So what happens is the creme de la creme rises to the top. People who are really engaged in language learning and want to do a good job they attract the best partners and those people help each other. What we were finding over the course of time is that the community because of the dynamics that are naturally baked into the structure, the interactions on the site, the community just keeps getting better. Better people, better instructions, more recommendations with a higher quality of experience overall.
John: Right. Yeah, the bigger the pool, the higher quality it gets that’s for sure. Well what I did in the last few days I started studying Arabic on Livemocha, which I have absolutely no experience with. I wanted to see what it felt like as a new learner. I briefly used it for Japanese a few years ago. But I’ve already studied Japanese for many years. So it wasn’t an authentic experience for me as a newbie. And yeah, I did enjoy it. The only thing I encountered which may be my lack of understanding about how it works yet, it didn’t seem like there is any place on the site that would teach me how to Arabic from the very beginning, what specific Arabic letter is, how it’s pronounced. I think it’s already assumed that you already knew how to at least read the letters. Is that something I’m misunderstanding or is that case?
Clint: [08:55] In fact, you’re probably exactly right. That’s a gap on Livemocha that we are quite eager to fill. And we are working very hard right now to fill that. I think that those types of instructions are best provided by the community, how to say it in traditional Arabic as opposed to broader regional Arabic. There is slightly different pronunciation, slightly different character. And so you start to do very quickly take on a responsibility for content development that far exceeds our ability to deliver on it.It’s taking some time admittedly but what we’re trying to build is an infrastructure on Livemocha that accesses repository and self-rating if you will, a repository for community-generated grammatical tips, grammatical feedbacks, specific pronunciation guide, even cultural and travel tips. There is a framework of community-generated content that we can wrap around the lessons that will make the lessons more effective, that will make them more relevant.
John: [10:10] I did notice that on the right side of the screen. You had a little section. You get thumb up or thumb down tip for any of those.
Clint: Yeah. That’s a poor man’s manifestation, the thumb, of the features that I’m talking about now.
John: Well it’s a start. It was helpful. I mean you could see if somebody would spend enough time to write something meaningful, it would get thumbed up and that will be the first thing that showed up. And when you click to view all the tips, you could see someone there that was not very constructive. And then they didn’t show up as often.
Clint: Correct. We can do a much better job with that and we will and are doing a much better job with that. But it does take some time when a site like ours is growing as fast as we are. And sometimes just keeping the lights on is a challenge so to speak. So we’ll get there but it is taking time.
John: [11:00] Right. I know how that goes. So down the road what are some future things that Livemocha users can look forward to? Features? Functions?
Clint: Yeah. I have a little bit of insight that I can share there. Some of it are super top secret. But one thing that I would be happy to share is the type of content that we make available on Livemocha is going to be changing. The best manifestation of this change is represented by our partnership with Pearson.We collaborated with Pearson to create a new course on Livemocha that’s a premium, paid-only course for people who are learning English. It’s called Livemocha Active English. And the focus of the course is entirely around conversational English, real conversation, real day-to-day dialog, showing English native speakers conversing with one another with subtitles available for language learners and dozens of languages, presenting English grammar to a student in their native language, in dozens of native languages, presenting vocabulary in a similar fashion and then with that familiar Livemocha reciprocal burning that’s integrated into an even richer course.
[12:30] It would deliver a lot of things that Livemocha’s current courses do not, including that video content and more explicit grammar instruction. We’re taking that model and now also expanding it in collaboration with Harper Collins to create similar courses for Spanish, French, German and Italian. And we may be looking forward to similar such courses in the future for a longer list of languages beyond.What we’re finding again and again is that what draws people to Livemocha and what they’re enthusiastic about language learning for is to have those conversations with native speakers with confidence. They want be able to go to the plaza in Madrid and ask for the best place in the town to have cafe con leche and to be able to understand what they’re saying and to say “Thank you” and to greet new people, introduce themselves. It’s not rocket science the types of things that people are aspiring to do. But the traditional tools just don’t really get from there.
John: [13:36] Yeah. I completely agree. That’s what my entire site is about. It’s why the traditional method doesn’t work and what does work. Now you mentioned about adding more explicit grammar explanations in people’s native languages. In my experience and research that actually partly contributes to the inefficiency of traditional methods, focusing too much on information about the language and then not getting enough input in the language.It’s not to say that the occasional glance at the declenching table can’t be somewhat useful. But especially for beginners I find that the reason they never get excited about the language and the reason they never get to practice listening and therefore cannot speak the language is because they spend too much time whether it’s in a book or on a website not listening enough to the actual native language and spending too much time thinking. How do you think Livemocha can overcome that handicap?
Clint: [14:48] Well I think the one thing that’s often lacking from the same traditional methods is just as you’ve mentioned the ability or the opportunity to put the language into practice and to actually have those conversations. The best way to learn how to have a conversation is to try having a conversation. The sequence of our lessons, the sequence of our exercises for these new courses, while they will indeed teach you more about the language you’re learning in your native language, they culminate in asking you to put the language into practice in real interaction with native speakers. So the introduction of let’s say grammar and vocabulary is a means to an end, not the end itself.
John: My basic contention is that if you learn a language, what I consider the correct way, there’s many minor variations that differ from person to person, basically if you’re learning the language through input, through topics you’re interested in, through just lots of listening and reading input you’ll eventually get it. You don’t need to be too academic about it because I said earlier I think being overly conscious, consciously looking at how things work, I think is what slows people down. And I think is what makes people believe Chinese or Japanese are difficult languages. They are difficult if you go about them academically because they’re so different from English. But in their essence all languages have evolved the same way. They all use the same part of our brains. They all rely on the same basic structures deep down.
Clint: [16:37] That’s really interesting. To me it touches on one of my dissertation topics. They are somewhat connected, that traditionally just because of technology limitations you were really constrained in being able to teach a lot of people a new language just because it was a one-too-many type of thing. You had a teacher and he was the one that had the knowledge and the sort of negating factor for disseminating that knowledge.
John: Yeah. It was broadcast only. Now we have uni-cast education.
Clint: You got it.
John: Just cool. Now there is no excuse now, I mean with so many wonderful products available online, many of which have a premium model like Livemocha. You can try it out. It’s up to 202; I guess it’s free.
Clint: [17:26] That’s right.
John: So there is no excuse. You can get on there. You can try it on podcasts like this one. I mean a lot of my listeners and readers are actually ESL students. So they’re using what we’re talking about right now to learn English to improve their English. And then what I do is I provide a transcript of each podcast so they can actually listen and then read each episode. So anyway there is a plethora of opportunities now so there is no excuse. Now you mentioned you have 30-plus languages on the site?
Clint: That’s right, over 30 languages. Occasionally we add new ones or take some other’s software to further improve or adjust the content. But right now we have 35 languages.
John: What are the top 10 most popular on the site?
Clint: [18:16] Top 10, let’s see. I can give it to you in a rough order.
John: That’s fine.
Clint: Number one most popular was clearly English, followed by an almost tie for Spanish and French followed by an almost tie for German and Italian, followed then by an almost tie for Japanese and Mandarin.
John: Interesting.
Clint: And then right after that it quickly disperses into a very long tail of languages all the way from Swedish to Czech to Hindi to Urdu to Croatian and so on.
John: Right. That’s interesting. If you looked at the list of the most commonly spoken languages in the world by native speakers versus the most commonly studied foreign languages, it’s amazing that difference there.
Clint: [19:05] Well the fastest riser in Livemocha easily is Arabic. I expect that Arabic will be among the top 5 languages that people want to learn by this time next year.
John: Yeah. That’s what I would point out. In the recent past it was not even in many university programs. And now it’s something a lot of people are going after. But if you pull all the Arabic dialects together, it’s I think number 3 or number 4.
Clint: Yeah. That’s exactly right. It’s all about English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic. Everything else is curiosity. In fact that long tail of languages that are available in Livemocha are there largely because our community has taken upon themselves to translate our sequence of words and phrases that comprise our lessons into their native language.
John: OK.
Clint: [20:03] So the reason why we have Croatian 102 is because we have enough Croatian native speakers on Livemocha who would like to see us offer that to those who want to learn Croatian.
John: Very cool. I mean that’s the way you’re going to do it. There is no way you’ll every get all the languages unless there is some kind of open source, crowd source, Wikipedia-esque way of doing it.
Clint: Yeah. The really cool thing is that because our lessons are a sequence of words and phrases and that sequence is fixed, we can show you translations in any one of those language pairs. So if you’re a Spanish speaker who wants to learn Russian, we can show you the pairing there. If you’re a Russian speaker who wants to learn Hindi, we can show that pairing, a Hindi speaker who wanted to learn Swedish, a Swedish speaker who wanted to learn Croatian. So you start to get into that long tail and you exponentially increase the number of relevant students and teachers that you can attract in the community.
John: [21:03] Right. In my experience because I studied Japanese first when I start studying Mandarin, a lot of times it’s actually preferential for me to use a Mandarin book or material meant for a Japanese person because 80% of the vocabulary came from Chinese. Same for Korean if you’re going to learn Korean.
Clint: Yeah.
John: So that actually is helpful in a lot of ways. I can see the derivations, “Oh OK. That character came from that character. OK I got it.”
Clint: I’m doing the exact same thing myself in learning Italian. I’m majoring in Spanish and it’s much easier for me to absorb Italian with Spanish as my orientation point.
John: [21:47] Yes. Thank you to you for your time and for making a good product. What was the new thing coming down the pipe?
Clint: Yes. Our Active Livemocha, active German, active Spanish, active French, active Italian.
John: And active Chinese I’ll be waiting.
Clint: That one will be on the top of the list.
John: I’ll be first in line.
Clint: [22:09] Thanks John.
John: Hopefully by the time it comes out I’ll be a tutor instead of just a student. We’ll see.
Clint: We’re ready for you.
John: All right. Actually there is one more question. Is there any limitations on who can tutor? Do I have to be a native speaker or can I just be proficient in the language?
Clint: [22:25] No. It’s all self-selected provided that you indicate on your profile that you are indeed a fluent or a native speaker of the language. We’ll let you try your hand at correcting others. But as I mentioned, if you’re not proving to be too helpful, the community will quickly let us know and you may not be on Livemocha much longer or identified as someone who is very helpful. But you’re free to try it.
John: Got it. All right. Clint, thank you so much for your time.
Clint: You bet. Thank you, John.
John: For a transcript of this show and more tips, tools and tech for learning any language effectively, go to languagemastery.com.
To learn more about LiveMocha, check out my complete product review:
Review of LiveMocha]]>
In our interview, Dr. Kelm shares what he believes to be the 6 most important factors in effective language learning.
Click the arrow below to play the episode. If you don’t see the audio player controls, your device doesn’t support Adobe Flash or you need to install the Flash plugin in your browser. If viewing this on a mobile device, just click the download button below to stream the podcast.
To download the MP3, right click on the button (or “Control+Click” on a Mac) and select “Save As” or “Save Linked File As”.
| Download |
Orlando: Well let me start by saying that I like your Foreign Language Mastery blog site; it’s been fun to read.
John: Thank you. I’ve ended up interviewing a number of my mentors and heroes, and I stumbled across your blog and really liked what you had to say, so I thought it would be good to share your views with my listeners and readers. So I think best would be maybe to go through those 5 fundamentals that you have on your blog. [Note: In my preparation for the interview, I accidentally missed reading No. 6.]
Orlando: Ah, sure.
John: I think that really sums up your basic stance. I’m sure there’s a lot more you could say, and we’ll fill in as we go. I think the first one was the 500 hours of study that’s required to reach a modicum of fluency.
Orlando: Right. The issue is time on task; that people underestimate how long it takes to learn a foreign language. And sometimes, even if they’re doing everything right, there’s a sense that ‘Oh, I still don’t speak Spanish!” because you don’t speak it as well as you speak English. And it’s always good to go back and tell people, “Even if you’re doing everything right, it’s not going to be a 20-hour project.” You know, I always get phone calls from people saying, “Uh, we want to negotiate with people in Mexico. Can you teach us some Spanish?” And it’s like, “Sure, but it’s not going to be a during your lunch hour for 3 weeks type of project.” So that first category is that realize that it does take time on task, and to be proficient in a foreign language, is going to take you a hunk of time.
That 500 hours is a nice number, too, because what it says is that even if you’re in a normal classroom situation and you meet 5 times a week for a whole semester, you’re still going to be way short of 500 hours. So a lot of it is you just got to spend more time on task. That’s number 1.
John: Ok, and then number 2 was about context.
Orlando: Number 2 is context, which is, words stick when you’re in the situation of the moment. Word’s don’t stick if you can’t connect them to some sort of experience or some kind of context. I often give the example to my students of a time I was sitting on a bus in Brazil, and there was this kid that was driving me crazy, jumping up and down and screaming and yelling. And the mother yelled out, “Não faça isso, filho.” (Don’t do that, son.) And I remember thinking afterwards, “Wow, command form!” And never again did I have to think about how to conjugate a command form in Portuguese. I saw the lady; I saw the kid; he was driving me crazy; and forever more, I could just say “Não faça isso, filho.” So that context of the moment really helped me have that word stick. So I think it’s a big deal to put all of your language learning into some sort of real context of a real opportunity.
John: Ok, on that note, what advice do you have for somebody who, for example, lives in the United States, and doesn’t have the opportunity to go live abroad? What can they do to create a context for themselves, so that that sticks?
Orlando: Well, you know what, the nice thing of being an adult learner is you can pretend. You can create those scenarios for yourself. You can put yourself in the situations. You can visualize yourself actually buying something, saying something. I actually think that’s one of the great opportunities of an adult learner; is we can role-play stuff. Where children when they learn a foreign language, they can never really put themselves in a role-play situation. But you see the sad thing is that a lot of people don’t know that. And so they will just take a big gigantic list of words, and kind of keep reading the list of words, and never ever try to visualize, “How are you ever going to really say this?” or “What would you really say in this real situation?”
John: You mentioned about differences between children and adults. Maybe we can go off on that tangent shortly. I think there are many, but I also think that there is a lot in common that people also underestimate. What’s your view on the similarities and differences?
Orlando: You know, I’m not a gigantic fan of the whole critical period, you’re kind of doomed after you’re an adult kind of thing. I also don’t believe, that, you know, sometimes people talk about how easy it is for children to learn a foreign language. But if you look at the amount of energy and effort they really put into it, we’re talking about 5, 6, 7 years where their whole concentration is language, language, language, playing with languages, playing with sounds, trying phrases out, communicating back and forth. There is nothing easy about the way children learn foreign languages. They’re just putting tons and tons and tons of effort and time into it. And so I think that sometimes we sell ourselves short when we say, “Oh, there’s automatic language learning that goes on when you’re a child.” Well, it’s automatic in the sense that you’re doing it every day, every day, every day, every day. But it certainly isn’t without tons of effort. And if we put as much effort into our adult language learning, as what children do into their first language acquisition, we would probably do a lot better as well.
Years and years ago, Lily Wong Fillmore did a great study, it was her dissertation, on little kids that were learning foreign languages in elementary schools. And she had a great example that kids first socialize, then they communicate, then they worry about form. And when we teach foreign languages, we do the exact opposite. We worry about form first; we worry about communication second; and we get to socialization third. And I thought it was kind of a neat observation, that that’s how kids worry about it. If they want to go play in the park, they play in the park. And that’s kind of their number 1 thing to do. And communication becomes second; form is down the road.
John: Interesting. Well, back to number 3, about schema theory and social scripts.
Orlando: Right. You know, I’m a gigantic believer in the idea of chunks, that we learn foreign languages in little chunks, little phrases, little situations. And we know how the script goes. Recently, I was the example I often give is that when I go to a bakery in a foreign country, that in the Unites States, I know the rhythm of going to a bakery. They ask what you want; they cut it open; they slice it. There’s kind of a way that you follow the pattern of buying meat, and cheese, and bread at a bakery. When you’re in a foreign language, that pattern changes. And it’s not a language issue necessarily; it’s that I don’t know the rhythm of how to keep the flow of everybody’s activities going in the bakery. So in foreign language, if you know the flow of the dialogue you’re supposed to follow, it helps you understand things.
I was recently in Rio, and when I was in the check-out line, somebody asked in essence if I had a “blah blah blah card”. Well of course I didn’t because I was a tourist. And that was not part of my dialogue. I was not ready for the lady at the checkout to ask me about if I had that card. And I went from understanding 100% of what she was saying to a bunch of garbled noise. Because I didn’t know the dialogue. And I had to have her repeat that a couple of times until I finally [realized], “Oh now I know what she’s asking for” and I could say, “No, I don’t have that.” [For] a foreigner that comes to the US, it may be that when you buy a certain thing, sometimes they say, “What’s your zip code?” Well, you’re not ready for them to ask what your zip code is. You’re just trying to buy some bread. And so you would probably not understand that question because you’re not used to that dialogue. So that’s schema theory. Schema theory is: What are the dialogues? What are the chunks? How do we put strings of words together? How do you take turns and change back and forth, and reinforce things? There’s a pattern that we do that in, in language, and the more we understand those patterns, the more we understand the foreign language.
John: That’s also why I think movies are an excellent way, but once you get…
Orlando: Well, we’ll get to that when we get to number 5 on narrow listening.
John: Good point. Ok, so number 4: input and intake.
Orlando: Yah, you see, when the second language theories first were coming out, they talked about the importance of input. And then years later, they said, “You know what? It really… It’s nice to have a lot of input, but sometimes it never sinks in. And so what really is a big deal, is what they call ‘intake’, which is input that you’re actually conscious of, that you’re aware of, that you’re concentrating on.” And you know, the words get changed. Sometimes they call it “consciousness raising”; I’ve even heard it called “input enhancement”. But basically it’s the idea that you have to be exposed to a lot of the foreign language, but it’s not enough to be exposed to it. You have to be actually listening to it; have it sink in. So your input becomes intake. And so I’m a big proponent of that, that you need to hear a lot of language, but you need to recognize it; you need to consciously be thinking of it. And see if it can soak in a little bit while you’re listening.
John: Ok, so number 5 was narrow listening and narrow reading.
Orlando: Yah, this comes from Krashen’s ideas that narrow listening and narrow reading basically means, I believe, that you get more success out of looking at a small chunk in detail than a very large, gigantic hunk, superficially. And so when you look at my materials, the clips will be 2 minutes long. And then I want the students to really study in detail what happens in those two minutes. I seem to get more out of that than I do watching a 2-hour movie. That kind of runs past me. I understand the movie but I can’t say I really learn a lot of foreign language watching that movie. But if I take that same effort and time and put it into a very small chunk of language, and study that in detail, I get a lot more out of it. So I believe that narrow listening and narrow reading does more for language acquisition than a broad, one time through sort of experience.
John: One thing though I have noticed when I look at a short chunk of material, I do agree that I get more out of it in terms of acquisition, but on the other hand, if I do watch a movie or I read a longer passage, I also can get lost in the story, instead of just focusing on, “Oh, I am learning the language”, which I think has its own benefits as well.
Orlando: When I was in China, it was my first time in China and I had a free afternoon, so I went to the movies. And I watched my first movie totally in Mandarin. And it was kind of fun to go through the experience of, “Ok, how much of this am I going to grab?” Because my Chinese is kind of survival level; it’s not fantastic Chinese by any means. But it was pretty fun to go through the whole movie and just see, “Ok, how much am I going to catch onto? No responsibility here; let me just soak in what I can soak in.” I think it’s good to be exposed to that now and again, too.
John: Number 6, then? Which I missed I guess…
Orlando: And the final one is, it’s a fairly old model, it’s called Schumann’s acculturation model. And that’s the one where you kind of lump together all the cultural and social factors that affect language learning. You know, as we’re about things like anxiety, motivation, how extroverted you are, how much you identify with the culture yourself. Do you have a girlfriend from that country? Do you love the movies from that country? Do you love the music from that country? That’s a big, big deal. You know, how much you just are the sort of personality that can just jump out and do that kind of stuff versus how much you just hang back.
I remember I had a friend in Brazil who was one of these perfectionists: “Unless I say it correctly, I’m going to say it at all.” And in the end, he never really did learn the language well because he held himself back. He was so guarded about, “Oh, I don’t want to do it wrong. I don’t want to do it wrong.” That sort of personality that can say, “You know what? I want to enjoy this food, and if I don’t say something, I won’t be able to eat it, so let me say something. I think that girl’s pretty. Let me talk to her, because I want to get to know her. I don’t care what it comes out like.”
Well I had a student a few years ago, when I took them to Venezuela, he was a music freak. And he would go out in the street, and as soon as he heard music in somebody’s apartment, he would literally stop, knock on their door, and start talking to total strangers about, “What kind of music are you playing on your radio right now?” His grammar was kind of backwards, but his ability to get to meet people and to talk to people was just phenomenal, just phenomenal. He was amazing.
John: Do you think there’s any harm in speaking too soon?
Orlando: You know, there’s no doubt that people fossilize. You kind of get to a certain level, and then if you can survive for whatever you need your language for, you kind of stop there. And you’ll see that for people who live abroad for 2 years. And after 3 or 4 months, they kind of stop their progress, and kind of never improve after that. But they kind of are able to use the language for whatever they need the language for. Part of the answer to your question is, “What do they really need language for?” And if you’re going just to socialize, just to hang out, you know, just for informal sort of things, maybe your informal Spanish or Portuguese is just fine. It may be that in other situations you need to have more precise, or let’s say “correct”, sort of language forms. I think a lot of it is not just the language learning process; it’s what are you going to end up using the language for.
In terms of speaking too soon, you know, we have the whole silent period concept where it’s good to let it sort of soak in for a while, and then you can start talking. And I think there’s some validity to the idea that you should learn how to be a listener. Too often when we’re abroad, we forget to actually listen to people, and try and soak in.” I know that sometimes when I’m abroad, I’ll say to myself, “Ok, for the next hour, I’m just going to sit and listen to people, and make little notes about things I hear. And even in languages I’ve been speaking for 30 years, I’ll still have a notebook full at the end of that hour, just because I want to hear what people are saying. So it’s a give and take. You know, there’s a point where you can fossilize, and if you don’t really, really concentrate, and force yourself to get a little better, you’re just going to get stuck there. And I think it takes a hunk of effort, to, when you feel yourself getting to that point, to actually improve and get a little bit better.
So anyway, those are the six items:
1) I think that you have to have a good time on task;
2) You need to learn language within the context of the situation;
3) I love Schumann’s…I love the schema theory of Vygostky on their scripts and chunks you need to follow;
4) I think that input should be more than input; it should be intake, so that it starts to sink in and you concentrate on it;
5) I like the narrow listening concept that Krashen has; and
6) I think we can’t ignore the big cultural factors that go into language learning.
And that’s all six.
John: Excellent. Very, very good.
Orlando: Well, it was fun talking to you today.
John: It was fun talking to you. I really appreciate your time. Talk to you again.
Orlando: Appreciate it.
To learn more about Dr. Kelm and his projects, check out his blog and grab a copy of his new book:
Orlando’s Blog When We Are the Foreigners]]>