Interview with Randy the Yearlyglot from FluentEveryYear.com
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"Just lay one brick, and just make sure every time that you lay that brick perfectly."
As posted on his site, Randy is “on a mission to learn a new language fluently every year.” His current project is Italian, with Lithuanian as a side-project saved for weekend fun. Randy has his language-learning head screwed on tightly, and I firmly agree with his contention that learners can reach “conversational fluency” (the ability to talk with native speakers on a variety of topics) in a year if you spend enough time doing the right things. As we both have observed, most people never reach this level in a language because they neither spend enough time nor do they do the right things…
Read or listen to the interview to see how he makes the time and find out what he considers “doing the right things”.
Listen to the Interview
This interview was recorded on June 6, 2010. It has been edited for time. Click the red arrow to listen:
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Read the Interview
| 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. |
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| 01:03 | Randy: Nice.
[Laughter] I guess my whole life I’ve always just been, sort of, interested in language just in general. I don’t really have a good explanation for why. I started, I guess you might say, 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. I actually had…one of my best friends in high school was a Filipino guy who had 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 the principal that he asked for some help on the first day and I gave it to him. So in addition to everything else he taught me a lot of Filipino Tagalog… |
| 02:06 | And 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 developed more recently or is that something you’ve kind of always gone towards? Randy: You know, that actually is a very recent development. It comes off the back of learning Russian pretty much fluently in one year, after everybody told me it would take six, seven, eight years of study. And, you know, I still don’t claim to be an expert, but I put in some time and did the work and after one year, like I said, I’m pretty fluent in Russian for a guy who’s only been learning for a year. |
| 03:09 | And so, everybody says that’s one of the hardest languages. If I can do it with that, I should be able to do with any language. And I don’t see why anybody else couldn’t do it, especially with the easier languages; 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. Benny proves that a lot times you can do that in three months.
John: Yah, I often say, I think 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 academic, sit-in-a-classroom way, it will take six years. Randy: Right. John: And so maybe the next question I have for you is, how exactly do you go about learning a language that you can do it in under a year? Randy: I never really formalized a learning method until I started writing the blog and now I’m starting to get it really in front of me and see that, oh, |
| 04:05 | “If I move this over here it would work better” and that sort of thing. So, actually I’m starting to see a lot of logic behind some of the more commercial products, like you think of a 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 like, 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 sort of a small conversation at the cause of just learning three things. |
| 05:03 | John: Right.
Randy: So I think that that’s really what I try to do. 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 sentences and those sort of things. And that way, you know, 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. And so it’s not practical for those that are gonna be moving to Japan tomorrow to spend six months on, you know, 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 constructed 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 if you’re studying at home. 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 it lost the entertainment value a long time ago for me.
John: You know, I have my opinions but I really want to just share the opinions of others, you know, what’s worth for them? Because obviously everyone’s different. and what has worked for me won’t necessarily work for everybody. Though 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 methods. Randy: Yeah, absolutely. It’s like the “Pareto Principle” of 80/20. Everybody can benefit from that 80. John: I think we’ve read the same books… So back to, then, what’s worked for you? So, you build on the basics, which makes sense. What other do’s and don’ts can you share? I know there’s a lot. |
| 07:13 | Randy: 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 a 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 actually… you lower the quality of your learning for the sake of getting more quantity. And 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 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 try. 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… Whether it’s a language, whether it’s getting in shape; I mean, it’s all the same. Usually the fear of the task is worse the actual task itself. |
| 09:02 | Randy: 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 how his dad had a shop and broke down the brick wall and then asked his sons to rebuild the brick wall. And the kids both said, “Oh, it’s impossible. That would take forever.” |
| 09:23 | And 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, they had rebuilt the brick wall of the shop. |
| 09:44 | That’s so motivational. You know, when you think of doing things, don’t think of how far you have to go or how long or hard the journey is; you just think about doing each step the best you can. And eventually you look back and you’re surprised at how much you’ve done and how easy it’s become. |
| 10:04 | John: Right. That’s really a good metaphor. I like that.
Randy: You know, especially with languages because there is a lot of work. We’d be fooling ourselves to say, “Oh yeah. Anybody can do it in a week or two weeks.” You know, 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 gonna be.” |
| 10:26 | I really like the metaphor you drew to working out. That particularly, for me, has always been one my favorite analogies for pretty much anything difficult in life. Because I go to the gym every morning. I’m a weight trainer in the morning before 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. Now, I don’t always succeed at doing it. But week by week I am pushing more weight every time than I was the week before. |
| 11:02 | You look at that long-term goal of, I want to bench-press 250 pounds or I want to squat 400 pounds, and you think, “Oh my god. That’s so far off and impossible.” But each week you look back and say, “Wow, I remember when I could only do 160.” And over time, you know, 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: Well, in addition to language my other main interest is martial arts. And I always like to share with people that the word “Kung Fu” (or 功夫) actually means “skill through effort” or “skill through time”… Randy: Nice. John: And it’s such a good analogy to 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 reasons so many people fail, I think, is ’cause they’re just not doing it ultimately. Sitting in a classroom is not doing it. Even watching a movie. You know, you put in a foreign language movie; that’s not actually doing it unless you’re actively 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 up 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 would be spending that same time on your own with a book once a week. The worst thing about a classroom is that if you don’t do it you can blame the teacher. “Oh, I tried but the teacher was no good”, or |
| 13:19 | “The class was no good”, or “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 you’d like to add or any don’ts? Randy: Well, there was one thing that sparked something in my mind that you said a moment ago too about a lot of people aren’t trying, and how 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 crack that book, or talk to that tutor, or put on that CD, or whatever it is that you do to study, you know, instead of turning on the TV. And it’s so easy, effortless, to keep doing… You know, once you do something and it’s a habit, you know, it’s effortless…it’s actually more work for you to stop and go turn on that TV and ignore your language time. Sometimes I find it astounding that people actually give up, because, you know, that means you’re making a choice to quit.[Laughter] |
| 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 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, important point, which is that 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 for more than 15 or 30 minutes of the time. I just try to do that two or 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. Yah, 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 lists, or whatever I’m doing that particular day, and again once at night. So yeah, probably about the same as you. Three times a day for maybe 15 to 30 minutes. |
| 17:01 | John: You know, as you said, listening on the way to the workout or on the 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, you know, sitting down at a desk.
Randy: And I would even go so far as to say that, you know, 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 trying to study vocabulary. I just do some-times. But it’s enough times. |
| 18:08 | John: 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 this 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 mean, I think so many people do things so far the wrong way, and get so fed up, and they develop this whole foreign language phobia, and this belief that, “I’m just not good at learning languages so I can 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 takes a lot of us; a lot of voices; a lot of echoes, for it to hopefully, eventually, get to, not everybody, but at least those that want to learn. Which I…I just hope that enough of our voices reach them, that they can shake themselves out of this belief that they can’t do it. |
| 19:22 | Randy: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think most of us probably all have similar stories about struggling with the 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.[Laughter]
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, that I can learn a new language every year. And 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.[Laughter]
John: Very good. So, what is your current language project and what is the next one you think? Randy: Wow, well, the current language project is Italian. Although it’s never just one thing.. I’m planning a trip to Lithuania in a few months, so I guess, 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. And the third one is 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.[Laughter]
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? |
| 21:38 | Randy: When you show somebody you’ve spent even the smallest amount of time to learn about them, especially 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.[Laughter] |
| 22:12 | John: Now you’re speaking foreign language to me. I don’t speak hockey. I’m sorry.
Randy: That’s all right. So a patron who had no place to sit was standing near my table and I started talking to her. And I picked up on her a Russian accent. So just 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. Whereas everyone else…I saw half a dozen…maybe a dozen guys come 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 motivation for you right there. I mean if you’re struggling to 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. Well, it’s a pleasure talking to you, Randy. |
| 23:08 | Randy: Absolutely. Yeah. Have a great day, John.
John: You too. Thanks so much, Randy. Randy: Take care. John: Bye bye. Randy: Bye. Announcer: 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. |
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