Interview with Olly Richards Polyglot and Creator of Language Readers (1) (1)
Steve: Okay.
Today, I have with me one of the leading members of the world international mafia of polyglots --
Olly: Good Lord!
Steve: Yeah -- who meet from time to time and put out videos and produce various things for language learning and a fellow that I respect tremendously for his language skills and his entrepreneurship around language learning, Olly Richards, who joins us from somewhere in England I believe.
Olly: Yes, locked down in London coming to you.
Steve: Locked down in London.
Olly: Yeah.
Steve: Okay.
The other day I saw you had put out a new series of books or a book in your series of readers. I can't remember which language. Tell us a little bit about you and about your graded readers and the other areas…
Olly: And the other stuff. Yeah, okay.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. What are you up to? A lot of my viewers will know you, but bring us up to date.
Olly: Yeah.
Thanks for the nice little intro. I'll see if I can live up to that.
My name is Olly Richards and I blog at a website called I Will Teach You a Language dot com. That's where I kind of started this whole journey. Over the years, I have kind of shifted into teaching languages and creating books and courses to teach people. I have an approach that centers around stories. I call this method Story Learning. That's how I'm kind of branding it these days. So to help people do that, I create books and courses which all have a story of the heart of it. So we're giving people lots of nice, fun input at a good level, along with different kinds of instruction to help them learn.
I've released a series of graded readers with Teach Yourself, which I'm sure some of you guys are going to be familiar with.
Steve: Show us. Yes, absolutely.
Olly: I've got lots of new languages in there. I've got Turkish and things like that.
Steve: Ooh, Turkish! I'm going to get Turkish. All right.
Olly: I've also got Swedish and Dutch. Teach Yourself are great because they are all for creating stuff in less common languages. So I'm currently working on Welch. How about that? Japanese.
Steve: Right.
Olly: I see my career a bit differently these days. I used to just spend all my time learning languages. Now I don't do so much of that in recent years. I haven't been doing so much of that in recent years. I'm kind of becoming more and more interested in how I can kind of create stuff to help other people learn and that's pretty much what I'm focusing on these days.
Steve: Well, you know, this is the problem. I have been working on my Persian and Arabic, but it's hard to find the time because we're doing these other things now and then we can't find enough time to work on languages. I do enjoy exploring new languages and I hope you come up with some graded readers in Turkish. Well, Turkish I've put on the back burner because I want to get better at reading in the Arabic script, so I'm focusing in on Persian and Arabic. But there is a lack of content in those languages, a lack of content in the sort of intermediate level, which is kind of what you're focusing on.
Olly: Yeah.
Steve: You do your beginner book and then the next thing you go to is a podcast, which I have transcribed. But those are very difficult for me, so to have something in the middle is very, very good.
Olly: It's interesting to think that someone with your level of experience says to jump up to that kind of native level is very, very difficult for you. For someone who's doing it for the first time it's nigh on impossible because they just don't have that level of experience and belief that it's actually possible. That's why I think the stuff that I'm doing and the stuff that you guys do at LingQ is so important because it just kind of provides that bridge from your beginner's textbook to the more interesting content.
Steve: One thing you said there was I think really interesting. First of all, that they haven't done it before so they don't have the experience, obviously, but they don't believe they can do it. I think that's a big part of why experienced language learners like we are, we may not be very good, but we're experienced, we know we're going to get there. We're going to get somewhere and whatever we get to we're happy with it. We never question ourselves. But I think your typical person that goes to the library and studies Spanish and has been doing it for 10 years and has never gotten anywhere, basically, they're convinced they never will. They will never get fluent. They will get a little bit better at ordering things in a restaurant, but they have a very low level it seems of ambition and they have no confidence.
Olly: Yeah, it's an extremely important part of the psyche of the language learner. I think people express it in different ways. If you kind of confronted them with that and said look. You don't believe you can do this, can you? I'm not sure how they'd react to that. They'd probably think no, wait. I can. I do think for a lot of people there is this sort of what if I fail. What if I can't do it? That is there lingering in the back of their mind.
Steve: Sure and just simply the fact that they've never done it.
Olly: Yeah.
Steve: They have trouble visualizing themselves as someone speaking another language fluently. They've never done it. That's understandable. That's the vast majority of language learners and that's why I think your series is so good.
One thing I did, for example, in Persian, which I would like to see by the way, here's a suggestion to you. I'm not a big fan of stories. I like history. So I found this young lady in Iran who creates content for me in Persian and one of the things she did she created 26 episodes of the history of Iran in very simple language read slowly. Every episode is about five-six minutes long and then it's followed by five-six minutes of these circling questions. So, you know, whatever, Persia went to war with Greece. Did Persia go to war with Turkey? No, Persia went to war with Greece.
So you have these circling questions where the answer is more or less given. You don't have to try to remember what was in the lesson. You just have to hear the statement, hear the question and hear the answer and that reinforces some of the vocabulary. The more vocabulary you have a better grasp on, when you listen to the main episode again you'll understand a little bit more.
I remember when I was learning Chinese we had a book called 20 Lectures on Chinese Culture, which was at a 1,000 character level. I know you like stories and I like stories, but for those of us who like nonfiction if you could ever develop a series.
Olly: It's funny you should say that. We've actually got a few things in development right now. The thing I like about your Persian example is it's specific to Persian. From a kind of production point of view that kind of thing is fantastic, but it's a bit limiting because if you're going to make unique resources for each language there's the scalability of what you lose, right?
Steve: Right.
Olly: So that's the particular challenge. When I actually spend time learning myself I'm also partial to nonfiction. I like history. I like biographies. I like business books and things like that. So we're actually developing at the moment a quite exciting series, which is the history of World War II in simple Spanish, French, German and English.
Steve: Okay.
Olly: I'm also doing climate change in a simple book.
Steve: Right.
Good idea.
Olly: We're working our way through different hot topics, if you like.
Steve: That's excellent. That has the advantage, too, that those are subjects that are familiar to people. If you're learning a language and the subject matter is familiar to you, already you have an advantage.
Olly: Yeah, for sure. There's that and there's also the kind of practical point that if we create content like that in Spanish it can fairly easily be repurposed into other languages.
Steve: Oh, sure. I understand that, but I'm saying from the point of view of the learner.
Olly: Yeah.
Steve: That's very good because whatever is familiar is easier.
Olly: Yeah, exactly.
Steve: I always get mad at these language courses which start out with the most exotic aspects of the local culture. So you're going to learn Korean and they give you three or four different ways of saying my sister, festivals. All kinds of stuff that you have no relationship to at all, so it adds to the difficulty it doesn't make it easier.
Olly: Yeah.
I love the example of the history of the Persian culture, though. Although it might be unfamiliar to someone who's just learning the language at the start, it is also often the reason that you're learning the language. So to be able to do a deep-dive in that kind of topic area is extremely useful.
Steve: Yeah. We don't really get into the sort of Persian festivals or stuff like that, although she does have a series where she talks about different things Persian. But in the history, in a sense it's familiar. You hear about the Greek-Persian wars from the Persian perspective. You read about Persians going into India and stuff. So you are dealing with world history and not sort of very specific cultural things, but it's good. She's very good. She's got a clear voice and it's really good. I'd love to have that in other languages. Many of the languages I'm learning these days are not ones that you're producing books for, although I see Turkish, so that's good.
Olly: Yeah.
I mean, there's always this balance, isn't there? Ultimately, this stuff costs a lot of money to make, right, so you've got to be able to make your money back on it.
Steve: Yeah, you've got to recover your costs.
Olly: We're kind of dipping our toes in the water with different languages for sure, but it has to be a gradual thing. I'd love to make all the stuff in the world for Persian, but then little things like Amazon Kindle don't support Persian and you're screwed from the start.
Steve: Right.
Olly: I'm working on it, but it's going to be some time coming.
Steve: All right, so let me ask you now. We've been in this sort of language learning, teaching, polyglot environment for quite a few years and, of course, we were learning languages long before the internet and mp3. At least I was. I don't know, maybe you were.
Olly: Yeah.
Steve: What do you think have been the major changes, what do you think are the things that are changing now and where is that going to take us as far as language learning?
Olly: In the last few years it seems that there have been some pretty seismic shifts. I think there's a few different ways to look at it. I think the big shift with the internet on the whole is just the availability of content. You know, the fact that you can just access the daily newspaper from any given country from anywhere in the world. That, from a language-learning perspective, I think is the most important change. That, plus video chat obviously is a huge thing.
