What Makes a Successful Language Learner?
Don't wait for someone to teach you the language.
The language is there.
Hi, Steve Kaufmann here again, and today I want to talk about
the most important qualities of a successful language learner.
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So what, what makes a successful language learner?
Now, there are a lot of, you know, objective considerations: where you
live, if you have access to a lot of good content, uh, there are a lot of...
the language that you speak, how similar is it to a language that you're learning?
There are many objective factors, but there are also
important subjective factors.
Uh, and I was thinking about this today.
Um, and I was thinking about it in terms of my continuing sort of
struggles with Arabic and Persian.
And I don't spend as much time as I would like.
Uh, I don't think I did any work on either one of those languages today, but,
um, every day, every second day I do.
And it occurred to me that, that the important consideration is
that I continue doing something.
I'm not expecting a sort of dramatic improvement.
Um, as long as I'm spending time with the language I will improve.
And, you know, I had a conversation yesterday in Persian after not having
done anything with the language for two weeks and I did okay.
So, uh, and so I thought to myself, you know, we have to be patient.
We have to be confident that as long as we're putting time in with the language,
we're listening here, we're reading there, we're doing something, we're getting
some kind of an activity score at LingQ.
As long as we're doing those things, we are improving.
So it's, it's important to be patient, uh, and to be confident that
every time we're engaging with the language, we are helping to create
neural networks in our brain that will improve our ability in the language.
If we go through periods of intensive work with the language, or, you
know, significant opportunity to use the language, we'll improve faster.
But nevertheless, as long as we're putting time in, we are improving.
So we need to have that sense of patience.
So I think patience is an important quality.
Another way of looking at it is this idea of living in the moment.
When you are with the language, when you are listening or reading just
remind yourself that what you're doing is valuable and it's going to
improve your ability in the language.
If you have content that's of interest to you so much the better
you can enjoy that time that you're spending with the language.
Sometimes we have to do things or engage with content that's less interesting
than reading it for the second or third time or listening for the fifth time.
And so maybe it's less enjoyable, but it helps if we recognize that all of this
activity, even though we don't sense that dramatic improvement, it is improving us.
So patience, living in the moment, these are important characteristics.
Another important characteristic is initiative.
So for example, romance languages and in fact, in many languages, things
like conjugations are difficult.
Uh, if we are writing in the language, you don't just write the first, if
it's ... is it with a 't' with an 's'?
You can't remember?
Don't just write it, look it up.
It's so easy nowadays to Google, you know, conjugate the verb ... and
French or whatever ... in Spanish, Google it, find it, look for it.
Uh, when I'm reviewing...
now I'm not doing romance languages but context Reverso has
a wonderful conjugating dictionary.
Take the opportunity to look up the conjugation whenever you
come across a form of that verb.
Uh, so these are initiatives you can take.
If you feel that you're lacking in certain, um, you know, technical jargon
or other terminology or vocabulary items, another thing you can do, which
I sometimes do is I'll write something up in English, use Google Translate to
convert it into whatever language I'm learning and what I wrote in English
contained the vocabulary items that I was interested in, and lo and behold, I will
now see those in the target language.
I can import that into LingQ and study it.
So that's another example of taking the initiative.
Don't wait for someone to teach you the language.
The language is there.
There's so many different ways that you can I acquire bits and pieces
of information about the language.
Speaking of initiative, I recently bought a scanning pen because
I have these Arabic textbooks.
So I've, I now can scan a line in the textbook and if I have an app
open on my computer, which could be, you know, a Google Drive.
It could be our Google Documents.
It could be anything including the import page at LingQ then
that sentence will appear.
If it's Arabic or Persian or whatever, French, Spanish, whatever you're studying,
that sentence will appear in the text space, in the import section of LingQ.
So that's just an initiative, not everyone is going to run
out and buy a scanning pen.
But, uh, it's just a matter of, you know, taking charge of your learning
is so important in so many different ways, choosing the content you're
interested in, uh, taking initiatives.
So to summarize here again, it's, it's being patient.
So to some extent, these things are a bit contradictory.
You have to be patient, you have to enjoy the moment, live in the moment.
However, you also have to take in.
You have to take initiative in terms of...
okay, today I'm going to study, or I'm interested in this subject or I'm going to
go to Netflix or I'm going to look up the conjugation table, or I'm going to look
up declension tables for Russian nouns.
You got to take the initiative.
Can't wait for someone to teach you that declension.
So I think that those are some of the important, uh, characteristics.
And finally another important character characteristic I
think is to accept uncertainty.
And I've mentioned this before, uh, you know, you're not going
to understand everything.
You're going to forget things.
Uh, even after a long time, it seems that you don't understand the same
bits and pieces that you're listening to, uh, but accept the uncertainty.
And so this ties back to the other two characteristics.
So if you're a bit confused about the declension or the conjugation, look it up.
Uh, accept the uncertainty.
Be patient.
Enjoy the moment.
Enjoy the time you're spending with the language.
So I'd like to leave you with two videos.
One that I did a year ago and one that I did seven years ago, and they
talk about, the one seven years ago talked about learning in the moment.
And the one that I did a year ago talked about learning languages in
the moment I haven't looked at them.
I didn't look at them in preparation for this video, perhaps I was of a different
opinion a year ago or seven years ago.
At any rate, if you're interested, you, you can go and have a look.
Thank you for that.
Bye for now.
