How many of you remember the radio series in the fifties
called the Scarlet Pimpernel?
They seek him here.
They seek him there.
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere.
They seek him here.
They seek him there, or for that matter, the popular song
in the, I think mid sixties.
They seek him here.
They seek him there..
That kind of summarizes my approach to language learning.
In everything I do, I seek words and structures.
I seek them in different contexts, and gradually they accumulate in my mind.
My goal in language learning is to seek out words and structures
and to increase my comprehension.
That's the goal.
We may have this vague goal of wanting to be fluent in a language, but that's
not the daily goal that I have with me in my language learning routine.
So let's have a look at my language learning routine.
Right now I'm on my 20th language.
I started Farsi or Persian about five years ago at the same time
as I started Turkish and Arabic.
So in a way, my progress has been somewhat slower than usual because I've been sort
of involved in three different languages.
But now if I pull up something down from the internet at an advanced
level on current events, I will find about 10% unknown words based
on how we count them at LingQ.
The statistics show maybe 15% for each of these items, but there's
usually, because the audio file is automatically transcribed, there's some
corrupted transcription, so they're non words, or you have proper names:
people, you know, cities, countries, and whatever, which are not really words.
So about 10% unknown words.
How did I get there?
I got there because my goal all along was to increase my comprehension, and that's
what I want to talk to you about today.
Making comprehension your daily goal by seeking words and structures and
phrases and sounds, and making things more familiar, seeking them in different
kinds of content and different contexts, and subconsciously seeing your level of
comprehension and your vocabulary grow.
So my daily routine, as I said before, I start with the easiest
thing to do and that's to listen.
So as I'm preparing breakfast, I will listen to the latest episode from my
podcast in Persian and I'll miss a lot.
But even as I'm missing a lot, I'm seeking here and there words and
structures that are being confirmed or I'm correcting some mistakes that I had.
I'm noticing certain things as I'm listening and reading, and so I'm
seeking here and seeking there things that are gradually accumulating
in my brain as I go forward.
Usually though there are lots of words that I'm very curious about now 'cause
I couldn't understand them or I'm not entirely sure what they mean or I need to
get the meaning in a different context.
Seeking here, seeking there.
So I go with my iPad typically in the afternoon, sit down for an hour and
a half, an hour, go through the same content in LingQ, looking up words and
phrases, but that's the toughest part.
That is the toughest part of my language learning routine.
Because you're sitting there, not entirely sure how much is sticking.
I'm looking up words.
I know that I'm gonna not remember them when I see them again.
I try to make the activity as varied as possible, so I might go in full page mode,
sentence mode, you know, I might listen to the timestamped audio for that sentence.
I might try to recreate the sentence, translate the sentence.
So there are a variety of different activities.
Maybe looking at the, as I mentioned the other day, by going to the vocabulary
area at the bottom of the page, I can open up vocabulary items that are not
yet known to me and review them again.
So I'm able to seek words and phrases in different ways here and there to try to
give myself a better chance of gradually
learning more and more and increasing my comprehension.
But the goal is not to speak.
The goal is to understand more, and typically as I get more and more of the
words and therefore understand more and more of a particular content item, when I
next listen to it, I will understand more.
Because I'll understand the context better.
I'll be more familiar, I'll have more words.
So then you might say, well, what about speaking?
We all wanna speak.
And I say, of course we all wanna speak, but you can't
speak if you can't understand.
So the goal ultimately is to speak and speak fluently.
But going back to Atomic Habits, which I've talked about in the past,
we need to have short term goals.
Actions that help us achieve the longer term goal fluency.
So my short term goal always is comprehension.
If I'm working with a piece of content on LingQ, I only
wanna understand what's there.
I don't worry about what I forget.
I just want to be able to work my way through that item of content and
understand more and more of what's there.
But your question is, what about speaking?
And of course I wanna speak.
And in a way, the most pleasurable activity that I do, insofar as my
Persian is concerned, and this is the third activity, is my twice or three
times a week conversation with my tutor.
I'm not stressed.
I can make mistakes.
She corrects me or she doesn't correct me, and I search for words.
Typically the range of vocabulary there is more limited because the tutor is
very good at keeping the conversation within the range of what I can, you know,
deal with and be able to respond to.
So by and large, it's a very positive experience.
I don't have that feeling that I have when I'm reading and I'm saying, geez,
will I ever remember any of this stuff?
Or when I'm listening in the morning and I keep on not understanding certain things.
When I'm speaking with my tutor, it's kind of a high point.
I always leave those conversations and the hour conversation goes very,
very quickly, feeling very good about myself, that I was able to communicate
on a variety of subjects with my tutor.
So the whole, you know, dopamine, serotonin, whatever is kicking
in, it's in a way the reward.
But you have to get there and you get there by working on comprehension.
So comprehension is my ongoing daily goal in my language learning activities.
And typically if I've reviewed the lesson on my iPad, saved some words,
increased my level of comprehension of the subject that is in this podcast
episode, then when I listen the following morning, I will understand more.
My level of engagement has increased it.
It's a bit like what happens in ai.
I always think of two sort of functions in AI.
One is this reiterative exposure to similar words, phrases,
structures in different contexts.
That is gradually increasing our ability to anticipate
what's coming, and that's the I,
the inference increases our ability to infer, to predict what's gonna come,
which is such an important part of being able to operate in the language.
So I just wanted to make this point that obviously our long-term goal is
to become fluent and speak well and stuff, but you can't do that without
a strong level of comprehension.
And since most of my learning activity is input based, I have to have
some daily meaningful goals while I'm doing these input activities.
And that goal is to increase my level of comprehension, and I'm confident
that if I'm understanding what I'm dealing with by looking up words or by
listening over and over seeking here, seeking their words that I suddenly
noticed that I hadn't noticed before.
All of that is contributing to my ability to understand better.
And if I can understand better, I will eventually be able to
speak better as I speak more.
So I hope that was useful and I'll leave you again with the kinks from 1965.
They seek him here.
They seek him there.
