How to learn any language in six months | Chris Lonsdale | TEDxLingnanUniversity (2)

you're going to be fine, relaxed, and you'll be learning quickly.

So based on those five principles, what are the seven actions that you take?

Number one: Listen a lot.

I call it brain soaking.

You put yourself in a context

where you're hearing tons and tons and tons of a language

and it doesn't matter if you understand it or not.

You're listening to the rhythms, to patterns that repeat,

you're listening to things that stand out.

(Chinese) Pào nǎozi.

(English) So, just soak your brain in this.

The second action is that you get the meaning first,

even before you get the words.

You go: "Well how do I do that? I don't know the words!"

Well, you understand what these different postures mean.

Human communication is body language in many, many ways, so much body language.

From body language you can understand a lot of communication,

therefore, you're understanding, you're acquiring through comprehensible input.

And you can also use patterns that you already know.

If you're a Chinese speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese and you go to Vietnam,

you will understand 60 percent of what they say to you in daily conversation,

because Vietnamese is about 30 percent Mandarin, 30 percent Cantonese.

The third action: Start mixing.

You probably have never thought of this

but if you've got 10 verbs, 10 nouns and 10 adjectives,

you can say 1000 different things.

Language is a creative process.

What do babies do? OK, "me", "bath", "now".

OK, that's how they communicate.

So start mixing, get creative, have fun with it,

it doesn't have to be perfect, just has to work.

And when you're doing this, you focus on the core.

What does that mean?

Well, any language is high frequency content.

In English 1000 words covers 85 percent

of anything you're ever going to say in daily communication.

3000 words gives you 98 percent

of anything you're going to say in daily conversation.

You got 3000 words, you're speaking the language.

The rest is icing on the cake.

And when you're just beginning with a new language,

start with your tool box. Week number one,

in your new language you say things like:

"How do you say that?" "I don't understand,"

"repeat that please," "what does that mean?"

all in your target language.

You're using it as a tool, making it useful to you,

it's relevant to learn other things about the language.

By week two, you should be saying things like:

"me," "this," "you," "that," "give," you know, "hot,"

simple pronouns, simple nouns, simple verbs,

simple adjectives, communicating like a baby.

And by the third or fourth week, you're getting into "glue words."

"Although," "but," "therefore," these are logical transformers

that tie bits of a language together, allowing you to make more complex meaning.

At that point you're talking.

And when you're doing that, you should get yourself a language parent.

If you look at how children and parents interact,

you'll understand what this means.

When a child is speaking, it'll be using simple words, simple combinations,

sometimes quite strange, sometimes very strange pronunciation,

other people from outside the family don't understand it.

But the parents do.

And so the kid has a safe environment, gets confidence.

The parents talk to the children with body language

and with simple language they know the child understands.

So you have a comprehensible input environment that's safe,

we know it works; otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue.

So you get yourself a language parent,

who's somebody interested in you as a person

who will communicate with you essentially as an equal,

but pay attention to help you understand the message.

There are four rules of a language parent.

Spouses are not very good at this, OK?

But the four rules are,

first of all, they will work hard to understand what you mean

even when you're way off beat.

Secondly, they will never correct your mistakes.

Thirdly, they will feed back their understanding of what you are saying

so that you can respond appropriately and get that feedback

and then they will use words that you know.

The sixth thing you have to do, is copy the face.

You got to get the muscles working right,

so you can sound in a way that people will understand you.

There's a couple of things you do.

One is that you hear how it feels, and feel how it sounds

which means you have a feedback loop operating in your face,

but ideally if you can look at a native speaker

and just observe how they use their face,

let your unconscious mind absorb the rules,

then you're going to be able to pick it up.

And if you can't get a native speaker to look at, you can use stuff like this...

(Female voice) Sing, song, king, stung, hung.

(Chris Lonsdale) And the final idea here, the final action you need to take

is something that I call "direct connect".

What does this mean? Well most people learning a second language

sort of take the mother tongue words and the target words and go over them

again and again in their mind to try and remember them. Really inefficient.

What you need to do is realise that

everything you know is an image inside your mind, it's feelings,

if you talk about fire, you can smell the smoke,

you can hear the crackling, you can see the flames,

so what you do, is you go into that imagery and all of that memory

and you come out with another pathway. So I call it "same box, different path".

You come out of that pathway and you build it over time,

you become more and more skilled at just connecting the new sounds

to those images that you already have, into that internal representation.

And over time you even become naturally good at that process,

that becomes unconscious.

So, there are five principles that you need to work with, seven actions,

if you do any of them, you're going to improve.

And remember these are things under your control as the learner.

Do them all and you're going to be fluent in a second language in six months.

Thank you.

(Applause)