The entrepreneur's guide to learning languages

Today's subject is business and language learning.

Throughout my life, I have been involved with business and I've been

involved with language learning.

And I want to talk about how those two activities compare what you need

for success in business, what you need for success in language learning.

I did a video on the subject a while ago, and I talked about entrepreneurship.

And of course the word entrepreneurship comes from the French word

entreprendre, to undertake.

And of course to start a new language is.

To take on a major undertaking.

So is starting a new business.

In my life, I have started two businesses.

One in the wood business, which I still have, that goes back to 1987.

And then of course, LingQ, which I started with my son about 20 years ago.

So how are they similar?

How are they different?

First of all, quite obviously to be successful in business or

in language learning, you need a high degree of commitment.

You need a degree of passion.

Passion, because it's not always easy.

So to stay the course, you need to have that burning desire to do something.

One of the reasons why in Canada, the level of bilingualism outside

Quebec is so low is that despite the literally billions of dollars that the

Canadian government spends, if people aren't motivated to learn French,

they're not going to learn French.

So learning a language.

Starts with motivation.

Similarly, if your approach to business is one of get rich quick and you don't have

a passion for the actual nuts and bolts of the business you want to get into, if you

are a shoemaker and you don't like making shoes, you probably won't be successful.

So that's common to both.

But there are some obvious differences right from the beginning.

When you start a new language, in a way you're starting from zero.

If it's a new language, in many cases, you know nothing about that language.

The recent languages that I started, which are very different from

languages that I knew previously, like Persian, like Arabic, like Turkish,

it's almost like starting from zero.

There's a very small number of loan words.

In business, on the other hand, if you don't have Some market

knowledge, some product knowledge.

If you don't know some people who can help you, if you're like basically

starting from zero, let's say you've got a very steep uphill climb.

So to that extent in business, that prior knowledge is very important.

Now you can argue that in language learning, if you're dealing with

some input and it's on a subject that you're familiar with, or it's a subject

that you have some prior knowledge about, you're going to do better.

So prior knowledge is always helpful, but prior knowledge is not a condition

for success in language learning.

Whereas I think in business, it is almost a condition.

And when I started my wood business, I had been working for

the Canadian embassy in Tokyo.

I had been involved with the forest industry sector.

I knew people.

People, I knew products, I had information about the market.

There was still a lot that I learned along the way, but nevertheless,

I didn't have that knowledge.

And of course I worked for, let's see, what was six years in Japan and a

longer time back here in Vancouver with major Canadian exporting companies.

So I had a lot of prior knowledge about the wood business in Japan specifically

before I started my own company.

Now, another thing that's different is language learning

to me is like atomic habits.

It's step by step, you slowly get better.

Very often you're not aware of the fact that you're getting better.

You just have to trust the process, continue to do whatever you're doing,

particularly listening and reading, I believe in input, and you will gradually

improve, even if you don't have the impression that you're improving.

If you stay with it, you're not going to get worse.

You can only get better.

That's not the case in business.

Business is much more volatile.

You can have some good luck, a good period, big demand for the product

that you're selling, for example, and then you can run into some bad luck.

A customer defaults on his payment or market prices go down, or you don't

get the big deal you're hoping to get.

So there's far more volatility in business and it does make it more challenging,

but there are moments of tremendous success, almost unexpected success.

Which don't happen so much in language learning, where we kind

of plot along and keep our nose to the grindstone, so to speak.

Another thing I find language learning is very much personal.

You learn for your own reasons, unless you have to learn for some other

purpose, which for me was the case when I was a Canadian government language

student and I had to learn Mandarin Chinese and I had to pass the British

Foreign Service exam in Mandarin.

Or when I was a student in France, I had to reach a certain level in my French.

But for the rest of the time that I've been learning on my own,

I learned for my own reasons.

I learned in ways.

that I like.

I don't worry about the mistakes I make.

I'm just learning for myself.

And it's a solitary journey and I can do it on my own.

I can have a teacher if I want, but I don't need a teacher.

In business, that's not the case.

In business, you very much rely on other people.

You rely on contacts.

You rely on suppliers.

You rely on customers.

Relationships are so important in business.

You, Don't want to burn any bridges.

You have to invest in relationships so that at a much later date, you can go

back there and perhaps reap the benefits of having provided a service to people

who are going to be helpful to you.

So business is much more dependent on interpersonal relationships,

whereas languages, not so much.

Of course, it's nice to have a good teacher.

And I've had some excellent teachers who have influenced me in French, in Mandarin.

Even now, I have an excellent tutor for Turkish.

I had an excellent Tutor for Persian.

So people can be important, but they are not as important as

is the case in business where they are absolutely essential.

So from that, if you're trying to learn a language, you can quit when you want.

You can be studying a certain bit of content or you're reading a

book and you don't like the book.

Can you just chuck the book?

You don't have to continue.

Whatever you do, you can stop at any time.

You can say, I don't like this language.

I'm not going to study this language anymore.

Or I'm now more interested in another language.

So therefore, while I still like that language, I might go back to it.

But now I'm going to do this other language.

So you're entirely on your own.

You're a vagabond.

Not so in business.

If you undertake to do something, you have to deliver.

If you promise something and you don't deliver, your name will be mud.

As they say, and in business, it takes a long time to build up a reputation.

It's easy to ruin your reputation and your credibility.

And similarly, language learning is personal.

I can make mistakes.

Somebody might criticize me for mistakes.

I don't care.

Those are my mistakes.

In business, your mistakes are not just your mistakes.

Your mistakes can cost your company, can cost your employees, can cost

your your customer or your supplier or whatever the nature of your business is.

Maybe you have to be much, much more careful not to make mistakes,

and it's much more costly to recover from mistakes in business.

However, there is a lot of similarity.

And I think that in the end, the biggest similarity is you have to stay with it.

I've learned that in business, where starting two businesses,

I went through long periods where it was very unprofitable.

I had very little, if any, money coming in.

I had only expenses, but I stuck with it because I believed in it.

I had that commitment, that passion, I'm going to stay with this thing.

And it's a good thing in both cases that I persevered.

Because even though there were lots of difficulties, some difficulties that I

didn't even anticipate, and maybe if I had anticipated those difficulties, I would

not have undertaken to do what I did.

But in the end, it turned out successful.

So languages are not quite like that.

You can stay with it and not feel that you're making any progress, but

you're not going to lose anything.

It's not like I'm investing a lot of money into a particular language

so that if I never get anywhere, I'll have lost all of that money.

As is the case in business, if you spend two, three, four years without

making any money, that's expensive.

That's coming out of your savings.

It's coming out of somewhere.

But in language learning, that's not the case.

You're just spending your time.

And The point is in language learning, however much time you put in and whatever

level you get to, it's all benefit.

It's all rewarding.

So even languages that I have left and would struggle to speak today, I

derived so much pleasure from getting to that level in the language, and

I know I can go back there, those languages aren't going anywhere.

There's still a part of me and I will quickly be able to refresh and get back to

the level where I was and improve on that.

In business, it's not the same.

If you spend three, four years and eventually get to a level where you

feel you cannot sustain your activity, there's just a not enough investment

capital available, you can't stay the course, you're going to have to drop it.

Everything you've invested is to some extent lost.

Now you have gained a lot of experience and there's a lot of people who have,

gone bankrupt two or three times.

lost a lot of money, but with everything that they have learned and

the experience that they have gained, then when they go and start another

venture, they're able to succeed.

So I think in both cases, if we look at the beginning and the end, you have to

have passion, commit the time and effort.

And at the other end of it, you have to stay the course, you have to persevere.

And if you do those two things, I think you have a high probability of

success, both in language learning.

I would say in language learning for sure.

And in business, More likely than not, but the big thing in

business is you're relying on luck.

Language learning is not about luck.

Language learning is about putting in the time and persevering only.

But business, there's a major element of luck and opportunity.

So I just thought I would compare those two and leave you with the

video that I did on a similar subject, entrepreneurship and language

learning quite a few years ago.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.