He has a lot of knowledge because he, have you ever heard about his background? He knows about 12 languages pretty well, and he taught at a Korean university for many years because his Korean was like perfect because he learned it and he had to teach the language. So I would say that it turns up the 10,000 hours in speaking.
So the shadowing in the beginning would be a good thing to do because it helps you prepare your muscles to speak it and you create the accuracy, but you won't understand it. You just know that when the time comes, it's easier, but it's not perfect.
And then when you start listening to passive, so like passive listening, I know you're not on that topic, but passive listening, active listening. If you listen a lot, like I did 10,000 hours of passive listening, not 10,000 hours of passive, maybe about 8,000 passive around there, but it helps you adapt to the speed of the language. So if someone talks very fast, you will adapt easier and you can hear every sound as Steve Kaufman quotes in some of his videos. I could hear every sound like in Czech and Russian, like because he listened to everything passively.
He would get up, he would do chores in the house. He would do other things like walk around. He only passive listening most of the time, but when he does active work, he does reading.
So that's like the one thing I don't really understand how it works, but that's just what I think about this certain topic.
Yeah, interesting. So he, he advocates for like shadowing, like from the very beginning then pretty much.
Alexander Gaze?
Yeah, he definitely emphasizes shadowing. That's his, that's his method.
Yeah, I mean, there's, there's, there's so many, that's the thing. I feel like language learning and working out is so similar because there's like, it's like, it almost feels like everything works in a weird way. Like everything can work as long as you put in the time. It's just like, yeah, there's just so many different angles you can go about this.
Like with working out, people say, oh, well, this exercise is good. Well, this is not. You got to eat this or don't eat that. Like there's so many variables that, but at the end of the day, you've got to do basically the same things in order to get to the goal.
It makes sense though, what you were saying with the mouth sounds, uh, that you, you do have to train that because I mean, just from my experience that, yeah, I mean, you have some people with a really, really bad accent. Um, and then you have people there with okay accent, even if it's not perfect, it's like, there's a difference. Like saying konichiwa, you know, like there's, there's a difference.
It's understandable.
It's understandable.
Yes. But like, yeah, you're going to be that. You got really unlucky with that, with that person, I guess.
So we talked about speaking. I want to talk a little bit more about, um, your listening approach and how you do that with Ling.
So, so you don't, yeah.
So I've, I've left a comment on your channel before when I first found you, um, because I'm like, okay, Ling is all about reading, but in your video, I see, yeah, yeah.
Well, no, yeah, you're right. Listening and reading, I would say for sure.
Right.
Uh, those are the, that's the like 50, 50 kind of split, I would say, or whatever. But, uh, you spoke about how you don't really do a lot of reading.
Uh, so yeah, if you could elaborate a little bit more on that. And I want to learn like how you actually use Ling.
And by the way, I would like to, I should have said this in the beginning. This is not a sponsored video for Ling. It sounds like it is.
Like this guy. Sponsor this guy, please.
No, I'm sure you'll get sponsored if you want.
Yeah, it sounds like that, but no, like, uh, we both legitimately just use Ling, uh, for a long time. You've actually started, you started a year earlier than I did, but our stories are, uh, kind of similar where I started.
Yeah. So like I started in 2019, dabbled in it and I found Steve, but I probably, you know, only got a few hundred or maybe a thousand known words. And then I kind of stopped using it. I was using Anki and then, and then 2022 or three, maybe 21, 22, 23. It was one of those. I can't remember exactly which one I decided to go back to like full on Ling.
So yeah, how, how do you use Ling?
Um, exactly. How did you achieve this impressive, super impressive like stats? Because I just still can't believe it. Like you're, I want to talk about Japanese too, because this channel is about Japanese.
Uh, you are way, yeah, you're way ahead of me in Japanese. So how do you use Ling basically?
An average Ling user, for example, they would read from left to right every single word. If you guys are not aware of what Ling does, you have a white word, which is a known word, yellow as in your first time, second time or third time seeing it. And you have the blue word is your first time ever seeing it.
So there's a lot of people that just read every single word, which is the right thing to do in this case. But it depends on what is your end goal, because when I started, I tried to focus on every single kanji, like for Mandarin, I call it hanzi, but for your case, it'll be kanji. So for people that know what kanji is, it's like those written scripts of Japanese.
And the thing is, is that if you go from left to right, you read every single word. Okay, if your goal is to read like mangas, read books, you're doing the right thing. But in my opinion, the part that makes me very, my method very unorthodox is that I ignore all known words and I go straight to the yellow and blues because that is the weakness of my knowledge. And that's where I want to tackle. And that's how I would approach words.
Did you get that because of Steve always mentioning that you need words, like words, words, words. You need words to basically, because if you don't have words, like, even if you don't, he said, right, if you, even if you don't understand all the grammar, uh, if you just know words, even if you're whatever you're trying to say was broken, like you could get the point across if you had the right word, essentially.
So was that your kind of thinking behind that?
Yeah, I had two things about this. Back then he gave me, he had a very useful video. It was 15 years ago. So if you've never seen his, his old videos where he doesn't mention Ling, it's gold. And he mentions that the more words you know, the higher the potential of your language.
I heard this definition of it's not progress. So I'm making like a very controversial claim. Knowing a lot of words does not give you progress. It multiplies your efficiency. But in my opinion, listening does the real progress.
So for example, if there's, you're standing on the road and you were to go from one place to another, knowing the words will pretty much improve your speed if you move. But we listen, you start moving more and more. So that's real progress because in the end, our goal is to speak to another person of that language.
Ideally, that's what we all mostly start for Japanese. A lot of people go for manga and anime, which is good. So if you're doing like the reading every single word, you're definitely going to improve your ability to read manga for sure. And if that's your goal, awesome.
But if you want to speak and talk to someone, you need to get to the speak, the listening ability as fast as physically possible.
The approach I did was to give me the words as high as possible to give me a higher probability that if I were to go listen to an audio and I have the transcript, once I hear the audio and I read at the same time, I can understand this word more likely. And that gives me the comprehensible acquisition effect ability that Stephen Krashen always mentioned.
It's the approach I did is to get to the listening ability as fast as possible. But my reading skills might not be the best, but I could pretty much understand the idea when I read it. So I pretty much sacrificing more reading ability for the actual listening potential.
Yeah, that's the, that's the part that is probably going to confuse a little bit of people.
Uh, for me, it was for me, I was confused when I was watching your video just because like, I'm like, okay, like Ling is about reading and like you mentioned, yeah, you, you understand that.
But in order for you to click known on a word, so when you click known on a word on Ling, right, uh, you can read it, right?
Yes, if I see it in a different context, I have an idea what it looks like. For Mandarin, I can read almost every single character. For Japanese, once in a while, I just need to look at it. I can get the idea, but I just want to make sure, so I click on it.
Okay, so my thought of it was correct.
Okay, so you can actually read, but you just don't do it in the traditional sense. Because you do have to see the words in order to say that you know them at some point.
But I think what you mentioned when I was leaving a comment on your video that everything that you watch and listen to has subtitles, doesn't it? So that's where you get a lot of your...
So that's where you get a lot of your actually reading. So you're not reading in the traditional sense that like, you know, a link user would just read, oh, a mini story, and they would just, or read a book on link and just like silently.
But you're watching YouTube videos with actual subtitles on it. So it's not like you're not reading, but you're not like reading in the traditional sense, right?
It's very unorthodox. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person that does it on link.
I can tell you a very good philosophy for this. Imagine link is as like one giant bubble and you have all these words that you claim you know. But for example, if you have like another bubble and this is actually where you actually listen to content.
So every word that you recognize from the first bubble and you hear it in the video, it'll like transfer from the first bubble to the second. So when you read a word, you can physically see the word, you can give it a definition.
Okay, but your ears have never heard that word before, so you have to train the listening separately and then you'll use this in the context of if, have this person say any words within the second bubble and do I understand what this person is saying?
Okay, you need more words and you need to listen a lot more.
It's a very interesting philosophy, but I probably need to be more specific because it's like a very weird strategy.
Yeah, no, I'm trying to make sense of it, but to me, so is your philosophy kind of if you know enough words, everything else will take care of itself kind of?
From listening, if you focus on listening and learn that way and like see the words.
So like I said, like I mentioned, you read the word or you do read the word at some point and then you hit known on it, but you're more focused on your listening.
And basically, if you know enough of those words, everything else will take care of itself, basically.
Yeah, if you've seen the word and you watch a video and you've seen that same exact word in the subtitle, okay, this is your chance to acquire this word in a listening context.
So you need the words to even transfer that information to make it now your listening vocabulary because you have a separate category for listening vocabulary and that another, your main vocabulary is what you can read, but they're not the same thing, two different completely skills, different skills.
Yes.
I would say one thing that you definitely do a lot different than me is that, yeah, you just ignore, you ignore any unknown words.
But for me, I only get, the only reading that I do on LingQ is not the traditional reading where I'm not reading a book with no audio.
I'm only getting audio.
So I'm kind of doing the same thing where I'm only getting audio and I don't read anything silently unless it's a visual novel that I'm reading and the main character won't speak.
That's the only time I ever don't get audio when I'm reading, but the everyone else in the game will speak.
And that's just for some reason, it's really rare for a visual novel to have the main character speak, but sometimes it does happen.
Or I'll watch a YouTube and I'll just kind of follow along on subtitles and I'll just link, but I will, for me, I'm trying to kind of understand the entire sentence as I go and then I just like link words as I go.
Do you follow along on LingQ at the same time you're watching the video or do you treat using the LingQ website as a separate activity after the fact that you've already like watched the video? Like how do you do that?
Back in the past, about the first two years when LingQ didn't have the sentence mode or the importability, I have to listen and follow along with the raw text because LingQ nowadays, they give you the underline the sentence and you can follow, but back then they did not.
So you have to figure it out on your own.
And I pretty much just use the audio and listen and try to comprehend as much as possible.
But nowadays I don't need to do that anymore.
There's like sentence mode.
But before I used LingQ for every single thing, but now halfway in, I use YouTube more because I reached the point that I can read almost everything, but the LingQ listening system is slower in my opinion because eventually you'll reach a point that there'll be delays because the more words you know, the system does crash more and more because there's too many words that you know because their database is going to keep adding up and up.
That's actually hilarious that you know that.
Yeah, if you get to a hundred thousand, you really, it's impossible to go from one page to another. It slows down a lot.
Really? I did not. That's actually crazy. I didn't even know that was an issue.
Yeah, there's actually one user named Gwen. I can send you a profile later, but she has 200,000 words in all the romance languages.
And I don't know how she does it because when I look at online, the dictionary for how many words are in like Spanish or French, she goes beyond that.
So I thought, okay, I don't know how she's getting these extra words. Are they numbers?
But yeah, the more words you know, but if you reach like 30,000, 60,000, your system will get slower.
But for Japanese though, I realized when I'm at 57,000, I quote, I claim, it's still pretty fast.
It's just the romance languages that are very slow.
Oh, really?
Yeah, maybe it depends.
It depends on the language.
But then again, because it's not sponsored, I will say LingQ is very buggy.
Oh my God.
I can talk about so many bugs and things that annoy me with LingQ.
I still love the website, but God, I don't know what browser you use, but I use Firefox and I noticed that when I switched to Firefox, it was way faster.
I don't know.
I think Google Chrome is very, it's high on resources for whatever reason.
Like you'll have one tab open and it's like taking up like a bunch of resources on your computer, but other browsers don't do that as bad.
I think you're onto something.
If you probably just have too much of a database, it probably does slow down no matter what, which is crazy to hear that because I mean, yeah, when you use a hundred thousand, that's crazy.
So when you're at a hundred thousand, I'll bring it back to what we were talking about.
But once you get to a hundred thousand, how many, is there even any, hardly any yellow words or blue words?
1%.
Everything is 1% now.
Maybe one every 10, 20 pages.
It's usually like all like names.
So I pretty much hit almost everything I can find.
And beyond that, it's all ancient words from scrolls and stuff.
Yeah, that's crazy.
For me, like I was just telling, it was Seabold Speaks, we were speaking and I was telling him that it felt like, what LingQ to me feels like, it feels like you're playing Pokemon and you're just trying to catch all the Pokemon.
It is.
It's exactly that.
It feels like that.
It feels like you're just hunting for new words.
So, you know, hearing your method and that's what it really sounds like.
You're just trying to collect all the Pokemon, basically.
I actually have a very good analogy I thought of now.
Okay, you might think this is weird.
I use LingQ the Anki way.
For example, each blue word is the front of a card.
And then we click on it, you flip it.
It's a definition.
So since I'm not looking at the known words, I'm always looking at the yellow and blue.
It's the same thing like Anki.
You're always going to review words you don't know.
So I'm pretty much doing it Anki in the reading environment that is natural to the human eyes because I'm guessing from when we're in school, we read books from left to right.
So that's what the eyes are used to.
But if you're isolated like Anki, then you have to look at one word and then, oh, it's actually pretty painful the way it sounds, but it's a lot more soothing to the brain.
You're not tend to be more stressed because one, LingQ does the flashcard for you because it's already automatically there because someone else already did it for you.
Yeah, so I did LingQ using the Anki style.
So this is like maybe a whole different mindset that you probably never thought of.
Well, for me, that's when I started putting in some serious time, like at least like, you know, like at least two to three hours, four hours of reading.
I noticed it was more engaging because I, first of all, was like actually engaging in something.
So I was like following something actual real thing.
It wasn't just sitting doing like single flashcards.
I'm not against flashcards, but, and I think they're great, especially for like lower frequency words.
I feel like there's a good argument there.
Like, you know, you're You know, so that was, for me, what hooked me with reading and doing all the link.
But what is the typical study plan for you?
So you open up YouTube, and I think you mentioned Language Reactor before.
You haven't yet, but you can probably talk about that if you want.
So walk me through, like, how do you actually study, like, in the order?
I just want to know for me.
I could probably just start saying, like, my routine, because back then, I would always get 100 words for Mandarin.
I would try to get 100 known words every day for Mandarin.
So that's step one back then.
And then I would just listen as much as physically possible from there.
And then now, because I reached, like, my goal, so I do all my listening in the morning because you want to do the hard test in the morning first.
And then throughout the day, you can do, you can use LingQ on the phone if you're outside.
You can make links.
You can find new known words.
Okay, that's what I would do now.
But for Japanese and Korean, I would do my daily routine for listening first.
Like, at least I hit the minimum, and then I would try to go for 100, why I quote 100 known words for Japanese, Korean, and Cantonese, because those are my lacking languages.
I would use YouTube Reactor to do all my listening because it's very useful.
Each language for LingQ is a lot different than you think because Japanese has the thing is, there's so many particles at the end of each word.
So the split system is not the best, but it gives you the advantage to get a lot of known words because...
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I just wanted to vent about it, but yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, because I might not know every grammar rule because I technically focus on grammar when I'm listening and I have the subtitles because that's what I'm actually hearing in real time.
And this is the higher chance I will hear this in front of someone.
I will hear someone speak like this.
And I would, for example, I would look at this and I say, okay, I know this character, and then I can recognize the rest of these.
And then how I would do it, okay, if I recognize the first character and I can say the rest of the particle, I would put a known.
That's just my style because people want to be very precise on grammar, which is fine, but
It's really hard to know every single grammar point, and it's going to slow you down as you go by. So I might not know this word, so I will just keep going on. But I would use LingQ; there's a left and right arrow key, which allows you to jump between yellow and blue and ignores all white. So I technically use this to my advantage so that I can go very fast. I try to go as fast as I can, but I'll try to describe how I do it. It's a little different.
Do you actually know these right now, or are you just like doing this as an example?
Oh, the ones I know, I know because I have the Mandarin to my advantage. I know how it's pronounced and I have the... Yeah, that's another thing I mentioned a little bit earlier—that there is an advantage for sure.
Yeah, because someone that doesn't know the Mandarin, they're going to be slower in this case. But for me, I can always learn the kanji in the video, but I generally know how it's pronounced and I know the overall meaning. So if I were to listen, I would look at it and I just need to get the listening portion and say, okay, I heard the word. I understand it. Move on. The brain will take care of everything else.
But this is generally how I would use LingQ. It's a little weird because to the eye of the average user, they think, why is this guy going so fast and why is he doing what he's doing?
So this is the actual speed you do this?
Oh, I go twice as fast.
What?
I go very fast. It depends on what the... because the more words you know, sometimes if you were to be at the last word and you do the right arrow key, you're stuck. So I'm spamming the right arrow. It's stuck. So you have to manually go to the right arrow and go to the next page, which is a pain in the butt.
Yeah, I bet there are third-party plugins just to get, just to use a shortcut.
Yeah. So you have to use the arrow keys too, or how do you use your...
I don't, so I don't. I do have a shortcut set for going to new words. It was actually because of your video. I kind of dabbled around in that, but I mostly just use the shortcut to, you know, for known, ignore, and then for paging, really. Because yeah, having to page with the mouse is annoying.
Like I wish I, I actually, ideally, I would like to page with the mouse, with buttons on the mouse.
Ideally, yes.
Yeah, that would be actually even better. And then also, of course, I use the number keys for the grading. It's very useful.
Yeah. Exactly, because speed is very big in language learning. If you're slow, your progress will be slower. So knowing shortcuts to how to use LingQ correctly makes things a lot faster.
But that's generally my approach to LingQ for Japanese. If I recognize the first character and I can pronounce the others, I'll just make it known because we watched the actual video. That's the real deal because you have to listen and understand what they're saying. But here, you might not need to know what they're saying because I'm more trained up in the listening approach. But here it could be for manga. You can do however you want.
My conditions are a lot different than an average person, but to me, it speeds up my progress to find new words and it gets me the high number count. Like this number might not mean anything because I can know a lot less or I can know more, but generally it just gives me the opportunity so that when I start watching a video, for example, this is Cantonese. I'll just mute it so that you can see how it works.
You're able to hover over each word and you're able to get, you can see the little, in Mandarin, we call it pinyin. So you have like the Romanization at the top here. But for Japanese, it'll be very similar that you can hover it over it. You go to the next video, next part of the script, and you can hover it and it gives you instant translation.
So language reactors. It's essentially like furigana, right? Like pretty much like...
Furigana, like katakana, right? However you want to do it.
Oh yeah, yeah. It's just called furigana, but it's actually in English, like for Chinese. That's it.
I wondered how you did that as well in Mandarin and stuff and Cantonese and all that. It's really weird because you have to learn like hiragana and katakana, right? So like for Japanese. So seeing it in a different language is kind of strange to me. Like, how do you do that?
You're not going to like the way I describe. I used LingQ from the beginning and every time I see hiragana, katakana, I try to match, like, for example, the na. So this must be na and this is ku, so this should be ku. I did that approach.
Wait, wait, wait, wait. So you...
Okay, yeah, that's a good point.
That's super bad.
No, no, that's a good, good point. I was going to ask you, so like, did you ever do any, yeah, any basic study when it comes to that, you know, in Japanese? So you just kind of learned by sheer exposure?
Raw. I went straight at it.
That is impressive.
Yeah, that is really impressive. I would look at the first character and I would match what makes the most sense. So this da, so this da, the ka, and then ra. Okay. And I just did that many times.
In the beginning, I was extremely slow.
Of course.
It took me like three months to get maybe a thousand words because the katakana hiragana held me back a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but the kanji made it very easy for me because now I only have to figure out how is it pronounced and then just like five different ways, which is annoying in Japanese, but Mandarin is more straightforward.
And the thing about Japanese is that there's a lot of things you have to worry about is, okay, now the grammar, you have to do the particles because the way they split is very particular and you have to figure...
Yeah, the grammar is a whole different story.
Yes, but Chinese, it's nothing but basically, I don't remember what it's called in Chinese, but like kanji, it's nothing but kanji. So, and you can read, you can know the readings through English, right? So that's why you never, so you don't have to worry about that.
I could see, because I know that experience of just seeing kanji over and over again in words and you just know how to read them because you've seen it so many times, kind of like that. So that, but that's what you did for hiragana and katakana, it seems.
Yeah.
The thing is, okay, I have a very good analogy that the people can use is that learning a word is the same thing as meeting a new person. When you first meet them, you know, you don't... You don't understand that until you start doing it yourself, that people just, they just don't get it. Like, you just have to, you just have to see it enough.
And that's what I was saying to people. So when it comes to, you know, kanji, what's it called in Chinese? Like, Hanzi.
So I'm gonna say it wrong. I'm gonna say it wrong.
Okay, so Hanzi. I'm gonna say it in my white American English accent. It's fine.
Yeah, so is that how you learned? So you never did any Anki or anything on that either. You just learned from sheer meaning.
I actually never had an Anki account. Like, I never, I went straight raw LingQ because of Steve. I was like a follower of Steve Kaufman, and I used only LingQ from day one.
Yeah, you know how many people out there that like, do not get that. They like, they don't understand how that's even possible to be able to do something like that.
But for me, so I did some kanji study, like not a ton, but I did go through like a deck of some of the most basics just to like kind of learn the kanji. But I forgot, like, all of it, almost, like a lot of it. I'm sure some of it did help me, but as I started to read more on LingQ, that's when it hit me that like, you don't even need to do that. You just need to see the words over and over again.
And it's like, I kind of had a similar analogy to what you said to meeting people, but my analogy was like, you just see things in pictures rather than, like, it's like a picture. If you see a chair and you don't know what a chair is and you see it a bunch of times, you're going to start to know that's a chair. And that's how it feels like to learn a word that's in kanji and stuff like that.
So in Japanese, I would say that for kanji, you do need a lot of exposure to it. You see it many times and you cannot escape it no matter what in Japanese.
Yeah, and of course, like, I think if you, if you did, I feel like it's not worth the time to invest it, but if you were to actually take the extra time to write it, you probably would be able to recognize it even better. Like, no doubt about that. It helps.
Yeah, of course it would help. It would probably help you a lot. But at the same time, like, you just don't, you don't really need to do it.
Made a video about that actually. Opportunity cost.
Yeah. You can probably do something else that makes more sense and more efficient compared to just writing. Writing is more of a passion, which is fine because calligraphy is a big thing and I don't blame them. It just, the efficiency is a lot slower.
Yeah, that makes me really happy to hear you say that because I was really interested in how you did that. So it's just, I don't know, vindicating. I don't know. I feel vindicated to hear that kind of thing.
I can also mention one more thing that when I'm like reading and you see all the characters, we're actually using a concept in speed reading that we don't, we rely on our eyes and we don't sub-vocalize everything. So the chair example is when you look at it and then someone tells you the definition, okay, now you see it visually from now on, you know what it looks like. You don't need to say it in your head. You just know it the moment you look at it.
But for what I do for LingQ, the reason it's so fast is because I had formal training in speed reading so I can read books fast.
Oh, really?
And because a good tip for learners that want to improve their speed of reading is to learn how to do, sorry, tips to improve reading is to learn how to speed read because when you're sub-vocalizing, you're slowed down.
So I will combine this concept with ignoring the known words to get the effect that it looks rapidly fast to the human eye or what you guys claim is way too fast. It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, you normal mortal human beings.
No, I'm just joking. It's good. It could be pretty fast. It takes training because I did over 200,000, like 200,000 of...
