Want to Learn a Language? Here's How to Get Started

You aren't very far along, but you have that sense of confidence.

I can do this language.

Hi there, Steve Kaufmann, and today I wanna talk about how do

you get started in a language.

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So I often get asked the question like, how do you get started in the language?

And you know, here I am, you know, 77.

In the last 17 years I've learned 10 languages.

So I have started a lot of languages.

And of course we say that the key to language learning is comprehensible input.

But when you start in a language, nothing is comprehensible.

So then how do we get a toehold in the language?

So I, I would like to share with you uh, sort of my experience and, and even

with languages that I've learned in the last, say, 15 years or so, which have,

you know, different writing systems like, uh, Greek or, uh, Ukrainian

or Arabic or, uh, you know, Korean or uh, Persian and stuff like that.

Very difficult.

Particularly if the writing system is, is is different from what you're used to.

You know, the Latin alphabet that we spent, our whole lives,

uh, reading in where it's, it's basically second nature for us.

So how do you get started?

So, a few concepts.

First of all, believe you're gonna get there, okay?

It seems almost impossible.

It's like looking at a, you've got a, a jigsaw puzzle and there's nothing there.

There you've got a bunch of little tiles, funny shapes, and, and

yet, you know there's a picture.

You know, there's a picture there.

And, and, and you know, from experience, if you've handled jigsaw puzzles

before that gradually as you put more and more pieces on the table, you're

gonna see how they connect together.

And over time, uh, you're gonna get a full picture.

But when you start out, it seems impossible.

But it's, it's, it's very, you know, important to have that feeling that

in time, with enough time and if I remain motivated then I will get there.

Okay.

Because at first it seems impossible, particularly when I had to try to

learn the Arabic writing system.

I, I don't remember 50 years ago when I learned Chinese, but for, um,

Arabic and Persian, I had to decipher this, this writing system where the

characters very, you know, depending on whether it's the beginning of a, of

a word, the middle of the word, or the end of the word, like there's lots of

complication, but you have to believe.

The next thing is repetition.

You know, as, as I often quote Manfred Spitzer who said, You know, uh, to learn

things, we need two things: we need repetition, and we, we need novelty.

Okay?

The language is new, but it's incomprehensible.

So there's not that rewarding kind of novelty because you

don't understand what's there.

So you need repetition.

You need to get the neurons to fire.

So you have to do a lot of repetitive reading and listening lots.

Uh, I often mention that I start with the mini stories.

Even though I'm, in a way, it's, this is, it's not like, Hello, how are you?

My name is, How old are you?

Not that kind of stuff.

It's actually relatively simple stories where there's a lot of

repetition within each story.

Most vocabulary repeats five times in a different tense or a different person.

Uh, and so I go through, typically in sentence mode in LingQ, and I look up

the words and I listen to the wor...

the sentence, and then I eventually get through that whole lesson,

five minutes worth of a lesson.

I listen to it again.

I don't wait.

And I think this is another point, I don't wait till I fully understand it,

because I'm not going to understand it.

When you're starting into it, even if you go through it and you look up every

word and you went through the sentence and you'd think you know what the

sentence means, but when you hear it again, you say, I can't understand it.

So the idea that you're gonna ace lesson one before you move

to lesson two is not a good idea.

I typically, as I say, I use the mini stories I go lesson one.

I get a bit of a sense of it.

Now.

This desire for novelty takes over even though I don't understand lesson one.

I wanna go to lesson two becasue I'm tired of, you know,

uh, beating my head against a brick wall with lesson one and not

understanding, so I go to lesson two.

New stuff.

New story.

Okay.

I have the translation there.

I can look up words.

I'm kind of listening to it, and you just keep going.

And then at some point you go back to lesson one again.

And on that basis, typically I'll notice that in my statistics at LingQ, I will

listen to particularly the first 10 or 15 stories - we have 60 mini stories.

I'll listen to them 30 or 40 times but not at one sitting.

It's very important to not push yourself too hard to try to learn this now.

You have to recognize that the brain doesn't learn that way.

The learn the brain wants the novelty, wants to mean or

wants to go onto new things.

And then you can come back to it later on.

Don't, you know, try to ace things.

And another advice I would have is listen before reading.

And the reason for that is when you listen, of course you don't

understand but you've now got a certain degree of curiosity.

Like, what was that?

And, and this is true at the beginning when it's all just noise.

But even later on as you progress in the language, you start to hear where words

end and begin, even though you don't know those words, you get a, you know, as the

jigsaw puzzle starts to fill out, you get a better sense of the words there.

And so you start to become, you know, curious and curious is a tr curiosity is a

tremendous driver, a tremendous motivator.

So by listening first you, you increase your level of curiosity in that text,

you've also got a bit of momentum so that when you go to read, and particularly

if you're reading, you know, in sentence mode and you listen to that sentence,

you can hear the audio for that sentence and you've heard it before.

All of that is building up some momentum because when you are reading,

you're gonna be sub-vocalizing.

You have to...

the, the whatever you're reading represents the sound, so you

have to have a sense of what that sound is, or at least some of it.

So I very much recommend listening even though you don't understand.

But then getting right in there to try and save words, to get some sense of what

it's about, and then you listen again and it's this repetitive activity of, of

listening and reading, uh, and going over the same material over and over again.

That's gonna be a big part of, I would say the first three

months of your language learning.

Uh, the first three months, uh, is somewhat satisfying.

It doesn't matter what you can say, day one, you know "my name is...".

That doesn't really matter.

What matters is are you starting to understand more.

Is your brain start...

brain starting to get used to the language?

And the first three months, if you do a lot of repetitive listening, I

find that I have a lot of tolerance for repetitive listening and reading

in the early stage in the language, because the language is so new to me.

So I am combining that repetitive, repetitive, you know, the repetition

with the sense that the language is new.

So there's some novelty there.

I'm curious.

I want to get to know the language better.

How does the language work?

And so that drives me through that first three month period.

And, and that is a, if you can get to where you have a feeling that

you made significant progress in the first three months, it's not

that you understand everything.

Lots of the, what you listen to, you don't understand.

You keep forgetting the words.

You can't really say much.

You aren't very far along, but you have that sense of confidence.

I can do this language, and that...

That's where the first three months are so crucial.

You have to push yourself in that first three months to

get to where, you know what?

I knew nothing about the language when I started and now look at me.

I can actually understand some things, and that is, in my

experience, tremendously motivating.

Now you can start crawling out from that and exploring other things.

I should also point out that I generally like to buy a starter book

to go with my, uh, activity at LingQ.

So it can be a Teach Yourself, it can be a colloquial, there's a, and and if your

native language is not English, I'm sure there are starter books from whatev...

for whatever language you're trying to learn based on your language.

It gives you an overview of the grammar.

Yes, you can also Google and download grammars, but there's something to holding

onto a book, flipping through a book.

You sit down in a chair, you're looking through a book, it's very useful to

have that companion starter book, and it's something you look back to with

nostalgia when a year or two later you're quite good in the language.

It's nice to look back at that starter book that got you started,

um, and it sits on your shelf.

And even though I don't need it anymore, I keep it there.

So that's some advice.

It's not the whole story.

It's some advice on how to get started in a language.

And I look forward to your questions.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.