Essential language tips for immigrants

Today, I want to talk about learning languages as an immigrant.

Now, to me, being an immigrant is the ideal environment in

which to learn a language.

You are surrounded by the language that you would like to learn,

that you in fact need to learn.

So there are very clear reasons why you should be learning the

language and you are surrounded by everything you need to be successful.

The main sort of receiving countries for immigrants are either English speaking, or

they're German speaking, or maybe they're Turkish speaking, or in the case of Latin

America, I think a lot of the immigrants are in fact people who speak the language

of the country they're moving towards.

But in any case, there are certain things that are common to an immigrant

needing to improve in the local language.

First of all, it is usually very important.

According to one survey in the U.

S., Close to half of all immigrants feel that they are held back by

their poor language skills in terms of job opportunities, in terms of

accessing services, in terms of many things that they would like

to do in order to function better.

In their new country.

So it is a serious problem in looking at some German sites.

It was the same people who have good language skills do well on

the job market and people who don't have good language skills don't.

So that's pretty obvious, but it is borne out by statistics.

So it is important to do well in your new language.

Now, one of the things I think that is important as an immigrant is that

when you arrive in the new country, that's when you should put the maximum

effort into learning the language.

Now, I realize a lot of immigrants are already there and struggle with the

language, and I'll get to that later, but if you are just arriving in a new

country, that's when you need to totally focus on getting as good as you can be.

I took that attitude when I moved to Japan.

First six months, I said, I'm going to become functional in Japanese because once

I get functional in Japanese, then I can.

Coast from there on, take advantage of being in a country

where everyone speaks Japanese.

Sometimes you hear people say, well, first little while I want to get used to the

country, uh, connect with a local, uh, community of, of expats from my country.

Not a good idea.

There are various reasons for this, but one of them is that

there is this phenomenon, which doesn't necessarily always apply.

But which is based on a pattern where in an initial sort of six months or

so, when we arrive in a new country, everything is new, different,

exciting, unreal, like a dream.

It's fun.

That's when you want to start in on the language because very often after

those initial six or nine months, there's a reaction that sets in.

Where we miss the old country.

We're annoyed by some aspects of the local culture.

And so we're less motivated to learn.

And this apparently can go on for a year or for 18 months.

And after that, we sort of settled into a period where we accept life in the new

country just is, that's the way it is.

It's neither exciting nor does it annoy us.

It's just is.

And, uh, that's how we live.

So.

The danger is that if you don't make that special effort in the first six months

to take advantage of the excitement of being in a new country, you might be

then turned off learning the language because of the negative things or the

things you miss about your old country.

And then you settle into a pattern where you are living perhaps with community of

expats of people who speak your language and you're no longer making that effort

to improve because make no mistake, it takes a lot of consistent effort to

improve in the language to get to a level.

where you are not amongst the 50%, for example, in the United States of

immigrants who feel that they are held back by inadequate language skills.

So what if you're already in the country?

You're no longer in the situation of having just arrived or you can take

advantage of that initial period of enthusiasm that I talked about.

What do you do then?

Well, my advice is start again, restart, refresh, try to generate

some enthusiasm, much like I do at LingQ when I have like a 30 minute 30

day challenge or a 90 day challenge.

Right now I've challenged myself to learn 300 new words a day in Turkish.

And I'm doing it.

I'm maintaining that level.

I started with 8, 000 words and I'm now at 16, 000 words after six weeks.

And I hope to get over 30, 000 words of Turkish before my

wife and I travel to Turkey.

Challenge yourself and you will get to another level.

In that language.

Don't accept that you're forever going to be in that group of people

who, you know, suffer from facing language obstacles in the new country.

I am also an immigrant.

I emigrated with my family in 1951 from Sweden, and you can

see me here in Sweden and then on the boat, and now I'm in Canada.

And I have no recollection as a five year old of transitioning

from Swedish to English.

And I promptly forgot my Swedish, although I've relearned it subsequently.

And my parents, of course, they lived in Canada with their accent, with

their less than native like accent.

English language skills, but they also spoke French and other

languages and they did just fine.

So it's obviously easy for the child to quickly sound like a local.

And the sort of adult immigrant is always going to be feeling inadequate

in their language skills, but they can be at a level where that

needn't be an obstacle for them.

And it wasn't an obstacle for my parents.

Link has always had a connection with.

Immigrants.

I was very interested in the situation of immigrants.

Back when we started LingQ, I was learning Cantonese.

I heard about an immigrant who had his money stolen at the airport.

We hired him because we were doing IT work.

He was an IT person.

We thought, at the very least, we'll help him out for a few months.

And then a If it turns out that he's a good employee, well, then

we've found a good employee.

And, uh, in the end he went back to China, but we developed LingQ.

And we realized at that point that all the TOEFL scores and other

scores are relatively meaningless.

He had high scores in TOEFL, but he couldn't really understand

what people were saying.

He couldn't really communicate effectively.

He wasn't connecting.

Now, in terms of how to learn, essentially.

It doesn't change.

It's the same three keys.

You have to have a positive attitude, you have to put in the time, and you

have to develop that ability to notice what's happening in the language.

So even when I was in Japan, surrounded by the Japanese language, I had to put

effort into making sure I could take advantage of being in that environment.

So, Lots of listening, lots of reading.

I was always listening in my car.

I was always reading.

And of course nowadays, you can access so many more resources than I had in Japan.

There's YouTube, there's all kinds of podcasts, there's all kinds

of resources available online.

Like here I am, I'm learning Turkish now, in Vancouver, and I went to an

e-book, audiobook website, worked my way through their Turkish.

Signed up, created an account and bought myself an e-book audio book.

So it's matching e-book audio book, okay?

I don't know how long it's going to take me to get through that book.

It'll take me a long time.

It's not ideal because the audio of that whole book is not going to match the

e-text that I've imported into LingQ.

In an ideal scenario, that book would be in five minute segments, all time stamped,

where I can focus in on the vocabulary from each of those five minute segments.

And we may one day at LingQ get to the point We're using AI, we can

break all imported content into five minute segments, or the user can

determine whether he or she wants three minute or eight minute segments

and somehow tie the audio to it.

We're not there yet, but I can go through the book in LingQ, Saving Words and

Phrases, and I can listen on my iPhone where I have this app from Storytel,

Turkish source for audio and eBooks.

It's just a small example, but someone who's in an English

speaking environment has audible.com, has

you know, unending resources, podcasts on every imaginable subject.

And so there's so much more in the way of resources that the immigrant

can use to improve because the focus still has to be on getting

the language in you, increasing your comprehension level and vocabulary level.

the language.

All the good things that we talk about on this channel and of

course which are embodied in LingQ.

Of course once you're in the country you can watch TV, you can try to make friends,

you can go to the community center, get into activities where you have common

interests with some of the local people.

All of these things to push yourself outside of your comfort zone.

Remember, don't worry about how you sound and how you speak, we are

never As good as we would like to be.

Never.

If you're waiting for that moment, when you're going to be so good

that you can just confidently speak, you'll never get there.

You're always kind of not as good as you'd like to be, but never

as bad as you think you are.

We're better than we think we are, but we're never quite as good as we

would love to be in an ideal world.

I also would caution people against being too reliant on sort of government

sponsored ESL classes twice a week.

That's not going to do it.

I see so many immigrants

who go to their ESL class twice or three times a week.

It's a nice social situation.

They make friends from their same language background.

It's comforting maybe, but it's not going to get them out of their comfort zone into

being able to use English effectively.

You have to do that on your own.

That ESL classroom is not going to do it.

You have to do the kinds of things that I talk about doing in order to

get to where you operate comfortably in the language again, so much of the

sort of language teaching industry builds up complicated structures

that in my mind are not very helpful.

One of these is the Canadian Language Benchmarks System, which divides language

levels into 12 levels defined so finely that I can't tell the difference between

level 4 or 5 And you can check the link that I'll leave here and see if you can

make sense of what that difference is.

You cannot define the level that's required to be a bank teller or a checkout

clerk in a supermarket or any other job.

It's always Less than that and more than that.

You need an overall level in the language.

You have to build up all your skills.

By the same token, much of this emphasis on business English and academic

English, I'm very much against that.

You have to improve your whole level in the language,

following things of interest.

And this is another important thing.

Find things you like in the new language.

Find things you like in the new community, activities or TV programs

or books, and spend your time with things that you enjoy doing.

And you do have to be able to eventually read a book, because that's an indication

of the level that you have achieved.

I often hear people say, I have trouble speaking, but I understand, or I can read.

But most of those people will never read a novel.

You have to get to where you can read a novel.

As an immigrant, if you really want to not be in that lower 50 percent,

you have to bring your whole level up.

Another thing that comes up with immigrants is this idea of not wanting

to lose their heritage language.

And statistics show that by the second or third generation, the

children of immigrants, or the children of children of immigrants,

speak the local language at home.

And this is held out as such.

Somehow a bad thing.

I don't see it as a bad thing.

I see it as a normal thing.

That's what happens.

That's what North American, for example, society is.

People integrate.

If the third generation immigrant wants to learn the ancestral language, fine.

But if that person doesn't speak the ancestral language, that's also fine.

I forgot my Swedish.

Then I went after French.

I was very keen on French for a while.

Then I learned Mandarin and Japanese.

All these other languages.

And I eventually got back to Swedish.

And even my parents who came from Czech and Slovakia, I got back to Czech.

In other words, people will learn the languages that they want to learn.

There shouldn't be some kind of an obligation to learn the ancestral language

as if this is some sort of absolute good.

Even here, I often hear Persian speakers tell me that I speak Persian better

than a lot of young generation children of immigrants here in Vancouver.

So be it.

I think to put so much emphasis on maintaining the

ancestral language is wrong.

Nothing wrong with learning the ancestral language.

If that's what the learner is motivated to do.

But if the learner is more motivated to learn another

language, go for that as well.

And I always consider it a good thing when the immigrant family

speaks English at home, because the children are going to do fine anyway.

They will learn to speak English as well as all the other people.

People surrounding them, but the parents are the ones that face difficulty

with their poor language skills.

And if they get in the habit of speaking English at home, at least

some of the time, I think that also helps them and improves their

prospects in the new society.

So I hope that was helpful and, uh, look forward to hearing your comments.

Thank you.

Bye.