Speed LingQing - My Language Learning Plateau Technique

Any technique that we can come up with that makes it interesting for us is

actually beneficial for our language learning because it keeps us engaged.

Hi, Steve Kaufmann here again, and today I wanna talk about a new

approach to working with your language content when you are in the plateau.

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Now many of you may remember when I talked about the hockey stick.

Okay.

And the story there is that when we start in the language,

we have a very steep climb.

But it's kind of satisfying because we're seeing, oh, maybe this way you

can see the different colors, we're encountering high frequency words quite

often and so it's easier to learn them because they they're high frequency.

They show up more often, but once we sort of turn the corner here, and we're on

this long road, this shaft of the hockey stick, we're going from essentially

A2 or B1 and we wanna reach B2.

B2 is that comfortable spot where you can understand

movies, you still make mistakes.

There's still gaps in what you under in your comprehension, but

you're, you're kind of launched you're on your own, but here...

right now in my Persian, I'm be in between that.

Okay.

So I've, I've developed a new technique that I wanna share with you.

It might be helpful for you in your language learning.

So what I do is I go to my normal source of podcasts in Farsi, which is Radio

Farad, which is, you know, Radio Free Europe, Persian language edition, and

every day there are a number of podcasts talking about the news in Iran, the news

in the Middle East, the news in the world.

And it has a lot of good vocabulary for things that I'm interested in.

So I download this podcast.

I get a transcript on Happy Scribe.

I importthe MP3 file and the transcripts into LingQ.

So now I have a lesson it's 30 minutes of audio and the

corresponding amount of text.

Now because it's written in the Arabic script it actually takes me a long time

to read, takes me 30 minutes to listen.

It takes me maybe an hour and a half to read through this thing.

I'm at the point now where I know most of the words.

So it's of course, good to read again, develop better fluency at

reading, but it also slows me down.

So what I find myself more and more doing, I may start reading the whole

thing and then perhaps, because I'm impatient by nature I start jumping.

So I jump from yellow word to yellow word.

In other words, the yellow words are words that I have previously met

that I have looked up that I have a meaning for, but they're not yet known.

In fact, some of them, they, that I might just have met are almost like new

words to me except they're no longer blue because I've met them before.

So I look them up again and again and again.

So what I tend to do now is I skip from yellow word to yellow word.

There's the occasional blue word so I look that word up, it becomes yellow.

And I go through my lesson that way and I can go through a 30 minute,

you know, audio file quite quickly.

And I'm focusing in on the words that I don't yet know.

To a large extent are the words that I didn't understand when I was listening.

Now, there will be words that I have made known, and I hear

them and I don't recognize them.

So nothing is perfect in language learning.

However, it is enabling me to focus in on words that are on my sort of saved

LingQs list, but are not yet known.

And I have like, I don't know, 27,000 saved links in Persian.

I have only 10,000 known words.

I wanna move that known word number up to 15 or 20,000.

If I'm at that level, I think I will be able to understand a lot more

and eventually to speak more easily.

So I just jump from the yellow word to the next yellow word, to the next yellow word.

And I'm finding that quite effective.

One advantage is if I'm in a, a lesson on economics, then certain economic

terms will show up fairly often.

So if I'm jumping from term to term to term, In a lesson on say economics

or, uh, teachers strike or whatever might be happening I tend to come

up with the same word that teachers union or hunger strike or whatever.

So I'm actually encountering these words fairly often.

I'm also then able to go and listen again and see if I don't understand

more and which I typically do.

So I, I get a sense of satisfaction that I've gone through this lesson.

Uh, and what's more uh, up on, you know, until I started doing this, I

found it difficult to keep up with my listening because, uh, at Radio Farda

they have their, you know, uh, ..., they have their ..., they have their midday

podcast, they have a number of these.

And I wanna process more of the language, listen to the more of the language

quickly, go through it, to pick out the words that I didn't understand,

perhaps move some of them to known.

And this, the technique that I'm using, I would call it sort of speed

learning when you're in the plateau.

So it's also more enjoyable because it sometimes can be tiring to continue

to read essentially the same words that you know, and then struggle with

the words that you don't yet know.

Whereas this way I'm able to focus in.

The interesting thing is if I try to deal with these yellow words

in a list which I sometimes do.

I might look at them as a list, say for that lesson before I go skipping.

Uh, but if I look at them in a sort of list in the vocabulary section, which

I also sometimes do, uh, it's not, it's more devoid of context, at least

when I'm skipping through the lesson.

I can always look for additional context to the left or to the right of the

word, that yellow word that I landed on.

So it's a little more meaningful than just going through a list.

So I don't know if that's helpful to helpful to you, but I just thought I

would share with you my latest technique.

And I admit that I sometimes move from one new technique to another new technique.

I tend to blow a bit hot and cold, which isn't a bad thing because I think in our

language learning variety is important.

Variety is important to keep it interesting and anything, any

technique that we can come up with that makes it interesting for us is

actually beneficial for our language learning because it keeps us engaged.

So on that subject, I wanna leave a couple of videos, one about listening

and one about reading, but I do consider both forms of consuming

input to be very much linked.

And there may be other techniques that you out there can come up with that

enable us to combine our listening activities with our reading activities.

Thank you for listening.

Bye for now.