Yeah, so you actually got speed reading in English beforehand, the practice, so you actually learned that skill to speed read?
Yeah, I bought a book about speed reading, and I studied the concept, and I said, okay, I just started practicing. I read like a book a day. I said, okay, I think I reached the peak. I don't need to read books anymore.
Was this before you started your language learning?
Yes, this was 2020, so right before the Mandarin thing started.
Really? Oh, okay, wow, that's like really crazy that that ended up actually helping you out like a lot. I mean, it would save time no matter what you do, I'm sure, but I consider myself a pretty fast reader, but not that fast.
Definitely not on your level, yeah.
Well, because back then when I started, I used my phone to learn words, and because to learn kanji, you have to be hyper-focused. In my case, I would use the phone to click the word manually and learn it manually, because if I do the speed reading method for Mandarin, it's really difficult, because you do need the time to understand the characters. But my methodology is also very unorthodox, so I ignore all Mandarin tones for the first year and a half, so that's a very debatable topic as well.
Yeah, if you know about pitch accent in Japanese and tones in Mandarin, I completely ignore all that in the beginning and then focus later.
Yeah, I feel like pitch accent has become a more recent topic. Like, you don't need it, but you will sound weird, you know, similarly, but it's becoming more of a thing that people are like getting, becoming more serious about.
I don't care about it.
I'm in the same boat. Like, I don't really care about it. I just want to be understood. Like, I know I'll probably have an accent.
I mean, I don't want a terrible accent, but I don't want the perfect accent either. I mean, I want it, but I don't know if I want to put in the work to do it. It's too much work.
Yeah, it is a lot of work to basically sound like a native. And I think there's some cases of people accidentally doing it right as well. So that's interesting.
Do you kick yourself in the butt because you didn't study earlier?
Because I do.
Oh, you mean I didn't start in high school?
Yeah, even earlier. Like, you didn't start as a kid to like, you know, oh, why didn't my parents teach me when I was little or put me in something?
I wish, yeah, I wish it was for me, but.
I actually have a story about it because I'm Vietnamese by ethnicity, but I chose Mandarin as my first foreign language. In this case, I'm what you know as the traitor because I learned the enemy's language. So Vietnamese is my third language and Mandarin is my second. And I had that thought sometimes that why did I not learn this earlier?
Because when I was in kindergarten, I kept mixing Vietnamese and English words together and then the teacher couldn't understand. So the teacher told my parents, please don't make him speak Vietnamese. Speak only English at home. And they took that seriously.
Yeah, well, that's pretty common. Like, so were your parents from Vietnam or?
Yes, they're born in Vietnam and then they immigrated to the United States and they only speak Vietnamese to each other. But when it comes to me, they spoke English. They tried to speak Vietnamese, but it started a little too late. But I rejected the language because I was the rebellious kid.
I didn't get good grades at school. I was more of, oh, I was chasing girls the whole time in high school. So that's a fun fact.
Yeah, I didn't study much. And Vietnamese could have been my second language, but I didn't care because to me, the language sounds very like an alien language and it sounds weird to me. But now I learned that, okay, it's actually very nice to know the language no matter how it sounds. It's beautiful in its own way.
Yeah, I see if I'm looking at the right one because I don't know all the flags, but are you at 10,000, almost 11,000 on?
That's the 10,000, yes.
Okay, yeah. So you are dabbling a little bit in that. I mean, that's not nothing.
In LingQ, the Vietnamese for LingQ is actually better, but back then when I used it, it was very terrible. But Vietnamese is one of those languages that there's no particles or anything. So around 10,000 is pretty much equivalent to my 100,000 in Mandarin because Indonesian and Vietnamese, they just say very straightforward things, but Mandarin, there's too many ways to say different things.
Have you used any of the Vietnamese that you've learned through LingQ to speak to your parents at all?
Oh, yeah, I speak only Vietnamese with them. I actually, during the Taiwan trip, I went to Vietnam too on that same trip.
Okay, this is more of a story. I was on survival because of Vietnam, it's like more of a poor country, my opinion. And I took my partner to attend a wedding. So the thing is, I have to go on my own without my family that usually translate for me.
And I had to rely only on Vietnamese because no one speaks English. Because this is a funny story. We went to this clothing store so she could buy clothes. I initially thought they spoke English.
So my partner asked the staff if she could help her find like a small size of this dress, for example. And they looked at her weird and they looked at me and said in Vietnamese, please translate what she's saying. And so I had to translate the entire trip and I had to buy everything. I had to get us taxis and stuff.
Only in Vietnamese. They do not speak English, believe it or not. It's yeah, Vietnamese was a survival challenge. So I think that Vietnamese really benefited me here because if I went without Vietnamese, I would struggle a lot.
Do you think your accent is okay because you heard it so much from your parents?
Oh, yeah, it sounded to my teachers and an average person there. They said I sound like a native depending on certain sentences. But the moment they catch me say a tone wrong, they just said, okay, he's foreign.
Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, it's just like English. Like, you know, immediately if someone has an accent, like you just can't hide it.
Yeah, that's really cool.
So I wanted to jump back real quick to your way that you study. So let's just say like, okay, let's say you want to get to 100,000 on Japanese. So like, and you wake up one morning and you decide to start studying. So what's the first thing you do? Do you open up YouTube?
Okay, now I would do my listening in the beginning, but during the middle of the day, I would open up LingQ on my computer and I would just do what I showed you and try to get 100 known words a day. I think we get to like 20,000, 30,000. If you do the approach I do, like you ignore all known words, like you're pretty much sacrificing reading comprehension for the chance to have better listening comprehension. Your known words will go faster because you're only targeting your weakness and you're ignoring the things you already know. It's going to forget, but you'll relearn them when you listen to your content with transcript and you'll relearn it anyway. So, and that's the stuff that matters is what you're listening to.
Yeah, so first, your foundation is you watch videos and you listen and you read the subtitles, right? Of those videos that they, because, you know, they always have it.
So like, yeah, so you focus on listening and reading the subtitles as you watch a YouTube video. So you're not in LingQ at this point. And so you get, that's your main activity, right?
Reading, sorry, listening is like the real goal because when you reach a certain amount of words, you can completely ignore it and just go straight to the listening because that's where the real progress happens because words is just a tool. It's not the real progress. It's just there to increase your efficiency to listen better because if you want to listen, you don't know the word, you're forced to pause and you have to look up the word compared to if you were just to let it keep going, it's going to improve faster.
But basically the idea is that when I'm listening, I'm not entirely staring at the subtitles. I'm like looking at the guy's forehead because it gets, it kind of triggers your subconscious to get the acquisition because if you're looking at the subtitles, you're kind of spoiling yourself. Like you're spoiling a movie before you watch the movie. So you need to attempt to predict what they're saying or hear it out of context. And then once you don't understand, you look at the subtitles, you would translate and then you would re-listen to the exact part again with all the translation you did, then you'll understand it better. So next time you hear it, your chances are higher.
Why I did Mandarin, I did about one hour of active every day. I would use my phone and do all my listening in the beginning stages. But the last two years, I would use Language Reactor. I will sit in this chair and just listen for like an hour of active. And then the rest of the seven hours, I would leave earbuds in my ears to let it go numb.
Okay, so yeah, so you would do a good amount of active study and then the rest was—
Exactly, because the ideology is that, for example, there's a water wheel. If you were to let the water wheel go, or you want it to move, you would push it or let water go through. You do it yourself, that's active listening. But if you were to leave, if you wanted to keep going, the passive listening keeps it going, but it goes slower because the effect of passive compared to active is not the best.
But Matt vs Japan kind of quoted that having passive listening, you need to listen to about four times the amount of passive just to equal to one active. But to me, if you don't have the transcript, you're not really gonna make any progress. So you have to listen to things you have already actively listened to to get the effects of passive listening and active, you just have to listen to whatever you think your level is. I tend to try to get to the native content as fast as possible because that's how they actually talk in Japan and ignore all comprehensible input because they baby the content for you so that you can understand it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I personally don't like to, I get turned off when I listen to that kind of stuff, especially lately, because, yeah, I do, it is helpful, especially when you don't know anything, but at the same time, like, you are kind of training yourself to believe that that's how they actually speak in Japan. And when you hear a real person, it's like, holy crap, like, super fast.
Like, it can be at least.
For me, whenever I hit a known word is when I can both read it and also know what it means, like, spoken.
So is that how you do it as well? When you decide?
My known words, basically, I do the same thing. I would look at it. If I look at it and I know the definition the moment I see it, great. I move it as known because I did the speed reading training, so I can visually see it and get the definition right away. I just look from left—sorry, I look at the word and look at the far right because that's where the definition is and just go back and forth. And that's how I tend to do it because when you do it so many times, your eyes are just gonna get faster and faster naturally.
Yeah, well, that makes sense. Like, that makes sense if that's what you're going for. I think that's crazy. That makes more sense why you're able to progress so quickly, I think.
I know one other YouTuber. He's called Michael the Hyperpolyglot. He does speed reading and he's pretty big. So his methodology is more of a train sentences that you mentioned, but he puts it in the list. They call it language islands.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's—is he Russian?
Is he Russian?
I think.
He is. I probably—I think he speaks Catalan.
Oh, I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know his ethnicity, but he's Mike the Hyperpolyglot. That's his name.
Yeah, he's in Europe. He's four languages. He just created an app, right?
I'm pretty sure.
Yeah. Hyperlingual. He was actually the reason why I started doing that sentence thing. I'm like, all right, let's just try this.
Yeah, it's basically kind of like language islands. I mean, I'm really focusing on like, oh, certain islands. I'm just focusing on creating things I want to say. That's really it.
And I'm essentially, it really does help. Like, I actually thought it was pretty good. This method is very good.
Like, I could do it, but I have 10 babies to take care of. So I did, I focus on listening mostly.
Do you have 10 kids?
Sorry, sorry. 10 languages. I call them kids because I have to spend time with them every day, right? It's the same thing.
I was like, what are—you're a robot. I was like, you have 10 kids and you're doing this video.
Hey, make that your hook. He has 10 babies. You're like, what is this context?
It's just like an AI generated image of you holding 10 babies.
Oh, that'd be so cool. You could do that. You could have like me at the background holding like a baby cradle and then you put all the language flags on top of it.
Oh God, that is actually, maybe, maybe we'll—I'm not gonna do an AI image. I know people get crazy with that. I'm gonna pause for this part, like I'm holding a baby.
Okay, I think I understand a little bit better. So basically you essentially do some reading, but you're not really hyper-focused on reading, but you do do reading in the subtitles that you watch and obviously you use Language Reactor, which supplies you with the subtitles. So like you're doing that. And so from your listening and your subtitle, you know, Language Reactor stuff, you go to LingQ then to the same lesson that you just did from the YouTube video that you created. Then you scroll through all of the ones that you recognize and know and you just hit known on them, basically.
Exactly. So that's the method.
Yep, you got it.
Okay. All right. So how—so explain to the listener, you know, how I do it is I will like, I will just basically press play and then I'll like, yeah, I do side by side. I hide the little tiny YouTube video and I have like an actual pop-out video. So it's like better.
LingQ right now is doing the basically Language Reactor sort of thing where it's going to be on the video itself or at least like below it, like way better. So like you can actually—
Yes, yes. On mobile right now, you can actually do it on Android where you can follow along. I think the downside is that you have to manually click on the words. But for example, Language Reactor, you just hover over it. So that saves you a little bit of time.
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I have only used it like once. I think they're improving it, but yeah, for me, I hold shift.
So like I don't hover. I mean, I do hover over it, but I hold shift. So it's like really not an extra step to it. And then for me, and I get the, also when I look up a word, I get my dictionary Yomitan actually tells me the audio as well.
So like I'm getting double the exposure when it comes to the audio.
Well, maybe from what you've said, it sounds like you do a mix of kind of like reading subtitles and then you'll also not read them just when you don't feel like it. That's what it sounds like to me, but—
The idea is that when I first hear an audio part, I would pretty much look away from the subtitles to let the brain test itself because you need to test the brain if it knows it. And then you listen to the sound and the sounds that does not make any sense to you, I would check the subtitles and match it, the void. And I said, okay, this is making this sound. So now I need to hear it again and catch that sound again. And then it's a lot more clear now.
So, so you listen to it first and then read.
Exactly. That's how it should be. Everyone usually on YouTube, everyone says that. I listen first and then I look at the transcript after this. That's usually what people do. I just sing it in a different way.
Oh, that is a really, actually, that's, that doesn't sound like a big thing, but I realized I don't do, I don't do that. I actually look at the subtitles as I follow along the video.
My comprehension is better than my speaking. So I do think that like, even though I'm probably not doing it in the most efficient way, like you're doing it, I actually think I'll try to practice doing it that way from now on to train your speaking because it just makes sense that it would train your speaking better, but you're still getting the reading in, but you're just doing it in a more efficient way that makes more sense.
So when you do a lesson, a video, you do spend a while. So you pause often and you just kind of like listen to it and then pause to see if you understand it. And then you move on kind of like that or—
Exactly. Because Language Reactor, if you hover over the subtitles, once it gets to the end of it, it automatically pauses and then you can click on it to reset the audio. So that's the benefit.
Migaku does pretty much, it sounds like Migaku and Language Reactor is very similar. It's just Migaku like allows you to, I don't know if Language Reactor allows you to create flashcards with the stuff, but you can do that.
On Language Reactor, you got, usually there's a membership available. I don't even have an account with them. I'm using the free version. I don't even know what they have.
So that one doesn't allow, the free version doesn't allow you to create flashcards pretty much.
No, not really.
I don't need the flashcards.
Yeah, exactly. No, I feel the same way, but I mean, I've been doing a little bit of flashcards, but it's just not my main focus. I'm definitely still doing the immersion approach, I would say.
But that, I don't know why, but that, yeah, that's really interesting to hear that you, that's the way you did it because it's just a small tweak. The matter, in my opinion, like I need to focus on my weak points, and that's it. I don't focus on the overall picture, just the weak points, and then the overall picture will fix itself with the image.
So when you said you had 10,000 hours, that's all basically pure passive listening, isn't it?
About 8,000 hours of passive. I tracked it. I do about an hour a day because an hour a day is about an hour or two, depending on the day. It might be one or two hours of active.
I would just sit there and have the transcript. So I think maybe 1,500 to 2,000 is what I really did for active. And then the rest, I just have earbuds on and I have a, on my phone, I put on the stopwatch so that it has to hit like six or seven hours. So I know that, okay, once it hits this number, I hit eight hours.
Okay, so that's how you actually track your time is through a separate timer, like, because I was gonna ask you, I was like, doesn't it bother you that you don't know exactly how many hours you've spent? Like, that's what I like about LingQ is that it does track like it's supposed to track, like how much you've actually been studying. That's why I like to stay in LingQ, but you know, it's really a mental thing. I just wanna know, but you can just use a timer to do the same thing.
Yeah, because the thing about LingQ is that if you wanna keep track of your listening hours or, you know, the overall studying hours, because I know you have 2,000, you definitely have—
Exactly, you have to actually use the app and do listening activities in LingQ to actually get that number up. But for me, if I were to directly put like seven extra hours or whatever, that number doesn't go up. It just stays there because it probably prevents people cheating and stuff to get into a higher leaderboard because people do care about the leaderboard on LingQ.
Yeah, have you seen some of the people on LingQ, the challenges? I think if I would have seen your—
Profile, I would have thought you were cheating, but like at some point, because I'm like, how do people do this? But there's this one guy, his name is like Orbyfold, or something like that on Japanese, and he has an insane, like every day, it feels like every other day, he's adding a thousand words or something crazy.
But like I asked him and he replied. He replied, he gave me like a really detailed reply of what he does. It just sounds like he listens a ton and just re-reads lessons like over and over again. But I would like to do interviews with these people too.
Like I wanna know if they're real, like, because I'm like, how do you do this? I guarantee they definitely use the keyboard. Probably, yeah. They're probably really efficient like you as well, but like, it's just crazy that you came up, you kind of came up with this all on your own.
Like. Yeah, because the more you do something, you keep always gonna question yourself, can I do this faster? Can I get more results if I do something else? You're gonna question yourself if you're making no progress. Because if you start getting to a point that you spend like two or three years and you still don't understand what the other person is saying, then the method is kind of slow.
Yeah, I mean, for sure. So how many hours do you actively study a day when you're hardcore? Just say like when you were like super. Back then?
Yeah, like when, yeah, when you were like going hard on Mandarin, I'm guessing.
Oh, I would wake up 4 a.m. every single day and then do it, do my listening until 6 a.m. So that was my routine. So 4 to 6 a.m.
I do like active listening. I'll use dramas or whatever I had back then. I would go to work. Before I get to work, I had told myself, I have about 45 minutes to get 100 known words.
So I would sit there in the break room and just try to get 100 words.
But once that's done, I would put in my earbuds, like my boss doesn't know that I put on my earbuds and I put Mandarin consistently, like autoplay means it's always gonna be a new video. I don't play the same audio. I should. Back then I did.
Eventually made me pass out just because I hear too much of the same thing. I get too bored. So I did have to take a lot of naps.
So the first tip I would give to recover from burnout is naps, 15-minute power naps, because anything beyond that, you'll get something called sleep inertia. And it's the same feeling as being drunk during the middle of the day.
Oh, I feel tired all the time. I feel like, like that's, that's honestly a problem. Like at the end of the day, like I, I make the mistake of like moving my studying to the end of the day sometimes and then I'm like burned out and like it's hard, hard to focus.
Actually, I actually do my listening extra at night because I realized that my tolerance is higher on at night, but in the morning to get, to make sure you get everything done because sometimes you might not able to do it at night. So you might as well try to get do in the morning so you don't have to worry about for the rest of the day.
Yeah, it's a priority thing too. Like, you know, if you really wanna do something, you'll do it. I, I spent two to three hours back then of active as in listening and try to get learn words because sometimes at night I will go, because back then, back in my day during the Mandarin era, I shoot for a thousand or 2,000 known words a week.
So I was always number one in the, on the active challenge. So people probably thought I was cheating because they always noticed me and they asked me questions once in a while, but I was always number one on the chart because I, I was the only one that gets like 2,000 because getting 2,000 known words a week is actually really hard for Mandarin unless you're cheating or you're a native speaker.
Does that say 18 million words of reading? I think it does. I'm looking, I'm looking at your, I'm looking at your Mandarin stats right now.
Yeah, so 100. Yeah, 6 million reading. The total, total, yeah.
Oh, wait. It matches according to how many known words you have. So I'm at advanced eight and you generally, in this case, I read 6 million out of the requirement of 1.8 million to be what you call it as advanced eight.
Oh, okay. Yeah, see, there's a big discrepancy there because, but it makes sense the way you explained to me how you do it.
See, like the guy, the guy that I was talking about for Japanese, who's like high up there, like basically number one over a hundred and he's even past you on, on, on Japanese.
It's fine. I mean, yeah, I mean, you're way past me. Everyone's way past me, but he's like going at an insane rate and his, but his words of reading are like astronomical. So he, I think.
18 million. It's like, it, no, it's like, I think, I mean, it's probably at 15 million now.
Yeah, my words of reading are actually are higher. I'm pretty sure because like I said, I do everything inside LingQ. I don't do it outside. So that makes sense that you don't have as much reading.
Let's see.
Yeah. I would say, okay, my, my number of reading in terms of how many words I read, it's a couple of falls. But in reality, because I do the skipping the known words, I probably have maybe like 400, 500,000 actual reading words. And then the rest is just me skipping known words.
Oh, actually I thought I had more. We have the same pretty much. I have 6 million.
I remember like, there's this one interview I've rewatched and I re-listened to all the time to try to kind of like make sure I understand all of it. I don't know why, but I just kind of got hyper-focused on this one video and I used to know, I remember knowing nothing. Everything was blue. Everything was yellow and blue. And then, you know, now it's all white.
So like seeing that, even if I'm not doing it as effectively, it's still very encouraging, you know.
Usually what people tend to realize that motivation is required in the beginning, but once you get results, that takes over. You don't need to care about motivation because the results is your motivation.
Yeah, it becomes like a self-fulfilling cycle, like the wheel thing you were kind of talking about. Like it's the more progress you make, it fills your, you want to continue because of it. You know, and it sounds like that's exactly what you've done.
So how do you divide, and this is the same thing I wanted, I should have asked this Steve as well. Like how do you divide your languages? Like how do you even keep up with it all?
Yeah, I actually had this answer prepared. I pretty much just, for example, I have two hours, I'll split it by 10. So generally I spend about 10 minutes per language, 10 to 15, depending on level.
But because I, my cycle now is that, okay, my efficiency is at the max, so I pretty much, I can probably do a five-minute YouTube clip that might match a Right.
Especially grammar-wise. So I think, I don't know a lot about Mandarin, but I assume it's, is it more similar to English than it is to Japanese, or?
Mandarin is the same as English, the grammar. That's why it's so, yeah, because in the endgame, Mandarin is the easiest language of all three, but in the beginning, probably Korean is the easiest.
So I would say that in the long term, grammar is the only thing that holds you back from there on. So the more grammar you have to figure out, the more complex it gets.
But Mandarin is like super easy once you're there, because I call Mandarin a long-term language. The beginning sucks, but the moment you're there, now everything just snowballs, like, multiplied by 10, but Japanese, Korean, you're pretty much still stuck at a certain slope, and it doesn't increase until, actually, it doesn't really increase at all, because there's always new rules that you have to learn.
Would you say Japanese is harder than Chinese?
Oh, way better. Yeah, it's a lot harder for an English speaker.
Really? That makes me feel better. That makes me feel a lot better to hear that.
It's very hard, because when you have to start speaking, oh God, because listening, okay, that takes time to get used to, but speaking, you're gonna have to figure out which word goes where, because I don't study grammar, so technically, the only way to do this is you have to put words together and it has to make sense, because Mandarin, you can put English words and replace it with Mandarin words, and that works, but Japanese, you have to flip everything backwards, and now you officially have another barrier to speaking is the grammar system.
Exactly, yeah. So basically, you will need like a whole separate session just to learn how to speak and train the grammar.
I don't train grammar, but I probably should.
What about other languages? I mean, you have 10, so is there any other languages that have weird grammar like Japanese?
No.
Really?
No, there's...
Is it really that crazy? I didn't know that.
All Romance languages is the same as English, like Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian. They're literally the same thing as English. It's a lot easier.
Vietnamese, what about that one? What kind of script do they use for that? Is it English? Like a Roman alphabet?
Yeah. Roman alphabet. It's pretty much, you ever see a Chinese pinyin? It's literally that. That's the language.
Okay. All right. That makes more sense now.
But Russian, though, I don't think you... Do you have Russian on here?
