I don't believe in linguistic genius.
22 November 2017 [link youtube]
Reflections on language-learning, philosophical and not-so-philosophical.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
so I have said before that I'm always
delighted to discover that I'm wrong when I find out that I've been wrong about something it means I'm learning so I may be wrong about what I'm about to say and opening up this video my honest opinion is that nobody is a linguistic genius and what do I mean by this I think it is a proven fact there are some human beings who are born with an extraordinary innate ability in mathematics that is not the result of education that they start off before receiving mathematical education with a very very high level of ability to do computations including geometric computations with a view and this is sometimes shown with children sometimes shown was shown with so-called idiot savant people with no formal education that this has been demonstrated time and time again but and I think it's it's an easy thing for people imagine there's a there's a parallel in languages perhaps because we feel that some of us have extraordinary difficulty in learning languages that there were a lot of people out there who are extraordinarily gifted that there's kind of a separate class of humanity parallel to math geniuses that unlike Western geniuses my honest opinion is that this does not exist every case I've encountered where say one person described another as linguistic genius and I then met the person face-to-face and talk to them or even when this was said to me and I then looked at their written work their publications or their YouTube channel now with the Internet these kinds of illusions are easier and easier to deflate what I found was if you just read their own description of how much they studied for how many years with what methods because these people very often want to document exactly what I would use that there's there's really no genius there obviously using exactly the same methods one person is going to get 10% better results than another 20% maybe even 50% and that may be partly due to the fact that the methods are not good for the particular person it'll partly due to you know the level of motivation what-have-you but when you think about what's really involved in language learning I feel pretty confident at this stage of my life after having studied so many different languages from Nakia not just different languages but different languages from different language families having studied most of them as an autodidact some with classroom methods learning written language so on and so forth for pretty much all of them doing a lot of language research a lot of language learning and a lot of language teaching I feel pretty confident that there really are no shortcuts neither in terms of the work you're doing on paper you know in front of your eyes outside of your body nor in terms of the internal component of it you know the mirror of the mind of what you're doing your mind like if you just think about vocabulary acquisition vocabulary acquisition is not like balancing a complex equation it's not like looking at a rhythm algebra arithmetic trigonometry there's really a challenge for most most of us looking at a complex equation understanding what's going on there I completely understand how another person may be able to intuitively grasp and make use of that information much more rapidly than I can in terms of the kind of progress you have to make in complex geometry what have you there's a mode of thinking there that is in no way comparable to the challenge I had when I was learning Korean a Jib way and I had to memorize the names of the months there are 12 months memorize the names of the months memorize the names of the season learn how to make a sentence it's too hard outside it's too cold outside whatever your methods are the kind of information your brain is having to acquire there which is something any imbecile can do of course small children learn language you serve you know you learn language when you're only two years old you're very mentally simple but also people who have really severe mental disabilities and brain injuries can learn new languages too it's not really so much about higher abstract reasoning or what have you but there is a process there is a matter of doing the work to learn new vocabulary and then practice using the vocabulary in different contexts of course trying to make senses trying to make yourself understood etc etc I don't see any any shortcuts there now okay my girlfriend can jump any time but this is a really my issue not her issue she just started learning Chinese and for that you know she's not someone who has a ton of experience it was amazing when we met somebody from Spain and he was like yeah it's normal like for people in Europe to know like three languages because and where I'm from in America people know one language maybe a little bit of language right so yeah this is true but the people in Europe is talking but they normally know maybe four languages that are very closely related so if you know Spanish and French and English these are cognate languages so the word elevator is going to be almost identical in all of them or maybe they also know Italian you know even uh you know I remember when we were in Italy I was going through the the dictionary room was just blew my mind especially when you got into technical language different types of medical tests medicines related things like computers elevators technology is this huge amount of vocabulary was either identical to English read one or two vowels different you know slightly different spelling so the extent to which those languages are cognate has to be taken to consideration I've experienced learning English I've experienced learning Chinese experience learning Japanese completely separate language family it's not just languages I've experienced working on Sri Lankan pally pally in the cinah Lee's tradition Polly in Myanmar Laos Thailand Cambodia and then the modern languages so Cambodian is a member of a totally different language family from Thai even though the next door one is mon khmer when it's time could die lotion etc and then in north america has already mentioned you know would you point create so when you have that kind of profoundly alien language gap the word for elevator in chinese has no resemblance to the word replicate or any much nothing you know even um you know french lesya allah so the name of this channel about the CL right and in English we have ceiling it is actually the same etymology they are cognate you know there are links even when they're not completely obvious so that is that is true there are many people in Western Europe who at least pick up a smattering of several languages or they are closer at it and that can mask what the real challenges are in in learning a new language you know when I have seen people celebrated on the Internet as linguistic geniuses have looked into a couple of them what I find is all they've done is acquire freeze book knowledge of a language through repetition so phrase book knowledge is like very specific you're not studying etymology you know stating the components of words you're probably not studying grammar probably not learning reading or writing ability because if you learn whole phrases a lot of people hype that that learning whole phrases but if you learn only whole phrases then your ability to read in the target language is very very limited because you're recognizing whole street phrase is not a visual word so you need it all right you need to work in to learn words word components and so and the phrases you need to do it all you can't just do phrases and there are people right now selling the language education package saying learn the language in six months that's exactly their point so I find there people who have just memorized phrases from phrase books and they've drilled them again and again where and they know enough about linguistics that their phonetics are accurate phonological II they are saying the words correctly so it's possible for them after only studying Cambodian for three months to walk up to a Cambodian person on the street and say two phrases that sound sound pretty accurate yeah I don't think that they could succeed in a conversation because you never know what somebody's going to say in response you know like I've had that happen to me with Chinese like I'll just you know right to go to the bunch I'll be like do you have these buns and yes or no right right maybe maybe they say some comp well we don't have any yet but maybe if you come back at six o'clock all right well in in terms of listening comprehension you never get to level 1 through phrasebook knowledge of a language because level one really has to deal with scanning the language you're hearing breaking it down into units of meaning which in most cases is words it's not an all language like in Korean a jib way it's actually in create a jib way it's a little bit different than it is in Chinese I'm not surprised there but even in Japanese it's totally different from is in Chinese when listening what are the word boundaries you listen for good even in English well you know the word English is an example it starts with Eng and that can sound like the ending of a verb before it right so the e and is that part of the end of one word or part of the you know start of the next word now of course in a need in the language that's where native speakers and we're not even aware that our minds are doing that when you start studying a totally alien language whether it's Chinese or a jib way or something that's a real process where somebody says something to you in Chinese and it just sounds like bah bah bah and you're breaking it into distinct units of meaning which may be individual words may not a lot of words are just ones yes yes and I mean you see Thai is an interesting intermediate position because ty has all this Buddhist influence we were looking today earlier that that video I did at a at a railway station here in China something in the Thai language and in lotion also so train station is cet'aeni lot fie so a lot there's a lot there to work with you're not gonna miss it you and me Chinese maybe you're gonna get whole church an maybe you're just gonna get Jan like maybe that's and Jan by the way it's written opinion with a Z H so depending on where you are who you talking to it could be pronounced like a J saying the consonant it could be more like a Zed sound you know like there's a lot of idiolect and dialect variation even with that one well so you know station is just one syllable in Chinese that's all you got to work with yeah so the the scanning and listening and listening part of it but but my fundamental feeling what language I am actually a bit of I guess you'd say a biological nihilist when it comes to language there's a lot of Mythology about language there's a lot of people people make up these stories oh well children are natural English stick geniuses you can learn so much between 0 H 0 and H 6 no when kids get to H 6 they speak English like a lisping six-year-old they struggle to make sense as they struggle to form complex thoughts it is not easy for six-year-olds to speak even their first language it's really not you may not have a clear enough memory of your own childhood how hard it was to be convincing how hard it was to present complex thoughts as a six-year-old they don't learn that much in six years and you if you go now and study Chinese for six years at the end of that process you don't want to speak like a Chinese six year old either you know I mean you don't you don't so you know there's a lot of mythology that way I look at human language as something in terms of evolution it's partly just an accident created by breastfeeding the actual cavity in our mouth that we use to form these complex sounds is a cavity created by the fact that breastfeeding the fact that we can use our lips in this manner which for example a reptile can't do to make these complex sounds reptiles can make noise it's down on their throat but they can't man that that ooh and these other comforts the use of our the roof of our mouth that cavity the shape of our lips and so on which even a very different animal like a wolf they have that because of wolves also breast feed and these lizards I'm talking about don't you know I'm saying monitor lizards don't have this kind of complex vocalization abilities because I learned about how old speech works but I didn't well right so yeah like I I took a class on like speech production and how it actually works anatomically but right why why yeah why did we have all this why do we have all same beyond the ability to scream for help or what you know many animals in the wild have they can give a few different signals but why do we have this really refined and complex set of speech organs it's actually related to breast feeding and anatomically so it's a bit of an accident of nature that way uh but then beyond that of course we mostly talk about the origins of purpose of language in very culturally Laden ways well as you say you know I in a sense I advocate for bilingualism my own daughter is growing up at least bilingual if not speaking three or four languages but she has two core languages she's learning in parallel English and French and she wants to study Chinese and she's trying to learn Chinese and she's evidently getting some influence from yet some other languages in Europe we won't mention her but you know she's because she was learning German until recently - right so it was three languages already plus Chinese but anyway I do think there really is a level on which we should should is the wrong word we we would learn language just through mimicry and just one language and carry that around with us our whole lives and it is really something unnatural we're pushing ourselves into when we try to learn a whole parallel set of vocabulary in a foreign language system it's not something that comes to us easily something comes to us naturally and I think it's actually debatable whether or not math comes to us naturally or whether or not math comes to some of us naturally you know what I mean there may be an innate instinct or a whole complex group of innate instincts involved in abstract geometry and trigonometry and calculus and algebra there may be you know I mean but I think definitely you have to have the kind of alter humility to say well biologically we have a certain capacity just by during this period of breastfeeding and being dependent on our parents which lasts a lot longer for us than most other mammals we hang around the adults and we pick up their language through mimicry and then we carry that capacity with us you know but there's definitely something unnatural sitting down with a deck of cue cards and at age 39 or something starting on a whole new language and trying to activate that infantile part of your brain trying to stimulate that and be motivated and focused and and get those results now of course you can I am living proof you can learn a whole bunch of languages but I mean I guess what's so beguiling with the idea of linguistic genius and as some people have said it about me I mean I met people who said that I was a linguist a genius and I normally sat down them and just talk through how many hours per day and with what methods how I learned the languages whatever it was they impressed with whether it was Patty or what-have-you assuming like Polly as an example most people who learn Polly do not learn vocabulary Polly is a language like ancient Greek or most Orwell or Latin or what-have-you where most people learn it in a very artificial classroom chalkboard way and I've pointed out to people look the reason why you perceive me as linguistic genius what I'm doing here is not that hard it's not that sophisticated I just actually memorized thousands of words of vocabulary which is what you would do for French or Spanish or any modern language any normal high school study it's just most people working on oh don't they just learned some rules of grammar and kind of scrape up with every category so maybe there are different things people perceive as genius contextually and I mean it's look let's be honest about how easiest mistress either we met my mom my mom had not seen me in 15 years we met my mom the last time my mom met me I probably spoke like one language I don't either but you know I'd started studying I guess it started studying Cambodian you know but last time I mom that mean my whole life was so different I started studying some languages you know and now my mom meets me and I seemingly speak totally fluent Chinese with the waitress right now in reality what I say to the waitress like there was a little bit of I had to explain no no no she wants two cups of tea my mom wanted two cups of tea not one she wants English style tea not Chinese style tea so there was a little bit of chatter back and forth with the wage was the waitress could understand everything I said Jenny I can understand what they said but I mean this is you know this is not remotely and this is not an impressive use of language when you really think about it but my mom has no ability to scrutinize that she's just like wow she's seen me for the first time in 15 years and I'm I'm able to speak Chinese I apparently learned Chinese in just seven months right which there's some truth to you know my Chinese handwriting looks very impressive especially if the person looking at it doesn't know anything about Chinese right and I mean just now I've been writing in lotion my lotion hand rising elope writing what's amazing which which is a shock to me too I haven't read or written that language for 10 or 11 years and I'm able to write this language and it looks fantastic but again what does this what does really mean so it's it's really easy for someone for an outside observer to massively overestimate your accomplishments in a language especially if your method of practice is to just rehearse phrasebook Yuka's phrase book phrase book usage it's a whole phrase it make sense to the native speaker you're talking to and so on but phrase book memorization it won't even give you reading comprehension and it won't lead you into advanced listening comprehension which is the hardest thing to buy because in university level courses you don't you don't really work on listening comprehension F and so on so yeah ya know just from the people that I knew in college those who were more advanced in German I was learning German sure it was pretty obvious to me that they just spent more time there's a famous scientific study I mean you guys may know this now that I describe it it was quoted in a famous book it got more famous the more it was quoted I don't really even know if I believe this but there was a famous study that claimed there's no such thing as as musical genius and it claimed this by looking at they actually studied and tracked the number of hours different music students to use to rehearse and their thesis was know what's being perceived as musical genius is actually just the musicians who are doing like 20 hours of rehearsal more per week we're putting in tons of time and effort and that's being perceived as an a genius and the other students were they tracked them through the same educational program they're doing like less than half as much prep and rehearsal and they're not being perceived as genius so that's that's nearest fact but I I'm skeptical that I think I think there is an argument that musical genius exists in the same way that your ability to learn languages is helped by your memory you have a good memory and also by your drawing ability your artistic you have an artistic mind in that same way I think people are I think there are many things I can help people improve your musical abilities a lot of people just have terrible pitch like they cannot write you know there's a form of listening comprehension of all the music people don't have rhythm right to certain extent like yeah - is there an extent there are qualities that can make you more of it musically but including also just passion and Verve and tenacity and wanting it wanting it more what motivates you I mean I learned a lot of pardon me I learned a lot of Chinese in seven months but I'm also honest to the people that I wasn't highly motivated I didn't want to learn Chinese MIT I'm not gonna get in the whole autobuyer if it was but actually I was dragging my feet I wasn't trying my hardest the Chinese whereas I did add the experience of really trying my hardest at some other languages a study where I was giving it 110 percent and I know how different that feels and if the results are but if I just stick with vocabulary and vocabulary really is the core of learning a new language there's no escaping it most people okay not most academics are very motivated to study and teach grammar because grammar is finite grammar is intellectually sophisticated and grammar is something gets suited to the lecture format in university you can stand in front of a chalkboard give intelligent station camera but vocabulary is way more important problems vocabulary is infinite it's frustrating it's a lot you know I don't think there is any shortcut for vocabulary memorization vocabulary drill and you know even with vocabulary there are the four elements listening comprehension speaking cooperation you know speaking ability and you know reading and writing and so on and then learning how it's used in a sentence and I what isn't for every language just that core function of the human mind which we all do as infants and you know you can do more effectively until this understand that core issue of vocabulary acquisition I don't think there is any genius for it over there is any shortcut and I said this about baking recently you know I don't think anyone's really interested in whether or not you're nobody's are leaders in your ideas or theory of baking they're interested in whether or not you bake you know I mean there is a whether actually made a good cake or a good bread and they can buy it or whatever you know I mean it's all about execution there's very little I mean language is also one of those things I like to philosophize about it I enjoy kind of philosophy of language but the bulk of the task ahead of you it really is just question of whether or not you you do that work and if you can find sources that are honest including autobiographies like autobiographies of great men have highly accomplished people that really break down for you how language how they studied it honestly I think you're gonna find that even the people who are perceived as linguistic geniuses actually they deal with exactly the same stumbling blocks exactly the same I feel struggle and they get approximately the same outcomes for the same methods maybe 10% change major 20% difference but yeah I mean maybe this is a great equalizer among humanity and maybe we overlook that fact because of some unique conditions like dyslexia and how that clouds are thinking about what language acquisition hasn't want to consist of that's what I got to say
delighted to discover that I'm wrong when I find out that I've been wrong about something it means I'm learning so I may be wrong about what I'm about to say and opening up this video my honest opinion is that nobody is a linguistic genius and what do I mean by this I think it is a proven fact there are some human beings who are born with an extraordinary innate ability in mathematics that is not the result of education that they start off before receiving mathematical education with a very very high level of ability to do computations including geometric computations with a view and this is sometimes shown with children sometimes shown was shown with so-called idiot savant people with no formal education that this has been demonstrated time and time again but and I think it's it's an easy thing for people imagine there's a there's a parallel in languages perhaps because we feel that some of us have extraordinary difficulty in learning languages that there were a lot of people out there who are extraordinarily gifted that there's kind of a separate class of humanity parallel to math geniuses that unlike Western geniuses my honest opinion is that this does not exist every case I've encountered where say one person described another as linguistic genius and I then met the person face-to-face and talk to them or even when this was said to me and I then looked at their written work their publications or their YouTube channel now with the Internet these kinds of illusions are easier and easier to deflate what I found was if you just read their own description of how much they studied for how many years with what methods because these people very often want to document exactly what I would use that there's there's really no genius there obviously using exactly the same methods one person is going to get 10% better results than another 20% maybe even 50% and that may be partly due to the fact that the methods are not good for the particular person it'll partly due to you know the level of motivation what-have-you but when you think about what's really involved in language learning I feel pretty confident at this stage of my life after having studied so many different languages from Nakia not just different languages but different languages from different language families having studied most of them as an autodidact some with classroom methods learning written language so on and so forth for pretty much all of them doing a lot of language research a lot of language learning and a lot of language teaching I feel pretty confident that there really are no shortcuts neither in terms of the work you're doing on paper you know in front of your eyes outside of your body nor in terms of the internal component of it you know the mirror of the mind of what you're doing your mind like if you just think about vocabulary acquisition vocabulary acquisition is not like balancing a complex equation it's not like looking at a rhythm algebra arithmetic trigonometry there's really a challenge for most most of us looking at a complex equation understanding what's going on there I completely understand how another person may be able to intuitively grasp and make use of that information much more rapidly than I can in terms of the kind of progress you have to make in complex geometry what have you there's a mode of thinking there that is in no way comparable to the challenge I had when I was learning Korean a Jib way and I had to memorize the names of the months there are 12 months memorize the names of the months memorize the names of the season learn how to make a sentence it's too hard outside it's too cold outside whatever your methods are the kind of information your brain is having to acquire there which is something any imbecile can do of course small children learn language you serve you know you learn language when you're only two years old you're very mentally simple but also people who have really severe mental disabilities and brain injuries can learn new languages too it's not really so much about higher abstract reasoning or what have you but there is a process there is a matter of doing the work to learn new vocabulary and then practice using the vocabulary in different contexts of course trying to make senses trying to make yourself understood etc etc I don't see any any shortcuts there now okay my girlfriend can jump any time but this is a really my issue not her issue she just started learning Chinese and for that you know she's not someone who has a ton of experience it was amazing when we met somebody from Spain and he was like yeah it's normal like for people in Europe to know like three languages because and where I'm from in America people know one language maybe a little bit of language right so yeah this is true but the people in Europe is talking but they normally know maybe four languages that are very closely related so if you know Spanish and French and English these are cognate languages so the word elevator is going to be almost identical in all of them or maybe they also know Italian you know even uh you know I remember when we were in Italy I was going through the the dictionary room was just blew my mind especially when you got into technical language different types of medical tests medicines related things like computers elevators technology is this huge amount of vocabulary was either identical to English read one or two vowels different you know slightly different spelling so the extent to which those languages are cognate has to be taken to consideration I've experienced learning English I've experienced learning Chinese experience learning Japanese completely separate language family it's not just languages I've experienced working on Sri Lankan pally pally in the cinah Lee's tradition Polly in Myanmar Laos Thailand Cambodia and then the modern languages so Cambodian is a member of a totally different language family from Thai even though the next door one is mon khmer when it's time could die lotion etc and then in north america has already mentioned you know would you point create so when you have that kind of profoundly alien language gap the word for elevator in chinese has no resemblance to the word replicate or any much nothing you know even um you know french lesya allah so the name of this channel about the CL right and in English we have ceiling it is actually the same etymology they are cognate you know there are links even when they're not completely obvious so that is that is true there are many people in Western Europe who at least pick up a smattering of several languages or they are closer at it and that can mask what the real challenges are in in learning a new language you know when I have seen people celebrated on the Internet as linguistic geniuses have looked into a couple of them what I find is all they've done is acquire freeze book knowledge of a language through repetition so phrase book knowledge is like very specific you're not studying etymology you know stating the components of words you're probably not studying grammar probably not learning reading or writing ability because if you learn whole phrases a lot of people hype that that learning whole phrases but if you learn only whole phrases then your ability to read in the target language is very very limited because you're recognizing whole street phrase is not a visual word so you need it all right you need to work in to learn words word components and so and the phrases you need to do it all you can't just do phrases and there are people right now selling the language education package saying learn the language in six months that's exactly their point so I find there people who have just memorized phrases from phrase books and they've drilled them again and again where and they know enough about linguistics that their phonetics are accurate phonological II they are saying the words correctly so it's possible for them after only studying Cambodian for three months to walk up to a Cambodian person on the street and say two phrases that sound sound pretty accurate yeah I don't think that they could succeed in a conversation because you never know what somebody's going to say in response you know like I've had that happen to me with Chinese like I'll just you know right to go to the bunch I'll be like do you have these buns and yes or no right right maybe maybe they say some comp well we don't have any yet but maybe if you come back at six o'clock all right well in in terms of listening comprehension you never get to level 1 through phrasebook knowledge of a language because level one really has to deal with scanning the language you're hearing breaking it down into units of meaning which in most cases is words it's not an all language like in Korean a jib way it's actually in create a jib way it's a little bit different than it is in Chinese I'm not surprised there but even in Japanese it's totally different from is in Chinese when listening what are the word boundaries you listen for good even in English well you know the word English is an example it starts with Eng and that can sound like the ending of a verb before it right so the e and is that part of the end of one word or part of the you know start of the next word now of course in a need in the language that's where native speakers and we're not even aware that our minds are doing that when you start studying a totally alien language whether it's Chinese or a jib way or something that's a real process where somebody says something to you in Chinese and it just sounds like bah bah bah and you're breaking it into distinct units of meaning which may be individual words may not a lot of words are just ones yes yes and I mean you see Thai is an interesting intermediate position because ty has all this Buddhist influence we were looking today earlier that that video I did at a at a railway station here in China something in the Thai language and in lotion also so train station is cet'aeni lot fie so a lot there's a lot there to work with you're not gonna miss it you and me Chinese maybe you're gonna get whole church an maybe you're just gonna get Jan like maybe that's and Jan by the way it's written opinion with a Z H so depending on where you are who you talking to it could be pronounced like a J saying the consonant it could be more like a Zed sound you know like there's a lot of idiolect and dialect variation even with that one well so you know station is just one syllable in Chinese that's all you got to work with yeah so the the scanning and listening and listening part of it but but my fundamental feeling what language I am actually a bit of I guess you'd say a biological nihilist when it comes to language there's a lot of Mythology about language there's a lot of people people make up these stories oh well children are natural English stick geniuses you can learn so much between 0 H 0 and H 6 no when kids get to H 6 they speak English like a lisping six-year-old they struggle to make sense as they struggle to form complex thoughts it is not easy for six-year-olds to speak even their first language it's really not you may not have a clear enough memory of your own childhood how hard it was to be convincing how hard it was to present complex thoughts as a six-year-old they don't learn that much in six years and you if you go now and study Chinese for six years at the end of that process you don't want to speak like a Chinese six year old either you know I mean you don't you don't so you know there's a lot of mythology that way I look at human language as something in terms of evolution it's partly just an accident created by breastfeeding the actual cavity in our mouth that we use to form these complex sounds is a cavity created by the fact that breastfeeding the fact that we can use our lips in this manner which for example a reptile can't do to make these complex sounds reptiles can make noise it's down on their throat but they can't man that that ooh and these other comforts the use of our the roof of our mouth that cavity the shape of our lips and so on which even a very different animal like a wolf they have that because of wolves also breast feed and these lizards I'm talking about don't you know I'm saying monitor lizards don't have this kind of complex vocalization abilities because I learned about how old speech works but I didn't well right so yeah like I I took a class on like speech production and how it actually works anatomically but right why why yeah why did we have all this why do we have all same beyond the ability to scream for help or what you know many animals in the wild have they can give a few different signals but why do we have this really refined and complex set of speech organs it's actually related to breast feeding and anatomically so it's a bit of an accident of nature that way uh but then beyond that of course we mostly talk about the origins of purpose of language in very culturally Laden ways well as you say you know I in a sense I advocate for bilingualism my own daughter is growing up at least bilingual if not speaking three or four languages but she has two core languages she's learning in parallel English and French and she wants to study Chinese and she's trying to learn Chinese and she's evidently getting some influence from yet some other languages in Europe we won't mention her but you know she's because she was learning German until recently - right so it was three languages already plus Chinese but anyway I do think there really is a level on which we should should is the wrong word we we would learn language just through mimicry and just one language and carry that around with us our whole lives and it is really something unnatural we're pushing ourselves into when we try to learn a whole parallel set of vocabulary in a foreign language system it's not something that comes to us easily something comes to us naturally and I think it's actually debatable whether or not math comes to us naturally or whether or not math comes to some of us naturally you know what I mean there may be an innate instinct or a whole complex group of innate instincts involved in abstract geometry and trigonometry and calculus and algebra there may be you know I mean but I think definitely you have to have the kind of alter humility to say well biologically we have a certain capacity just by during this period of breastfeeding and being dependent on our parents which lasts a lot longer for us than most other mammals we hang around the adults and we pick up their language through mimicry and then we carry that capacity with us you know but there's definitely something unnatural sitting down with a deck of cue cards and at age 39 or something starting on a whole new language and trying to activate that infantile part of your brain trying to stimulate that and be motivated and focused and and get those results now of course you can I am living proof you can learn a whole bunch of languages but I mean I guess what's so beguiling with the idea of linguistic genius and as some people have said it about me I mean I met people who said that I was a linguist a genius and I normally sat down them and just talk through how many hours per day and with what methods how I learned the languages whatever it was they impressed with whether it was Patty or what-have-you assuming like Polly as an example most people who learn Polly do not learn vocabulary Polly is a language like ancient Greek or most Orwell or Latin or what-have-you where most people learn it in a very artificial classroom chalkboard way and I've pointed out to people look the reason why you perceive me as linguistic genius what I'm doing here is not that hard it's not that sophisticated I just actually memorized thousands of words of vocabulary which is what you would do for French or Spanish or any modern language any normal high school study it's just most people working on oh don't they just learned some rules of grammar and kind of scrape up with every category so maybe there are different things people perceive as genius contextually and I mean it's look let's be honest about how easiest mistress either we met my mom my mom had not seen me in 15 years we met my mom the last time my mom met me I probably spoke like one language I don't either but you know I'd started studying I guess it started studying Cambodian you know but last time I mom that mean my whole life was so different I started studying some languages you know and now my mom meets me and I seemingly speak totally fluent Chinese with the waitress right now in reality what I say to the waitress like there was a little bit of I had to explain no no no she wants two cups of tea my mom wanted two cups of tea not one she wants English style tea not Chinese style tea so there was a little bit of chatter back and forth with the wage was the waitress could understand everything I said Jenny I can understand what they said but I mean this is you know this is not remotely and this is not an impressive use of language when you really think about it but my mom has no ability to scrutinize that she's just like wow she's seen me for the first time in 15 years and I'm I'm able to speak Chinese I apparently learned Chinese in just seven months right which there's some truth to you know my Chinese handwriting looks very impressive especially if the person looking at it doesn't know anything about Chinese right and I mean just now I've been writing in lotion my lotion hand rising elope writing what's amazing which which is a shock to me too I haven't read or written that language for 10 or 11 years and I'm able to write this language and it looks fantastic but again what does this what does really mean so it's it's really easy for someone for an outside observer to massively overestimate your accomplishments in a language especially if your method of practice is to just rehearse phrasebook Yuka's phrase book phrase book usage it's a whole phrase it make sense to the native speaker you're talking to and so on but phrase book memorization it won't even give you reading comprehension and it won't lead you into advanced listening comprehension which is the hardest thing to buy because in university level courses you don't you don't really work on listening comprehension F and so on so yeah ya know just from the people that I knew in college those who were more advanced in German I was learning German sure it was pretty obvious to me that they just spent more time there's a famous scientific study I mean you guys may know this now that I describe it it was quoted in a famous book it got more famous the more it was quoted I don't really even know if I believe this but there was a famous study that claimed there's no such thing as as musical genius and it claimed this by looking at they actually studied and tracked the number of hours different music students to use to rehearse and their thesis was know what's being perceived as musical genius is actually just the musicians who are doing like 20 hours of rehearsal more per week we're putting in tons of time and effort and that's being perceived as an a genius and the other students were they tracked them through the same educational program they're doing like less than half as much prep and rehearsal and they're not being perceived as genius so that's that's nearest fact but I I'm skeptical that I think I think there is an argument that musical genius exists in the same way that your ability to learn languages is helped by your memory you have a good memory and also by your drawing ability your artistic you have an artistic mind in that same way I think people are I think there are many things I can help people improve your musical abilities a lot of people just have terrible pitch like they cannot write you know there's a form of listening comprehension of all the music people don't have rhythm right to certain extent like yeah - is there an extent there are qualities that can make you more of it musically but including also just passion and Verve and tenacity and wanting it wanting it more what motivates you I mean I learned a lot of pardon me I learned a lot of Chinese in seven months but I'm also honest to the people that I wasn't highly motivated I didn't want to learn Chinese MIT I'm not gonna get in the whole autobuyer if it was but actually I was dragging my feet I wasn't trying my hardest the Chinese whereas I did add the experience of really trying my hardest at some other languages a study where I was giving it 110 percent and I know how different that feels and if the results are but if I just stick with vocabulary and vocabulary really is the core of learning a new language there's no escaping it most people okay not most academics are very motivated to study and teach grammar because grammar is finite grammar is intellectually sophisticated and grammar is something gets suited to the lecture format in university you can stand in front of a chalkboard give intelligent station camera but vocabulary is way more important problems vocabulary is infinite it's frustrating it's a lot you know I don't think there is any shortcut for vocabulary memorization vocabulary drill and you know even with vocabulary there are the four elements listening comprehension speaking cooperation you know speaking ability and you know reading and writing and so on and then learning how it's used in a sentence and I what isn't for every language just that core function of the human mind which we all do as infants and you know you can do more effectively until this understand that core issue of vocabulary acquisition I don't think there is any genius for it over there is any shortcut and I said this about baking recently you know I don't think anyone's really interested in whether or not you're nobody's are leaders in your ideas or theory of baking they're interested in whether or not you bake you know I mean there is a whether actually made a good cake or a good bread and they can buy it or whatever you know I mean it's all about execution there's very little I mean language is also one of those things I like to philosophize about it I enjoy kind of philosophy of language but the bulk of the task ahead of you it really is just question of whether or not you you do that work and if you can find sources that are honest including autobiographies like autobiographies of great men have highly accomplished people that really break down for you how language how they studied it honestly I think you're gonna find that even the people who are perceived as linguistic geniuses actually they deal with exactly the same stumbling blocks exactly the same I feel struggle and they get approximately the same outcomes for the same methods maybe 10% change major 20% difference but yeah I mean maybe this is a great equalizer among humanity and maybe we overlook that fact because of some unique conditions like dyslexia and how that clouds are thinking about what language acquisition hasn't want to consist of that's what I got to say