Learning Languages: ADVICE NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR.

what we have here is a completely normal
language textbook for a completely normal language but the advice I'm about to give you is wildly abnormal is totally unlike anything you're gonna hear on YouTube or I think anything you're gonna find via the internet as it has now been restructured and reordered by social media it's a normal text book it's got cartoons it's got an audio CD it's got lists of vocabulary it's got little songs for you to sing really in this case it's Chinese but it's not so different from a textbook you might have for any other language right now I'm helping my girlfriend learn Chinese and she's starting from a beginners level what's the best possible advice I could give her on how to start with this textbook turn to the appendix tear it out of the book write out the entire list of vocabulary and memorize every single word before you start on page one of chapter one I doubt that any university professor has ever suggest this to you any high school teacher any internet personality who's out here peddling advice on how to make learning languages quick and easy and fun and painless and that's the problem learning languages is not quick it's not easy it's not fun and it's not painless I have many years of experience with learning and teaching languages and I now have many years of experience watching the myth-making process that goes on here on YouTube and what sitter's to me is parallel to the fitness world people giving you advice on how to lose body fat and gain muscle the vast majority of people who are selling you myths of fast and easy language learning they don't make any money out of it they're not selling you an application they're not selling you a book they're not selling you a course what's the time they don't even have a website most time they're not even making really any money out of YouTube they're just giving you they're telling you what you want to hear you don't want to hear that gaining muscle with the gym is gonna be physically painful and physically exhausting that it's gonna ruin your night sleep make you wake up feeling like crap that you're gonna be standing at your job with unbelievable pain in your back in your arms and your legs that you're gonna literally collapse on the floor of the gym and lie there out of breath nobody wants to hear that and indeed even in video format here on YouTube most of the time you don't see that I had a few little anecdotal encounters with people recently that reminded me of this side of the fitness game and how rare it is for people to even be honest about it when they're talking about their own process of how they lost weight how they gain muscle etc etc just omitting pain just omitting lost nights of sleep when you couldn't sleep well because of muscle stiffness or muscle all that stuff is left out and there's a really odd comparison to be made here because one of the most compelling myths in language teaching and language acquisition is ultimately what we would call a naturalistic fallacy now not all uses of the concept of nature are fallacious but suppose someone were to say to you the best way for you to lose body fat and gain muscle is to hike up and down mountains and to climb trees and to walk around in the forest carrying a bow and arrow and shoot the bow and arrow of things because that's what our ancient ancestors did that's natural you might find that convincing you might look at the unnatural steel-cage at your gym and suddenly feel like the veil has been lifted from your eyes this is some kind of perverse postmodern concoction that in no way can compare to the historical genetic variants of our ancestors over millions of years maybe you decide that you should go back to the jungle go back to the forest climb mountains and climb trees and see what kind of results you can get the thing is if you do this for just three months or six months it's gonna be very obvious to you very quickly but because it's empirically visible that the results you're getting are not nearly as good as what you could have achieved in the same amount of time and the same amount of effort using that steel cage and those heavy weights those unnatural cultural and scientific accretions that people have figured out for how to lose body fat and how to gain muscle mass what I hear and see again and again here on YouTube and yes I've dealt with it face to face with people in real life is that the natural way to learn language is to imitate what babies and toddlers do because what babies and toddlers do is supposedly fun and effortless compared to this now there's a lot wrong with this appeal to nature fallacy including the way in which it's used as an excuse or a pretext to recommend that you do the types of low effort self-indulgent activities that you as a YouTube viewer may already be inclined to want to make excuses for doing anyway so I see protracted method logically sophisticated discussions of how the best way to acquire a new piece of vocabulary is this hand hand the same way a little baby is shown a hand and is told the word hand repeatedly that you're gonna pick this up in your second language your third language whatever it is your your your study that this is something infinitely better than working with unnatural methods like the steel cage in the gym more discursive and analytical methods methods that involve reading and discussion and learning and repetition and what and what have you and um here's the thing if you pick up vocabulary 'we a 5 year old does hand hand how do you now interpret the word hand when I give you the following sentence economic development and political liberalisation go hand in hand you may not realize it but from a five-year-old's perspective that's really baffling five-year-olds don't talk that way even most 10 year-olds who by that point will have had more than 5 years of formal education and enormous hours of informal education you can't possibly reproduce as an adult more on that later they don't talk that way they can't read and easily understand language communication that way they haven't been taught the range of idiomatic and just syntactically complex ways in which we actually use the concept of hand and if you think English is the most difficult language in the world for this you're dead wrong it gets way harder and there are all kinds of examples that are even outside of the scope of what you can find in dictionaries if you're using modern and discursive methods if you really wanted to reproduce the natural form of learning a language the way a toddler does or the way a young school child does would you be interested in employing an elderly woman to live in your apartment with you and to pretend to be your grandmother an old woman who forces you to do household chores and step-by-step corrects you whenever you say the wrong word forces you to say banal sentences back and forth or who is spooning you I don't know tofu and is saying - again again tofu tofu no no tofu giving you this kind of experience with an elderly parental figure I've lived in countries like Laos and Cambodia where this really is the main way the language is communicated between the generations and in some respects those cultures are very pure examples of this grandparent to grandchild language transmission because the grandparents often have zero formal education and even zero literacy you have illiterate grandparents who are putting in long hours of repeating simple words and phrases to young children but again guess what the results are after thousands of hours of language immersion by age 10 they can barely string together a sentence like a lisping ten-year-old if you're starting now at age 30 or even if you're watching this video and you're aged 15 after five years of spending hundreds of hours thousands of hours intensively studying a language and an enormous amount of money paying for teachers of different kinds you do not want to be at the level of sophistication and language ability that is achieved by a child after five years of learning those methods and if you really started to make an inventory of how infants small children and young school children learn their first language let alone a second language if you start putting together the number of hours of the day that are really spent in language practice of various kinds it's going to start to dawn on you just how many people you're gonna have to pay how much money to play some kind of parenting or grandparenting role in helping you through this but coming back to the comparison with lifting weights at the gym in a steel cage as opposed to getting out in the wilderness climbing up a mountain gaining muscle the natural way the naturalistic fallacy the appeal to nature the idea that you should do things in the most natural way possible with Fitness this encounters a limit because the results are empirically obvious you can take off your shirt and look in the mirror and see how you're doing and you may be able to compare yourself to your brother or your cousin and what he resolves he's getting at the at the gym etc etc and with language those comparisons are not obvious they're very difficult for you to perceive yourself they're difficult for other people to perceive measure or even Grady won and it's incredibly easy for you to lie to your self and mislead yourself and imagine that you're making much more progress in the language than you actually are guys are gonna keep this video short I sincerely do not know if I'm gonna put my girlfriend through the agony of rote memorization of several hundred words of raw vocabulary before she starts on page one chapter one of this textbook it's not fun it's not easy it's not natural did I ever do that when studying a language yes I did I studied a language very few Western people study that's called poly pa Li and I was highly motivated to study that language even though I had no teacher and in a sense I had no textbooks leave that aside um and I decided that with all three of the textbooks are used starting off textbooks I to some extent had to rewrite and reformat myself and post on the internet myself put together of bits and pieces or typed out from old printed copies I found in Sri Lanka long story was putting together my own educational materials on this and indeed typing out the entire textbook myself this is already a significant form of language practice most people would never engage in and of course I had to type out the entire index the index of vocabulary at the back as an appendix and I decided I'm going to memorize every single word and in some cases they were both words and word forms so that's like not just the word but also a common ending like with an ing ending on it that kind of thing um before I start on page one chapter one of this textbook and you know what that allows you to do it means that when you're reading specific examples your limited time energy and focus is going into the heart of the language exercise instead of just struggling to remember or remind yourself or figure out basic items of vocabulary so you have a sentence like the man walked down the road from the hillside until he came to the of a certain tree let's say it's a persimmon tree so when I looked at a sentence like that I'm able to focus on the relationships between the words the grammar figuring out oh sorry so he's coming down the hill or is he going up the hill I already recognized all the basic words he'll walk tree I probably will not know persimmon I probably won't work as the type of tree it is I can look that up in a dictionary or not because I'm still understanding most of the sentence what I'm doing with the language exercise reading writing and practice is profoundly different because I went through this unnatural heavy lifting process of preparation of memorizing the vocabulary and you know I noticed something I taught myself that language while being very busy with a number of full-time jobs while studying other languages like Thai and lotion which are members of a completely different language family well being busy with all the regular things of doing my dishes and taking a shower and going to the gym I really didn't have that much time to kill but in maybe two years I had learned much more of that language than any of the people with PhDs in the field whom I met and I was able to look at complex statements about philosophy in the language and have a huge advantage partly just because I was starting on the basis of rote memorization of vocabulary and then I built on top of that the ability to practice what you might call the more sophisticated issues of syntax grammar just trying to get the whole meaning of a sentence out of the ways in which the the different words are juxtaposed and let me tell you something well you've already got all six meanings of the word hand memorized then it's very different when you see in a peculiar context the usage like economic development and political progress go hand in hand you're starting from a sophisticated discursive knowledge of the range of possible meanings an explanation may be also of how in some contexts this is a verb in some contexts it's a noun etcetera etcetera you're starting from an natural artificial scientific sophisticated knowledge of how the word is used in the language that indeed a ten-year-old doesn't have a five-year-old doesn't have a toddler or a baby doesn't have that the majority of people never develop in their first language but that empowers you as a rational thinking intelligent adult to make rapid progress progress much much more quickly than a native speaker does between a 2-0 and age 10 this is the advice that nobody wants to hear