THE WORST ADVICE on Learning Languages: Welcome to the Internet.

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[Music] 10 or 20 minutes a day 10 or 20 minutes a day that's what you're being told is optimal does anyone really believe that if we have two identical twin brothers and one of them studies a language for 10 or 20 minutes a day and the other one separately studies that language for 4 hours a day does anyone really believe that the brother who's only putting in 10 or 20 minutes a day is gonna make more progress in that language what's really going on here why do we have videos why do we have such a mountain of seemingly expert advice that's devoted to telling people what they want to hear that's devoted to normally often with an application for sale or a link to a website that somehow gonna make money out of this why do we have this mountain of evidence premise on promising you that language learning can be fun and easy and painless when we all know that it's the opposite of each of those things that it requires tremendous devotion self-discipline even self-sacrifice and above all else a commitment of time cannot be exaggerated hundreds and thousands of hours of your time that you'll never get back and if you have kids it's time you don't spend playing with your kids if you have a job it's time you don't spend doing your job you may have to quit all your other hobbies you may have to make serious sacrifices in your life to learn a new language and the seriousness of that sacrifice is exactly what's being trivialized here 10 to 20 minutes a day you can't write out a paragraph as a beginner in Chinese think about just how time-consuming it would be to practice writing a one paragraph once in Chinese how little you could get done in 10 to 20 minutes a day what's being sold here isn't advice its mythology so let's put these two suggestions together and ask if there's some kind of quantifiable advantage that we've never noticed before 10 to 20 minutes just before you go to bed and this is advice being given without any reference to your particular circumstances you may be a parent who has kids you have to take care of you may be a person with an active sex life who makes love to somebody of the opposite sex or the same sex or a team of 5 partners for all I care you may have sex before you go to bed I may be numerous reasons why just before going to bed is the worst possible time for you to sit at your desk and devote your attention to studying a language and there may be very obvious reasons why waking up at 5:30 in the morning is the best time I did have a period of my life of intense study with Chinese were waking up before I went to class I think class started at 9:00 a.m. so waking up at 5:30 a.m. was crucial to my reviewing and drilling language before I went to class I'd another period of my life with Cambodian Cambodian is not worth that rest - but it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to see how this advice might not pertain to your circumstances but look guys this is 2018 in the whole history of the world did the u.s. army ever discover that when soldiers studied a language for 10 to 20 minutes before going to bed suddenly they just got these fabulous results when you know even during World War one when I was studying French I should have texts of a beautiful little textbook printed during World War one for soldiers in World War one they were struggling to teach soldiers French as rapidly as possible so they could survive in the conditions of World War one on that front of the battle do you think the army just said hey you know what guys 10 to 20 minutes before you go to sleep that'll just devote covering the Korean War the Vietnam War any War World War two you name it most wars involve people being suddenly thrown into linguistically complex situations amidst tremendous stress and turmoil and there's pressure on people to hit the books as hard as possible and for organizations with big budgets organizations with infinite budgets to get organized to bring people up to a level of language fluency as rapidly as possible and yet none of them ever in the past ever notice this trick that all it takes is 10 to 20 minutes before you go to bed oh maybe all these experts and specialists they were making the mistake of studying languages after lunch it's just nonsense on so many levels but people seek out this content they consume it and I guess some of them try to live by it because it's basically giving you excuses for your bad habits just watch TV just hang out with friends just take it easy 20 minutes is enough the problem isn't just the premise of the thing it's basically the implications they draw out of it for what it means in your life to learn a new language the point I'm gonna raise here might surprise some of you in American culture and only in American culture I hear people talking about mentors and role models I have never once in my life heard an Englishman or a Scotsman or an Australian talk about the importance of mentors and role models but Americans do it all the time in your field of study in your language is this how your mentors and role models learn this language maybe you've never even thought about it that way before when I was studying pally a language not that many people study I was able to look at the whole history of great men of highly accomplished scholars and how they had learned that language when I was studying Chinese I mean obviously he's a huge well-documented history of the great scholars of the Chinese language but I could even look at my own professors you know I had white Western professor and he learned this language at a time when there were no computers he's now retired and you know for him the first fundamental step of the language was memorizing what are called the radicals and learning how to use a paper dictionary and count brushstrokes and identify radicals and analyze the written characters into their components and there's a discipline there that you're never going to get at by using this application on your smartphone or sitting around with your friends and we all know the reality is most people who come the internet looking for this advice are not in a situation where they have five or six supportive friends who sit down and study these languages with them you're on the Internet precisely because you lack a network of great teachers great colleagues and great fellow students helping you learn these languages sad fact but I think this is worth questioning across the board no matter which language you're learning for me I have experience with Cree a Jib way Cambodian so many languages when you look at the history of the people who really became highly accomplished in this field what did they do and how and I think the answers you're gonna find are they made tremendous sacrifices they live lives of single-minded determination for a period of 10 years sometimes they developed their acumen and ability in the language through tremendously hard work and you can find out the precise conditions and methods they used and they're not going to be anything like the mythology that people are now trading in on social media I don't have a lot to say here this is just standard wishful thinking but I've had to caution Chinese parents about this Chinese parents who were gonna spend a fortune to try to send their children to Canada to learn English in immersion in Canada and of course once in a while you talk to white Western people who are gonna spend a fortune to study language and emerge in another country you really need to think systematically and in a methodologically robust way about who is gonna talk to you about what and what are their motivations going to be when you go to the market to buy five kilograms of potatoes the person who works in that market and weighs the potatoes they're motivated to say about ten words to you whatever the language you're studying doesn't matter if you're in China Vietnam you're learning Arabic whatever the example is you cannot show up at the market to buy a bag of potatoes and think that this person has any motivation or investment in talking to you in depth or correcting your grammatical errors if you speak comprehensible broken version of that language they're just gonna communicate to you how much the potato's cost whether it's too much or too little there's a just a very limited window of communication and engagement there and of course most people are shy most people are not comfortable just going out and bridging these gaps and the shyness works on both ends there's a language learner is the public at large there's a terrible pattern you see again and again with Chinese students who are sent to Canada by their parents they become isolated they spend all day playing video games and the only people they talk to are other Chinese people here in Canada who don't speak English with them who speak to them in Chinese and guess what I've seen the same thing with white people living in Laos Cambodia Thailand Kunming China numerous other cities have been - there are white people white expatriates who spend all of their time only socializing with other white people they would rather spend all of their time drinking beer with other people who speak English or even just other people who speak some other European language that rather speak to Germans that spend their time with Chinese people and of course there are reasons for that both complex and simple if you're not paying someone to be your language teacher who's not an excellent language teacher they're not going to be engaged to help you develop your language ability it's a kind of lazy wish-fulfillment fantasy that you can go on vacation and improve your language ability you can't don't get me wrong you can but then your vacation will not be a vacation at all it will be hard work it will be rigorous in many ways it will be even more rigorous than enrolling in university program if you're going to go on vacation and really utilize that vacation as an occasion to improve your language ability in any given target language what I'm trying to demonstrate is the concept of comprehensible input as its second language acquisition scholar stephen krashen did in this lecture of the first claim of his we'll look at is that there is acquisition and learning and crashing says improvement and language ability is only dependent on acquisition and not learning the difference between acquisition and learning is tricky but it's kind of like the difference between getting a joke and having someone explain the precise reasons why the joke should be funny the point is you have this massive pattern recognition device is jammed into your head and when you understand the meaning of the message your brain will naturally pick out vocabulary and deconstruct grammar patterns based on the context actually naturally pick out vocabulary and deconstruct grammar patterns based on the context in my earlier video I made the comparison to fad ideas that have become popular in weightlifting and weight loss people who want to lose body fat and gain muscle mass and here I'd like to make a bit of a different comparison to the martial arts to self-defense very often you'll see on YouTube very often you'll see on social media someone trying to teach you a trick a technique something so simple and remarkable that suddenly makes it easy to defend yourself against an assailant and one of the questions I have to ask is if there were any truth to this why has this never come up in the history of civilization before why don't we have examples of the US Marine Corps teaching people this method why don't we have examples of the Russian military or the Israeli military or some military why is this something that comes up I don't know in the context of a kind of sport or recreation at the gym the Sun that people are doing for fun and in a silly not terribly serious manner generally why is there such a contrast between footage of the US Marine Corps teaching people how to defend their lives in deadly serious situations and in the type of practice the regimen the self-discipline the drill of real education in self-defense and the sort of peculiar classes for self-defense that we see at gyms we see at recreation centers we see at places of exercise and entertainment around us all over the world on some level I think we know that it is the same problem that we see here creeping into advice on language education the fundamental problem is that entertainment is corrupting education when the US military or the Israeli military teach self-defense it's not fun it's not entertaining it's also not safe or painless it's quite dangerous and painful for the people involved and they drill they do the same motions repetitively often while shouting out the same instructions again and again and again a hundred times perhaps and there's a real parallel to language learning there when language learning is serious it's not fun it's not entertaining there's no special trick that suddenly makes all the hard work analysis and study of grammar go away there's no way if you just naturally pick up this habit of mind and indeed it involves drill it involves repetition dozens or hundreds of times Trulli actually pick out vocabulary and deconstruct grammar patterns based on this context there's a lot more going on here than just an appeal to nature fallacy if this were something natural natural in human psychology natural in the course of language education why isn't it attested throughout the whole history of human civilization why is it that we have so many centuries of records of how people in Europe learned the Latin language we know how Latin was taught and how Latin was learned when it was a living language being taught to people whose mother tongue was a completely unrelated language within Europe then the Roman Empire we know how it was acquired as a language as it transferred from being a living language to a dead language more scholarly language we have records going over centuries and centuries and we can contrast how this language was taught in France Germany Romania Eastern Europe Western Europe within Italy itself nowhere and at no time is there any evidence for the approach being outlined here the approach being outlined here is 100% wishful thinking what what a great concept that you could just naturally naturally naturally pick up grammatical concepts that you could naturally develop acumen and analysis for understanding the parts of the sentence the you know semantic range of a word how idioms work when something is and isn't in humanik usage when when the same word is a noun as opposed to a verb in a given context and that the idea this would be possible when you're learning a language from a totally different language family than when your first language is English and you're learning Chinese that this would be possible don't get me wrong tremendous leaps of inference are possible if your first language is Spanish and your second language is Italian if your first language is Spanish and your second language is Portuguese don't get me wrong there are some languages so closely related that what's being said here could be viable advice but if you're learning Chinese Japanese any any genuinely alien and challenging language and your first line for his language is English this is astoundingly terrible advice and if there were any truth to it we'd be able to see evidence written throughout the history of education throughout the history of Western civilization it simply would not have been necessary for so many centuries for people to have been taught the Latin language in the way that they were because they would have been able to naturally naturally naturally learn that language through the methods that have just been described to you methods that are from my perspective completely surreal if we're going to examine language as anything more profound than recognizing the color red when you're prompted with the color red and then using the corresponding word one appendix I wanted to add on at the end of this video is that the question of how good or how terrible a device may be is ultimately going to be related to the personality and particular circumstances of the person you're giving advice to I was going to begin my first video on this topic the video that was uploaded just a few hours ago today I was gonna begin it by making the blanket statement that 100% of the advice of seen on learning languages on YouTube is terrible and then you know I had to challenge myself does a hundred percent really mean a hundred percent or does it mean 95% or 99% or there's some exceptions I can throw in here but when I really did go and check various sources if I were going to make exceptions they would be principals so broad and so vague that I think it's insulting to the intelligence of the viewer to call them good advice like you know write things down in a notebook advice um this level like you know well if you really had never thought of that before yeah there was another guy he was advising you to go through and circle certain key words like because and bigger than smaller than more than less than the question words like why and how I said to my girlfriend unless I was I was just reviewing these sources to see if I should kind of make some concessions here I said the only advice here that I think is not terrible is so broad and so vague and so basic that it would never occur to me to say this to you out loud now I do not think that my girlfriend is some kind of like innate linguistic genius but I just can't imagine having to say to her out loud the word because is especially important in this sense well this is a there's a piece of crucial vocabulary that you need to make sure you know for for any conceivable human language there gonna be you know these kinds of these kinds of words that obviously you can't you can't even get through your first few months the language though becoming familiar with um no on the other hand it's true my personality type and my approach to language is so relentlessly analytical that it didn't occur to me this is I got one negative comment on the first video it didn't occur to me that I would say out loud to somebody that they should take the time to review the fundamental phonetic properties of the language to make sure they're pronouncing things correctly before engaging in memorization of the basic vocabulary that's in the the appendix to their textbook that's in the index at the back of the textbook it wouldn't occur to me to say to somebody out loud you need to understand the phonetics and the orthography so how to pronounce the sounds and how the sounds are written the relationship between how how something sounds notes written down that is so basic and so general but I had someone leaving an angry comment saying that this is terrible advice that was giving because I just suggest that you memorize some vocabulary they were thinking without even knowing how it sounds or how it's written so yeah from my perspective how do you even use the index at the back of the book if you can't read or pronounce isolated words in the language right got it so yeah guys those are the only caveats I can I can offer here I do think that we're in a situation with language learning on the Internet where there are a few powerful biases that are shaping what people are saying and what people are doing in the same way that advertising weight loss tea weight loss diet tea weight loss drinks had a powerful effect warping what happened on Instagram in the same way that certain fads of exercise and diet for years were warping what was going on in vegan activism in the same way that really terrible advice really terrible methods of practice I'm gonna have you bring about different kinds of fads in fitness and martial arts and self-defense in the same way I feel that we're going through a period of time where language learning ultimately because of a contest for money and popularity and social media stardom and as I said in the first video because most people find it gratifying to tell the audience what they know the audience wants to hear tell the audience they can just go on vacation watch a movie watch a movie with subtitles spend time hanging out with their friends that they can remove the element of pain and hard-working commitment and tell the audience what they want to hear these are I think unexamined biases that have to a ridiculous extent work what's going on in language learning the internet and the tragedy of it is that YouTube is an amazingly powerful tool for language learning communication study exchange encouragement and improvement in your language ability I remember the first time I saw YouTube really literally the first time I saw this website the first time I saw clips of video being shared this way I thought wow that's gonna change the world for the Deaf forever sign language think about how difficult it was to teach someone sign language over the internet using a text interface I thought wow there's so many languages like sign language there's so many things gonna take off I thought wow Cambodian people you know in the Cambodian Diaspora Cambodian people living in France and in Montreal and in Cambodia itself for the first time there's going to be this kind of you know communication uhm so many languages that have struggled to get on the internet in written form because back at that time was very very difficult for many years to actually type in Cambodian and get Unicode to get a font get computers to even display Cambodian text properly I lived through that with Cambodian with Burmese with quite a number of languages I worked on I saw them struggling to get the text form but then by contrast video communication like this was racing ahead by leaps and bounds and of course in so many ways it's more emotionally powerful it has more educational potential so on and so forth and when I buy these video game consoles like the Nintendo 2ds Nintendo 3ds portable video game consoles and buying video games for my daughter I always look at this technology and see this amazing educational potential it has especially for language learning and I see that potential completely utterly going to waste so in the next 10 years what do you think we're gonna see guys could be the same whole thing could be that this potential continues to get flushed down the drain but I'm hoping that these videos have provoked or inspired some of you guys to think about these questions from some new angles I remember when I was working on Korean a Jib way Algonquian languages at First Nations University in Canada so those are languages that may go extinct the next 100 years but they do really have a chance to survive thrive to take on more speakers I was always proposing again and again by email and face to face with professors can't we work on a card game like a deck of cards based game something like the pokemon card game or something so that children can practice this language while playing a game can't we develop a video game where we could develop a card game linked to a video game portable video game for something like Nintendo we've got to find ways to get this language into daily use for the next generation and there's so much potential in this kind of technology even in ultimately the technology that the deck of cards and nobody's doing it I'd also ask questions like why are why aren't we having no smoking signs of this language so on and so forth uh um and Yale professors a lot of them responded very positively they were really inspired to have someone on the campus who cared someone who was looking forward that way but whether you are studying a language that's endangered like Cree or a language that may have 1 billion speakers like Chinese the challenge we're facing in the 21st century is struggling with the the very strange reality of mutual isolation and mutual communication that the internet now brings us and I hope I hope we can do better than the sources I've just been criticizing in this video [Music]