The mysteries of being perceived as a native speaker

I was working with the Airport police yesterday with an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. I spoke Farsi, she spoke Dari. I had heard Dari before and knew this sort of Farsi-Dari communication was possible and as no Dari interpreter was available, I was called in. I knew it would be hard but I have to admit, I did't expect I'd have so much trouble understanding her. 

After about 20 minutes the lady said in Dari, "let me try to speak in English, because Dari seems to be hard for you to understand". I automatically thought, well.. my Farsi is poorer than I thought. 

The thing is, if you speak Farsi really well, in theory you should be able to understand Dari pretty well too, so I thought it was clear the problem was my Farsi and not the fact that I didn't understand Dari too well. 

I continued speaking in Farsi and she spoke in English. After about an hour she asked: Where are you from? I said "Here." and pointed to the ground. To my surprise, she asked: "You are not from Iran?" 

Can anyone learn a foreign language?

Polyglot Conference Berlin 2015

A student writing his paper on "Learning a language as quickly and efficiently as possible" sent me an email and asked me these two questions:

1) Do you think being a polyglot is something you're born with or a skill you can develop with practice? And why?

2) What is, in your opinion, the most important tip, for learning a language quickly and efficiently?

I often get these questions asked actually and as my answers tend to be a bit non-conventional and longer, no matter how hard I try to simplify them, I decided to post them here on my blog for anyone interested.

I thought about both of these questions many times in my life and my opinion has evolved, so I might add or change something in the future again, but right now I think that:

1)

If there is such a thing as talent for learning languages, something that people are born with and cannot be learned or acquired, it consist of:

a) inborn pattern recognition ability/general intelligence

b) time it takes for a concept (word, sentence structure, pattern, sound etc) to get stored in one's long term memory 

c) persistence

For instance, there are several techniques that can help you improve your memory, pronunciation, time management, motivation etc. that can be learned. There are also good materials that can explain language concepts very well, good grammar drills etc., but be it as it may a) and b) cannot be improved on by a lot, or takes a much longer time in my opinion, and therefore if there is such thing as talent, it's probably related to this.

Additionally c) I feel like is just a quality, that is necessary in general and maybe even more so when it comes to learning languages because this skill takes longer to show results in my opinion.

2) 

The one single most important tip probably would be to allow the mind to become organically and intrinsically very keen on learning the language you want to learn. The statement is a bit fuzzy, but simply put I would call this "sheer organic/intrinsic interest and the organic/intrinsic will to improve" or knowing the difference between the mind where it 'wants to learn (very much)' and where the mind 'has to be taught'.

For instance, force a child to learn the letters of the alphabet and it will take long. Give the same child an iPad and allow it to hang out with friends on some app and apart from learning all the letters, that child will probably even learn how to change settings on that iPad you had no idea existed.

The same works for adults in my opinion, although adults probably really do not learn as quickly as children do, even when accounted for the greater amount of knowledge and experience they have to make their task easier.

It seems to me the brain is naturally apt at absorbing information/concepts at great speeds, it just has to be incentivised correctly. Same with language learning. If you have your mind set correctly and have the correct incentives, I believe you can learn anything/any concept, like Mandarin Chinese, Quantum Mechanics, Calculus etc. and learn it quickly. Obviously it has to be a concept that someone has learned at least once before in history, proving that it can indeed be learned. Right now, as we stand, it seems impossible to learn every single language in the world to a C1 level for instance, or understand and learn some mathematical concept that hasn't been discovered yet.

When it comes to language learning, this incentivisation can be anything from moving to the country where the language is spoken, being in love with the script or the culture of the target language, having a romantic partner that only speaks that language etc. but it all usually boils down to honest, organic deep and persistent interest. Once you have your mind set right, you will learn much quicker, will not need any motivational tricks to keep you focused and will be keen on improving and improving your own learning methods.

My random thoughts on language learning

My random thoughts on language learning 

Mastery/no blind spots

Inspired by Salman Khan, while learning a particular concept, try to learn in a way that you understand everything you are learning perfectly with no ‘blind spots’ in your understanding. In other words, if tested on what you are learning, you should get 10/10, ten times in a row. It seems, that the information you learn needs to be perfectly understood by your brain so that it can turn into a solid, automatic, functional block quickly. 

Additionally, you can’t just learn something and know how it works roughly. It’s like learning what the gas and brake pedals do, but not learning what the clutch does and then in the next lesson being taught how to parallel park. Obviously I need to know what the clutch does before I can do that. 

Law of distributed burdens*

It is wise to divide brain-intensive operations into separate, more manageable chunks. While logical, it’s unfortunately not obvious and this strategy has helped me many times deal with brain intensive operations, not only when it comes to language learning. 

For instance, it is very inefficient to learn Chinese by learning how to read, write, speak and understand the language all at the same time. If you distribute the burden, say, learn how to read in pinyin first, then move on to listening, then move on to text-chatting in pinyin, then to speaking, then to reading Chinese characters, then to learning how to type Chinese characters and finally to handwrite, the task will be much more manageable.

This approach can be applied to lower levels of language learning too. For instance, it is more efficient to try to improve your pronunciation one sound at a time rather than try to improve several sounds at once. It’s for instance more efficient to consciously accept that you are not pronouncing the Spanish ‘r’ correctly and leave the improvement of this sound until after you’ve become somewhat fluent in the language. Working on both improving the ‘r’ sound while trying to improve your general fluency at the same time might be overloading the brain and actually slowing down the progress towards fluency itself considerably.  

*I don’t have a better name for this concept unfortunately but I hope it will do. 

Impossible tasks and bad techniques

If you see someone trying to lift a 500 kg stone with rollerblades on their feet, maybe knowing that that person had never done any exercise in their lives before, it's clear to you that that person will not lift the stone.

Firstly, the stone is just too heavy and secondly, it's really a dumb idea to try to lift it with your rollerblades on.

Unfortunately, the way people are trying to achieve language proficiency in some languages, is something you cannot see with your eyes, and a lot of people simply don't realize that either the goal they are working towards is impossible to achieve or the methods they are using will not work.

Some very difficult languages just cannot be learned to a satisfactory level with current methods. It's just like trying to lift that very heavy rock with rollerblades on.

So..if you are learning a language and are not making progress the problem might not be your lack of talent, but rather the fact, that with the methods you are using, you just objectively cannot learn what you are trying to learn.

A basic roadmap to learning Mandarin Chinese

Of the popular languages, Mandarin Chinese is one of the most difficult ones for Westerners to learn and extremely difficult to reach a high level of proficiency in. Learning languages like Spanish is relatively easy for those of us who speak English because of how closely related the two languages are in terms of grammar, vocabulary and even within the cultures there are lots of similarities to be found. This means that English speakers learning Spanish for instance already have a significant head start. However, when it comes to learning Mandarin Chinese, the situation is different. The grammar, vocabulary, syntax or the logic of Mandarin is nothing like English. Many of the typical language learning strategies are often inapplicable with Mandarin, which is why even the most experienced language learners would find it a challenge.

I’m not saying I found the key to learning high-level Mandarin efficiently, but after almost 12 years of studies and having worked as a Mandarin interpreter for the past 4 years I believe that, by trial and error, I have devised general guidelines that will hopefully save you some time.

It would be difficult to explain in detail what it is that makes Mandarin so hard, but in short, the four pillars of Mandarin difficulty are:

• Pronunciation
• Vast and unfamiliar vocabulary
• Sentence structure and sentence patterns
• Different cultural norms

University research about expressing feelings in different languages - interview

I was approached by a university student who is doing research about how people express their feelings in different languages. This short interview will be a part of that research and I thought the questions in it were very interesting and wanted to share. Hope you enjoy.

What made you start learning languages?

I don’t actually know to be honest. I grew up in a multilingual environment, where most people around me spoke several languages and it was just natural to learn at least one or two for everyone I knew. I learned several languages as a child too and just continued learning as I grew older, because I liked being good at something and this was something I could do a bit better than others I guess.

How many languages would you say you speak fluently?

The Right Reasons

Many times I've been thinking about what the key to successful learning is and I'm convinced that it is strong will. Will stands at the origin of every action, including learning. Will makes you take the first actual step. And the second one. And the third one. Strong and lasting will makes you take enough steps to eventually learn what you need. 

At the origin of every will there is a reason. If you have the right reason, you'll have a lot of will. You'll have a lot of will to do what you want, for instance, to learn. More importantly, with a will that originated from a good reason, you will want to learn long enough. If you want to learn Chinese because you like Chinese food, you do not have the right reason. If you want to learn French because you have pleasant chills going down your spine when you hear the French language, you do. 

Strong will is an emotion, not a skill. You cannot practice wanting something very much, but you can have the right reason to which your mind will respond.

Try to work on the reason first. Everything else will be much easier later.

Top 5 tipp a sikeres nyelvtanuláshoz

Nagyon sok népszerű cikket és könyvet írtak a motiváció fontosságáról a nyelvtanuláshoz, a legjobb nyelvtanulási technikákról, a top 10 legfontosabb indok, hogy nyelvet tanulj vagy éppen arról, hogy hogyan válhatunk sikeres nyelvtanulókká. A blogomon általában olyan cikkeket írok, amíg eléggé specializáltak és így a célközönség is jóval kisebb. Gyakran beszélek különböző szempontok alapján a mandarin és más nyelvekről, ami talán nem annyira érdekes mindenki számára. Ezért is gondoltam dolgozhatnék egy kicsit olyan témákon is, amik inkább "átlagosak", hogy a blogom változatosabb legyen.

Próbáltam a dolgokat amennyire csak lehet egyszerűnek megtartani és a következő kérdést tettem fel magamnak: ha csak öt dolgot választhatnék, ami összefoglalja az én nyelvtanulási stratégiámat, mik lennének azok? Képzelhetitek milyen nehéz kérdés volt, még akkor is amikor a sok gondolkodás után rájöttem csak ötöt megnevezni nagy kihívás.

Kicsit megfordítottam a kérdést. Végül rájöttem, hogy amikor valami nem ment jól a nyelvtanulási folyamat közben, mindig elhanyagoltam egyet a következőkből:

Motiváció

Ráfordított erő

Teljesítmény

Következetesség

Ismétlés

Motiváció

Akár napi rutinod, akár nem a motiváció a kulcsa és valószínűleg a legfontosabb tényező a sorrendben, hogy jó eredményeket viszonylag rövid időn belül elérj. A legegyszerűbb mód, hogy bármit is megtanulj, hogy légy teljesen lenyűgözve és hozzá bilincselve. Sokszor mondták már és teljesen egyetértek azzal, hogy ha szereted amit csinálsz a) annyi időt tölthetsz ezt csinálva amennyit csak akarsz anélkül, hogy unottnak vagy fáradtnak éreznéd magad b) az idő amit arra fordítasz, hogy azt csináld amit akarsz az nem munka c) ha tanulsz valamit, amit szeretsz, akkor sokkal gyorsabban fogsz emlékezni dolgokra, habár beszélni egy nyelven az jártasság és nem fogsz rögtön jól beszélni, de nagyon sokat segít.

19 languages 15 minutes

Hello, everyone, 

I went to an event this May called the Polyglot Gathering Berlin 2015 and, in order to prepare for it, I practiced almost all the languages I’ve studied in my life. After the conference was over, I realized that I would probably never speak all these languages this well at the same time again and wanted to make a video to remember it.

Obviously, I did prepare for this video in the sense that I didn't just sit down in front of the camera and started speaking. I had a script in my mind for most of the languages and, as I say many times throughout the video, with the languages I don't speak that well, I asked for my friends' help.

In the video I speak: English, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, Russian, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Serbian, Farsi, Portuguese, Polish, Romanian, Dutch, Taiwanese, Japanese and Cantonese. 

Feel free to leave comments with your opinions or corrections. Any input is well appreciated.

Vladimir

P.S. If you like, you can follow me by email and receive notifications about new post on this blog. You can do that by subscribing to my mailing list via the 'Follow by email' field on the right.

Топ-5 правил для успешного изучения иностранных языков

 «Важность мотивации в изучении иностранных языков», «Топ-10 основных причин, по которым стоит изучать иностранные языки», «Топ-10 способов быть успешным в изучении языков» - на эти и другие подобные темы, связанные с эффективным изучением иностранных языков, уже написано немало популярных книг и статей. На своем блоге я обычно пишу специализированные статьи, часто нацеленные на достаточно узкую аудиторию. Зачастую эти материалы касаются различных аспектов китайского и других экзотических языков и вряд ли заинтересуют широкую публику, поэтому на этот раз я решил немного разнообразить содержание блога и осветить более универсальную тему.

Рассуждая об эффективности в изучении языков, я пытался как можно более упростить свою задачу и свести ее к вопросу: «Если бы мне нужно было выбрать пять основных пунктов, которые суммировали бы мои стратегии в изучении языков, пять пунктов, которыми бы я постоянно руководствовался, изучая языки, какие бы я назвал?». Разумеется, вопрос оказался непростым, и даже после долгих размышлений я пришел к выводу, что выделить лишь пять пунктов совсем непросто.

Тогда я решил немного переформулировать исходный вопрос. В результате я пришел к выводу, что на моей памяти все сложности в изучении языков возникали тогда, когда я пренебрегал каким-либо из следующих пунктов:

Мотивация

Инпут (входящая информация)

Аутпут (исходящая информация)

Последовательность

Повторение

Мотивация

Независимо от того, почему вы учите языки, мотивация является, пожалуй, важнейшим фактором, который позволит вам достичь высоких результатов за достаточно короткий период времени. Самый простой способ выучить что-либо – это по-настоящему увлечься. Полностью согласен с известным мнением, согласно которому, если вы занимаетесь любимым делом, то:

Learning how to learn a language - Interview with David Mansaray

Learning how to learn a language

An interview with David Mansaray

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of my podcast. My guest today is a very special person. I’m sure a lot of you know him from his presence online, he was born in Sierra Leone, spent most of his life in London and currently lives in Spain. He is a lover of knowledge and a very knowledgable person, has his own website and a youtube channel, is the awe inspiring, the super positive, the one and only David Mansaray.

Some of you might  know, that a couple of months ago, David interviewed me for his website and I've always had the thought of interviewing him for my blog in the back of my mind as well, I just couldn't come up with a suitable topic.

There were several things that I was considering, but because David is a fantastic, talented learner in many different fields and it so happens that he has decided to start learning foreign languages, I thought we could discuss something related to language learning in general.

David has read lots and lots of materials on the subject and talked to a lot of people and I always wanted to ask him what his own personal observations and opinions were, so I thought it would be great if he could share some of that wealth of knowledge with us. Hope you enjoy.

Vladimir

My 5 language learning tips

There have been several popular articles and books written about the importance of Motivation in Language learning, Best Language learning techniques, Top 10 most important reasons for learning a foreign language or ways of becoming a successful language learner. On my blog, I usually write articles that are quite specific and are often aimed only at a fairly narrow audience. I usually talk about various different aspects of Mandarin Chinese and other languages, which might not be that interesting to everyone, so I thought I could try to work a bit on topics that are more general just to make my blog more diverse.

I tried to keep things as simple as possible and asked myself the following question: If I had to choose only five things that would sum up all of my language learning strategies and have these five things in mind during my language studies, what would they be?  As you can imagine, this was quite a complicated question and even after giving it a lot of thought I realized that naming only five was still very challenging. 

I had to turn the question around a little bit. In the end I came to the conclusion that in my experience whenever something was going wrong in my language learning process, I was neglecting one of the following:

Motivation

Input

Output

Consistency

Review

Motivation

Learning an intermediate language - Italian

Hello all,

On my blog I have written articles about difficult and simple languages before and I realized that I didn’t write anything about intermediate languages yet, so I will try to dedicate an entire post to them now. As I mentioned earlier, there are probably much better divisions of languages based on their difficulty. I do not challenge them, but I find that up until now, all the languages that I’ve learned fall into three simple categories: simple, intermediate, difficult – depending on how far a language you already speak at a native/advanced fluency level is from these languages.

For me an intermediate language (or a language that I find to be intermediately difficult to learn) is:

• A language that is outside of my native language group, or outside the language group of a language that I already speak well, but still within the same general family[1]
• The grammar is at least 50% identical with the languages I already speak at an advanced/native fluency level
• Another 30% of concepts present in the grammar are concepts that can also be found in the languages I already speak but are used rarely or formulated in a different way
• At least 10% of grammar concepts are completely alien to me
• There is a large number of cognates in the language, but different pronunciation might leave them unrecognized at first
• The sound system is at least 50% identical[2] with the languages I already speak
• Literal translations are often possible
• Cultural difference is not a substantial issue

From a strictly analytical point of view, if you look at English and Italian for instance, you almost can go as far as saying that they are two distant dialects of Indo-European. They both share large amounts of Latin or Greek based vocabulary, Italian vocabulary has received a lot of influence from English, there are numerous grammar concepts that overlap, a lot of expressions in Italian can be directly translated into English, often literally.

How to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese

Hello all,

some of my friends have been asking me to provide a more detailed explanation on how to learn Mandarin Chinese but at the time I didn’t feel competent enough to give any advice because I wasn’t fluent enough myself and I had to wait to find out what actually worked for me and what didn’t.

There is unfortunately no step-by-step manual on how to become fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but I will try to write down in brief what I think worked for me. Goes without saying that what worked for me might not work for the next person and this is really only my personal opinion based on my own experience and the experience of other students I know.

Without any specific order of importance, these are the key points that helped me learn Mandarin Chinese to Advanced fluency:

Learning a difficult language – Part 2.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin, Part 2.

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

Listen to MP3
For more information see Part 1

Pronunciation

Mandarin pronunciation is difficult and important at the same time. Mandarin is a syllabic language. Every syllable is a morpheme, so simply put every syllable has a meaning (please see typology of Chinese for further info). But what makes Mandarin pronunciation so difficult and important? It is difficult, because almost every sound in Mandarin within the syllables is different from the sounds we have in our European languages so you have to learn how to pronounce and recognize a whole deal of new sounds. Some sounds differ only slightly, some I cannot get down until the present day. And why is pronunciation important? Because as I mentioned since every syllable in Mandarin is a bearer of information and words usually consist of only one or two syllables, even a slight change in sound that you might not notice as a beginner might make others not understand you. It is not the problem of not being able to get your point across, it is the problem of not being understood at all. If you mumble a word in a western language or mispronounce a great deal of it, because of the fact, that western language words are usually pretty long and not every syllable is a bearer of information, you have a very high chance of being understood, but since Mandarin words are so short, every sound counts.

Vast unknown vocabulary

Learning a difficult language – Part 1.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

Listen to MP3

Table of contents

Introduction

General reasons

The difference of Mandarin

Inner logic of Mandarin

Specific reasons

Sounds

Tones

Pronunciation

Vast unknown vocabulary

Grammar

Writing system
Memorizing characters
Hand-writing characters

Conclusion

Introduction

Hello everyone and welcome to my podcast. First of all I’d like to apologize, for the fact, that it took me a while to upload this article, but there are a number of reasons for that. I originally wanted to continue my recordings with the “Learning intermediate languages” series, but didn’t have that much inspiration in the past few weeks and had much better ideas for a recording about difficult languages instead, so in the following series I would like to talk about learning difficult languages. Unfortunately since Mandarin is the only difficult language I’ve learned, these episodes will be about Mandarin only and will relate to learning difficult languages as a whole only to a certain extent. Another reason for publishing my recording so late is, that I didn’t want to record an episode only for the sake of putting something online and as it takes me some time to write a presentable article, it took me almost 3 weeks to publish this one. In this first episode of the Learning a difficult language series, I will try to talk a little about what I personally think makes a language difficult and why I consider Mandarin to be a difficult language. In the episodes to come, if possible, I will try to look back at my studies and step by step develop a learning strategy for us westerners on how to learn Mandarin from scratch which will be based on listening and speaking only.

Learning a simple language - Part 3

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone,

last week I did a recording on how I would learn a simple language (Slovene) and because the recording got a little bit too long, I divided it into two parts. This is the second part of the recording. Enjoy.

1. The reason for doing all of this listening work is to be able to understand 95% of everything that is said before you go to Slovenia. Like I said in the earlier recordings, speaking is something that you can only learn well in the country where the language is spoken (for the most part) and so you eventually will have to go there anyway but this way you will save lots and lots of time and energy.
2. I would continue listening to the newscasts until I get to a point where I would not need a dictionary anymore, because I would understand the words that I hadn’t heard before out of context. And I would just keep listening to the newscasts for the pleasure of listening and information itself and get deeper into the language. Understand how some of the more complicated wordings are used, under what circumstances and so on.

Learning a simple language - Part 2

Listen to MP3

I said in the last recording that the language learning process should be natural and no “textbook science” should be used to explain it to the learner as I think language learning is no science just a very natural process that should be expanded to its maximal potential and I think the brain should do most of the work on its own. This doesn’t mean that one should not take the advantage of all the shortcuts to help him understand the language better and learn it faster. These shortcuts – grammar tables, word lists, mnemonics, sound recorder and so on can speed up the process a lot. In this recording I would like expand this thought a little and in order to make it as demonstrative as possible, I would like to talk about how I would go about learning a simple language, because I think explaining something on a specific example is the best thing to do.

1. First of all I would not learn a language just to learn a language. I mean there has to be more to it than just to learn a language for the sake of learning so if I were to start learning a new language I would already have a very good reason to do it like for instance I really liked a song in that language, or the culture of Japanese manga and so on, because correct and lasting motivation is very very important.
2. As we are talking about learning a simple language, let's say I would like to learn Slovenian, because when I was in Slovenia it was fascinating to turn on the Slovene radio and feeling like they were speaking Slovak I just didn’t understand anything. I loved the sound of the language, the signs written in Slovene and so on. I also for instance heard that Slovenian is one of the most conservative Slavic languages in terms of grammar, which all is quite a good motivation to start with. Learning a language for securing a better financial future is not enough.

Learning a simple language

Listen to MP3

Hello everyone,

as I said many many times, I am very sure that there are people out there who have much more experience with language learning or language tutoring than me and I do not consider myself to be an expert in this field at all. People sometimes ask me, how to start learning a foreign language, but truly, I don't know how to answer and I really don't think that I am the most competent person to do so too. I have not read any book on how people learn or should learn languages, and I have only some teaching experience. The few things that I've read about how we learn languages or new things in general were mostly online and almost everything that I've learned myself I learned by trying and trying until something eventually worked (doing a lot of thinking during the trial and error process of course), so I don't know how many people would be interested in listening to my rants on language learning, since they only might work for me and might not work for the next person.

But, maybe there will be someone out there who might get some new ideas from what I say and I can be only happy about that so I will try to make this small introduction to language learning today, starting with a "how to learn a simple language" podcast. Enjoy.

Continue to Part II.