Frequently asked questions

Hello everyone,

by surpassing 35 000 subscribers on Youtube, I thought it would be finally time to make a few long overdue videos which I really hope to do soon, but in the meantime, I decided to give my podcast a little restart as well. I made a podcast recording answering some of the questions asked in the comments recently:

How to maintain several languages.
How to regain motivation after losing fluency in languages once spoken at a B2/C1 level.
Resources you recommend for learning Mandarin from scratch.
What happened to your podcast with 天一？
How old were you when you started learning Chinese?
Is it important to study grammar?
Learning two languages at the same time?

Many thanks to my friend (can't say his name:)) for making the sound in the recording sound professional.

Fitness

A lot of people have been asking me about my fitness, diet, daily routines, travel and just random things which I love to talk about so I thought why not make what 1000 people do every day and start a podcast:) If you'd have a specific topic you would like me to talk about just leave a comment, these recordings are really a lot of fun to make, I'll try to make my best to be consistent if you guys like it.



iTunes link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/vladimir-skultety-podcast/id1202514702?mt=2

Learning how to learn a language - Interview with David Mansaray

Learning how to learn a language

An interview with David Mansaray

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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

Basic language structures project

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Podcast transcription:

Hello this is Vladimir, coming to you from Taipei, Taiwan. It‘s been a very long time since I did a recording for my podcast and it’s been quite a while since I wrote an article as well and so I decided that this has to end that I have to dedicate more time to my blog and my podcast.

There were several reasons for not writing and not doing recordings, mostly because since the last time I wrote an article which was probably sometime in March or April - since then we’ve been having wonderful weather and I just felt bad whenever I spent time inside. And another reason probably is also the fact that it takes me a lot of time to come up with an interesting topic and something that I personally think would be worth writing an article about, let alone to do a recording about and it takes a lot of time to work on the article itself, to work out the details and if it's recording it takes a lot of time to work on the recording so that it looks good and sounds good. So whenever I was out in the beautiful weather and I was thinking that should go back and work on the recordings I just sort of postponed and postponed basically until now.

Learning a difficult language – Part 2.

Learning a difficult language – Mandarin, Part 2.

By Vladimir Skultety MA., BC.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Phonetic typology of the Chinese language

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Typology

- comparison of languages based on their formal structure
- no historical connections
- only the analysis of the present state of the language

Types of typology: syntactic, phonetic..

Phonological typology

Syllabic language - every syllable is a morpheme

Morpheme - shortest sound which still has a meaning

Phonetic typology:

Tonal language

Tone  - a melody of the voice, in which a syllable is pronounced and which has the same importance as any letter of the syllable

Historical division of Chinese

Old Chinese

1000 B.C. – 3rd/4th cen A.D.

- probably no tones – they developed form suffixes

- probably not a syllabic language

The Chinese script

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Hello everyone.

Since there is a fairly large amount of youtube channels, blogs or podcasts, where people can get very good information on language learning or anything related to this field, I thought that I might be talking about things that have been said many times before and decided to try to do this recording in a more academic way. I’d like to discuss a rather specific topic, but a one that still might be interesting to listeners not so familiar with the subject – the Chinese script.

I hope you’ll enjoy it and wish you a belated Happy New Year.

Chinese script

-         writing is a form in which you can express language units

Characteristics of the Chinese scritp:

1. morphemographic
2. syllabic

 Characters:

Han dynasty reform

8 strokes:

永

                                    Yong3

My multilingual recording in 11 languages

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Hello everyone. After a lot of consideration, I have decided to give it a shot and record myself trying to speak in the languages that I have learned. I was a bit afraid to do so, because while in general and in my experience people find polyglottery interesting, to some it might seem that people who do similar recordings or videos are show offs and attention seekers, which really wasn't my intention. I only wanted to join the community of people who have done so before and babble along in the languages that I speak for anyone who'd be interested in listening to my specific language combinations. I was hesitating for a long time and only until there were dozens of people out there with similar blogs, recordings or videos, I decided to give it a shot myself. This way I didn't feel like I was standing out too much and felt like just one of many.

Another reason for doing the recording was, that on my blog I post articles mostly about languages and language learning and doing a recording of this sort seemed like a nice way to let readers decide, whether my articles would be interesting for them to read. I wouldn't be very honest if I'd say that I didn't do the recording to gain some sort recognition, or try to compare myself to others, but I really didn't do it to show off.