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You missed the best language learning video ever — Transcript

by Days and Words · 3,395 words · 457 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00It is a superpower of a language learning method.
0:03Genius, right there. Genius.
0:04I'm so bad. You're just so good.
0:06A week ago, I stumbled across the
0:08best description that I've ever heard
0:10of how to learn a language
0:11from zero to full fluency.
0:13If you want those results, you
0:14have to go to those extremes.
0:16It came from a very unexpected place.
0:18I don't know if this is good.
0:19And the video says a lot of things
0:21that you probably don't expect to hear.
0:23I didn't understand anything anyway.
0:24But why am I talking about someone else's video?
0:27Wait, wait, wait. We need to hear that again.
0:29Exactly. The answer to that is that the creator of
0:31this video has very humbly titled it
0:34"How I Learnt...", followed by the language.
0:36Just good language learning advice
0:38with none of the bells and whistles.
0:40And considering how niche that language is, the
0:42video has a good number of views.
0:44But still, less than 2% of the people who should
0:46watch this video have actually done so.
0:49You should do this if...
0:51Because it doesn't matter what
0:52language we're talking about,
0:53the insights shared here are invaluable.
0:55Whether you're beginner,
0:56intermediate, or SO advance
0:58that the next step for you would be to start
1:00sounding non-native in your first language.
1:02And then I had, like, all these sentences.
1:04So in addition to wanting to share my own
1:06reflections on what Illis says in her video,
1:08watch the s*** out of it,
1:10I also don't want anyone to let the fact that the
1:12video is called How I Learnt Norwegian
1:14stop them from hearing these wise words.
1:17Instruction number six, listen to...
1:19Keep watching to hear why I think this might be the
1:21best language learning video in the world.
1:27Okay, let's calm down and start from the beginning.
1:30Okay, I thought you could use these tips even if
1:34you're learning another language.
1:36Almost all the advice you've ever heard on how to
1:38learn a language would apply to any language,
1:40but most of the best videos are about someone
1:44learning a specific language.
1:47Oh, I almost forgot to say, "tjena chicos!"
1:49So when people hear me speak Norwegian, ask me how
1:51long I've been living here,
1:53and I say that I've been
1:54living here for three years,
1:55they just tell me what, how is it possible?
1:57People are asking her how
1:59long she has lived in Norway,
2:01and the answer is three years.
2:02But she also said before that it was important to
2:04her that she understood Norwegian
2:06before she moved there.
2:08And the reason that it's important
2:09is that if you speak fluent English,
2:12people are going to get used
2:13to speaking to you in English.
2:15She arrived in Norway
2:17speaking some Norwegian already.
2:19It's not how much Norwegian she spoke in that time.
2:22It's the difference when she landed.
2:24It's like hitting the ground running.
2:26I just want to quickly clarify that I'm not saying
2:28that Illes is trying to mask
2:30how long she's been learning.
2:31The point that I was trying to make
2:32was that those three years in Norway
2:34would have been made many times more effective by
2:36the fact that she already had some ability
2:39in Norwegian when she arrived.
2:40If you are going to a country for
2:42any length of time with the attitude
2:43that you'll just learn when you
2:44get there, I suggest you reconsider,
2:46especially so if that country's
2:48population speaks English well.
2:50If you start learning before you go, your chances of
2:52being successful skyrocket.
2:54Also guys, literally as I was editing this video,
2:57I got the news that I know some of you have been
2:59waiting a very long time for.
3:00StoryLearning has finally released their uncovered
3:02courses in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.
3:05They've been a long time coming.
3:07I'm very excited to check them
3:08out for myself, but it gets better
3:10because I actually helped
3:12them to find the Swedish teacher
3:13that they eventually worked
3:14with to develop the course.
3:16They've given me or my
3:17audience, you guys, a special deal,
3:19which means if you buy any of the
3:21courses, Swedish, Danish or Norwegian,
3:23you get the other two languages thrown in for free.
3:26So that could be perfect for
3:27you if maybe you haven't decided
3:28which Scandinavian language you'd like to learn yet,
3:31or maybe you're traveling there and you want to get
3:32a feel for all three of them.
3:34Maybe you're just like me and one day you would even
3:36like to understand Danish,
3:38you know, pigs will fly and all that.
3:40Yeah, whatever course you pick
3:42up, you get the other two thrown in.
3:44That's a pretty good deal, but it doesn't last long.
3:46It's only about six days at
3:48the release of this video.
3:49So you don't have a ton of time anyway.
3:50Hopefully you haven't missed out
3:52already when you're watching this.
3:53Link will be in the description, of course.
3:55And now back to the video that I was editing
3:57that was already about someone
3:58else's video about Norwegian.
4:00So it's like Inception if it were about Norwegian.
4:04So it's like Insomnia.
4:05A little Christopher Nolan joke for you.
4:07Back to the video.
4:07When I started learning Norwegian,
4:09my goal was to speak
4:11Norwegian like a native Norwegian.
4:13I didn't want to just like
4:15be able to understand people.
4:17I didn't want to just be
4:18able to make myself understood.
4:20I do remember a time where I was like,
4:22I want to speak Swedish to this level.
4:24And then like watching
4:25movies in Swedish and being like,
4:27I literally have no idea what they're saying.
4:29I am never even going to understand Swedish, let
4:32alone speak it like a native.
4:34Personally, I would not advise
4:35most people to have that goal.
4:38It's fine to have that goal like one day.
4:41But the reality is going to be that
4:43you suck for a very, very long time.
4:45Motivation is a little bit
4:46like the wind when sailing.
4:48You need to work out when it's working for you
4:52and when it's working
4:53against you and adjust accordingly.
4:57There we have it.
5:01Number one, listen as much as possible.
5:03Insert your language there.
5:06Listen as much as possible to
5:08whatever language you're learning.
5:10Although this sounds like the most
5:12basic advice you could ever hear,
5:14I think what stops people in their tracks
5:17is the discomfort of doing that at first.
5:20So when you hit that wall of discomfort,
5:23either just deal with it and keep going.
5:25But if you really, really can't do that,
5:27then find a way of making it
5:29more comprehensible to you.
5:31When you're a kid, what you do first, like for the
5:34two first years of your life,
5:35is listen.
5:37You listen all the time to
5:38people and you don't speak.
5:40You're just like this and
5:41you're listening all the time.
5:42Kids are definitely trying to talk or at least my
5:44kids were when they were one.
5:46But because they are so limited in their capacity to
5:50actually produce the language,
5:51the linguistic gains that they are making for the
5:54first five, six, seven years of their life
5:57are 99% input.
6:00Even if they start speaking
6:02at two, three, four, five,
6:03it's still the input that is actually making them
6:06progress in the language.
6:07So what I thought was,
6:08okay, what I'm going to do first
6:10is that I'm going to listen to
6:11Norwegian as much as possible.
6:13So what I did is...
6:14Genius right there. Genius.
6:15I wish I'd figured that out as early as she did.
6:18I didn't understand anything anyway.
6:19So I was just like listening to things.
6:21I didn't care what the theme was.
6:23And I was just listening all the time or not all the
6:26time, but every time I could.
6:29Ain't that all Norwegian all the time.
6:30All French all the time would sound strange.
6:33If you want to learn as fast as she did, you will
6:35have to be that intense about it.
6:37This is the same for everything, but I think in the
6:39language learning sphere,
6:41there's more often a cognitive dissonance between
6:45the person who wants this result,
6:49who won't do what is required.
6:51It's just the most basic thing.
6:52If you want those results, you
6:54have to go to those extremes.
6:56The end.
6:56What I did was hearing, for
6:58example, the same book over and over again.
7:02And sometimes my mom, she
7:03tells me like, when you were a kid,
7:04you knew one book by heart.
7:05You just like turned the pages.
7:07You knew exactly when the pages had to be turned.
7:09Exactly.
7:10My eldest son's version of that was
7:12Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy,
7:15which he used to read in a Scottish accent.
7:17The times that he heard it the most was an audio
7:20book that was just on repeat.
7:22And the audio book was read by
7:23David Tennant, the Scottish actor.
7:25I think he wasn't even three.
7:26He may have just turned three.
7:28And one day we were in the car and
7:30I could hear him turning the pages.
7:31Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy.
7:34I knew he wasn't reading it, but I'm
7:35driving so I couldn't actually see.
7:37And he gets to his favorite bit.
7:39And I said to my wife, he
7:40loves that bit with the cat.
7:42And she turns around and she's
7:43like, he hasn't even got Harry Maclary.
7:46It's where's Wally...
7:46But he was turning the pages at the
7:48correct time that you would need to
7:50if you were reading the actual Harry Maclary book.
7:52Kids do repetition like nothing else.
7:56And if you can learn to tolerate it as an adult,
7:58it is a superpower of the language learning method.
8:01Everyone sees how kids behave, but very few people
8:05seem to take the lesson away from that.
8:07So if I was reading a lot of
8:08times, for example, like five sentences,
8:11and I was learning grammar,
8:12vocabulary, conjugation, pronunciation,
8:16I was learning all of this in one exercise.
8:20Wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to hear that again.
8:22This is that I was learning everything I need to
8:25learn about the language in one text.
8:29Thank you. Thank you.
8:30You're not learning the
8:31entire language in the one text,
8:33but you're learning everything that
8:36you need to know about the language
8:39before you start getting input
8:40from the language from that one thing.
8:43I do not know all the Spanish that's out there,
8:46but whenever I hear something in Spanish, I can
8:50single out the bits that I didn't understand.
8:53And I can do that because I've memorized certain
8:56passages of Spanish where I know every single
8:59thing. So then when I hear
9:00something else, I'm like, okay,
9:03these are the parts that I
9:04don't know. I need to look them up.
9:06See how much easier that makes it rather than trying
9:09to learn everything about
9:11this kind of nebulous idea that is the language.
9:14Just learn this paragraph.
9:17I was learning everything I need to
9:18learn about the language in one text.
9:20So if I was reading a lot of
9:22times, for example, like five sentences,
9:24and I was learning grammar,
9:26vocabulary, conjugation, pronunciation,
9:29I was learning all of this in one exercise. And then
9:33I had like all these sentences with all the
9:36sentences from the first time I watched this video,
9:39there were certain times that I noticed
9:41she sounds Norwegian while she speaks English, but I
9:44couldn't remember exactly where it was.
9:45That was definitely one. And
9:47then I had like all these sentences.
9:49And then it helps me remember vocabulary and be able
9:54to use the vocabulary that I learned.
9:56I got a lot of questions on Instagram about how to
9:59remember vocabulary, how to learn new words,
10:02how to like know how to use
10:03the vocabulary that you learn.
10:05The relationship between memory, like memorizing
10:08things and learning a language
10:10is more complex than people realise. And I think
10:13it's too simplistic to say that like,
10:15oh, Anki doesn't work because
10:17it's just words and blah, blah, blah.
10:19You misunderstand what Anki is for.
10:22And it's also too simplistic to say,
10:24you just need to memorise a whole,
10:26you know, all the words of the language.
10:28I don't think you really need to spend too long
10:30thinking about where memory comes into play,
10:33but you do need to understand that you're going to
10:36need to hear the language a lot,
10:38which she's already explained she was doing. So I
10:41think that how did you manage to remember words?
10:44Well, she didn't really need to
10:45remember them. She heard Norwegian a lot.
10:48After you hear Norwegian
10:49enough, memory isn't really an issue.
10:51Use Google Translate. I know that
10:54like, at least for me at school,
10:56we saw Google Translate like the devil. It was
10:59always like, no, don't use Google Translate.
11:02But Google Translate is actually good. I think that
11:04people pick on Google Translate,
11:06not because it's actually bad, but because they
11:08think it makes them sound smart.
11:10Like I felt so proud and I got so
11:12much motivation because I was like,
11:15this is a book that normal Norwegian people read and
11:19I can already understand a bit of that.
11:22I remember the first time I had that feeling in
11:25Swedish, I had listened to the first 80 minutes
11:28of this audio book like 50 times. One day I was
11:32like, well, I've I know the beginning of this
11:34book so well, as I started from just the 80th minute
11:37and started listening from there.
11:39Couldn't really understand very much, realised that
11:41I needed to go back and listen lots of times,
11:43probably listened to the next 80 minutes of it,
11:46maybe 10, 15 times. And then one night I was out
11:50running and I had the book in my ears and I remember
11:54being like scared of what was happening
11:57in the book and just suddenly realizing I no longer
12:00hear Swedish as a foreign language.
12:04I am now just interested in
12:05what's happening in this book.
12:06[Music]
12:08Instruction number six, listen to audio books. She's
12:12put the instruction as simply as it really
12:14needs to be said. Another thing that I did really
12:16often was to read a book and at the same time
12:19listen to the audio book because when you read, even
12:22if you read in your hand, I call this scuba diving...
12:24do it. Watching for example an episode of a
12:27series, watch it again and copy some sentences
12:31that I thought were useful. I would change the
12:34subtitles sometimes. The first time I would watch
12:36it without subtitles to see what I understood. Then
12:39the second time I would watch it with
12:41Norwegian subtitles to see if I understood a bit
12:43more. Third time I would watch it with English
12:46subtitles and then I would re-watch it again, for
12:50example with Norwegian subtitles. Now I'm speaking
12:52of like a scene, not a whole episode or a whole
12:55movie obviously, not a whole episode or a whole
12:58movie obviously, but like I'm sure. That's actually,
13:01that would be more effective, especially if it's
13:03dialogue heavy. You find a really dialogue heavy
13:05scene. Watch the s*** out of it. When there was a
13:08sentence that I thought was useful that I just
13:11copied it in my notebook and if I just wanted to
13:13like have something to read. I wonder if all these
13:17like anti-unkey keyboard warriors would be as
13:21against copying something by hand into a notebook. I
13:24feel like just because it's a more traditional
13:27thing that people have been able to do for thousands
13:30of years, they would be like oh yeah no,
13:32it's great to copy things into notebooks. But the
13:34second you get a spaced repetition
13:36algorithm involved, they're like that doesn't work,
13:39it's not real language learning. When I got my
13:41story back, now you know what I did. I read it a lot
13:44of times and I also got like a vocal. Then I
13:47would listen to the vocal like a lot of times. Then
13:50I would like read it until I knew it by heart. So
13:54I would spend one to two weeks on it. Her way of
13:57learning Norwegian was so much more efficient than
13:59my way of learning Swedish. I think that we think of
14:02learning things by heart as like a bad thing,
14:05but honestly these stories, learning them by heart
14:09and reading them a lot of times, what it helped me
14:12with was remembering vocabulary, understanding
14:15grammar, learning conjugation. That's exactly it.
14:19When people think of learning by rote, they think of
14:22a certain kind of content that people learn by
14:25rote. For example all the conjugations like ich bin
14:28du bist and they conclude that learning by rote
14:31is bad. In a way we learn our native languages by
14:34rote. Like if you think about how three-year-olds,
14:37four-year-olds talk, they often just say exactly
14:40what you said. To speak a language like a native
14:43speaker, you have to learn what the native speaker
14:45learned and that might involve learning some things
14:48by heart. And something I forgot to mention because
14:50I've been recording this video for like two hours
14:53and there's parts of Illes's video and lots of
14:56things in my video that will inevitably be cut out.
15:00There will be an extended cut available for my
15:02channel members. I call them the Tim Tam Cartel
15:04and you can join that by clicking the thing that
15:06says join just below this video. It's only three
15:09Australian dollars a month. That's about two US
15:11dollars a month, actually slightly less. So yeah,
15:14join. And this is why I think that it's so nice to
15:17learn sentences by heart is because when you
15:21like try for example to speak to yourself or when
15:24you try to speak to someone else,
15:26it's really good. You have to do it. But problem
15:29with it is that you're always looking for your
15:31words. You're never like saying a whole sentence
15:34without taking a break or this will take a long
15:37time for you to do. And then you never learn, you
15:40never teach your brain to pronounce words, to work
15:44on the accent in a long sentence because you don't
15:47know how to make a long sentence. You will get
15:50better. And even if you don't see the progress right
15:52now, even if you've been working for two
15:55weeks and you feel like you're exactly at the same
15:58point, first is not true. You're improving,
16:00even if you don't see the result right now. And
16:03second, maybe in a week you will see like suddenly,
16:06oh now I can feel it that I've become better. So
16:09knowing that you can't always see the results
16:12right now, this is completely normal. But if you
16:15keep doing what you do, if you keep trying to
16:18find out what is the best method for you, you will
16:21get better. Languages take longer to show
16:25any improvement. Most other skills show immediate
16:27improvement to a certain point. And then it takes
16:31a long time to really, really step it up from there.
16:34And languages sort of happen the other way
16:36around. And one of the reasons for that is that an
16:39unfair comparison to make is also the most
16:41normal comparison to make. And that is of native
16:44speakers. I hope that this video was helpful. I
16:46hope that you learned something. Although this video
16:48by Illist did get a disproportionate number
16:51of views to the size of the channel, I still think
16:53it needs more views. Probably not many people who
16:56are not interested in learning Norwegian are going
16:58to click on it. This video is entirely just good
17:02language learning advice with none of the bells and
17:05whistles. Because it's not from like one of the
17:07big language learning channels, it will not get the
17:11kind of attention that it maybe deserves. Go
17:13and check out this video for yourself so that you
17:16can see it in full and not my edit of it, etc.
17:18It's getting crazy hot in this room in October with
17:22all the lights on. Make sure you're subscribed
17:24if you're not already. I have lots of videos coming
17:26out in the next couple of weeks. Until next time,
17:29lo quiero.

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