My next video has been edited, it's ready to go, and I just had a thought that I wanted to share with you before we get into today's video, I want to share with you the tremendous enjoyment that I get from learning a new language, and I'm referring to my recent experience in Turkey. By getting to a level where I could understand so much in the language, where I could communicate with people in the language, gave me so much enjoyment and even a sense of power. And enjoyment.
In the connections that I was able to make with people, but by the same token, I sensed that by speaking their language, I also gave enjoyment to the people in this case of Turkey. Now it may be that with English, it's almost a given that people should speak our language. But I am always impressed when I hear a non native speaker speak well in English.
Even with mistakes or with an accent, I'm always impressed and appreciative. And I think the same is true. And perhaps even more so when we learn the languages of other places and countries whose language is not the sort of international language that English is.
So I just want to throw that in there before we get into today's subject. I've been learning languages for just about my whole adult life, since I'm 79, that's like 60 years. I realized very early that the key to language learning success is meaningful input.
What Stephen Krashen refers to as a meaningful message. Some content item, some message, something that we are interested in. We have to be interested in order to learn language from that.
It's not grammar drills, it's not grammar explanations, it's meaningful input. If you look around my library here, all the books behind me, and I've got shelves elsewhere, you'll see a lot of books in foreign languages. And for the longest time, I wanted to read these books on subjects of interest, but I was held back because there were just too many words that I didn't know.
And looking words up in a conventional dictionary is very time consuming, and we very quickly get lost. Forget whatever meaning we find in the dictionary. So about 20 years ago, I was tossing ideas around with my son, Mark, who, when he was at Yale, when he wasn't playing hockey for the Yale Bulldogs, he studied engineering.
And so he had some ideas. Out of this came LingQ. For the last 20 years, I have been using LingQ as my main language learning Platform and tool link recently was surveyed by an independent organization based out of a university that compares different language learning apps.
And lo and behold, link came out on top. I'll leave a link to this study in the description box. But let me go over with you seven reasons why I think LingQ is an excellent place to learn languages.
Number one, it's the amount of meaningful input that we have in our libraries. Now, the definition of meaningful input can vary. It can vary from person to person.
Obviously, it can vary depending on your stage in the language. I find that at an early stage in learning a language, I have a high tolerance for content that is relatively uninteresting, as long as there is a lot of repetition of high frequency vocabulary. And so I have a high tolerance for our mini stories, which I find very effective because the same vocabulary in a slightly different form or tense or person repeats.
And then I always feast on my many stories when I start into a language. And I often go back to the many stories in order to refresh my knowledge of a language. However, comes a point because meaningful input is so important.
We have to go out and find other things, things that are intrinsically more interesting. And in that regard, in our library, you can search by topic. You can search by level in order to find the key.
content and each one of our language libraries, and we have over 50 languages at LingQ are full of interesting content. So I normally find that at the beginner level and certainly the lower intermediate level, I tend to stay in the LingQ libraries. However, the second reason why LingQ is so effective is that we are not limited by what's in the LingQ libraries.
In fact, the potential content is limitless. You know, it used to be when I was learning Chinese, for example, 50, 55 years ago. Everything was books, printed books, and open reel tape recorder.
Well, that's no longer the case. We live in a world where the internet is full of all kinds of content. E books, podcasts, YouTube videos, movies on Netflix, you name it.
Whatever is available on the internet, Can be imported into LingQ as learning content. It can be imported as a file, as an ebook, as an mp3 file. It can be scanned into LingQ.
Uh, I have even taken photographs of content in a foreign language, passed it through chat GPT to get the digital version and I import that into LingQ. So there is no limit. To the kind of content you can use.
This means that it's easier to be dealing with meaningful content. In the old model, the teacher told you what to study, told you which textbooks to use. I'll show you a picture here of a book in the Stanford University bookstore, 2015, several hundred dollars for the compulsory textbook for the Italian course.
And that's only one book. At LingQ, you have access to limitless content. And it's the monthly cost for access to all of this content within our libraries, or that you can bring in from anywhere on the internet is dollars a month.
So that's the second point, limitless content. Now, point number three, I mentioned that I had trouble reading the books in my library because there were too many unknown words. How do you acquire words?
We need words. In order to access meaningful content, even in terms of studying grammar books, where there are examples of different grammar patterns, if you don't know the words, you can't make much sense of the grammar examples that they're showing you. So LingQ is extremely efficient at helping you acquire words.
Every time you see a word you don't know, you look it up. It goes into your personal database. The next time that word shows up, it's changed color because you'll have forgotten that you ever saw the word.
And so you're able to follow the progression of your words and phrases as they gradually become better and better known. So the database that you create is kind of like an external hard drive where you park all of the words as you come across them and gradually. They are brought back to your initially passive vocabulary when you're reading and eventually some of them into your active vocabulary as you start to use them.
Bear in mind that at LingQ, the content syncs across all devices and whatever words you are acquiring in whatever lesson in one, whatever device, it's all synced across the system. Now, point number four, we know that meaningful input, comprehensible input is how we learn languages. That's the fundamental way we get used to a language, we acquire words.
However, meaningful implies motivated. We have to be motivated. And very often we can be sort of working with content which we might find intrinsically, Interesting, but we feel that our progress is slow.
We're continuing to forget the same words and so forth. And that's where variety comes in. Variety of ways of accessing the same content.
So you can read it. You can read it on page view. If the content is difficult, you can read it in sentence view.
The advantage here is that you can actually have the live audio timestamp to match that sentence. You can look up individual words. There are even exercises where you.
Reconstitute the sentence. So you can work very intensively sentence by sentence, or you can go through the content page by page. You can also read in what we call karaoke mode, where you can listen to the audio and follow the words in the text, much like in karaoke.
Also, we need to remember that listening and reading are very similar in our brains. In other words, when we are reading, which is something that humans started doing relatively recently, Once we have decoded the letters, the whole process of the sounds and the meaning making its way through your brain and connecting neurons is essentially the same. So reading and listening are very similar.
In fact, studies show that listening has the same impact on your brain as reading. And so LingQ, which gets you to listen and read to the same content, is strengthening your ability to do both those things. And in life, we need to be good readers.
We need to be good listeners. So the variety of ways whereby you can access this meaningful input at LingQ and the ease with which you can change to something else when you get tired of what you're listening to, all of this strengthens our ability to listen and read and to learn not only languages, but other things in life as well. Now, when we acquire these words or when we put these words into our database, Somewhere in our memory reserve in our brain or parked them in our external disk drive, we occasionally need to review them.
And here again, one feature of LingQ is the variety of ways there are to review your vocabulary. You can review your vocabulary in a great long list if you want. You can review them in flashcards.
My personal preference is to review my vocabulary after each page, because it's then very close to where I saw them in a given context. I know from experience that reviewing vocabulary doesn't mean that it's going to stick. But the closer I do that to the content, the better off I am.
But even there, we have a choice. We can review them in flashcards. We can review them as a list.
We can review all the words in a given lesson. We can review The words in a sentence or on a page, all of this variety keeps things fresh for us. It's very easy when learning languages to have the feeling that we're working very hard and we're not getting anywhere.
That's why LingQ enables this variety, this switching to different types of activities to keep things fresh and the brain likes variety, the brain likes novelty. Now, some of you will say, well, what about speaking correctly, correct usage, grammar? How does LingQ deal with that?
Well, of course we want to speak correctly. I firmly believe that the only way to get to speaking correctly is to expose yourself to enough meaningful content. But even there, it can be helpful to review grammar explanations.
I find myself always buying a grammar book. We even have grammar reviews at LingQ for many of our languages. And of course, I like to seek out the services of an online tutor, where we have conversations, the tutor will often point out my mistakes or structures that I have trouble with, send me a report with some of these words and phrases.
Of course, I know from my own experience, because I import these tutor reports as content and link, and I go back three months later. Six months prior, and I see that I make the same mistakes over and over again. Doesn't matter.
Looking up a grammar rule doesn't mean you're going to get it right the next time. Being correct. It doesn't mean you'll get it correct the next time.
However, it's part of the process of making you more aware of what's happening in the language, but it has to happen based on a solid set of rules. Sense of the language. You, you have to have that experience and exposure to the language.
And only then can you make sense of grammar explanations, have a hope of speaking correctly. And of course, eventually as you gain more and more confidence and a larger and larger vocabulary, you want to speak more and more often. But the big thing at LingQ is that the grammar activities, the, uh, tutor conversation activities are integrated with your basic input based learning, with your accumulation of words and phrases.
Point number seven on motivation. Obviously, if we go to a classroom, and again, I showed that picture of textbook at Stanford, if you attend a language class at Stanford, I mean, you're paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend Stanford. I don't know what that works out to per language course, but it's a lot of money.
But, the language class Provides motivation, provides a framework. You have to show up. You have the sense that you did something.
So how do we deal with the need for people to have a sense of framework at LingQ? The way we deal with it is statistics. So you set yourself goals.
I find the goals very motivating. When I find my enthusiasm flagging, I am nevertheless nudged by the desire to achieve my goals. For example, before going to Turkey, where I had a level of 8, 000 known words.
In LingQ, I said in four months, I'm going to get to 35, 000 words. So even those days when I was not very motivated to read my Turkish, I was nevertheless motivated to get to a couple of hundred or more new known words every day. So the statistics are very motivating.
The statistics not only enable you to set goals for yourself, but it also allows you to look back at what you have done or to compare yourself to other people who are involved in a language streak. All of these different ways create a framework, create an environment that can be just as motivating as having to go to a classroom. And ultimately, The framework at Ling has this advantage over the language classroom as a framework.
And that is that it is portable. It goes with you wherever you are, and it makes you more independent. And to become an independent learner of a language or really of anything fits in with the world in which we live.
No longer is the classroom the only, or even the main place where you acquire knowledge, whether it be language or other things. So learning to become an independent learner at LingQ helps you when it comes to language learning, but also makes you aware of all the other opportunities there are to work on your education and learning on your own. Since we started LingQ, the internet has evolved.
The availability of language content has exploded. Technology is constantly evolving and so is LingQ. LingQ is so much more efficient now than it was before.
We are taking advantage of AI, for example, to ensure that our word translations are context relevant, rather than simply giving you four or five words from a dictionary. AI enables us to transcribe MP3 files in order that these audio LingQ. And we are going to continue evolving as the technology evolves.
So I just thought I would explain why I'm such a fan of LingQ. Obviously I'm involved, uh, my son Mark and I are co founders. And so it can easily be said that I'm not being objective, but nevertheless, I just thought I would try to summarize my views on what I think makes LingQ such an outstanding language learning platform.
And of course we were recognized by that independent third party organization as being. The top of the pack when it comes to language learning apps. Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.
