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Today, I'm going to be talking
to you about a slightly different topic
which is something to do with teaching
something to do with learning
definitely something to do with languages.
And I would like to start by thanking you all,
dear polyglots, because you helped me get over
a huge feeling of frustration that I had had for many years.
I'm serious now.
You know, I've taught English in many different settings.
I started well since I was a little bit better than my classmates
I started teaching them,
then I taught in primary, secondary schools and
language schools, companies, and now
I teach at the University and I always
felt really frustrated. Do you know why?
Because I always knew how I learn languages effectively and how it works
and that it can actually be
pretty fast, that it can work very well, but
I could never transfer that "know-how" on
to my students, I could never see the
progress with my students whatever I did
However, I tried. However many lessons
I had with them.
I felt really really frustrated with that.
It's like: "Okay how can I make them
get what the language learning is about"?
You basically helped me to figure it out,
because, this is from last year some of you
might recognize yourselves in the picture.
This is where I came with for the first time
into the Polyglot gathering and I was
completely new to the polyglot community.
I didn't know anyone.
I actually remember sitting in one of these rows
talking to someone, one of the guys
and he said: "Have you heard?
Luca Lampariello is not going to come.
He had to cancel." And I was like, Luca who?
What? You haven't heard about Luca Lampariello?
But you have heard about Richard Simcott, right?
Well, sorry Richard, I hadn't up to the last year's Gathering.
I didn't follow any blogs or anything else.
I was just learning languages by myself, in my own ways.
And then, it was really really
inspiring to meet all of you,
to talk to 300 polyglots
who learn languages in different ways
and to figure out how you learn languages.
And I found out, that there are so many methods
and they seem to be all working!
So for example, Benny speaks from day one.
But Steve Kaufman says: "I better
first build up my vocabulary, I read a lot and listen a lot
and then I start speaking."
Two different methods but they seem to be working.
Not just for them, but for many people that are following them.
That's just one example.
Maria de Vera at the first Polyglot Gathering
said: "I am a grammar nerd."
I start learning a language by taking a grammar book
just going through it all
just to know what the grammar is about.
And Emanuele Marini basically starts with a dictionary.
He starts using the language using a dictionary
so if he doesn't know a word, he looks it up,
uses it in conversation.
So that's a different approach again.
Another example is Gabriel Wyner
who really is a big fan of flashcards.
Maybe you heard about him. And Luca Lampariello, whom I now
do know, says he couldn't care less about flashcards.
So I realized by meeting you and by following
all your blogs and videos after the conference
that there are just so many ways how we can learn a language.
And it's not limited to one particular method,
and that got me thinking.
I started thinking, what is the difference between how the polyglots
learn languages and how people learn languages
out there outside of the polyglot community?
I'm talking mostly about people who
take language courses and go to schools, etc...
What is the difference there?
After studying all these polyglots and reading about them,
talking to them, I think the secret is
that polyglotes do learn languages
and they are not taught languages.
I think this is really the main difference.
It's about the responsibility that you take for your own learning.
Because we just don't go to a course.
I never met anyone here who would say:
"You know what? I happen to speak
five languages, because I had an amazing
teacher he taught me all that"
We all have a lot of methods that we use,
but it means a lot of work that we put in ourselves.
To put it in more detail,
for me personally learning a language is based
on four main pillars and this is something
that I realized after the gathering,
and after looking at many different polyglots
and how they learn languages.
I think first of all,
whatever we do must be fun.
Do you agree that learning languages is fun?
Absolutely! We just love it!
You know, five minutes a day you take out
your AnkiDroid
and you go through the vocabulary
or you take a grammar book and
you do some exercises, right?
Well it can be fun, but it also means that you use materials
that are interesting to you, so you don't just take a book
that someone told you, this is the best book ever for learning.
French or whatever. You pick a book that you like, right?
It has to be a book that smells good
that you like holding in your hands
that has a nice picture, etc...
So, we need to have a positive attitude
towards learning languages and I think
this is so important, because it all happens a lot in language courses
and in language schools for example, that there's just one book and
people work with just that one book.
But, you know, sometimes I'm not interested in
reading about the history of Thanksgiving, for example.
And yet, we're spending two lessons with that
talking about it over and over again
I'm just not interested, okay?
I would rather watch an episode of Friends
where I see how Thanksgiving works in the U.S.
in practice, and that's my way of learning
that's how I prefer to learn, right?
So, I think that it's extremely important
that we do stuff that we like, that we enjoy,
that we kind of...
pick up our own methods how to learn
and our own materials.
Do you agree? Is that important? Definitely.
Now the second thing, and I think this is
probably the greatest difference between polyglots
and unsuccessful language learners
who are struggling with the language for a long time.
That is quantity.
It's the huge amount of hours that we put into
our language learning and this is something
you know, that people suppose that
if you speak a few languages
"Oh you're so talented you know.
It's just so easy for you,
you just learn another language just like that".
I hate to hear that, because there's a lot
of hours that I put into every one
of my languages and it's fun hours,
because I pick the materials and the
methods myself, but it still is a lot of hours
that we need to put into that learning,
and we need to do it actively.
This is the responsibility that we have
for our learning.
So I think, this is another huge difference.
The third thing that I heard with many many polyglots
is that you need to do something
not just a lot of it, but also to do
a little bit every day, right?
15 minutes here, 15 minutes there.
It's much more effective
than learning for three or four hours
on a Sunday for example, right?
So, it's really really important to do it on a frequent basis.
And finally, I think learning a language is really much easier
If you have a system, if you have a plan
how to start doing it, how to end,
what do you want to achieve?
How to set your goals? Etc...
So this is basically my language learning philosophy
that I figured out after the Polyglot gathering
and as I told you, my great frustration
was: How to put this in practise?
How to make other people learn languages like that?
And that's why
I came up with an idea and I think
it's best illustrated with this picture.
An island.
and it's actually a metaphor, that Alex also used yesterday
which is interesting.
When you don't speak a language, you're basically
on the island, on an isolated island right?
And you have very limited possibilities,
you cannot communicate with so many people,
so you're kind of stuck there.
Now when you want to get out to the beautiful ocean
which is full of possibilities, you need to get across the waves.
But as you can see the waves are just around the island,
They're not everywhere on the ocean, right?
So what you need to do if you want to learn a language well?
is to take your boat
from the island and row your way through the waves.
And I think this is something that people don't
normally do very well, because they row a little bit, you know
like have a lesson on Monday in a language school
and then row a little bit on the right
have a lesson on Wednesday and then
they just wait. They don't learn every day
they don't put in all the work that we do
and so, the waves carry them back to the island a little bit.
So they kind of move forward, but then
they're dragged back towards the island.
The thing is they never get across these last waves
which are the biggest ones, the biggest struggles
and I think personally, that's the B-2 level for me.
I don't know about you, but when I managed to achieve
a B2 level in a language
when I don't have to think about it,
I use it naturally and that's why I don't have to worry
about the language learning so much.
I just enjoy the beautiful ocean swimming in there
and using the language in all possible situations.
But I don't have to row so much every day.
I think in order to get there I need to row quite a lot
to get across the big waves.
So this is just an explanation of how I see language learning
and I'm telling you this, because I want to tell you now
about a few experiments that I've done with my students
where I was testing this idea in practise.
I wanted to see, if I tell people about this
and if I make them realize that
if they want to speak a language,
if they want to know the language well,
they need to start learning it and not just wait to be taught.
I wanted to see what happens and the results were actually quite amazing.
So this is something, that I decided to call Language Mentoring.
I decided not to teach any lessons ever in my life again,
because I am not sure, if it's really possible
to teach someone a language.
That's again something that Kirsten mentioned yesterday
and we heard it in some other talks too.
Is there such thing as teaching someone a language?
Well I call it "Language Mentoring"
and I'm going to explain to you what's the difference
and how I go about doing it.
So I did my first experiment at the Comenius University in Bratislava
where I'm currently finishing my PhD, and as such I teach some classes.
I normally teach interpreting classes, but sometimes
they ask me to teach something like "the introduction to English studies"
I had 100 students in four groups,
and I was supposed to do two things with them in one semester.
I was supposed to improve their presentation skills, so how to present
in the public and to improve their practical English skills.
There are students on a B-2, maybe C-1 level
but mostly B-2 and they need to practice their English quite a lot
and you know how difficult it is on the more advanced levels
to actually practice in a systematic way,
so I said: "okay, let's do it!"
But I only had 45 minutes a week.
Can you imagine a class of 25 students 45 minutes a week and you're supposed to
make them learn or practice their presentation skills and also
improve their English?
How do you do that?
And that's how. That's what I did.
I tried the language mentoring in practice.
So basically I told them:
"Okay guys, I'm gonna tell you one thing.
This university is not going to teach you English at all.
You're not going to improve just by studying here.
They studied to be translators and interpreters.
And I'm telling you that now, so that you save some time.
So let's take the learning into our own hands
and let's learn together actively.
I want you to do something every day,
That's the frequency.
I want you to do a lot of it and it doesn't matter
if it's watching series or reading books or working on your vocabulary or grammar
or whatever you like.
We also have a system about it, so we had a plan,
we had an accountability sheet, etc...
so we put some framework around it,
so that is not just, okay I'm learning here, I'm learning there.
So this was the project, the experiment
and some of the students came up with
amazing ideas how to note it down, how to monitor the progress.
For example one of the students created a calendar like this
and every day she put in the information what she did
like she watched some TED Talks, and BBC learning and YouTube videos, etc...
and she put in the time and then she counted it
how much time it was, which was quite an interesting way.
She had it in front of her table, so that she always sees it every day.
Now I'm gonna tell you
I'm gonna show you what they actually weren't doing.
Because I asked them at the end in a questionnaire all 100 of them
and it was interesting to see that when you tell them:
"Ok guys, you need to learn by yourselves, this is what happens."
They started listening to podcasts quite a lot
93% of all the students, they started watching TV series,
but not just you know TV series with Slovak subtitles
as they would normally, but English subtitles or no subtitles at all.
Which I think is much more effective.
They started using AnkiDroid for the vocabulary
from other lessons,
they read books and articles online
or watched some other YouTube videos
or other videos and they did grammar exercises.
15% of them, isn't that amazing?
I was quite happy with that result
because I told them you can pick yourselves.
We left it up to them, because I said it needs to be something you want.
You know what you need to improve so, make sure that you do it in a way
which is interesting to you and so this is what they did.
and I asked them at the end: "How did you like it?
"How was the learning program for you?"
Not the let's be taught, but let's learn.
And I was so glad to see, that just seven percent of them said:
"Oh well, not really my cup of tea,
but the rest of them, you know, said it was great
or it was quite interesting.
So they were really enthusiastic about learning English.
Finally! I asked them: "Has your English improved?"
Because I didn't have any objective ways how to test it.
I didn't test them at the beginning and at the end, I did it
with my second experiment which I'm gonna to tell you about.
But these guys just said by themselves like:
Do you think your English has improved?
And we are talking about two months here, okay?
Not a very long period, just two months
October, November and look at how many of them said: "yes"
at least a little or even quite a lot in just two months.
And again, this was a lesson of 45 minutes
where I didn't spend any time actually teaching them.
We just presented with, we just did presentations in the lesson,
but no learning was actually done in the lesson itself.
It was all about them spending time outside of the lessons
with English in a way which they like.
I asked them if they would like to continue in such a program
in another subject,
because, you know, the introduction to English studies
actually had nothing to do with learning English
or it was not the primary goal and almost all of them said
"Yes, absolutely, let's do it, it was good."
So they were happy about it,
they were satisfied.
Now when you look at the time,
how much time they spent, Veronika was the most active student
and in two months she put in 81 hours of language learning
and I can tell you these guys are extremely busy.
I studied the program myself, they study two languages at the same time
plus they have some subjects about translation and interpreting.
They often have as many as 12 or 13 subjects every week, okay?
And they need to prepare for all of them, so they're extremely busy.
So when I saw that she could put in 81 hours of language learning,
just because she wanted to,
she wanted to improve, I was really really happy to see that.
The other students were like 36-34 and on average it was 23 hours.
When you actually compare it to what they would have
if I was teaching them in the lesson,
we would have spent six hours in two months all together,
because it was just 8 times 45 minutes
and now they've real learning time which they spent by themselves,
not because they were taught, but because they were learning by themselves
was 23 hours.
So when you compare that, it's almost 400% of increase in learning time.
Isn't that amazing? And it's much more effective
and I think whatever I would do with 25 students in a class
I could never find something that interests all of them,
so whatever they were doing is something that they picked themselves
and I think it was much more effective for them.
Some of them worked on the grammar, the 15 %,
some of them worked on other areas,
that they needed and everybody was enjoying it.
You know that fun, it was a really nice atmosphere.
We spent seriously just 5 minutes every week talking about the learning,
I asked them if anyone had any problems, it was kind of motivational
and it just worked amazingly.
They often came to me and said "Wow, this was so good,
let's do it in other semesters too."
And it's just one simple idea you tell them
"Guys don't wait to be taught, start learning yourselves."
So then I asked them, how the program has helped them
and I was really happy to see their answers, because
you know these are students who just learned English at school,
they don't have any experience learning by themselves and now they said like:
"Wow, I have never worked on my English as intensively as during this semester,
thank you!"
or then the last one: "I never liked listening exercises at school too much,
but now I enjoy listening to English,
maybe because I did it voluntarily in my free time.
Maybe, yes,
What a good idea.
Really nice discovery.
And it was beautiful that they discovered
kinda for themselves, I told them like you need to learn
and these are all the methods that you can use
for learning a language, it was beautiful to see how they actually agreed with it.
Like: "Yes, yes, this is much more fun,
much more effective, I see results. Let's do it again."
So, then I did my second experiment.
I moved it a little bit higher even, it was again with a hundred students
but different ones, different classes
and the program was called "Semester with Language Mentoring".
And we just finished it last week, so I'm still processing the results of that.
And the amazing thing is that I work with a group of a hundred students
with 13 different languages, not just English.
And it's because that in our university you can study as many
as probably 20 different languages to be a translator and interpreter
and they are in different combinations.
So we have students who study French, Spanish, German, Portuguese,
Finnish, Croatian, you name it and students with 13 different languages
came to that class. It was actually not a class
because I just told them:
"Let's do it as our free time activity, you're not going to get any ECTS points
any credits for that." In fact they are, but I didn't tell them,
because I wanted them to have a genuine motivation.
It's a surprise, I'm going to tell them next week.
Just those that persevered until the end. They didn't know that.
I told them learn, because you want to learn,
you want to improve your languages
and not because someone asks you to
or because you're going to get credits for that, right?
So basically what I did at the beginning is
I gave them a lecture where I explained to them
what I just told you
about my language learning philosophy.
And I actually started by using all the languages that I speak
so that they they see that it's possible,
that they can learn languages too and they were really inspired by that.
It was like: "Oh, wow this is cool! I want to learn that too!
So, I told them: "Okay, now listen, you need to put in a lot of hours
there is no shortcut in language learning,
deal with it, okay?" And I told them:
"You know, now I know 300 polyglots
and they say the same, so they trusted me they took my word for it
So,I explained to them what language learning is really about.
And I told them: "Okay, let's create a plan
and let's learn according to that plan"
So, everybody created their individual plan
and now we had regular weekly meetings
where I put them into groups according to
the language that they were learning
and so this would be a Spanish group and the French and German, etc...
And I told them to pick just one language to do this with,
even though they study all of them two languages,
because I think it's more effective
if you concentrate on one language at a certain time.
So, we were meeting in three groups
once a week and we were discussing the learning.
And the amazing thing was that I was learning together with them.
I was working on my Russian and we were all letting
each other know how we're doing, and so
They could all see what I did on my Russian,
so it was very motivating for me also.
Not to give up and not to be lazy,
but to continue, because I was the example for them.
So, that's how we met and we discussed
all the learning problems and there was
no learning done in the meetings
it was all about learning outside of the lessons.
And again it worked amazingly!
They spent a lot of time for example watching TV series,
reading books, reading newspapers, magazines, etc...
...working with their Anki vocabulary,
writing the Goldlist method, etc...
I told them about all possible methods
and they picked whatever they liked.
I think that's really amazing to see how people
can get excited about language learning
when they realize that it's up to them
and it's in no one's hands. And it was nice,
because I could tell they believed that I knew what I was saying,
because I studied the same program four years ago,
I finished at the same University
studying English and German
and I told them, "Do you have the feeling like
you're in your third or fourth year
and you're studying, let's say, English and German
but you're in fact kind of ashamed
to tell people that you're studying German,
because your German is not fluent enough?"
And they were like "Yes!". I had that too,
and and I said "It's perfectly okay,
it's because you're not doing anything about
your language and this university is not
going to make you a perfect German
or English speaker. You need to put in the work yourselves."
I think they understood that and now they're approaching
language learning in a completely new way
and they're writing emails like this:
"This is so amazing, I'm doing it for my other
languages too and I have a plan to work in the summer on my Spanish,
which I want to take as a third language" So, they got really motivated
about language learning.
I did the group of this methodology, this language learning experiment
also in small groups.
These are five my friends
who are learning English and Spanish on an A2-B1 level.
And again, we met every week at my place,
and and we had a nice talk about that.
And I just wanted to see how that works
and it seemed to be working really well,
because they really are achieving great results.
Or another group of people who are actually
starting to learn a language so, I am kind of testing the idea
on different groups of people
and now I started to organize seminars even for the public
where I tell people it's all about the learning
it's not about being taught and it's mostly
you know, these people that go to the courses are people
who would normally just take a lesson in a language school but that's all
it takes for them to learn a language.
You know actually, when I was here at the Polyglot Gathering,
I bought Judith's book "Fluent Chinese"
I think it's called and I probably put a lot of interest
even though I'm not interested in Chinese
and I really enjoy the book and then my friend from Serbia
wrote to me and he said: "Lydia, I'm going to teach English in China".
I said: "Yeah, that's cool, good for you.
and he says: "And you know what's amazing?
they're going to give me a private teacher so I'm even going to speak Chinese".
And by the way how he said it he looked to me
like he thinks: Okay, "tick" that's done.
You know, Chinese is another benefit of the work for free.
You know, that's okay, so I just sent him the book right away
I was like "Read this. You better work on your Chinese
as Judith says, because she knows what she's talking about."
And you know I think this really is something that people believe in general.
Like all you need is a good teacher and he will do the work for you.
You know and then these people go and look for the best teacher who can give them
the the best know-how or the best language knowledge
or something, but I don't really think it exists.
I'm thinking teachers were always to make the students learn
and I think the teachers are very important
but the teacher should always stress
how important is that students work on their languages
by themselves outside of the lessons.
So these are the seminars that I'm organizing right now, testing the idea.
I'm gonna see what it brings me. I took it as my private mission to tell
all the world that this is what polyglots do.
You know, they actually learn the language,
they don't wait to just be taught.
And as I said this is all based on the four things
which I think are the most important thing
in language learning and it'll be really interesting to hear your opinion
whether you agree with it, whether maybe you would like to add something
and now we actually have some time for the discussion
so that would be that would be all Are there any questions?
If you agree,
I will ask my question sir then give it to you after
Lydia I think it is not a teaching, but a learning revolution
you are pointing out is really wonderful.
And one thing, with the first group you showed to us
there were three percent of people who
we're not amused with this,
I go to complain to the direction
I mean you are not a director of your school, are you?
So, how the direction reacted to that?
Yes, this is one thing, I'm very glad you ask
thanks for the question. And this is something that
I was thinking a lot about how to actually do it,
because it's a formal education, you know I need to actually assess them now.
How do you assess learning in their free time?
I asked them how much time, we actually had a chart
and they filled in how much time they spent but if I had told them you know,
those of you who will spend more than, I don't know, 20 hours
altogether will get an A, then I wouldn't believe what they say,
because they would just put in anything
So I told them, look guys, officially I'm going to asses you
just based on the presentations and we did a few more activities,
like vocabulary tests, etc...
but the most important thing in this subject is the learning part.
it's the most important one, but I cannot assess it formally.
So, let's just agree that we are going to do it.
if you really don't want to, you don't have to.
There is no way for me how to find that out
and it's totally up to you.
But I'm telling you, this is your once in a lifetime opportunity, you better use it,
because no other teachers are probably going to tell you to do that,
so let's do it together,
so, I tried to motivate them in a positive way.
And if they didn't, you know, if they didn't like it or something
if they didn't put in all the hours it's like okay, that's your problem.
When they were doing it, they came back to you for questions
on particular points?
Yes, during the last moments five minutes at the end, yes to discuss
whatever they want to discuss about the learning.
Thank you. You are welcome.
Thanks, you use the term "Gold list",
Can you briefly explain what that is for those who don't know?
Oh no, I think I may not be the best person to explain that.
David James, the author of the method is here among us...
And the "Gold list" is a basically method of rewriting vocabulary lists
at least two weeks after writing the first list, so you go
you basically distill the vocabulary and you rewrite 70% of the words
that were most difficult for you every two weeks or more.
And it's learning into your long-term memory
without actually wanting to learn, without forcing your brain to learn.
I think you could talk to David James about the method.
I think it's a really interesting one, I'm using it myself.
How about senses learning tools
that can teach a student in order to continue his studies
to see one level after he finished his
intermediate and beginner?
I will not now talk about all the methods
I basically gave my students a two-hour lecture
about the possible methods I think it takes a lot of contact with the language
and it depends on you know what level.
If you'll be frosting about the upper
intermediate advance then I suppose that
people should work with native materials
and work with the vocabulary a lot and just listen,
listen a lot and read.
Because this is something that our students
just don't do enough of listening to start one thing
that at least in Slovakia is really underestimated.
Can we give the microphone to exactly that person
I thought you were the person.
I don't think James is here.
What a question?
I fully believe in what you're doing,
but how do you make it that we go out of our comfort zone?
Because I mean personally, I like reading or writing
this is where I'm going to do all the time
when I kind of don't go to the oral part because it's my tougher part
and I say okay I prefer taking a book that looking at a video,
so how do you push your student to go out of the comfort zone.
Very good question thank you
and the first thing I did with them
is for them to realize what are their three priorities
that they need to concentrate on
and I made them write it down before I continued.
So I said okay now think about it what do you need
to work on most?
For 93% of them speaking is number one
and vocabulary is number two
and then you know listening, writing,
whatever it is, whatever they chose
and I said okay, let's spend these two months
concentrating on your priorities and if you put in speaking
now I want you to actually write down
exactly how you're going to improve your speaking
and I gave them a range of possibilities
even including things like talking to yourself.
Self-talk which is an amazing way for introverts for example,
I think it's a good method,
so I told them various possible ways like
you can go to language cafes
you know you can use several websites
actually meet foreigners in Bratislava,
you can use italkie for online teachers,
you have a tandem we have Erasmus students
in Bratislava, so there's best possibilities
and I told them now pick one and
write down what you're going to do
and then we did a challenge and I told them
okay guys some of you said your priority is speaking
but I see in the chart that you still
haven't been to any language cafe
you haven't talked to anyone,
so how are you going to improve your speaking
and then I always tell them
it's very comfortable to do the things that we like
like you're reading and listening
where we are not also outside of our comfort zone
but you're speaking will never improve without speaking.
So I said okay before next week I mean this week
everybody needs to do something about
the priority that they haven't still done
anything about and you're going to report to me
next week and then I would ask them in front of the other people
so, what about your language cafe did you go?
and they're like yeah you know um
I already have an italkie session
booked for tomorrow.
It's like okay good,
So this basically motivation like that
I have for the mic back here
send it up front after one more person.
Here I normally don't plug things
but I recently took a course from sensible Chinese
for learning Chinese characters and I was extremely impressed
by the systematic approach that it's.
It wasn't specifically to teach me Chinese characters themselves
but how to go about doing that in a very regular
easy-to-understand way if anyone's interested good
Hi thank you so much for that presentation
you sort of answered my question
but I just want to know if there's anything else
so to ask it directly you had the puzzle pieces
there and one of them was system so you
discovered about you know, they make the goals
and then they work on their priorities and all of that
was there anything else as part of that system
that you haven't already mentioned?
Yes it's also the accountability sheet or count account
making sure that they are held accountable for their learning
which is something that I took
inspiration from the add1challenge you know the Google spreadsheet
where people write what date.
I think it's a really good way of making sure
that it's public everybody sees it
It's not just something they would report to me by email
that would be a lot too much work anyway to process
that so this is how I did it
we basically also make sure the accountability was there
I think that's an important part of the system.
Well first of all well done
guess what I agree, I said half of the things
that you said yesterday in your presentation
right yeah but better amazing work..
really really great.
One thing I was wondering is your group are all busy
taking and interpreting and translating degree
they're all foreign language students
you've got like a big self-selecting group of language nerds
to a certain extent maybe not as nerdy as nerdfest.
However you did then say that you know you were
working on it with your friends you've worked on it
with sort of even zero beginners
I think that's really interesting
because I'm looking at it's good
I'll do this in my town this is great
but I would never find you know like people
who are self selected language people
so I wonder if did you notice any differences?
Yes, surprisingly the students who study languages are not
such language enthusiasts you would probably expect
right and they often choose that
because they didn't get to medicine or whatever
But in Slovakia we have five universities
that prepare translators and interpreters
we have like 20 languages in there
so it's just you know you're studying
polish why well they open polish in m year
so you have students and students there
you know um however, I do work only with people
who do have a little bit of internal intrinsic motivation
I don't need to persuade anyone like if someone
wants to be taught and they are willing to pay a lot of money to be taught
I let them figure it out for themselves
because it's like I tell them about this
and it doesn't resonate with them
then too bad you know I decided to just work
with people who want to work because
I don't promise any miraculous methods
you know this is like
hey guys I'm going to help you learn a language
but you need to do the work
I'm just going to be the guide
I'm not going to give you the perfect method
which will teach you English in two weeks
So I guess this is this is the natural selection.
I tell people about it some people say like
well sounds like a lot of work
I'd better go to my to my language course
if others like the idea and we work together in the voluntary group.
Did you have anyone drop out like yes this went quiet on you?
Yes actually counted it yesterday
I think 76 people ended the course and were regularly going and doing this.
This is the things some of them broken you know like yeah you know...
I'm really busy this semester and one day I will do the amazing things that
you told us about and that's what for example Brian Tracy calls the one day.
You know people never get out of that. Thanks,
So I am a classical guitarist
and I completely agree with every single
point and when I'm hearing a lot from people here
is that people want to play an instrument but not practice
people want to speak something but not speak
and so that's so as a musician to language learner everything you said
is 100% true so if you have that comfort zone problem
to one day I'll whatever you want to call it
maybe both if you're an introvert can't do this because
you're setting up your own boundaries
and that is why you cannot advance
she cannot help you no matter how good
of a teacher she is if you are
not willing to step out so you get it.
I use this metaphor quite a lot
in my in my lectures on my students
I use the guitar and I show them a picture
of the guitar and I said if you like
to play the guitar.. how do you think you
will achieve that?
Do you think you could
watch some YouTube videos and practice
with on the imaginary guitar and then
once you know how to do it you take a
guitar and go and do a concert that's that word?.
I go like no, of course not...
You need to pick this along with the guitar
it's like okay what about speaking you
know you want to practice speaking and
you're accepting and somehow
by just reading something and listening to
something you suddenly start speaking in
a fluent way doesn't work
and it helps a lot when I tell them
if you know I've gone through this
process several times right now
I'm learning Russian and
I'm somewhere still in the wave zone you know still
struggling and still putting a lot of work
But you know even though I it's my eighth language right now
I still felt really frustrated at
the beginning it's like it is a painful process deal with it
okay you want to say something
you're talking to someone you could express it
in fact on the language ease
what you want to do it in Russian it's like
how do I say that you know it's really a painful process
but I tell them just keep growing
and it's going to pay off right
Going on with that it's like you want
to have a concert but you only want
to play the first piece in your program
you want to play a concert but
you're only going to practice scales
when you have other pieces
if you play scales cause I mean you can play arpeggios
if you play arpeggios
I mean you can play scales etc
so listen to her, excellent work.
ah I would have interest in your Google sheets that you set up
and I don't know it's like because I did that too
do they have to do it every day
or every week and what what do they enter
because it can be too much it can be too less,
I don't know your balance
I'm experimenting with this again
I'm trying to work out the best way
with the first group we did it with colors
so we had a we had a sheet which was the
rows were this run from s 60 and the columns were individual students
in several sheets and they were basically
supposed to color the given cell for the day green
if they did well, yellow if it was like half the time
they were starting to they were planning
red if they failed that day.
and it was style of violet if it was a day off.
because I told them you don't need to study every single day
and so then you looked at the chart and you saw
exactly like a there's quite a lot of red cells in here
you know what's going on and then you could discuss it
with that student so that was my color method
and I even rewarded them like if you if you put it twice as much work
because you know students get really motivated at the beginning
and they start learning a lot
so I told them if it's a really active day
then make it a green cell and put in a smiley face
you know and then you can see like I have so many smiles
this week you know, they were very proud
to show the others, so that's my first method, right now
for making them actually write into the cells what exactly they're doing
how much time they're spending.
we're counting the minutes
and they're giving notes like what exact day
they were doing like 15 minutes of that 20 minutes of that
and then we count it together that's how
I could find out how much time did she spend doing
so it's even with numbers or with colors.
Actually I lectured two English teachers
in Slovakia about this and some of the
teachers were to be like I'm actually coming to try
these with my students and one of the teachers
worked with kids which are more like 10 years old
and she says it works perfectly
you know the kids are watching YouTube videos
and they're learning English
and it works well and she works
with the colors because they want
to have the green cells you know
and they even have a chart
in the classroom or color the things themselves
so seems to be working even for children.
Hi thank you very much back to my seat
thank you very much for your presentation.
My name is Johanna I created a kind of teach yourself method
language learning method some of my clients get private sessions with me
I'm thinking of one in particular he's a very busy businessman
I'm supposed to teach him or he's supposed to learn English
and I try to explain kind of the same thing you're saying
I give him a lot of resources with video he could watch
but I never tried the accountability option
what would you recommend for one-on-one sessions?
Because he has nobody else to to prove to
he cannot do a Google sheet with anybody else,
so what could you recommend?
Okay there's another thing that I tried
a mentor like that a friend of mine
with whom I said okay people are really
motivated by money you know people
want to have money and when they lose money
they feel bad about it.
So I think that's a good motivation too
so I told her okay you give me 50 euros
and you learning German, so I'm going to test you
in one month in 50 most frequent irregular verbs in German
If you fail the test, I'm keeping the money
I didn't see them but with my friends the two groups that I showed you
they gave me 100 euros and I told them
you need to stick it out till the under three months
otherwise I'm going to have a really good weekend
and so this or something like that seemed to work
for them too you know they don't want to
people are really really afraid to lose money
So I didn't want to take any money from them
because they're my friends
I was just testing the idea in this way
they were like you know I want to actually earn money by learning
look at that you know what an amazing approach
like if I learn a little bit more
I get a 100 euros the psychology of that
it seems to be working pretty well
if you haven't tried that.
Thank you so much that's really inspiring
because I would love to do some
of the thinking of mentoring methods
that you do and I was wondering
how you found different group sizes from
1 on 1 to 100 what have been the differences
pluses and minuses benefits of each one
and is there a size you would say
you would recommend not going past
I think this can be done with as many people as possible
and it also doesn't depend on the languages you know.
I help people improve their finish
I don't speak a word in Finnish
so it doesn't matter what languages there are even what level
I think it could be done with people on different levels as far
as everybody's learning on their own level
and there are some pluses and minuses
like I would say with this group of 100 students
it was extremely motivating that they met in person
that they actually weren't there together
and even when I did the lecture you know I'd propose
this all around the university
I said we're starting a new learning revolution here at the Faculty
make sure you kind of learn how pointless learn languages
and I had a whole roomful of people you know
and they were like it was amazing to see that this room
is actually full in one of the lectures you know
and that there are so many other people
who want to learn that was very inspiring for them
to see that their classmates are also doing it
and then I also put them into Facebook groups
where they could share resources for their individual languages
so we had a Russian group English German etc
and I kind of motivated them and I boosted the activity in the groups at the beginning
I even had assistants who actually
helped me with that and you know that they were motivated by other classmates
mentioning you know what they were doing for example with a will but
this thing the goal based method
I told them it's important to have a notebook
that you love you know you need to take a really beautiful notebook
and so one of one of the students in the Italian group
actually posted a picture of her notebook
as she said has anyone got a prettier
they were motivating themselves it's amazing
you just need to basically kindle the spark
and it seems to be working by itself
so I would say that's the greatest benefit of working with a group
and working with one on one it can be more adapted to the needs of the person
so for example I mentor a few people where I discuss their language learning
in the language so it is considered English
for example which for them is an additional practice
which they like I couldn't do it with the group
of a lot of students with different languages.
This is exactly what
I do in the finals
I said I'm a lazy polyglot and this is exactly, thank you
what I do I used all my time that I couldn't normally
use when I was at university queuing for the university restaurant
on eating with friends or washing dishes whatever
and I always have either YouTube or some friends to practice languages
with I think this is the secret, isn't it?
isn't it like people? people think like: oh you spent
two hours a day or three hours a day learning
and I was like no really no.
I mean I don't have that extra time
I'm quite easy so I just use I make sure I use the time when I need to.
Exactly those things, okay guys so just one more thing
if you if you want to find out more
I know the website right now in Slovakia
you'll probably not understand
You also have languagementoring.com
which I'm just starting right now so there is not much
but you can contact me there if you have any other questions or ideas.
Thank you very much.