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TEDx Talks
Published: 2013-11-20
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0
people in the back can you hear me clearly okay good have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it comes part of how you think maybe even part of who you are as a person well I've had a question in my mind for many many years and that is how can you speed up learning now this is an interesting question because if
you speed up learning you can spend less time at school and if you learn really fast I probably wouldn't have to go to school at all now when I was young its goal was sort of okay bot and I found quite often the school got in the way of learning so I had this question in mind have you learn fast and this began when I was
very very young when I was eleven years old I wrote a letter to research is in the Soviet Union asking about hip Nupedia this is fleet learning where you get a tape recorder you put it aside your bad and it turns on in the middle of the night when you're sleeping and you're supposed to be learning from this %HESITATION good idea unfortunately it doesn't work bot
hippy did did open the doors to research in other areas and we've had incredible discoveries about lending that began with that first question I went on from there to become passionate about psychology and I have been involved in psychology in many different ways for the rest of my life up until this point in nineteen ninety one I took myself to China and I decided that I
was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years not you need to understand that in nineteen ninety one everybody for Chinese was really really difficult and that a western a could study for ten years or more and never really get very good at it Niles the women with a different idea which was taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point
and applying them to the learning process what was really cool within six months I was fluent in in Mandarin Chinese and talk a little bit longer to get up to native but I looked around and I saw role in these people from different countries struggling terribly with Chinese that's a Chinese people struggling terribly to learn English and other languages and so my question got refined down
to how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly easily and effectively now this is a really really important question in today's world we have massive challenges with environment we have massive challenges with social dislocation with wars also the thing going on and if we can't communicate with really gonna have difficulty solving these problems so we need to be able to speak each
other's languages this is really really important the question is how do you do that well it's actually really easy you look around for people who can already do it you look for situations where it's already working and then you identify the principles and apply them it's called modeling and I've been looking at language landing and modeling language landing for about fifteen to twenty years now and
my conclusion while observation from this is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside six months now when I say this most people think I'm crazy this is not possible so let me remind everybody on the history of human progress it's all about expanding our limits in nineteen fifty everybody believe that running one mile in full minutes was impossible and then Roger Bannister
did it in nineteen fifty six and from there it's got shorter and shorter a hundred years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesn't fly except it doesn't we all know this how this heavy stuff fly we re organize the material using principles that we have learned from observing nature birds in this case and today we've gone even further we don't even further so you can fly
a car you can buy one of these for a couple hundred thousand US dollars we now have cars in the world that fly and is a different way to fly which we learn from squirrels so we need to do is copy what a flying squirrel does build to suit Korda wingsuit and off you go you can fly like a square now most people a lot of
people went to everybody but a lot of people think that Khan drawl however there is some key principles five principles that you can apply the leading to Jordan you can actually learn to draw in five days so if you draw like this you learn these principles for five days and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this now I know this is
true because that was my first Doering after five days of a applying these principles that was what I was able to do and I looked at this and I went wow so that's how I look like when I'm concentrating so intensely that my brain is exploding so anybody can learn to draw in five days and in the same way with the same logic anybody can learn
a second language in X. months how they're five principles and seven actions there may be a few more but these are absolutely core and before I get into those I just want to talk about too myth someone to dispel to myth the first is that you need talent let me tell you about Zoe so we came from Australia went to Holland was trying to learn Dutch
struggling extremely screaming a great deal and finally got people saying you completely useless you you you're you're you're not talented give up your ways to time and he was very very depressed and then she came across these five principles she moved to Brazil and she applied them and in six months she was fluent in Portuguese appellant doesn't matter people also think that immersion in a new
country is the way to learn the language but look around Hong Kong little westerners who've been here for ten years who don't speak a word of Chinese look at all the Chinese living in America Britain Australia Canada being that ten twenty years and they don't speak any English immersion per se does not work why because the drowning man cannot lend to swim when you don't speak
the language you're like a baby and if you drop yourself into a context which is all adults talking about stuff over your head you won't let so what are the five principles that you need to pay attention to fast full words attention meaning relevance in memory in these internet interconnected very very important Weiss especially when you talk about learning come with me on a journey through
a forest you goes on a walk through a forest and you see something like this both Moxon entry maybe you pay attention maybe you dont you got another fifty meters and you see this you should be paying attention now the fifty meters if you hadn't been paying attention you see that and at this point you're paying attention and you just learned that this it's important it's
relevant because it means this and anything that is related information related to your survival stuff that you're gonna pay attention to and if we gonna remember it image related to your own personal goals then you gonna pay attention to it it's relevant you can remember it so the first rule first printable for learning languages focus on language content that is relevant to you it brings us
to tolls we lost a told by using tools and we learned to is the fastest when they're relevant to us so let me share story a keyboard is a toll typing Chinese a certain white their methods for this that's a toll I had a colleague many years ago who went to night school Tuesday night Thursday night two hours each time practicing at home she spent nine
months and she did not learn to type Chinese and one night we had a crisis we had forty eight hours to deliver training manual in Chinese she got the job and I can guarantee you in forty eight hours she learned to type Chinese because it was relevant was meaningful it was important she was using a toll to create value so the second principle for learning a
language is the usual language as a tool to communicate right from day one as a kid does when I first arrived in China didn't speak a word of Chinese and on my second we've got to take a train ride overnight I think I have now is sitting in the dining car talking to one of the guards on the train he took an interest in me for
some reason and we just chatted all night in Chinese and he was drawing pictures and making movements with his hands and facial expressions and piece by piece by piece I understood more mall but was really cool was two weeks later when people were talking Chinese around me I was understanding some of this and I hadn't even made any effort to land that but it happened and
absorb it that night on the train which brings us to the third principle when you first understand the message then you will acquire the language unconsciously and this is really really well documented now something called comprehensible input this twenty or thirty years of research on this Stephen Krashen a leader in the field is published all sorts of these different studies and this is just from one
of them that the purple blouse to show the scores on different tests for language green and that the purple people were people who had land by grandma and formal study the green ones are the ones who led by comprehensible input so comprehension works comprehension is key and language learning is not about cumulate in lots of knowledge in many many ways it's about physiological training one I
know from high one did great in English at school you got a gradual way through went through college a grades went to the U. S. and found she couldn't understand what people were saying and it was stunning I started asking her are you dead and he was English death because we have filters in our brain that filter in the sounds that we are familiar with them
they filter out the sounds of languages that we're not and if you come here you won't understand if you can't understand enough in the land they actually have to be able to hear the sounds and you their ways to do that but it's physiological training speaking pikes muscle you got forty three muscles in your face you have to coordinate those in a way that you make
sounds that other people will understand if you've ever done a new sport for a couple of days and you know how your body feels hurts if you face is hurting in doing it right and the final principle is state psycho physiological state if you're sad angry why read upset you're not gonna lend period if you're happy relaxed in an alpha brain state curious you gonna learn
really quickly and very specifically you need to be tolerant of ambiguity if you're one of those people who needs to understand one hundred percent every what you're hearing you will go knocks you because you'll be incredibly upset all the time because you're not perfect if you're comfortable with getting some not getting some is paying attention to what you do understand you're gonna be fine to be
relaxed and you be learning quickly so based on those five principles what are the seven action that you take number one listen a lot I call it brain so can you put yourself in a context where you hearing punk and punk and punk of the language and it doesn't matter if you understand or not you're listening to the rhythms you listening to patterns that repeat your
listening to things that stand out upon all the food just soak your brain in this the second action if you get the meaning first even before you get the words you go how do I do that I don't know the words well you understand what these different postures main human communication is body language in many many ways so much money language from body language you can
understand a lot of communication therefore your understanding you're acquiring through comprehensible input and you can also use patterns that you already know if your Chinese speaker of Mandarin and Cantonese and you go to Vietnam you will understand sixty percent of what they say beer in daily conversation because Vietnamese is about thirty percent Mandarin thirty missing Cantonese the fed action stop make staying you probably have never
thought of this but if you got ten verbs and nouns and adjectives you can say one thousand different things right languages the creative process when a baby is due okay me by now okay that's how they communicate so stop mixing get creative have fun with it does not to be perfect just has to work and you do when you're doing this you focus on the Cold
War what does that mean well with every language is high frequency content in English one thousand words come his eighty five percent of anything you're ever gonna sigh in daily communication three thousand words give you ninety eight percent of anything you're gonna say in daily conversation you got three thousand words you speak in the language the rest is is icing on the cake and when you're
just beginning with the new language stop with your toolbox week number one in your new language you say things like how do you say that I don't understand repeat that please what does that mean or in your target language you're using it as a whole making it useful to you it's relevant to learn other things about the language by week two you should be saying things
like me this you that give yeah hot simple pronoun simple nouns simple verbs simple adjective communicating like a baby and by the third or fourth week beginning into what I call gloom words with no bottom therefore these that logical transformers that pie but some a language to gather allowing you to make more complex meaning at that point you're talking when you're doing that you should get
yourself a language parent and if you look at how children and parents and to rack you understand what this means when a child is speaking it'll be using simple words symbol combination sometimes quite strange sometime very strange pronunciation other people from outside the family don't understand it but the parents do so the kid has a safe environment gets confidence parents told to the children with body
language with simple language they know the child understands so you have a comprehensible input environment that side if we know what works otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue so you get yourself a language parent who somebody interested in you as a person who will communicate with you essentially as an equal but pay attention to help you understand the message therefore rules of a
language parents spouses by the way is not very good at this some guy but the full rule without festival they will work hard to understand what you mean even when you're way off base secondly I will never correct your mistakes thirdly they will feed back their understanding of what you're saying so that you can respond appropriately in and get the fuck get that feedback and then
they will use words that you not six thing you have to do copy the face got to get the muscles working right taken sound in a way that people will understand you there's a couple of things you do one as you used to hear how it feels feel how it sounds which means you have a feedback loop operating in your face but ideally if you can
look at a native speaker and just observe how they use their face like your unconscious mind absorbed the roles then you gonna be able to pick it up and if you can't get a native speaker to look at you can use stuff like this in the final idea hit the final action you need to take you something that I call direct connect what does this mean