Pratica di Shadowing: Fluent Forever - Impara a parlare inglese con i video
Creazione lezione...
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Here's a true story.
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Over 10 years ago, I was in a bookstore.
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Remember those?
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And I was just browsing the language shelves.
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Because, of course I was.
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And I see this book called Fluent Forever.
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Now, even in 2014, there were YouTube polyglot grifters.
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In fact, that was probably their apogee.
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And even then, I was skeptical of outrageous claims like learning a language in three months.
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So I pick up this book, ready to just rip it apart.
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I was expecting a mix of linguistic naivete over confidence and just general confidence man pablum.
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I open it to a random page
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and he's talking about how important it is to learn the sounds of your target language
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and how the international phonetic alphabet can actually help you do that.
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Okay, I think.
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Even the con men have to have a nugget of truth to give legitimacy to their lies
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but surely there's something to tear apart here.
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So I flipped to another page, and it's a great example of how to think about syntax and morphology in a useful way.
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Okay, fine.
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But then when I flip the page, something I've never seen before.
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Surely this will be where I catch them.
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But actually, wait a minute, this is really good.
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Long story short, I bought the book, and it had a pretty strong effect on how I think about language learning.
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So imagine my reaction
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when I get an email out of the blue offering me a free copy of the updated second edition.
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It'd be nice if you gave it a review, but there's no strings attached.
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I was curious what updates there were and curious to revisit it 10 years and a PhD in linguistics later.
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And it turns out it's still really good.
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In fact, I had to wait to make this video, not just because I was making a failed foray into ASMR for an audience that hates ASMR even more than I do,
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but also because I lent the book to a friend who was toying with the idea of revisiting their Spanish.
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So today I'm going to talk about what I got out of Fluent Forever in 2014, what's different and interesting in the new edition,
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and of course what Gabriel Weiner gets right and what he maybe gets a little wrong.
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If you're new to the channel, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones.
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I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, and I love learning languages and sharing the insights of linguistics.
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Today, instead of debunking hyperpolyglot's ridiculous claims, we're going to see what one polyglot does right, and what we can learn from him.
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I'm Dr. Taylor Jones, and this is Language Jones.
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Perhaps surprisingly, this video is not sponsored, but I do want to give a special thanks to Jonathan
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at Penguin Random House's Harmony Books imprint for thinking of me and for sending me the new edition.
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I'd been meaning to revisit the original book, and this gave me the motivation to revisit it and some new content.
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So who is Gabriel Weiner?
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Honestly, if you read the preface to the new edition, and I won't post spoilers here, it seems like he's also been asking that question a lot lately.
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Seriously, read the prefaces and acknowledgements and forewords to things if you want to piece together some hot DAS.
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Gabriel, I'm happy for you and it sounds like you had a hell of a journey.
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Anyway, for our purposes, what you need to know is
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that Weiner was an aspiring opera singer who had failed at language learning in the classroom
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but caught the language bug with an experience at Middlebury, the famous language school where you take a pledge to speak nothing
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but your target language for a few months and you live in residence and they kick you out if you slip up.
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He tells a great story in his book about applying for the wrong level in French and faking his way in.
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Of course he realized
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that part of his cramming to fake learning was actually just
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making use of more effective methods with a lot of motivation and a specific goal, but I digress.
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He became obsessed with learning effectively and did a ton of research, like actual research, and used himself as a language learning guinea pig.
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Now, a brief note here is important.
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Being motivated to study lots of languages
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and even having success achieving a high level in those languages does not mean
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that you know anything about how to teach those languages or even how to succeed at effective and quick learning.
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Most of the hyperpolyglots I see on YouTube have succeeded to the extent that they have, despite themselves, and they peddle bad advice.
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So that's basically what I was expecting the first time I picked up this book.
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But instead, what I got was somebody who, when he wrote about linguistics, wrote knowledgeably and correctly.
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When he talked about learning and memory, he drew on current research, and he put it together in a way
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that made connections I hadn't yet made on how to actually apply the linguistic side of things
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and the learning and memory side of things to efficiently effectively learn.
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Now this video is not sponsored but I can say
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that the original book was fantastic and the new edition is also great, clearly expanded, and was a blast to read.
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If you want to order a copy, I will have a link in the description.
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So I'm not going to go over all of it because that would be like a five -hour video.
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But I will tell you some key points and some things
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that surprised me and that I have added to my language learning routines.
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And if you want more, check out his stuff and maybe buy the book.
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His main argument basically boils down to three things that you didn't really need Gabriel Weiner to tell you.
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Learn sounds first, don't translate, and use spaced repetition software.
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But there's a lot to unpack in that alone, and the book itself covers so much more.
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And for what it's worth, he's part of the reason that those three things feel obvious to people interested in language learning and on YouTube right now.
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Let's unpack those three quickly, though.
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Languages are spoken, first and foremost.
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We're bracketing sign modalities here.
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So sounds are the building blocks.
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Learning the sounds of your target language first and using all
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and only the sounds of your target language is a tremendous piece of advice.
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It will give you a good accent.
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It will help your listening comprehension.
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It will help prevent mixing up similar languages like Spanish and French, because while a lot of the words look similar on the page,
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under the hood, they're totally different.
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And the sounds are the building blocks of morphemes and in turn words, phrases, and sentences.
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Morphological and syntactic patterns that could be confusing are just not
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when you start with the sounds and get a handle on what's actually going on.
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Similarly, don't translate seems like either obvious advice or completely impossible and unhinged when you're first starting out.
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But the idea is basically just to map those sounds that you've learned to concepts, ideally circumventing the process of translating through your L1.
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The benefits are well documented and include faster comprehension, recall, and production.
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And more importantly, you start to train both phonological and semantic priming in line with your target language.
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He gives an example in the book of a textbook claiming girl in English is девушка in Russian.
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Technically true.
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But a Google image search turns up results that are, shall we say, very different depending on the language.
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And it's like this for, well, every word.
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Otherwise, languages would just be code and not, you know, different languages.
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And lastly, he kind of folds all of his memorization advice into use spaced repetition software
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and then just has a lot of details on how to optimize that.
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But of course, the devil's in the details.
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He gives so many excellent tips, it's hard to remember them all, ironically.
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So spaced repetition software, or SRS, is basically just a software -optimized approach to surfing the forgetting curve.
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I've talked about this at length elsewhere, but long -term learning is actually a process of repeatedly forgetting
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or nearly forgetting something and then strengthening all the neural networks it connects with in the act of remembering, trying to remember, or being reminded.
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So in service of these big three ideas, he has chapters or sections of chapters on learning and memorization, the importance of sound and how to approach it.
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This is what got me hooked.
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Words and vocabulary building, sentence structures and how to memorize them, stress minimization, and a lot of other good stuff.
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I'm just going to share a few of the things that really stood out to me.
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First was his game of spot the differences, which we've already seen with девушка.
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This is surprisingly fun and extremely helpful.
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Second was his use of action mnemonics for memorizing grammatical category things like gender or case marking.
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I talk on my channel a lot about what I call naughty mnemonics, but he's got a masterclass on how to maximize their impact and why they work.
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Basically, anything that kicks your animalistic hindbrain into gear, things like violence and sex and strong emotions,
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are things that are implicated in memory circuits and the formation of vivid, long -term memories.
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I'm pretty sure I still remember his examples from German from reading the first edition in 2014.
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So there's maybe something to be said for this kind of amygdala hacking.
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But the main two things that really stood out to me in reading the new edition were his approach to
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simplifying learning grammatical rules and pick a thing.
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His approach to grammar is so totally diametrically opposite to my training as a linguist
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and yet it's also just another way of saying the same thing.
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He suggests learning grammatical structures by referring to a good grammar, where have you heard that before,
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and picking an example sentence or two or three and then just breaking that sentence apart into multiple flashcards using closed deletion.
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That's a fancy term for fill in the blanks.
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The way he recommends is to have one for new words, one for new forms of a word, and one for any kind of surprising word order.
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So he gives the example of learning pacifization by taking a sentence like, my homework was eaten by my dog,
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and giving yourself an image of a dog along with multiple cards.
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One would be like, my homework was eaten blank my dog.
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You can do that or you can try to memorize
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that by is the preposition that introduces the optional agent in a passive construction.
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But honestly, that technically correct linguistic description is basically just another way of saying
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that the word by goes there in that sentence.
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Similarly, he might have a card with my homework blank to eat by my dog, and he'd have to supply was eaten.
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So you get really, really good at a few specific sentences, but they're sentences that teach you all aspects of the structure that you're learning.
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And then when you learn a new word, you can easily fit it into those structures.
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I thought this was brilliant.
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And an even brillianteer addition was to underspecify agreement and other hints, meaning basically something like, my homework was eaten by A slash N blank,
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if you were memorizing dog.
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This way you don't narrow down the search space by having the word A indicate you're looking for a noun
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that starts with a consonant.
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Pick a thing was another great trick that's a simplification of the memory champion technique of person, action, object.
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He gives the example of needing a mnemonic for multiple different German plurals.
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There's like six different ways that German pluralizes things.
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How do you know if words pluralize with S or EN or something else entirely?
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In general, you have to just memorize that.
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So the brilliance of his approach is its unashamed laziness.
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Ends with an S, that's just like English, so treat it as the default.
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Even if linguists would argue about whether that is structurally or statistically accurate.
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For an English speaker, it's the closest to expected, so for our learning process, it's the easiest and therefore the default.
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Ends with EN.
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Can you remember that without additional effort?
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No action needed.
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But let's say you can't.
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The example he gives is struggling to remember that it's not students, but in German it's Studenten.
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So, pardon my accent by the way.
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So he thinks about a thing related to students.
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In this case he settles on a backpack.
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He adds a backpack to the card.
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And then to every card that he makes for a word that has an en plural.
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He goes on to explain something like an envelope might be better since it triggers phonological associations.
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So what about something like nation, which also takes EN?
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Well, you're going to imagine multiple nations wearing backpacks.
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That's it.
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I started doing this with my memorization, and holy shit, you guys, to give context, I'm super lazy.
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And Duolingo Hebrew is actually one of the better things out there if you supplement with Anki.
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That's a space repetition software.
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But of course, I went with pre -made Anki decks as a time saver.
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So I've been adding pictures to my deck, but often it's just of, you know, something evocative of the concept.
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And I have words that I struggled with because I just kept getting them wrong or confusing them.
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Exam and frying pan, for example.
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That's mifkan and makvat.
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I had a bunch of words like this.
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I started adding more mnemonics, phonological cues, or even just partial phonological cues, or both.
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Phonological cues and mnemonics and holy shit.
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Literally the process of even just trying to do that got some of these words locked in.
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For a frying pan, I added a chef shrugging and asking a question.
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The question, of course, is do you want I should machvat?
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For peilut, activity, I had a bunch of kids bouncing on balls.
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That wasn't working for me.
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I've added pay and loot.
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It's absolutely ridiculous how effective this is.
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It's so freaking stupid, but it really, really works.
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And if you speak a bunch of languages, you're not limited to English for the priming.
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I finally memorized importing, which I used a picture of a container ship at a port for by adding bees to it.
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It's mais à b.
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Get it?
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Mais à b.
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Anyway, it works for me and that's all that matters.
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If you use mnemonics, leave me a comment with your craziest one.
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Oh, and one more thing.
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He has an approach for memorizing grammar paradigms without just brute forcing it like we did in French class.
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Je mange, tu mange, il allon mange, nous mangeons, vous mangez, il mange.
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Not knocking that method, but I'm excited to try his version,
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which is basically to use closed deletion flashcards with interesting stories for each of the forms.
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Something unexpected and engaging like le médecin mange son stethoscope.
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The last thing that I want to say he gets really, really right is a chapter on stress management and goal setting.
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Insert joke here about the state of the world such that this wasn't in the 2014 edition of the book.
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There's tons of other good stuff in the book, and he writes in a clear and engaging fashion, and there's only 153 pages of appendices and how -tos.
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Seriously, it's pages 220 through 373.
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It's got all sorts of information on flashcards, and of course the list of your 625 first words to learn that he's famous for.
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I will say there are some flaws, but nothing that I think really detracts from the overall benefit of the book.
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First, he doesn't really have much to say about how to learn under -resourced languages.
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He has a ton of information on resources, but a lot of this is just assuming that you're learning something like Spanish or French or Russian or Japanese,
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which, frankly, is statistically a safe bet.
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And while he does have some on using AI, I was surprised not to see much discussion of AI image generation,
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which I applied to make mnemonics based on what he had written elsewhere in the book.
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For instance, ma guiche is serving, so I made geese who are servers as a mnemonic.
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It works for me.
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Meat Gaber is overcoming, so I made a mnemonic about a bear who overcame the world telling him
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that he couldn't be a Lady Gaga impersonator in a meat dress.
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Meat Gaber.
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But on the whole, the book is great, and I'm grateful that Harmony Press sent me a copy.
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Like I said, I immediately loaned it to a friend.
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Said friend is now fired up to improve their Spanish because it feels more achievable.
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That's the main thing that he's selling.
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Of course, the other thing that he's selling is an app, which purports to simplify a lot of the process for you,
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reducing your data entry time and allowing you more time for memorization and learning.
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I think that's totally fair.
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And if you have the money to throw at the problem, why not?
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He says as much as well.
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If you want to snatch a copy of the book, I'll have an Amazon affiliate link in the description.
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I definitely think it's worth the asking price.
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I'm probably going to try to implement all of his suggestions when I go back to Persian, which has been a struggle for me to retain, compared to French and Spanish and so on.
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If you like what I'm doing with the channel, you know, except that one attempt at ASMR, then please like and subscribe and leave me a comment.
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I've said it before, but comments feed the algorithm and the algorithm feeds my family.
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You can also support the channel with super thanks, or over on patreon .com slash languagejones.
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Until next time, happy learning!
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Contesto e sfondo
Il video racconta la storia di un linguista che, dopo aver inizialmente sfidato le affermazioni esagerate su apprendimento rapido delle lingue, scopre un libro che cambia la sua prospettiva: Fluent Forever. Attraverso la conversazione, emerge l'importanza di approcci concreti, come l'uso dell'alfabeto fonetico internazionale e l'analisi della sintassi, che possono aiutare gli apprendisti a migliorare la pronuncia inglese e a capire le basi della lingua in modo più efficace. Questo contesto è perfetto per chi vuole imparare l'inglese con i video, poiché combina storie reali con consigli pratici.
5 frasi chiave per la comunicazione quotidiana
- "I was skeptical of outrageous claims" (Ero scettico/a riguardo a affermazioni esagerate): utile per esprimere dubbi in conversazioni informali.
- "Long story short" (In breve): perfetta per riassumere una storia o un argomento.
- "No strings attached" (Nessun impegno nascosto): ideale per specificare che un'offerta è senza condizioni.
- "Toying with the idea" (Giocare con l'idea): per esprimere che si sta considerando un progetto senza impegno.
- "Catch the language bug" (Prendersi la febbre delle lingue): un modo colorito per dire che si è appassionati/a all'apprendimento di una lingua.
Guida passo passo al shadowing
Per sfruttare al massimo questo video e migliorare la pronuncia inglese con il shadowspeak, segui questi passaggi: 1. Ascolta un frammento di 5-10 secondi e nota l'intonazione e il ritmo. 2. Ripeti immediatamente dopo, cercando di imitare ogni suono e pausa. 3. Ripeti il processo 3-4 volte finché non senti che il flusso è naturale. 4. Prova a registrare la tua voce e confrontala con l'originale per notare le differenze. Il shadow speak è efficace perché aiuta a internalizzare la pronuncia e la struttura delle frasi, rendendo la comunicazione più fluida. Con questo video, che combina conversazione e approfondimenti linguistici, il shadowspeaks diventa un esercizio divertente e produttivo per chi vuole rafforzare le sue abilità orali.
Cos'è la tecnica dello Shadowing?
Shadowing è una tecnica di apprendimento delle lingue supportata da studi scientifici, originariamente sviluppata per la formazione dei traduttori professionisti e resa popolare dal poliglotta Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Il metodo è semplice ma potente: ascolti un audio in inglese di madrelingua e lo ripeti immediatamente ad alta voce — come un'ombra che segue il parlante con un ritardo di solo 1–2 secondi. A differenza dell'ascolto passivo o degli esercizi di grammatica, lo shadowing costringe il tuo cervello e i muscoli della bocca a elaborare e riprodurre simultaneamente i modelli di discorso reale. La ricerca dimostra che migliora significativamente la precisione della pronuncia, l'intonazione, il ritmo, il discorso connesso, la comprensione dell'ascolto e la fluidità del parlato — rendendolo uno dei metodi più efficaci per la preparazione alla prova di speaking dell'IELTS e per la comunicazione reale in inglese.