Shadowing Practice: How 5 Polyglots Broke Language Learning - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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These five polyglots crack the secret to fast language learning,
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These five polyglots crack the secret to fast language learning,
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and we're going to steal their techniques for ourselves.
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Polyglots are famous for knowing many languages and learning them fast.
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They're the evidence that mastering 10,
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20, or even 50 languages is possible.
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And the good thing is,
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you can do this too.
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So what do the best language learners know that we don't?
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And what are they doing differently than the rest of us to learn languages so fast?
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And some of their genius techniques are surprisingly easy to copy.
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And it all starts with this first legendary polyglot,
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Giuseppe Casper Mezzofanti, an Italian legend who was able to speak at least 30 languages fluently.
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And the trick he used to learn them might just be pure genius.
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Giuseppe was born in Bologna, Italy in 1774.
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He was not only a cardinal for the Roman Catholic Church,
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but also a linguist.
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And his passion for languages started when he was just a little boy.
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Being raised in a very humble family,
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he demonstrated great memory skills,
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a musical ear,
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and an extraordinary ability to learn foreign languages people from all
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over the world would eventually travel to talk to him while he stayed in Italy.
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And it's even said that after passing away,
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people sought out his skull to learn the secrets of his abilities.
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But what was his trick to learning so many languages?
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Well, before becoming a Cardinal,
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Mesophanti spent most of his time as an interpreter of the dying
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and the wounded in the Austrian and French wars of the late 1700s.
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He clearly had a devotion to his calling,
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so when he started attending to soldiers who spoke Slavonic,
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Czechish, Romanić, and Polish amongst other languages,
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he realized he couldn't give them all the attention they needed either physically or spiritually because of the language barrier.
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So he took it upon himself to turn that into fuel to learn their languages.
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In one case, it's even said
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that he learned enough of a new language overnight to be
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able to confess two criminals who are going to be executed the following day.
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So how would he learn?
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His trick was to ask a native speaker to recite the Lord's Prayer in the target language.
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Mesophanti would then use that to deconstruct the basic structures and rhythm of the language.
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You see, Mesophanti knew the Lord's Prayer really well,
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so hearing it in another language,
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let him decode the basic rules of that language very quickly.
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American Polyglot Tim Ferriss would later build something very close to Mesophanti's method centuries later
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and call it the 12 Golden Sentences technique.
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He says
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that we only need to translate these 12 sentences to the language we we want to learn to grasp the basics.
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The apple is red.
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This is John's apple.
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I give John the apple.
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We give him the apple.
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And so on.
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Each of these sentences will teach you different structures in the target language,
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and you'll quickly pick apart the big differences and similarities between the language you know and the one you're learning.
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You can then quickly master the familiar patterns and focus on the ones that are different to speed ramp your language learning.
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Now, if you're smart, you'll combine that with this next trick from the legendary polyglot,
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Kato Lom, a Hungarian interpreter who spoke about 16 languages and understood almost 30 by using her own unique language formula.
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Lom was born in Peks,
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Hungary in 1909, and apart from being a translator,
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she's considered to be one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world.
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This means that unlike most translators,
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Lom could translate almost instantaneously in real time without the speaker having to take a pause.
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Are you able to afford an attorney?
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Can you pay your lawyer?
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No. No. But if we look back,
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Kato actually didn't do well in foreign languages during her school years.
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And in fact, she grew up speaking only one language.
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But like many other countries in the 1930s,
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Hungary was in a deep economic depression.
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So Cato knew she needed to find a good job and took to learning and teaching French and English to do so.
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And that's how it all began.
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Several years later, she would invent one of the most popular language formulas.
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Cato thought that learning a language was like a math equation.
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Invested time multiplied by motivation divided by inhibition equals the best results.
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For invested time, she meant time spent studying the language.
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And Kato didn't think much time was needed.
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Just 10 minutes per day would do for a good start.
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But the way you spend that time is critically important.
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For Kato, the three best things to do are the three autos method.
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Autolexia, autografia, and autologia.
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Autolexia means to read for oneself.
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And Kato did this by finding something interesting to read like a crime short story or a romance novel.
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Autographia means writing for oneself.
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And she used this by writing about her daily thoughts and routines.
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And Autologia means to speak to oneself.
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And Kato would often encourage speaking to herself casually about her daily life as language practice.
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But Kato thought that motivation was the key driving force behind her learning.
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So before starting a new language,
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she would ask herself, How much am I interested in this language?
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What do I want to do with it?
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And what good is it for me?
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And these answers would keep her from deviating from her goals as things got tough.
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So where does inhibition come into play?
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Well, Kato almost lost her will to learn languages at one point.
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In her first translation job for a local pharmaceutical lab, she failed miserably.
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Even getting a note that whoever had made the translation was very brave.
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But Kato fought back and used this failure as a trigger to learn even more.
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She understood that the more she could put her errors aside,
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the sooner she would learn the language.
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So Kato put a strong emphasis on taking motivated time to study with techniques you enjoy and without fear of making mistakes.
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This is something the next polyglot also does,
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but he adds an extra layer to it.
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His name is Kenneth Hale,
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and he's an American professor who spoke about 50 languages.
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But that's not even the most impressive thing about him.
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Hale could learn the basics of a language and start speaking it with just 15 minutes of listening to a native speaker.
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But how is that possible?
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Well, it's important to know how he started his language journey.
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Well, it's the famous Bike Party and Magic Stunts book,
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the world's biggest candy value, only a nickel.
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Hale was born in Illinois in the U.S in 1934,
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and in his teenage years,
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he was thrown out of school for being so distracted learning languages.
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But he used this to his advantage,
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later teaching at the prestigious MIT,
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where he became a champion for endangered languages.
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The voice for the voiceless, as he was called.
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He displayed a great talent for acquiring languages fast,
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and his secret was listening plus a silent period.
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One of Hale's anthropology students at MIT,
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Joe Campbell, breaks it down for us.
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He had gone to Tepoztlan in Mexico with his teacher to examine the local Spanish for traces of the Nahuatl language.
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And Campbell noticed that his teacher kept repeating the same strategy.
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He would listen intently to the native speakers without speaking for some time.
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And then all of a sudden,
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he'd switch and start speaking and it would seem like he had made leaps really quickly.
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This is what American linguist Stephen Krashen calls the Comprehensible Input Hypothesis.
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He says that we only acquire languages by listening,
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not speaking, and that we subconsciously learn to use the language by receiving information which is slightly above our proficiency level.
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So we should listen to input that we can mostly understand,
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but where there are some unfamiliar words and structures.
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And we only have to listen until we feel ready to speak,
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and then we can jump in to start expressing.
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Krashen says the process of learning a new language is very similar to how we did it when we were toddlers.
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We just listened first and then probably went through what's called a silent period.
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This is a time where a language learner has started absorbing the comprehensible input,
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but hasn't yet developed the ability to create original statements.
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They can only repeat what other people say.
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So pushing language learners to talk when they're not ready yet might not be very effective.
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But this doesn't mean you shouldn't speak at all.
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Prashen says that practicing sounds,
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words, and phrases out loud is completely fine
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because repeating what we're learning trains our vocal muscles and improves our pronunciation while not burdening us with generating original content.
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And that's exactly what Hale did.
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Hale would listen at first,
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then he would take the time to process,
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and then he would finally start to speak.
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Hale's method of listening for a time before speaking is great,
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but when we're ready to speak,
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this next method from Powell Janulus will take us to the next level.
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Powell Janulus is a Canadian translator who's said to have held the Guinness World Record for speaking 42 languages in 1985.
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And he did it by developing what may be one of the most unique language methods yet.
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Janulus was born in Vancouver,
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Canada in 1939 and as a child he was exposed to many Slavic languages since his parents were polyglots themselves.
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He's believed to have mastered 13 languages by the age of 18 all by himself using his own technique.
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So what's his method for language learning?
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It all starts with thinking like Janulus does when learning a language.
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His first rule is to put on a silly hat that'll make people laugh.
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Why?
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Janulus believes that to successfully learn a language we need to love making mistakes.
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And for that, wearing a silly hat lets us be carefree and relaxed.
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After relaxing, Janulus would dive into his method.
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Canadian doctor and accelerated learning expert Marilyn Atkinson spent seven years analyzing the language techniques of Janulus in 2020,
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and she wrote a book called Velocity Instant Fluency to describe them.
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Amongst many methods Janulus used,
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there are two that he relies on the most, intoning and enchanting.
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Have you ever noticed that a singing voice has little to no accent?
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Many times when we sing in another language,
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we suddenly lose our strong accent.
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Well, this is what intoning is based on.
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Atkinson says that we should select 20 to 30 words that we want to learn,
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assign rhythms to each, and repeat them three times, almost like chanting.
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By the third time, the mouth,
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ears, brain, and body will begin to synchronize,
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and you'll more easily remember the words.
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This might seem a bit crazy,
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but it does actually make sense when you think about songs being easily remembered because the lyrics are repeated rhythmically throughout.
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Atkinson claims that intoning once a day for a month is enough to change the trajectory of a language learner's journey.
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And this is somewhat backed by science.
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A study carried out by Dr. Ludke in the journal Memory
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and Cognition shows us that melodies and rhythm can help us in learning and remembering new phrases in another language.
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In the study, 60 adults were split into groups to learn Hungarian either by speaking,
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rhythmic speaking, or singing.
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And the best performing group was the one that was singing.
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The reason singing helps with language learning is that music and language share the same neural pathways in our brains.
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So attaching words to a rhythmic pattern improves our memory for those words.
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Powell's second key technique was enchanting.
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For that, Atkinson says that Janulus would listen to a native speaker and note what words they repeated the most.
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Then on a whiteboard, he would use those words to create what's called an n-chart.
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And this is a really interesting concept.
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is a sentence building system that looks something like this
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and we can make one of these for ourselves by starting with a simple end chart
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that helps us talk about our favorite food it could look
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something like the following for example you could say i like pasta
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or you don't like pasta
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or we love chocolate the great thing about one inch art is
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that it allows the learner to mix
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and match just 16 words to actually learn 256 different sentence combinations crazy right
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but moving more into modern day one of the biggest polyglots found a surprisingly easy trick to learn languages
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because his name is steve kaufman a canadian polyglot today who speaks about 20 languages
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and the trick steve adds is something we can immediately use
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as part of our language learning repertoire steve kaufman was born in sweden in 1945
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but moved to canada with his parents a couple of years later he was exposed to both czech
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and german as a child since his parents spoke them
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but he grew up only speaking english after school he got a job in construction
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which he quit to work on a ship that would take him to Europe.
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This is where he started picking up new languages as he was regularly hitchhiking through many countries.
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A couple of years later,
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he started working for the Canadian diplomatic service and he began learning more languages to improve on the job.
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So what can we learn from Steve?
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Well, Steve strongly believes in not using memorization to learn a language.
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Steve thinks that it's pretty ineffective to repeat the same word over and over to remember it,
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not only because this is boring,
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but also because there's a better and more enjoyable way to do it.
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Have you ever come across the word so many times that you end up learning it almost by accident?
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Well, that's what Steve tries to recreate with what he calls the vagabond technique.
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This is where we expose our brain to the language in
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different ways without trying to shovel information into our heads with repetition.
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It's more about wandering or vagabonding around the language,
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becoming aware of the words and the grammar and then encountering them
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so many times that the brain has no other option than to remember them naturally.
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For example, Steve tells us that when he was learning Persian,
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he would listen to an interesting piece of news,
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then he would read the transcript of the news,
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translate new words, and find other ways to interact with the news piece.
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By doing this, he was exposing his brain to the same language information from a few different perspectives
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and letting his brain become aware of the context.
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Steve also uses this for grammar.
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Many learners often read the explanations for grammar rules that don't yet have any impact on them.
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But Steve thinks that getting a lot of exposure to the target language will help us come across grammar rules naturally.
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And just being aware of them and encountering them over
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and over again in different situations will help move them from unknown to something we learn.
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It's a process of going from subconsciously noticing the rule to consciously using it.
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These polyglots give us valuable language techniques to become fluent
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and you'll just need a convenient conversation partner to top it all off,
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which we cover in this video right here.
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I'll see you there and hasta la próxima.
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Context & Background
In the realm of language acquisition, the insights from renowned polyglots can illuminate effective strategies for learners of all levels. The video "How 5 Polyglots Broke Language Learning" explores the experiences of language masters, showing how they tackled difficult languages and communicated effectively. One key figure discussed is Giuseppe Casper Mezzofanti, an Italian polyglot with fluency in at least 30 languages, who utilized innovative methods to break down complex linguistic structures. His techniques still resonate today, revealing that anyone can harness these strategies to enhance their own English speaking practice.
Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication
To focus on practical language learning, it’s essential to master pivotal phrases that aid in everyday conversations. Here are five fundamental phrases, inspired by the techniques shared in the video:
- The apple is red. - A simple declarative statement to describe objects.
- This is John's apple. - Useful for identification and possession.
- I give John the apple. - Introduces action and helps with verb use.
- We give him the apple. - Expands to plural subjects and pronouns.
- How are you today? - A common greeting that aids in social interaction.
Practicing these phrases regularly can help solidify your understanding of structure and context, which is essential in improving English pronunciation and fluency.
Step-by-step Shadowing Guide
To effectively use the shadowing technique for English language improvement, follow these steps:
- Select Your Material: Choose a video or audio clip that features native speakers. The video discussed in this transcript is a great start.
- Listen Actively: Pay careful attention to the pronunciation and intonation of the phrases mentioned.
- Recite Simultaneously: Repeat the phrases as you hear them, mimicking the speakers to adopt their rhythm, a process known as shadow speech.
- Break it Down: Focus on one sentence at a time. Utilize the 12 Golden Sentences technique inspired by Mezzofanti to grasp sentence structure effectively.
- Practice Regularly: Incorporate this method into your daily routine to strengthen your sentence recall and build confidence for IELTS speaking practice.
By integrating shadowing into your practice, you'll develop not only your vocabulary but also the confidence needed to engage in conversations. Whether you're preparing for an exam or aiming for fluency, these methods can significantly enhance your learning experience.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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