The best language hack? Speak it!

I should have known it wasn’t Jenny saying “language hack”. As they say in Brazil, “rsrsrs”.

This is good advice…in general. But I really noticed the importance of JUST SPEAKING today. I was making a video myself speaking random sentences in Spanish for work (I just started learning Spanish using the app my company makes), and at first I was really nervous. Maybe it was the fact that I was recording myself, maybe it was that it was my first time speaking Spanish in front of people, out loud.
Anyways, even just 30 minutes later I was so much more comfortable and really surprised myself with how much I knew! The video isn’t ready yet, but I’m excited to share it and I know that future videos will be better and better.

Most language students don’t understand the importance of just speaking either. But you need to practice speaking to get better at it, just as with any other skill. I noticed a huge difference in my French ability when I finally started recording myself and listening to it as well.

Steve, one would think that with the amount of posts you’ve written about me and my website a year ago you would have at least had taken a couple of seconds to look at my videos or the sidebar of my site to figure out which 8 languages.

I don’t claim to be mistaken for a native generally in any language on a daily basis (although it does happen occasionally – Colombians thought I was a Spaniard and Quebecers occasionally think I’m French). When I was living in Rio and very active in my Portuguese, I confirmed several times that they thought I was a carioca. If you don’t believe this FINE, but it is within a social context, so analysing videos I make many months later when I’m out of practice is not a good scope to judge it.

Please don’t start beating this dead horse again – it’s tiresome having to explain myself to you so many times.

Your method works for your goals, which as far as I can tell are to be passive in languages. I want to live in my languages with human beings, not podcasts, and have a social life in those languages. When you were in Japan you said you put most of your time for Japanese at home and were with your family, presumably speaking English all day. This to me clearly states that speaking is a dramatically smaller priority for you compared to me.

Avoiding speaking is impractical if the goal is to speak well. It’s just illogical. If you have other goals, then other approaches will be necessary.

Please drop this Steve – I’m not interested in starting this fight again – your goals and mine are just too different to make discussing learning methods practical. When people tell me their priority is to read or listen to a language well, I refer them to you. Otherwise I specifically tell them to ignore anyone who tells them to wait and wait and wait…

Nobody “feels” like speaking early because getting over your fears is a big part of being social in a language in my opinion. From my view you are constantly telling people to embrace those fears.

Steve, I don’t think Benny ever implied that people cannot learn if the do not speak from the beginning. He’s only asserting that they will learn faster if they do so.

The only person you can speak with from the beginning is a teacher. You can socialize with native speakers but then you will mostly be listening. Meaningful speaking, where you are not testing the patience of the listener, can only come after considerable input based learning, (which Benny dismisses as passive, inhuman anti-social etc..) The amount of speaking we can do at the beginning is so limited as to have no impact on the speed of our learning, in my view.

As I said in my first post, I feel that Benny does a disservice to language learners by discounting input based learning, and I will continue to say so when I come across Benny spinning his line.

As for your point of view, I can assure that you since your unsolicited vulgarity on my youtube channel I do not take you seriously.

Why don’t you both have a phone interview in French, Spanish and German.

Then it will be clear if Benny’s social talk right away method is on par with Steve’s.

I hate to jump into the crossfire too much on this, but Steve is quite fluent in the languages that I’ve heard him speak. I distinctly remember going to a sushi restaurant with him and hearing him effortlessly converse and joke with the waitress.

Whatever criticisms you may have about Steve and his methods, it cannot be said that he’s uninterested in or unsuccessful at interpersonal communication.

Communication with Steve gives me a headache. It’s too confrontational. I use my languages to be social, not to talk about languages. Please go to my site to hear a very long live interview on the radio to hear my Spanish skills. I spoke spontaneously with a friend in German in another video on my Youtube channel.

It’s not surprising to me that you hadn’t noticed it. You never read my comments thoroughly and this is why I have to repeat myself so much with you.
“Speaking some Japanese when I had the opportunity” – seriously?? You were in JAPAN. You always have the opportunity!! Not speaking for several hours every day would have slowed down your learning progress. I’m sure you speak great now, but in my opinion you learned how to read and perhaps write very efficiently, but learned to speak much slower than you would if you had been more active. But it was less of a priority for you since you spent time with your family (I also work, but what about the other 8 waking hours a day?)
If it’s less of a priority, that’s FINE. I’m not criticising your goals. I’m just saying to be honest about them. You appreciate reading and listening passively to languages and that’s great. My advice holds less worth for such activities.
I find it terrible that so many people might fall into your trap of “wait until your ready” if they happen to put speaking as a priority. That’s what annoys me about your advice. It’s not wrong – in fact it’s way better than mine if someone has very different goals.

I don’t “test the patience of the listener” – I think this is a very one-dimensional way of looking at how people think. Here in the Philippines every time I speak even basic Tagalog more people I wasn’t even talking to come up to encourage me to keep going and think it’s great that a westerner is trying. And we participate in real conversations – not talking about the weather. You don’t understand what is involved in my approach beyond simply speaking – there is a lot of social engineering involved.

In other countries I have to be more convincing and use other social hacks to make sure their interest is maintained. But this is always possible – only Paris has posed me a challenge, but I later figured out what I was doing wrong.

But dismissing all of them as not interested in hearing you just shows lack of understanding of how people think, especially in the non-English speaking world. Perhaps you wouldn’t have patience to listen to a non-native struggle with English. That just makes you mean and unhelpful in my opinion.

In most counties I’ve been to, “the only person you can speak with from the beginning” is EVERYONE. By being social and making friends, you’ll find people who will actively encourage you and help you on a daily basis.

Speaking with Steve (he interviewed me for his site) is what got this stupid endless argument started in the first place!

This debate isn’t about who speaks what languages better. Arguing that is pointless, and is nothing more than a p*ssing competition. That would be the only purpose of that talk you suggested, and wouldn’t resolve ANYTHING in this vendetta Steve has against me.

I’m more than willing to be social, but if you read Steve’s blog this time last year you’ll see over 16 posts where he tries to debunk me as a fraud, while consistently ignoring or selectively quoting my retorts to be nothing but negative. He deserves no respect from me because of these attacks.

As I said, his method is valid in particular cases. I just don’t like the guy because of how he has treated me, and have no interest in talking to him again. You’ll hear more spontaneous interviews with me conducted by *natives* if you must judge my level – I am more interested in friendly exchanges and if a native invites me for such an interview then I’d consider it.

I actually did already have a spontaneous interview in French online, conducted by the Quebec TV station TQS, but unfortauntely they took it down.

Of course you need to speak in order to improve your speaking skills, and even to become more aware of the language generally. The question is when to start.

My view is that it is up to each learner, and depends on circumstances. I prefer to invest most of my initial efforts in becoming familiar with the language, and increasing my vocabulary, so that I understand what people are saying. This makes conversations more meaningful and beneficial. Furthermore I do not live surrounded by speakers of the languages that I am learning, so organizing the listening and reading activities is more practical.

Other people may prefer to start speaking earlier, or have more such opportunities. I do not think that speaking early makes much difference in the final outcome. It is just a matter of choice and opportunity.

Much better than that would be to just meet up with Chinese speakers. Unless Zhu lives in a small village, this would be very easy in most Canadian cities. It’s easy to maintain languages without relying on cathode ray tubes.
Speaking IS the key. Watching TV will maintain your ability to understand a language, but you’ll lose the flow of speaking it well without spoken practice.

I find it weird that so many English speaking cultures are so afraid of talking to strangers. I’d talk to a new person to get to know him, and speaking his language would almost always break the ice easier, so THAT’s a good reason to use the language, not for an empty way for me to simply practice.

I’m not interested in practising languages for the sake of it. I want to interact in new and interesting ways with people of other cultures.

The only reason not to do this is disinterest (which is fine, not everyone has to like speaking languages) or FEAR if you really do want to.

This fear of speaking to strangers is less apparent in Ireland & definitely less so in other countries I have lived in.

I guess once I get married and am older, I won’t be able to talk to strike up spontaneous conversations with new people any more(!)

1) Meaningful conversations take more than a few days, I never suggested you can debate philosophy your first week. Without patience to endure imperfect conversations for a few weeks, then it definitely will not take a few weeks to reach something meaningful. I have gotten used to frustrating myself many times and this means I learn quickly. If someone isn’t open to that frustration, then they would have a very hard time doing much in terms of speaking in a short couple of months.

2) I wrote about my first week in Germany here. Just before going into the shop I spent 2 minutes looking up key words in a dictionary and then spewed them out enough to get my point across. Eloquent? No. Efficient? Definitely.

I was also clear about why they may speak English to you in Germany on my blog. If you act stressed out then they will do it because they are NICE and want to save you from that stress. The social aspect of speaking a language is so incredibly crucial – it’s important to inject some personality into your conversations. Yes, this does involve some charisma, and yes I’m not going to sugar coat this and I prefer to slap some sense into people to snap them out of excuse-mode and try to improve their social skills.

Perhaps a self-help guru would be nicer than me and give a step-by-step answer to overcoming shyness, but I really feel the best way to do it is to stop focusing so much on the shyness itself and just approach people. This is how I got over my shyness, not by following a complicated programme.

3) I never said “almost fluent”. It was conversational Czech so I was still hesitating, but it was definitely spontaneous conversations. I clarified precisely where I was at on the blog, so I couldn’t follow conversations between two natives speaking quickly for example, but could participate at many levels when someone spoke slowly and clearly to me. It’s important not to exaggerate this to “almost fluent”. I’ve reached fluency in other languages in other circumstances.

How did I do it? By speaking so much and getting so much feedback that I had no choice but to improve. My way is not the most fun way to learn a language because it involves a lot of frustration, but it is the quickest if someone can endure that frustration over many weeks.

Perhaps you are focused so much on the difficulties in Polish (its cases etc.) and saying things exactly right that it’s slowing you down from simply communicating. I got my case endings right sometimes, but not all the time, and yet I had several pretty deep relationships in the language.

My way is a perfectionist’s nightmare I work on communicating FIRST and then tidy up the edges after that. A perfectionist that reads my blog would have a lot of changes in mentality to take in, so it isn’t for everyone.

I don’t see how you can possibly think that my blog is “more” about bragging about my travels. I write a post about my travels perhaps once a month, sometimes even just once in the entire trip – I almost never talk about my personal life on the blog, but give location updates for more transparency, since that is part of my story.

Nobody can promise you a one-site-fits-all solution. I can only tell you what I feel works remarkably well for me and those who I have been in touch with directly. Every day I get a lot of e-mails from people I’ve never talked with who thank me for my advice since they have applied it and it is working. The best thing is to take a little from everyone as you have done and in the end it’s great that you have found a method that works for you.

If you have any other questions feel free to e-mail me. Otherwise, after some struggling it seems you are on the right path now with a good combination of reading, listening and conversation

Paul, let me share my views on this input versus output issue and reply to the points you raised.

1) If you live where the language is spoken, it is possible within a few days and certainly weeks to say a few things in the language in very limited situations. You can buy things in a store, or ask for directions, for example. You have to pick situations where you can get away with saying things where you need not worry about the reply, or the reply is predictable and within the range of what you know. Doing this is fun, but, in my view, of limited benefit to language acquisition.
2) Benny spoke German before going to Berlin, having studied it at school and having lived in Germany for months, roomed with Germans in Spain etc. so that situation is not comparable.
3) After two months it is certainly possible to have limited but fairly satisfying conversations in a language, if, you have been able to spend 4-5 hours a day working on your input activities. This true whether you live in the country or not, but more so if you live surrounded by the language. However, this assumes you have put in a lot of hours on input, vocab review, some grammar review etc.
You don’t have to wait months before doing this but you have to have some competence in the language. I cannot just go up to people I don’t know in order to speak in a language I essentially cannot speak, I imagine how I would react if someone did that to me in English! However, after a few weeks of hard work, I would certainly try out what I have learned, even if it gets me into trouble, (the conversation stops as I get out of my limited comfort zone).

The most important thing with input activities is that you enjoy them. My preference is to concentrate on listening and reading, where I can listen to what I read, and read what I listen to, and save words and phrases for review like we do at LingQ. I would also have the TV and radio on, and go out with locals, but would understand little of what I was listening to, and would not have the opportunity to review most of what I hear, so those activities would be, for me, secondary, and just for fun. However, they are very beneficial and are part of the advantage of living where the language is spoken. You may prefer to focus on different input activities, but it is the input that will give you the words and familiarity that will enable you to eventually speak. Of course you will also want to consult grammar books from time to time as well.
And if you live where the language is spoken, you can start speak quite early, as soon as you feel comfortable doing it as I said.

I do agree that being a perfectionist is not ideal in language learning. We need not wait until we are perfect before speaking, because we never achieve perfection, never. We can expect to always improve, and if I lived where the language was spoken I would certainly be using it in an ever increasing variety of situations. Remember what Krashen said, language acquisition is based on meaningful acquisition and low anxiety. Obviously the anxiety level in our interaction with native speakers decreases as we understand more of what is said, and have more words to use to maintain a discussion. The choice of when to speak is yours, and living in Poland I would encourage you to speak as often as is reasonable while putting a lot of effort into the input activities of your choice.

From your blog

” I actually studied German for 5 years before going to University – it’s the language that I’ve put the most work into, and yet, right now I couldn’t even order breakfast in German if I wanted to. You’ll notice that it is not one of the flags I’ve included on the right of this site as a language that I speak.

I know all about the Accusative/Nominative/Dative cases and the various ways to say the (der, die, das, den, dem…), I know that the order that words appear in a sentence goes by Time then Manner then Place, and that the second verb goes at the end if there is an auxiliary verb. I can reproduce tables of rules and I can read some text and have a pretty good idea what it’s about.”

“I spent several weeks in Munich and a month in Freiburg (both in south Germany) a few years ago. I felt like I was starting over from scratch, but even so, I managed to start speaking a little. I even lived with two Germans in Spain for several months and got to practise even more.”

However much you may discount your German knowledge before you got to Berlin. it was not zero. If I remember correctly you said that your German at the time was like your Czech after two months in Prague, although I assume it was better since you did a video not too long after you got to Berlin, where you spoke German quite well.

It really does not matter. The point is that you had considerable background which would make it much easier to use your German. It was not like starting from scratch. I am not misrepresenting anything.

I am no longer interested in replying to comments from Steve Kaufmann or related to any attacks he has brought up here. To understand this, please read this final comment I made to him in a previous argument. We have exchanged thousands of words worth of comments already and the bickering is getting far too repetitive.

It’s over Steve.

He may retort with more very selective misleading quotes or lies (a.k.a. “if I remember correctly” suggestions) or other feats of misdirection or irrelevance – the only way I can stop this madness is to ignore him. His vendetta against me (as he had for Tim Ferris) means I can expect him to comment elsewhere online as my name comes up in an attempt to reduce how valid my advice is.

Challenging my advice is important, but hijacking any mention of me online with irrelevant additions is wasteful and childish.

I find this to be a poor show of character. I don’t know if it stems from jealously that he isn’t in the spotlight as “the language expert”, dislike of me personally, or genuine passion to stop me from encouraging people to speak languages sooner, but arguing with him in endless circles like this is just taking over the comment thread on Jennie’s blog for a post that has nothing to do with Steve.

When he appears in comments on guest posts or mentions of me elsewhere on the Internet, I suppose the best thing I can do is to simply link to our argument as I’m doing here and my reasons for not wanting to talk to him any more as the entirety of my reply, pointing out that he has attacked others online and hope people understand my position and how I have lost any respect I had for this man. He doesn’t deserve my replies any more.

His language learning advice is very valid and clever (in certain situations, especially if speaking is less of a priority for you in the short term) and his LingQ site is useful too, but his personality, arrogance, persistence and negativity have worn my patience down and I’m not interested in playing his game any more.

I hope other people will comment on this post on issues related to things discussed in the post. If you want to argue input vs output (i.e. the “benefits” of waiting until you are ready to speak) then I welcome your comments here and I’m sure Steve will welcome your comments on his site too. If you have any other questions about “gaps” in my approach or advice, e-mail me and I’ll try to get back to you as soon as I can with an answer, but this post is not a good place for arguments. I talk about these issues many times on my blog – comments there are a good place to share your scepticism on particular aspects of my approach.

Looking forward to other (relevant) comments on this page and sorry to everyone (especially Jennie) who has to read this petty argument between two people who simply dislike one another and shouldn’t be so public about it.

I forgot: Benny, you are a GREAT CLOWN — see your video “Overdose on homeopathy in the Philippines”. Making jokes about homeopathy just shows that you understand nothing about the successes and benefits of homeopathy.

Steve, Most of the time, I am on the same side of the argument as you in regards to input-first, etc. And there are good arguments for this. Sadly, neither you nor Benny ever actually get to any kind of truth in the matter because your both too busy fending off strawman arguements to ever actually pursue the reality behind any of this. Is this because you both have a product to sell? Probably. It’s the same reason, Steve, that you deny the benefit of proven technology like Spaced Repitition Software, LingQ doesn’t provide any type of SRS accomodations, and you’ve been too busy destroying natural resources and pillaging virgin forests to develop the programming acumen to create such a thing, which, actually would amplify the power of LingQ many-fold if you embraced it, so instead you troll anything different and promote your own blog and services. Sadly, although you are a wealthy individual, you haven’t developed much business acumen either or you would realize that you’ve built LingQ around an old-fashioned and faulty business model which simply isn’t successful on the internet. Anyone who wants can build a site that does exactly what LingQ does, make it free and then either charge for only a few VERY select services or work completely off donations and make far more money than you. It’s the model behind nearly every contemporary internet business to meet with major success. Yes, I’ve heard you bash wikipedia for putting out their “begging bowl” once a year, but that “begginb bowl” model brings in tons of money, while also allowing everyone who desires it access to wikipedia, which is completely FOUNDED on the idea of donated energy, resources, and knowledge. It’s where business is going, but I guess you’re too old to understand. But, my point is this, Benny has said repeatedly he’s no longer interested in having this “debate (that’s a farce, it’s a commercial and that’s all)” with you, but you follow him all over the internet commenting on any blog or forum he says anything on. I’ll give you this, you may not be internet savvy as far as running an internet business (if you were you wouldn’t have to constantly harrass Benny just to promote yourself, and you could focus on ACTUALLY improving the quality of Lingq) BUT you are an extremely successful internet TROLL. And that is for sure.

ya, this is why I shouldn’t have jumped in. You’ve both impressed me with some of your language skills, so I see no need to doubt that either of you applies your different methods successfully.

The part that annoys me is the generalized statements against the other. Benny commonly claims that any method not based on immediate speech is “antisocial” and ineffective, which I think Steve takes issue with. Steve seems to also claim that Benny’s ultra-social method is inefficient, but I see Benny’s good results so I have to say that it seems to work somehow.

Personally, I just can’t (yet) figure out how to be that social, so I can’t use all of Benny’s recommendations. Instead, I start out with weeks or months of input-based learning a la Steve, and then I use many of Benny’s methods after that for activating my knowledge. This led me to success in German, and is currently my process for Dutch, which is going well so far.

Thai, Czech, Tagalog and Hungarian are not part of the 8 languages I claim fluency in. These are listed on the right on my blog and I have been interviewed in various languages on Youtube.

Thank you SO MUCH for adding that bit about you believing in magic placebos. To quote yourself… “Where are the proofs” – the hypocrisy is just so delicious!!

If you’ve been reading for less than a year then I’ve only taken on German and Hungarian (still in the process of Tagalog). I was successful in reaching fluency in German (and my spoken level is at European standard C2 according to the Goethe Institut).

If anyone would like to suggest that this “doesn’t count” and exaggerate that I spoke it already because of the C I got in my non interested attempt at German in school, then I invite you to work as public relations for the Irish Education board, but not to drag up your speculations of my level here.

I hope this answers your question, although I really don’t see how what I have done specifically in the last year is relevant to this particular post. Please ask any questions on my blog or e-mail me.