You missed the best language learning video ever

It is a superpower of a language learning method. Genius, right there. Genius.

I'm so bad. You're just so good. A week ago, I stumbled across the best description that I've ever heard of how to learn a language from zero to full fluency.

If you want those results, you have to go to those extremes. It came from a very unexpected place. I don't know if this is good.

And the video says a lot of things that you probably don't expect to hear. I didn't understand anything anyway. But why am I talking about someone else's video?

Wait, wait, wait. We need to hear that again. Exactly.

The answer to that is that the creator of this video has very humbly titled it "How I Learnt. . .

", followed by the language. Just good language learning advice with none of the bells and whistles. And considering how niche that language is, the video has a good number of views.

But still, less than 2% of the people who should watch this video have actually done so. You should do this if. .

. Because it doesn't matter what language we're talking about, the insights shared here are invaluable. Whether you're beginner, intermediate, or SO advance that the next step for you would be to start sounding non-native in your first language.

And then I had, like, all these sentences. So in addition to wanting to share my own reflections on what Illis says in her video, watch the s*** out of it, I also don't want anyone to let the fact that the video is called How I Learnt Norwegian stop them from hearing these wise words. Instruction number six, listen to.

. . Keep watching to hear why I think this might be the best language learning video in the world.

Okay, let's calm down and start from the beginning. Okay, I thought you could use these tips even if you're learning another language. Almost all the advice you've ever heard on how to learn a language would apply to any language, but most of the best videos are about someone learning a specific language.

Oh, I almost forgot to say, "tjena chicos! " So when people hear me speak Norwegian, ask me how long I've been living here, and I say that I've been living here for three years, they just tell me what, how is it possible? People are asking her how long she has lived in Norway, and the answer is three years.

But she also said before that it was important to her that she understood Norwegian before she moved there. And the reason that it's important is that if you speak fluent English, people are going to get used to speaking to you in English. She arrived in Norway speaking some Norwegian already.

It's not how much Norwegian she spoke in that time. It's the difference when she landed. It's like hitting the ground running.

I just want to quickly clarify that I'm not saying that Illes is trying to mask how long she's been learning. The point that I was trying to make was that those three years in Norway would have been made many times more effective by the fact that she already had some ability in Norwegian when she arrived. If you are going to a country for any length of time with the attitude that you'll just learn when you get there, I suggest you reconsider, especially so if that country's population speaks English well.

If you start learning before you go, your chances of being successful skyrocket. Also guys, literally as I was editing this video, I got the news that I know some of you have been waiting a very long time for. StoryLearning has finally released their uncovered courses in Norwegian, Danish and Swedish.

They've been a long time coming. I'm very excited to check them out for myself, but it gets better because I actually helped them to find the Swedish teacher that they eventually worked with to develop the course. They've given me or my audience, you guys, a special deal, which means if you buy any of the courses, Swedish, Danish or Norwegian, you get the other two languages thrown in for free.

So that could be perfect for you if maybe you haven't decided which Scandinavian language you'd like to learn yet, or maybe you're traveling there and you want to get a feel for all three of them. Maybe you're just like me and one day you would even like to understand Danish, you know, pigs will fly and all that. Yeah, whatever course you pick up, you get the other two thrown in.

That's a pretty good deal, but it doesn't last long. It's only about six days at the release of this video. So you don't have a ton of time anyway.

Hopefully you haven't missed out already when you're watching this. Link will be in the description, of course. And now back to the video that I was editing that was already about someone else's video about Norwegian.

So it's like Inception if it were about Norwegian. So it's like Insomnia. A little Christopher Nolan joke for you.

Back to the video. When I started learning Norwegian, my goal was to speak Norwegian like a native Norwegian. I didn't want to just like be able to understand people.

I didn't want to just be able to make myself understood. I do remember a time where I was like, I want to speak Swedish to this level. And then like watching movies in Swedish and being like, I literally have no idea what they're saying.

I am never even going to understand Swedish, let alone speak it like a native. Personally, I would not advise most people to have that goal. It's fine to have that goal like one day.

But the reality is going to be that you suck for a very, very long time. Motivation is a little bit like the wind when sailing. You need to work out when it's working for you and when it's working against you and adjust accordingly.

There we have it. Number one, listen as much as possible. Insert your language there.

Listen as much as possible to whatever language you're learning. Although this sounds like the most basic advice you could ever hear, I think what stops people in their tracks is the discomfort of doing that at first. So when you hit that wall of discomfort, either just deal with it and keep going.

But if you really, really can't do that, then find a way of making it more comprehensible to you. When you're a kid, what you do first, like for the two first years of your life, is listen. You listen all the time to people and you don't speak.

You're just like this and you're listening all the time. Kids are definitely trying to talk or at least my kids were when they were one. But because they are so limited in their capacity to actually produce the language, the linguistic gains that they are making for the first five, six, seven years of their life are 99% input.

Even if they start speaking at two, three, four, five, it's still the input that is actually making them progress in the language. So what I thought was, okay, what I'm going to do first is that I'm going to listen to Norwegian as much as possible. So what I did is.

. . Genius right there.

Genius. I wish I'd figured that out as early as she did. I didn't understand anything anyway.

So I was just like listening to things. I didn't care what the theme was. And I was just listening all the time or not all the time, but every time I could.

Ain't that all Norwegian all the time. All French all the time would sound strange. If you want to learn as fast as she did, you will have to be that intense about it.

This is the same for everything, but I think in the language learning sphere, there's more often a cognitive dissonance between the person who wants this result, who won't do what is required. It's just the most basic thing. If you want those results, you have to go to those extremes.

The end. What I did was hearing, for example, the same book over and over again. And sometimes my mom, she tells me like, when you were a kid, you knew one book by heart.

You just like turned the pages. You knew exactly when the pages had to be turned. Exactly.

My eldest son's version of that was Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy, which he used to read in a Scottish accent. The times that he heard it the most was an audio book that was just on repeat. And the audio book was read by David Tennant, the Scottish actor.

I think he wasn't even three. He may have just turned three. And one day we were in the car and I could hear him turning the pages.

Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy. I knew he wasn't reading it, but I'm driving so I couldn't actually see. And he gets to his favorite bit.

And I said to my wife, he loves that bit with the cat. And she turns around and she's like, he hasn't even got Harry Maclary. It's where's Wally.

. . But he was turning the pages at the correct time that you would need to if you were reading the actual Harry Maclary book.

Kids do repetition like nothing else. And if you can learn to tolerate it as an adult, it is a superpower of the language learning method. Everyone sees how kids behave, but very few people seem to take the lesson away from that.

So if I was reading a lot of times, for example, like five sentences, and I was learning grammar, vocabulary, conjugation, pronunciation, I was learning all of this in one exercise. Wait, wait, wait, wait. We need to hear that again.

This is that I was learning everything I need to learn about the language in one text. Thank you. Thank you.

You're not learning the entire language in the one text, but you're learning everything that you need to know about the language before you start getting input from the language from that one thing. I do not know all the Spanish that's out there, but whenever I hear something in Spanish, I can single out the bits that I didn't understand. And I can do that because I've memorized certain passages of Spanish where I know every single thing.

So then when I hear something else, I'm like, okay, these are the parts that I don't know. I need to look them up. See how much easier that makes it rather than trying to learn everything about this kind of nebulous idea that is the language.

Just learn this paragraph. I was learning everything I need to learn about the language in one text. So if I was reading a lot of times, for example, like five sentences, and I was learning grammar, vocabulary, conjugation, pronunciation, I was learning all of this in one exercise.

And then I had like all these sentences with all the sentences from the first time I watched this video, there were certain times that I noticed she sounds Norwegian while she speaks English, but I couldn't remember exactly where it was. That was definitely one. And then I had like all these sentences.

And then it helps me remember vocabulary and be able to use the vocabulary that I learned. I got a lot of questions on Instagram about how to remember vocabulary, how to learn new words, how to like know how to use the vocabulary that you learn. The relationship between memory, like memorizing things and learning a language is more complex than people realise.

And I think it's too simplistic to say that like, oh, Anki doesn't work because it's just words and blah, blah, blah. You misunderstand what Anki is for. And it's also too simplistic to say, you just need to memorise a whole, you know, all the words of the language.

I don't think you really need to spend too long thinking about where memory comes into play, but you do need to understand that you're going to need to hear the language a lot, which she's already explained she was doing. So I think that how did you manage to remember words? Well, she didn't really need to remember them.

She heard Norwegian a lot. After you hear Norwegian enough, memory isn't really an issue. Use Google Translate.

I know that like, at least for me at school, we saw Google Translate like the devil. It was always like, no, don't use Google Translate. But Google Translate is actually good.

I think that people pick on Google Translate, not because it's actually bad, but because they think it makes them sound smart. Like I felt so proud and I got so much motivation because I was like, this is a book that normal Norwegian people read and I can already understand a bit of that. I remember the first time I had that feeling in Swedish, I had listened to the first 80 minutes of this audio book like 50 times.

One day I was like, well, I've I know the beginning of this book so well, as I started from just the 80th minute and started listening from there. Couldn't really understand very much, realised that I needed to go back and listen lots of times, probably listened to the next 80 minutes of it, maybe 10, 15 times. And then one night I was out running and I had the book in my ears and I remember being like scared of what was happening in the book and just suddenly realizing I no longer hear Swedish as a foreign language.

I am now just interested in what's happening in this book. [Music] Instruction number six, listen to audio books. She's put the instruction as simply as it really needs to be said.

Another thing that I did really often was to read a book and at the same time listen to the audio book because when you read, even if you read in your hand, I call this scuba diving. . .

do it. Watching for example an episode of a series, watch it again and copy some sentences that I thought were useful. I would change the subtitles sometimes.

The first time I would watch it without subtitles to see what I understood. Then the second time I would watch it with Norwegian subtitles to see if I understood a bit more. Third time I would watch it with English subtitles and then I would re-watch it again, for example with Norwegian subtitles.

Now I'm speaking of like a scene, not a whole episode or a whole movie obviously, not a whole episode or a whole movie obviously, but like I'm sure. That's actually, that would be more effective, especially if it's dialogue heavy. You find a really dialogue heavy scene.

Watch the s*** out of it. When there was a sentence that I thought was useful that I just copied it in my notebook and if I just wanted to like have something to read. I wonder if all these like anti-unkey keyboard warriors would be as against copying something by hand into a notebook.

I feel like just because it's a more traditional thing that people have been able to do for thousands of years, they would be like oh yeah no, it's great to copy things into notebooks. But the second you get a spaced repetition algorithm involved, they're like that doesn't work, it's not real language learning. When I got my story back, now you know what I did.

I read it a lot of times and I also got like a vocal. Then I would listen to the vocal like a lot of times. Then I would like read it until I knew it by heart.

So I would spend one to two weeks on it. Her way of learning Norwegian was so much more efficient than my way of learning Swedish. I think that we think of learning things by heart as like a bad thing, but honestly these stories, learning them by heart and reading them a lot of times, what it helped me with was remembering vocabulary, understanding grammar, learning conjugation.

That's exactly it. When people think of learning by rote, they think of a certain kind of content that people learn by rote. For example all the conjugations like ich bin du bist and they conclude that learning by rote is bad.

In a way we learn our native languages by rote. Like if you think about how three-year-olds, four-year-olds talk, they often just say exactly what you said. To speak a language like a native speaker, you have to learn what the native speaker learned and that might involve learning some things by heart.

And something I forgot to mention because I've been recording this video for like two hours and there's parts of Illes's video and lots of things in my video that will inevitably be cut out. There will be an extended cut available for my channel members. I call them the Tim Tam Cartel and you can join that by clicking the thing that says join just below this video.

It's only three Australian dollars a month. That's about two US dollars a month, actually slightly less. So yeah, join.

And this is why I think that it's so nice to learn sentences by heart is because when you like try for example to speak to yourself or when you try to speak to someone else, it's really good. You have to do it. But problem with it is that you're always looking for your words.

You're never like saying a whole sentence without taking a break or this will take a long time for you to do. And then you never learn, you never teach your brain to pronounce words, to work on the accent in a long sentence because you don't know how to make a long sentence. You will get better.

And even if you don't see the progress right now, even if you've been working for two weeks and you feel like you're exactly at the same point, first is not true. You're improving, even if you don't see the result right now. And second, maybe in a week you will see like suddenly, oh now I can feel it that I've become better.

So knowing that you can't always see the results right now, this is completely normal. But if you keep doing what you do, if you keep trying to find out what is the best method for you, you will get better. Languages take longer to show any improvement.

Most other skills show immediate improvement to a certain point. And then it takes a long time to really, really step it up from there. And languages sort of happen the other way around.

And one of the reasons for that is that an unfair comparison to make is also the most normal comparison to make. And that is of native speakers. I hope that this video was helpful.

I hope that you learned something. Although this video by Illist did get a disproportionate number of views to the size of the channel, I still think it needs more views. Probably not many people who are not interested in learning Norwegian are going to click on it.

This video is entirely just good language learning advice with none of the bells and whistles. Because it's not from like one of the big language learning channels, it will not get the kind of attention that it maybe deserves. Go and check out this video for yourself so that you can see it in full and not my edit of it, etc.

It's getting crazy hot in this room in October with all the lights on. Make sure you're subscribed if you're not already. I have lots of videos coming out in the next couple of weeks.

Until next time, lo quiero.