HOW TO LEARN LANGUAGES EFFECTIVELY | Matyáš Pilin | TEDxYouth@ECP

Last summer when I was alone in Tallin Estonia, I had to face a challenge this challenge was the simple phrase and many others like it "Tere tulemast" I presume none of you speak Estonian I take that as a no so and I was in the same situation as you are right now back in the last summer, because I never spoke Estonian, never read Estonian book never watch an Estonian movie, never actually seen Estonian song or met anybody from Estonian I had to act quickly, I had to be able to day one single spot, be able to understand what the barista was saying when I was ordering my coffe, be able to understand what the passport security person was asking me at the airport, when I was coming to Estonia I was living Tallin, I had to be able to comprehend the language, to comprehend it at that very single moment, and this experience reised the question. How can one learn a language in a very limited amount of time, comprehend it, be able to act with it, be able to work with it , to meet people with it and most of all progress in it. I attended to talk last september which was right above this issue it was held by a polyglot, she was from Slovakia and was willing to talk about how he/she is learning, how she was learning and is still learning to this day new languages, she told us of people that spek six, ten, twelve, sixteen languages even they devote their whole lives to this idea of being able to comprehend every single one of them, or as many as they could, and if you were thinking that there is a magical way, some magical secret which she told me, I have to disappoint you there is no single super method.

The polyglots all of them worldwide agree one thing there is no way one fastest way how to learn a language, it has to be personal, you have to be able to choose a personal way and find it, and find your language through a personal personal way and modify it as much ass you possibly can to suit you to suit your type of learning. Some people prefer stuck thier head for vocabulary and to fill it with words and phrases until they head bursts some of us prefer to watch a movie to talk with a person in a pub or like me when going back from the librer working in a essay for six hours till dying morning meet a drunken Frenchman and talk to him in play French and practice as much as I can. There are many ways, some people even prefer those video games that you know your phone's you know the memorizes and those kind of things I'm not much fan of that but that's a personal thing again today what I'll be presenting to you is something differente, it is or these are four points which are intrinsic to our learning, which are building blocks of any learning of any language you will ever do doesn't matter if it's a Chinese, if it's Arabic if it's Hebrew, Estonian, French, Spanish, any language will so ever these four things: message, importance, observation, comprehension all amount of the same thing the same goal learning a language effectively and they all are as you'll soon find interconnected.

You can not just focus on one of them, you can not just focus on importance and hope that you will through this relevance to who you are you´ll be to able to learn quickly or similarly you can not just focus on comprehension as we do in our schools nowadays, we focus too much on memorizing vocabulary or learning phrases about whatever thing that there prescribed by the booklets, but that´s not how you learn a language. I´ll get into them more later once the progress through the talk. The first one is message some of you this might seem a bit bizarre, but would I be my message, it is well you´ll see yourselves.

This sentence in in Stonian since you know we speak Stonian I´m not going to be asking what actually means but does anybody or rather let me read it, I´m not fluent Stonian so just like be ready with me so. Speaking Stonian Now still you have no clue what this actually means, I don´t presume that from some magical learning of some broken Stonian magically speak or learn, understand this one phrase but already you can see that there is yah twice and because language is logically structured, you are able to deduce that, probably because also these two works are the same endings this one, and this one and then these two then maybe that means end and already in less than 30 secconds you understand one word in languages you´ve never seen in your whole life, and through progressing like this, through making these small steps you´re able to actually learn it. What if I put another sentence here in a language of some of you speak, maybe more that some of you, maybe all of you.

But certain that is more familiar, because we are anglephone, francophone society, so most of us presumably and, what if I put another, one which all of us speak, in English. This is how you learn a language, once you find the meaning, the message behind a sentence you´re able to acquire the language, there are signifers in a language, which all help you to build a logical structure of this set language. When you understand the message, you unconsciously acquire language, this doesn´t mean that by understand one phrase from the charter of human rights from the United Nations you understand Stonian or French or English for that matter.

It simply means that you will have the bulding blocks with which you can build the learning, you have this, the logical structure which build on this language. Then you have importance, every language, no matter what it is has to be useful to you, has to be relevant to you, has to be something you enjoy. When I was in school many years ago, in my elementary school I was forced to study Spanish, I hate it, I couldn´t stand it.

Nothing against Spanish, nothing against that It was just simply didn´t enjoy it I could´t learn a single sentence. When I was in Italy for my . .

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Edinburgh residential trip, I decided to study Italian and I was like yes, I´m gonna learn this language and I failed because I was not able to enjoy it, because I just didn´t enjoy, and actually from the one trip, I had more from Swedish, because I met a Swedish friend that I´m still in talk in contact to this day. It is this enjoyment is relevance to you that is important. It has to be relevant to ours education, something that you want to learn because you want to progress in your life.

Has to be relevant because of your family, your friends, if you find enjoyment in it. It has to be relevant because of your job maybe you have a job in I don´t know Ireland or Stockholm and you need to learn the language to be able to work with it, and like me maybe it´s through the travels because being international, this what this whole day is about, means that you want to open yourself to other opportunities. For me that means to see different cultures in different worlds and as a part of that, you have to be able to speed the language at least some degree.

Languages are tools just like any other part of our lives, they can be used in some meaningful way once you find this what this meaningful way is you´re to able to learn much faster and therefore chooses languages useful to you. Now on to observation and this is probably the part that I think might be one the most important simply because it can be so easily. This photo was taken when I was also last summer walking to the Mont Blank in between France, Italy and Switzerland and when I took it I was jus crossing the Italian-French border I juts came from a little refugee on the French side, and was walking up the mountain to cross the Italian side and in the same day I spoke French and Italian My French is by no means good but I´m able to talked with it, Italian is much harder, but still I was to able to comprehend the people ask for a bed and a dire situation not be forced to sleep outside and wind and freezing cold because they´ll be not being enjoyable at all.

And from it I realized that there are two key things, that you have to be actually immerse yourself in a language to some degree, you cannot just stand set at home and hope the language will come to you that the knowledge that you are able to do with will actually come to you some like that, you have to be actually able to put yourself there to pay attention to observe how people are doing, how they speak, how they emote and hopefully from that build up your knowledge and this is actually a key thing and I think people should start doing this you should be look for something called: parent speaker Now this is what I learned during the talk about the polyglots back in september, it is an idea that when you´re speaking a new language you´re like a baby, you have don´t know how to actually operate language, you´re just put in a world we´re all adults speaking in a foreign language and you´re hoping to crack grab grasp a meaning about it, grasp something that you can´t know it´s a world that you can´t understand, what you need is a parent speaker, somebody that will speak to you in the same level, will help you learn new words and will actually correct you, will actually give you advice how to speak better and will now diminish you in any sort of way. That is key because when you´re able to practice you speaking you´re learning in that sense that you learn faster because and this is actually gonna be the very next slide I think afterwards so I´m gonna quickly get this sorry for that. When you actually learn a language through comprehension, through observation you are able to then speak the language, and this is one of the most important things because how else would you communicate with people especially when you want travel, you need to be able to act on your knowledge .

You have to be able to actually find somebody that you can talk to an equal sense and you have to be able to listen a lot. People don't want to listen they revert back to English they revert back to to their natural tongue because they are scared don't be scared this gonna sound like a great cliche don't be scared to make mistakes, make them. They're gonna be corrected by people and you gonna learn from that.

And now the other thing that I was hoping to talk about Comprehension. And this thing can be slipt into two parts memory and comprehension or knowledge And I feel like nowadays in schools what we do is we just stuff our heads with vocabulary until they explote we shouldn't be do that because memory or knowledge is in comprehension like for example I know one sentence in Irish speaking Irish does it mean I speak Irish by no means I don't even properly know what the sentence means but I know that it's Irish I have that one piece of knowledge but I couldn't say I comprehend the language by no means whatsoever and that's the issue we force ourselves to learn complex vocabulary that is nor relevant to us. We force to stuff our heads with words that don't be are any meaning and that will never probably use ever in our lives we don't actually focus on comprehending them comprehending the structure and the sentences to actually using our existing knowledge from other languages from my maternal tongues to actually progress further.

We should be doing that we should be trying to learn with use of our existing languages we should be using a native tongues we should be using our abilities to speak from they one we should be looking at actions more than words or nouns . When you learn what it means the word to hurt it's still more useful than actually what it means what the word arm is it You can be like hurt but what do we do with it an arm it doesn't work like that. Actions are more important than words and this sort of progress is somenthing that's key for learning a language effectively.

So I presented to you today is four principles and some key points some things that maybe you've heard some things that you that maybe we're new to you the parent speaker probably . All these things are essential you can remove one and hope that the others will come with it or that you focus only on one of them and completely disregard the others it is important to push yourselfs to your limits to go out there and this is gonna sound like a great cliche once again but to push yourself go out there and actually experience the language firsthand. No school, no institution no book can ever give you that and just only very end I would like to dispel one last thing that I've been told in past that I've heard people tell me or people tell other people, that it's talent that's required that for being able to learn languages you need talent you need to be able to have this magical skill with things that you're born with, it's no true anyone can learn language anyone I've known when they push themselves hard enough they're able to speak a language some people are far superior to me and ther are probably hundreds and millions alike that.

But it is that thing that you push yourselves that differentiates you from other people this push. So don't be scared to push. Thank you.