How 5 Polyglots Broke Language Learning

these five polyglots crack the secret to fast language learning and we're going to steal their techniques for ourselves polyglots are famous for knowing many languages and learning them fast they're the evidence that mastering 10 20 or even 50 languages is possible and the good thing is you can do this too so what do the best language Learners know that we don't and what are they doing differently than the rest of us to learn languages so fast and some of their genius techniques are surprisingly easy to copy and it all starts with this first legendary polyglot

jeppe Casper mes ganti an Italian Legend who was able to speak at least 30 languages fluently and the trick he used to learn them might just be pure genius jepe was born in bolognia Italy in 1774 he was not only a cardinal for the Roman Catholic church but also a linguist and his passion for languages started when he was just a little boy being raised in a very humble family he demonstrated great memory skills a musical ear and an extraordinary ability to learn foreign languages people from all over the world would eventually travel to talk

to him while he stayed in it ity and it's even said that after passing away people sought out his skull to learn the secrets of his abilities but what was his trick to learning so many languages well before becoming a cardinal Meson spent most of his time as an interpreter of the dying and the wounded in the Austrian and French Wars of the late 1700s he clearly had a Devotion to his calling so when he started attending to soldiers who spoke slavonic cish romanic and polish amongst other languages he realized he couldn't give them all

the attention they needed either physically or spiritually because of the language barrier so he took it upon himself to turn that into fuel to learn their languages in one case it's even said that he learned enough of a new language overnight to be able to confess two criminals who are going to be executed the following day so how would he learn his trick was to ask a native speaker to recite the Lord's Prayer in the target language mesop fonti would then use that to deconstruct the basic structures and Rhythm of the language you see mesy

knew the Lord's Prayer really well so hearing it in another language Let Him decode the basic rules of that language very very quickly American polyglot Tim Ferris would later build something very close to meeson's Method centuries later and call it the 12 golden sentences technique he says that we only need to translate these 12 sentences to the language we want to learn to grasp the basics the apple is red this is John's Apple I give John the Apple we give him the apple and so on each of these sentences will teach you different structures in

the target language and you'll quickly pick apart the big differences and similarities between the language you know and the one you're learning you can then quickly Master The Familiar patterns and focus on the ones that are different to speed ramp your language learning now if you're smart you'll combine that with this next trick from the legendary polyglot katoom a Hungarian interpreter who spoke about 16 languages and understood almost 30 by using her own unique language formula LOM was born in PEX hungry in 1909 and apart from being a translator she's considered to be one of

the first simultaneous interpreters in the world this means that unlike most translators LOM could translate almost instantaneously in real time without the speaker having to take a pause are you able to afford an attorney no no but if we look back Kato actually didn't do well in foreign languages during her school years and in fact she grew up speaking only one language but like many other countries in the 1930s Hungary was in a deep economic depression so Kato knew she needed to find a good job and took to learning and teaching French and English to

do so and that's how it all began several years later she would invent one of the most popular language formulas K thought that learning a language was like a math equation invested time multiplied by motivation divided by inhibition equals the best results for invested time she meant time spent studying the language and Kato didn't think much time was needed just 10 minutes per day would do for a good start but the way you spend that time is critically important for Kato the three best things to do are the three Autos method Auto Lexia autog graphia

and AIA Auto Lexia means to read for oneself and Kato did this by finding something interesting to read like a crime short story or a romance novel autog graphia means writing for oneself and she used this by writing about her daily thoughts and routines and AIA means to speak to oneself and Kato would often encourage speaking to herself casually about her daily life as language practice but kach thought that motivation was the key driving force behind her learning so before starting a new language she would ask herself how much am I interested in this language

what do I want to do with it and what good is it for me and these answers would keep her from deviating from her goals as things got tough so where does inhibition come into play well Kato almost lost her will to learn languages at one point in her first translation job for a local pharmaceutical lab she failed miserably even getting a note that whoever had made the translation was very brave but Kato fought back and used this failure as a trigger to learn even more she understood that the more she could put her errors

aside the sooner she would learn the language so Kato put a strong emphasis on taking motivated time to study with techniques you enjoy and without fear of making mistakes this is something the next polyglot also does but he adds an extra layer to it his name is Kenneth hail and he's an American Professor who spoke about 50 languages but that's not even the most impressive thing about him hail could learn the basics of a language and start speaking it with just 15 minutes of listening to a native speaker but how is that possible well it's

important to know how he started his language Journey well it's the famous bike party and Magic stunts book the world's biggest candy value only a nickel hail was born in Illinois in the US in 1934 and in his teenage years he was thrown out of school for being so distracted learning languages but he used this to his Advantage later teaching at the prestigious miit where he became a champion for endangered languages the voice for the voiceless as he was called he displayed a great talent for acquiring languages fast and his secret was listening plus a

silent period one of hail's anthropology students at MIT Joe Campbell breaks it down for us he had gone to tootan in Mexico with his teacher to examine the local Spanish for traces of the na language and Campbell noticed that his teacher kept repeating the same strategy he would listen intently to the native speakers without speaking for some time and then all of a sudden he'd switch and start speaking and it would seem like he had made leaps really quickly this is what American linguist Steven crashion calls the comprehensible input hypothesis he says that we only

acquire Languages by listening not speaking and that we subconsciously learn to use The Language by receiving information which is slightly above our proficiency level so we should listen to input that we can mostly understand but where there are some unfamiliar words and structures and we only have to listen until we feel ready to speak and then we can jump in to start expressing crashion says the process of learning a new language is very similar to how we did it when we were toddlers we just listened first and then probably went through what's called a silent

period This is a time when a language learner has started absorbing the comprehensible input but hasn't yet developed the ability to create original statements they can only repeat what other people say so pushing language Learners to talk when they're not ready yet might not be very effective but this doesn't mean you shouldn't speak at all crash says that practicing sounds words and phrases out loud is completely fine because repeating what we're learning trains our vocal muscles and improves our pronunciation while not burdening us with generating original content and that's exactly what hail did hail would

listen at first then he would take the time to process and then he would finally start to speak hail's method of listening for a time before speaking is great but when we're ready to speak this next method from pow janulus will take us to the next level pow janulus is a Canadian translator who said to have held the Guinness World Record for speaking 42 languages in 1985 and he did it by developing what maybe one of the most unique language methods yet Janus was born in Vancouver Canada in 1939 and as a child he was

exposed to many Slavic languages since his parents were polyglots themselves he's believed to have mastered 13 Languages by the age of 18 all by himself using his own technique so what's his method for language learning it all starts with thinking like Janus does when learning a language his first rule is is to put on a silly hat that'll make people laugh why Janus believes that to successfully learn a language we need to love making mistakes and for that wearing a silly hat lets us be carefree and relaxed after relaxing julus would dive into his method

Canadian doctor and accelerated learning expert Marilyn Atkinson spent 7 years analyzing the language techniques of janulus in 2020 and she wrote a book called velocity instant fluency to describe them amongst many methods janulus used there are two that he relies on the most in toning and ench charting have you ever noticed that a singing voice has little to no accent many times when we sing in another language we suddenly lose our strong accent well this is what in toning is based on Atkinson says that we should select 20 to 30 words that we want to

learn assign rhythms to each and repeat them three times almost like chanting by the third time the mouth ears brain and body will begin to synchronize and you'll more easily remember the words this might seem a bit crazy but it does actually make sense when you think about songs being easily remembered because the lyrics are repeated rhythmically throughout Atkinson claims that intoning once a day for a month is enough to change the trajectory of a language learner's journey and this is somewhat backed by science a study carried out by Dr ly in the journal memory

and cognition shows us that Melodies and Rhythm can help us in learning and remembering new phrases in another language in the study 60 adults were split into groups to learn Hungarian either by speaking rhythmic speaking or singing and the best performing group was the one that was singing the reason singing helps with language learning is that music and language share the same neurop Pathways in our brains so attaching words to a rhythmic pattern improves our memory for those words pow's second key technique was ench charting for that Atkinson says that janulus would listen to a

native speaker and note what words they repeated the most then on a whiteboard he would use those words to create what's called an En chart and this is a really interesting concept enchanting is a sentence building system that looks something like this and we can make one of these for ourselves by starting with a simple inch chart that helps us talk about our our favorite food it could look something like the following for example you could say I like pasta or you don't like pasta or we love chocolate the great thing about one inch chart

is that it allows a learner to mix and match just 16 words to actually learn 256 different sentence combinations crazy right but moving more into modern day one of the biggest polyglots found a surprisingly easy trick to learn languages because his name is Steve Kaufman a Canadian polyglot today who speaks about 20 languages and the trick Steve ad is something we can immediately use as part of our language learning repertoire Steve Kaufman was born in Sweden in 1945 but moved to Canada with his parents a couple of years later he was exposed to both Czech

and German as a child since his parents spoke them but he grew up only speaking English after school he got a job in construction which he quit to work on a ship that would take him to Europe This is where he started picking up new languages as he was regularly hitchhiking through many countries a couple of years later he started working for the Canadian diplomatic service and he began learning more languages to improve Pro on the job so what can we learn from Steve Well Steve strongly believes in not using memorization to learn a language

Steve thinks that it's pretty ineffective to repeat the same word over and over to remember it not only because this is boring but also because there's a better and more enjoyable way to do it have you ever come across a word so many times that you end up larning it almost by accident well that's what Steve tries to recreate with what he calls the Vagabond technique this is where we expose our brain to the language in different ways without trying to shovel information into our heads with repetition it's more about wandering or vagabonding around the

language becoming aware of the words and the grammar and then encountering them so many times that the brain has no other option than to remember them naturally for example Steve tells us that when he was learning Persian he would listen to an interesting piece of news then he would read the transcript of the news translate new words and find other ways to interact with the news piece by doing this he was exposing his brain to the same language information from a few different perspectives and letting his brain become aware of the context text Steve also

uses this for grammar many Learners often read the explanations for grammar rules that don't yet have any impact on them but Steve thinks that getting a lot of exposure to the target language will help us come across grammar rules naturally and just being aware of them and encountering them over and over again in different situations will help move them from unknown to something we learn it's a process of going from subconsciously noticing the rule to consciously using it these polyglots give us valuable language techniques to become fluent and you'll just need a con venient conversation

partner to top it all off which we cover in this video right here I'll see you there and [Music] Proxima