Learn a language in 2025 by setting the right goals

Hi there, it's that time of year. We're approaching Christmas. After that comes new year where we like to make New Year's resolutions.

And next week I will talk about my New Year's resolutions for the year 2025. But today I want to kind of prepare the ground a little bit because I was listening to a podcast in Persian where he was talking about the life of Jeff. And, uh, of course, Jeff Bezos, who is the founder of Amazon was someone who throughout his life was very interested in technology and he was a bit of a risk taker and he was confident.

And so in the end, and he was patient with his Amazon project and he was successful, he was confident that he would. succeed. Now we can't all be Jeff Bezos, but it made me think about this whole issue of planning and resolutions and what we're going to do and can we stick with it and so forth and so on.

And it reminded me, in fact, I went and grabbed this book, which is, uh, in German by my favorite German neuroscientist, Manfred Spitzer, and also Norbert Hershkowitz, who unfortunately recently passed away. Wie wir denken und lernen, full of wisdom. And again, Manfred Spitzer is a bit of a popularizer.

So I can't vote for everything that he says. Uh, I found a lot of his observations, very interesting. Uh, I, perhaps there are things that he says that I don't agree with, as is the case with anyone whose views and opinions you value on some issues, but perhaps not on every issue.

However, one example in that book is this. Chess player who is able to predict moves forward in a chess game so much faster than anyone who has been studying the rules of chess, because the experienced chess player has so much memory, has so much knowledge that has accumulated that he can then project forward in terms of which moves are going to take place as a, you know, consequence of whatever move he's going to make or the other player makes. And we know from research that.

The brain, when it learns a language, it is actually trying to predict what's going to happen in the language. And what happens is either confirms what was anticipated, or the reaction is, is negative, this N400. If you say the pizza flies, I think as an example that was used, well, pizzas don't fly, so we have this reaction against the meaning and that.

Process of getting rid of inaccuracies in structure or in vocabulary usage is a big part of how we learn. And of course, when we go to speak in a language, we draw from memory. We draw from words and structures that we have in our memory reserve.

Again, we project them forward. So we're constantly in our planning or in any resolution or any actions that we take, we are relying. On what we already know or what we have in our memory.

And this is all pointed out in Spitzer's book, but Spitzer's book does more than that. He explains, and I think this is relevant to the Jeff Bezos example, that who we are and how we think and act is conditioned by amongst other things. But two main features of our personality, one is our temperament and the other is our character.

And he makes a distinction that the temperament is something that we're born with. So we are risk takers or we are optimistic or outgoing. And these are things that are in our genes.

However, our character is based on our experience on what we have learned, uh, how we sympathize with other people, things that we find worthwhile, not worthwhile, our value system, all of these things are tied up in our character. And these things evolve over time. And so our character continues to develop over time.

throughout our, our life. And then Spitzer and, uh, Hershkowitz divide people into different stages of their life. So say as a teenager, we're impulsive.

In fact, as a little child, there's still this process of pruning and blooming where unnecessary neurons are pruned. And those that are going to be important to us are somehow encouraged. And I think that's also largely, uh, as with language learning, this sort of Error driven process through experience.

This is good. This is no good. The brain evolves in a certain direction.

And this pruning, by the way, goes on well into our twenties. And after that, apparently there is no more pruning of neurons. However, a number of things do continue to happen in our brains, which Spitzer and Hershkowitz talk about.

And one of these is the improved communication with different parts of the brain so that this, uh, myelin or myelination. Of the pathways of the brain mean that our decisions and the activity in our brain contains more of an element of, of, you know, call it the emotional side of the brain, a value driven part of our thinking, rather than simply a reaction to a meaning, in other words, we develop a better ability to control our impulses because we have a more balanced reaction to things that come at us in our lives. And this then evolves sort of through our twenties and thirties.

We become more empathetic with other people. We have more values of our own that we have arrived at through, you know, our own life, and I'm not going to give you everything that's in that book. I suggest you get a copy of it.

It might be available in English, but in a period from our forties to our sixties is kind of like the high point of our efficiency. We have this tremendous balance of value and yet the, the speed of our You know, neural processing is at a highly efficient rate. You know, we have this, uh, myelinization of our pathways in the brain.

I don't understand all this stuff, but I'm just sort of popularizing the popularizer. So our brains are particularly efficient and people typically have families. They have a sense of responsibility.

They have to worry more about the future. Whereas people in their twenties, typically can just, uh, be driven by impulse and, uh, do whatever they feel like doing, not entirely true. But as I say, he's a popularizer.

There's some generalizations there. And then after the age of 60, the speed of our neural processing slows down. We are starting to lose more and more neurons, although I'll get back to that point, but we have acquired more and more wisdom, more and more knowledge.

We know more things and this helps us in our decision making and this then takes us through to our eighties. Uh, two things I was going to say on that, by the way, is that, uh, one, while we lose neurons, we can afford apparently to lose a lot of neurons. Like even if we're down to 90%, that's still a lot.

It doesn't really damage us. And there's a number of studies showing that the, uh, you know, where a group of 70 year olds were asked to remember things that they had just seen and they were compared to a group of 80 year olds. In their eighties and the seven year old group cohort was 87 percent accurate.

And the 80 percent cohort was like 80 percent accurate. So there's not a big decline. Now, how does all of that relate to New Year's resolutions and language learning?

That's what I want to get into. So I wanted to suggest that our approach to New Year's resolutions, and I will give you mine next week, is going to be based on what we know, what we have in memory, our value system, our temperament, where we are in life, in our twenties, our thirties, our forties. Any of these things can influence what we do going forward.

You know, are we confident, uh, are we outgoing? Are we optimistic? Are we in our sixties, seventies, twenties, thirties?

These influence things, but we don't want to have stereotypes. I believe someone who maybe is not optimistic by nature, but because of experience of life and some success or some interest in particular things, they may develop a very positive attitude. to choose towards, for example, learning languages.

But another interesting fact that, uh, Spitzer and, uh, Hershkovitz point out is that we react more immediately to things that relate to our values than we do to meaning. So this they're able to measure because the N 400, this negative reaction to something that either semantically, in other words, in terms of meaning or in terms of structure is not appropriate in the language, that's 400 milliseconds. It's.

But the positive reaction to something that's an important value to us is faster. It's P200. And they explain that that's because, you know, we had to be able to judge, you know, is this animal coming to eat us?

We had to be able to judge that very, very quickly. And so that reaction is very fast. So our value, Reaction is fast.

That might explain why very often people in arguments and discussions react from emotion long before they listen to what the other person is actually saying. Now, all of these different things then take us back to what we're interested in is language learning. And when you prepare your new year's resolutions, think about what your values are.

Think about your ability to suppress. You know, impulses, even in learning languages, we have to suppress those words and structures that don't belong, that come from another language that we have learned. So this idea of suppressing what doesn't belong, suppressing what shouldn't be there, focusing on what we want, even in terms, again, of, uh, the massive amount of information that we have available to us now, whether it be in podcasts or on social media, like never before, or I did a video where I talked about YouTube as the new university, there's so much stuff out there, we have to have that.

Value system that enables us to suppress things that we are not interested in, that we don't agree with. And there, in my opinion, we have to value people who have experience like the experienced chess player, rather than jumping on the last little bit of information that's been thrown our way. So based on all of this, then what our value system is, what your value system is, your stage in life.

If the type of person you think you are, I would challenge all of you to come up with some resolutions, New Year's resolutions. In my own case, I have an idea of what my New Year's resolutions will be, but I'm not going to divulge them until next week. So I just thought I would prepare the ground for the New Year's resolution video that's coming out next week, to which you can all react with your own New Year's resolutions.

Thank you for listening. Bye for now.