Professor reveals how to REALLY learn a language (science-based)

now the key word technique improves learning by about 20 to 25% and there's probably about 60 70 studies on that Professor PA nation is a well-known expert in language learning research and in this video he shares his best advice on learning languages as efficiently as possible there's there's a lot of misinformed Prejudice about this one of our PhD students did a piece of research which for me was one of the most important pieces of research in V every studies for the last 20 or 30 years and she she found that so one of the most

important aspects of my conversation with Paul nation was talking about the importance and the efficacy of learning with flash cards or you know word cards as he calls them I didn't use word cards in the beginning but when I started learning Japanese I realized that my mind was just a leaking bucket of vocabulary and so I started using Anki uh like you know the the flash card program um uh I get the feeling that there's sort of a sense that well you know it's you're learning words or maybe sentences if you do sentence cards but

it's it's it feels a little bit artificial so they're wondering is does this really translate into actual knowledge and is this actually effective can you just like get input and get similar results as opposed to boring flashcards there's there's a lot of misinformed PR this about this people believe every word should be learned in context you know you shouldn't be learning words out of context and so on well it it's good to meet words in context and so on and you do that through meaning focused input but so there's a 120 years of no 130

years of research of the effectiveness of deliberately learning words and isolation and recently and though recently now is probably about 15 years ago I guess one of our HD students did a piece of research which for me was one of the most important pieces of research in votary studies for the last 20 or 30 years and she she found that when you deliberately learned words on word cars these words were both implicitly and explicitly available now explicitly available means if someone says what do s so mean then you can actually go to your mind and

tell them what it means implicitly available means when you read and you've only got a split second to bring up the meaning of that word does word card learning give you that implicit knowledge which you can access in very real time in short time indeed and she found that the deliberate learning using word tart resulted in both implicit and explicit noge and there are now other studies which have supported that now this goes against one of Steve crash's ideas in that things which I learned deliberately are not available for normal language use their research showed

very clearly that things which are studied deliberately B gy which is studi deliberately is available for normal langri cutes and so that that's a very important research finding iPad then it really speeds up BL learning the more Ma and then i' I've reviewed most of the studies about deliver earning and earning work language and the research shows very clearly that things were studed deliberately are retain in memory uh they can be retained for a very long time and and all the predes again so but overall they're not supported by respect and so you know Paul

and I we really talked a lot about flashcards and in fact his arguments were so strong that they push me to uh create what is now the Ani core decks uh some of you guys have heard about this these are my flashcard Decks that I created for Anki I'll put a link to this in the description of this video now Paul Nation mentioned something that really surprised me he introduced a learning technique that a lot of people don't know it's called the keyword technique and he said that without this technique without the ability to use

this technique he would just give up on language learning altogether and so this technique he said improves learning by 20 to 25% now there's a there's a vocab learning technique called a keyword technique which is a rather strange technique but it's where you you want to learn a word so say this take Japanese Fring example you want to learn the word hagaki which is a word for postcard the way you apply the keyword technique to that is to say well hagaki begins with the word he h a g which is an English word and now

I'll make a a a visual image in my mind the visualization that I use was I've been to taidi Temple in in Nara and there's a picture of a monk a counting of a monk who' been fasting for 40 days or something really hagged and thin and I think of that picture on the postcard so I'm combining the HG which is the phological link and the picture of the Monk on the postcard which is the meaning link and then that makes it stick in my memory now the keyword technique improves learning by about 20 to

25% and there's probably about 670 studies on that you mean now specifically on the the keyword technique yeah specific but if I didn't know that technique i' I'd give up learning language now because uh uh that technique allows me the words that won't stick in my memory I now have a strategy for making that stick in my memory and the keyway technique helps me do that I also asked Paul a a question that I often asked people is um if you had a year to learn a language and what would you do what would be

the program and so he gave a long answer but the first two things that he mentioned where you have to use a frequency list of vocabulary as a guideline and you have to do some extensive reading too from next week you have no responsibilities anymore just your full-time job is going to be learning a language let's say it's going to be something fairly hard like Arabic you have one year to reach let's say C1 so what would you do on a daily basis what resources would you use well I get hold a frequency list vem

in the languard and I make sure that I that was a rough guide to what I learned because um in English the first 10 words covers 25% of every text the first uh 50 words covers uh first 100 words covers about 50% of the words in any Tex so i' be getting on to that high frequency stuff as fast as I could uh doing deliberate study of them and learning there's clear cost benefit analysis then in Ching vocabulary uh in terms of its frequency and usefulness so that Learners get the best return for their learning

because um I had to learn to read and I'm certainly be beginning early on on picking that up because I'd be wanting to get meaning focused input through Reading as quickly as possible and uh I'd be looking around for material which is written more My Level and lastly we also talked about you know when people learn languages it it's often the case that even if you learn for a long time even Advanced language Learners they make mistakes in terms of pronunciation but also in terms of the language structure the grammar and so how do you

prevent this and how do you learn a language in a way that you prevent making these mistakes down the line and so he talked about the importance of really getting things right from the start and how frequent vocabulary I think uh you know survival vocabulary actually facilitates this and also the importance of being able to imitate the pronunciation of a native speaker with audio for example one of the requirements of of early learning and of most learning is that you're generally you should have the best chance of getting things right or getting things acceptable let's

put of that way and I think that as early as possible you should be try also trying to get things right you know with something like the survival work C starting off it simply me memorization of the sentences then being able to use those sentences and so on and and you use them with with a good pronunciation the best pronunciation you can do it at that stage you know simply by imitation and and that's good but it doesn't mean when I say using a language it doesn't necessarily mean that you just stumble along and you

know make tons of errors and do things like that the clips that you just watched are part of a 2-hour conversation I had with Paul nation and so I'm going to put the link to the 2hour conversation I had with Paul nation in the description of this video and following my conversation with Paul Nation I also made uh I started building flashcards based on his advice for Anki and so if you want to check out these flashcards for multiple languages uh there are so many languages available go to eny cex.com and I'll put the link

in the description and I'll see you next time