Professor Reveals Way to ACTUALLY Learn a Language (backed by research)

it's not possible to reduce language into neat rules that you memorize and then practice and then go and apply and so if your selft talk is I'm not good at learning languages then you're going to have problems if you are fluent enough in English to understand our conversation here you can acquire another language Dr Diane youba is a specialist in how we learn languages not only that she's a Chinese Mandarin speaker and teacher she her PhD in multilingual education from the University of Iowa and is about to start as clinical assistant professor of multilingual education

at the University of Louisville she's got a podcast for language teachers as well as a YouTube channel with content for Learners of Chinese I'll put links for both in the in the description in this interview she explained how we learn languages the mistakes you need to avoid and whether Chinese is actually a difficult language to learn enjoy how is it that adults learn new languages right there is a huge question and there's a lot of people trying to answer that in multiple ways and so um I think it you know it depends on how deeply

you want to go so here's here's my short answer um I think there's cognitive elements there are innate processes in the mind that are happening as we're gaining additional language and your mind is sorting out and making its own new system for language so at a cognitive level there's that going on there's experiences with language that are affecting what kinds of things the mind has as resources to build that new system of language and so the kinds of input you have the sorts of what what you get from whatever language exposure you have how much

you understand it how rich it is how communicative it is and these are things that are going to affect the way that that progress goes and then there are social factors where you're joining a language community and how of that Community might be might affect your progress and your experience of gaining that additional language um how much help others give you um how much you have the opportunity to get feedback that is of a supportive kind so that you get more input that you can understand um so those kinds of factors all are in play

and so those are the same factors that happen for a child but because the adult has a very strong at least one language already there's a language system in the mind um there's there's cognitive there's the conscious learning kinds of processes that are way active in an adult like you're very conscious of your progress or your failure to progress as you thought you should and so there are additional kinds of emotional factors that go into that that I think very young children because they're really still gaining their first language they don't feel it in the

same way and they're cognitively um the developmentally they don't have some of the same issues adults do so I I find in teaching adults um that or learning myself as an adult remembering to coach what is the process like what are the outcomes I can expect where am I today and what is my next step those kinds of factors we can't do with a 5-year-old as well but for adult Learners I think that is helpful for them to understand the process so that they can relax um make good choices with the time available to them

and and reach for the goals that they personally have yeah yeah um and from that it sort of sounds that the process for adults is very similar but there are other external factors that might change their uh experience of that that process of picking up that new language right right and then the the fact that there is less time on task for most adult Learners unless you're able to just take off work and family and other life responsibilities most adults have to squeeze that into the little niches of their life so that's a challenge as

well and others may may if you're trying to use that language people aren't always as patient with an adult learner who doesn't seem fluent U the way that when a two or three-year-old child does it it's adorable and everyone is just cing and and but it's harder for adults to find that kind of supportive caretaker kind of relationship with others in the language they're learning for a beginner so an adult learner who's um you know not not in a classroom or anything else like that where do they start how do they start to learn a

new language in this way I think it's much more challenging when you're entirely on your own the internet has changed that significantly because you can start to search and find other ideas you're looking for some kind of way to ex get a lot of experience in the language at a very high level of comprehension so you're at least understanding at the message level you know kind of what's going on you might not be able to pick out each and every word and match it up to meaning in your own first language but you can follow

a story you can follow the meaning of a ation you know what's going on at least that level preferably even more so especially if you have the opportunity to interact with someone so if somebody is trying to ask you questions you want to understand that question very well to be able to answer so you know someone says how are you and you say correct um that's going to be a obvious problem and so if if you're getting that opportunity to talk with people you want an even higher level of comprehension I would say so that

you can really participate even if your answers are just head nods and very short phrase it's an answer um I would look um first to things like YouTube where it says something like comprehensible input name of language um if you can find things like that not everything labeled like that will really suit and sometimes I find that some of those materials are actually pitched towards somebody who already has a hundred or so hours in the language that's still a beginner but if you're absolutely at Ground Zero it's very challenging I think to start without any

help at all I therefore my background is in language education and so I recommend looking for a teacher especially at that beginning level somebody that can be that supportive social back and forth with you who can track your comprehension level and adapt their speech to the need that you have to understand um that can make it more engaging more personally relevant by what you talk about rather than just you know memorize textbook dialogues or something like like that but can in real time adapt what they say to what your understanding what you seem to respond

more to um and continue from there the the big question then is uh yeah how how does someone then find a a teacher like that would there be anything any clues for someone to go oh that's the kind of teacher that Diane's talking about is I I find if you are hearing somebody talk about stories as the basis of their teaching sometimes that will help um if they're talking about teaching grammar in context versus studying grammar outside sometimes that in context can be helpful stories comprehension comprehensible input yeah um maybe communication maybe teaching things in

context those might be phrases to look for if they start saying how well first I teach this kind of grammar then I do this kind of grammar here's my vocabulary list everybody learns from day one that's a little all rigid and and so whilst we're on it then so what is the problem of the the stereotypical traditional um approach of lists of grammar rules and and vocabulary list to to memorize what's the problem with that when it comes to language learning I think it's treating language as if it's another subject matter like if you can

from the outside analyze and neatly put it into little boxes and um I know you've interviewed Bill Van Patton I've um I know him and have read a lot of what he talks about but it's absolutely not just him talking about the complexity of what language is like um it's not possible to reduce language into neat rules that you memorize and then practice and then go and apply and so it gives you a sense of progress because you can measure quickly like oh I could do the thing but it's not developing a really strong robust

flexible dynamic system in your mind with that new language as well you get something it's something it's not nothing but it's um ultimately it's not it's a very skewed version of the way the language Works what would be the the biggest misconception you think students have around learning a new language I think that they I'm going to spin it by the contrast um they don't have enough of a Zen onet um and what I mean by that I'm I'm actually I'm not Zen I'm not a Buddhist but I'm a Christian actually but but the what

I mean by this is I think that's the the the first thing maybe to appeal to that your outcome is not necessarily the thing that you rehearse and rehearse and push hard to do you need to back off you need to keep that aim in mind yes but your main especially at a beginner level your main goal is to really be taking in and understanding and responding to rather than producing when I've started teaching adults who had that kind of again that present practice produce kind of model where they thought well I should be making

a lot of sounds with my mouth or I'm not going to how am I learning this and and so helping them to relax to feel their progress over a few weeks they could tell that they were able to understand much more Chinese I teach Chinese um than they could produce and so telling them that that is very typical very ordinary that is part of the process so keep pursuing more and more of that input as you proceed so the other thing um that I was I wanted to ask is especially in the in the world

of of YouTube and language learning all that that kind of stuff um one thing that everybody seems to want is results quickly how how can I be fluent in you know six months a year whatever it is from from the what we we're talking about that sounds like that's going to be pretty difficult for for a Learners do potentially but um is there any way that a learner can speed up the process of of acquisition or make it more efficient in some way um yes and no it depends on how technically you mean that question

and so I would say in some respects there are things that are immutable about the way an individual's mind works I do think individuals have different Paces so some are really accelerated like they have a high aptitude for language it's not that that others can't gain another language but that some might be quite gifted at that and therefore make more fast progress um that I think is possible but but in terms of accelerating mostly it's like the quality of the experiences you have with the language the kind of social network and support you have and

how much time on task so that your mind can do the work of building that language I do find it can be helpful to take breaks I'm thinking of a time I lived in China and I was studying full-time while I was there for the first few months and when we got to a break in in the school year we had a couple weeks off um my teacher said you know it's really good I see that my students take this break I suggest don't study these two weeks and I was thinking what I I was

I had all my plans you know and the teacher said what I see happen is when students really take a rest they come back with more ability in the language than when they left and I and I I can see how that happens you are doing things that you are not aware you are doing with that language um sometimes even with a short break in longer pauses yes you you might have some attrition you might end up losing some um or at least losing the immediacy of recall but um if you can take a little

break sometimes I think it actually is good to do that you you teach um Mandarin on online and obviously you've got quite a lot of experience in teaching anyway um so when it comes to someone who's who's normally an adult learner um is there what's the benefit for them to trying to learn a new language online um access to resources um timing um even if it's an online class that meets synchronously like the ones that I teach you have the flexibility of being anywhere um possibly even you I had students sometimes had to go down

to the laundr mat during class time and so she'd keep her camera off but she was listening she was engaged in the class she was adding things to the chat um and so yeah those kinds of opportunities are of course impossible um and especially I think for a less commonly taught language you have access to far more resources than you would if you were just searching for somebody local um particularly if you don't live in a big metropolitan area what's the the benefit of actually having a teacher because so many people online will just use

resources that are to hand but what what can actually having a teacher bring to learning a new language I think that's there the um going to say the phrase language parent might come from Chris lale and it may be from someone before that but the idea of somebody who is able to observe your progress who knows the kinds of things that you need especially at that beginning level and can adapt to where you are today in real time as they see you as they interact with you as they ask you for responses again that might

not be verbal necessarily but they're reading your comprehension your interest and adapting to that in real time um that is very hard to do even right now with AI you have to kind of steer the AI and Coach the AI into doing the right thing for you um and I haven't yet seen that really do what a human can do so I think that's the advantage some of the pressur is off of taking pains to make your own plan like what content will I do next you might not be able from the outside of the

language to know what is really commonly used language or what is high frequency language but your teacher May um they may be able to because they're communicating with you they may naturally bring in those key phrases that are very common in the language you're gaming so if students AR going to go oh well I think actually I will try and have a teacher I've got this language parent to to guide me through this process so um again we've touched on it briefly but if people are going to try and find uh a teacher what makes

a good teacher when it comes to teaching new languages it's not necessarily the case that someone who is trained to be a language teacher is the best language teacher uh it's also not the case that the native speaker is the best language teacher they have cultural fluency that is very important um but a non-native speaker of a language can be an excellent language teacher and may know your your points of need because of their own personal exper erience in acquiring that language what will be confusing to you what will you easily misunderstand uh and they

can highlight those things as they go um in a way that sometimes native speakers find more challenging uh as we were looking or as we were talking before about what kinds of things would you look for in terms of uh maybe a description of a class or something you're looking for comprehension comprehension based maybe story Based Teaching maybe um communication um so particularly again if your goal is to be able to communicate in the language rather than simply to analyze it and to understand it from the outside but to engage in the language um with

other people um then those things are going to be a priority oh yeah and for uh this would be your your experience as a teacher what are the what are the common mistakes that you think you you see Learners often make and what what should they try and avoid I think much of the things that I think actually seem to affect their progress are beliefs um and attitude about themselves as a learner and so if your selft talk is I'm not good at learning languages then you're going to have problems and um because you're you're

maybe going to hinder your own progress um ultimately that doesn't stop you from acquiring a language if you're doing all the right things but you might hate the process when you didn't have to you could really enjoy yourself more yeah definitely and just com what you mentioned about selft talk I do think that that is possibly one of the the biggest thing that particularly beginners struggle with of you know I can't learn a language or um I'm not good at this well you're going to struggle if your your entire belief system is oh this is

going to be uh not an enjoyable experience whereas particularly if we if we focused on input based learning you can have a great time whilst you're picking up this language without having to to force that that process in your head right exactly you you have if you are fluent enough in English to understand our conversation here you can acquire another language a lots of people think that Chinese is a difficult language to learn that's kind of the one of the things that I hear a lot of people say what's your what are your thoughts on

the idea that Chinese in particular is difficult I have a lot of feelings on this I would like to take the word difficult and give a couple other D's so take difficult and put it over there and distant distant um and different so distant and different from English or other European languages um rather than difficult because for example for somebody from a language that is more closely related to Mandarin Chinese it is not so hard to to grasp Chinese yeah it's not that inherently Mandarin or other Chinese dialects are more difficult it is that to

an English speaker from the outside it's just very different you can't pick up a text written in Chinese and sound it out yeah uh and you can't you know the structure of the language is going to feel a little different in fact there are things that are easier in Chinese um particularly verb forms never change there is no conjugation there is no verb tense I I would think you know think about what your goals are what what outcomes do you need what ways do you want to use this language like I want to be able

to read very fluently I don't feel as much of a need to be able to handw write everything just thinking of of characters and things when it when it comes to either teaching for for yourself or Learners learning um the characters and the tones of Chinese are also um something that's going to be different for the majority of Learners certainly from from an english- speaking background um how is it you recommend that that Learners try and pick those up I think um being maybe the the being aware of the concept there are tones is enough

uh what I don't find necessary uh and I used to do in teaching and I was exposed to in like learning of manderin Chinese first uh and that was learning the whole tone system understanding what those all related to um I wait until a student masks um so when I'm in class I actually use the white board that's over here and I'm writing on the Whiteboard with pinion letters and there are tone marks there if if a student says you know what are you doing with those accent marks I say oh those are tone marks

um let's see you know here you compare so here's uh you know and then I do some comparison of some syllables that they would be familiar with already do you hear the difference there well that you know like I wait till they've got a sense of question arising it's Chinese Teachers typically that get anxious about that or students who have been told well oh Chinese tones that's really hard you're going to have a trouble with that I think that the fear of it's called fossilization There's um I think maybe there's a very narrow way that

that is a real thing but for the majority of situations if we do something wrong as a beginner if we're hearing and exposed to lots of language that we understand and we're in that language environment a lot then that little bit of oops or developmental form or error that we made is not fossilizing there I think if if you were drilling them and they were only producing language and they weren't hearing others speak that you know you could have a problem but in if you're getting good quality input in the language I think that overemphasis

on get that tone right in your production from day one you just don't need that so much and if you delay it even like two days three days students start to speak in a way that they have heard a lot and I don't again you know 98 99% of the time they're they're doing just fine uh with characters I find it a little different um I think I what I've come to like best in learning to read in Chinese is an roach initially based off of work by Terry Waltz um she calls it cold character

reading the idea is that you have this text that only contains words that you know by sound you didn't memorize the characters in advance but you know the sounds of the words and so when they're new you're writing the pinion you're seeing the pinion the phonetic spelling of the Chinese and as you read all that pinion is set aside but there's a text that has just characters from words that you know and the teacher starts guiding and because the the reading is designed in such a way kind of like a Dr Seuss books if you're

familiar in English uh like they're they're written simply there's a repetitive use of just a few words um but there's a meaning to it there's a story there's conversations there's something so there's a long text but it reuses only a few new characters at once um I I produce some that are along those lines of that model um I call them read aloud videos readal videos excuse me readal videos where there on YouTube where you can listen to The Sounds um read aloud or you can mute it and try to predict okay it's going to

sound like this and they are designed in that that same way where there's just a few new words added to the text from what you've learned before and you're building just a little bit more of your character recognition over time I guess that that would be not too dissimilar from you know native um Chinese or native Mandarin speakers who will have a level of proficiency in the language at the point they start to read you know you don't expect a child to immediately start reading they've already got some level of communicative ability um by that

stage anyway haven't they right and it's very strong so they yeah the the teachers appealing to language that they already know by sound and now they're just attaching like I I do this thing when I'm talking to to people about this so I'm trying to connect sound to meaning sound to meaning sound to meaning the child in China has that very very strong so then when we've got that really strong we just now this is how it looks oh look at that character that's what that looks like huh how about that I mean that's really

that can become the attitude of it like it's this discovery process in this reading rather than that oh there's this sound there's this meaning there's this atmology there's this other thing and and they all look and it's like you're trying to do seven or eight things all at once well no wonder you're overwhelmed can you just do sound meaning found meaning for a while when that feels strong now you have the mental working space the me the working memory to then ah when I read it oh that's how that old friend looks what's your opinion

um on the the CL classic for Chinese is to remember the first let's say 2,000 characters you just need to do flashcards and just get through them in order to learn the the most um most used characters and then at some point after that you get to have a good time and do the reading but before that you've got to you've got to do the flash cards what what what are your um what are your thoughts on that yeah I it's not necessary to get it's certainly not 2000 okay I mean if you enjoy that

I don't think that's harmful per se but it's a limited window on knowing that word it's a very limited window you don't know what's the context in which this is used what connotation does this have you gain those things by reading them in context orar hearing them and seeing them in Social actions so you need a more more diverse input let's put it that way yeah that makes that makes sense and I mean just to to it's not plain Devil's Advocate but plenty of people will say whenever if I've mentioned flash cards before they say

oh well it won't be just the one character it will be a sentence and you've got to then you see that character in context which um that that now you've instead of this narrow of a window you've made it this narrow of a window because if that one sentence that's not you know in what context is that sentence appearing what other sentences does that word appear in like like that you know yeah I I I think learning based on a sentence like sentence mining as a strategy I think that can be helpful but again that's

still you want something more diverse as well what about things like practicing tone pairs if I'm sort of reading out these um uh pairs of words out loud in order to prce just that change of tone between one word to the other to make sure I maintain my level of um of I speaking my pronunciation everything yeah as I was saying with any kind of focus on form or or focus on forms even um the this is a Michael long term he's a researcher so the idea is that when we can focus on meaning we

can focus on form we can focus on forms so he would say like if we're focusing on form like oh if I get these two tones produced correctly I'm going to be more understandable so people are going to get my meaning I would say that's that can be helpful a little bit but it's after it's after it's honing what you've already got it's not um precursor to gaining it so when the words are brand new I wouldn't worry about it too much I would focus in on understanding it on hearing it in context on seeing

how people are using those words and from from that I be right in thinking it's more about focusing on communicating meaning in for those interactions rather than just thinking I've got to get the perfect tones for for no reason whatsoever right I think sometimes it can hinder you actually from being communicative being able to express meaning if you're so fixed on I am thinking of every letter as I speak it you know like Like You Hinder the progress I think of actual communication okay and I think the other thing too is knowing that you you

are probably going to not sound like a native speaker if you're not a native speaker that's okay I think we need to decenter the idea that the native speaker is is the thing that you have to become you have to become understandable enough to the native speaker I I hope that I sound Pleasant enough that people want to hear me if I need to speak to them in Chinese um so just a fairly big question but but I'd be interested in what your response to this would be so let's say tomorrow you wake up and

you've forgotten all of your your Chinese you have to start from square one again exactly you know what what would you do what would that look like to get you back to the point that you're you're fluent in the language well it has taken me some time so I started in college and that yeah so U I would do it differently than the way that I was taught I would be looking for a beginning level like you know I retain my understanding of what I think about how to acquire language now I would go with

this I would look for a beginning level teacher who would give me that kind of scaffolding that sort of personalized experience that comprehension-based experience that's relevant to me um I would ideally rewatch the video from class after class A couple days later um I would delay some of my reading emphasis I would do it in context based on things I already knew orally and I would read based on that just a few new characters in each text seeing them a whole lot of times um yeah I I would approach it that way and and I

mean I guess I can say you know I am doing that in other languages still like I I have like a low intermediate level of French I'm seeking out level appropriate opportunities to encounter French um both reading and oral input sometimes through a teacher sometimes just finding things online yeah interesting um so I think this will be my my last question and I'll let you get on with your big to-do list um so uh if you could give um give Learners sort of one piece of advice or one thing to to take away what what

would be the the piece of advice that you'd give them to help them on their their language journey I actually find that kind of hard to say I would say um maybe it's a combination of like you know have have a sense of your goal um but know what to do next and do it just do that one next thing so you're like you're aimed in a good direction but you're not pressured by that end goal just like okay I know these are things that are going to be helpful to me I'm going to do

that next thing I'm going to do that next thing rather than uh feeling under the pile by the goal not still being way far out there perhaps um yeah I'm speaking as a a perfectionist myself recovering perfectionist we'll call it that um just knowing that you know I I can't I can't do that thing yet um but oh I can do this thing I'll do this thing that'll keep me moving in the direction that I want to go small steps have a goal and small steps to get there fantastic well um thank you very much

I think I think we'll we'll leave it there unless there's anything else you you want to add to that I know it but it's been delightful it's been fun to talk