Multi Subtitle - How to learn any language in six months

[Applause] people at the back can you hear me clearly okay good have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it becomes part of how you think maybe even part of who you are as a person well i've had a question in my mind for many many years and that is how can you speed up learning now this is an interesting question because if you speed up learning you can spend less time at school and if you learn really fast you probably wouldn't have to go to school at all now when i was young school was sort of okay but i found quite often that school got in the way of learning so i had this question in mind how do you learn faster and this began when i was very very young when i was 11 years old i wrote a letter to researchers in the soviet union asking about hypnopedia this is sleep learning where you get a tape recorder you put it beside your bed and it turns on in the middle of the night when you're sleeping and you're supposed to be learning from this good idea unfortunately it doesn't work but hypnopedia did open the doors to research in other areas and we've had incredible discoveries about learning that began with that first question i went on from there to become passionate about psychology and i have been involved in psychology in many different ways for the rest of my life up until this point in 1981 i took myself to china and i decided that i was going to be native level in chinese inside two years now you need to understand that in 1981 everybody thought chinese was really really difficult and that a westerner could study for 10 years or more and never really get very good at it and i also went in with a different idea which was taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point and applying them to the learning process what was really cool was in six months i was fluent in in mandarin chinese and it took a little bit longer to get up to native but i looked around and i saw all of these people from different countries struggling terribly with chinese i saw chinese people struggling terribly to learn english in other languages and so my question got refined down to how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly easily and effectively now this is a really really important question in today's world we have massive challenges with environment we have massive challenges with social dislocation with wars all sorts of things going on and if we can't communicate we're really going to have difficulty solving these problems so we need to be able to speak each other's languages this is really really important the question is how do you do that well it's actually really easy you look around for people who can already do it you look for situations where it's already working and then you identify the principles and apply them it's called modeling and i've been looking at language learning and modeling language learning for about 15 to 20 years now and my conclusion my observation from this is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside six months now when i say this most people think i'm crazy this is not possible so let me remind everybody of the history of human progress it's all about expanding our limits in 1950 everybody believed that running one mile in four minutes was impossible and then roger bannister did it in 1956 and from there it's got shorter and shorter a hundred years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesn't fly except it does and we all know this how does heavy stuff fly we reorganize the material using principles that we have learned from observing nature birds in this case and today we've gone even further we've gone even further so you can fly a car you can buy one of these for a couple hundred thousand us dollars we now have cars in the world that fly and there's a different way to fly which we learn from squirrels so all you need to do is copy what a flying squirrel does build a suit called a wingsuit and off you go you can fly like a squirrel now most people a lot of people i wouldn't say everybody but a lot of people think they can't draw however there are some key principles five principles that you can apply for learning to draw and you can actually learn to draw in five days so if you draw like this you learn these principles for five days and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this now i know this is true because that was my first drawing and after five days of applying these principles that was what i was able to do and i looked at this and i went wow so that's how i look like when i'm concentrating so intensely that my brain is exploding so anybody can learn to draw in five days and in the same way with the same logic anybody can learn a second language in six months how there are five principles and seven actions there may be a few more but these are absolutely core and before i get into those i just want to talk about two myths i want to dispel two myths the first is that you need talent let me tell you about zoe zoe came from australia went to holland was trying to learn dutch struggling extremely extremely a great deal and finally you know people were saying you're completely useless you you you're you're not talented give up you're a waste of time and she was very very depressed and then she came across these five principles she moved to brazil and she applied them and in six months she was fluent in portuguese so talent doesn't matter people also think that immersion in a new country is the way to learn a language but look around hong kong look at all the westerners who've been here for 10 years who don't speak a word of chinese look at all the chinese living in america britain australia canada have been there 10 20 years and they don't speak any english immersion per se does not work why because a drowning man cannot learn to swim when you don't speak a language you're like a baby and if you drop yourself into a context which is all adults talking about stuff over your head you won't learn so what are the five principles that you need to pay attention to first the four words attention meaning relevance and memory and these into interconnect in very very important ways especially when you're talking about learning come with me on a journey through a forest you go on a walk through a forest and you see something like this little marks on a tree maybe you pay attention maybe you don't you go another 50 meters and you see this you should be paying attention another 50 meters if you haven't been paying attention you see this and at this point you're paying attention and you've just learned that this is important it's relevant because it means this and anything that is related any information related to your survival is stuff that you're going to pay attention to and therefore you're going to remember it if it's related to your own personal goals then you're going to pay attention to it it's relevant you're going to remember it so the first rule first principle for learning a language is focus on language content that is relevant to you which brings us to tools we master tools by using tools and we learn tools the fastest when they're relevant to us so let me share a story a keyboard is a tool typing chinese a certain way there are methods for this that's a tool i had a colleague many years ago who went to night school tuesday night thursday night two hours each time practicing at home she spent nine months and she did not learn to type chinese and one night we had a crisis we had 48 hours to deliver a training manual in chinese and she got the job and i can guarantee you in 48 hours she learned to type chinese because it was relevant it was meaningful it was important she was using a tool to create value so the second principle for learning a language is to use your language as a tool to communicate right from day one as a kid does when i first arrived in china didn't speak a word of chinese and on my second week i got to take a train ride overnight i spent eight hours sitting in the dining car talking to one of the guards on the train he took an interest in me for some reason and we just chatted all night in chinese and he was drawing pictures and making movements with his hands and facial expressions and piece by piece by piece i understood more and more but what's really cool was two weeks later when people were talking chinese around me i was understanding some of this and i hadn't even made any effort to learn that what had happened i'd absorbed it that night on the train which brings us to the third principle when you first understand the message then you will acquire the language unconsciously and this is really really well documented now it's something called comprehensible input there's 20 or 30 years of research on this stephen krashen a leader in the field has published all sorts of these different studies and this is just from one of them that the purple bars show the scores on different tests for language the gree and the purple people were people who had learned by grammar and formal study the green ones are the ones who learned by comprehensible input so comprehension works comprehension is key and language learning is not about accumulating lots of knowledge in many many ways it's about physiological training a woman i know from taiwan did great in english at school she got a grades all the way through went through college a grades went to the u.s and found she couldn't understand what people were saying and people starting us started asking her are you deaf and she was english deaf because we have filters in our brain that filter in the sounds that we are familiar with and they filter out the sounds of languages that we're not and if you can't hear it you won't understand it if you can't understand it you're not going to learn it so you actually have to be able to hear these sounds and you there are ways to do that but it's physiological training speaking takes muscle you've got 43 muscles in your face you have to coordinate those in a way that you make sounds that other people will understand if you've ever done a new sport for a couple of days and you know how your body feels hurts if your face is hurting you're doing it right and the final principle is state psychophysiological state if you're sad angry worried upset you're not going to learn period if you're happy relaxed in an alpha brain state curious you're going to learn really quickly and very specifically you need to be tolerant of ambiguity if you're one of those people who needs to understand 100 every word you're hearing you will go nuts because you'll be incredibly upset all the time because you're not perfect if you're comfortable with getting some not getting some just paying attention to what you do understand you're going to be fine you'll be relaxed and you'll be learning quickly so based on those five principles what are the seven actions that you take number one listen a lot i call it brain soaking you put yourself in a context where you're hearing tons and tons and tons of the language and it doesn't matter if you understand it or not you're listening to the rhythms you're listening to patterns that repeat you're listening to things that stand out paul nods so just soak your brain in this the second action is you get the meaning first even before you get the words and you go well how do i do that i don't know the words well you understand what these different postures mean human communication is body language in many many ways so much body language from body language you can understand a lot of communication therefore you're understanding you're acquiring through comprehensible input and you can also use patterns that you already know if you're a chinese speaker of mandarin and cantonese and you go to vietnam you will understand 60 percent of what they say to you in daily conversation because vietnamese is about 30 mandarin 30 cantonese the third action start mixing you probably have never thought of this but if you've got 10 verbs 10 nouns and 10 adjectives you could say 1 000 different things right language is a creative process what do babies do okay me but now okay that's how they communicate so start mixing get creative have fun with it doesn't have to be perfect just has to work and you when you're doing this you focus on the core what does that mean well with every language there's high frequency content in english 1 000 words covers 85 percent of anything you're ever going to say in daily communication 3 000 words gives you 98 of anything you're going to say in daily conversation you've got 3000 words you're speaking the language the rest is is icing on the cake and when you're just beginning with a new language start with your toolbox week number one in your new language you say things like how do you say that i don't understand repeat that please what does that mean all in your target language you're using it as a tool making it useful to you it's relevant to learn other things about the language by week two you should be saying things like me this you that give you know hot simple pronouns simple nouns simple verbs simple adjectives communicating like a baby and by the third or fourth week you're getting into what they call glue words although but therefore these are logical transformers that tie bits of a language together allowing you to make more complex meaning at that point you're talking and when you're doing that you should get yourself a language parent if you look at how children and parents interact you understand what this means when a child is speaking it'll be using simple words simple combinations sometimes quite strange sometimes very strange pronunciation other people from outside the family don't understand it but the parents do and so the kid has a safe environment gets confidence the parents talk to the children with body language and with simple language they know the child understands so you have a comprehensible input environment that's safe we know it works otherwise none of you would speak your mother tongue so you get yourself a language parent who's somebody interested in you as a person who will communicate with you essentially as an equal but pay attention to help you understand the message there are four rules of a language parent spouses by the way are not very good at this okay but the four rules are first of all they will work hard to understand what you mean even when you're way off bit secondly they will never correct your mistakes thirdly they will feed back their understanding of what you're saying so that you can respond appropriately and get the get that feedback and then they will use words that you know the sixth thing you have to do is copy the face you've got to get the muscles working right so you can sound in a way that people will understand you there's a couple of things you do one is you you need to hear how it feels and feel how it sounds which means you have a feedback loop operating in your face but ideally if you can look at a native speaker and just observe how they use their face let your unconscious mind absorb the rules then you're going to be able to pick it up and if you can't get a native speaker to look at you can use stuff like this and the final idea here the final action you need to take is something that i call direct connect what does this mean well most people learning a second language sort of take the mother tongue words and their target words and go over them again and again in their mind to try and remember them really inefficient what you need to do is realize that everything you know is an image inside your mind it's feelings if you talk about fire you can smell the smoke you can hear this the crackling you can see the flames so what you do is you go into that imagery and all of that memory and you come out with another pathway so i call it one same box different path you come out that pathway and you build it over time you've become more and more skilled and just connecting the new sounds to those images that you already have into that internal representation and over time you even become naturally good at that process that becomes unconscious so there are five principles that you need to work with seven actions if you do any of them you're going to improve and remember these are things under your control as the learner do them all you're going to be fluent in the second language in six months thank you