Awesome Methods to Learn any Language

- I believe it's possible to learn a second

or third language, whatever your age,

but you need two things.

Let's talk about it.

(gentle music)

Hello, it's Keith from the Keith Speaking Academy.

Now, you know, I was rubbish at French at school.

(Keith speaking French)

And actually I loved it.

And when I wanted to do French at A level, my teacher said,

"Keith, don't do it," right?

They said I wasn't good enough.

Now, the thing is,

at that time I had one of the things I needed

to learn French, but I was missing the second,

and I only discovered it some years later.

Over the years,

I've learned French and Spanish

and Chinese up to a good level,

at least good enough for me, and that's important.

And here's another important thing, right?

I believe there are two things you need

to learn a language successfully.

Number one, motivation.

That drive, maybe that passion to do something.

You need a reason,

whether it's to pass an exam,

to speak to family and friends, or to go traveling.

That reason and that motivation is key.

If you don't have it, you'll stop,

because despite what TikTok says,

you will not be fluent in a week or a month, right?

It takes time and patience

and you need to study and practice.

So, that motivation

and keeping that motivation is really important.

Number two is a study method that works for you.

Now, again, social media has probably convinced you there is

a secret method,

a secret way to learn and be fluent in English.

It's not true, it's not.

There are only ways that work for you.

What works for me may not work for you, okay?

So, yes, we need to follow good practices

based on research and theory, no?

But then you need to find a way that works for you.

That's so important.

With that said,

I'd like to share with you in this video the key steps

and methods that I have used to learn French and Spanish

and Chinese over the years

so that maybe you can try them and see what works for you.

Choose the method that works for you.

Let's do it.

Right, let's talk about French.

So, I learned French initially at school, as you remember.

And I had the motivation,

but I was missing the study method that worked for me.

It was all grammar translation

and it didn't work for me, so I had to find other ways.

Later, I went to university and studied French,

and there we had a year in France.

And then I also found other ways to study

and practice that really worked.

At school, one of the key things that I learned,

and I can't remember who told me,

was the cover, guess, and check method.

So, cover, guess, and check.

The teacher, right, gives you a word list.

Yeah, word lists.

And you have to go home and just memorize 20 words, right?

So, I didn't do homework at home, I did it on the bus,

going home or going to school.

Get the list of words, get my bus pass,

and you have the French and the English, cover the French.

So you cover, you guess, and you check.

So it says chair.

And I go, oh, in French la chair.

Check.

Oh, no la chaise.

Okay, repeat again.

Chair, la chaise. Good.

Table, la table.

Oh, yes, la table.

And then that's it, so cover, guess, and check.

And that was great. It worked for me.

Even better was sometimes on the bus I was with a classmate.

So, if I was with a classmate, we would test each other.

The same thing, more or less, right?

How do you say chair? La chaise.

Oh yes.

And there's something about interacting with another person

that makes it memorable.

There's something, sometimes you say funny things,

la table, la table, and it just sticks.

So that interaction with another person is a really good way

for me to learn words.

Later, when I went to university,

I discovered drama

and I joined the French drama club.

And I remember we did "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme"

by Moliere.

And doing drama was fantastic,

'cause what you have to do

is you have to memorize your script.

You have to repeat your words or phrases 20, 30, 40 times.

And so, that memorization

and saying it correctly was important.

You have to go on stage

and you have to project your voice to make it loud,

so you're really pronouncing clearly.

And the teacher would check and give you feedback.

And again, that interaction with other people,

it just becomes so memorable

that the grammar and vocabulary embedded

in the script stuck with me for years and years.

Great method.

One of the things the teacher did,

the French teacher, was he gave me a cassette.

So, in those days we had cassettes.

He'd recorded the key pronunciation things

that I didn't right, things like A is eh, right?

Jeh, J, jeh.

And so he'd record all of those and I would just go away

and listen and listen and repeat and listen and repeat.

Again, that kind of working out,

controlled repetition worked really well.

Years later when I started working,

I wanted to carry on with my French,

and so one thing I did is I joined

a monthly magazine basically.

Like nowadays you have monthly memberships,

it was a monthly magazine I subscribe to.

And it was great.

Once a month I'd get the magazine in the post

with a little audio CD and you'd listen to the story.

You could look at the vocabulary.

There'd be interviews and quizzes.

And for a few days I was just immersed in French

and I used to look forward to getting the magazine so much.

It was so exciting that that helped me keep my motivation.

Even now as I'm much older and I'm living in Spain,

I've subscribed to a French community

where there are classes and that motivates me.

And just by speaking to other people, you get ideas.

And they talked about, well, why don't you read a novel?

And so now this year I've read a novel in French,

which I've not done for years, and I'm so happy about it.

And so, having that contact with French,

contact with other people,

again, I think that really works for me as well.

Anyway, that has been my French journey.

So let me talk now about Spanish and learning Spanish.

So, actually, when I left university, learned French,

I went to live in America for a year.

I worked in a restaurant, it was like a gap year,

but in the restaurant I met a lot of South American people

and it gave me a taste for Spanish.

I learned some basic words, hola, que tal, things like that.

And when I came back home, I thought, right,

I want to learn Spanish.

Why not take another gap year,

go and work in Spain, teach English, and learn Spanish?

So, I did.

In my early 20s I went to Spain

and I started learning Spanish.

And I think 'cause I'd learned French, it was easier.

But yeah, within a couple of years,

I felt I was pretty fluent in Spanish.

Some of the techniques I used, one of them,

and I think I've mentioned this in some other videos,

is juggling, and juggling Is this, right?

Whoa.

Now, when you juggle,

the ball represents the word or the phrase you've learned.

So let's imagine in English you've learned the expression

to be over the moon, meaning to be happy, right?

Now, you could say to be over the moon, to be over the moon,

to be over the moon.

You could just repeat it.

But you could also juggle, change it around.

I was over the moon. I will be over the moon.

I would be over the moon, changing the tense,

and then make it even more complicated.

I will be over the moon if I pass my exam.

And so you are juggling,

I will be over the moon if I pass my exam.

I would be over the moon if I won the lottery.

And you are juggling this phrase, different tenses.

And look at the practice.

Look how that is much more,

it's much deeper and richer than to be over the moon,

to be over the moon, which is a bit boring, right?

So juggling something I discovered

that really worked for me.

That's for later.

Now, another thing I did,

and I still do in Spanish particularly, is read.

I read voraciously.

Nice word, right? Voraciously, avidly, a lot.

And I still do, right?

I mean "Isabel Allende," the classics, "El Camino,"

up to date stuff, "Cica Triz," right?

On prime video.

I mean, it's motivating and interesting.

And I think reading widely is really important.

I mean, also newspapers, blogs, not just your coursebook.

If you are limited to your coursebook,

it's not enough, basically.

And the way I read is with a sense of curiosity.

So, most of the time I'm reading for fun, to enjoy it,

but I do notice things and it's so important.

I remember chatting to Steve Kaufman about this

and the idea that when you notice language

is when you learn.

Just have a sense of curiosity.

You know, like, ooh, that's interesting.

In Spanish they use the future tense,

where in English, I probably use the present here.

And just being curious about things

and checking dictionaries or course books,

ChatGPT if you like.

And that sense of curiosity,

noticing grammar, verbs, tenses,

it's really, really powerful and generally reading.

Wow, it's the big game changer I think

for language learning is when you expand your reading.

The final thing I remember I did in Spanish

was I used to make an audio diary at the end of the day,

especially the first few months when I was studying.

And I would record on a cassette,

press record and just go through not what I did in that day,

but the words I'd learned that day, right?

So today I'd learn this word, this word, this expression.

I'd just repeat them.

So I'd mix English and Spanish.

Today I learned (Keith speaking in French).

Today I also learned (Keith speaking in French).

And just saying out the words

and kind of summarizing what I'd learned

in a short five minute audio.

At the time I didn't know why it worked,

but I think it's to do with when you learn stuff,

within 24 hours, you forget 80%.

And it's so important to review before that 24 hours is up.

So I was doing that just for five minutes and recording it,

so it was also audio like multimedia.

I didn't realize it was actually a research backed method,

it just felt right, it was dead easy to do.

So that kind of audio diary nowadays,

you could do a video diary,

just any kind of review

at the end of the day I think really, really helps.

So yeah, that was my Spanish learning journey

and still is.

Let's move on.

Okay, when it comes to Chinese, I actually learned,

I began learning Chinese, I began studying Chinese in Spain.

Duh. Why?

Interesting story.

I was about 33, 32, 33,

so no spring chicken,

walking down the street and I went past a shop

and there was this beautiful Chinese calligraphy,

like the writing, the painting in the shop.

And I went inside and I saw the guy there.

I said this is beautiful.

And he said, "Yes, I teach people

how to do Chinese calligraphy, how to paint."

I said, ooh, and how much are the classes?

And he looked at me up and down and then said,

"Yeah, a thousand pesetas.

In those days, it was before the Euro,

but I think the price changed depending on the student.

Anyway, I began and I started learning the calligraphy

and what the words meant.

Very, very basic.

It was more about painting rather than learning Chinese.

But then what I did is I,

well, I decided at some point to relocate

and go and live in China and learn Chinese.

I was gonna be a director of studies of a school, got a job.

And then I got a hold of a book and a cassette.

I can't remember if it was Routledge or (indistinct)

like Rosetta Stone, one of these beginner Chinese books.

I put the book away

and I listened to the cassette every day for a month.

And I just listened and listened.

I didn't understand anything.

But every day I listened and I listened.

And then it was time to go to China and I arrived in China.

And then in China I took out the book

and started to look at the conversations and at the words

and the translation and began to understand.

But the big difference was compared to some friends

who were also English in China,

they were starting to learn from reading the Pinyin

and I already made the connection of the sound.

So, for example, when you look at a phrase written

to say, I am happy in Chinese,

my friends were going, okay, wo, hen, gao, xing,

and I was going wo, hen, gao, xing,

because I could make the connection

with what I'd been listening to and what these words were.

And I remember at the time people said,

"Wow, your pronunciation's really good."

I said, well, but I've only been learning for a month.

But it had such an impact

and I thought it was really important for me,

'cause Chinese is a difficult language to pronounce.

So I put that emphasis on pronunciation.

The other thing I did is I spent a lot of time

on tones, right?

You'll know in Chinese there are tones,

there's the flat ma, ma, ma, ma.

There are different tones.

I don't say them perfectly,

but I spent quite a bit of time listening to tones

and working out how to use them.

Again, that made a big difference,

'cause most English people speaking Chinese forget

about the tones.

wo, hen, gao, xing, wo, hen, gao, xing.

Everything's dum, dum, dum, dum, right?

And it's just,

I think it's important for that language in particular.

So, for me, focusing on learning to speak from listening

rather than learning to speak from reading

was a game changer.

Really important and worked for me.

The other thing I did is around immersion.

And when I first arrived in China,

for the first nine months,

I did intensive lessons every day,

two hours in the morning before work.

And basically, I just knew that I had to immerse myself

in the language and have that drive, that motivation, right?

That every day there's a class

and every day you are going at it.

It is a marathon and I did that for eight months

and it helped, and I built up slowly my level.

There was a feeling of success and getting better,

which motivates you again.

And then as you start to use it in the street

and you notice you can communicate,

wow, what a great feeling.

So, that kind of immersion and intense study.

I chose eight months.

I mean, you could choose three months

or four weeks deciding and committing to that time

to do it, right?

The other curious thing,

and an interesting thing that I discovered learning Chinese,

is that I learned better listening

to non-native Chinese speakers

than to native Chinese speakers.

So when I used to listen to the TV

and the radio Chinese speakers, I found very difficult.

But then suddenly at that time we had YouTube

and then I started listening broadcasts of the laowai,

the foreigners,

like American and British people

who spoke very, very good Chinese

and I could understand them.

I thought, wow.

And I would listen to these interviews.

They were speaking very good Chinese, I could learn a lot,

but it was easier to understand

an English person speaking Chinese than a Chinese person.

So, again, in the early days I did a lot of that.

Of course you need to balance that with also listening

to native speakers.

You need both.

But that really helped me and built my confidence,

'cause I thought, oh, actually, I can understand him.

I know he's from Manchester, but you know,

I can understand his Chinese.

So those are a few snippets of my Chinese learning journey.

So there, I hope this has been interesting for you

and maybe giving you a few ideas of different methods

and ways you can practice and try.

I am curious,

which method have you used or would you like to try?

Let me know in the comments.

Do remember, as I said,

I think there are two things you need, right?

You need motivation and you need a study method

that works for you.

To be clear, right?

There is no best study method, right?

Anybody who tells you there is, is lying.

There's only the best method for you.

And probably you're gonna use different methods,

not just one, right?

The important thing is you start experimenting and trying

and finding the things that do work for you.

Action point is thinking about this video,

take one method you've not tried,

have a go and see what happens.

Now, you may remember at the start of the video,

I said you can learn a second language whatever you age.

And it's true, right?

I learned French at school, I learned Spanish when I was 22,

I learned Chinese when I was about 33.

Now I'm 57 and I'm still learning new phrases and words

and I'm still practicing as well.

Yes, it's easier to learn a language

when you are younger, okay?

That's true, but age is not a barrier.

It's not a barrier to learning, or more importantly,

to practicing and enjoying the language.

So, whatever you are learning, whatever your age,

keep going 'cause it's worth it

and you really will reap the rewards today

and as you get older.

So, that's it for today. Thank you so much for watching.

If you liked this, give me a like,

just subscribe to the channel to see more videos coming up.

And I will see you maybe in the next video.

Take care. Bye-bye.

(gentle music)