How NOT to learn a language

Hello.

My name is Emma, and in today's video, I am going to teach you how not to learn a language.

What do I mean by this?

Many people I meet make a lot of mistakes in the ways they learn a language.

They do things that are not practical or are really not going to work.

So, in today's lesson, I wanted to teach you some things you shouldn't do when you're learning

a new language.

So, let's get started.

My first tip is, in general, when you are learning anything, if it is boring, it's going

to be harder to learn.

It's not the topic that's boring; it's how you're learning that can make something boring

or interesting.

Okay?

So, for many people learning English, they think, "Ugh, English.

I hate English.

It's such a chore.

It's so difficult."

It's not because English itself is boring; it's because the way you're learning it might

not be the best way.

So, let's look at some ways sometimes people try to learn a language and why they don't

really work.

When I was younger, I tried to learn French, and one of the things I did was I memorized

lists of vocabulary.

So, I would memorize all the different sports in French, and I'd memorize all the different

vegetables in French, and I spent so much time just memorizing words.

I never actually used any of these words, and so I was able to remember words, but I

couldn't use them in a sentence.

So, it's not a good idea to just memorize lists of vocabulary.

Same with the dictionary.

There was one man who actually tried to memorize all the words in the dictionary, and was he

able to speak the language?

No.

So, just because you memorize a word doesn't mean that you're going to be able to use it.

And one of the other parts of this is that just memorizing lists can be very boring.

Your brain needs something interesting to help it to remember.

Sometimes in different language classes, teachers make students repeat really meaningless sentences.

So, you might have to say the same sentence again, and again, and again.

Some of the sentences might not make any sense to you, like, you know, you might have to

keep repeating, "Do you like coffee?

Do you like coffee?

Do you like coffee?"

And if you keep having to repeat it, and there's no context, this can get really boring really

fast for your brain.

So, you don't want to just repeat sentences that are meaningless.

You learn language by using it in an interesting and relevant context.

Okay?

So, you need to be using it in a practical way, and in an interesting way.

That's how your brain best remembers things.

Another mistake I see a lot of learners making is they want to learn a language like English,

and so they will look for a really difficult book.

We call these books sometimes classics, like they will look at Dracula, or Frankenstein,

or some olden day book, and they'll try to memorize every word in the book.

This is really boring, in a way, because if you keep having to look up what words mean,

it takes so much time and, you know, it tires out your brain.

So, it's much better to read something that is easier, that is closer to your level.

Okay?

So, reading classics or books that are too difficult is not a good idea when you are

learning a new language.

You want to read books that are closer to your own level.

These might be comic books, or children books, or even just newspaper headings.

The main thing is you want to read things that are close to your level, where you're

not spending all your time looking things up with a dictionary.

Let's look at some other tips on how not to learn a language.

Okay, so my next tip of what not to do is learn every single word you come across in

English.

English has over a million words.

It actually is one of the languages with the largest vocabulary.

Even if you're learning another language, the same idea applies.

You don't need to learn every single word in a language.

It takes way too much time and usually, you know, way too much effort.

So, what is the better idea to do?

Well, instead of learning and memorizing every new word, I would recommend to ask yourself

when you see a new word, is this new word useful?

Okay?

Is it something that's relevant to your life?

Can you think about how you would use it?

I'll give you an example.

I had a student the other day who said to me, "I'm feeling very indefatigable today."

Now, if you're an English speaker, a lot of English speakers don't even know this word

because it's an older word that's not really that common anymore.

What it means is that you don't get tired easily.

So, this is the type of word that I would say is an English word, yes, but it's not

really useful for most people to know this word if they're learning the language.

So, is the word useful?

You also want to think about where or who did you learn the word from.

Think about who do you like and who would you like to speak like in English?

Do you want to talk like a professor would talk, or a scientist, or maybe you'd like

to...

Maybe you're a teenager and you want to talk like a teen, or maybe you want to talk like

just an everyday person.

So, it's a good idea to think about how you want to sound in the language, and then find

somebody to be, like, a role model.

Okay?

Think about what words do they use, how do they sound, and learn from them.

Okay?

You also want to question where did you hear a new word from?

If you see a word, for example, in National Geographic, that word might be less commonly

used than a word you hear on TV in an everyday conversation.

So, where you hear the word is important.

Again, is the word relevant to you?

Maybe it's about the work you do, so maybe that's an important word.

Maybe the word is about, you know, something in physics, and maybe you're not interested

in physics, so maybe that word would not be relevant.

A good question to ask is how common is this word?

There are about 300 English words you can...

You can learn, the most common 300 English words, and those will help you in most conversations,

so you don't need to learn every single word in order to be successful in a conversation.

You also want to make sure that you're learning words that are verbs and adjectives as well.

Many people learning a language focus just on nouns or on objects.

They know how to say "pencil", "book", "clothing", or different objects, but they don't know

many action words.

You really need action words in order to make sentences and to have good conversations,

so when you're learning a new word, try to learn action words as well, or adjectives,

words that describe people.

Again, many people learning a language focus too much on nouns, but you should be focusing

on other types of words as well.

Okay, so just to recap, one way not to learn a language is learning and memorizing every

new word you come across.

In this case, quality is more important than quantity.

What do I mean by that?

It's better to focus your time on choosing words that are relevant to you that you might

use in your day-to-day conversations, and really focus and practice using those words.

Use them in different situations, different contexts; study them again and again.

That is a way better system than just writing down every new word you come across and trying

to learn thousands of words at a time without actually putting in a lot of practice.

It's much better to focus on a few words and learn them really well than to focus on every

word and learn none of them well.

Okay?

So again, ask yourself these questions.

They're very important, and be selective with the words you choose to learn.

So what is my next tip?

This is actually my favourite tip on how not to learn, and that is some people try to learn

a language in their sleep.

This does not work.

When I was a kid, I thought you could just listen to somebody talk in a different language

and it would seep into your brain, and then suddenly you'd be able to speak it.

Unfortunately, that's not how language learning works.

In order to learn a language, you need to be actively using the language.

You need to be practicing the language.

You need to put some effort into learning the language.

Active learning, like, you know, listening to something while you're sleeping, just does not work.

That being said, I should also mention that sleep is important when you're learning a

language.

What's important is to get a good night's sleep, because when you sleep, your brain is

actually doing a lot of different activities.

So everything you learn during the day, your brain is processing that information, it's

organizing it, it's storing it.

So your brain is working very hard while you're sleeping, and it is helping you learn a language,

but just listening to people speak a different language with headphones while you're sleeping

is not the way to go.

Let's look at some other things you should not do when you are learning a new language.

So what is my next tip on how not to learn a language?

Well, it has to do with grammar, okay?

Some students are very focused on grammar.

They spend hours and hours practicing conjugations or thinking about how to use the present perfect

versus, you know, present perfect continuous.

It's important to learn grammar, but it's not the only part of learning a language.

So grammar is important, yes, but there are a lot of other things that are equally or

more important when you're learning a language.

So do not take a grammar-focused only approach to learning a language.

This means when you are learning a language, don't spend all your time on the grammar.

There are a lot of other things you should be focusing on, like listening, conversations,

final phrases, you know, reading, writing, vocabulary, there's a lot - slang - there's

a lot of different things that we need when we're learning a language.

The other thing I wanted to point out is sometimes grammar doesn't impact the meaning of what

we're trying to say.

So for example, if a student or if somebody says to me, "Yesterday, I go to the store."

There's a grammar mistake here.

They should have said, "Yesterday, I went to the store" because they're talking in the

past tense, but I still understood perfectly what they said, even though they made that

grammar mistake.

So this just goes to show that even if we're making grammar mistakes, we can still have

people understand us, and when we're learning a language, the most important thing is we're

focusing on communicating.

So we do not need to be perfect when we communicate; the main thing is getting our message across.

The next thing I would recommend against doing is translating in your head.

Sometimes when we're learning a language, we do a lot of translation.

Somebody says something to us and we think, okay, they said this word, this word means

this word in my language, and we try to change their sentence into a sentence in our own

language.

We try to do translation.

The problem with this is it slows us down.

When we communicate with people, it usually is quite quick.

There's a lot of back and forth happening, and it all takes place very fast.

If you're translating everything, you're going to go too slow in the conversation.

So a better idea is to really learn the language, and instead of translating, just listen for

key words.

You don't need to learn or know every word somebody else says.

Use context, okay?

What do you think they're talking about?

Sometimes you might have to guess.

Sometimes you listen for just the main idea or key words.

Even if you don't understand everything, that's okay.

Another thing sometimes people who are learning another language do is they try to avoid making

mistakes.

They're so worried about making mistakes that they actually won't even speak in the language

they're learning.

Remember, one very important part of learning is making mistakes.

That's how we learn, okay?

So if you're not making mistakes, that's when you actually are doing something wrong.

I love it when my students make mistakes.

It's very important to the language learning process.

So please, please, please make mistakes, and then learn from your mistakes.

After you make them think, "Okay, why was that a mistake?"

You'll learn a lot, and it's easier to actually remember when you learn from your mistakes

than not making them at all.

Okay, what about this?

Seeing language learning like a chore.

When I was younger and I had to learn French in school, it was a very painful experience.

I found it very boring, and I hated French class.

Now, as an adult, I love learning French.

What's the difference?

It's all about how I see the language.

When I was younger, it felt like I had to learn French; I had no choice.

Now as an adult, I realize, okay, when I'm learning French, I'm learning about a whole

different culture, a whole different way of seeing the world.

I'm learning about new music, new movies, new ideas.

So it's really important when you're learning a language to remember all the exciting things

that are happening and that become available when you learn a new language.

It's a good idea not to see it as a chore, because if you see it as a chore, it will

be a lot harder to learn.

Okay, my next tip is about practice.

Sometimes students will spend eight hours learning one grammar point, or they'll spend

most of the day learning a specific grammar point or studying vocabulary, and then they

think, "Okay, I spent time on this, good.

All done."

And the next day, they move on to something else.

Unfortunately, that's not how our brains work best.

What is a better idea is to do a little bit every day over a period of time.

So instead of spending one day learning the past perfect, and then the next day learning,

you know, the future continuous, and learning different tenses every day, it's much better

to focus on learning maybe the past perfect first on this day, then the next day, then

the next day.

Again, review, review, review is very important.

So we can call this spaced intervals, where you do a little bit of studying, but you do

it every day.

That's a lot more beneficial, and it's a lot easier to learn that way than to just do one

day, where you just overwhelm your brain with information.

So now we are going to talk about my final tip on what not to do when you are learning

a language.

So my final tip, be careful with how you spend your money when you are learning another language.

Many people will try to sell you things.

There are many products out there that say they can teach you a language in a couple

of days or maybe even a week.

You can't learn a language in that short amount of time, okay?

So if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

The way to learn a language is you need to put in some time.

It takes time to learn a language.

It takes effort, okay?

Your brain has to do some work when you're learning a language.

It takes practice.

You need to practice the language, ideally in a communicative context.

So what do I mean by that?

You practice in the places where you're likely to use it.

You need to have fun when you're learning a language.

Your brain remembers things when they are interesting and fun, okay?

So if you find what you're doing is very boring and you fall asleep whenever you're studying,

you're not learning the language in the best way.

The way you should be learning a language is in the fun way.

You also need sleep when you're learning a new language.

Your brain does a lot of work when you are sleeping, okay?

So it's not a good idea to stay up super late memorizing lists of vocabulary.

It's a lot better to do some English practice every day and get a good night's sleep.

So thank you so much for watching this video.

I hope you learned some things on the language learning process.

You can actually take a quiz on what I talked about in this video at www.engvid.com.

Remember, practice is the way we remember things, so taking this quiz is a good way

to do that.

You can also subscribe to my channel.

I have a lot of other resources and videos on different topics that have to do with studying,

with writing, reading, and many more.

You can also check out my website at www.teacheremma.com, sorry.

There you can actually find a lot of other resources that can help you in your language

learning process.

So thank you so much for watching, and until next time, take care.