Polyglot Conference Budapest 2013 - Anthony Lauder "PolyNot"

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Anthony Lauder talks about being a PolyNot and how they are different to Polyglots. So how does a PolyNot become a Polyglot? Czech out his channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/FluentCzech

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This T-shirt represents everything I'm going to say today.

Can you see the shirt?

Even at the back?

It's actually, it's a match, which is here on fire,

and there it's completely burned up.

and this represents language learning for me.

because when I study languages,

I'm enthusiastic and energetic,

then I feel like I'm on fire and burning and dying,

and I end up frazzled and at the end I have to lie down.

Whereas Richard, I heard him say that it's the opposite way around for him.

He comes home after a hard day's work

"Well, I feel on fire! I'm completely alive!"

And at the end of hard session, he's reinvigorated.

So, I want my language learning
to stop being like that

and to be more like that.

And I've always been fascinated

with this difference,

why some people frazzle at the end

and some people get energised.

OK. So my presentation touches a bit on that.

I have to be ambidextrous

which I'm not.

So, the number 262 is important

because that's how many slides I've got.

[Laughter]

Yeah.

Oops! Sorry. It's not doing anything.

[Audience member] - Try again!

No.

Yeah, all my slides say 262.

[Laughter]

Oh, is it up here?

Where does it point?

Oh, I was pressing the wrong button. OK.

I'm not good at technical stuff.

Yeah. And that's about how many minutes
I've got to do it.

So, if you're good at numbers. That's a lot of slides.

So I'll be talking quickly.

Anthony Lauder.
That's me.

Who?? Never heard of him.

I'm the only person here that I've never heard of.

This is a polyglot conference.

Polyglots? What? Why am I here?

[Laughter]

I'm a "polyNot".

I am useless at languages.

My cats are better polyglots than me.

If I say "food", they come running.

If I say "tickle", they roll on their backs.

If they say "Miaow",
I've got no idea what they're saying at all.

[Laughter]

I'm good at mathematics. OK?

So, you shouldn't invite me
to a conference to talk about languages.

Instead, I'm going to talk about
the Peano Axioms,

which were formulated by Giuseppe Peano
in 1889.

And the Peano Axioms, as you probably know,

[Laughter]

are the product of meta-mathematical research

into fundamental questions of consistency and completeness in number theory.

And specifically they state that all natural numbers are closed,

under an injective and non-zero successor function. Yeah?

And a reflexive, symmetric, transitive equality func...

Zzzzzzz [snoring]

[Laughter]

Sorry.

In other words...

[Audience Member] It was interesting!

Yeah, thank you.

Think... This is what it's saying in real English.

Think of a number.

41

Add one to it
and what do you get?

42

Brilliant. So, you're good at mathematics.

You can apply Peano's axioms

Because that's all they say.

You get another number.

And you can keep going.

41 plus 1 is 42 and if you add one again

you don't get 42, you get... 43.

Is it?

And you can keep going and going...

And this "Add 1" is all you need.

You can count to all the numbers in the universe, and beyond.

And what's the lesson from this?

When you're good at adding one,

numbers become really easy.

Great.

When you're bad at adding 1,

numbers are very hard.
[Laughter]

So, how does this relate to polyglottery?

Well, it actually does.

I'm going to take my sandals off,
because they're slipping around a bit.

So, if you can smell anything bad,
it's Richard, it's not me.

I'm using Peano Axioms to understand

the easiest way to be able to speak 10 foreign languages.

I see on the forums,

people always want to know what's the easiest way,

what's the quickest way, what's the best method.

I'm going to tell you now

with my strong mathematical background

- I have a PhD in Theoretical Computer Science.

I'm really good at this kinda stuff. -

And I'm gonna tell you how, using that,

to be good at speaking 10 foreign languages.

Are you ready?

Step 1...
[Audience laughter]

[applause]

It's really easy. It's a 2 step plan.

Who could ask for more?

So, which is the hardest of those two steps?

I think it's probably step 1 is the hardest, yeah?

But once you've done that,
it's much easier to add one more.

OK. And how do you do that?

The way to be able to speak 9 languages is,

because that was the hard bit, is
speak 8 and add 1.

And you can keep going.

And the hardest step is always step 1.

And then adding one is easy...

until you get here.

Now step 2 is the hard one.

[Audience laughter]

Yeah?

And this is important!

Because for mega-polyglots, adding 1 is really easy.

But for people like me, "polyNots",

adding 1 is really hard.

And my speech is going to be about why.

Yeah, this is the big question.

Literally. It's a big question.
[Audience laughter]

[Applause]

So, I don't know the answer!

I don't know anything about languages,

so I decided to do some research.

And I looked into Applied Linguistics,

and I found out that

Applied Linguistics is the branch of linguistics

that's actually useful to people who aren't linguists.

[laughter & applause]

So, the other advantage of this is

anything I say here might be nonsense

but all I have to do is

- like English newspapers when they are about to say

"That guy is a lying idiot" -

they just put the word "allegedly"
at the beginning

and don't have to worry about it.

So allegedly, this is how to be good at adding one.

So, applied linguistics isn't about theories.

It's not some people just thinking up
something that "sounds good".

Instead they do experiments in real life,

find results, and publish the results.

It's based on lots of evidence over decades.

I've read mountains of papers

and one great book.

This great book.

It's big and it's fat

and it's boring as hell.
[Laughter]

But it's really good, if you don't mind being bored.

But it teaches a lot.

It actually surveys in great detail
600 research studies.

And it finds,
if you wade through all that,

that the main difference between
Polyglots and PolyNots - like me -

- so people like him, and people like me -

is... polyglots are good at...

[crowd makes inaudible suggestions]

guessing.

[Crowd laughs]
Who got that then? Ha!

I bet Richard did!
Okay...

And it turns out,
the reason they're good at guessing,

- Now don't say nonsense yet, just bear with me -

is because they have better memories.

Now you'll say
"No, my memory is no better than anybody else's."

And it might be true,

because polyglots do not have

better long term memory
than mere mortals.

[Laughing]

But they do have better short-term memories.

There's some geeky words here, for linguists only,

so I hope you can't read them.

It's qualifying it
in case there are any linguists here.

Short-term memories is good enough.

Polyglots can remember things for a few seconds,

and PolyNots forget them immediately.

Did I say this yet?
[Laughter]

It's "in one ear and out the other",
literally.

So why is short term memory important?

Why does it matter?

You know, we learn all these things about

how to remember words years down the line,

but why is it important

to remember something
for 5 seconds or 10 seconds?

Well, it turns out that
short-term memory is essential to,

it supports,
3 very important language skills.

And those are

noticing things,

processing things, and

guessing things.

I'm gonna get into these in great detail.

So, without those three skills,

you can't use the methods that polyglots use.

And polyNots struggle with language learning because

they lack the three skills of...

What were they?
[Laughter]

noticing, processing and guessing.

And that's great news for polyglots
and bad news for polyNots.

Therefore,
the road from polyNottery to polyglottery

is a process of
developing a better short term memory.

And then you can train in the skills of
noticing, processing and guessing.

And from that, you can apply the methods
that polyglots use.

If you try to apply them
without having those skills,

you're gonna burn up.

OK. Now, interestingly, this process
is iterative and bidirectional.

Oooh, whatever that means.
[Laughter]

What it actually means is

the more you improve your memory,

the better your skills in processing,
and so on, and guessing become.

And then you can start to use the methods.

But, once you're using the methods,

they actually build the skills,
which builds the memory.

So it sort of snowballs.

And it turns out,

you actually only need a few weeks of training
to build these skills,

and then you can be pretty independent.

So, let's relate this to language learn--

... to learning vocabulary.

Now one reason that it's about vocabulary

Is because the big fat book I read
is about vocabulary.

If that book was about something else,

this speech would be about something else.

But it's because

loads and loads and loads of real research

from applied linguistics and not from theorists

has shown that in order to comprehend spoken stuff

and written stuff,

vocabulary is actually far more important

than subject knowledge ...
knowledge about the subject matter

and far more important than grammatical knowledge.

Now, how many words do you need?

I guess you people
know all these kind of numbers

that talk about things like

"Native speakers have
20,000-word vocabulary."

Ooh! That's a big number!

It actually turns out that

people learn around a thousand words a year

pretty consistently up until around university age.

So when a child goes to school for the first time,

they'll know 5,000 words.

mostly learned orally

from their parents,

and add a thousand words a year.

"I haven't got 20 years
to learn some foreign language!"

"Jesus Christ! I am an old man!
I'll be dead by then." [Laughter]

But you need a very high vocabulary

in order to have "pleasant free reading",

for it not to be a frazzling experience,

for it to be a pleasurable experience.

If you have 95% coverage of the vocabulary

in a newspaper
like the Guardian or something,

You can understand it.

It's not easy.

If it's 90%,
understanding of the vocabulary in the Guardian,

you really know you're studying.

85% - it's for Richard Simcott and Luca only,

and even those guys are defeated when it's 80%.

Oooh, that's pretty spooky.

So, what's the polyNot approach to vocabulary?

Well, I didn't have to look very far to know that!

Yikes! 20,000 words!

That's a lot of flashcards!
[Laughter]

PolyNots tend to believe in the existence,

that there's one magic strategy

that's going to be the best one.

You see them asking this on forums.

Actually, interestingly,
people have spoken to polyNots

and found that
they don't really believe it

but they kid themselves into believing it.

They feel guilty they are not using
a wider range of strategies,

but they're more comforted by believing
they are using the best one.

So they seek confirmation
from people like Richard,

to say, "Yeah, that's a really good one."

Then they feel they're doing
what the masters do.

And they tend to stick with it then

despite all the evidence.

You know that definition of insanity is

doing the same thing over and over and over again

despite all the evidence

and expecting a different result.

That's what we do ... us polyNots.

So, they spend a mass amount of time

on learning single, unrelated words,

and you end up with things like "Anki addiction".

I've seen on Anki forums guys saying...

"I've spent 2 hours putting new words into Anki today...

and 15 minutes reviewing them."

They're just... addicted.

And they do these lengthy cramming sessions

when they want to be heroic.

"Ooh. I'll get as much energy as I can

and do a cramming session tonight."

And they want to pin down
the one true meaning of a word

and get that one simple definition
on their flashcard.

They see dictionaries as authoritative,

so that, if they think they know
what a word means,

but they see a different definition
of the word in the dictionary

they'll abandon their own understanding of the word
as completely wrong.

"Oh no! I'm an idiot."

"I've got it wrong."

"It means something else
because the dictionary tells me so."

And they beat themselves up
when they forget a word.

As you can imagine,
I'm beating myself up a lot.

The idea then is that
you either know a word or you don't.

It's black or white.

And you stop reviewing a word
once you know it.

"Oh, I know that word now,

time for me to move on to another one."

And where do they decide
what words they're gonna work on?

Those that are given to them
in homework

or in the textbook
are the most important by far,

even when they know
they're not interesting.

Things that are in thematic groups.

I remember when I was studying French,

and we were given a list of all the
different words for different fishes.

And it had their English translations,

and I'd never heard of half of
the English names for the fishes,

but was still learning the French ones.

What?!

This is interesting:

ones that "sound nice".

Pampeliška.

Who knows what pampeliška means?

It's a nice sounding word...

You should go and look up what it means.

Vulgar or unusual words.

"Eeeee! Let's get the slang book."

"I can learn the swear words!"

"Won't that be good?"

And none of this is about whether the words are useful.

So, they shun output quite a lot
as too painful

"Oh no, that's going to remind me
of what I don't know!"

"I'm going to look like an idiot!"

"I'm not going to do any output."

One day I'll know 20,000 words

and then I'll be fluent.

It'll be easy.

I won't need to go through all that output.

It'll just be easy all of a sudden.

So, like one of my friends,

you can say 'octopus'...

you can say 'hovercraft'...

but you can't say
"Can you help me, please?"

[Laughter]

If only they'd learned
the word for 'helicopter',

that would have been it!

So, the polyglot approach to vocabulary

according to that book

is very different.

Vocabulary learning is not an end goal
for polyglots.

It's not about
"I've got 20,000 words in Anki!"

No, it's about
effective control over vocabulary

for confident and fluent use

in listening, speaking,
reading, and writing,

not just for getting high scores on Anki.

So, knowing a word
is not an all or nothing affair.

Words sink in over time.

You get repeated viewings,
like on an Anki card,

but you also get a broader,
more diverse viewing of a word

from different contexts

to teach you the wide meanings

and the broad meanings of words.

In particular, polyglots see knowing a word
as multidimensional:

form, meaning, and use.

Which means,

the spelling of the word,

the parts the word is made up of,

... the word ...

and the pronunciation of the word,

what the tone is,

where the emphasis is,

all these kind of things.

And the meaning...

Maybe there's a central concept to the word,

but there can be
very diverse meanings as well

and you have learn all of these.

You don't reject all of them
apart from the "one true one".

And words have lots of associations

- We saw this
in one of the speeches yesterday -

If you use the wrong word
in the wrong context,

it'll cause all sorts of
strange associations to people

that were unexpected to you.

And use...

So, is this a high frequency word?

And in what context is it high frequency?

"How's it hangin'?"
isn't very high frequency in written form

for example.

How formal is it?

"Hey man, give me five"
isn't very good at a job interview.

[Laughter]

Oh, medium, yes...

Is it spoken form or written form?

And collocations

- I don't even know if I'm saying that correctly -

- I've always said it /kɑləˈkeɪʃənz/ -

is a thing that polyNots tend to ignore

but polyglots, even without realising it

- we'll see - place a lot of emphasis on these.

So, polyglots cover all those by

balancing four strands of study:

Intensive vocabulary study

This is the stuff that polyNots like me
over-focus on

Extensive listening and reading

Speaking and writing

and Fluency development

I'll come to these in detail.

Strand 1: Intensive vocabulary study

Choose words based on frequency.

Frequency really means usefulness.

You need 20,000 words to get 98% coverage.

"Ha! No! I've got to learn all of them!"

No. Because even just knowing 10 words,
you can get 24% coverage.

So, learn those 10 words first.
[Laughter]

[applause]

So, it's been shown in research

that you should study quite intensively the first

highest frequency 2,000 to 4,000 words

That's worth putting time in.

That's worth sticking into Anki.

In fact, it's very interesting,

polyglots, perhaps from their vast experience,

have a general sense
for what's high frequency,

for what's worth knowing.

PolyNots don't.

They see every word
as equally worth knowing

so they just take other people's lists.

So, they should probably use frequency dictionaries.

There are some brilliant ones

With the most 4,000 ...

4,000 most important words
in Spanish, or French, or German, ...

Just go with those.

Make that your order
rather than randomness.

But then, rather than learning the next 2,000
high-frequency general words,

it's far more useful to you to focus on

the 2,000 most frequent words

in your specialist field
of personal interest.

So, for example,

there's something called the "Academic Word List"

which has got about 350 words.

If you learn those

- There are books on this actually,
things like

French for Reading,
or German for Reading -

and they train you to be very good

with the academic vocabulary
for reading scientific papers.

You'll learn a few hundred words

that'll be really useful in that field.

Conversational vocab

This is what ...

- I don't know if anybody knows

what my "conversational connectors" are -

This is focusing on stuff that

you say a lot in conversations

but you never see in written form.

So, a lot of people just read textbooks

or study literature or something,

and they can't hold a conversation

because they've never been exposed to

conversational vocabulary.

Journalism - It turns out there are
just a few hundred words

that appear constantly across journalism,

and you need to know them
to work in that area.

Fiction.
Fiction has its own vocabulary.

Shoe selling

It's worth knowing the word "shoelace"

if you're doing shoe selling,

but not if you're reading Tolstoy.

There was a personal stab
at a specific person there

I won't say who.

OK

Now, some researchers
looked at this whole field

and they found, for example,
there's a very important textbook

with 300,000 words.

- It's a big, fat
telephone directory kind of book

for macroeconomics -

and they found that
just 34 specialist words

covered 10% of that textbook

Learn those

if you are interested in macroeconomics.

Has it stopped? OK.

Then, beyond those 6000 words,

"Ankimania" is probably not worth it.

The words are going to come up too rarely

to make that intensive study worth it.

Just let yourself get exposed to them
naturally,

through [Strand 2] Extensive listening and reading.

Again, according to the book, not according to me.

So, extensive listening and reading
does three things.

It helps you encounter
low frequency words.

It helps you enrich and deepen
- This is so vital! -

enrich and deepen
your knowledge of high frequency words.

It's not, "I know that now.
It's a waste of time me seeing it again."

It needs to be enriched and deepened.

And it helps you to master collocations.

I'm going to come back to those.

So, unfortunately
to learn words from context,

from reading and listening,

you need about 95 to 98% coverage.

Supergeniuses...
of which there are many in this room

but none standing up here on the platform

can manage with 90%.

So does that mean you've got to have

20,000-word vocabulary before you start?

No. It turns out that polyglots

have this fantastic ability

at sniffing out manageable material:

Things they can handle.
Things that don't intimidate them.

I say,
and many other people have said actually,

that one of the best things a teacher can do,
is not lecture you on grammar,

but point out to you

appropriate material
for you to be working with.

"You're ready for this now."

"Go and look at that, now."

"You won't be overwhelmed and
you won't be underwhelmed."

An example: graded readers.

Great, if you are learning English, by the way,

bad if you're learning
Dzongkha from Bhutan.

Unfortunately there aren't any.

But the Oxford Bookworm series
has 6 levels

each introducing 400 words only.

Level 1 requires a vocabulary
of only 400 words.

And by the end of the 6 levels,

about 10 books in each level,

you've learned 2,500 high frequency words.

And they are not baby books.

It's not "Spot the Dog" or
"Here is Peter and Jane".

It's things like "Mutiny on the Bounty"
and "The Phantom of the Opera"

and stuff like that, stuff that adults...

stuff that's not going to
bore the pants off you.

And the aim here is not to make it easy.

The aim here is to help you
develop vocabulary control

by eliminating the deleterious superfluity
of very low frequency vocabulary,

such as "deleterious superfluity".

[Laughter]

[Applause]

The idea here is that you hit words

from many, many, many different angles.

And you deepen and broaden
your knowledge of it.

OK?

Then after those graded readers,

then you are ready for authentic materials

in your specialist area.

You can dive in.

They've prepared you.

Now, unfortunately, it takes a long time.

To learn 1,000 low-frequency words a year

needs massive amounts of exposure.

You need - Oh My God! -
one million words

reading or listening, or a combination

to give you sufficient repetition

to absorb 1,000 words a year.

So, I think that's a realistic goal.

People want to become masters in days.

Be realistic.

OK, that means you have got to read

one or two books a month,

or read a magazine like Newsweek
every week,

to steadily increase your vocabulary

rather than just maintain your current level.

OK, so how do you deal with
unknown vocabulary?

Well, polyNots - like me - rely on a gloss

that's some kind of cheat-sheet

with the words in it,

which is good for textbooks,

bad when you're reading Harry Potter.

There isn't a cheat-sheet.

So then you jump to the dictionary

and look every word up

and it's bloody slow.

It doesn't half make the book far less interesting

But polyglots, though...

guess!

And this is the central thing.

Guessing is what it's about.

Guessing, it has been shown

- with probes in the brain, apparently -

[Laughter]
- I've had probes in many places, but not yet in my brain. -

- But that's enough bedroom talk. -
[Laughter]

So, guessing, it turns out,

gives longer-lasting and
deeper meaning over time.

You remember things for longer

and your understanding of them gets much deeper,

because you've... thought it through.

And, yeah, there you go

and repeated encounters with the words

in different contexts

mean you think my guess was probably wrong before

because now the word means something else

in this context.

Oh! That doesn't mean you
reject the old meaning.

That means enhance it, enrich it,
elaborate it, and broaden it.

Now good guessing, how does it happen?

It's not... random guessing.

It's based on good clues.

Now knowing similar languages can help.

"Ah! It's easier for him.
He already speaks... whatever."

Because, you know, it's easy

'cause that language has got cognates in it

- words that are similar.

But it can also hinder

due to interference between languages.

And polyglots, though, are aware of this

and they have mechanisms for managing it

and that awareness comes from

guessing lots of times

and learning when to be careful.

They rely far more

on a wide variety of contextual clues

to make their guesses sensible,

rather than just on their backgrounds.

And they evaluate these clues
against each another.

There've been loads of studies

looking at eye movements

and all these kinda things

showing people broadening out

and narrowing in

to look for new guesses...

- And it's an automatic process. -

- You don't even know you're doing it,
once you're doing it. -

... until they feel that their guess

is sufficiently well founded,

or at least as well founded

as they can make it now.

So they don't guess randomly.

They're actually inferring things

from the context.

It's informed guessing,

which increases the chance
that the guessing is sensible.

And, importantly,
they're happy not to know everything!

They will leave things for another time.

Happy with partial understanding.

PolyNots hate that.

All the research, though, shows

that to notice clues,

and to evaluate them against one another,

and then to make good guesses,
you need...

a very strong short term memory.

And without it,
you don't notice the clues.

You can't remember them.

You forget them
as soon as you've seen them.

And so you can't evaluate them
against each other

And so your guesses
are absolutely useless!

Like my guesses.

Thankfully, short term memory
can be trained.

The downside, though,

is that it gets a lot harder
as you get older.

There's been research by neurologists

that shows that old guys like me

have an ever-decreasing
short term memory.

I'm just hoping to hold on to
the bits I've got left!

If you're young like half the pe---

90 percent of the people here,

compared to me, are very young.

Train your memory now, if you need to.

So, the idea though,

is to gradually increase
your reading span, with recall.

Just start on a couple of words,

look away

and recall what you've just read.

It doesn't have to be word-for-word,
but close.

Then broaden it, broaden it,
and broaden it.

And it has been found that just doing this

for 10 minutes a day for 6 weeks

will make you into a good guesser.

I guess.
[Laughter]

And then...

So, once you've got the
noticing and recall bit,

then you can start to apply guessing.
Yeah?

You can now recall the clues

and then you can guess based on them.

And again, go back to going small,

expand it out again

until the guessing becomes automatic.

And this is what's important:

automaticity,
doing things without thinking anymore.

By the way, this is where
you cannot compress experience.

You can go through the motions,

but you can't compress experience,

because it's automaticity of guessing
that you really need.

Strand 3: Speaking and Writing

Activation is really hard!

Learning thousands of words does not mean
you'll be able to speak them.

It doesn't happen magically.

And polyglots are very good at feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

This is a Benny type of thing here:
["Benny" = Benny Lewis, a well-known polyglot]

Speak early; speak often!

10 words is enough to have a good conversation.

Thankfully for me!
[Laughter]

2,000 words is considered a mature adult vocabulary
for colloquial conversations.

You don't need 20,000.

You might for reading literature, but not for talking.

So how do you activate?

You saw my big fat book there
on vocabulary,

which is dull and boring.

Here's my favourite book on activating.

"How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately"
by Boris Shekhtman

You can search on my name and
I've got a video about it.

Why is that book so thin?!

I want a fat book that... tells me how to activate!

But there's very little research on this

and one reason is thought to be

that historically,

language teaching is about
keeping the student quiet,

so that they can focus on
what they're being taught.

And there's a load of research
in teaching vocabulary,

very little in the student
actually becoming active.

Richard...

[Laughter]

Rehearsing at home helps!

Just talk to yourself,

make a fool of yourself,
laugh at yourself in the mirror.

Actually, talking to yourself
in front of the mirror

is one of the best ways
to get over the fear of talking in public,

it turns out.

Seeing another face.

Looking yourself in the eye.

OK.

Self-talk

Just repeating everything you see in your daily life

and these are things
that polyNots do not do.

Polyglots, it turns out,
often do these things

without even realising
they're doing them.

When they are studying vocabulary,
very often,

automatically in the back of their head

they'll be thinking of
how to apply the vocabulary

and just using it automatically

rather than thinking,
"I've just learned it."

And this is
- perhaps the number one thing -

is to summarize things.

We've seen you can use 400 words

to write Moby Dick
and these kinds of books.

So you can use 400 words to summarize
pretty much anything.

Simplify, simplify, simplify!

Please practice,
to all the PolyNots out there,

and just... do it.

And this is another one, "Islands" mean...

- this is from here -
something very important.

And I'm not going to tell you
what it means.

I want you to buy the book.

That author deserves it.

Ok, there you go.

For writing, again, you only need 400 words
to write some pretty good stuff.

You can write Phantom of the Opera.

And then you keep elaborating
what you've written

as your vocabulary grows.

So you could write Phantom of the Opera

with a 400-word vocabulary,

and then come back to it

and write a better version.

This is what "islands" are about.

Write loads of things;
keep elaborating them.

Strand 4: Fluency Development

Oh, what's "fluency"?

I'm going to go with a really simple definition.

Fluency is not a magical process

of sounding like a native. No.

Fluency is not about a big vocabulary.

Fluency is about being quick,
and smooth, and in control...

with what you already have.

You can be fluent with your 10-word
vocabulary in conversations.

And it's training for automaticity.

People have asked me in the past,

"How do you think in a foreign language?"

And my answer is always:

The aim is to learn not to think at all,

for the words just to
come out automatically.

Because, it's shown that thinking is
too slow for real life. [Laughter]

And 4 practices have been shown as
essential to gaining fluency

without needing to think
when you're having conversations.

So the first one: Overlearning

Learn and learn and learn and learn.

Just because you know a word,
you don't know it.

Keep hitting the word from different angles.

It'll get deeper inside you.

Do things at a higher speed
than you're comfortable with.

PolyNots will listen to the radio
and think,

"I can't understand it.
It's too quick."

put it aside, and go back to something
really slow in the textbook.

They never expose themselves
to the hard stuff.

You need to.

Do "time-boxed" reading and writing:

"I'm going to read as much as I can
in five minutes".

And you're going for speed.

Speak. Speak quickly.

And try not to make stupid errors,

but mostly go for speed.

And writing...

Write an essay as long as you can
in five minutes.

And these prepare you for real life,

even though you're going to make mistakes.

And then - another Benny thing -

get out there in real life

and have lots of real-life encounters.

Because that is where all your theory
comes into practice

and you realise you're tongue-tied.

And the only way to not be tongue-tied

is to get out there and do it.

However, even gaining
automaticity with words,

you're still not fast enough.

Thinking's too slow.

Automaticity with words is too slow.

You need automaticity
with clusters of words.

And it's been shown ...

In other words, these are collocations

I'm going to use this word
"collocations" to mean

to mean "clusters of words
that tend to go together in real life".

Because research has shown

that in real-life speech

- they've recorded native speakers, and so on -

in authentic speech ...

and found that they are speaking at rates

faster than the ...

[video skipped; see slide: "...brain could possibly recreate..."]
just building it on grammar and individual words.

So you need to be able to say things like,

"You need to be able to say things like".
[Laughter]

But collocations are about far more

than just speed.

It's not just speed training.

They deepen our understanding

of the rich meanings of individual words.

So, learning chunks
also teaches about individual words.

For example, the word "cause".

This is just a pretty
neutral-sounding word.

Does "cause" sound positive,
or negative, or neutral?

I'd say neutral.

But, actually, it turns out it collocates

with undesirable situations.

You very rarely say,
"That causes happiness."

But you would say, things like

"Ooh, that causes concern."

"He's causing trouble."

"Oh, that's are real cause
for embarrassment."

"Cause" tends to collocate
with negative stuff.

So don't use it talking about
positive stuff so much.

"Signal" - This is a good word.

Who knows what "signal" means?

Oh, nobody?
[Laughter]

"Thank you for the signal."

What does it mean?

[muffled answer from the audience]

"She sent the king a signal."

A message! It's a noun, isn't it?

"Then saw him signal back."

Oh, it's a verb!

Oh, I was wrong!

Here's a very good one

that you probably don't know

unless you're a native speaker.

"It was a signal honour."

It's an adjective!

It means "significant or important".

And only by hitting the word

through massive exposure in many contexts

and understanding
the various meanings of things.

Like, "signal honour" is a collocation

you see all the time

if you... read books about signal honours.

[Laughter]

And collocations are necessary
to sound authentic,

because a great many things

that are grammatically correct,

even if you know
all the grammar and the vocabulary,

well, we just don't say it that way!

"I want some speedy food."

"I've not got time,

I'm gonna get some quick food for lunch."

Why do they only say "fast food"?

Because they do!

And many collocations are grammatically incorrect,

and you might not even realise it.

"Go to bed."

That's grammatically incorrect.

You don't say, "Go to kitchen."

It's "Go to the kitchen".

Why isn't it "Go to the bed"?

Because it isn't!
[Laughter and clapping]

Some are just weird...

"hell for leather"

Who knows what that even means?

It means "go fast".

"He's running hell for leather."

Quite a rare one,

but you'll sound bloody authentic
if you use it!

Plenty of them are fossilised...

"by and large"

You can't say "by and big".
[Laughter]

"Law and order"

"Bird's eye view"

If you say "Ooh, let's take
a bird's eye look at this,"

it won't quite sound the same will it?

"raise an eyebrow" [Laughter]

But if you say "lift an eyebrow"

it means the same thing,

but people will think you're a weirdo.

That was a very good
eyebrow raising there.

(Audience member) Thank you very much.

He's got really good eyebrows.

But as well as understanding fossilisation,

these ones are the hardest ones
to deal with:

Flexible collocations

This is the real mark of authenticity.

You can "entertain an idea".

You can also "entertain a belief",

a bit less frequently.

Entertain a thought,

a bit less frequent.

You can say it.

But these are all collations you'd see.

And why are you saying "entertain"
related to these words??

You're not doing a song or dance,

but it's what people say.

Now, polyglots, then, actually focus

and favour, often without realising it

high-frequency collocations

over low-frequency words.

Don't bother learning
the rare names of fish

when you can learn things like

"raise an eyebrow".

This is important,

because research has shown repeatedly,

over about thirty years of research,

the greatest increases
in fluency and authenticity

come when learners switch their focus

from yet more low-frequency words

to automaticity of
high-frequency collocations.

And again, polyglots seems to know this

and do it automatically.

PolyNots don't.
They add more words to Anki.

In short, more than 30 years of research

tells us that native speakers know

around 20,000 individual words

but several hundred thousand collocations.

Can you believe it?

That's what they're doing
all the rest of the time.

That's what their
24-hours-a-day exposure

for their whole adult life
is teaching them.

Not more vocabulary, but richer, deeper

meaning in collocations.

So, to be highly functional in a language,

whatever that means,

a learner needs to have

gained automaticity with about

4.000 general high-frequency words,

2,000 specialist words
in whatever their area is,

and tens of thousands
of high-frequency collocations.

And this is what reading
all that literature is doing,

listening to all those materials is doing.

And then continually enriching
through exposure

the breadth and depth of their knowledge
of all that stuff.

There you go, through life-long exposure.

And the key to achieving all this

is to be able to ...

Guess!

That's it!

(applause from the audience)

(cheers from the audience)

I'm afraid there's no time for questions.

(applause and cheers from the audience)

(continuing applause)

More!
[Laughter]

I can't hear my wife clapping!
[Laughter]

(Richard) I don't think there's going to be any questions.

I don't think that was a very popular speech, to be honest.
[Laughter]

(Richard) Fantastic! I've just realised that I'm a polynot.
[Laughter]

I'd never have guessed!

(Richard) And proud!

So, no, thank you very much.

I've got to say, just in preface to this,

we're friends on Facebook

(Anthony) Oh no! Don't tell them about my Facebook posts, please!

I'm keeping everything secret.

But I did see one post saying

"I've got three hundred and twenty slides"

(Anthony) "[unclear] ... and I'm only half way through!"

And I just thought...

"Oh my God. What the hell is he going to talk about?"

(Anthony) So I trimmed it right back down to

the bare minimum of 262.

So, um, yeah, imagine my relief

when I saw it was just 262.
[Laughter]

So, I didn't see any of this before

you saw it today.

It's all new to me too.

So, I'm looking forward to questions.

I'll start at the front.

Less for me to walk.

(Q1) First of all, Anthony, that was fabulous.

- That was absolutely fabulous.
- Thank you.

Second of all, I just wanted to add maybe,

I have a comment more than a question.

just... Mezzofanti and Emil Krebs both

did a lot of this stuff through parallel texts.

When Emil Krebs died,

they found a gazillion different copies
of the New Testament in his chambers.

And it is said that Mezzofanti also learned different languages

through these chunks, these collocations as you're talking about.

He would perform the last rites and hear confessions

from soldiers from all over the world.

- Anyway, it sounds like it was good research.
- Thank you.

(Q2) Hello, Anthony.

First of all, I want to say thank you for your presentation.

You were one of the first people that I encountered on YouTube, when I

- you know - first started to learn languages, and you provided me with some inspiration.

And so, I'm interested in... I can relate to your experience

because I believe that when I,... my first encounter with langauge learning

was when I was at school trying to learn German

and I believed I had absolutely no talent whatsoever.

And, I've made significant progress with my Spanish.

And now I'm living in Madrid.

I want to hear about your experience

going from or being a "polynot", as you describe it,

and - you know - how your process of learning languages has changed,

and do you feel that you have grown as a language learner

and that - you know - there's potential for you to become a polyglot one day?

Um, ok.

I'm an old man.

Now, you are supposed to say "Noooo..."

[Laughter]

Huh! Thanks!

Um, yeah.

I have a twin brother.

And he saw a very beautiful woman around 18 years old working in a pub.

And he was speaking to this young woman and flirting a bit and she was flirting back.

And it hit him. She could be my granddaughter.

And he said, "Do I seem like a dirty old man to you?"

And she said, "Yes, but you're a customer so I've got to be nice."

[Laughter]

Yeah. And, um...

I feel a little bit like that with language learning in a way. That...

I'm sort of the dirty pervert, the peeping tom,
looking at all you people

and enjoying it vicariously. There's a good word.

But I think I'm getting a little bit better in language learning,

mainly through learning to be patient.

But I think I'm too old to ever be fantastic.

I recently saw some videos by a man who,

I won't name him, but you may know who he is because of what I'm about to say.

And he had a list of something like 80 languages he wants to learn in the next 10 or 20 years.

And he said, "I realise that's unrealistic.

I've trimmed it down to 72." [Laughter]

It's great to be ambitious.

But I don't have time to be ambitious.

So, I am reasonably good in Czech now

so that I'm not studying it anymore
and I can just live the language.

And I do study a several other languages

and if I can get anywhere with them before I die, I'll be happy,

because now I'm enjoying the journey, not just focusing on the destination.

Yeah, that's it.

- (Q3) Hello.
- Who's that?

(Unlear) Iversen and I'm

And I'm so probably your best example of [... unclear ...] gone mad.

Because you may know that I have made word lists

that I've made about... I've counted how many Russian words I've printed on word lists

since I started my holiday, 14 days ago, that's about 1500.

But, I have the idea.

I think that I know what I am now. I'm not a polyglot.

I'm a polynot, but in 12 different languages.

- Yeah.
- Because everything I see hear and read, I forget.

But I note it down.
And once I've written it down, I remember it.

And that's why I write all my words down,

because then I can start guessing.

And I can't start guessing just because

I really learned one thing from all your, what was it, 200

slides, and that was the word polynot.

[...unclear...] but that's enough.

Have you thought about different ways

of getting to the guessing stage...

apart from being a born polyglot or somebody who works through paper like me.

But for instance, people who live in places where they have to guess

because they never know what the next person is going to say to them.

India, places like that.

What do they do in a situation where they cannot read,

they cannot write everything down, and they are not polyglots?

Yeah. So, I have... sometimes people say,

on these forums they say, "What language should I learn next?"

How do I know?!

The two reasons to learn a language are

because you have to,

which provides masses of external force on you to do it,

or because you want to,

which provides lots of internal force on you to do it.

And I think with those pressures, internal and external,

you'll find a way.

But when you're at school,

and somebody's telling you,

"Now you're learning German."

There's no actual need.

So I don't think the automatic - all the antennas are up

and your guessing abilities will become automatic - will be there.

Now,

I am no expert in all this... in this guessing game.

So you asked what are the different ways of being good at guessing. And I can't guess.

I don't know. I got most of what I talked about,

especially the jokes, from this boring textbook.

But now that I know that guessing is important

- and I think it's a pretty convincing argument -

the next stage for me is, how can I transform myself into a good guesser.

And I don't know.

If I come to another conference, hopefully I will.

Maybe I'll be able to give a presentation

on how a useless guesser became a good guesser in a year.

[Applause]

(Q4) Hi. Um...

I suspect many people may know the answer to this question in the room,

but I'm curious about how do you quantify how many words you're fluent in.

You speak about 2000, 4000...

I have no idea what my vocabulary is even in my native language.

One very interesting thing is,

there were a lot of studies

in the 80s and before that

about people's vocabulary knowledge.

And that's because, as I said,

the main aim of languages then

was about language teaching
and language testing

rather than language using.

And they constantly invented tests

for judging people's vocabulary.

And, I think it was as late as 1980,

it was estimated that native speakers at an adult level

would have a rich vocabulary of around 90,000 words.

And now that's realised that's a massive overestimate.

And the tests of vocabulary have become much much much better.

So that now they estimate it's 20,000.

And the way they have tested it,

is by applying lots and lots and lots and lots
of different tests

to find tests that give consistent results.

Know what I mean?

So, and then that tells them what the good tests are

and gives them confidence that their measures are correct.

And so there are actually papers that test things,

they show you a shape and say,

"If this one is smaller than this, then the other one is ...."

...bigger. Or something like that.

And I would put "shoe lace". I don't know.

So, but, there were many many tests, and

in the back of that book

it actually has a couple of sample tests

and refers to loads and loads and loads of others.

So there were people whose whole career is working out good tests, yeah.

- (Q5) Um, I was wondering what is the
- Who is that?

- I was wondering what's the title of that thin book that you recommend

because I didn't get it when you were talking about it.

Yeah. It's called "How to Improve..."

Now, the polyglots will remember this title

and the polynots will have forgotten the first word already,
[Laughter]

"How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately"

by Boris Shekhtman. It costs around $10.

The guy, actually, um...

is Russian by birth. And he was

employed by the Foreign Service Institute

to teach Russian.

He was the head of teaching Russian

for diplomats in the US.

And he taught there for many many many years.

And he realised that certain practices

were common to the students that were doing the best.

And so, when he left the FSI,

he made his own company

teaching some of these practices.

And the main part of it is activating vocabulary:

how to get passive knowledge into active knowledge.

And this book,

there's actually a second edition,

which apparently has a few more wisdoms in it

- I don't have that - um...

But this captures

practices that you can do

on your own or with a friend or with a teacher

on how to activate vocabulary.

So, "How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately".

Please buy it and support him.

I learned of him, by the way, from...

what's his name? Harold...

who did the Chinese

- course.
- for Michel Thomas.

Michel Thomas Chinese course.

- Goodman. Harold Goodman.
- Harold Goodman. Yeah.

So he liked some of my videos

and said, "Oh, I like your videos."
Blah, blah, blah...

And started... so I had some email exchanges with him.

And, he was taught languages first by Michel Thomas,

and said "Michel Thomas died, so I needed a new teacher."

And he searched high and low and he found Boris Shekhtman,

and he said, "This guy is phenomenal."

That got me into buying that book.

And I agree.

- Yeah.
- (Q6) Hi. So, going back to 'seppe Peano,

my question is

which is the influence
of the Axiomatic Theory of 'seppe Peano

on the Axiomatic...

No, just joking.

- That's a very interesting question because...
- 'seppe Peano invented... No, I'm not finished.

'seppe Peano invented a language you know....