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....