HOW TO LEARN LANGUAGES EFFECTIVELY | Matyáš Pilin | TEDxYouth@ECP

Last summer, when I was alone in Tallinn, Estonia, I had to face a challenge. This challenge was the simple phrase and many similar ones "Tere tulemast". I guess none of you speak Estonian. I take that as a no and I was in the same situation as you now last summer, because I never spoke Estonian, I never read an Estonian book, I never watched an Estonian movie, I never saw an Estonian song or met anyone Estonian. I had to act quickly, I had to be able to stay up to date in one place, be able to understand what the barista was saying when I ordered my coffee, be able to understand what the passport security person was asking me at the airport, when I came to Estonia I lived in Tallinn, I had to be able to understand the language, understand it right then and there, and this experience raised the question again.

How can you

learn

a language in a very limited time, understand it, be able to act with it, be able to work with it, meet people with it and, above all, progress in it? I attended a talk last September, which was right on top of this topic. He gave her a polyglot, she was from Slovakia and was willing to talk about how he/she was

learn

ing, how she was learning and continues to learn to this day, new

languages

. He told us about people who speak six, ten, twelve, sixteen

languages

, they even dedicate their entire lives to this idea of ​​being able to understand each one of them, or as many as they can, and if you were thinking that there is a magical way, some magical secret that She told me, I have to disappoint you, there is no single super method.

Polyglots around the world agree on one thing: there is no faster way to learn a language, it has to be personal, you have to be able to choose a personal way and find it, and find your language through a personal way. way and modify it as much as possible to suit your type of learning. Some people prefer to put their heads into vocabulary and fill it with words and phrases until their heads explode, some of us prefer to watch a movie to talk to a person in a pub or like me when I return from the bookseller working on an essay for Six Hours Until the last morning I meet a drunk Frenchman and I talk to him in game French and practice as much as I can.

There are many ways, some people even prefer those video games that you know your phone memorizes and that kind of thing. I'm not a big fan of that, but that's something personal again today, which I'll present to you. something different, it is or these are four points that are intrinsic to our learning, that are the pillars of any learning of any language that you ever do, it doesn't matter if it's Chinese, if it's Arabic, if it's Hebrew, Estonian or French. , Spanish, any language will therefore have these four things: message, importance, observation, understanding, it is all the same, the same goal, to learn a language

effectively

and, as you will soon discover, they are all interconnected.

You can't just focus on one of them, you can't just focus on the importance and hope that through this relevance to who you are you will be able to learn quickly or, similarly, you can't just focus on understanding like we do. In our schools today, we focus too much on memorizing vocabulary or learning phrases about whatever is prescribed in booklets, but that's not how you learn a language. I'll talk more about them later once the talk progresses. The first is a message for some of you. This may seem a little strange, but my message would be, okay, you'll see for yourself.

This phrase is in Stonian, since you know we speak Stonian, I'm not going to ask what it actually means, but will someone let me read it? I'm not fluent in Stonian, so bear with me. Speaking Stonian Now you still have no idea what this really means, I don't suppose that from some magical learning of some magically broken Stonian speaking or learning, you understand this phrase, but you can already see that it exists yah twice and because the language is Logically structured, you can deduce that, probably because also these two works have the same ending, this one, and this one and then these two, so maybe that means end and already in less than 30 seconds you understand a word in the languages ​​you know.

You've never seen it in your entire life, and by progressing like this, by taking these small steps, you'll really be able to learn it. What if I put another sentence here in a language that some of you speak, maybe more than some of you, maybe all of you? But surely that is more familiar to us, because we are an angular, French-speaking society, so the majority presumably and, if I put another one, one that we all speak, in English. This is how you learn a language, once you find the meaning, the message behind a sentence, you can acquire the language, there are signifiers in a language, which help you build a logical structure of this established language.

When you understand the message, you unconsciously acquire language, this does not mean that by understanding a phrase from the United Nations charter of human rights you understand Estonian or French or English. It just means that you will have the building blocks with which you can build the learning, you have this, the logical structure that is based on this language. Then you have importance, every language, no matter what it is, has to be useful to you, has to be relevant to you, has to be something you enjoy. When I was in school many years ago, in my primary school they forced me to study Spanish, I hate it, I couldn't stand it.

Nothing against the Spanish, nothing against that. I just didn't enjoy it. I couldn't learn a single phrase. When I was in Italy for my... residential trip to Edinburgh, I decided to study Italian and I thought, yeah, I'm going to learn this language and I failed because I couldn't enjoy it, because I just didn't enjoy it, and in fact, from one trip, I had more of the Swedish, because I met a Swedish friend who I am still in contact with to this day. This enjoyment is relevant to you which is important. It has to be relevant to our education, something you want to learn because you want to progress in your life.

It has to be relevant to your family, your friends, if you enjoy it. It has to be relevant because of your job, maybe you have a job in I don't know Ireland or Stockholm and you need to learn the language to be able to work with it, and like me maybe it's through travel because being international, that's what it's all about All this day, it means that you want to open yourself to other opportunities. For me that means seeing different cultures in different worlds and, as part of that, you have to be able to speed up the language at least to some extent.

Languages ​​are tools like any other part of our lives, they can be used in some meaningful way, once you find this meaningful way you will be able to learn much faster and therefore choose languages ​​that are useful to you. Now let's move on to the observation and this is probably the part that I think could be one of the most important simply because it can be so easily. This photo was taken when also last summer I was walking towards Mont Blank between France, Italy and Switzerland and when I took it I was crossing the Italian-French border.

I came from a small refugee on the French side, and I went up the mountain to cross the Italian side and on the same day I spoke French and Italian. My French is not good at all but I can speak it, Italian is much more difficult, but I was still able to understand People ask for a bed and in a dire situation they are not forced to sleep outdoors and in the wind and freezing cold because they will not be being pleasant at all. And from there I realized that there are two key things: that you have to be really immersed in a language to a certain extent, you can't just stay at home and hope that the language comes to you and that the knowledge that you are capable of learn.

It's actually going to come to you like that, you have to be able to put yourself there to pay attention and observe how people are doing, how they talk, how they get excited, and hopefully from that, develop your knowledge and this is in reality. one key thing and I think people should start doing this, they should look into something called: parent speaker. This is what I learned during the talk about polyglots in September, it's an idea that when you speak a new language you're like a baby, you don't know how to use the language, you're just in a world where we're all adults speaking a foreign language. and you hope to grasp a meaning about it. , grasp something you can't know, it's a world you can't understand, what you need is a parent speaker, someone who will talk to you on the same level, help you learn new words and actually correct you. , he will actually give you advice on how to speak better and now he will diminish you in any way.

That's key because when you're able to practice your speaking, you're learning in the sense that you learn faster because I think this is going to be the next slide after, so I quickly feel it. When you really learn a language through understanding, through observation, then you can speak the language, and this is one of the most important things because how else would you communicate with people, especially when you want to? travel? You have to be able to act. in your knowledge. You have to be able to find someone you can talk to along the same lines and you have to be able to listen a lot.

People don't want to listen, they go back to English, they go back to their natural language because they are afraid, don't be afraid, this is going to sound like a big cliché, don't be afraid to make mistakes, make them. People will correct them and you will learn from that. And now the other thing I was hoping to talk about is Understanding. And this can be divided into two parts: memory and understanding or knowledge. And I feel like nowadays in schools what we do is just fill our heads with vocabulary until they explode. We shouldn't do that because memory or knowledge is in understanding like for example, I know a sentence in Irish speaking Irish, does that mean I speak Irish in any way?

I don't even know exactly what the sentence means, but I know it's Irish. I have that knowledge, but I couldn't say that we don't understand the language in any way and that is the problem that we force ourselves to learn complex vocabulary that is not relevant to us. We force ourselves to fill our heads with words that have no meaning and that we will probably never use in our lives. We don't really focus on understanding them, understanding the structure and sentences to use our existing knowledge of other languages. of my native languages ​​to progress further. We should do that, we should try to learn by using our existing languages, we should use native languages, we should use our skills to speak from them, we should look at actions more than words or nouns.

When you learn what the word hurt means, it's even more helpful than what the word arm actually means. You can be like hurting, but what do we do with it? An arm doesn't work like that. Actions are more important than words and this type of progress is key to learning a language

effectively

. So today I presented to you four principles and some key points, some things you may have heard, some things we may be new to you parent speakers. All of these things are essential, you can eliminate one and hope the others come with it or you can focus on just one of them and completely ignore the others.

It's important to push yourself to your limits to get out and this is going to ring. It seems like a big cliché once again, but to push yourself, go out and experience the language firsthand. No school, no institution, no book can give you that and only the end. I would like to dispel one last thing that I have been told in the past and that I have heard people say to me or other people, which is talent. It is required that in order to learn languages ​​you need talent, you must be able to have this magical ability with the things you are born with, it is not true that anyone can learn a language.

Anyone I've ever met when they try hard enough. You are able to speak a language, some people are far superior to me and there are probably hundreds and millions of people like that. But it is what you strive for yourself that differentiates you from other people. So don't be afraid to push. Thank you.