Ancient Language Learning DESTROYS Modern Methods - How to Become Fluent FAST – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.we are the most literate society that has ever existed so we have enormous amounts of information Antiquity is not like that how people learned Latin let's say 2,000 years ago because clearly they didn't have dualingo and they didn't have this conversation wasn't happening like this yes they use a lot of rote memory in Antiquity pretty much all of the education is individual you start school when your parents think that you have that maturity learning vocab is really really important in the ancient world because you cannot use a dictionary you know you can't look them up so I'm a professor at the University of reading um and that means that part of my time I teach undergraduates about the ancient world and part of my time I do research about the ancient world so I try to discover things about it that are not already known so in terms of research I'm a linguist and I work specifically on the kind of the Latin and Greek languages and how how well partly just how they work but also how people understood them and how people taught them in Antiquity so for example we know how we learn Latin today it's not a secret what happens in a Latin class there are textbooks Etc but what happened in a Latin class 2,000 years ago supposing you were an ancient Greek and you wanted to learn Latin was your Latin class like our Latin class well no it wasn't is the answer and so I look at what we can know about what their Latin classes were actually like I also look at what actually happens with the language so for example I've just published a book on Latin lone words in ancient Greek so we tend to think well Greek speakers they weren't borrowing words from Latin it wasn't cool to borrow words from Latin whereas speakers are always borrowing words from Greek it's very very cool to borrow words from Greek but actually that's not true there are an awful lot of words that Greek speakers do borrow from Latin now we're not talking in the fifth century BC here we're talking more like in the 2 Century ad when the Greek speakers are all part of the Roman Empire and that's why they're borrowing words but I'm also looking like which words are they borrowing why are they borrowing those particular words some words are obviously like it is cool to borrow this word and other words aren't and that partly has to do with what kind of categories they are and that Maps interestingly onto lone words today so like you think about where do we borrow words well we like to borrow words for food for example there's an awful lot of foreign words in English for food and that's not just true because obviously we borrow the food yes I mean if you're going to if you're going to borrow the taco it kind of makes sense to borrow the the word Taco but it goes further than that because foods that we didn't borrow we still like to use a French word for and that has to do with many cultures just finding it cool to use a foreign word for Foods also for clothes um we like to borrow French words for clothes and the French like to borrow English words for clothes and back in Antiquity the Romans borrow Greek words for food and clothes and the Greeks borrowed Latin words for food and clothes so there's a a kind of something amiliar about the the way that they're borrowing these words so that's what I do in terms of research and then the that's not the main part of my life the the other half of what I do is teaching so I teach undergraduates and I teach graduate students um and then I teach school children because I've got a project called the reading ancient School room where we reconstruct what an ancient School looks like and what people actually did in an ancient school and then we invite children to come and find out not only what it's like to write on a wax tablet but what kinds of things you actually did write on a wax tablet if you were an ancient child wow okay where to start let's go back to the very some of the very first things that you said before we get into my journey of language I think it'll come out naturally through the evolution of this conversation you said that you studied kind of how people learn learned Latin let's say 2,000 years ago because clearly they didn't have dualingo and they didn't have this conversation wasn't happening like this I couldn't get across uh you know Mainland Europe to to speak to you Etc so how different was it and how effective was it compared to the way we're doing it now yeah as far as I can work out and you know the data are not going to be huge on this point but as far as I can work out it's roughly equally effective that's to say I've got no evidence that it's more effective or less effective and that's partly because if you think about language learning today there's a huge range of effectivenesses so there's plenty of people who you know they tried to learn a foreign language and they didn't get anywhere nothing happened and you know maybe they spent four years in school learning French but it doesn't mean that today they can walk into a shop in France and buy something really really simple and common they just they didn't learn any French um but then there are other people who maybe they didn't have any more exposure to French than that first person and they have learned French and they can go carry on a conversation so there's a huge range in how effective language learning is because it's not just about the method that's used but also about the person who's learning um if that person kind of really wants to learn the language and really makes an effort it just comes out really different from if that person is not genuinely interested and there's also an issue that different learning styles really suit different people so there are some people who work really well by their ears they can pick up a lot of information that way um they can they can retain it well it just works really well and other people they're just not good at learning things using their ears they might be however good at Learning things another way and like for example you give them written texts and they'll do much better some people are good at learning things with grammar some people are not good at learning things with grammar and so any language learning system that you use is going to work for some people in your class and not for others and whether some people that will almost always work for and some people almost never work for there's also a group of people for whom it's going to work with one system and not H another but those are not equally distributed if you see what I mean um I don't think it's really true that like one system is inherently better it's that different people have different brains and different things will work for them which unfortunately you do not know when you start your class which of my students need this and which of my students need that so so it's really hard to gauge Effectiveness today and it's even harder to gauge effectiveness in Antiquity where we have the results but we almost never have the information on how long it took to achieve those results so some people learned some Latin speakers learned Greek and some Greek speakers learned Latin really really well no question about that we've got the results how much time and effort did it take them that we almost never have um so I you know it's it's very hard to know but could they could they learn it you know not as native speakers not not as little children but learning it later could they learn it so that they knew it really well the answer is definitely yes we have people writing in languages that we know they are not native speakers of and doing it effectively flawlessly wow okay then uh just one followup to that before I give my my my ideas in that what were they specifically doing though were they more doing translation of text did they have a tutor who would constantly speak to them in that language what was the if there is any or if you have any data or understanding of what the predominant method you know like we have a traditional method now in school what was their predominant predominant method right so they do have a teacher who can speak to them in that in that second language definitely um it's not always a native speaker but they they do have a teacher who can speak it right okay they don't when they talk about learning a foreign language they don't say I want to learn to read Latin or I want to learn to read Greek they say I want to learn to speak Latin or I want to learn to speak Greek because even though they will in most cases learn to read and right that's not what they see as the key element in knowing a foreign language it's being able to speak it and that of course is because both Latin and Greek are living languages in Antiquity so nowadays there are people who speak Latin and ancient Greek but that's not the main reason that most people would learn those languages the main reason would be to read it but that's just not really true in Antiquity they their living languages which you know makes total sense um they have a teacher and the teacher can speak the language and they have a dictionary and the dictionary is arranged by subject it's a bilingual dictionary and it's got um little little sections with maybe 10 to 20 words in each section on different topics now learning vocab is really really important in the ancient world because when they write they do not leave spaces between the words so if you want to read a text in Antiquity you need to know what the words are yes you need to be able to recognize them because if you do not recognize the words you cannot use a dictionary you know you can't look them up so now a Latin student will say gosh I've never seen this word senatus let me look in the dictionary I'll look under s because it begins with s but the student knows it begins with s because the student has a space you know the student sees that word with a space before it and a space after it but the ancient Latin student doesn't have those spaces doesn't know that the word cotus begins with s because can't be really sure that that s doesn't attach to the the previous word so one of the main things you need to do is learn loads and loads of vocab and therefore they have these dictionaries which are not in alphabetical order they also have dictionaries in alphabetical order but it looks as though that's not what they're mainly using at the beginning they use these classified ones and they just basically learn one section at a time so you'll have a section on birds and you'll learn the names of birds you'll have a section on fish you'll learn the names of fish you'll have a section on four qued animals you'll learn those names parts of the human body you learn those words and until you have learned a lot of words you're not going near a normal written out text so we can give our students like sentences and paragraphs and even texts at a relatively early stage because of the word Division and they can't so what they give them in written form is these very cute little bilingual stories which are divided into very very short lines basically one two or three words per line and they have a line forline equivalent between the Latin and the Greek and originally these were stories about a child who goes to school and learns ancient Greek they were Roman stories written for Roman children and they are so cute they have the child he gets up in the morning and he washes and he brushes his teeth and he calms his hair he's a very good little child he goes to school he's accompanied by his personal slave boy because you know let's be fair here it's not the it's not the people too poor to own a slave who are going to school um so he's got his personal slave boy and he's accompanied by his pedagogue and possibly he has a nurse to help him get dressed he goes to school he doesn't have to carry his own stuff mind you he's got a personal slay for for that yes um and then when he gets to school um he says hello to the teacher there is no set start time to a Roman school day you get there when you get there and so you walk in and you say hello to the teacher you interrupt the teacher for that purpose and then you say hello to everybody else who's already there and then you sit down and start working on your first task because pretty much all of the education is individual there being no set start time to the Academic Year either so nowadays you know everybody um who turns seven in a particular year they're going to start school on the same day but it's not like that in Antiquity you start school when your parents think that you have that maturity and that means you're probably the only child who starts school on the day that you start school and so you can't really be grouped meaningfully with somebody you know somebody else who has the same background that you do and so they just take it from there and so you arrive at school you do your task and then you when you've done your task you go up to the teacher and you go over it um and a lot of what we know about Roman schools comes from these cute little bilingual textbooks explaining um the day of a of a not very good child in some respects I mean he starts out good but there there are different version he's not very good at all um so that's what the Romans use to learn Greek but the Greeks they didn't learn Latin in primary school they learned Latin later um at sort of teenager level so they didn't really they didn't really want to write stories about small children learning languages and they write little dialogues about grown-ups not learning languages but kind of using them so there's a story about somebody who goes to the bank and borrows money there's a story about somebody who goes shopping and buys food somebody who goes shopping and buys clothes somebody who goes to visit a friend who's ill you know things that you might actually do very much like the dialogues in modern foreign language techbooks where you you know you go to a cafe in Paris and you buy a quason and you pay for it 10 euros and this gives you the culture as well as giving you the the language so these are these are readable by a child who or by a person who hasn't learned much of the foreign language yet because the lines are so short and you have this bilingual translation so you may not know what homo means but you see on the same line right across on N or anthropos until you say okay that means person or man depending on what sense of homo we've got um so probably what you do with these things you don't translate them yes because they're already bilingual probably what you do is you memorize the half in the language that you're learning using the half in the language you already know to make sure you understand what it means and then you go and you perform it just the way nowadays you know when you've learned your little French dialogue then you go perform your little French dialogue to show that you know it and while you're doing this you're also learning all of these chunks of vocab and So eventually you get to the stage where you have enough vocab that you can start reading an actual text now obviously you're also doing some conversation something oral but we don't have as good evidence for what that is because of course it's only the written stuff that really survives um but then when you when you get to the stage where you can do something um that is that involves an actual text then you get this text which you know it doesn't have any word division maybe it doesn't have any punctuation um it's much harder than our text and at this point you're also usually reading something that was not written for Learners so we write things especially for Learners or we adopt them especially for Learners and they do that in the bilingual stage so those bilingual texts are written especially for Learners and occasionally they'll take a a text that wasn't written for Learners and they'll put it in that bilingual format and then it's been adapted um but when you've when you've finished the bilingual stage you're getting a real a real text and these things are hard so you you get a dictionary you look up the words in the dictionary you write the translation of the words over the original the way our students do today but unlike students today you've got to put the punctuation in yourself which is hard you've got to work out where the words divide which is hard and then when you've prepared your little chunk you go up to the teacher and you read it alloud with all the you know with all the punctuation in the right place and the right expression the rest of it and then you translate it um and then you get another bit to work on is that making sense it makes complete and total sense I am curious on uh one thing before they're getting into these bilingual texts of course and before they're even maybe getting into the uh the bilingual mini stories you said that they're memorizing you know these vocab words for instance yeah were they using rot memory I didn't really mean before I suspect simultaneous suspect that it's the at the same time okay but it's very hard to know because what we have is mostly the materials right um but yes they use a lot of rot memory in Antiquity rot memory is a big thing not just for language learning but more General um it's how the education system works and that's partly because if you think about how their society Works they're not a super literate Society we are we are the most literate society that has ever existed so we have enormous amounts of information that exists in writing and exists only in writing an illiterate person has terrible trouble getting around and just doing basic things in the 21st century but Antiquity is not like that indeed it's writing that kind of has second place and writing isn't very efficient it's not just that there's no space between The Words which you know it's it's a problem that but also they have a different book form so we have a book form where it's relatively easy to find things we have all these different pages and the pages all have numbers and at the start of every book we have a table of contents explaining what kind of things you got with each page and you can open that book to any page you want it's really kind of simple so if you look in the table of contents and it says I don't know laws about um about cows are on page 45 and you want a law about cows you open it to page 45 and there are your laws about cows but in Antiquity for most of antiquity that a book consists of a Papyrus rooll it's just a a long scroll and you can't easily open it to any one place and it doesn't have numbered Pages it couldn't have numbered Pages because it doesn't have pages and it doesn't have a table of contents at the start and it doesn't have the kind of help that we have so it doesn't have headings it doesn't have paragraphs um it's just a block of text and that means that if you've got something like that and you want to find the laws about cows you don't know where they are and therefore even for people who are literate and are functioning in a literate way memory is just more useful because if you want to know efficiently where to find those laws about cows it you you need them in your head would it would it make sense to draw the inference that there long-term memory or memory for stories was incredibly good then yes okay they did a lot of memory training and their memory was much much better than ours yes all right I mean yeah because I mean just in my short span on the earth the fact that I can't tell you anyone's number that I've met after the year 1999 right uh tells you enough is that you know we can't memorize seven we don't even look at it anymore but uh okay so I find that incredibly fascinating let me give you just an understanding of me uh a little bit and and then we'll come back to some of the the parts of the questions that I have I was born in the US grew up in a family that spoke English although my father is from Nigeria and he grew up speaking English as well but also Yuba and he was obviously exposed to a whole lot of other languages as well just uh there in Nigeria my mother grew up she grew up in um on the south side of Chicago completely English speaking it was her idea while I was young that it would be a great idea for me to learn Spanish and so I was exposed to Spanish probably by the time I was five or six right and so Spanish comes very easy to me uh I don't have to think very hard there's no struggle right even when I didn't use it all that much you know uh up until teenage years I then went on to learn a whole bunch of other other languages uh some from travel and some from Individual and so uh my individual use and those languages being Spanish French Italian which would make sense obviously English I already mentioned um I learned German essentially on my own um and then Danish and Swedish I both played in I played in Denmark first and that was my base and then throughout the covid time I was basically in Sweden and then I've played a chunk of my career in the Balkan where I'm at right now I'm actually in Zagreb and so I learned Croatian and Serbian first because I played in Serbia uh and then I played in aeran for about two and a half years so I learned Russian and that was a conscious decision for me to learn Russian rather than uh aani due to my Slavic background right with all of that came tons of mistakes as you can imagine using the traditional method over focusing on grammar sometimes not knowing at all what I'm doing just kind of shoving everything into my head right just trying to figure it out and seeing what's G to what's going to pop to some more now refined methods and ways that I see work and uh and I will say work for me but that I found because um I have a friend who just like you said is horrendous with his ear learning like that just doesn't you can tell what comes out he doesn't have that gift Talent what it's just not there it's not there and so one of the most interesting things was well he's an American learning a Slavic language learning Croatian where did all of the methods where did the success come from if he can't just hear it and speak it maybe I can I can do that a little naturally better um and so obviously immersion is one of the greatest and easiest ways no one's really going to going to debate much of if you're there and you have to and you have to use the language and all of that versus actually there are some people for whom immersion doesn't work it's really fascinating there are people okay you put them in a 247 linguistic situation and they don't pick it up they just don't get okay okay what what happens do we know what works for them instead I don't know I'm I'm I'm passing they speak language there's another way to teach these people the foreign language but I definitely know people uhuh for whom it just has not worked I see that's I I find that interesting so I learned two of the languages without having gone to the country even when I arrived in Italy for the first time I could speak Italian and was able to tell people this is my first day in Italian in Italian you know it my first day here and so I'm a learner I'm a very big self-learner tons of books around here I like learning that's my that's one of my things that I like to do outside of sports and um and so one of the I've already found this fascinating I can already see that I'm going to go watch this everything that you just said to understand uh ancient Rome and and and Greece better one of the reasons I'm doing this to is to try to find I know like you said things will work differently for different people however just like if I I wanted to teach you how to play soccer right and how to kick um someone who doesn't know how to c kick could waste a whole lot of your time versus me who might just say well this is that's not going to work this is definitely gonna we can cut out we can cut down your time drastically if you guys don't have to figure it out and and so I found at least some similarities what appear to me within language learning and that I'm hearing from other polyglots and hearing from you know people that are in positions like you that are truly you know making it their life's work to study this stuff and um I'm G to assume you're aware of what is a buzzword now but Dr Steven crash's theory on comprehensible input are you familiar with what this is I'm aware of it but if you want me to comment on it you're gonna have to give me a refresher I will I will do my best to to to summarize it but it's essentially Theory based on SE language acquisition that hopes to mimic the way in which we learned our mother tongue stating that the majority of what we learned was through comprehensible input at first meaning that we saw something and I said this is a headphone you know I didn't spell out headphone I didn't have you break down I didn't write to you as a two-year-old what what it was you can't read right but I had to say this headphone and then I would maybe do something like ah this is a head maybe use something else is a phone we put it up to and you figured it out right through the the fact that you understood what I was saying even though you probably couldn't repeat it just is what happens to Children of course they're taking in tons and tons of input throughout those first year two years three years however long before they want to have their first words and then you know an assimilation process happens that allows them to then speak and speak correctly even they're getting constant feedback they'll say this is red you'll say no it's blue and they'll put the words in the wrong order and that's essentially the basis behind it it's an attempt to mimic uh how we learn language is naturally and uh to make it all full circle I the guy who couldn't hear his name is Tyler and he's not very good at at languages in Slavic language versus in English it's very very distant you know and and so we can't just break down the words they don't mean anything to him it'd be easier for him to learn Swedish or Danish or German or something like this and so the comprehensible input method helped a whole lot because it it took off and while his brain is very analytical he just can't when you're to break down these words you have to learn it's a whole it's alien it's literally alien you know Slavic text versus an English text yeah no I tried to learn polish and it didn't work I've learned quite a few modern languages well not as many as you definitely sure um but but yeah the Slavic ones didn't work for me and the Semitic ones worked even less and that's precisely for the reason that you say that okay these these words were too foreign for me there was nothing I could really hang them on on in my brain that I already knew and so they didn't stick right uh so I I was curious a what you think of that as being let's say better I I like you you mentioned those people that take four years of French I did take four years of Spanish but the reason I took it was just for the EAS a because I wanted to play football that's why I took it right but my friends wanted to learn and they don't speak any Spanish they speak absolutely zero and so my question then becomes why are we still teaching in the traditional method even though some of them may not come out obviously speaking but could we not just like in my analogy of the footballer the soccer player wants to teach you could we not make them give them a little bit more of a leg up by using this the other this is something that gets debated a lot um and I think it's it's really complicated because the the data are not as clear as I think you're presenting them as being okay um I Heard a a fascinating lecture from a linguist who said you know we all think of natural language acquisition that children do as being kind of the gold standard because they learn so well without putting any work in but he says that's not really true if you look at a small child trying to learn language they're working really really hard it's most of what they do for about five years and at the end of it they sound like a five-year-old and so if we manage to exactly duplicate that with an adult learning French you're going to work full-time on it for five years and you'll sound like a five-year-old and he had a certain point there um that I think we we tend to underestimate how hard that natural method is and how much how much time it takes and I think the people who for whom immersion doesn't work are often people who you know they don't stick it out they don't do it fulltime for five years because they can't stand it and they don't have the time you the five year-old does have the um there's a very interesting set of experiments going on at Oxford University at the moment about teaching Latin orally and of course Latin is normally taught entirely through um grammar and translation um and it you know there isn't normally a speaking component and they're experimenting with a speaking component which enables one to use some of these comprehensible input theories um more easily and what they seem to be finding is that overall it is working better but it's not working for everyone and it's not always working enormously better I think overall it is working better but part of the reason it's working better is people putting more time in and of course any system is going to work better if you put more if you put more time in and for some people you know if you look at how the brain is structured there are things that are connected to your ears that are not connected to your eyes and so if you learn a language using both your ears and your eyes you've got actually more bits of your brain available to help you that language um of course if you do it only with your ears then you maybe don't have more bits available than if you did it only with your eyes but if you do it both ways you've got more bits available which gives you a leg up I think it can't be a question that if you you're engaging more bits of your brain you've got to leg up but there are people who who feel really shy and inhibited about speaking in a foreign language and and active production is really really helpful for language learning so if you try to learn it only passively so that you you can maybe read it you can maybe understand it but you never are trying to produce it again you're missing out on on things your brain can do that are that are helpful and so when you have students who just can't face opening their mouths in a foreign language the oral method has some problems so although basically I'm in favor of an oral method because I think overall it works better um to kind of combine speaking with learning grammar and with reading and with writing I think the more different things you do the better it works I think I have to acknowledge that different people work differently and that therefore in an ideal world everybody would take a diagnostic class be diagnostic test before they started a language class and then would learn by the method that fits them the best right and uh well what's interesting about that in the oral method I'm not sure I know that I so number one I would I would agree with you 100% that desire the decision and desire to learn the language is above all because they will push through like you said the immersion you know if they just are just going to stick it out no matter what however long it takes that usually brings some sort of results better than a structured course in class and kind of offloading the responsibility to the school and someone else uh what I what's funny now I don't know whether or not what I would consider My Method truly while it incorporates portions of the comprehensible input method I do so many other things and I've I've seen and talked to other polyglots that I know that they do too but one of the most important things I've seen number one uh people who have issues talking to other people talk to themselves I I have full conversations with people within my own head uh you know on a constant basis with a limited vocab which is yes now I've done that too when I was learning Norwegian um and I had some problems with Norwegian because I was living on a farm and they spoke this dialect and I hadn't yet understood that the problem was the norion I was learning was not the same norion that they were speaking so there wasn't any comprehensible input coming in here yeah and so I would go for these long walks and think in Norwegian and I had to bring a dictionary in order to think yes you know it seems really silly but in the end I did manage to learn a reasonable amount of Norwegian I'm not sure I still know it but it did it did get me to a point where I could start producing enough Norwegian um I'm not I'm not the kind who who is shy about speaking it has to be said but it's nevertheless I agree with you 100% doing it in your head to yourself is is really really helpful that of course is not something that anybody but the person concerned can do um you know if you want to learn the language you can do that in your head um um I mean I've tried learning lots of different languages in different ways so I've done I've done Latin and Greek sort of the traditional way where you um you do the grammar and you do the translation and then I thought I'm G to learn Swiss German as a as a purely non-written language and I'm not going to look at any written materials at all and I'm going to see how that goes and then I started doing the spoken Latin as well to see how that goes um I learned Swedish purely by reading I didn't need any active competence in Swedish I only needed passive and of course once you have some Norwegian Swedish is not that not that hard um but I just got some long books out of the library and bashed my way through them so you know I have tried different methods but I don't think I'm in your category but one of the people who finds it easier than most sure you found it easier even from the get-go yes yes well not when I was in elementary school but by the time I was in junior high school I was it was just easier for me to learn languages sure than most people so I think I think there is there is a certain question of I don't know whether one wants to call it talent but there is sure there are some people who find it easier and it's cumulative because you know learning one language is not totally different from learning another language so the more you learn the better you get at it and that's particularly true if you start learning languages that are related to each other because you kind of know what kind of things they're going to do but even with unrelated languages once you've learn one foreign language you you're aware where English is really idiosyncratic and so you're not you're not expecting languages to to all be like English in a way that the first time around you are um so you know people who are good at it and like doing it get better and better and better at it and we can use methods that I wouldn't really recommend for people who are just starting out so you know my experiment with Swiss German it was fun but it was a linguist kind of fun it wasn't something that I would that I would commend right for someone who just who needs to learn Swiss German because they're moving to Switzerland or etc etc yeah but also who who doesn't have a lot of experience in learning foreign languages it was a it was the kind of game you play when you've done it multiple times and I think when if we come back to Latin and Greek learning Greek was almost always the first foreign language for a Roman but Latin was not necessarily the first foreign language going the other way because because a lot of people who were Greek speakers were not native Greek speakers um so they might have been for example actually from a bilingual Greek Egyptian family or even from an Egyptian family and then they learned Greek in school and then they decided they wanted to go into Roman law and now they're learning Latin I see um they've already got some of these skills that you learn from learning a foreign language right uh one of the things that I was going to add to the to the method and things just by thinking and another one thing that I found and I think it's in line a little bit with what they were trying to do in Antiquity is seeking to understand I found that when you have a story and when you have a concept like they've broken things into Birds fish animals and and stuff like this or however they would do it human body whatever um by seeking to understand a story by seeking to understand a concept or something greater something that's greater than the words that you're looking at it just kind of something else happens along you're no longer putting pegs on this white wall without any sort of connection you've got this concept to it and context as we know definitely is very helpful when trying to understand you may not be able to reproduce What You've just read or or learned or heard or however it is but at the very least you know you know something you're G you understand something something and that's a huge point and something that I think gets missed at least from what I've seen for the people who are asking I'm trying to learn this language I'm trying this and I kind of analyze a little bit what they're what they're doing and there's all these all these things all over the place they've got dualingo teaching them some words about this stuff kind of over here and over here they're doing this and there's no story there's no nothing that they kind of Peg themselves for a win because what I found for sure for some of the people that it's hard for it's so important to get that early win within language to keep you going most people take the thing this this is too hard I don't get it this whatever or they maybe they they have great persistence they stick with it for six months and it's just not no wins and no wins leads to you quitting that's how it works we don't keep doing things that we're bad at or we're not succeeding at yeah that's really true and so I I found that seeking to understand was was was huge as well as well as you know at least utilizing the comprehensible method there's a definite definite difference between taking something and while I float for a lot of people just at that beginner stage because most people don't get past the beginner to say intermediate there's a big difference between deciding that you want to go from I'm I can communicate walking into the store to I want to read this ancient book in that language there's a big switch there's a lot of writing and thinking and that that energy input is long and you're not going to see any light at the end of the tunnel for a while and then it will you know event you just go whoa you know I understand everything I don't have to think about this and it's great and so that there's a big switch there uh let me just check one of my so you when you're thinking of uh Latin and and Greek the way that you go about them now do you read text or what I guess I should ask you because you're so I didn't know you were so talented as well what languages do you speak or do you feel comfortable in or that you've studied even the ones that you've forgotten and what do you consider your strongest and what are you using constantly right um my strongest might actually be French um which is the first one that I learned I was in Paris for two months last year teaching in French at the sorbon and I didn't really have a problem with the French there it takes me a little longer than teaching an English but but basically um I would say French is proba it's probably stronger either than Greek or Latin me which is a bit weird given I put you know I put my whole career in on Latin and Greek but French is just a lot easier um and then probably German and Latin would pretty much tie for second and I would say when it comes when it comes to reading and writing probably better in Latin and when it comes to speaking and probably better in German um I have done some spoken Latin but it's still not that easy for me um and then Greek definitely um comes after Latin but probably before any other modern languages and then we're into things that I have at one time known better than I now do so I spent some time in Leiden and I learned Dutch but the Dutch is not currently all that functional um as spent some time in Switzerland I learned Swiss German but it's not currently all that functional spent some time in Wales and I learned Welsh I spent some time in Norway and I learned Norwegian I spent some time in Italy and I've learned Italian at least three times but it doesn't stick partly because it gets confused with French um yeah I did a bit of modern Greek I did some Hebrew I did two years of Hebrew I should have ended up with more Hebrew than I did but let's face it the Hebrew never really clicked I did eight weeks of Arabic and that didn't click either um I did a little tiny bit of Polish and that didn't work and then there's a bunch of ancient languages that I've kind of looked at so liian and hittite and um askan and umbre and and you know these are languages that nobody nobody knows really all that well um but but I've had a look at them but then I've forgotten them wow okay that is very very FAS so you had massive exposure to different languages uh and even courses and stuff like that uh I would I would be curious then even given what we've already said about different methods and things I'm curious myself how would you go about it for someone who would want to learn I I'll give you two since this is a unique opportunity how would you go about it if you could give a simple breakdown of the first attempts for someone to try and learn Latin uh to speak in Latin and obviously to read or to be able to read if their goal if their grand goal is to be able to read some of these ancient texts and then how would you go about it if you just had to I don't think I heard Spanish on your that's right Spanish is one I haven't done okay so yeah if you were going to learn Spanish that would be another one that I would do so if you could separate those two uh into how you would approach them I'd love to hear okay so Spanish is me and Latin is somebody else yes uh yes yes yes exactly okay so for somebody else trying to learn Latin I would I'd really want to know who they are and what they find hard and easy and I'd really want to spend some time sitting down with this person trying to understand what would work for them because I really think people are different um but regardless of who they are I would recommend that they find a Latin teacher I think while learning learning um by yourself is possible it just is harder for most people than with a teacher and ideally I would recommend a Latin teacher who speaks it as well as being able to read and write it and I would recommend doing the the kind of mixed approach and I would recommend starting off with doing some reading so always start with with a text and with grammar sorry I interrupt that famous one I I've never really I've never attempted to learn Latin myself but there's that famous one with the Rome is this the river is I'm not sure of its name it's popular know I don't actually know what you're talking very very popular very but I'm sorry yeah go ahead I'll find it um so there are lots of different textbooks and which textbook you use is going to be intimately connected with which teacher you use because most teachers are only prepared to teach out of one or at most two different textbooks so i' tell them to find a teacher that they get on with that they feel inspired by that they feel they click with and find a textbook that works for that teacher um my sense is that with most different textbooks you can actually learn it makes it makes a lot less difference which textbook you use than people think but that you should you should have some grammar from day one because Latin is hard without grammar you should have some reading from day one because any language is hard if it's just disembodied bits and you should have some speaking from day one because that engages different bits of your brain um and you should work with a with a teacher now for me if I was going to learn Spanish um it would partly depend on why I was learning Spanish but assuming that I want to learn like all four bits of it so I can I can read it and write it and speak it and hear it I would go and I would look for a Spanish speaker to to help me because I really think like I said learning languages works better if you have doesn't have to be like a professional teacher but somebody I'd want somebody whose Spanish was good um preferably native um and I would want a textbook because I would want some grammar um grammar doesn't doesn't bother me at all I've done grammar of lots of languages and I think it's easier to be told how the irregular verbs conjugate than to have to work it out for yourself how the irregular verbs conjugate so I'd want I'd want that kind of information and I'd want a text um and one reason I have not learned Spanish is that when I was a graduate student I learned Italian like I said for two years solid I took Italian classes it didn't do me much good I had to read some Italian So eventually I go off to the library and say I'm just going to bash through this Italian article and I sit there for two days with this 80-page article and a big Italian dictionary and it goes it works I understand what's in this article but every time I look up a word in the dictionary it's never exactly the same in the dictionary as it is in the text and I don't really understand why until I get to the very end and it says Madrid and I realized that that article was not in Italian that article was in Spanish wow but I got through it anyway and I had understood what it said even though I was using an Italian dictionary instead of a Spanish dictionary because when it's something in your subject matter and you know other romance languages you can you can do it so that's why I never bothered to learn Spanish um but assuming that I really do want to learn Spanish I would then you know I'd want a text um and I'd want a grammar and I'd want a a human being and what I'd want from that human being wouldn't be Direction so I would go through the grammar and I would read the text but then I'd want to meet that human being for at least an hour a week and speak to them in Spanish about what I was doing so I could ask questions about the stuff I didn't understand and I'd want to do that in Spanish I see uh I 100% agree it's funny too just to to go to your your part on grammar it's utilizing it's like just enough there needs to be just enough I when learning German got way too caught up on the grammar because I was like what is this the words got to go here this verb two verbs this and what there what is going on I got so so caught up in it that learning the language stopped being the thing that I was actually doing without me knowing this an obsession with the rules is what end up ended up happening and that's what happens when you go grammar extreme what was nice was when I finally switched and realized what was happening and started to get it the fact that I I know the the the triggers for the the dative case you know and the prepositions and I know all that because I had this weird session on German grammar for for a while and it it actually ended up helping me when I started to formulate sentences and the I know what this is and I don't feel you know I'm very confident about this I know the rule right and so there has to be it is better you're right if I can if you can tell me how to do the irregular verbs or even the standard conjugation yeah it's nice it's nice to know than figuring it all out yourself but as a list form right it's kind of not to not don't get stuck on on this because that's not the language isn't the grammar the language grammar or the rules and so I like what you've done with your tutor and and specifically especially because what ends up happening what I've seen at least is that the tutors will come in with their prepackaged no understanding of you what you are what your goals are what this ours and they they'll give this token word to yes we tailor it to you but really they'll just come in with their package and they'll do this and what you've done is create a course in which you want to talk to them about what you want to talk about the subjects that you are interested in that you have maybe even done some work outside of obviously the class to do so which is tough to get in a um in a school right we can't all tailor till all 20 of you but it's not hard to find a speaker and you know I don't need a teacher I need a speaker or somebody who has the knowledge if it's a if it's a non-spoken language and when I was a student I used to just trade with my friends so like I started learning Welsh because I had a friend who was a native speaker of Welsh she wanted to learn ancient Greek and I wanted to learn Welsh so we swapped and we met up every two or three days and we spend an hour where I'd help her with Greek and an hour where she'd help me with Welsh and it was just fun it was a nice fun way to interact with one's friends and and there wasn't there wasn't any grind to it at all yeah yeah so I and you know I like being in charge of my own language learning yeah yeah which is something that I I've I've wanted to try in preach uh and I it's kind of and I know this is two people talking who enjoy language learning and enjoy the process but uh we haven't um delegated our responsibility to learn the language to someone else or to an institution you've very much taken control over it and and made it work for you so um I won't take any more time I have other questions but I will what I will what I will do is I'll find that Latin book because I think it would be interesting I'd love to hear your your okay thoughts on it it's very popular and it kind of follows the comprehensible input method let's say because it's very it's very basic um and it gets people from absolutely no Latin to understanding you know a little bit and uh I definitely I'm going to have some other questions I think I'll have questions on even what diagnostic questions you would want to find out if you could run a diagnosis on everybody before they you know learned a language what would you want to ask them so um in any case we will edit this to make it look tremendous uh and and break things down and probably put things in little short stuff but this has been utterly fascinating awesome thanks again see you later bye bye