Lýdia Machová, a language mentor, teaches people how they can learn any language by themselves. In this upbeat, inspiring talk, she reveals the secrets of polyglots and shares four principles to help unlock your own hidden language talent — and have fun while doing it.
Here is the full text of her TED talk titled “The Secrets of Learning a New Language”.
Lýdia Machová – TRANSCRIPT
I love learning foreign languages. In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years, currently working on my eighth one.
When people find that out about me, they always ask me, “How do you do that? What’s your secret?”
And to be honest, for many years, my answer would be, “I don’t know. I simply love learning languages.” But people were never happy with that answer.
They wanted to know why they are spending years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency, and here I come, learning one language after another. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages.
And that made me wonder, too, how do actually other polyglots do it? What do we have in common?
And what is it that enables us to learn languages so much faster than other people?
I decided to meet other people like me and find that out. The best place to meet a lot of polyglots is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place to practice their languages. There are several such polyglot events organized all around the world, and so I decided to go there and ask polyglots about the methods that they use.
And so I met Benny from Ireland, who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one. He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them right away.
He doesn’t mind making even 200 mistakes a day, because that’s how he learns, based on the feedback. And the best thing is, he doesn’t even need to travel a lot today, because you can easily have conversations with native speakers from the comfort of your living room, using websites.
I also met Lucas from Brazil who had a really interesting method to learn Russian. He simply added a hundred random Russian speakers on Skype as friends, and then he opened a chat window with one of them and wrote “Hi” in Russian. And the person replied, “Hi, how are you?” Lucas copied this and put it into a text window with another person, and the person replied, “I’m fine, thank you, and how are you?” Lucas copied this back to the first person, and in this way, he had two strangers have a conversation with each other without knowing about it.
And soon he would start typing himself, because he had so many of these conversations that he figured out how the Russian conversation usually starts. What an ingenious method, right?
And then I met polyglots who always start by imitating sounds of the language, and others who always learn the 500 most frequent words of the language, and yet others who always start by reading about the grammar.
If I asked a hundred different polyglots, I heard a hundred different approaches to learning languages. Everybody seems to have a unique way they learn a language, and yet we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently.
And as I was listening to these polyglots telling me about their methods, it suddenly dawned on me: the one thing we all have in common is that we simply found ways to enjoy the language-learning process.
All of these polyglots were talking about language learning as if it was great fun. You should have seen their faces when they were showing me their colorful grammar charts and their carefully handmade flash cards, and their statistics about learning vocabulary using apps, or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language.