Quote of the Week...from Steve Kaufmann

The best way to learn a language is to massively ingest it, by listening and reading.  Listening and reading are so powerful.  If you can read the books, you know the language.  To get to know a language takes a lot of time and a lot of interacting with it...and a lot of that time has to be on your own.  I think it's better to work on comprehension and vocabulary without pressure to reproduce the language (by speaking). 

                                                                               ---Steve Kaufmann

Steve Kaufmann is a 77-year-old Canadian polyglot...that is, someone who speaks more than two languages...in his case, twenty to varying degrees.  He has spent his lifespan traveling and living abroad, investing years in his country's foreign service.  I've seen him on YouTube and he really does know his field, able to switch at a moment's notice from one language to another.  The above quote, which I lifted verbatim from the Wikipedia article about him, sums up his philosophy about learning languages. I have long felt that my formal academic education in foreign languages, from elementary school through high school and even college, totally got it wrong when emphasizing sometimes arcane grammar concepts, perfect pronunciation, and grading students on the "correctness" of their speech instead of doing what they should have been doing, which was to stress building vocabulary and increasing listening and reading comprehension.  My life experience has been very different from Kaufmann's although I have entertained a long-time interest in foreign languages...I've yet to set foot on another country's soil.  Yet in today's world of near-instant communication and vast resources through the Internet I find it easy to access material in any language I want to pursue...of course, Wikipedia is a great starting place, along with an instant translation program or app.  I can also translate this blog and then note the new vocabulary and structure in the target language...pretty cool!  Steve Kaufmann has his own podcasts and a language-learning company called "LingQ"...I've heard that it's of limited use in its free version and that the premium version, for about ten bucks a month, opens up a lot of links and vocabulary-building features in a number of languages.  But for now, I'm listening to Steve's podcasts and working on my listening and reading.  The languages I'm focusing on, all of which I already have a reasonable...but to me, pretty inadequate...degree of understanding, are Spanish, French, German, Russian and Chinese...