Top 5 linguist hacks for language learners

Language learners and aspiring polyglots are missing out on SECRETS that linguists know. In this video, I share the top five tips, tricks, and hacks that are a repurposing -- if not a gross misuse -- of the tools of linguistics. These are the things I do every time I sit down to study, and I think they'll help you.

[Correction: at 5:15 it should read "finiront" with an 'o']

[FredoCorleoneJB]

I asked for toilet water (acqua gabinetto) instead of tap water (acqua rubinetto) at a restaurant in Italy

[vindelanda]

During an oral exam in my German class in university I said I had “Baumschmerz” (tree-pain?) instead of “Bauchschmerzen“ (stomach pain). Once the teacher started laughing I realized my mistake and made a joke about being very environmentally friendly. I managed to save my grade somehow.

[SteinGauslaaStrindhaug]

My grandmother who really spoke perfectly fluent English once managed to ask a woman "When do you shut up?" after several minutes of polite conversation with the very talkative receptionist of a small hotel in England; when what she really meant to ask was "When do you lock the doors for the night". Apparently the receptionist understood what she meant anyway; because she just answered "No, it's always open!"

...either that, or maybe she she actually never stops talking.

[leirex_]

As an introvert I found that consuming media and talking to yourself in the target language is a relatively good substitute for having real life conversations, at least at the beginning. It's the way I learned English. Yes, this might make you look insane but as long as nobody sees it it's easier than having embarrassing conversations with strangers. And once you're somewhat fluent you can start trying having real conversations, because the anxiety of sounding like an absolute fool is significantly lower.

[spage]

When I arrived in Germany in November 1982 with the US Army, I was given a one week training in basic German. Not long after that I attended a party. I needed to use the restroom and tried to ask in German where it was. Many English and German words sound similar so I asked " Wer ist die Toilette" thinking I had asked where is the toilet. Instead I had actually asked "Who is the toilet".

[tmcantine]

I accidentally inflicted an embarrassing language moment on one of my Japanese professors when I was an undergraduate minoring in the language. We had just started learning about the passive voice, which in Japanese can have an additional implied meaning for verbs we don't normally think of as transitive. For example, we might say in Japanese "I was died by my pet" to mean I was affected by the dying of my pet. Trying to be helpful, I mentioned to the professor that we had a somewhat more colloquial way of saying this in English: "My pet died on me". She thanked me, and moved onto the next example: "I was doing my homework, when my friend came on me." The native English-speakers in the class all winced.

[samwisegrangee]

I just picked up a book called “The Loom of Language” and one of his best tips is to learn the fixed parts of a language first. Little particles like conjunctions (and, but, etc), prepositions (over, under, in, etc), adverbs (fast, very, often, etc), and even interrogatives (what, how, when, etc) tend not to change. For example, I remember being surprisingly relieved when I learn that “si” means “and” in Romanian, and I saw dozens of them on the page: words that have a fixed form and a relatively fixed meaning take quite a burden off a new language learner. Depending on the language, you can have a huge part of your working vocab established before even getting into the inflection that comes with verbs, pronouns, articles, etc.

[MiKenning]

My girlfriend is German. Her family invited friends round for food the first time I came to visit. I did not speak German at all at the time, but one woman who didn't speak English spoke Greek, and fortunately I spoke enough Greek to have a conversation. Her husband, who was German, was there, and I asked in Greek when they got married. Except I didn't ask when the wedding was (póte ítan o *gamós*) but instead asked them them they fornicated (póte *gamiéste*). The lady laughed, told every one in German what happened while I rushed to explain what happened to my girlfriend in English. I haven't forgotten it since. It's a good memory.

[WeiShiQiang]

I've had many, but my favourite has to be in Cantonese when someone asked me what I like to do on weekends. I wanted to say I like "hiking" which should be 行山 hang san, but instead I said 鹹濕 ham sap, which means "to act in a perverted way towards someone" That was a fun conversation!

[sholme]

I work as a flight attendant and English is not my first language. On top of that, the engine noise can be extremely loud in certain areas of the plane. All of this to say it's not so uncommon to mishear what passengers are saying.

I remember once, during the bar service, a passenger asked me for drinks and after a while added: "Merry Christmas"
We were nowhere around Christmas time, but instead of asking him to repeat what he'd just said, I just laughed and without a second thought replied "Happy New Year".

I guess the look of confusion on his face made something click in my head because only then I realised he had said: "Maybe some crisps" and not "Merry Christmas".
Oh well.

[TheEnglishCoach]

“Remembering is about forgetting”— 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

[tennesseedarby]

My personal approach to language learning is based upon what my first language teacher taught me. And his work was partially based on the theory of comprehensible input and the ideas of Stephen Krashen. Essentially, largely forget grammar, and spend all of your time consuming the language the way it’s meant to be. Read, listen, converse, and especially if you can do it in simple, repetitive, in context stories. In the video, the French subjunctive is brought up. I little formal education in what the subjunctive is, but I naturally do it because it sounds right to me. I do it because I’ve seen and heard it enough that it sounds wrong without it. This is the method that works for me, and I think it is the most natural for the way our brains are programmed. That also makes me very interested in your last point. It’s something I’d never considered, and I believe that that is actually very key

[letswatchhank]

Nobody ever talks about the difference between "translating" a language and "interpreting" a language which I think is one of the most important distinctions you can make in language learning. When you're socailizing with people they're interpreting what you're saying so you better make sure you're saying what it is that you want to say!

[curse_]

I've fallen in love with linguistics at an age of 12 years, decided to learn English because of that and improve my native language (Arabic) even more. Right now I wanna learn Spanish and re-learn French after a long time of ignoring it in my school! Your tips are very helpful, thank you so much!

[CouchPolyglot]

Despite being a linguist, I am not a very theoretical learner and prefer just sticking to material I like (series, books, podcasts, etc.), so mostly using the natural approach with comprehensible input. It is just the way that feels most fun to me anyway, though it might not be the most effective one for everyone or for every language 😄

[sergea]

I studied linguistics in undergrad, so I used most of this which may be why people think I have a "knack" for it (I don't and my memory is horrid). I think my biggest obstacle to language learning is time and dealing with ADHD which makes the former a larger obstacle

[sarahshawtatoun]

This is great! I fell in love with the Czech culture, language and literature in the 80's when I began working with several international organizations trying to free Vaclav Havel and other Czech dissidents. It turned out the head of my local Amnesty adoption group was Milan Kundera's translator- and a professor of Slavic languages at UCLA. He convinced me to take his 1st year Czech course, telling me that my year of Russian would help (it didn't) and that I could take it as an external student, so I wouldn't have to worry about grades and exams. THEN he told me that he was off to Russia for the semester, so he wouldn't be teaching the course. 

The teacher who taught in his place started off by telling us it was a course for graduate students in Slavic linguistics who were already fluent in at least one other Slavic language, that he expected us to have a reading knowledge in 10 weeks- and to learn all the case endings by the end of the first week. I've always attributed my eventual fluency in Czech- and my complete failure to learn Russian- to the fact that they threw ALL the case endings at us at once, giving us a basic structure to hang everything else on. (Of course moving here in 1990 and marrying a man who spoke no English also helped.)

For the past couple of years I've been trying to reactivate my ancient French in the service of spending some time in Morocco (I fell in love with the country the same way I did Czechoslovakia)- and also learning Darija. I had the bright idea, inspired by youtube polyglots, to also study Russian, since I've discovered it's similar enough to Czech that I was actually able to have some pretty good conversations when I took the Transsiberian in 2009. And that would bring me up to 5 languages, so I could call myself a polyglot by age 70. Well, I turn 70 this coming year and it's clear that ain't happening. My knowledge of French isn't actually too bad, but I find all the terror of speaking I remember from studying Czech returning- and also every time I try to respond to anyone Czech comes out, making it incredibly frustrating. 

I had pretty much given up, but you've given me the impetus to try again, so thanks! Off to study the international alphabet now. I'll let you know how it goes!

[Spvrinnaeli]

i've had zero interaction with linguists in my life despite it being my major in university, but holy hell has understanding some basic linguistic concepts turbo-blasted my ability to learn my languages. suddenly consonant gemination in italian or diphthongization in spanish make total sense to me, but completely stump my peers. suddenly the use of the analytic "voy a hacer" instead of the synthetic "haré" makes perfect sense given the historical evolution of the language. it's even given my the opportunity to learn some pretty challenging regional accents that i've been told i recreate very convincingly, (like my tuscan accent in italian, which turns unvoiced stops into fricatives, but ONLY post-vocalically, and only then in situations where syntactic gemination does not occur -- tricky stuff to remember if you're not familiar with at least a little morphology!) great video.

[SB-lcqg]

Some people object to using the IPA, and yes it might be an obstacle for some (I have only used it a little myself) but it is useful for learning to hear and pronounce sounds not native to you. Having a uniform and scientific guide for how sounds are made is very helpful for learning things (as a native English speaker) like nasal vowels, “r” sounds in various languages, anything with a diacritic, clicks, etc.

[cd]

I think the most important thing is making it relaxed and playful. How you do that is up to you but you can create your own systems to learn anything effectively in the right environment. I also think you can bring immersion to you by immersing yourself in language in all its forms (written, spoken, various types of media). Create as many associations as you can at once. It's not perfect but it's better than telling everyone to learn all the boring stuff.