Language Learning: The Biggest Mistake People Make.

People stay with the beginner book or course too long. They think they have to stay with it until they understand it or can remember everything. Forget it. Believe me you will. You will need to keep on going back to the beginner book. In the meantime, get into interesting authentic content. Do it as soon as possible, even if you don't understand it very well. Don't even use graded readers.

0:19 Staying with the beginner material for far too long.
0:49 How one should work with a beginner book.
1:35 My experience with Czech.
3:19 Do I understand everything I read in Czech?
3:49 How good is my comprehension after 2 months of reading in Czech?
4:37 Are beginner books already useless for me?
5:22 My perspective on the beginner courses offered by universities.
6:16 When one should switch from a beginner book to real language.
6:51 Reading false and true objective.

[Thelinguist]

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[jerryjared]

Makes sense. Just like working out, need to lift heavier weights. Otherwise there is no growth.

[LifeFirst]

This is basically what I did. My Japanese learning was restricted to only textbooks, and I wasn't learning much cuz they're godawfully boring. So one day I just bought a 500 page detective novel and read the whole thing. It was hard as hell at first. But I managed to finish it, and from novels now are just a breeze.

[wcuribe]

6:47 The sooner you get into the real stuff the faster you will learn

[Thelinguist]

I find reading is powerful. If I have time to dedicate to the language, I read.

[gomiakayo]

Whenever I fall off Japanese study or get frustrated, I come back to this video to remind me of the process. I don't need to understand everything I'm reading--just keep doing it. Thanks for the wonderful advice~

[LenaPrusenkova]

Steve, thank you so much for this advice. I realized that my perfectionism in language learning, as in the form of refusal  to move on to a more advanced level was holding me back all this time. I am going to begin my new way of learning. You are truly an inspiration.

[enaselhalawany]

Dear sir,
i couldnt found any word to thank you, you will never image how this 7 mintes make me happy and give me hope .... acutly i was really near of crying .... dear sir if there is something i regretful about that would be i didnt saw this video befor 10 years ....i lost 10years of my age seaching about nothing and i didnt even get any progress. for you, thanks for julian (someone has a channel on youtub) how recommended to see your video thanks becouse you took from you time to give advice for me .... :)  God bless you Sir . God bless you :)

[halynaryf]

This is a very good point. I keep hearing that when learning a language you should understand 80% of the materials you're working with. If at any point when I was starting out learning English I could understand that much I would assume that I already know it.
And it must be really boring to stay at the beginner level for too long.

[PinkGloom]

Motivation is the key! It doesn't matter if you're retired or not. It's a passion and finding the time because you want to learn.

[BobTheTrueCactus]

You nailed it - this is exactly what I do! I try to be close to perfection on my book but hesitate to get further. I'll drop it for now and if things are important I'm sure I'll learn them sooner or later.

[mrMetropolis]

TO co říkáte je opravdu důležité. Děkuji za Vaši radu, přeji hodně úspěchu v Češtině :)

[barsorrro]

Great video and great advice. I think everything boils down two two main things: 1. languages don't bite (... even tongues don't do that :)), 2. you should be learning a language only if you want to have some use of it (and passive use is still a use), so why put that off for some indefinable future and satisfy yourself with the boring repetitions over and over again! :)

[Chantal_P-vx]

Great, helpful, motivational video. :) I've been working on my french for a year or so, and still very much at beginner level. I'm constantly second guessing my understanding of the language, and questioning my translations of simple sentences. Perhaps I should be looking at articles in french by now, not stuck on my beginner stuff.

[stevekaczynski]

I agree with this. You should as soon as possible be going for material that is a little bit above yourcurrent level. Not far above your level but a little bit. The step into the swimming pool analogy is an apt one.

[payasitabella]

Great information! Sometimes I try to tell people tips for learning languages but I have never thought about putting the "getting beyond beginners level" into words. I usually tell them to just jump in....but it's easier to understand when you say "get beyond the beginner book".

[Thelinguist]

@jjay75 In my experience, there was no grammar to speak of in Chinese. Yes I had to spend a lot of time on learning characters, but still my main thrust was to get as much reading and listening exposure as possible.

[MaestroBaldone]

Thanks for the encouragment by uploading this video. Over the years I couldn't help getting stucked in every single language I wanted to learn. I failed 8 or 9 times at French beginner's course (motivational reasons). Then I decided to give up on learning and just listened to English and Dutch ressources since I knew them quite well. This brought back self-confidence. I realized a few days ago that this is the way I should learn French, too. And I feel this will work well. :)

[alkantre]

It's exciting to plunge into a linguistic swimming pool.
I do it in different ways for different languages.
For Turkish, I watch Turkish dramatic shows without subtitles on youtube endlessly .
For Chinese, i read the Bible and the Qu'ran in Chinese translation without using the dictionary.

[LauraBCReyna]

I think the biggest mistake ppl make is not putting in the necessary TIME. There's no getting around it, learning a new lang takes a lot of effort & time, just like any other complicated endeavor (& to be sure, some will pick up a new lang faster than others). If you want to learn a musical instrument, you need to put in a lot of hrs of practice. A few yrs a ago I started teaching myself German & got frustrated with my lack of progress, so recently I switched to French which is close to my 2nd lang, Spanish. It feels like I'm making better/faster progress with Fr than I did with Ger. But looking back on it, I have to be honest & say my Ger study time had big gaps in it. I would go weeks w/o picking up my German material. Now I'm more consistent in my French studies. Putting in more consistent time and effort has made the difference in my progress.