Language Learning tips. This is a lecture that I really enjoy because it can give you some background on how you can learn phrases or even whole new languages. I think you'll like this one because not only will you get to listen to me, but I have a special guest, Mr. Chef sila from West Africa, Senegal, who will give us some tips on how he has been able to learn five languages. So I want to give you some background on the big picture, there are a few things that you need to understand in order to be able to put yourself in the mindset of learning a new language. One is that learning a new language is really about immersing yourself in the language and in some ways, the culture because language is about context and the cultural background of the person speaking it.

The second thing is you need to be able to get rid of your inhibitions. What do I mean by that? Well A lot of times when you're trying to speak a language that you're unfamiliar with or learn new pronunciations, you become very shy, you become fearful of making mistakes, or even seeming silly and not pronouncing things correctly. But you need to get out of that mindset. Because in order to be able to practice, you are going to make mistakes. And you might even sound silly sometimes, but the only way to do it is to actually keep practicing and get rid of that fear.

And that leads to the third thing, which is in order to learn a language, you just have to speak it. You can read, you can listen, you can do all kinds of things in terms of memorizing vocabulary, but at the end of the day, you have to talk you have to speak the language. And there are many different apps and software's that can help you on your language learning journey. Technology has really come a long way and has little allowed us to be able to learn the language right at our fingertips. One of my favorite apps is Duolingo. It's an app that you can download, and it's free.

And it helps you to learn a language almost like a game. It tracks your progress. It gives you different ways to get bonus points for going ahead of schedule in your vocabulary. It even allows you to link up with the partner so you all can hold each other accountable and even compete for learning the phrases. You get points for correct pronunciation and for being able to identify vocabulary. It's really fun.

And each day they're adding more and more languages. Another program that's not free, it's a small fee for it is pimsleur. And this is actually based on research about how we remember information that's unfamiliar. So that's basically what learning a language is about being exposed to familiar words, phrases, and information and being able to remember it. So there's a researcher who was able to gather information on how to help people remember, as they're learning a language. There are many success stories with this program.

And if you go to their website, you can find out more about the research behind it. A third one is really popular and has been popular for some time. It's called Rosetta Stone. It's a program you install on your computer. And they even have apps, their Rosetta Stone languages, language programs for hundreds of languages, from Arabic to French, to Spanish, to Armenian, and so many different languages from all of the continents all over the world. And it approaches learning a language the way a child would, which is putting words into context, their pictures and their sentences that help you to understand the context.

And the meaning of the word not just to remember one word by itself. Another really good way to practice immersion and speaking is to actually participate in in person meetups. meetup calm is a website that allows you to link up with people who have similar interests as yours. And that could be cultural interests and in some cases, language interest. So you might be able to meet up with the group that includes a native speaker, and other people who are at different levels of learning the language that you're interested in. It's a great way to meet people with similar interests, but also to practice that thing that you need to do, which is speaking the language.

Finally, the Peace Corps has some really good free resources that some of his former volunteers has compiled have compiled and that includes lessons on how you learn some very unique local language. Where Peace Corps volunteers have been so small local languages in parts of Africa, and South America, and Asia. And they've put a lot of this information online including handouts that are online with vocabulary and even audio files where you can listen and repeat and practice pronunciation. So some people like one of these methods and others combined a few of them to help them learn. So, I want to now introduce you to what I call an amazing polyglot. This is a man who speaks five languages fluently, and knows and has been exposed to at least three other ones.

The languages are English, French, Wolof, Pooler. malinka and the ability to read Arabic and learning Spanish and I think Italian. So Mr. Chef Scylla has some really important tips that he's going to talk to you about. He has sat down with me and told me the three things that helped him or have helped him over these years. One is to listen, not just to read, but to listen, you have to listen, whether it's through radio, media, movies, TV, people talking, that listening, not reading is the key.

Also that it's important to learn phrases and not just words. That's that context that I was speaking about earlier. You have to understand the whole phrase, and not just a string of words. Also, repetition is the key to mastery. If you say something one or two times you might think you've remembered it, but repetition even to the point of boredom is the key to making it stick in mastering those phrases or those words. So now I want to introduce you to chef Scylla who can tell you about his experience as a multi lingual polyglot Language Learner.

Thank you for having me, Nicole Montero My name is shake Scylla from San Diego. As she mentioned, I speak several languages, which is more so that I didn't go to school to learn how to speak. Today I will give you my secret about learning languages, as she said. languages are very fun if you are interested, and those who travel need at least to know the basics ob, but how can you learn what are the most effective methods of learning? Today it's very easy to learn a language. How come you don't have to be able to read the words you don't have to know the alphabetical letters, but just be patient use your ears.

Listening is the most powerful tool of learning a language Select take of short phrases, phrases, don't make a list. Just learn one phrase and learn it and over and over and over, you will master it. Because if you just heard it once, you might be able to repeat it that day. But after a short time, it is high possible that you forgot what you learn. But if you keep the same lesson for at least a week, repeating the same thing over and over, the chances are you will remember better and you will pronounce better. Let's take an example of a kid and a parent and a parent, his or her parents who travel in a foreign country.

The chances are, the kid will learn faster and better than the parents because the key doesn't ask questions. All they do is to listen. That means listening is the key of learning, you might read, you might be able to read but you might not be able to pronounce properly. But if you listen over and over, that's the the biggest, the unlock key of any languages you learn. So remember, you don't have to learn by your eyes by reading, but you have to learn by your ears by listening. And by listening, just don't listen diverse things in a short amount of time.

But listen, a small amount of phrases and repeat them over and over until you master the pronunciation goes. That's one of the things that cause the difficulties in any languages. That was all today. I hope I will come next time and give you oddities of learning languages. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much, Chef.

And I think that those are some keys that we can take away from us. And he's right in the next lesson, we're actually going to get some pronunciation lessons and phrases from chef for our next upcoming trip to Senegal. So I'll see you then.