Richard DeLong: 14+ years in Eastern Europe

And in the show, we talked generally about language learning and Richard shares his methods and philosophies for rapidly acquiring a new language. And in the discussion we get into a few things that people often get wrong with vocabulary acquisition, and we also talk about actually using the language that you learn rather than just studying it.

And for me, it's a really interesting episode and something that really made me think afterwards, just how terrible my original studies of Russian were. And in general also some mistakes that I kind of kept doing long after. But of course, you know, live and learn, so I hope you learn something from Richard today.

And other than that, yeah, I hope you're having a fantastic year. It's a, it's going well so far for me here in Denmark. And, um, I don't want to take up too much of your time today. So, and it's also a rather long episode because we, we keep getting into such interesting things that, uh, I just couldn't stop recording. But enjoy the episode and, as always, if you want to support the show in any way, head over to actualfluency.com/support. I really appreciate it. And to everyone who's already supported, thank you so much. You guys are the true heroes. And this is for you. So, enjoy my discussion and interview with Richard.

And I've lived in four different countries during that time: Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine, and now the Republic of Georgia. And I'm basically permanently located in the post-Soviet region. And I work as a conference interpreter, uh, a bilingual writer, so I write in English and Russian. And over the years I've done a lot of writing and website creation and things like that. So basically, in a few words that's what I do.

And in high school, I saw that my, my friends' main goal in life seemed to be to get the highest possible SAT score, which would lead to the the best possible university. And then at the best possible university, they'd study the most prestigious subject. And then become a prestigious doctor or lawyer or something like that, earn the most money possible, and, uh, bring recognition or, uh, value to their families. I should add that most of my classmates were Asians. I was living in Southern California, and I think people who are from the US, who know a lot of, uh, Asian Americans can relate to to their to this type of value structure.

But I found that I could not imagine a future for myself in that society. So I I looked at how people were always preparing for the future. They'd take out a loan to buy a car that would allow them to go to work, that would allow them to earn money to buy a house, or at least get a mortgage on a house. Uh, so it turned it, I saw people living this kind of unadventurous cycle of, uh, indebtedness or, uh, working for someone else, basically, that I just, uh, from a very early age didn't want to be a part of.

And so my family has a a tradition of exchange students, both, uh, going abroad ourselves as as children and taking exchange students in from other country in countries. In fact, we had a student from Denmark.

So I ended up going to Slovakia and, you know, before that, I'd never, I had no particular fascination with foreign languages. I'd taken German in school. I'd done well in my class, but, you know, it it wasn't anything special. But then, just on the plane to Slovakia, and this was my first time out out of the US, in the plane itself, I felt a kind of transformation. I don't know if you've ever experienced this, but I was leaving my old self behind and I was very attentive to what kind of people were around me. And this, this feeling continued as I got on the bus, as we rode the bus from Vienna to Bratislava, which, I don't think had an international airport at the time.

And you know, back then, things were very different. We got in the bus and I noticed the body odor, you know, it it was kind of a, kind of a hot, stinky bus that day. And, uh, a lot of things have changed since then. You know, you would you wouldn't think of making a joke about, you know, the body odor of Eastern Europeans these days. But at the time, you know, that was something that even the smell was different of people back then. So I remember getting the in the bus with my fellow exchange students, who were also going there for a year, and just being extremely attentive to how people around me were behaving, how they talked, how they looked, uh, what kind of eye contact they made, what their facial expressions were.

And, uh, so I get to Slovakia. I I met my, uh, my host family. None of them spoke any English at all, except my older host brother, who was leaving for the university a week later. So, uh, it was then that I realized that my preparation, uh, had been quite inadequate. I'd found one Slovak textbook for like $150. Uh, my parents had bought it for me. It had some cassette tapes. You know, I'd studied a little bit, but nothing serious. And, uh, so I, I was immediately put in a full immersion situation. And I really took to that. I liked my host family. I immediately began studying the language the best I could.

And, uh, some of the things I did there were I made a, I made a chart of the declensions. I know that you've studied at least one Slavic language, so you know about all the difficult declensions. I made a color-coded chart of that. I would, uh, go through my textbook, do some studying there. And I kept a vocabulary notebook, where I would take interesting words out of the out of the dictionary and, uh, jot them down in a notebook, and then I'd go through the notebooks periodically, mark the words that I felt I'd learned. And, you know, this, this approach, uh, paid off quite well. And I thought I was really hot stuff for speaking Slovak so well. I basic basically spent the whole year speaking nothing but Slovak.

And, uh, the year following that, I was back in the US, at the, uh, at the university. And slowly, bit by bit, I began to realize that I hadn't done as well learning the language as I could have. There were some things that bothered me about my experience in Slovakia. One being my shyness. I felt that, uh, until a person knew me and knew who I was, I wasn't really, I wasn't willing to open up and risk making a mistake. So I I really suffered from this kind of perfectionism. And also, I found that I would avoid anything that I didn't know.

So, in the Slavic languages, and probably, uh, a number of different languages, like Spanish, you can, you can say something similar, *hay que hacer*. So, I this needs to be done. I need to do. So, in Slovak, they have this wonderful word, *treba*, which is similar to like *nada* or *nuzhna* in Russian. And when I didn't know how to, uh, conjugate a verb, I would figure out a way to use it in the infinitive. So instead of saying something like, I will pour you a drink, I might ask, uh, does a drink need to be poured? Uh, which sounds very awkward in English, but it's kind of okay in Slovak. So, I really didn't like this, this feeling of avoidance. Like I, uh, I wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't have that feeling of full command and confidence.

And then I, at the end of my year abroad, I went through my vocabulary notebooks, and I did a thorough, uh, survey of just how many of these words I'd actually learned and used over my year. And I I found that I'd only learned about a quarter of them. And this made me think, you know, why had, had I wasted time, had I chosen the wrong words? Why was it that my vocabulary notebook just had single words and not phrases? You know, I I didn't learn the words in context. I didn't indicate the conjugations of verbs. I didn't indicate indicate declensions or irregularities. It was just the the base form of words themselves. And it took me a whole year after, uh, my experience in Slovakia to come to terms with the fact that I had really made some systematic mistakes in my language learning that I wanted to correct the next time around.