Mike Campbell - Glossika and Repetition Learning
Kris Broholm and guest Mike Campbell discuss effective language learning strategies. They explore the importance of repetition and context, along with the dynamics of input versus output in language acquisition. Campbell shares his academic insights on why specific learning methods are effective.
October 4, 2018 · 1 hr 10 min
EP 128: Mike Campbell - Glossika and Repetition Learning
0:00 / 1:10:08
Guest
Mike Campbell
What You'll Hear
- 1 Welcome: Effective Learning and Repetition
- 2 Guest Background and Black Box Theory
- 3 Build Foundation, Not Just Vocabulary
- 4 Ditch Rote Grammar: Learn Contextually
- 5 Glossika's Deep Grammar Approach
- 6 Repetition: Fluency Through Muscle Memory
- 7 Reawaken Languages: Discover Glossika
Links Mentioned
Questions Covered in the Show
What is the 'black box' concept in language learning?- 8m
How do you build a foundation for language learning as an adult?- 12m
Why is output important in language learning?- 15m
Why are traditional grammar rules and vocabulary lists not ideal for language acquisition?- 21m
How does Glossika adapt its language teaching method for different languages?- 27m
How does memory work in language acquisition and why is muscle memory important?- 50m
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Hey guys, welcome to another podcast episode. This is episode 128 of the Actual Fluency podcast. And today I'm chatting with Mike Campbell from Glossika. And we have a really good all-round discussion about really language learning at its core, but specifically focusing on how to learn effectively and using repetition to build up your skill. And this is, of course, reflected very much in in Mike's product, which is Glossika, where you can get started with a free trial on tryglossika.com. Give it a chance there. And if you like it, it's a monthly subscription that gets you access to all the 50 languages.
But Mike is an extremely interesting character. He he knows so much about language learning. And in the episode, your head might start spinning a little bit from all the linguistic and academic references he gives, which is a little bit unusual on this show. Normally, uh certainly I speaking for myself, I I mostly speak out of um anecdotal evidence or from what people have experienced. But Mike actually has both. He also has the academic background, the studies that show why certain things work.
And it's obviously no secret that Glossika is the sponsor of the show. But I actually think that we succeeded in making a really interesting program for you today that doesn't really involve Glossika that much. Glossika is kind of a tool to you know, learn the languages. It's a tool to that, according to the philosophy of the software, is efficient in doing so. Um but it's not required necessarily for what we talk about here. We talk a lot about input versus output. And we talk a lot about the value of repetition, the value of context. And Mike shares a lot of of general tidbits and advice. So well worth the listen. I hope you really enjoy it. And uh like I said, if you want to give Glossika a try, uh say Kris sent you and they'll take good care of you. Uh at uh tryglossika.com. And it's spelled G L O S S I K A. So give that a try and let me know what you think. And enjoy the episode with Mike Campbell.
It's been basically ages since we last talked. It was February 2015. So that's over three years ago. Uh so obviously people have forgotten everything we said back then. So we can just uh if we just slide the old recording in now, we can go have a coffee break. And be back in an hour. No, of course not. But for the people who don't know Mike Campbell, do you want to just give them a quick run through of your backstory, how you got into languages and and then tell us a little bit about uh what Glossika is as well?
Yeah, I was just thinking about the last three years and some things feel like they move very slowly and some other things feel like they move quickly. So yeah, there've been quite a lot of changes since then but um, but all in all, I mean, it's we're we're still on the same on the same path. Same path to to um just delivering more content for languages and language learning.
So um originally I started off with And just like you had you had just alluded to before we um started the interview was that um I've also done some work with some um more obscure languages. But I think that um the reason why I did that was just kind of to test some theories about language learning because um it's one thing where you can go to the store and buy, you know, one of these um Routledge colloquial or teach-yourself books and learn a language from a book and you have all of the grammar laid out for you and it's really nice and maybe even a CD and recordings. Uh but what happens if um I think you really test your abilities like if you go into um into some mountainous area or a jungle and you come across a tribe and uh can you learn their language? Uh so, so you've learned some some tricks from these books and you've uh learned maybe one or two languages. So I think it's the true test of of um so there's a whole idea of an obscure language is it it's it's it's nice to be able to say, well, we would like to help these languages, you know, be able to thrive in the modern world and with technology. But I think it's another thing is that um do your do your methods is there any grounding for for these methods? And so can they actually help me acquire a language where there are no resources available? And if I'm just actually going in there face to face, you know, um and I would be, of course, it would be nice to maybe travel to Siberia and try this and somewhere somewhere else and uh I don't have the um the ability to travel to some places and try that. But I think that um here in my backyard, there are a few languages um since I live in Taiwan. There are a few languages that we have access to here and that I could go and try this.
So, um that's kind of been the idea behind this this whole language learning is that can you learn a language without the text, without materials, and without reading from a book? Um can you do it with just sound, with just audio? And if that audio is in place, um you know, like one of the earlier earliest methods I used is I would take a whole set of um sentences and just um pieces of of ideas, not just vocabulary but just like these um these pieces of ideas and and reconstruct them and have them record these. And I would listen to these recordings again and again to to pick it up.
And I found that you could really um there's a lot of talk these days in um Artificial Intelligence and AI, and in machine learning. And there's this concept called a black box. For example, if you want to teach a car how to drive autonomously on its own, you give it a basic set of instructions, you know, stay within the the lines of the road and use cameras to view. But then the whole learning itself happens inside of a black box. And so this black box is actually the humans we don't really know what the car is doing specifically while it's learning. But it is learning to stay within the lines and turn corners and do all these other um these other uh functions. And so I believe that there is some aspect of our brain that is a black box. But if you don't build a foundation for for that learning, then the brain doesn't really pick up the patterns and learn. So, for example, if I you could watch some TV programs for 20 years in a foreign language. But you'd never pick up anything because you just haven't given it any sort of foundation for picking up the patterns.
Mhm. Right. So, a lot of people they think, well, just mass exposure to lots of media really helps. Well, it doesn't really help unless you already understand something and you're just adding a little bit every time. Because if your understanding is near zero, then you're actually not adding anything at all. Right. So, how do you get started then? Is that um is that the those books, the Routledge you were talking about or
All right, so um you're asking how I got started?
Well, we can talk about that as well. Uh so I just just a little bit of echo. Uh do you I don't know if you changed anything I can hear myself in in the in the uh recording. Is it gone now? Maybe it's okay.
I turned my volume down.
Just for just for as much as you can hear me still. Um no, I was just wondering because that uh concept is something that I've been dealing with a little bit lately as well is is this idea of we have a a basic set of ways to learn languages. The brain has a natural way of assimilating. But that works very well when you're a baby because that's when you need to learn it. But when you're an adult, I feel like a lot of times people either do way too much um sort of fake stuff. Like let's say I'm on Duolingo all day. I mean, that's not really going to get me to use the language at all. Or people will just sit and watch films or you know, just listen to stuff which is very useful, but again, it doesn't create that language. It doesn't build the skills needed.
Uh so what the question that I had that immediately sprung to mind is if I need a basis or a foundation to begin to build something off of that native material or the listening or the shadowing, what is that foundation in your mind anyway that that people can effectively use to to start out the right way. Is it textbooks if they're available? Is it some of the, you know, really beginner-friendly content? Is it a kids' uh fairy tales? What what can people do to to start out with?
Yeah, I I think that there's actually two two sections that we could talk about in that question. Um first of all, I mean, you could you can go on to the Glossika platform that that we built and try a lot of language that um that maybe you've never even heard of. Um got things in there like Kurdish and um I don't know what languages people might not have heard of before. Um uh maybe like Bengali, even though that's a national language. Um maybe some people have never heard of it. But you could go on there and try it and then um it in my mind it should be able to give you some of that foundation so that you can actually move forward. But I would say that Glossika probably has a really hard starting point for people that don't have experience with languages. I often say the hardest language in the whole world to learn is the first foreign language you learn.
Right. I agree.
And then it gets easier after that. So if you fail at the first one, don't worry. Try another one. Try two more. Um you might as well make the first one really, really hard anyway, because everything after that's easier. Um so um so like I said, there are kind of two parts to that question, if I can remember exactly uh what I was thinking about. The um the first thing would be that to to build to build that foundation, okay, so the first thing I wanted to to mention real quick was just the input output part. So, um what you're saying is it's it's you can get a lot of input, but actually creating the output is very difficult. And I think that that that has to do with environment, that has to do with um your own motivation and whatnot. But um if you're just getting a lot of input, there may not be that push or impetus to to actually create the output.
And so this is where shadowing is actually really good. So even if you're not pronouncing things out loud, but you're moving your tongue and you're kind of mimicking like how a baby does. This is actually building muscle memory. The tongue is a muscle. So move it. Move it as much as you can and then start to mumble your words and start to make some sounds. And even if you sound really silly in the beginning, it's it's kind of okay because that that is actually part of the process. Uh it's like learning to swim or, you know, learning to sing. You're just going to sound really silly at the beginning, but after after a thousand hours of singing practice, you probably start sounding much better. Um and so, you know, that's the first thing is that the output the output really depends on muscle memory.
And so I like to think of our tongue as falling into um for some listeners who may not be familiar with English, we have a word called a rut, which is the the wheels of the carriage that leave the the line in the road. And so we we say we say things that where you've you've fallen into a rut, which means you've fallen into this one line that just gets deeper and deeper, you know, and you're always following that one line. But I think that our tongue, when we are babies, they fall into like maybe three or four or five ruts in our mouth. And so our tongue position always hits those exact same positions every time when we speak. So, my T's and S's always going to be one position, my K's and G's are always going to be in another position. And it's really hard to kind of adjust out of outside of those ruts over time. And so learning a new language actually forces us to to learn new positions and and ruts. And that's why, you know, learning a second and a third and a fourth language gets easier because the pronunciation just matches with something you've already been doing. You already have new ruts in there. And so that muscle memory is really important. So that that's the first part of your question.
Um now let me see if I can remember the second part of your question was um okay, so building the groundwork. Um for example, my my belief is is basically that you have to have a way for the brain as a black box to start doing pattern recognition. And so when you're doing a lot of input, whether that's media, TV, radio and whatnot, you just don't have you just don't have the ability to do pattern recognition on a mass amount of conversation. If you take a small child who's three years old and you start talking to them about politics and the elections and everything else that's going on on TV, for the child that's just noise. And the child is not for the child it's like us listening to a foreign language. There's nothing that they understand. But if you go up to the child and you say, do you want to eat, are you hungry, you want to go to sleep, then the child can interact and start, you know, understands, because it's you're speaking at a level that that is it's really important to their life. First of all, like yes, I have these feelings inside of me and you're addressing them and and I feel excited because I'm I understand and I'm communicating. And then at some point the language grows and grows and grows until they're able to talk about politics and everything else. But that's not going to happen for a three-year-old. And so we are we are very much like three-year-olds. And so you have to you have to really start off with um pattern recognition.
And so what we do at Glossika is we build um pattern recognition really comes down to syntactic structures. That's a fancy word which just means word order. And so, um the funny thing about these programs, um there's a lot of apps out there and a lot of new ones coming on the market that are really just um they're kind of fun and they got fancy sounds and little things you can match and this is great. Um but they really focus on vocabulary building.
Right. Yeah.
The vocabulary building is is just I would say it's, you know, it's a very small portion of language learning. I think vocabulary building is important, so go ahead and do that. As long as you feel engaged and you feel like it's fun, then you're enjoying the process and you're learning. That's great. But when it actually comes to communicating, where you put the words in the sentence are also very important. And when the words appear in a different position in the sentence, you have different grammar starting to affect those words and they change, you know, so this is really important as well. And you can't really learn that from just learning vocabulary.
Right.
You know, if I'm learning if I'm learning a um a language that has um older grammatical forms from the the old European um structure, which where it has genitive and locative um declensions and accusative and dative declensions, then you're and it has this vestige of um this older grammar in it. that we don't have in English anymore. But, um then you're going to be faced with a problem with um well, do I learn all this grammar first and then I learn how to speak and I learn how to apply it to every single vocabulary word that I'm learning. But actually I found that a lot of that grammar, it doesn't actually appear on every single vocabulary word. And so some vocabulary words, they have a specific grammar in a specific situation. And if you just learn that and then you start learning a lot of phrases with the similar structure, you actually get the grammar intact as you're speaking, just as a child does. I mean, if you ask a five-year-old child who speaks Lithuanian, which word is dative case? They'll have no idea. But they are actually creating it naturally because they they mimic their surroundings and it makes sense to them because in that specific word order or syntax, it just comes out and it flows right.
Okay, so, um this is the basic idea is that you have to you have to build up the foundation where that you give them simple structures where they're mimicking um the word order with the grammar intact. And so when they speak these very simple sentences, whether they're I'm I'm hungry, I'm tired or I'm thirsty, they're actually creating the predicate form with the correct grammar intact. And so you start building off of that. And so there's basically, you know, about a dozen um major areas of syntactic growth that you have to go through um to really build out your fluency. And so that was just the very first step.
Hm. Yeah. It's funny, I I talk about this a lot about learning in context. That, you know, in in languages like Russian or other declensed languages, you have phrases that are rarely going to be, I mean, you have phrases that are used so much and that therefore learning that case will not be a like learning the the declension table, it would just be like, okay, if I want to say this, this is the ending that I'm going to use. And for me, that just makes a huge difference, because let's say you you're learning a Russian vocabulary. Well, you're suddenly learning, I mean, what is it? eight forms of the word? Uh some of them are some of them are the same, I guess.
For example, if I say 'zhivosh-st'va', I don't even have to think that I'm going to say that in genitive case. It just comes out.
Yeah, exactly. Because you've got that pattern, you've got that uh experience seeing that kind of uh pattern of words next to each other. I I think that's really useful because when I started, I would do a lot of flashcards, which are very effective, I will say, you know, but I don't think they work very well for those kind of languages. I guess that's another problem we might we can maybe address. Uh if I'm learning, let's say a an easier language, maybe like Danish, my my native language. We don't really have any kind of declension or cases or anything. Like we have two cases but you know, they're not really, there's no rule for it, so you can't really learn it. You can't say words ending in this should be that and words ending in this should be that. It's just
Do you learn, do you learn the rules specifically when you go to school as a child?
But there are no rules. It's just part of learning the uh the learning the gender of a word. Is it's either it's this or it's that. And because we only have two
They teach you the specific grammar in school as a child, you have to do exercises and
No.
No.
You just know.
You just say it naturally, huh?
Yeah, you just know. Like you just know. I mean, people still make mistakes with this. And there are new words coming in from English that are being, you know, 'danglified' and there's always a huge debate whether it's one or the other, because there are no fixed rules. There's no like spelling or anything to do with former. So if I had to compare those two languages, I would first of all say Danish objectively is a lot easier than Russian. You know, I know some people have a hard time kind of comparing languages, which is fair enough because if you're let's say a Serbian, then Russian is probably easier than Danish, but
Right.
Let's say for me anyway. And the thing is, if I was learning Danish through flashcards, I would probably do a really good job because there's not that many variations. I mean, the words are the same anyway because we don't use endings, we use we put it in front anyway. So there's only one way there's only one way to say the word, which is great. But if I'm learning Russian, there could be up to eight ways. And let's say I have to learn all of them because I'm being a completionist or idiot, I guess you can say. I'm suddenly spending eight times as long learning the words. Meaning I learn eight times as little. And I don't even need it because
Not only that. Not only that, but the declen, yeah, the declensions in Russian will change from word to word. And so you'll have a masculine declension that sometimes has an O ending and sometimes has a Y ending.
There you go. Exceptions. Yeah.
And I think that if you if you actually I've been writing a little bit about this about the um the these grammatical details of Russian and that if you actually treat the the there's actually a very interesting relationship between the the 'o' and the 'ye'. And um it really just has to do with the palatalization in the word. So a lot of that can just be determined. I mean, it it would actually flow out very easily. And the and the 'o' is actually always a weak consonant. So it's always and there's also a complex relationship between the the 'o' and the 'ye' and the 'yo'. Which is the accented the accented um palatalized 'o', but it actually is an 'e' with a with a 'umlaut' or a 'dieresis'. And so, um this is actually it actually is a um the if you go deep, deep, deep into the grammar, into the history of the language, it's actually an 'o' that is palatalized and now it's um it's has an accent. And so you don't really realize it because it's spelled like with an with a 'ye', with a with a letter 'e'. And so this is um it can be kind of confusing, but there's actually this complex relationship between them. And then if you if you actually learn the language speaking um in a more of a fluent way, in a relaxed way, rather than memorizing all of the the declensions and the rules, you actually kind of create the right endings naturally.
Yeah. You can hear it actually, you know, you just
Yeah, you don't really need to think about it because it's almost impossible to switch over to an 'o' when it's already palatal because it just doesn't flow. It just So I think memorizing all those endings is actually your your hurting yourself by just
Definitely.
You're you're building walls for yourself in learning because you're just going to get frustrated really, really fast.
Yeah.
And if you just relax and let it flow, you have to mimic exactly how the native speaker does it. But by doing that, you actually feel the right endings always flowing out easiest.
Yeah. But I think it comes from school. I think it comes from the uh the rote learning in school where you just Yeah. You just you just have to learn all the the conjugation tables. I I remember learning it for German. Uh doing we we did phrases going through all the you know, 'der, die, das, dem, der, den' and all the different article conjugations. And I didn't really learn it, to be honest. Uh I I speak German quite well, but I make a lot of these gender mistakes and and grammar ending mistakes. Even if we spend a lot of time
I can still remember I can still chant it. 'Der, die, das, dem, der, den, des, der, dem, des.'
There you go. You had it as well. Uh but I remember
I think I can recite it as well.
And you've got the um what are they called? The prepositions that take certain cases as well. Um and these these are just examples of in my opinion a way of taking language learning, which is a really natural process, and turn it into something like math, which is something we just kind of made up. You know, this as far as I know anyway, I'm not an an expert on math, but to me there's nothing really that natural about math. We, of course, you can find math in nature, but
Right.
The understanding of math, I believe is as far as I know entirely made up. Like that's we decided that that's
Well, I know a few mathematicians and I've never heard them speak fluent mathematics.
There you go. There you go.
They can write things down on paper and show you, but they don't really speak it fluently.
Right. There you go. So that that's
And even when they write it down, I still don't understand it, but
Yeah, I have no idea, yeah. But that just shows you it must be a terrible way to learn a language is like doing it like math because nobody speaks fluent math.
Nobody speaks fluent math. But but interestingly, though, and and if you look at this, um there's a really good parallel here. And that is that um math does describe nature. It is a it is a um it is a way that we can encode all of the uh you know, the the physics and the the science of nature. And and and actually writing is the same thing. It's like we're encoding the science of our language um and writing it down, we're recording it, just as we are recording the the the physical, you know, mathematical, you know, of of nature. And so, in a way, you know, writing is is sort of a construct. And it doesn't really and I I believe seriously that writing is actually you you take time to revise and rewrite um and and uh redo all of your your writing and your prose and your your essays and you do this many times and and make your writing better and better. But few people that I know of can actually stand up and and speak with excellently excellently written prose directly out of their brain.
Right. It's very different.
So few people can actually are fluent in that way either.
Yeah. No, it's it's it's it's hard for sure. But so, what, as a as a um as a, you know, founder of a language software company, how do you deal with that difficulty of just how different languages are? Because I know you said you have Danish, you have Russian, you have Bengali, you know, you have such different kind of uh languages. How do you face up to those challenges of teaching fundamentally the same? I mean, it's a language, you know, people speak it, people communicate, it's communication, but they have such different moving parts because for me, I wouldn't even know where to begin with that. That must be a huge challenge.
Well, you know, if you have um a child at the age of 12 months in any country in the world. And a and then from 12 months to 36 months, uh the third birthday, all children in the world, they're are basically going through the exact same process in different countries, in different environments, with different languages, but they're all experiencing the same thing. And by 36 months, they speak 600 words at least. Every child, even the slow learners will have maybe at least 500 words that they can speak. And they probably understand maybe up to 1,000 more, which they start they start slowly uh integrating into their speech in in the following years. And so every every three-year-old child has this active vocabulary of about 600 words. And so it happens across all languages. Now, I don't know about the bilingual child. Maybe the bilingual child has some um slower slower capacity with with both languages. Um but they they start to appear later. I haven't seen any studies on that specifically. But I know for for monolingual speakers, it's it's like that. And so we actually know what vocabulary they learn uh in what order for most children. I mean, they they actually start producing certain words at a certain month. And there's a great study by Stanford University that has done this. Um and it's a a study that covers about 20 different languages from around the world. So it's it's quite comprehensive. And um I their numbers are higher for Chinese, but as a Chinese speaker, I think that they're counting words differently. I think that the number is still the same. You know, they're probably counting individual characters. But I I I still believe it's the same.
Um so I I I find that, you know, language learning really is the really is the same for for for every child around the world. So when you ask me the question, how do we, you know, I I think we we look at it is how does a child learn a language and what what prepares the mind to be able to pick up um that data. For so we're not children and we learn languages differently. We think about things, but we also want to address um the basic the basic issues of of human life, which is, you know, I'm hungry, I'm tired and we kind of start off with those kinds of words and we build it out from there. And then we start talking about what your your daily activities are. What are you planning for next week? What did I do yesterday? And all of these kinds of things. And we work through all of these activities and um that that's content related. I mean, we could actually create all kinds of different we could change our content completely. We could change every single sentence in our database and it wouldn't change how how we actually deliver uh the content. We deliver the content in the same way.
Right.
But what Glossika does is we actually um break down the structures of every single language and we sort them. So this is this is the difference from our 2015 version, from three years ago, is that, which was a static um book form. Today it's it's um you know, every language is delivered a little bit differently and an algorithm figures out the sorting for that um based on that language's uh different kinds of complexity. And what is the the easiest way to to acquire um these specific concepts. So every sentence it actually has a a deep uh what I would call a syntacto-semantic layer, which is different than the surface layer. The surface layer is what you actually hear. And so every every word every sentence actually has that underlying um syntacto-semantic framework.
And so from that framework, uh one common example I give is that you could say an accident happened. In English we say the accident first and we say happened second. But the accident is not an agent in the sentence. The accident did not do anything. The accident occurred. It is an is an existential verb. So the existential verb means that it just existed. It it came into existence. You could say come into existence a problem or an accident, you know, and this sort of encodes that how maybe an Aborigine speaker would speak in his own language. But if you if you look at the Russian, um you can't say the word order in the same way that we do in English, even though Russian is typically subject verb object. You say you don't say 'avariya proisoshla', you say 'proisoshla avariya'. And it's not 'avariyoo', it's not in the accusative, it's still in the nominative. You say 'avariya'. And so some learner of the language might say, well, why do you say 'proisoshla', 'proisoshla' is obviously conjugated for a a neutral form, it it's it's not conjugated for you're not saying 'proisoshla', it's not for the 'avariya'. It's it's um it happened. It it happened. It's it. 'Proisoshla'. And then the 'avariya' happens. And then the 'avariya' is just a theme for the sentence. So the the theme is just like a third party in the sentence. It doesn't really it's not a subject, it's not an object. So if you use a a sort of subject object learning pattern for everything, you're just going to get really confused.
And then in a lot of a lot of languages, you have these um these actions that happen that are related to the body that we don't really control. So for example, a lot of things are like um you you fall asleep or you cough or you sneeze or you wake up. And these are just a lot of things that happen with the body that we don't really control. They just happen. And so in a lot of languages that I is actually a me.
Yeah.
And so we have to group these kinds of sentences into their own group. Like bodily functions are in their own group because maybe in that language, you want to be able to pick up the pattern and you're not you're not learning it in some other pattern, which is subject verb an object, where you're mixing it up with a bunch of other sentences, because then you're just going to get confused. It's like, why suddenly sometimes the I is now a me? And and sometimes, you know, I'm getting confused. Why why is this? But if you if you separate all of the sentences by their the the very deep grammar, which is what is the the inter the interrelationship between all of the parties involved in the sentence and do they fall into a certain class?
So there's a a kind of a verb called a semofactive verb. And a semofactive verb is something that happens once and it happens and it and it and it's gone. It's done. For example, maybe my my cup of coffee here, it falls onto the ground and shatters. So fall, it's a semofactive verb because unless I take a snapshot in time, while it is falling, but normally when you if you ask me, what happened to your coffee? I would say, it fell. I wouldn't say, it was falling. You can't even say that. You can't even put it into the continuous tense. It was falling.
Right. Maybe I could if if it was falling for a long time and the telephone rang. And it was falling and the telephone rang. You know, But it actually just happens really fast. Or even when it shatters. A shatter is a semofactive verb. And so you don't have these verbs happening in the continuous tense. So if you're learning Russian, you just you're you know, you're not going to have the imperfective form of these verbs. You're only going to have the perfective form of these verbs.
And so a lot of a lot of students actually confuse, you know, they might be learning um Spanish or French or German and they get confused, you know, you have perfect verbs or the present perfect and the past perfect. And then in in the Slavic languages, you have perfective and imperfective. And what is the difference? Is there a difference between these? Well, and the answer is yes, because the perfective verb, the perfective verb actually means that a an action is finished. But in the Western uh European languages, perfect means that it is both time and finish. So there is both a a time element and the completion of the action um built into one verb.
But isn't that super hard to teach though? Because
It's really hard to teach because students they
You speak use the translation let's say. You say you translate the same way.
Right, you have to break up the patterns into into different groups. And so if you say that something happened at a certain over a certain period of time, for example, in English, I could say um it happened this week or it has it has happened uh it has happened once in the last month or something like this, you know, have a period of time attached to it. And the German German is a little bit a little bit less strict about this. Um you it could it could um you know, it's it's you could say that it it happened um uh it happened on Friday, you know. Um I'm trying to remember my German here.
Well, Yeah, I'm not not better.
Es hat es hat am Freitag, um you know.
'Passiert' or
Passiert. Yeah. And then you could say um and then you could use the present perfect form there. Um but it it is actually referring to a a point previous in time. Whereas the Russian, it doesn't really have because right now I'm my Russian is probably fresher in my mind than my German. But the um the Russian is actually focused more on the completed action and less on the time. And so that is what perfective is. And so the imperfective is like the imperfect, except that the imperfect encodes the time and so it's always in the past. So the imperfect is I was doing. Like you're having in Spanish and French, you know. And in Russian, the imperfective is not I was doing. It was it is I am doing and I was doing. You have to add you have to add the tense to it. And so the perfective in the perfective in Russian, you don't have a present tense. It can be the future because I will do it means I I I am certain that I will go and complete this action.
Yeah. Right.
'Ya prochitayu knigu'. I I will go and read this book to completion.
Yeah. Well, that makes it really hard to learn Russian, for instance, but I just wondered with the if you use primarily let's say a translation, how do you explain the difference between 'ya chitayu knigu', 'ya prochitayu knigu'.
Well, you just have to say is 'read' I guess. I hmm.
Right, you have to
Or I read the book. I was reading the book. Maybe that's the difference. it's not as complicated as I'm making it out.
Right, you have to set up right. Okay. You know. Well, I have to say, I I tried out an app recently, um maybe it was about a year or so ago. But uh I I chose Russian. And and so I was starting off with the app and it asked me to type in the word for 'man' in Russian. And I was thinking, this is level one. So I type in 'chelovek'. I don't know, I think I made a um a mistake or maybe it was the wrong word, because I do know a few words of Russian. And um and then just the first thing I got was wrong. Oh, this is not really this is not really building my confidence.
Encouraging. Yeah.
Encouraging. Not very encouraging.
No. But that's But yeah, I think that's I think it's okay for learners to to be making those mistakes. Because I think one of the one of the hardest things for people learning Glossika at the beginning is that they think that they're supposed to memorize the sentence and they think they're supposed to get it right the exact the very first time. And that's that's a wrong impression to have because that sentence that you get on the first day, it's going to show up many, many times. You have many, many opportunities to get it right. And you don't need to memorize it, because after you've practiced it 20 times over the next three or four over the next week, uh or three or four days, um you're going to remember that sentence naturally. You don't have to do any extra effort. You don't need to turn off Glossika and then do homework.
The whole point of this is that we don't I'm personally, I hate homework. I never do my homework. I never really revise and review. So, the next time I do my session, I want to do my all of my revision and and everything right there in the session. That's how we built it. Because I know that people are busy and by the time the next day they come back to it, they're going to forget everything. I know you're going to forget everything. That's why we built it like this. Because we're going to help you. Just go over the material again and then add a little bit of new stuff. It's just so easy. It's so it's so convenient and I don't have to lay out my lesson plans or figure out what I'm going to learn next. It's all taken care of for you.
So I think the greatest thing about Glossika is that I can I can go live my life and forget about all my language learning and I can come back and just do a little bit every day. And it and it really just builds. And and that review and revision it really helps me learn everything um without without any extra effort, you know. Keep the effort level low but really high um um uh a really high you know, effect, you know, and results.
Yeah, and I I think also I don't I don't have any science to back this up, but I think we're more likely to remember things if we don't try to remember them. If we focus if we really focus on it. It's kind of this like uh idea. I think I when I did my driving lessons, uh it was about 12 years ago. I was driving and then the instructor said, you have to focus your point of view on the road, the middle of the road in front of you. You know, the middle of your lane. If you focus on the oncoming traffic, then you're your hands are automatically going to, you know, steer towards it. So it's to me it's interesting that, you know, we don't want to crash, of course. But sometimes if you focus on the thing uh that you want or that you don't want too much, it kind of just makes it a little harder. Uh and I think for the memory, it it it it cannot feel like you're trying to remember because then it will do anything it can to not remember it properly. You know, I I don't have any science for this. I wish if somebody has any studies.
There's a little bit of science behind this. And most of our memories go through uh a piece in the brain called the hippocampus. And so when a memory is created, it it normally has um these connections between the the neurons and cells in the brain. And so there's something called an anchor, just a it's just a convenient word that we have. But if you experience if you experience um something happening, that becomes part of your long-term memory. Normally that if you have sight and sound and smell and touch and all of these other things, they all create an individual anchor. So more connections with that cell or that group of cells that create that memory. And so those connections, the more connections you have, um the deeper ingrained it is in your brain. So for example, if you do experience a car accident, you're going to have a lot of a lot of anchors in there and a lot of trauma involved with that. So it it actually stays in your your memory a lot longer than let's say the kind of food you had for lunch yesterday. You will easily forget. Was it a sandwich? Was it a soup? I forget.
Right.
Right. But but sometimes those flavors like maybe the flavor of your grandmother's cooking or your mother's cooking might go stay with you for life. And and so maybe in old age, you have that same flavor and you're like, wow, this is exactly like my grandmother's cooking. And so that creates a very strong anchor from from early in life, you know, that stays with you for life. So we're able to identify very specific things um later in life. And so there there's an interesting parallel here with language learning is that building up those anchors. And and then actually strengthening the um the the cells in the brain to remember. Um normally that just happens with uh exposure. So you you can create a stronger connection with more exposure, as long as it's exposure that's meaningful and it's something that you understand. So if it's a meaningful exchange of information, then you're more likely to remember it longer. Especially if you build in the muscle memory with the tongue, then you're building an extra anchor because the muscle moving in combination with the sound is is the best is the best way to um to build that long-term memory with the with the with language. And that that works towards fluency. Because fluency fluency is embedded in the muscle. It's not embedded in the eyes, it's not embedded in the in the knowledge of the brain. Fluency is in the muscle. So you have to move the muscle if you're going to get to fluency. And so I mean it's okay. You don't have to practice with your tongue, but um you can get to the point where you understand a lot of things, but
To repeat out loud, I guess.
To repeat out loud. It just it just really helps to to move the tongue along with whatever you're you're listening to. No matter how much mumbling it is, because it gets better. It gets better. It gets much better. And it improves very quickly.
Yeah. Practice makes perfect, I think, is the uh kind of the conclusion to uh to our discussion here.
Yeah. And you really don't even need somebody to fix your pronunciation that all that much because um well we're always going to have some accent in a foreign language, but um the more practice you do, the better your pronunciation gets. And especially if you get outside and you speak with a native speaker. So if I'm if I meet with an Italian or a German or a Russian person and I'm speaking and I say something that's just wrong, they're just going to look at me funny. And and then I and then they tell me how to say it the right way and and I say and that creates a a very strong memory connection in my brain and that experience will help me remember it and I'm more more more than likely say it right the next time.
Yeah, I might still happen. Um but yeah, I mean uh I think I think you should have your own podcast, Mike. You're such great uh interesting inputs on on the the facets of language learning and on the the theories behind it. So that could be an interesting new the Glossika podcast with Mike, you know, uh people could listen into some of your musings on the on the different learning ideas. I think you should consider that.
Well, we do have a a weekly video that goes out on the Glossika YouTube channel. And so I invite people to ask questions because then I can address those questions with um some information that I share every week. Um we may we may increase that to more than a week, but um but you know, it depends on how many questions we get. I mean, we I could just sit there recording a lot of different things all the time. But we try to keep it short. We try to keep it like maybe three to five minutes. Um so if you find a topic you're interested in, um anybody out there listening and um on the YouTube channel, Glossika YouTube channel, you can um go ahead and sign up and we'll have new content coming out. Be sure to send us in questions and I'm most available to answer and of course, Kris, you can always um invite me back on and if you have um maybe you pick up on topics from other people you interview and maybe you'd like to to ask me um what I think about it and vice versa, ask your other guests. Um but thank you very much.
No, you're very welcome. It's been a real pleasure and I I can't believe the the time has flown by so quickly. It's been really an interesting uh episode and I also want to I need to start I I need to do more work. Every time I I talk about methods and strategies I always get excited to go back. So I I might load up a a little session of my my Glossika here after. Do you have any any last um any last uh piece of information for people or places uh website URL, anything you want them to check out. Of course, they can try our Glossika tryglossika.com. You get the you know
Glossika.com and Glossika with a K uh it's from the Greek word for for language, linguistics. So it's um hopefully not too hard to remember. And um yeah, we've got the we've got um yeah, just the website, Glossika.com. You can sign up for free and you actually get um free courses if you if you actually sign in, we have some free languages in there. They're normally um non-national languages, like minority. So you can get Welsh and and Scottish and Catalan and some Chinese dialects in there for free. And then we also have um um you can try any of our languages for free. So there's that at least a a week's worth of material in there for for each language that you can try. So whatever you'd like to um it's fine.
Just to see if you get on with the the method because obviously we're all different then some people just respond a lot better to certain methods than others.
And a great thing is that if you've had maybe French in high school and it's been a few years, uh or maybe French in university and it's been a few years since you've practiced it, then getting back on Glossika will bring the the language back alive really quickly. And you might actually just recover what you've lost in a short amount of time. And make a lot of new progress. And the great thing about that is that you've probably had a lot of grammar classes, you kind of know how the language works, and how the grammar works. And what you really need right now is just that kind of um you know, that that voice, that audio training. And by doing that, you you'll pick up a a huge amount of the language in a very short period of time. So it really helps for those people that have had classes in the past and they've haven't come back to the language in a long time. That's where you're going to make the that's where Glossika gives people the biggest benefit. And the other thing is we've had um stories from people where they they learned the language as a child or they heard their parents or grandparents speaking the language, but they never actually learned to speak it themselves. These people actually get a lot of um a lot of uh progress in the language because they're familiar with it already. And so Glossika just really builds that that that um that expressive ability for them really quickly.