Olle Linge: Hacking Chinese and Academic vs Non-Academic Learning

Hello everyone, welcome to episode 181 of the Actual Fluency Podcast. Today I'm talking to Hacking Chinese founder Olle Linge. And we discuss a lot about language learning from an academic and non-academic perspective. But most of the examples given will be extremely useful for people who are currently, or in the future learning Chinese. But a lot of the examples, a lot of the discussions are really universal. So even if you're not learning Chinese, you're going to get a lot out of this episode.

And this episode is the last of 2020. So I just wanted to thank you for the support over the year, which has been a very stressful year for many of us. I myself just moved to Portugal, which is why the audio quality of this kind of introduction bit is a little bit different from the rest of the episode. I'm sorry about that. I will get a proper setup in due time. Also, my living room is basically wooden floors and blank walls, so the sound is bouncing all over the place. So if you hear some echo, that's why.

But I'm excited to be starting the next chapter in the podcast next year where I'm going to be taking, there won't be any more episodes for this year, as I said, and then in January, I'm going to be inviting a bunch of new guests and hopefully get ahead of the scheduling. So if you have any suggestions for guests you'd like to see on the podcast, please do go ahead and send me a message. I'd love to reach out to as many as possible and get into a weekly schedule next year. This year has been so messy for so many reasons. But I do apologize for the sometimes sporadic posting. But thank you for listening and thank you for staying with us. And I know next year, it's going to be a lot better and more consistent. And also, outside the podcasting world, of course.

So enjoy this episode with Olle, and he also has a special offer for Actual Fluency listeners. So if you go to actualfluency.com/Olle, and that's O-L-L-E, you'll be taken to the page where you can see the special deal for any Chinese learners out there who just are interested in Hacking Chinese. It's a special sort of 10-year anniversary of the site special deal he's running. So if you listen to this in the future, there's probably a different deal there. You know, I made sure that he he put a link up where he could update it, even if you're listening to this in the future. So enjoy the episode and I'll see you in the next one.

I want to start off this episode by giving a quick shout out to the show sponsor, OptiLingo. John C and the team have been amazing for Actual Fluency in terms of support, especially in this very uncertain year. And they've also been supporting the Polyglot Cruise. And so I just want to say a big thanks to OptiLingo. And do go check them out if you want to say goodbye to boring drills and memorization and start talking rather than typing into, you know, boring flashcards. So check out OptiLingo and let's get into the show.

Uh, so, it all started with, um, I practiced for some reason, I don't know why I started. I think it was just like, I saw people practicing uh Tai Chi Chuan or Tai Chi, I guess we would say in English, uh, in, where in the city where I lived, where I grew up. And I kind of joined in and thought it was kind of interesting. Um, I practiced lots of martial arts back then and this looked like an interesting thing to to add, so I did that. And that led me, you know, to, uh, a bit of Chinese philosophy. Not much language, we didn't speak like Chinese or anything and the the teacher and instructors were Swedish. Um, but it got me interested in in in philosophy and a bit of history maybe, a bit of, you know, ancient uh Chinese wisdoms and and all that.

Um, and then there was a an opportunity to study Chinese for like a year full time, uh at the university where I studied. And I was studying a teacher's program. I I wanted to be a teacher in in English and Swedish at the time. So, uh, I just said, "Well, why don't I take a break from this for a year and just do this Chinese thing?" And I cannot explain like afterwards like why did I do it. It was kind of a, you know, I I if I don't, if I'm going to try something like this, why why don't do it now? I'm a student, I don't have any commitments, I can just just try it out. And I did. And during this year, I applied to study study, um, in Taiwan with a scholarship. And this was not something that I planned, it was just a teacher said, "Hey, I received this email, there there is this scholarship, and if you want to, you can you can apply." And I did. And the application, I just, you know, sent something away, I didn't plan on going, I didn't think too much, I just, I don't know, for some reason, I sent it. And I got it. And if you get an opportunity to study like in another country for a year, and they basically pay most, covers like living and tuition and so on. I mean, you can't you can't turn something like that that down, right?

Uh, so I did that, and I ended up staying a bit longer, I stayed for another year, I stayed for two years. Uh, I came back to Sweden to complete my degree, and then I thought, "Okay, I mean, I kind of know, I can speak Chinese, I can I can do most things in Chinese, but if I'm going to like do something serious, like teaching Chinese, I I think this is not really enough." So, I went back for a master's degree, and studied for two years in a master's degree program, uh, taught entirely in Chinese, where most most of my classmates were native Chinese speakers. And, uh, I came back from that in 2014. And since then, I've been, uh, I've been working with Chinese education in in various, uh, forms.

And it's always hard when people ask, "What do you do?" And people say, "Yeah, I'm this or I'm that." And I have, you know, it's hard to summarize because I do a lot of different things. But my main, the main thing I do is that I work with professional development for language teachers at Uppsala University. And, um, that is not limited to Chinese, but we do offer courses for teachers, um, for their, well, it's like courses in how to teach languages, how to, you know, how to upgrade their their teaching methods and and things like that. For for for teachers in schools, I mean, in high school and junior high school and so on.

Um, so I do that. And, uh, apart from that, obviously, I have my my website. Uh, I work with, uh, Skritter, which is a an app that, uh, for learning to read and write Chinese, Chinese and Japanese characters. Um, I also work with a project called WordSwing, where I create interactive text games for Chinese learners.

So, those that's roughly what I'm doing. And, you could say that it's all an accident. Like, I found this interesting course and I applied for it and then it just snowballed. I never had a plan to actually do this. It took a few years before I realized, "Okay, I guess I'm committed now. I I'm spending all this time so you know, what are you going to do?" I mean, I I need more to do and you feel that you always need more and then at some point you're you're stuck. You've invested so much that you that's, yeah, that's what you're doing. And I like what I'm doing, so I'm happy I did, but but it was never planned and it was never my intention to end up where I am now.

But what I want to, first of all, I think there's a lot of really cool topics that I'd love to talk to you about. So we'll see how long this episode gets and how much we can get around. But the first I wanted to talk a little bit about is the is learning Chinese. So from a learner's perspective, it's a very highly, I don't want to call it a requested language, but a lot of people in the West seem to be drawn to Chinese because of the just the amount of people that speak it, the kind of growing economy and and and, you know, tech and exports and everything. It's a big business partner for many countries and parts of the world. But a lot of people don't succeed very much with learning Chinese and and a lot of people say that it's very difficult to do it. And it also turns people off that it's a different script and characters and everything. So can you share a little bit maybe your strategies and methods and experience with learning Chinese in in in a relatively short time to such a high level where you could actually do classes entirely in Chinese in front of native speakers?

And you also asked about, I mean, the the script here. So, Chinese characters obviously is one of the big factors when people say that it's hard.

Um, so I would say that when you approach the language, you you it makes sense to focus mostly on the spoken language, and you can get reasonably far in spoken Chinese in a limited amount of time. It is, I would say, slightly harder than learning say German, like I said, for me, or for an English speaker, too, obviously. Uh, but it's not it's not impossible. Uh, there are some very forgiving things about Chinese, too. Uh, for example, beginner grammar is super easy, you just basically pile words on top of each other, and you have some basic sentence pattern and and it kind of works. Uh, grammar gets a lot harder when you, uh, get further into the language, but it's as a beginner, you can have your words and kind of kind of use a basic formula, and you'll be able to say things, and and it works. Uh, so some people learn, I don't know, if you invest a lot of time, you you can learn to speak decent Chinese in just a few months. Obviously, if you study like a few, I mean, I don't know, a few hours a week, it will take longer. But, uh, to give you like some kind of idea, the the the people we teach, the students we teach at university, and they are motivated, and they study a lot, but they are not, you know, it's not the only thing they're doing. They're spending a lot of time, uh, but it's not the only thing they're doing. And I would say like after a semester, they can kind of converse a little bit, after a year, the best of them can definitely talk about most things in Chinese. So, it's not impossible, but like I said, it it it does take does take a bit of a bit of time.

But some people seem to disregard this entirely when they talk about the difficulty of learning languages. They just rate them next to each other, but they don't realize that it's really about more about you and not the language. Like, how much can you how many hours can you put in? You you said week, but it could also be day, you know, I've heard about the professional programs, I know that the Danish army for instance trains officers, they call them language officers for interpreting abroad. And they have, I think, about six or eight hours of lessons per day, and then about the same doing homework after the classes. So it's clear that obviously if you do that, then your language skills are going to be insane after even a short period of time. But for most people, the idea of doing, let's say, an hour a day, is can quickly overwhelm and then they give up and

So, it's about it's about spending the time, like you and I've worked, for example, one of the things that are, I mean, research clearly shows that learning say pronunciation gets harder the older you you get, and that's just it's just the way it is. But I've worked with lots of people who are 60 plus with their Chinese pronunciation. And so far, I've never met anyone who who can't improve. It it it works. They can learn. It's just that some people have this, "I can't do it." And that's that's the only, I wouldn't say it's the only challenge, but it's definitely the first and most important challenge. If you can overcome that and just stick to it and, you know, invest the time and effort, then then everybody can learn I think any language.

So, yeah, it requires a lot of commitment to do something like that. And that's maybe why I said in the beginning that I think it's important to have realistic expectations. Like, if someone tells you, "This is super easy, you can do it without effort," they are wrong and you shouldn't listen to them. Because what's going to happen then is that you do it and then you realize, "Wait, this is not as easy as this guy said. Does that mean that I'm stupid? Does it mean that I'm doing it wrong or something?" No, it doesn't. It just means that they kind of tricked you a little bit.

But actually, and he he does mention it in the movie, so he's not trying to be you know, he's not trying to hide the fact that he worked on it. And he also says that he was much more interested in Chinese. So he worked a lot more on it than compared to his friend, Pat, who was not as interested in Chinese. And it showed in the in the in the level. But then when they went to Korea, it was the reverse. So that's kind of it's kind of funny that it's not about your personal kind of academic skills or interests or work ethic. It's it's also how drawn you are to the language. So if you've tried learning a language for a long time, maybe it's just not your language. Maybe you just don't that could be sure.

Um, but yeah, it's important to say that and and the personal story I have with that is always, you know, Benny Lewis, you know, I I love Benny. He's a great friend of mine. And I think a lot of yeah, I think he's he's solely responsible. I think in many ways for a big growth in the language learning industry, because he he was one of the frontrunners together with like Luca and and Richard producing videos about learning multiple languages. You know, this was kind of a foreign thing for for a long time, where I think it's becoming a lot more mainstream now with technology. But there was a tendency in his in his earlier work to show a lot of the wins, you know, short videos that showed great improvement in very short time and great conversations with native speakers. But it it also didn't show him that he was spending eight hours a day.

So I I I always say like the inspiration and the excitement and the, um, you know, it's great to encourage people, but we also always have to be realistic, because otherwise you get that you get that negative effect that you mentioned. So I totally agree with you with you on that. And I think that you summed it up well, you know, it's it's it's it's difficult, but it's not impossible.

And I figured that if you do something like Benny, uh, did, like where you study for three months and you literally do nothing else, you kind of get more hours in those three months than you get over seven years of schooling. And the important lesson here is, of course, that people see that, yeah, you can learn languages. It doesn't have to take seven years, and even after those seven years, maybe you you still feel that you can't speak the language. So that's an important message that you can do things that doesn't take, you can learn a language in less than seven years. But then what we are talking about here, that's more like, yeah, but what what actually matters is not which date you started learning. It's like, what did you do? What, I mean, did you invest the hours? Did you did you spend all the minutes? The minutes count, not the not the like the the the the years.

But so I was curious actually like how many hours have I spent on it. And I I'm not the greatest sort of off-school student. So it's not like I would go home and read like German novels or do Duolingo. I mean, there was no Duolingo back then, but you know, I I didn't do a lot of work outside of class, let's put it that way. And I calculated with starting in fifth grade and ending in grade about 13, I guess, the equivalent would be, you know, so that includes high school as well. So there's seven, eight years of German. I concluded that I had no more than 300 hours.

German tuition. So when you break it down like that, you see, okay, and that's a very related language. So maybe if you did 300 300 hours of focused study in a sort of shorter time span, maybe that will get you quite a lot higher than I got. But because it's spread out over so many years, there's a lot of decay as well. There's a lot of I lose a lot of the the the the language when I don't use it. And obviously I don't use it a lot either, which is the problem. But imagine that, 300 hours, right? So that's about a year of one hour a day.

And there's actually an interesting parallel here, I think, to where you're studying the language. Is like you have, uh, the kind of the same myth, if we use that word, uh, to describe people who think that you will get fluent just by going to China.

Uh, because there are, of course, we you can prove that's wrong by doing looking at two examples, right? We have plenty of expats living in China who do not speak Chinese, even if they've lived there for tens tens of years. So we know that that's false because of that. You can live in China forever and not learn Chinese.

Obviously, we'll pick up some some greeting phrases and stuff like that, but you will not learn you will not learn the language just by living there. Because if you teach English or if you work at an English-speaking company, why would you learn Chinese? Right? It's the same, if you started learning, said you started you've you've learned been learning the language for 10 years, but you spent that time doing other things. Why why does it matter that it was 10 years ago? And why does it matter you live in China?

And of course, you can also look at people who don't live in China and still learn the language. So, I mean, I think there are lots of these things that people who haven't thought about these things too much, like they kind of get hooked up on, like they kind of get stuck, and they think, "I have to go to China to learn Chinese," or I, you know, you you have these mental blocks. And I think those things are important to talk about. And like you said, inspiring people and letting people know that this is possible, you don't have to do that and you don't, you can, you know, you can there are many ways to to to learning languages.

Um, so I was learning the language with that knowledge. But actually, what I found was the struggle of starting over in a new country and making new friends and learning how things worked, the bureaucracy, the local government, and all these things and challenges actually filled me up so much mentally that I didn't put much studying in. I just didn't I just didn't have the kind of energy, mental energy left over, because I was dealing with, you know, you had to find a an apartment, you have to do this and this and this, everything is foreign, you're all alone. You have to make money as well, you know.

Um, so I actually found that my Russian, which is a a language that I studied mostly in Denmark, is doing much better having never been to a Russian-speaking country ever, even though I was 18 months in in Hungary. So obviously, your your mileage will vary, but I think it's it's a it's a it's an advantage to be in the country, or it can be, you can definitely make it an advantage if you if you do the right thing.

And you will see signs in the language, you will see all these things. But the problem, I think, is that when it comes to some languages, and I mean, basically any language that is kind of not too related to your own, like I I imagine that if I move to Denmark, uh, I would probably be able to just learn Danish by living there and kind of absorbing things. I think that would work. But in Chinese, that doesn't work. Like it obviously doesn't work for reading, for example. Is that that doesn't work. And probably doesn't work for speaking either, because you have like you don't have that kind of framework to to, uh, to make sense of what you're you're hearing.

But on the other hand, and this is maybe related to traveling to learn languages, too. Like, if you have, uh, already know some, uh, Chinese or Bulgarian or, uh, whatever language it is we're talking about, if you know a little bit when you go there, like you have your you have your fundamental vocabulary down already, then you can kind of, even if you don't study that much like actively, you can still pick things up, you can start piecing things together and so on. But without that kind of, you know, entry into like this anchor point or I don't know, uh, what I know, um, beachhead or maybe, I don't know. But some kind of when you have this, um, uh, like opening where you can kind of get into the language and kind of start making things sense of things, that's when I think immersion really helps.

Uh, because I mean, if you're at home, I mean, you're at sure, you can listen to podcasts, you can you can watch movies and go to go on iTalkie and so on. But these are all things you have to sit down and actively decide that this is what I will do instead of watching something in my native language or hanging out with my friends or, you know, doing other things. Whereas if you're immersed, you kind of it just happens. So that's the main difference, but it's not like you said, it's not as important as people make it out to be.

And this is almost opposite of what I did, which is also why my Hungarian mission was such a spectacular fail. I mean, it taught me a lot, so I guess you can say that, I mean, nothing's really a failure. It's just a a lesson learned. But what I did was I was uh moving to Germany. I had a flight to Germany after Budapest, after Hungary. And uh when I got there for a little mini conference, I just liked it so much. I I think Budapest is such a beautiful city. And it was affordable and it was the weather was nice and people seemed friendly and it just had everything that I liked. And I was moving out of Denmark anyway, so I thought, you know, why would I go to Berlin, which is so I wouldn't say familiar to me, but I've been there quite a few times for the Polyglot Gathering and and other trips over the years. So to me, Berlin was like the safe and and also I spoke German pretty well already. So I didn't see it as a language advantage. So I just thought, okay, I'm just going to stay in Budapest instead and and not take my last flight ticket.

Um, so obviously, I didn't prepare any Hungarian for that because I I thought I thought I was only going to be there for a week. Um, so um, so that's why I I kind of didn't prepare for it. And I think that that's a big that was a big mistake, because when you get there, you're like I said, you're so overwhelmed by all other things that the idea of learning basic the basic language to get you started can seem like a big hurdle.

Um, so I would definitely recommend people, if you know you're moving to a place, get started from home. Uh, and and and actually saying this at the time of the recording, I'm about to repeat my own mistake, because I was spontaneously moved to I'm moving to Portugal soon. But again, that wasn't planned. So it's hard, you know, life changes all the time. Like you said, you got a scholarship for for for studying abroad, and you didn't you didn't expect it, you didn't plan for it. Luckily, you had some language preparation before as it as it happened. But you know, we have to also roll with the punches and and do what we can, when we can.

But for immersion, I would say getting out removing the idea that immersion is some kind of secret sauce and some kind of magical method where you just learn by osmosis, is not true. That's definitely the wrong characterization. It can definitely enhance and it can definitely improve, but you need a fundamental level. And even then, I would say the the the if you have one person do both like an immersive immersive way, and when I say immersive way, I really mean you're going to the country. I know you can create a semi immersion environment at home, uh with many methods, a lot of people do this. Um, so what I really mean is the difference between going to the country and not going to the country or region where it's spoken.

Um, but I think a learner might not necessarily be any more successful with one or the other. It's all about your personality and it for example, introverts might find it harder to use the language when they get there. And so they don't get the immersive benefits anyway. Whereas extroverts might be completely the opposite. They might really enjoy going out speaking 500 mistakes a day or whatever that some people recommend.

So that's also important. But maybe to round off like this, um, segment about language learning, which it's one of my favorite segments and always obviously you've done a lot of research on it. But um, for Chinese specifically, do you have any kind of top tips or maybe I mean, we already you already gave some of your top tips as a as a general rule for for language learning. But for Chinese, do you have any kind of inside secrets that people listening to this, who might want to dip their toes into learning Chinese in the near future can benefit from?

And the reason is not that I think it's that's talking to people is an excellent way of learning Chinese. I think it's not really, I mean, you're mostly using words that you you already know. Uh, but it can be very motivational, that's one thing. You realize that this is actually a language used by people. And you have these, you know, uh, you see in your textbook that, okay, if I say if I say ma instead of ma, it suddenly means hemp and not horse. And you say, oh, oh, that sounds weird. And, but you don't get the feeling that this is real. Like, is you you still have that feeling that this is something someone must have made this up, right? It's it's just how can it be this complicated? And how can how can such a difference that I don't hear, how can it make such a big difference for them?

But when you talk to people, you get you you experience firsthand that pronunciation is kind of important, uh, in the sense that you you you get feedback on what you are saying. So, if your pronunciation is completely off, uh, which is probably the case for many people, um, then you will you will you will know that when you start talking to people, because people will not understand what you're saying.

And, of course, this differs depending on whom you're talking to. So, if you have a trained teacher, so let's say that I talk to you in Chinese and you're a beginner. Uh, I would probably be able to guess what you say, regardless of what you say, essentially. At least as a beginner, because I know what you know. I know that you're not suddenly going to say, I mean, hemp, for example, is not a word that most people use, right? And I will know that you mean horse. I don't remember what I said, I think it was horse. Um, I know that's what you mean, right? Uh, so there's a certain amount of guessing that works very well for beginners.

But when you speak with real people, you still get this feedback. And you can do this at iTalkie. I don't mean you have to do it in China. I mean, just do it. And this also stops you from, for example, I have met students that somehow thought that tones could be ignored. And and this is preposterous. Like, you still see people on forums who say, "Tones are not important, native speakers don't care about them in real life anyway." And I mean, okay, I can just say, I've I've done my specialty in research is tones and tone acquisition and so on. And this is just wrong. Uh, it's like saying, okay, when you learn, hey, okay, I want to learn, Chris, I want to learn Danish. And you tell me like, someone tells me, "Hey, when you learn Danish, vowels are not important."

So, take pronunciation. This is my kind of heartfelt advice after working with pronunciation a lot. Take it really seriously from the start. You can take almost anything else less seriously. Characters, you can learn those later, there is no problem. But if you like, say, learn Chinese on your own for a year, maybe, or even longer. I've met a person who studied Chinese for many years in Sweden, and then went to China and realized, "Oops, I missed something here." And he didn't learn any tones. And he told me that he studied Chinese for, I don't know how long, maybe 10, 20 years after this happened. And he still says he struggles because of this. And it's so hard, like I've done I've made mistakes, I've misunderstood how a certain tone worked, um, when I when I first learned Chinese, um, which is what I ended up writing my thesis about, by the way. But I made a mistake, and fixing this thing, this misunderstanding, took, I don't I it's hard to say how much time I spent on this individual issue, but I would estimate maybe 100 hours. And we're we're talking about sitting down with people like trying to fix a specific problem. Like it's not a a very easy problem, but it's still like a concrete thing that is identifiable and it's limited, it's like one of the tones, okay? And it takes an extreme amount of effort to fix this later. Whereas if you do it right from the beginning, yes, it will take you a few hours extra to get these things right from the start. But then you don't have to spend those 100 hours later. And I I promise you, you don't want to do that.

Um, and this was sort of surprising to me. I don't know why. Maybe it was an obvious thing, but so when I when I was doing Russian a couple of years ago, I skipped all the pronunciation. I just did like, as good as it can be, you know, and I remember some of my first tutoring lessons, like three, four months into the project, and the teacher, this is why this is this is a really profound moment for my Russian. The teacher was repeating words and I couldn't hear the difference. She was saying different words over and over that had slightly different, I think it was an S sound we were working on. Russian has like four or five S sounds. And um, and I just couldn't tell the difference. She was like, can you not hear the difference between A and B? And I was like, no, I can't. And that's when I realized I was a little bit late with that.

But part of it, I think, comes from listening as well, which is also to a little, I guess, it's a little nice opportunity to plug the bite-size language courses, which are which are offered on Actual Fluency. They're beginner listening courses. So if you get started, let's say, on Spanish, I mean, it's available in six different languages, but the aim of that is to give you an easy-to-listen-to resource, so you can improve your understanding of the sounds of the language.

That's the key benefit. So ideally, you sit down, you can use any tool you want, of course. There are lots of ways to do this. But for the bite-size courses, you sit down and you listen to simple beginner-friendly dialogues over and over again, so you tune your ears to the sounds of the language. And then ideally, you take that and you you you you go to a teacher session, or you go to the country or whatever, and do what you say and basically get feedback, direct feedback, and interact with the language and use what you've learned.

But I think a lot of the reasons that people are terrible at pronunciation is because they skip that initial listening step often. They go into production very quickly. So like I want to, I want to say things in Chinese. I'm just using Chinese as an example. Obviously, I don't know anything about the language, but, you know, I want to say things in Chinese, but in reality, maybe people would benefit better from saying, okay, I'll take a month or so and find some unfortunately, bite-size Chinese is not yet available, but if I find someone to make it, maybe it will be in the future, so check it out. But, um, maybe take some time to just simply listen and and kind of absorb the language.

And I think that that will be that will pay you huge dividends in the long run. Uh, is my understanding and and, um, idea of it anyway, because

Um, so listening is very important. And that's something that is overlooked. I think maybe in particular in Chinese, but I think this is true in most formal settings, at least, I would say any kind of school, university thing. There is a very strong tradition, at least in the West, uh, and I would say across the world, to focus on that's kind of writing matters more. Writing is the real thing. And I mean, it used to be that people who study languages in the West only studied, you know, classical texts, or they only studied literature. Uh, they only did translation and stuff like that.

Whereas we are talking about a very functional approach, where we want to communicate with people. And I would say that listening is important, first in itself, it is important, because obviously, it's, well, it's a main part of the language, like you said, it's the key to pronunciation. It's also socially important. Like, if you don't understand what anybody's saying, it will feel very hard to do anything socially. Whereas if you don't cannot say something specifically, that might be okay. But it's much much worse for you to not understand what's going on. And if you think about it, uh, if you don't understand what's going on, you are also not learning anything. Uh, like we said, like I think I mentioned this before, but when you speak, you normally use what you already know. You cannot like learn a new word by speaking. It doesn't work. Uh, but you can learn words from what other people tell you. Uh, but if you don't understand what they're saying, you're not learning.

So, listening kind of accelerates, and it's kind of has a good, um, you know, transfer to any other area of learning. So, I would say that's that's that's uh, definitely the case.

So listening is important. But I also said that it's more important in Chinese, I think, than in many other languages. And that is probably because Chinese, uh, Chinese education is, and I mean education, both maybe for native speakers, but also for foreigners, like us, if we learn Chinese. Uh, the characters take up a lot of space. So, I just recommended people in the beginning when we talked about this, to kind of, I said it was okay to like delay character learning. That's not, you probably didn't blink, but that's a very controversial thing to say for some teachers. So, many native speakers, not all, but many native speakers who work with Chinese education, their reaction to this kind of statement is, no, you can't do that. You have to learn characters from day one. And that's not based on a kind of pragmatic, research-based, empirical thing, this is how it works. It's just a gut feeling that for them, if you don't do characters, it's not Chinese, or it's not like the real stuff, right?

Uh, and I'm not saying that the spoken language is the only important thing. I also think characters are interesting. I've spent so much time with characters and I like characters. But I also realized that that's not necessarily what you have to do from from day one. And what's going to happen then is that if you take, I cannot speak for everybody in all countries and so on, but if you take a course in Chinese or have a teacher or anything, the likelihood is that this teacher will probably stress the written language more than I would recommend that they do. So, pronunciation, for example, you mentioned listening. So, how much listening, how much space or time does listening take up in a curricula at a university in the West? Uh, I haven't not, I haven't done a survey here, but in some cases, it's actually zero.

So what they often did was they had either CDs or cassettes that would and again, I'd love to hear emails about your experience learning languages with this method, but my understanding is that it was very common for a lot of language lessons to be simply the teacher press play on on a CD that had so so the students were listening a lot. But it seems like in modern school, uh, in the modern school age, this isn't as popular anymore. And but but perhaps it was never popular in the universities, because they focus so much on reading.

And hopefully, it does change, you know, over time. But I guess to circle back to Chinese actually, I would say that the the tip here is, like you said, you said the owner was on the student. And that is, uh, maybe the most important thing. And I think that's applicable to any language, but maybe particularly Chinese. And that is that you cannot just learn what your teacher says.

If you do that, and you get full marks, and I can tell you a story here, because I did this exactly this. So, I studied this program, right, for a year before I left. And I mean, I did well. I I I got full marks on my Chinese courses. And then I, uh, moved to Taiwan and started speaking with people. And I knew, I don't know exactly, maybe a few thousand words at this time. I would say. And I mean, I I wasn't into, uh, you know, language learning. I had not I didn't know about, well, your podcast didn't exist, but, you know, there were still people this is in 2008. So, there were still people talking about language learning online, obviously, right? But I did not, I was not, you know, an expert in how to learn languages. Uh, I did not know like of I could not like list 10 ways of learning vocabulary. So, I pretty much did what the teacher told me for the first year. And I had good teachers, I should say. They weren't bad. But if you do that, you will miss super important things. We talked about listening, you missed that. And of course, you you do some listening, but I'm saying you should do 10 times as much listening as your teacher says.

Um, and people are not really, you know, Chinese people care about, I mean, face, everybody cares about face, but I mean, they are not likely to confront you with your bad pronunciation. So, you can actually have serious problems without noticing it, even if you're in an immersion environment, even if you speak with professional teachers.

And that's why you kind of have to care yourself. It's your language learning, right? If you end up with, uh, I don't know, incomprehensible spoken Chinese, you could say, "Oh, it was my teacher's fault." Uh, but then again, you are the one who ends up with that language. So, it doesn't help blaming other people. Yeah, it might be true. Maybe your teacher should have told you. But on the other hand, that doesn't really help you, does it? Um, you need to, you need to kind of I'm the person learning the language. I'm an independent learner. I can do all these things. And by all means, take courses. I I think, I don't know, most people, I think, benefit hugely from taking courses. I'm not advising against doing that. I'm just saying, don't think that your teacher will teach you everything you know, because they won't, for sure.

Um, so that's obviously part of the reason people don't because a lot of people say, well, I've had Spanish for three years in high school, but I can't say a sentence. Which I think is a great shame, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the course is bad. Yeah. Or the way that we teach languages is bad. I I would say there's I mean, you're you're, uh, you know, 100 times the academic I am. Maybe infinitely more, let's use that term. But, you know, you can maybe argue there's some correlation, maybe, that a great course might have better results on average, but even a terrible course can be successful for the right student doing the right things.

Um, so maybe that's really the secret is that because I always I always thought that the language community could be a great kind of a driver in improving language education and tuition around the world. But maybe the reality is that we do that from within, so we give the individual students the tools and the mindset or help with the encouragement or or any of the tips here. And then that kind of radiates from within, I don't know.

Um, unfortunately, we we mostly reach people who are already interested, though, because the people who really need to hear your podcast, they are they are probably not going online searching for how to learn languages or something. And and that's a problem.

I also realized I actually I forgot to finish the story I started. I said that I got very good grades for my first a year of Chinese in Sweden. But that wasn't the point. I mean, getting good grades in a course like this, you just basically if you spend the time, you you get good grades. It's not it's not hard. Um, but, uh, when I moved to Taiwan and started talking to people, I realized that I had all those thousand words I mentioned. But I still struggled immensely to say even basic things. Of course, I could point at like most things and know what they were called. What's that called? Oh, it's a door, it's a house. I mean, I could do all those things. That was not a problem. I could ask basic questions. I didn't understand any of the answers, but that's that's that's another story.

Um, but, you know, I remember someone asking me like, "Where do you live?" Okay, understand, no problems. And I can say like, I live in this place. I do that. But then I tried to say something slightly more complicated, like, okay, I live in the building behind that building over there. And that's not like a super complicated sentence. And I had all the vocabulary, all the grammar to do this. I probably had that after studying for a few months already. But still, I remember that that phrase took me, I don't know. It took me a minute to get out.

And and that's not okay. Like, that's the reason that happens is because, well, I studied all these things and I learned all these things, but I simply didn't, you know, you didn't use the language enough. And that's, of course, we talking about listening and all these things that listening is important, and listening I do think is much more important than speaking. But then there also comes a time where if you know lots of things, like we said, if you if you prepare for your immersion trip or if you prepare before you travel or something, then when you actually get to a situation where you can use it, you will learn extremely fast. Because you already have the groundwork. You have the words. You have the grammar. You have all these things, and your brain just needs a little kick to kind of get started. And then you can learn very quickly.

Um, but the problem, I think, is that most people don't do that last step. They do these things in school. They learn it kind of a little bit passively. They speak a little bit, but not enough. They don't listen enough. And they just stop there. That's my French. Like, I've I've I've lived in France for like a month in summer, I don't know, when I was like 16. But that's all. I've never like kind of used French beyond that. And what happens to it? It just disappears, right? I never really had that where I started using everything. So I kind of, you know, nothing happened after that. And that's where I think many people end up. Like, they they they take German, Spanish, or something in school, and they feel, okay, I took it in school, I still cannot talk. I cannot do anything. But maybe they know more than they think. It's just that they never had that opportunity to actually activate all these things they do know. And that makes them feel that they know nothing.

Because in practice, they maybe they know nothing, because they can't communicate properly because they haven't practiced. So, yeah, I think that's also an important thing to to keep in mind.

Um, so the the the practice is is tiny. Uh, but I have found the the experience of and and this comes back to input, right? Uh, listening and and reading benefiting your language skills, even though you don't realize it, because when I went to Germany after, let's say, five, six years of German, I thought my German was terrible. And it wasn't great. Don't get me wrong. But being in Germany for about two, three days, I was speaking German fully. You know, I was all day. And you obviously didn't learn that in three days. Right. And it wasn't perfect and it wasn't like I was totally C1 native-like speaker, but I could I lived my life during that trip, that second half of that short trip in German. So all that, uh, that I've learned and picked up over the years, it just kind of, it it just the brain just, I don't know, it just kind of it's like assembling Ikea furniture, you know, you you get a you buy the you get the box and it's like, how is this ever going to be a desk? It's like a box the size of, you know, it's like a few centimeters tall at most. But then you take it out and then the tools kind of assemble it and you get a desk.

I think maybe that's what what happens when we go abroad or go to a country where that one of those languages is. And it also underlines the the idea of spending a lot of time on it, because even though we might say, well, 300 hours of German is not a lot, it's still 300 more than probably most people who didn't have it in school, you know, so Yeah.

It's still a significant amount of input that you Yeah. I think maybe we should we should mention something. I I know people who listen to this are probably interested in languages, but I would I also like to highlight that, of course, learning a language to a very limited level is also useful, right? Even if you spend 300 hours and what you get to is some kind of you can have basic conversations about easy things, then that's great. I mean, you don't have to invest 30,000 hours in in a specific language to and take a master's degree in it and blah, blah, blah. You don't have to do all these things for it to become useful. I mean, sometimes people ask like, "How long do I have to learn X to to for it to be useful?" It's like, yeah, you can start it for one hour and I still think it's quite useful. It's just like what are what is it useful for? That's a different question.

But, you know, you we we might scare people when we say, "Oh, 300 hours is nothing." And I'm thinking, yeah, I mean, 300 hours you can get a pretty pretty far in the language and you can do useful things with it. Obviously, you you cannot listen to a lecture in in linguistics after three hours. Uh, as 300 hours. But you can do lots of other things and that maybe those are the things you want to do. So you don't have to spend, I mean, that that might be enough for for for some people in some languages.

Yeah. And it's also we didn't touch on the distribution of those hours either. So if you if you, uh, if you watched, uh, Harry Potter 7 in uh, in your target language for 300 hours straight, it's probably not going to learn much. sounds like an experiment you should try. I already did this because it in not 300 hours, but I I when I heard that listening was good, years ago, I didn't really make I didn't really think it through very well. So I assumed that you just listen to native level content because you know, at some point it's going to start to make sense. But actually, that was one of my many failures, but, uh, that's what, then you go and and then the problem becomes, oh, you go on somewhere like Babel or uh, I don't know, Pod 101 or one of these premium course providers and I I checked this for, I think it was it might have been Hungarian Pod 101. And I actually don't have anything against Pod 101. I think it's a reasonable resource to use and it's great for when you're running or doing chores and things like that.

Um, but I I I timed it and if you take their most the easiest lessons they have, the actual target language content is about 10, 15 seconds. Yeah. But they spend about 10 minutes explaining it, talking about it, uh, they introduce it. They have a jingle, they have an outro. So by the time you've listened to that, yeah, you're going to understand more about the language on a sort of theoretical level. But I would say the value the the listening value of that is extremely limited.

So that's why the the bite-size languages actually don't have anything in them. They's just a dialogue. And there's a there's an app where you just press play. And actually for a for a while because it was a new app, they there was no function to like stop. So if you just cycle through committed, you have to. Yeah, it was like it wouldn't stop after each lesson or anything. It would just be like it would play from lesson one to lesson 100 until you basically stopped doing it.

And there and I think that was really the aim. It's not there's a big difference between sit down study methods and like immersion study method or, you know, passive study method. Um, and and I just think that that was missing. So that's why we came up with that and and uh built that out for for beginners to do. Because I couldn't find anything really similar. You know, you go any app like Duolingo, Babel and just you hear the sentence once. And but you have to click a lot of buttons and Yeah.

And it goes back to what we talked about, where you're spending your hours and minutes, right? I mean, yeah, if you're going to say, hey, how much did you practice Chinese listening? Okay, I practiced Chinese listening for 100 hours. Okay, great. How much of that was that with actual Chinese then? Oh, maybe maybe maybe one hour. And it doesn't sound so impressive. You did one hour of practice that was actually listening to the language.

And that's interesting sometimes. I think we have a tendency in the I mean, we could even call it the pragmatic language learning community because that's the aim for most people listening, sort of to speak and use the language. Uh, versus the academic world and there's sometimes some clashes. There's some, the academic world can sometimes be a little snobby and, you know, they're not really, they're they're not really, uh, they they value sort of like, you know, like you mentioned earlier that they value certain things differently. And passing tests and things has no real transferability to your actual language skills. It just means you're good at passing the test.

Um, but anyway, I just wanted to thank you for coming on and I hope that people, um, have enjoyed our little chat today. And, uh, it's been a long time coming. So, uh, it was definitely worth the wait and just as a final question, where can people find out more about you?

Thanks for listening to the Actual Fluency Podcast with Chris Broholm. To get more language learning tips, strategies and inspiration, join the Actual Fluency email club by going to actualfluency.com/join. We hope you enjoyed the show and hope you've gotten some useful information. Till next time, this is the Actual Fluency Podcast. Signing off.