Quinn Taber: The power of Immersion

Hey guys, today I am really excited to bring you episode 119 of the actual fluency podcast. On the show today, I've got Quinn Taber, who's going to be talking about his experience with immersion, spending several years in the Middle East learning Arabic. And he's also going to be sharing a little bit about his language learning startup that's going to be very much revolving around immersion. So if you want more information on that, you can go to immerse.online and and read more information about that.

predominantly Paris, but we traveled a lot and then we moved back to California, where my mom is from, uh when I was in grade school. But then, even through high school, college, kind of kept traveling. So, went to university in Los Angeles, but studied for a year in Europe, and then spent a lot of time in the Middle East. I, so, where am I from? Kind of everywhere, it feels like sometimes.

That's cool. That's cool. And uh so I guess the traveling bug uh gave you the uh the interest in other cultures and and I guess particularly relevant to this podcast, the languages of other cultures.

Exactly. Yeah, 100%. Um, a big one for me was actually the refugee crisis. So, in 2012, 2013, I heard about what was happening with the Syrian refugees in the Middle East. And it just grabbed my heart. I I didn't know what to do with it. I'm like, wait, how am I supposed to stay in these really nice places in California or France, when I know about these 10 million people that are stuck in camps. They don't have food or sanitation or anything.

Can imagine lost to go into there. So, so whereabouts did you live in different places or is it mostly in one place?

Yeah, so I, uh, I moved first to Beirut, which is uh, actually a pretty like western city. And really enjoyed it. Uh, lived in the kind of the western part of the city where a lot of the Americans live. Um, and this is probably the start of my, I know, the start of my my language adventure. Uh because I had grown up traveling a ton and particularly in French speaking countries. I had uh, picked up French as a kid, kind of immersively, because I went to a French school and my parents spoke French.

Right.

It was so tough. So that was kind of the big intersection in my language journey was I, I thought that I was good at languages, because I had grown up in these different immersive settings, I'd grown up in places that spoke French, so I learned French kind of naturally. And then tried this adventure of learning Arabic, and because I don't think I really had the right methodology around it, I would spend all this time memorizing flashcards, all this time memorizing flashcards, and wasn't getting anywhere. It was it was killing me. Yeah.

Well it's a tough language, isn't it? I mean as a as an English native speaker or most of Europe, I suppose, Arabic is a quite a different beast in many ways.

Yeah. I completely agree. I know. They say that Arabic competes with Mandarin for the hardest language on Earth. Uh and I think that was part of my my disappointment was I was always the the student growing up that got really good grades. I like would work hard and study hard and then get an A and be like, oh, check that off the list. I got it. I'm good. I can move forward.

Right. Well it's almost like they are different things, you know. Educators of the world pay attention.

I know, everyone listen. Yeah, so that's uh it kind of began this this journey of having to reconstruct how I saw languages, and thus like almost building my own method to become fluent in Arabic, not just reading and writing, but actually being able to have a conversation with the guy down the street.

Yeah, and and I bet there are people listening now who's like, I've been learning Arabic for 30 years. This guy doesn't know what he's what he's getting himself into. This is a you know, this is just a beginning, man, you know.

Yeah, I know, I agree. I think, uh, anyone that both uh learns Arabic or I'm also uh an entrepreneur now, anyone that signs up for those two endeavors have to be pretty, I would say not just optimistic, but naive, because it's not a not an easy endeavor. Um, but it is possible. That's my that's my main takeaway.

Yeah, uh so what kind of um, did you have any language in school, like uh America obviously one of the notorious uh monolingual countries. Uh in which is interesting because you got so many different cultures and and and immigrants and like the languages are, the family languages are still quite alive, but it seems like for a large majority of people, uh language classes or language uh success is kind of a almost a myth. language second language.

That's a good question. Yeah, that's the perfect question. Um, I think if anything, America broke me. They made my language learning journey way too hard because like I said, I assumed that when I got an A on the test, that meant I was fluent. Uh and that's kind of how I've come to my like transformation of how I see language and like really true fluency, not the A1 A2 being able to write some sentences. Uh, but that next level, it has to happen outside the classroom.

It's a real shame yeah.

Yeah. I totally agree.

That happens everywhere. Like in the, in the in the in the European universities, often people will go through let's say three to five years of a master's degree and they'll know everything about the language. They know everything about the history. They can even cite passages from the great classics in the language. But ask them to have a normal conversation and they they they just can't because it's not part of for many what a university degree is, which is complete completely ridiculous.

I could not agree. Yeah, that's the the joke that me and my buddies have is we passed our Spanish class, but now years later if we went down on a a surf trip to Mexico, I couldn't put a sentence together.

Oh yeah. You in California

Like I don't even know how to order tacos.

This like me learning Spanish in the middle of the UK, okay, maybe you can see some limitations there. But I imagine California must be like rich in in in the Latin American culture and must be loads of Spanish speakers also. So there's really no excuse if you live in California.

I I know, you're calling me out and it's deserved. I completely agree.

Well, more more your country. I think they you you do well, I think to be more uh more encouraging to learn the other languages. I think that would be be good. But but what is it like in in America, like what's the language learning uh kind of environment like now because, you know, Europe I think uh maybe because we're so many countries next to each other in different languages. I feel like it seems a little bit more normal to talk about and people seem to have more languages on average. But but talk talk us through how like what's your feeling in the US like now you're you're you're doing entrepreneur in in language learning as well. So how do people react when you say that or when you say, oh, I also know Arabic, you know, what what kind of reactions do you get and

Yeah. Man. That's such a good question. Um, I think especially Americans, but anyone that has English as their first language, it feels a little bit like a like a curse because everywhere you go, at least in my experience, everyone speaks English. At least a little bit. And then so when I'm in when I'm in France, the French people in France that I want to practice my French with, their English is way better than my French is. So I'll get one or two sentences of French. And then they'll just kind of laugh at me like, oh, nice try. And then they respond with perfect English. I'm like, ah, I got my practice.

Wow. Yeah, that's amazing.

Yeah. So this summer I'm going to, yeah, yeah. I, but I think that's the hard part is for me and my buddies, we have it too easy. We go to Thailand and people speak English. We go to Mexico and people speak English. We go to Paris and people speak English.

I heard a lot of Americans don't have a passport even.

Exactly.

Is that true?

Ooh. That's a good question. Man.

I mean if you don't know it, then you don't know about it.

I would I feel like I heard that like one in one in two or like something ridiculous didn't have a passport in the US even. It's kind of hard to imagine people learning languages if they're not even interested in leaving the country for at least a week or something.

I know.

I know.

But anyway, this wasn't supposed to be like I want to look it up on Google now. This wasn't supposed to be like the doom and gloom of American language learning, but I just feel like uh it's not it's not often that I have Americans on the show, so I like pounced on the on the opportunity to grill you a little bit on the status of your country's language learning. Um,

Yeah, but but tell me, honestly, tell me a little bit more about your experience learning Arabic because or perhaps more about the experience living in the Middle East because that must have been some culture shock even if if Beirut was quite, you know, a modern city. Like what kind of challenges do you have adapting to it and and how did you feel your experience changing as you got better and better in Arabic?

Ooh, man, that's another great question. Um, Beirut. I like this a lot. Beirut is a really interesting city. It's actually, so like I said, I'm about to go to my 50th country, which I'm secretly a little proud of. Uh, but Beirut is actually one of the most diverse, like cross-cultural cities on Earth. Uh, they say it's been kind of the like the highway between the East and the West for so long. There's Americans, French, Syrian, Egyptian, uh even Chinese. So it's this big hodgepodge. Uh, which in many ways a lot of fun, that's for sure. Um, like the nightlife is fun, the people are really rich, the food's great.

Wow. That's uh quite adventurous, I would say, for most people. I mean, you're already in quite a foreign country. You're in the other part of the world and you're like, this isn't foreign enough.

Yeah.

So, so what happened then? So you went to you went off the grid in a way. You went a little bit further out. Uh what what happened then?

Yeah, it it changed everything. Um, I I literally, I stopped hanging out with the Americans and I had been reading about these different really thoughtful people who believed that the only way to truly learn a language is immersion. And a lot of the kind of philosophy behind their thought process is how do you emulate the experience that a a young child has learning their their parents' language, just by doing. Um, anyone that cares about languages, heard it a dozen different ways and a dozen different times.

No, no, I was just I was just going to say that's you're probably adapting your environment to your level maybe. I mean, you were kind of like a young Arabic speaker yourself.

Exactly. Yeah, no, I fit in. Yeah, it was it was a perfect fit. Um, so that was a big piece that uh I had been reading about in this immersive philosophy was be with people that are nurturing, that will allow you to make mistakes, kind of copy what the child's experience is.

Yeah, so what what about do you feel like, because you said you were doing uh the learning in a bit of a technical way, you were doing a bit of sort of uh grammar and or more bookish type stuff, maybe the type of stuff you would see in university or school. Do you feel or or or how do you think that benefited you when you actually went into the immersive environment? Do you feel like you could just jump into that nurturing environment you mentioned and have the same results, or do you feel like that base that you had from before really helped you accelerate?

Yeah. Gosh. That's such a good one. I, I go back and forth. I'm sure in reality having that base of vocabulary and grammar did help. But at the same time, there's a lot of a lot of sports metaphors in my mind, because I grew up playing a lot of sports. I'm really tall. So I played basketball and volleyball. The coaches would always say, I would rather teach a little kid how to shoot a basketball perfect when they're young, instead of someone who's 15 and maybe really athletic and have to get rid of their crummy form and then rebuild it.

Yeah, I think the internet obviously makes it possible to do uh sort of a a pseudo immersive experience from your from the comforts of your own living room, but obviously that has limitations and I I don't know what I think myself. Obviously, uh I think immersion is is great and it's it's like the way to learn how to speak a language is to speak a language. Like there's no way around it.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. For my couple Western friends who have done the same thing, who moved to Jordan and lived in these camps, uh, what we because we would compare notes all the time. What we kind of decided was the immersion, the guys that only did immersion, they took off like a rocket ship. They learned really, really fast, really quick.

So you need both.

Exactly. Yeah. I spent the first half in the classroom.

Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah, regardless I think you need both, I agree.

So, I mean, you're young you're young person. You've been living in the Middle East. You've seen action in the camps. You've done your bit for humanity. You are really fascinated about foreign languages and cultures and you come home to California and you're like, what am I going to do next? Is that is that an accurate assessment?

That was 100% accurate. Yeah, I uh so I put in my three years, which is the contract I agreed to. And I actually, I had this really fortunate thing happen where I both really wanted to keep working on my language skills and keep helping refugees, but I also, uh me and a couple of my best friends knew that we wanted to start a company and we had a couple ideas. And we actually, we found the intersection.

Hey guys, just taking a quick break from the episode to talk to you about this show sponsor, which is Glossika. I'm super excited to have Glossika on board, a really reputable and trusted language course producer. They're producing courses in many, many languages. I think they're over 50 to choose from at the moment, and you get access to all of them with a single subscription. And if you want to give it a try, you can go to try.glossika.com, in one word. And uh yeah, get started for free. See if it's anything for you.

Yeah. That's another good question. Um, I actually, without naming any names of the the websites that I found tutors on, when I moved back, that's the first thing I did. Was log into a couple of the famous websites, find a tutor, and it didn't scratch the itch I had from being overseas, because I really wanted to do real life, to have these practical kind of visceral experiences, because that's where I learned the best. I learned when I was picking things up and doing things and not just talking.

That's an advantage, yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. And then we would talk about it. They would say, exactly. Yeah. They would say technology will allow people in a couple years to be able to do exactly what you did, Quinn, overseas. Let's start doing that today. So we actually, uh using photos and videos and these like almost picture books, uh kind of like wordless picture books, you can meet with a tutor and go through these a ton of different scenes that we've created. So we have an online scene for you uh walking down the Champs-Élysées in Paris, ducking into a cafe, ordering a coffee and a baguette. And it's kind of almost like a cartoon, a series of pictures that you go through.

Ah, okay.

And then the whole time, yeah, the whole time you're on uh video call, so you can see the face of your tutor, but you're going through this experience. And when you find a new word, you can write it on uh, right on the cartoon. It's really fun. So if you want to write the word uh, let's see, or if we want to do Arabic. If you see the word chair and you forgot what it is, you can ask the tutor, oh, what was that? And because you're both seeing the cartoon on your computer screen, and you can both see each other's mouse moving around, the tutor will move the mouse over to the chair, click it, and then write down for you, and then they'll do the little translation, chair. And they can even record the pronunciation, that's a hard one for me. I always suck at pronunciation, and I hear them say it properly, so that then I can go back at the end of the day or a week later and review and see, oh, on that scene, ordering at the French cafe, I learned these 20 words. Here's the pronunciations I can go back and listen to. Um, we even have fun little games for you to review. So little quiz games of, okay, which one was the? And you have to click on the chair. Uh, so that's today how we try to construct immersive experiences for the online tutor.

So it's a bit like uh so it's kind of like role playing in a sense, but like in in a new modern way. Not just uh imagination, you can actually see something going on in front of you.

Exactly. Yeah. For me, the big one, I learned so much quicker when I had all of my senses engaged. That's something that's kind of part of how I recognized I learned the fastest. So if I could see something and hear it and touch it, and like really engage my entire mental capacity, I would remember it forever. So that's why we really want to create these experiences that engage everything, we really kickstart the memory.

Yeah, you know what we should do? I mean, this is an incredibly ambitious idea, but you could even have uh, you know, you can have the tutors in different like green screens and they could have like uh props. Wouldn't that be great?

Oh, that'd be so cool. I'm down.

Like welcome to the cafe.

I will.

That's proper immersion.

I could not agree more. That's what our uh, our plan is actually, and it's it's not a a a secret, but we're kind of keeping it on the the the hush on the low down is in a year or two, once we get enough people using it, we're going to create an option for virtual reality. And I don't know if you're familiar with that, but it's the headset that lets you really feel like you're in Paris and like actually seeing everyone moving around. Meeting your tutor there will be a lot of fun.

Even more fun than the cartoons we're building right now. Yeah, that would be insane if you could do something productive with that. I I've seen some not so productive uh uh, you know, AR kind of projects. But uh if you could somehow get that technology working in sync and you can actually be there, because I've had I've heard of people using stuff like Google Maps already without the uh the AR augmented reality component, just using like the pictures, just saying, okay, direct me to the fountain or whatever. That's a way to kind of learn if you're a dedicated teacher.

Yeah. I so agree.

So and I think it's it's kind of two-fold, or go ahead. Yeah, I was just going to ask if the the people, the tutors or the teachers you're going to have on the platform, are they going to be doing a program that you decide, or are you just going to offer the platform, then it's up for the teacher of what they're going to do with it? Or is it going to be quite a like is it going to be your thing, or is it just a a platform where every teacher can decide how ambitious they get or how much they do?

Yeah. That's another good one. Um, right now, we have we have about a thousand of these different experiences that we've constructed. Um, and that's that's all that we want. Literally our our mission as a as a project and a group of friends that are working on this is to just make this tutoring experience so fun and engaging, and way easier for the tutors. Because this way, we can control, we'll create all the curriculum for you. We have all the reporting on how many words you learned.

I see. So when is the uh so when are you planning on launching this? Uh when is it going to go live and uh do tell people where to find out more.

Absolutely. Yeah, go live June 1st. So we're 16 days out. Wow. Um from the day that we're recording this. Yeah. Uh our right now it's just uh on our website. So if you go to immerse.online. Uh, so it's not dot com, it's dot online. And then in probably six months, we're going to launch the app for both your computer and your cell phone and everything else.

Cool. Cool. Um, well, that's uh I think that was a a great little rundown of of what could be an amazing service. I mean as as any new upstart you still have a lot to prove, of course, before we uh call it the new uh hail mary of language learning. But why don't we just take a couple of minutes, just winding down this episode to like give me your top five quick language learning tips for anyone sitting out there. You can choose whatever topic you want, whether it's specific to Arabic or just general advice, motivation, grammar, whatever you want, just give me your five five quick best tips.

On the spot. Yeah, absolutely. I know, five's a good number. Uh over the course of us being on this journey, trying to create a software, I've put more thought and research into language learning than I ever thought I would. It's been a lot of fun. And in the process we've todified, we've created the immersive method and kind of the step-by-step rules.

Yeah. Yeah, I've done that. I've done that.

Once I could really Yeah. Once I really like picked up the, the chair, saw it, touched it, heard myself saying or hearing a tutor. We call it our our memory threads. When all you use is your eyes, it's just one thread to memorize something. If you can employ all your senses, it's almost like five or six different threads, because when you're in conversation, you don't have a minute to remember something. You need this instinctual, you need to be able to grab the word in a millisecond. So the more threads you have, the better.

Cool. Well, those are some great tips also and and so the last thing is um, well and people should definitely check out immerse.online after June 1st. So I guess they can sign up now for uh the waiting list or a little bit of a a teaser there. Um, what's next for you as a as a for your personal language? Do you have any new projects on the cards or any big uh sort of plans coming for yourself?

That yeah, absolutely. I, for one, I'm excited to review my Arabic, because I've now lived back in the US for eight months and I really miss it. So I'm probably I'm going to be our biggest customer. uh on Immersion. I'm probably going to be on it two or three times a day. Uh we joke that on this whole team, we've been working on building it, but it's all selfish. It's just for me. If no one else uses it, we'll still be happy. My Arabic will be better.

Try and that well be sure to document it as much as possible, because that would be interesting to see how that goes as well, because we like we talked about a little bit earlier, how much do you actually, how how far can immersion alone get you and I guess your contention right now is that it can get you as far as any other method. But uh we we'll see. I I'm yeah, be sure to get a lot of data for that. That would be cool to check out.

Yeah, no, I'll be I'll probably be blogging. I'm sure it'll be hard, just like every language, but I'll uh I'll let everyone know how it goes.

There's no such thing as an easy language. Even the easiest are tricky to to learn just because of the mental process involved, I feel like. So, I don't think people should ever kid themselves that learning a language is ever a simple or easy task. Uh but uh obviously with your experience, maybe that can offset the difficulty of Hebrew a little bit and and get you uh maybe you know more instinctively what sentences and words are important. So you can maybe stick them in your brain uh faster when you hear them.

Thanks so much, Chris. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

Yeah, time time flew by.