Steve Kaufmann: YouTube, Travelling, and learning languages when retired

Welcome to the actual fluency podcast. Each week you'll find inspirational motivational interviews with some of the world's best language learners, industry experts, all trying to help you to learn foreign languages better, faster, and more efficiently. And here we go.

Okay, well, I live in Vancouver. And, for most of my career, I was in the lumber business. The lumber business took me, and and pardon me, about briefly, I was a diplomat for seven years, then the lumber business. And with that, I lived in Hong Kong and learned Chinese and lived in Japan and learned Japanese. And then I got interested in languages. Of course, I studied in France, so I had French. And then I just discovered I enjoyed learning languages and have always, wherever I had the opportunity, I've I've learned languages. And of course, I did business in Europe, Germany, Spain, Sweden. And so I learned a bunch of languages.

Fantastic.

Not that I speak them all fluently by no means, but I enjoy learn exploring languages. And of course, I have a web I have a YouTube channel, and I have a blog and, and, and of course, LingQ, and so it's become like a second career. Not a remunerative career, well, I shouldn't say that, but anyway, it's a passion.

Yeah, definitely. And I just wanted to tell the story of the first episode. I can't remember if I told it, I probably I told it in Montreal for sure, I don't know you if you were in the audience at that time, but anyway, I'll I'll tell it just for the listeners to give them a reminder because I think this is it's fun to go back and the podcast was basically started because I knew I couldn't finish anything. So I was like, you know, I wanted accountability and, and but how do you start an interview podcast if nobody knows who you are? You've never had anyone on who's, you know, has a name in anything. So, how do you get that first yes? And I sent out a massive invites and some people were a little bit, maybe, maybe not. And I remember sending an email to you and and you said, yeah, let's do it.

The the reason I say, how about now, is because if we book some date in the future, I don't know if I'm going to have a dentist appointment or I'm going to be doing something else. If if I know I have time right now, I'm I'm always like, if if anything can be done now, I prefer to do it now.

Agreed, totally.

The sooner you're hanging out there, the better.

But I'd never interviewed anyone. That was before the first interview and it was in a okay, foreign language. I'm sort of bilingual anyway, so that wasn't a big deal. But, just starting out, I, you know, just so nervous because I'd never done it before and it was, you know, like I said, your YouTube channel was so popular, everybody knew you because of the, you know, the back and forth with Benny at that time and. So, it was just a really big deal for me and the fact that you just said now is like made it it was very cool and we it was great that we did it right there, but it was also nerve-racking for me. But I think we got through it.

Yeah, I mean, this is where I think polyglots have a problem. So, you're asked, how many languages can you speak or do you know? Okay. There are some languages that I speak very well. There are some that, you know, I did I spent three months, three, four months on Persian and ended up with an exit interview, what you call an exit interview after that study. And I can say certain things in Persian. I can go around to shopkeepers here in North Vancouver and and they get, by the way, the the Iranians, I have never seen a group of people that are so happy when you speak to them in their own language. But, I can't really say that I speak it well. So, obviously, when you're should I not mention languages that I don't speak that well? Should I not, you know, I learned up my Greek and I went to Crete and I was using it happily. Same with Romanian, if someone came to me now and started speaking to me in Greek or Romanian, I would be incapable of saying much. And yet, I know that if I had just a few days to go over some of the material that I had used, that I'd be right back to where I was and probably I would quickly improve.

Yeah, I've noticed, when I I I've watched some of your videos and I noticed that you you often come back and do another, let's say, three months or another stint in the languages that you already know to to kind of improve them. So, it's kind of a, I guess, a steady increase in level that you you always have a base that keeps going up. So, your bottom is always better than it was last time you did a challenge or.

Just like it's like you've got a another bank account, you know. And you can let it the money sit there for a while and then you can go and put some more money in the bank account. Um, that's all. So, it's not I'm so I don't I think most so-called polyglots would probably claim really good fluency, like your podcast is actual fluency, in half a dozen or so. And maybe Richard Simcott or Luca might go for more. But, it starts to go downhill pretty quickly. Yeah.

But it's a funny question to ask polyglots that you know speak a lot of languages because there's always a disclaimer or some kind of, well, you know, if you ask how many languages do you speak, it's there's always like a a full sentence of explanation and I get it as well and it's like, what do you actually answer? Because speaking, it doesn't really mean anything. If you say one word, are you speaking the language? Do you need to be absolutely perfect? So, everyone has that issue, even, from from kind of the, if you only knew a couple of languages like myself.

I mean, it's so much fun like I'm now sort of focusing my attention on sort of Middle East, Central Asia, Middle East. So, it's a lot of fun to explore Turkish, Arabic and and Persian. There in three different language families, but they share a significant amount of vocabulary. And of course, historically, culturally, they're they're connected. So, that's it's it's very it's it's exciting to explore this. It's exciting to be able to read in those languages, to listen to podcasts that we kind of don't understand, but kind of are able to get snippets off. It's it's a great, you know, my wife and I were watching this Turkish soap opera on Netflix and I can't understand hardly anything except that they got to word here and a word there. It's fun.

Yeah, and that's the most important thing, isn't it? You got to have fun, otherwise.

Yeah. And that's exactly what I'm doing in Turkish, you know, that's all.

Yeah. So, how do you how do you pick your your next project? Is it a sudden?

Circumstance. Um, you know, right now, for example, my wife and I are going to Croatia. It's going to be our 50th, wedding anniversary. So, we figured.

Congratulations.

He was originally going to come to Bukovska, but then we lived there for nine years, that's not. We're going to go to Croatia. So, we're now getting Serbo-Croat mini stories on LingQ and we're going to launch Serbo-Croat. So, probably I'll have to kind of stop my Turkish and spend a couple of weeks on Serbo-Croat before I go there because I I think with my other Slavic languages, that's all I'll need in order to at least have a sense of what people are saying and stuff. So, it's just circumstance. I had to go to Romania, so I learned Romanian. I had we're going to go to Crete, so I learned Greek.

Right. Yeah, that's amazing, just follow whatever the circumstances are. If you like traveling or even if you like something on TV, I think.

Yeah, and very often one language leads to another. So, having learned Russian, I was tired to go after Czech, and Polish, and then Ukrainian. So, you know, learned up a bit of Slovak before going to Bratislava a couple of years ago. Slavic and Czech are so close, it's hard to.

Do you always try to go traveling to the country that of the language you're learning or is that or are you learning the countries where you're going to go travel or both?

I don't like to arrive in a country without knowing some of the language. And I think even in terms of using sort of travel as a means of learning a language, I always recommend that make sure you put a lot of effort into the language before you go. Because that way you can take advantage. Otherwise, if you arrive with zero knowledge, you won't be able to do anything. And I've had that experience. I've arrived in Vietnam or Myanmar knowing relatively little and I and I had a phrase book and at the end of a week, I still had only one phrase. It's not that easy.

Yeah, I moved to Hungary and I didn't know I was moving to Hungary. I was supposed to just be there for a a week for a holiday. But then I decided to stay instead of moving to Berlin where I was originally going to move. And I was found myself in a country where I didn't understand anything. And I thought, well, okay, I'll just learn it, but actually immersion, I think, is great if you have a base because then you can connect it to something.

And even if you have some of the language, you almost have to arrange some speaking partners before you get there. You arrive there and you hope that you're going to walk into a store or into a cafe or sit in a bar and start a conversation, forget it.

Just go in a circle.

Just go in a circle. Yeah.

Taxi drivers like to talk so there's never a problem in getting them to talk. Yeah, sometimes. I think the most talkative people are probably hairdressers, but.

Okay.

That sounds dangerous also if you don't know how to say what you'd like to have done. If you get it, sometimes it's the hard part is to get them to stop talking, I find, in the hairdresser. Stop talking. Yeah, there's too much. No, that's really cool.

Well, I mean, obviously, I'm retired. So, I don't have any obligations workwise. Um, I don't know. I'd like to go and see different countries, either we go with friends or my wife and I go. My wife was in Ukraine. I wanted to follow up because I'd been, communicating with these people in the war zone, helping them a little bit and I wanted to see what they were doing. And then I decided I'd have, you know, stopped by Lviv again and refresh my Ukrainian. You know, we're going to Japan now, Croatia. It's I have no plans, but it seems one for one reason or another, and my wife likes to play golf, so this we're going to Croatia, then we're going to Spain, we're going to Gerona near Barcelona where she found some golf clinic. So, okay, so we'll do that.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I'm sure some people are listening, they say, oh, he's retired, he can spend 10 hours a day, but actually with all the commitments and your family, that hour a day becomes key and and consistency, I guess, is more important than the amount of hours anyway.

I find that the, the listening is very important because I listen and that's so easy to do. I get up, I put on my earphone, I prepare breakfast. I listen, I don't understand. So now I'm motivated to read because I did not understand what I was listening to. So the the listening A is very important. People don't listen enough. If I look at people's statistics on LingQ, sometimes people ask me to analyze their profile. People don't listen enough. Like I've been in into Turkish now for 13 days. I looked at my statistics. I've listened to 18 hours of Turkish. That's a lot, yeah. There's people in six months who don't listen to 18 hours of the language they're trying to learn. So, listening is key and that triggers the rest of it.

And I think that's a we're in this gamification age now where you almost have to do something active, whether it's with your fingers or your brain or you have to click some buttons or do a game or otherwise you feel like you're not doing anything, but actually that kind of input of of I mean, people are not reading enough anyway either. So, it's a question of what are people actually doing, but yeah, definitely listening. Also for the pronunciation, you know, how do you how are you going to be able to, you know, say the words correctly if you haven't heard them say over and over again.

The listening gives you some momentum because when you're reading in a foreign language, inevitably you're sub-vocalizing, right? If you read in your own language, typically, you just fly over it. It's meaning, you don't necessarily pronounce it to yourself in your head. But when you're reading in a foreign language, I find that I tend to sub-vocalize. That's why the listening is so important because I've heard it so often now, you know, because I'll typically listen to the same stuff many many times. So, then I have this momentum going into my reading. So, even though, if I were to say it out loud, I would say it wrong, but at least in my mind, I'm saying it correctly.

Right. Yeah. That's a good point.

And then, but and it's interesting. I'm going to do a video, in fact, tomorrow. And I'm going to show the different because it's very important to be active in the language. Like at LingQ, we measure activity. We don't measure the outcome because as long as you're active, you'll you'll improve. So, we measure the reading, the listening and all that stuff. And but there's different ways of being active. There's sometimes, like, I don't want to read this thing for the tenth time. So, then maybe I want to do my flashcards. But then I can do the flashcards, I can do dictation, for example. I can go through a story in sentence by sentence and hear the natural voice. You've now set it up timestamp so you can hear the natural voice for that sentence. I can try to imitate the intonation of that person and say it out loud. So, so these are things where I'm not increasing my vocabulary, but I'm getting deeper into the language, a better sense of the pronunciation.

Yeah. Consistency, yeah. And I think a lot of people also struggle a little bit to fit in the language learning if they have, you know, kids and family and careers and everything. And so, the idea of filling up your chores with listening, I think is a fantastic idea, because we all have we all have a smartphone these days where you can play podcasts or or any kind of audio.

So, I was wondering, so it's been five years since we last talked on the podcast anyway, we met in Bratislava a few years ago. But, I was wondering, is there anything that you've you've changed in your kind of approach to language learning over in in those five years, like any kind of methods or anything you used to believe was really good that maybe now isn't so good or vice versa?

I think the biggest thing that has changed is the impact of our mini stories, which is not something that we invented. I got it from, Piotr of Real Polish.pl. If you ever learn Polish, you got to go to his website. And he says he got it from AJ Hoge, who has this, um,

Learning English.

For effortless English, who in turn got it from some other group of people. And it's these point of view stories, right? There are the same story repeats like I did something or you will do something, so the tense and the person changes. And then there's a bunch of questions. So, the same words and phrases repeat three, four, five, six times within the same story.

Ah.

What that has done for me, it has, first of all, significantly sped up my learning. I so for Greek, for Persian, for, for Arabic, I mean, I was speaking with my Persian tutor after two months, whereas it took me eight months to speak to my Czech tutor. Even though with Czech, I had done Russian, so I had a lot of, you know, the grammar is essentially the same. Vocabulary 60% the same. So, and with that, I start speaking earlier.

Right. And do you facilitate that via LingQ or do you have to go on do you find your own tutor per language?

Uh, with regards to the tutors, if I can find the tutor on LingQ, that's what I prefer to do because A, it supports our site, and B, the format is there, they know what they have to do, they can record and add the recording and I'll get the thing back as a lesson. But in languages where we don't have tutors, then I go to Italki. And I ask them and I I find someone who's willing to do what I want them to do. And which isn't difficult. Increasingly, all the tutors know that they've got to provide you with a list of of your words and phrases.

Yeah, or at least that it's not just speaking to you, you know, that there's something else usually expected. I think they're.

I find now in even in Persian and in Arabic, I say, I would like you to give me a, you know, a list of, okay, I'll give you a Google document. Bingo, the Google document pops up. They're pretty swift now, I think. The tutors.

Yeah, I think the competition has definitely, because there's so many tutors on Italki, you know, you can't afford to be like a bad tutor because then you just get bad ratings and then you never get any new students. So, that's nice to see that the the quality has definitely gone up and people are using these methods.

Well, first of all, my position has always been that you can speak when you want to speak. Right. Speak from the. You know, there's no obligation to speak. And, in fact, I think often in traditional language class, they put too much pressure on people to speak. And even correctly when they have very little chance of doing that and puts pressure on them and either they can't speak as well as the other kids in the class or they they don't like listening to the other kids in class. So, for me, it's unnecessary.

Right. So, you've you've sped up even. That that's that's really impressive. Absolutely sped up. And I learned Persian, I after three months in Persian, I was far ahead of where I was in Czech.

Even though Czech is written in a Latin alphabet and shares so much vocabulary and almost all the grammar with Russian, which I had already done.

Right. And obviously, you have a a big YouTube channel, lots of videos and and lots of people watch the video. So, you must get tons of questions. What are what are some of your favorite questions? Maybe some of the maybe you have some questions that you are not a big fan of or maybe a pet peeve there somewhere, or some, some common issues that people have.

Well, of course, there's, you know, there are people who follow my YouTube channel because they find it motivating. And they generally appreciate because I try to convey this idea that you can do it and it doesn't matter, you know, don't compare yourself to others, enjoy the language, if you enjoy the language, you'll improve. The brain learns. So, put in the time, enjoy it, and you'll improve. So, there are those and generally those comments are very appreciated.

Yeah, exactly, don't watch it. Don't watch it. Yeah, I find it, um, well, obviously, YouTube comments are notorious for, kind of the trolls and the the haters, so maybe it's just part of the platform, I don't know.

I mean, I, one very interesting book that I read in German is written by this German neuroscientist called Manfred Spitzer. It's called Lernen, I can't remember what it was, but it talks about the brain. And one of the statements in there was, the brain learns. The brain cannot do other than learn because the brain is constantly reacting to experience, right? And creating networks, neural connections to deal with that experience. Otherwise, we couldn't operate, we couldn't function, right? The brain is constantly, you know, getting you to a point where you can almost anticipate what's going to happen because we've seen it before. That's what the brain does. The brain learns. But then he adds, but the brain learns slowly.

Right. Definitely.

Very important.

Yeah, because I'm sure there are people listening and and they watch the videos or they watch other polyglots who have had many, many years of experience learning languages and they get really fine, say, three months like you did with with Persian. And they think, oh, it's just a talent thing and I could never do that. But, you know, that's years and years of experience, right? So, you can't compare yourself too harshly to to other people. I think that's a big one as well.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was Kathol Lombe, Hungarian polyglot who had this formula where she she said, attitude and time, you know, divided by, and she put inhibition. But I would broaden that to be any kind of resistance or or constraint. So, so it's part of attitude, but if you don't think you can do it, if you don't like the language, if you're not confident that the way you're learning is right, like if whatever resistance there is, is going to is going to require more time or a more positive attitude.

Yeah. It's a funny balance, isn't it? Because I'm sure somebody listening to this would say, yeah, yeah, Steve, I I get it. I need to be more confident in myself, but I've never learned a foreign language before. I'd really like to do it, but I'm not sure I can. Like, I I'm not sure how you would convince that.

I think it's extremely difficult. And I see this in immigrants here in Canada, who claim that they want to learn English. They go to the ESL school. But they're not really into it. They go home and watch Chinese television. And and some of them try kind of at some level.

You've got the momentum going, but

You've got the momentum. But they try to for someone who has never experienced becoming comfortable in a second language, they don't think they can do it. They don't think they can do it. And that's a big obstacle.

That's a big obstacle if you overcome it. That's a very laudable if if if you do come that. That's a big challenge. Is that the biggest challenge in languages, just the conquering the self? Is that sounds like the the Art of War almost. Or wait, is that the Art of War?

I mean, it's the idea that like, I'm here talking to you and you're speaking a second language. And yet you speak it better than most native speakers.

No, you're too kind.

No, no, but I mean, people can learn other languages. And they don't have to speak as well as you do. Like, there are people I've dealt with all my life, say in English, in business, people from Germany, from Sweden. Even the Swedes, when we say, you know, they all speak English so well. I mean, you have them they make the same mistakes all the time. Of course. You know, like, I don't know if the Danes do that, but they they never say, there are. Right. They say it is. Yes. It is many people in China. It is many people in China. They even totally fluid people say that.

Yeah, yeah. I know people like that. That's good, good impersonation for sure. Yeah, so, where can we, where are we going to meet again? Is it going to be Montreal? Yeah. For the Langfest. People can come and and say hi to you there. Absolutely. Get an autograph and, an autograph copy of of LingQ. And that would be great. Um, but yeah, Steve, time has flown by as per usual and.

They are. I enjoyed it.

Yeah, me too. Me too. I I really like it. I I think I didn't intend for this to happen before the episode, but it's really been a true catch-up, you know, we we've gone around a a lot of the topics and we've we're looking back at at the last few years and I really enjoyed it. That was that was great.

Well, LingQ, of course, is lingq.com, which they can find on the Internet. I'm Steve at LingQ if they ever want to send me an email. I have my YouTube channel, Lingosteve, and they're welcome to come and have a look and subscribe if they want. Um, yeah.

It's about it.

The lingq.com is my blog and, I certainly would love to meet up with anyone that's going to be in Montreal.

Lovely city, highly recommended and I haven't been to the last two Langfests, but the first one I was at was a fantastic experience and the the organizational team did a really good job, especially considering it was the first time they did anything such like that. And the weather should be fantastic at that time as well.

We hope.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time, Steve and, can't wait till the till the next catch-up, but let's not wait five years this time.

Anytime. Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the actual fluency podcast. I really appreciate having you here today.