Mike Campbell: Sentence-based learning and Glossika

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of the Actual Fluency podcast. This is episode number 48. And today, I'm very excited to be joined by Michael Campbell, who's the founder of Glossika. And Michael and I get to talk about sentence-based learning and why it's advantageous over the alternative methods. And we also talk about the power of the Glossika method, which is indeed a sentence-based method. And along the way, we make a few tangents on traditional learning, like classroom style learning. And we also talk about dialects and normalization. So, that's very interesting and it's coming up in just a minute.

I'm not going to take too much of your time this time on the introduction. I sometimes do have a lot to, uh, say, a lot of news going around the world. But right now, it's a bit of a quiet time, so you'll get to enjoy Michael Campbell in just a second. But before we get to the episode, I just want to say thank you to everyone who supported the crowdfunding for the upcoming season two of the podcast. The last episode of season one will be episode 50, and I have a very special guest on that episode, uh, to help me celebrate and look forward to the next, the next season. And in regards to that next season, I have the crowdfunding running, and there's still about two weeks left on it. So if you haven't supported yet, and you would still like to get some of the exclusive benefits and, well, in a way, free stuff, then go on to igg.me/AFpodcast. You can also find a link on actualfluency.com. At the top, there's a bar, and, uh, that'll get you to the crowdfunding page, and you can contribute anything you see fit. And I'm extremely grateful for everyone who has contributed, who has shared, who've, uh, sent emails, uh, thanking me for doing this season, uh, so far. And of course, that's incredibly motivating for me to keep going and produce even greater episodes.

And speaking of today's episode, I know that the audio quality is a little bit off. And I apologize for that. And part of the reason that it is off is definitely, uh, me to blame, uh, because I am unfamiliar with the current setup I'm using. You might have heard that the old computer I used to edit all the podcasts on and record them on as well, uh, kind of broke down, it gave up on life. And that's part of the reasons why I started the crowdfunding was to simply replace the equipment, uh, needed to record these, uh, episodes. And therefore, the adjustment period for getting onto a new system, starting to record using a different program, doing the editing again, it has been a bit of a problem. So, I, I apologize for the audio quality today. I know there's a bit of static, uh, but please bear with me because Mike shares a lot of great stuff in today's episode. So, it's definitely worth hanging onto the end. And speaking of the end, he also shares the Glossika new, Chinese New Year's super sale. So, uh, stay tuned for that discount as well, your exclusive discounts for, uh, Glossika, uh, purchases only in February. So, that's, uh, exciting, uh, at least.

But with all this audio quality, and I know it's happened a few times. I'm not going to pretend that the audio quality is, is the best. I, it's definitely my ambition to do it, but a lot of the times it's really out of my hands. And a lot of the times, I'm also an idiot and make mistakes. So, you know, I know that it's important to have good quality out there. And just so you know, it is my number one priority, um, possibly only slightly behind the, the content. You know, if the content wasn't good then the quality wouldn't matter. But, uh, on a very close second, the quality matters a lot to me. So, this is by far the biggest priority I have for the upcoming season two. And I hope that you will, uh, help me do that by pointing out mistakes, or if you, you know, if you ever hear any problems, don't hesitate to write to me. I, I really love, uh, hearing from you in every capacity. It doesn't have to be, uh, only praise, you know, I, I love to hear criticism as well, things I can do better. I am aware of the audio quality problem, and I hope to fix it for the next season. It is a learning curve for me as well, uh, and, uh, I hope that together we can make it just fantastic. And, uh, that's all for me today. And I hope that you enjoy this interview with Mike Campbell.

Alright. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Michael Campbell. He's a linguist with more than 20 years of experience, and also the founder of Glossika Language Training. He joins me from Taiwan. Hey, Mike. How are you doing?

And I think that, um, a lot of the students that I've worked with in the past have been, are all very shy, maybe even introverted types as well. So, I think that instead of just focusing on, hey, let's have lots of conversations, um, that doesn't always work. People need structured input. And so, uh, if you, uh, if you just tell them, create a sentence using this word, they'll sit there for five minutes and still not think of something. And, you know, you have to be able to work with these kinds of, uh, personalities. And some people are just not, um, they just don't communicate. Uh, but they want to communicate. So, you have to provide them a lot of data. And then if you, uh, if you just ask them to, to say things, uh, they'll get the grammar wrong, and they don't know why it's wrong, and, you know, and so I just found that one of the, one of the, uh, ways that I used was giving students a lot of input, and having them repeat that input, recognize the grammatical, you know, parts in that input. Um, we don't always have to understand why it's like that, but we just need to recognize that the, the grammar is there. There must be some reason why native speakers say it this way. And we practice it until it becomes something that, that really flows, you know, it's part of fluency is just, uh, getting the sounds to, to flow, getting the intonation, and all of these things. And then the, the students are less focused on a psychological, like, how do I talk to people, but more on an activity of just learning the fluency. And once they've done that a few times, if you put them in a, in a conversational situation, because of the practice they've done, they're, they're more likely to be able to, uh, to, to converse and, and open up and, and say, say some things despite, you know, how shy they, they may be.

And then when you, uh, at a, at a quite a young age, I actually started to, uh, get, uh, exposed to Chinese. And so, I, I wanted to be able to master this language so that I could more easily master other Asian languages that had Chinese influence. And so, I really put a lot of effort on Chinese. And, uh, what I found is that if you're learning to, like what you said, if you have these blanks that you fill in, uh, and you have this, the, the framework is completely different. It would be the same as if you went from a European language to a Bantu language of Africa, or if you went to a Dravidian or, or, or, or Japanese, or an Altaic, Turkish language. Um, they're just, they're just built on completely different frameworks, or if you go to Arabic, the, the, the frameworks are different. And so, it's not that they can't express the same things in the same depth, it's just that you have to rearrange the whole framework of how you express yourself. And what I found is that in the European, from one European language to another, you know, with the exception of maybe Hungarian and Finnish, what you get are the pretty much the, the exact same framework. And you're just, you know, the, the, the dependent clause, you're going to start with the word that. It could be good or gay, in Italian, Spanish or French. Um, you might use a, a an article in, in German, um, in kator in Russian, uh, you know, something like this. So, if you, all of these languages have almost a parallel structure, is what I mean. And so, when you're learning one language to another in a parallel structure, what you get is a lot of one-to-one mappings, or maybe just rearranging, uh, for the word order, but it's really still the same structure. When you go to another language like Japanese or Chinese, or Arabic, what you're, when you have, what you're faced with is a completely different framework. And so, what I found is that if you're learning just vocabulary, vocabulary doesn't translate. If you're learning just the sentence structures, they don't really translate either. What you have to learn how to do is restructure everything that you want to communicate into a completely different framework. And you have to understand how to, how to, you have to understand that framework as, like a native speaker does in that language, and then say it, present it, uh, how they would in that language. So, oftentimes when we do translation between Chinese and English, for example, we, we would have to focus more on, um, of course, there are key vocabulary words, if you're, if you're doing a lot of, um, technical, uh, translations or interpretation, you want to be able to use the same kinds of, um, adjectives and verbs and nouns, but the framework is, is quite, it's quite different.

And so, if you are working from the, if you're learning a language from the position where I'm just learning a lot of vocabulary words, and I'm going to learn what the tenses are, and I'm going to learn how to say the past tense and the future tense, well, you're going to have a really, really hard time understanding what human language is all about because you're still in one corner of the room. If the, if the world is, is a room, you're just sitting in one corner. And if you venture out, and you get into all of the other corners, you'll figure out that human expression is, is, is really variable. And there's a lot of different frameworks to present your ideas. And so, uh, it, it just comes back to the point where what is the approach that you use? And so, if we look at a foreign language in the sentence, what, my most favorite way of doing it is, here's this sentence, and here's, in my language, and here's the sentence in the foreign language. Somehow these two sentences have the same meaning. Now I have to figure out how the parts match. They could be in completely different orders. They could be using different verbs. But then again, you look at English and a lot of words, they have completely different meanings. There's an example I use, uh, in our publications. It's, uh, for example, in, we translate into Chinese, to commit to a relationship, uh, means that you're, you're putting an effort into this. To commit a crime or to commit suicide, means you're doing a completely different activity. And so, when you seek your own language, you may never even realize that you use one word to mean many different things. And in some other languages, they'll use different sets of words, or they'll use different actions all combined into one word, which you may not even have realized that you could do that in another language. So, there's one-to-many mappings, and there's many-to-one mappings, and you just need to recognize how words, um, are put together. And that's what we call collocations, because, um, if you just learn the vocabulary, you're missing out on a lot of data on how to express yourself in a, in a foreign language.

The, if we're just working on, uh, memorizing our vocabulary, memorizing vocabulary, for example. And there's a lot of these websites that do it for Chinese characters, and I have a lot of, uh, issues with that in particular because Chinese is not what people, most people think, the, the structure of Chinese vocabulary is not what most people think it is. Chinese is not one character, one character, one character for every word. That's not how it works. Um, it's normally strings of characters that are morphemes or roots in a, in a larger structure, and those morphemes get put in there in a certain order, uh, to express a, a specific meaning. So, Right. you can take a, a word in English like right, and then you can add a, you can add a prefix to it and it becomes right then becomes rect, and it becomes correct. Then I can add an ending to it, like ibble, and it becomes corrigible, and I can add another prefix to it and it becomes incorrigible, means something that cannot be corrected, right? So, I built it off of the word rect, correct, corrigible, incorrigible. Okay, so, uh, that's an example of a fusional language, where the sounds change inside of the word. In Chinese, you can build things up in much the same way. So, if I wanted to say incorrigible, um, puneng jiaozhengde, or, you know, I can just, I could just automatically translate that into Chinese using the, the, the knowledge of the roots. But these are not words by themselves. Uh, the characters are not used, uh, you know, in, in isolation, I should say.

So, the problem with these, these methods of just memorizing vocabulary is that, great, you can measure it, you've, you can see that I've made progress. I got 100% or I got 90% progress, and I remember this many words. And then you go and you listen to the language, well, you have, you're going to have a completely different problem there. You can go read some articles in the language. Well, you're having a different problem there because you have, uh, a, the lex, uh, not the lexical issue, but the syntax issue. The word order is going to confuse you. Um, maybe some grammatical points, but it's probably more or less word order and choice of word, or choice of vocabulary. It's not a good idea to just translate vocabulary directly into foreign languages. You, you can do that. I mean, you can speak like that and, and they may understand you, but it's not how, uh, locals normally speak.

And so, it's, I always think it's great to get full sentences with all of the syntax in there, with all of the word choices in there. And it's the way a local person would speak. And I learn from the way he speaks, and I practice that way of speaking, and I get familiar with those common words the way they use it. And, uh, slowly but surely, I learn the, the native way, the way these native speakers speak.

But, um, there's a, a Chinese language that I speak, or that I have, I've learned, it's called Southern Min, or it's, uh, more commonly known as Hokkien or Taiwanese. And there's another dialect of it, uh, spoken in, uh, Mainland China, in the city of Taosan, or Chaozhou. And in their online, uh, online, they usually refer to themselves as Teochu speakers. It's a, T-E-O-C-H-E-W. And, um, when I first heard this dialect spoken for the first time, I couldn't understand anything. Even though I can, uh, converse regularly in Taiwanese, even though these are dialects of the same language. Now, when I was listening to it, I started to hear some words in the middle of the sentence in various sentences that were exactly the same as Taiwanese Hokkien. I said, oh, wow, I understand that. Oh, oh, there's another word. Oh, there's another word. I could, I could actually hear those words, and then because of the word in front of it and behind it, I started to understand what those words were. It's like you had a completely gray area, and then you had something that was really clear, and then something next to it that was a little bit gray, but became clearer. Then as time goes on, you listen to more and more of them speaking, and you start to hear more and more parts that make sense, just because you already had some common ground, and then you build up your understanding from those parts. Now, I would be very, very far away from actually speaking the language at that point, just by listening, but I would get some understanding of the language in a relatively short period of time.

So, when people say that, oh, all the Chinese languages are just dialects, they can all understand each other, that's not really true. Uh, if the language is, is really different, then there's, it's really impossible to understand the language. We have a, a Cantonese speaker in our office, and if she, she starts speaking Cantonese to everybody, nobody will understand anything that she's saying. And, um, my ability to pick up maybe on a different dialect is probably completely different than how, um, some of my, my colleagues in the company, uh, completely different than what they would be able to do because they don't have as much linguistic, uh, experience that I have. So, just because I can do that with their dialects doesn't mean that they can do it themselves. They would really need to have a lot of contact with that dialect to really start to understand it. And it takes time.

So, um, uh, there are some other, uh, websites that you can use where you can practice, uh, sentence methods as well. And, uh, a lot of those methods, they're based solely on the written word. And the way people write their languages is completely different than how they speak. Uh, for the last couple of weeks, I've been working a lot on both, uh, Armenian and Polish, in addition to Hakka, one of the Chinese languages. But I'll leave that aside. Uh, when it comes to Polish, um, what I've seen that the people talking about in the, uh, Polyglot forums is that, uh, Polish is extremely difficult. It's one of the most difficult of all the Slavic languages or of Europe. And, and I don't, I don't see where they get this idea from. If you're just looking at the writing, it can probably look a little bit confusing because they use two letters to represent one sound, like the Czech, they would use a hatcheck over the S. But in, uh, in, or, or over the R. And in Polish, they would write the same sound, S-Z or R-Z. They just add a Z instead of writing a hatcheck. So, if you recognize the spelling and what it stands for, it's, it's written very, uh, it's written very phonetically how the people speak. And there's a few simple rules that you learn to, to create the voiced version of the language, uh, devoicing certain sounds and whatnot. And then it's just a matter of practicing sentences and building up vocabulary from those sentences.

And I don't think it's, it's, compared to Russian, Russian's much more difficult because you have an issue with, um, uh, the accent or the stress in the word moving all over the place. This happens in Belarussian and Ukrainian as well. But in, in Czech, Slovak, and Polish, the accent is always fixed. So, I don't even need to use a dictionary to figure out the pronunciations of Polish, Czech, or Slovak when I'm learning the language. I don't need to put the word in Google Translate and then hit play to hear how it sounds or how it's pronounced because the spelling in Czech and Slovak, the stress is always first, and in Polish, it's always on the second-to-last syllable, unless it's a word borrowed from Latin, like music would be muzyka. Um, and then, you know, there's some very, very logical, logical things going on with the, with the stress patterns in Polish. Polish is not a difficult language. If people would stop telling themselves it's a difficult language, they sat down and took maybe 15 minutes to look at the spelling system, and said, okay, the spelling system, it makes sense the way it's written. They have their own system, it's different than other countries, but it's their system and it works in their way. If you sit down and learn it for 20 minutes, Polish becomes a much easier language to learn than I would say Czech, or even to pronounce in, in terms of pronunciation. Um, or, or even Russian or, or Ukrainian or Belarussian. And there's a very large Polish community online, uh, a very large presence online. And also, they have a, a large group of people living overseas. I think Polish is a beautiful language, and people should, um, really get more interested in it. Don't be scared by the way it's written. I think the same thing is true with Chinese or, or Japanese. People are scared because of the way languages are written. The, the way languages are written have nothing to do with, uh, with the language itself. It's just a, a way of writing it down, it's just a way of recording it. You know, if I record my speech right now in MP3 format or WAV format, or I record it in video format, who cares? You can record every language in, in whatever script you want to. The point is, is, does it help you learn how to speak the language? Does it help you understand the language when it's spoken? So, learning to read and write is a completely different skill than learning to, to speak and listen.

And so, this is one of the things that we're trying to get across with Glossika is that all of our publications provide sound files, we provide international phonetic alphabet. So, you can look at the language on the page and see how it is spoken compared to the script. Because obviously the spoken form of Polish or Russian looks very different than its spelling. But we put it there side by side on top of each other. So, you can actually compare this is what the language should sound like when you're speaking it, and this is how it's spelled, which is kind of an old system which, you know, is already starting to get old and maybe it doesn't match the way people are speaking today, like Russian. The last, uh, update for the spelling system has been already 100 years. So, um, a lot of letters in the Russian, in a lot of the Russian vowels are now, you know, spoken differently than how they were spoken 100 years ago. You know, if you, if you learn the word harasho, there's three different pronunciations of the vowels in that word. There's three different pronunciations of the O vowel. So, if you, if you want to go in and analyze all the rules and everything, you, you can spend several hours doing that, or you can just repeat after me, harasho, harasho, we'll practice the sentences, um, and then you start speaking the language and you have some fluency that you've gained in 10 to 20 minutes. So, it's your choice. I mean, you can analyze or you can practice. And I, I tend to tell people, practice, practice, practice. And then if you want to know more, go analyze it, spend some time if you want to. But, you know, put your practice as number one. Keep practicing, keep practicing because if you look at little children, they don't analyze things, they just keep doing it. They keep doing it, keep doing it until they're fluent. And it's a good method. It works, you know. And don't give up, you know, just keep, keep going.

So, if you, if you observe the way that a British person would pronounce certain words, uh, if they're speaking received pronunciation, and they're from London, England, or whatever, uh, they're going to use a lot of, um, aspirated T sounds. So, they would say, better. Um, little. And if you listen to Americans speak or Canadians speak, and even in England, a lot of the, the local dialects as well, uh, more spoken forms of English, uh, they're going, they're not going to use the T sound, they're going to use, uh, some places in England they'll use a glottal stop. And other places they'll use, uh, a flap sound. So, you'll hear Americans saying, better, little. Now, this is, of course, everybody will understand better, and they will also understand better, but it sounds rather strange when you're teaching students, and they're over pronouncing every single letter according to how they learned it in the alphabet. And that, that feels very robotic and strange to a teacher.

And so, my, my whole goal was, how can I develop a way to help these students speak fluently without feeling so tired trying to over pronounce everything? Because, uh, native speakers they rarely, uh, they rarely annunciate everything so clearly. It's, it's a flow, it's a speech flow. And, uh, a lot of, uh, teachers at the time were telling me, don't worry about it. When they get older, they will just automatically switch to fluent speech. And I, I didn't, I knew these students for many years. I never witnessed that happen. I, I said, I talked to older students, I talked to adults, and they still have the same problems that the children had. And I said, there's a problem with that. There, there, there's something wrong here. And so, I looked at the, um, the research, and yeah, there's a difference between a dictionary pronunciation and a, and a spoken language pronunciation. And that has to do with these small little sound changes. And, believe it or not, every language has them.

But, um, getting back to my point is that, uh, if we're going to teach Arabic, uh, we could teach Modern Standard Arabic, uh, then you can learn how to talk like a reporter, or like somebody reading the news. But nobody talks like that in real life, and you'll have a hard time trying to communicate and make friends. So, what I want to do is, uh, have the Modern Standard Arabic along with the dialectal Arabic. And then our whole audio program is based on the, on the dialectal Arabic. But at least you have something that you can go back and forth and compare with the, uh, the International Standard language there.

Um, and then, uh, part of my quest in trying to figure out what are the, uh, ways to acquire a language, and how it's, uh, spoken and understood, is, I had to give myself a few challenges, and go out of the way to learn languages that are completely unrelated. And because that gives me a challenge in vocabulary, in syntax, the whole framework. Uh, so, I have to go learn a language from another, uh, from another language family. And, uh, fortunately, where I live here in Taiwan, there are, um, a lot of aboriginal languages. Number one, the resources are scarce for these languages. And number two, they're built on a completely different framework. So, if I took my methods, and I tested myself on learning something completely different, on, on a language that has no resources to begin with, it's only a spoken language, then what results am I going to get? So, I, I focused on learning a number of these languages. And I actually went and took a government proficiency exam on one after four months time. I scored 92% on the speaking and listening, uh, for, for this government proficiency exam. And this is a new program that the government is putting out. It's to allow all of the ethnic people to have, uh, to recognize themselves. We have our own language, we are a recognized group. And so, I think that's great because people, they like to have, uh, they, they like to have some sort of sense of belonging, they, they have their own tribe, or they have their own language, or their own group, their own family. Uh, these clan, you know, these things are important to, to human, humans, uh, in human nature. So, the government has recognized that and given, given all of them, uh, recognition that they exist. And so, part of that effort is also allowing them to create their dictionaries and their stories and their literature and put some effort in, in, uh, their languages.

And it just so happens that these languages are the, uh, the source of all of the other Austronesian languages around the world. So, Malagasy and Madagascar, now when I look at this language, there are a lot of similar words that, that appear in the, the languages of Taiwan. And I'm, I, I'm constantly surprised that a language so far away, on another island, halfway around the world, has so much, uh, similar vocabulary. I'm looking at Maori, or Hawaiian, or Indonesian, or Philippine languages. They all have these similarities. And so, it's really fascinating to, um, have been able to learn what we would call an aboriginal language, but that's just because it's so small. There's just a small number of people here in the mountains of Taiwan. But they have spread out all over the world. Their, their, uh, children and grandchildren, the descendants have, have gone off and lived in a lot of other countries. And then those countries gave birth to new languages over time. But they continue with the same traits. So, I think that if you learn one language in one family, you have it easier to learn other languages. And it's easier to understand a lot of the other languages in the same family.

So, um, that was part of my goal was, uh, number one was, um, to try and learn one of these, uh, aboriginal languages to see what, what would be the efficiency of the method. And number two, um, once you start learning a language, you really start to make a lot of connections with that language and that culture. And so, um, I would have never thought that I would get involved with, uh, aboriginal affairs and things like this. But then you, you tend to start to see the world from their point of view. You talk to them, you speak to them in their language, and you, you hear their voice, and you start to, to understand, um, their point of view of the world. And they're just like this tiny little corner. For example, they're, they're on this one little mountain in a tiny little corner, and the whole world out there is different than them, and they have nowhere else to turn to. And so, they, there's, they're, a lot of times very shy, um, they're a lot of times they're just very inwardly focused. Um, they're, they don't know how to communicate with the rest of the world. They don't know how to stand out and be confident and, and, uh, lead like, you know, in a modern society, a successful career and other things like this. And so, I think that by the government's intentions of allowing them to, to really focus and, and on themselves and their own identity, it gives them that confidence that they can walk into the city, and they can go in and get any job that they want, and they can proudly say that they're, uh, an aborigine, or their mother language is, is something you've never even heard of. Maybe even in your own country, you've never heard of this language before. And they say, wow, that's a language of Taiwan. I didn't know that. You know, and that, that kind of thing happens all the time because nobody in Taiwan memorizes some 20 different language names, you know. So, it's, it's, um, it's, it's, it's empowering. It gives people this kind of empowering. And I think that me, I'm a person that is involved with, um, improving language methods. And so, these, these people here in Taiwan, the aborigines, they're the direct benefit of my efforts, uh, to improve language training. I turn around and work with the government to improve better and better, uh, training methods. Not just for the aborigines, but also for the local Chinese languages as well. And so, I've learned a lot just because, well, yes, I can learn a language. And, uh, I can learn a language using this method, even a language that is not written, and even a language that has, um, very little resources. And so, I think that that goes to show that there's some value in the method that I'm putting out there. And number two, you don't always need a writing system to learn a language. And so, the writing system, we can develop it and we can make it better and better over time. Uh, the aborigines, they all have writing systems now, but they're still going through spelling reforms and changes based on the, the structure of the language. It's, it's, it's kind of a complex process.

And we also, um, we also make some money from selling our major languages as well. But I think it's a trade-off. I mean, um, I want, I, I want to be able to provide, we have languages in development for India. We have languages like Sorani and Kurdish, uh, and, uh, Kurmanji Kurdish. And, uh, very few people want to learn these languages. But our, our, our courses can actually help the Sorani speakers and the Kurmanji speakers learn other languages like English, French, German, uh, Chinese, you know. So, it's, it's a, it's a two-way street. So, we may not, we may never sell a, a Kurdish course. We may only sell it to a few, uh, you know, interested people. Five or six people around the world. They might buy a Kurdish course. But, if you provide this course and you work with the local, uh, local people in there and they promote it, uh, a Kurdish course for learning English that we've developed by an international company abroad, then it gets attention. And so, um, that's one way that, you know, that the project can be subsidized as well.

So, the other thing is, if you don't have any experience, what I would recommend to people is, if you sit down with the audio and you open your book, and you listen to the whole audio for the whole book, by the time you close that, we have 1,000 sentences in a book. So, if you, once you've finished the 1,000 sentences, that whole cadence of the language and the intonation and, and a lot of the words that have been repeating over and over in a lot of different sentences, you'll actually have gained a lot of vocabulary from that exercise. You'll have gained a, a real close, um, recognition of what the, the language sounds like and the intonation of the language. And that could take three hours, you could sit down on a Saturday or Sunday and spend three hours and, and, listen to the whole book. Go through the whole thing. And that is an incredibly empowering activity right there because what you walk away with is a new-found understanding and knowledge of this language. Then you go back to the beginning and start your regular daily practice, maybe 20 minutes a day. And you'll start to acquire all of this, uh, all of these sentence patterns. So, it's, um, that's how I recommend you use the course.

Most children, when they learn their, their own language, they, they speak about a million sentences by the, the age of 10. So, if you haven't spoken a million sentences in this language yet, you're not even close to a 10-year-old's ability. I've done the math before. I, I've told my, all my students in Taiwan before. I've done the math for them. Through all of their high school careers, how many sentences have they actually spoken from their own mouth in English? Very rarely have they, have they gone past 3,000 sentences. And I told them, how many sentences do you need to say out of your mouth fluently before you start to have the communicative ability? They say, I have, I have no idea. And I said, you need at least 30,000. You need to say at least 30,000 sentences. And it's a, wait, wait, wait, I just spent my whole education and career on 3,000 sentences. And you're telling me I need 30,000? I said, an average 10-year-old has spoken a million sentences. Come on. So, fluency comes from saying sentences a lot, a lot, a lot. It's not just repeating vocab, vocabulary. It's, it's full sentences.

So, uh, our course, uh, has, uh, the spaced repetition. 18 times that every sentence is, is, uh, is repeated, uh, throughout the course. So, you get 54,000 repetitions right there. 50,000 basically puts you over the threshold for, uh, fluency. And so, that was my goal with this course. Is you start with fluency one, you go through fluency three, and that'll put you over 50,000 repetitions. And you're at the point where the sentence structures are so familiar that you can rearrange them and create all of your own sentences now, and you can basically communicate. Your vocabulary will still be limited. We don't focus a lot on building vocabulary. We focus on manipulating all the parts of the sentences. So, you still need a dictionary to help you, uh, or you can use other websites like Memorize or, or Duolingo to improve your, uh, other aspects of the language. Duolingo probably works mostly with, uh, with the written form of the language. Um, and then Memorize, they have some spoken and whatnot, but it's mostly vocabulary. So, uh, those tools can be used in conjunction.

Um, and, uh, we, we are also at the Taipei International Book Exhibition, uh, during the second week of February, uh, 2015. So, um, if you're listening to this podcast after the event, and it's already past, then you can probably look up, um, some past event photos, or you can see, um, parts of that activity, uh, after it's happened. So, but we'll be at the book fair. Um, we have our own booth there with a lot of our, um, printed books on display at the, uh, book fair. And so, if you're in Taiwan, and you want to, and you're in Taipei, we're right next to the Taipei 101 Tower. And you can come on in. Our booth number is A-1318. And we'd love to meet any fans. And I know there's some people, uh, traveling from Europe during that week that, that will be in town. So, we look forward to seeing everybody. Thank you very much.