Intro

Yesterday I listen 4 lectures from Polyglot Conference 2016 in Thessaloniki, Greece on YouTube. The lectures were:

1. Lýdia Machová – The Power of Setting Priorities in Language Learning [CC English/Español] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT7dx52wIC8
2. Helen Abadzi - Efficient language learning for all: What your brain needs to do https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-1oHIneSNw
3. Alexander Arguelles - Language Learning as Mental Exercise and Discipline https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XhIWpN4tDA
4. Professor Alexander Arguelles - Reading Literature in Foreign Languages: Tool, Techniques, Target https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUqME-RTtIs
5. Steve Kaufmann - How many words do we need to know? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AHFL8veIvs

I was eager to listen these polyglots who I follow in YouTube. Actually I was not listened prof. Arguelles before but was read some of his famous posts in HTLAL forum 5 years ago. I like to listen lectures about language learning, techniques and ideas. I am in a period of my life that I have to consolidate my speaking skills, to focus on some weak points and to reach high level in some of them. So I decided - as one of my goals this year - to listen/read about these techniques, to summarize what is useful for me and I agree with and to implement it actively in my language learning practice. I have to say that listening YouTube videos or listening podcasts is relatively new to me as a practice from maybe a year. The basic information about language learning I know from books and HTLAL forum. I prefer to read than to listen but nowadays I feel more confident in listening.

What I missed

I understand that I made some mistakes. Some of them are:

• I have no system in my language learning (strategy);
• I have no global goals for each language I learnt;
• I have no goals for this year;
• I have no idea how I learn - which techniques I like and use and which does not like

So I take notes during the lectures I think about want can do. I realized that I have to organize my learning process. I have some goals in my mind for this year but I have to do some other things. So I decide to take these steps:

• Which are my goals for every language I learn;
• Which are my goals for every language for this year and for next months;
• How to measure both my development and achieving my goals;
• What system for language learning is suitable for me;
• How to implement desired language learning system in my everyday life.

And these questions will be my next posts. When I listen lectures I realized that I already use some of their techniques and I agree with some of their ideas. Maybe would be a great point to continue to use some of my habits if they work for me. But before I decide O inevitably have to make a deep understanding of what I am using now and which of these techniques I use, like, dislike. So this diary will help me with this not so easy task but rather boring.

What I did last four months with Portuguese

I did these things:

• I review what kind of learning materials I have and decide to use 2 manuals at once;
• I was bored from Teach Yourself (although I like it) and continue with 40 leçons pour parler portugais but stuck with it because I had no exercises - only to produce silly sentences. But I focused on pronunciation and try practicing oral and nasal vowels - with the help of https://european-portuguese.info/ .
• started to listen massively podcasts - Practice Portuguese (I like it very much) and a bunch of other but tried to focused on European Portuguese and native speakers. I did not want to add another foreign accent on the top of my own.
• continued to read scientific articles about Portuguese from internet and books with Kindle and use the dictionary inside Kindle (I hate it because is stupid, it explain the word with the same word);
• continued with my grammar notes about Portuguese in Bulgarian - I made a good step; started to write this diary in Portuguese - very shy but started.
• start phonetic drills as I said before.

All I could say is that for these three or four months I better my listening comprehension and start to build writing and speaking skills. I realized that I read a little, I think insufficient, and had not trained the grammar. I autoestimate my success with this table.

	Before	Now
Listen	3	5
Speak	2	3
Read	4	3
Write	2	3
Grammar	4	3
Pronunciation	3	4
Average	3	3.5

(Great - I train a table in Markdown! - and it not function! Marvelous! After many hours of reading I made HTML table because nothing else work)

(scale from 2 - very bad to 6 grade - excellent)

By “Grammar” I understand “overall comprehension”. I think I have a progress. But I think too that I am trapped between all these goals. I think I better some skills but worse others. This is what I like to do compared to what I do now.

	Like to do	Now
Listen	4	5
Speak	3	3
Read	6	3
Write	5	3
Grammar	6	3
Pronunciation	3	4
Average	4.5	3.5

I think that I have good progress with listening and obviously I have to keep going ahead and make this progress my everyday habit. Although I think writing is better but I have to keep the tendency and to make it my everyday habit.

Lýdia Machová - The power of setting priorities in language learning

I listened her lecture from the Polyglot Conference in Bratislava. She talked about what polyglots do differently in language learning - a very interesting lecture I listen twice.

From this lecture I like very much her 4 pillars: fun, quantity, frequency and system. Let put them in a table:

		Love to do	dislike	Average
1.	fun	grammar reading	speaking vocabulary	writing listening
2.	quantity	grammar reading writing	speaking vocabulary	listening
3.	frequency	reading grammar writing	speaking vocabulary	listening
4.	system	grammar writing	speaking vocabulary	listening reading

For speaking, vocabulary, listening and reading I have no system. It is obvious that I dislike speaking and vocabulary and I have to do something with this.

Another interesting things that I heard were that some grammar exercises were needed in the beginning (I agree) and that we have to write a logbook (I agree too - I started a logbook in HTLAL and here). I like how she organized language skills into these categories:

• reading
• writing
• listening
• speaking
• grammar
• vocabulary
• pronunciation

The last two I combined it above but I think is good to be separated. I hate vocabulary but average like pronunciation. She proposed a program that I liked:

2-3 priorities for 2-3 months (4 months past already)

	She proposed	I think for me
1.	listening	OK
2.	pronunciation	OK
3.	vocabulary	I tried grammar

Then next 3 months (now)

	She proposed	I think for me
1.	speaking	Not sure, better reading/grammar
2.	vocabulary	OK
3.	listening	OK

Then next 2 months

	She proposed	I think for me
1.	speaking	Not sure, better reading
2.	grammar	OK
3.	reading	OK

Then next 3 months

	She proposed	I think for me
1.	writing	OK
2.	speaking	OK
3.	vocabulary	OK

I like benefits of the priorities she explained:

• structure (we know exactly where we are in the road)
• we see improvement (if we concentrate in one thing we see the results in short time, otherwise we see results after a year) - this is more motivational
• we do not forget things that we do not love (like speaking and vocabulary for me)
• we remind yourself that we have goals and have to make steps to achieve them. So we are not so afraid of speaking because we made this decision

Set your smart goals:

__S__pecific

__M__easurable

__A__mbitious

__R__ealistic

__T__ime bound

In addition, for a nice end - letter of Eva (English teacher):

"I have realized that my attitude towards English was wrong the whole years. When I wanted to improve my English at home I tried to focus on everything - on grammar, listening, reading, vocabulary, etc. I was lost because I didn’t know how to find the system in language learning. Thanks to concentrating on 3 priorities, I have found my lost motivation and I have started to like English again :)”

Lectures of prof. Alexander Arguelles - 2 Lectures

He spoke about motivation. He talk about types of learners - solitary learners and group learners. Of course, I am solitary learner - I like mostly grammar, linguistics, reading and writing and do not like speaking. Recently I have to say That I enjoy listening and now I listen every day about 2-3 hours foreign languages. I made something similar before but only with English. Now I bravely add Spanish, Italian and Portuguese to the soup and I am not afraid to listen two foreign languages at once even if they are very close. I think I have to try “shadowing” - the technique of prof. Arguelles. I try something similar but not for words but for vowels and consonants. I like the idea of Diachronic learning - to learn whole language family and one old language - like Latin. I do exactly the same now - learn the Romance language family (except French and Romanian) and I learnt years ago Latin by myself. I am a huge fan of Latin but I learnt it when I was 16 just because I like how it sounds. I was learnt it on and off for 4-5 years but mainly grammarly. However, I think that the idea is very good and I immediately add Latin to my diary. I added it in my table for learning hours alongside Galician (from Romance languages) and English (I consider English for Romance language because of vocabulary) and Russian. I found the original of my Latin grammar which I love truly (I learnt before from a copy to take notes on it but lost some pages) and have two manuals, also found some interesting books about Vulgar Latin and some sites. But I think that would be nice to add Galician too - I like it very much and I have manuals, only had no time before to started seriously.

He speak about focus on work itself not only to do the goal (I agree and do this), systematic, efficient, effective learning - I am not good here. I am not so systematic, try to learn every day but cannot. I have no stress in learning but face some lack of confidence and burn-off from time to time. I feel exhausted frequently - mostly when speak or listen. And I feel so bored when I learn new words that I have to try some new techniques - flashcards are boring(tried Anki and Memrise - they are good but have to be combined with something else maybe, I cannot make them my habit), Duolingo - too (only 3-4 times a year is not boring for me). Maybe I try to combine flashcards that pronounce words with speaking (“shadowing”? maybe) and old-school writing new words for 5 rows and pronounce them (maybe only for hard to remember words). The old-school method was efficient but slow and made you mad from speaking one thing on and on until became breathless, voiceless and handless from writing.

For me the most interesting was the second lecture about Reading. I am a big fan of reading and read every day but now only 5 pages maximum. Some days I give up everything and read all the day and this is a true pleasure for me. According to what he said if I want to read a novel I have to know about 9 000 - 15 000 word families. I make the test in the site he pointed - https://my.vocabularysize.com/session/evstxx and the test shows me that I have 9 300 English words families. I was read before years some books in English but nowadays I read only books about web development, language Learning and grammar books in English. Maybe I have to start reading non-fiction literature. I have to try the rule for 6 unknown words in a page but I think I probably get many more.

There are two types of reading:

• intensive reading - very hard, can be done with very short text. The intention is to extract information fast but have to use dictionary
• extensive reading - for pleasure, relatively easy, not supposed to use dictionary, have to learn words from the context. It is for overall language development. It is a good idea to make word lists. We have to know 98% of the words in the text, which means to have no more than 6 unknown word per page.

9000 w. f. (educated) - 5000 (minimum) = 4000 word families (literary words - not so many used but needed for reading )

Reading is more efficient tool than listening and is a good approach if you want to speak well.

How to start reading? We have to read better in our native language first. A good speaking test is to read aloud - it is a good exercise to speak fluent and to make your thoughts ordered.

How to choose a text for extensive reading? It have to be easy like children books, graded readers, bilingual texts (the best one, better with literal translation to compare sentence-by-sentence first and then read paragraph by paragraph), novels (original + translation - this is good for advanced readers). Audio books are harder than normal books (because of listening comprehension), easy to distract,the narrator is very important. There are 5 different types of using of audio books:

1. translate + listen the same text (like Assimil)- this is like watching tv with subtitles on the same language - “listening reader”
2. read original text and listen translation
3. read original text and listen original
4. ?
5. listen original + two different subtitles - this is very good for comparison

What is literature? Fine quality text, which is well written and cultural significant.

Some tips I liked:

• read every day 20 minutes (I already do it)
• read 1 month in your strong languages (for me - English and Spanish), then 1 week for every week language (for me - Italian, Portuguese), add one old language for a week (for me - Latin) and I will add - why not add some small language from the same language family for a week (for me - Galiacian). The goal is to become confident with your strong languages first and then they will help you with your week languages.

Helen Abadzi - Efficient language learning for all: What your brain needs to do

This was very interesting and comprehensive lecture. I like her approach to grab first the whole picture of the lesson or book and then listen it. The grammar is important because of categorizations - adults have aptitude for categorization and grammar is a shortcut. It is very good to make analogies, which is useful when conjugate verbs. It is very important to keep all our old textbooks and notes we made - it is easier to remember some language with your own notes. It is a very good technique to make some type of physical activity during studying (like chewing gum). Oher useful technique is study-sleep-study cycle. Some other useful study techniques:

• understand each word in the studied dialogue
• use emotions (it is more useful emotional listening that listening a text generated with software)
• it is very useful to slow down the audio to 50-70%
• record your lessons with a teacher to listen them again later

1. Online apps and courses:

• Mango
• Duolingo(tried it)
• Yabla
• Candy crush
• Rosetta stone(tried it)
• Memrise(tried it)
• Pimsleur
• FSI courses

Start with one app and finished it. It is better to start with app or to use app when you already knew something. They are limited in vocabulary and have little grammar explanation. Courses with audio materials with small chunks are better. For intermediate learners it is normally hard to find learners materials - some suitable ones are textbooks with audio/video supplements and newspaper readers from Dunwoody Press (but they are only for not world language - so nothing for Spanish, Italian and Portuguese)

Steve Kaufmann - How many words do we need to know?

3 overwhelming factors:

• attitude
• time
• developing ability to notice things

He is a big fan of Stephen Krashen - “compelling input” (the input must be comprehensive, meaningful, understandable)

Conclusion

All I have to do is:

• to determine my global goals for all my Languages
• to set up a system for learning languages suitable for me
• to test my level in grammar, vocabulary size
• to set up my goals for the years
• to make a plan for the year