Everyone is Bad at Languages Until They Learn THIS
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Think you’re just bad at learning languages? You might have been blaming the wrong person! In this video, I’ll show you what your brain actually needs to pick up a language, using Stephen Krashen’s idea of comprehensible input. You’ll discover how reading stories can help you learn vocabulary and get a feel for grammar — without stopping to memorise every word.
👉 Get a 7-day FREE trial to one of my story-based language courses 👉🏼 https://storylearning.com/language-courses
0:00 Are you really bad at languages?
0:57 Try this German experiment
2:48 What your brain actually needs
4:36 Why reading changes everything
7:44 Learning words without memorising
9:51 When grammar starts to click
12:29 Is your book too hard?
14:53 Four things to remember
#StoryLearning #LearnThroughStories
https://l.storylearning.com/read-in-any-language
👉 Get the StoryLearning App: https://l.storylearning.com/storylearning_app_read
Think you’re just bad at learning languages? You might have been blaming the wrong person! In this video, I’ll show you what your brain actually needs to pick up a language, using Stephen Krashen’s idea of comprehensible input. You’ll discover how reading stories can help you learn vocabulary and get a feel for grammar — without stopping to memorise every word.
👉 Get a 7-day FREE trial to one of my story-based language courses 👉🏼 https://storylearning.com/language-courses
0:00 Are you really bad at languages?
0:57 Try this German experiment
2:48 What your brain actually needs
4:36 Why reading changes everything
7:44 Learning words without memorising
9:51 When grammar starts to click
12:29 Is your book too hard?
14:53 Four things to remember
#StoryLearning #LearnThroughStories
@storylearning
👉 Grab your FREE guide: How to Read in ANY Language l.storylearning.com/read-in-any-language
👉 Get the StoryLearning App: l.storylearning.com/storylearning_app_read
36 likes
@soberhippie
Bloody hell, I've been telling people to draw sketches of the things they are learning the words for, commenting to themselves what they are drawing in that language. And then, when revising, look at those doodles and remember the words. You don't need a "your-native-language-word" to "your-foreign-language-word" pair in your brain, you need a direct connection between a word and the thing.
268 likes
@richardmanville1486
That little German drawing session was a revelation.
84 likes
@colinremmer2417
I always find that childrens' books are great ways to learn, plus they don't waffle on for ages, they get into the story and keep you there
377 likes
@meldroc
One fun thing to try: Find a movie that's one of your favorites, say Star Wars, in my case, and watch it in the language you're studying. You'll want to pick a movie where you've seen it a million times, you love it, you've memorized the dialogue in your own language, so when you hear it in French, you already know the translation, and you can do a better job at picking out words and figuring things out.
83 likes
@danielhurst8863
Before the days of cellphones and instant language translation, I was at a fast food place eating and a young Japanese woman walked in and put a newspaper in front of me. She was looking for an apartment and didn't speak any English and I spoke no Japanese. Despite this lack of a mutual language, I understood what she wanted and the apartment she was looking for was a one year lease and she would also need first and last month's rent. I managed to explain this to her with drawings and language and learned she worked at a family restaurant and wanted her own place so she would learn English. With visual clues and effort, as large amount of detailed information can be passed, without understanding the basics of the language.
244 likes
@johnvienna3422
My Japanese teacher got frustrated with me when I got verbs right without being able to state which verb group they belonged to. They just sounded right, cos I'd heard them enough times.
13 likes
@upapaepops
60 years ago I was at a Loretto convent in Mauritius. Classes were in English but all around me everyone spoke French and I didn’t know any. We had to take out 2 books a week from the library which were all in French too. I discovered the wonderful French/ Belgian comic books – Tintin, Asterix, Quick and Flupke, even Tanguy and Laverdure about 2 french air force pilots. I read them all and learnt so much. I remember my delight when I first grasped a French pun (thank you Asterix)
86 likes
@kd-vf2or
This is why students in every country read "The Little Prince" when learning French. It is a picture book written as a fable. Very philosophic for adults, but very simple language and action. The real clue is PICTURE book. The example of the face is good because he draws the things, so new words are not guessing games. Without the picture, you can guess what a word means and be TOTALLY wrong.
89 likes
@mikenielsen8781
Having never studied or spoken Spanish, I have made huge progress in just a couple of months (starting at zero) from doing exactly this. I'm now reading fairly comfortably at maybe B1 or B2. Listening to the audio for the books is a fantastic exercise. Of course, speaking is a different skill, so practicing that is also a big help.
253 likes
@uhorne
Comprehensible input is definitely good, but from my own experience it works even better in combination with other methods. Learning a bit of grammar gives the brain an idea on the pattern to look for. Speaking and writing helps cement the knowledge, as you actively have to use the language
49 likes
@jaden-hampton
I think the hardest part about learning a language is that I want to learn them all so picking one which interests me first is hard. From Swedish to Farsi I want to just put it all in my brain 😂
8 likes
@christiangudrian1195
I remember my English teacher more than 40 years ago urged us to read. And to not look up every unknown word immediately but instead try to derive its meaning from the context.
1 likes
@kikacre
I generally agree with your video, but I think there is an important difference between understanding a language and being able to use it actively.
I watch almost all films in English with English subtitles, and I can usually follow the meaning of almost everything I watch, including YouTube videos. Yet when it comes to speaking or writing English myself, I often struggle to find the right words and get the grammar right.
It’s interesting how much harder active language use can be than simply understanding what you hear or read.
43 likes
@MichaSloman
I learned Hebrew using graded reading story books. It really is helpful. It is also important, in my opinion, to speak a lot in the language without worrying about making mistakes.
8 likes
@thereader14
This is why reading to small children is so important. Watching the story of life play out is literally how we learnt our own languages when we were small and picture books help reinforce that before they even recognise there are words on the page
10 likes
@smithjohn383
I decided to re-learn Swedish thirty-some years after school so I bought a stack of comicbooks. I thought the pictures would give enough clues that I can follow the story. It seems that after all these years I still got the grammar rules somewhere in my memory, only the vocabulary had been lost.
First needed a dictionary on almost every speech bubble but after some months I could go several pages without checking anything.
So this definitely works.
( Btw, English is not my first language. )
43 likes
@darrentomlyn6853
It's not that we're bad at learning - it's that academia doesn't understand it well enough to teach it properly. Recognising and understanding the difference between communication and language itself would be a start, but it cannot even do that properly because of far more fundamental problems. If only writing everything up as to how it really exists was this easy :P (It doesn't help when too many things humanity obviously recognises and uses/involves don't have any labels (in the English language) because of said academic failure.)
5 likes
@kakidreamweaver103
"French in Action" a TV series on PBS years ago really helped me with French & was a very entertaining. You can still pull up the episodes on YouTube.
2 likes
@hellequingentlemanbastard9497
In School I couldn't really follow my French and English teacher.
What I did was reading as a refresher "The Eagle has landed" in German, a book I had read several times before.
Then I bought the same book in English and French and read them both consecutively and several times.
Within a year my grades in both languages had gone up.
Although it didn't work for Latin.
That was in the early 80's and I have used that approach ever since.
50 likes