Learn Languages with Steve Kaufmann

When I start a language like Persian or Arabic, at first it's just noise. I can't even tell where one word ends and the next begins. So I listen first, every morning, while I make breakfast or do my exercises. I listen to a short story two or three times, move on to the next one, and come back to it later. Do you start a new language with listening or reading?

Portuguese should be easy for me. I speak Spanish, and the vocabulary, grammar and word order are almost the same. But when I go to speak Portuguese, Spanish keeps getting in the way. I had the same experience moving from Japanese to Korean, and with Persian words hiding in Arabic. Have you ever found a "similar" language harder than you expected?

What makes language learning content easy? It's not about knowing 97% of the words. That's the goal, not where you start. What helps me most is repetition, short sentences, clear audio, and above all, content I'm genuinely interested in. What kind of content made a new language finally click for you?

Many learners are told to focus on the 1,000 most common words and stop there. I've never done that. In Arabic I now have over 35,000 known words at LingQ, and while I can't use most of them yet, they let me follow podcasts on history and politics and discuss difficult subjects with my tutor. A big vocabulary is my potential in the language. Do you stick to common words, or do you push yourself to learn the rare ones?

Some of my best language learning material came from a random book I pulled off my library shelf. A history of Portugal, a book about Prague, a Swedish novel. A little Portuguese here, a little Czech there, a little Swedish, and it all adds up, like snow that slowly covers the ground. You don’t always need two free hours to make progress. What’s the most useful thing you’ve found by accident while learning a language?

Someone told me they can speak their second language but cannot understand what people say back to them. I know this one well, because my wife can hold a social conversation in French and Spanish while missing most of what she hears. The fix is not more speaking practice, it is a much wider base of listening and reading. Comprehension is what lets you talk about more than a handful of familiar subjects. Which side are you on right now, speaking or understanding?

I meet a lot of people who tell me, almost with pride, that they understand a language well but can't speak it. Usually two things are going on. Their comprehension isn't as broad as they believe, because they only follow the familiar topics they hear again and again. And they have made "I can't speak" part of their identity, so every meeting they sit through in silence confirms it. Which language do you understand far better than you speak?

When I start reading in a new language, I accept that I am not going to understand most of it. My brother compared it to mowing a lawn: if the grass is high, you set the blades high on the first pass and lower them the next time through. I go over the same content again and again, and each time I pick up something I missed before. Do you push through content you only half understand, or do you wait until you feel ready for it?

Spanish is spoken across three continents, and learners worry constantly about picking the wrong version. But compared to English or Portuguese, the variation is surprisingly small. The vowels stay consistent whether you are in Mexico, Colombia or Spain, and most of what really changes is slang, rhythm and a couple of consonants. I have found that after a day or two in a new country you stop hearing the accent at all and just hear the meaning. Which Spanish accent do you find hardest to follow?

I have somewhere between 60 and 70 shelves of books in this house, well over a thousand of them, in several languages, and I have finally started cataloguing the lot. Going through them reminded me why paper still matters to me. The research is fairly clear that we retain more from paper than from a screen, and I think the reason is simple. When it is just you and the book in your hands, there is nowhere else to go, no pixels, no navigating, no temptation to scroll away. When did you last read a paper book for three hours straight?