#83 Hugo Cotton on Learning Through Topics that Matter

Hey there, language lovers, and welcome to the Language Hacking podcast. I'm Shannon Kennedy, co-host along with Benny Lewis, and we're chatting with Hugo of InterFrench, a popular French podcast and YouTube channel. In our chat with Hugo, we talk about the story behind the creation of InterFrench, using languages as a tool to learn about other things, good resources for learning a language in this way without it becoming too complicated, tricks for finding good resources in another language, choosing compelling content as a language teacher, or creating compelling content, the biggest struggles French learners face, and how to use what you're hearing and learning in another language in conversations. If you enjoy this episode of the podcast, we appreciate your reviews. You can let us know what you think over at languagehacking.com/review. As always, all of the links and resources mentioned in this episode will be available to you as a part of the showdowns. Now, let's get into our chat with Hugo. The links and resources mentioned in this episode can be found at languagehacking.com/83. Welcome to the Language Hacking podcast from Fluent in Three Months. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Language Hacking podcast. Today, Shannon and I are chatting with Hugo, who is from InterFrench. He has a very popular podcast and a very active YouTube channel as well, and he's got lots of tips for us. We're going to dive right on in. How are you doing today, Hugo? Great. It's amazing to be here, so yeah, thanks again for the invite. Of course. So I'd like to kick it off by hearing you give your own story of how you got into languages and how you got into helping other people with languages. It was mostly by accident because when I was younger, I was never really interested in languages, which was a bit weird because at school, I was kind of a nerd, but languages were really not my favorite topics, so I was more into literature, history, philosophy, etc. So yeah, I never thought that I would become a language teacher, but after my studies, I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life because I just graduated from a business school, and I knew that I didn't really want to work in a big company, and at that time, my best friend, who's Polish, he suggested that we move to Poland to start a business there, and by business, I mean a small event agency to organize techno parties because during our studies, we were DJing on weekends, and yeah, we just wanted to try to do it a bit more seriously, so we moved to Poland because it's a bit easier to start a business there compared to France, so you don't really need as much money. But yeah, unfortunately, this business was a big failure, and I lost all the money I had saved, but I still wanted to stay a bit longer in Warsaw, because I really liked the city, the vibe, because yeah, Poland is a country that's growing quite fast, so it's really interesting to be there, and my friend suggested that I try my luck at the French Institute, so originally I thought that I would offer my services as a marketing or communication consultant because it's what I studied, but they didn't need anyone to help them with the marketing, and they were looking for a native speaker to teach conversation classes, and yeah, they just gave me the opportunity to try, and to be honest, I was really terrified, because I had no former experience with teaching, especially not with teaching a language, and when I arrived in the classroom for this first class, I was the younger in the room, the youngest one, I mean, so yeah, it was a bit terrifying, but I really enjoyed that first class, and then I decided to take it a bit more seriously, and I started learning more about yeah, language learning, language teaching, etc, and yeah, that's really what kicked off my career as a French teacher. So you went from teaching French to now running your own language business in our French, did all of your experience leading up to creating your own business, hope you manage creating your own business with the story behind creating inner French in particular? I'd like to say yes, because then it would justify why I spent five years studying business, and why I got my master from this business school, but actually not really, because the business I'm running within our French is very different from what I was studying, because basically in a business school, usually you study to become a manager in a big company, but not really to run your own business, so I kind of had to learn everything from scratch, and I use mostly the internet for that, and it's really grew organically, so the story is that at the same time I started teaching at the French Institute, I also started learning Polish, because yeah, I realized that I wanted to stay a bit longer in Poland, so it might be a good idea to learn the language, and at some point I stumbled upon a Polish podcast, called Real Polish, and for me it was really aha moment, as you say, because the guy was not really teaching Polish grammar, but he was just telling interesting stories in Polish, and that was my discovery of comprehensive input and stiff-and-crash-and-stereys, etc, and I know that you had him on your podcast recently, so it was a really interesting episode for me, but yeah, so basically this podcast was super inspiring for me, and I started looking for a similar podcast in French that I could recommend to my students, but I couldn't find any, so I just decided to create my own, so at the beginning it was really just for my students, but through word of mouth, etc, it started growing, and I started to get more and more requests for private lessons, etc, so at some point I just left my job, I quit my job at the French Institute, also because I didn't really like the way classes were organized there, and I wanted to have more flexibility, more freedom, so I started teaching mostly privately, and then a year and a half after starting the podcast, some of my listeners kept asking me to create a course, so that's what I did, I created a first online course, and after that I created a YouTube channel, also because yeah, some of my listeners were asking for it, and then a second course, etc, so it was really, nothing was planned, and it just happened organically, so like you said, you've been inspired by the comprehensive input learning philosophy, and I'm curious what is your teaching style taking that into account, and why did you feel that other podcasts that were about learning French weren't necessarily teaching in a way that you found as useful, and how did you try to change that with yours? It's just because I realized that it worked, so when I started learning Polish, I was mostly using textbooks, and I had a private tutor as well, and I was making some progress, and it was useful at the beginning to learn some of those Polish cases, etc., the whole declination system, which was something completely new for me, but really when I started listening to this podcast, it was something completely different, and I got hooked from the first episode, and I still remembered the title of this episode, it was Nash Musch Yeslinive, which means our brain is lazy, so it was about psychology, and personal development, etc. And it was super interesting. It was so interesting that the next month, I just listened to, I don't know, maybe 30 episodes. Like, yeah, I think I was listening to an episode every day. And those episodes are quite long. They are around 30 minutes. So it means that, yeah, that month, I just spent 15 hours listening to and learning Polish. And very quickly, I realized that it was easier for me to have short conversations, that I was learning new vocabulary even without realizing it and without having to use the boring flashcards. So, yeah, I knew I was wanted to create something similar in French. And at that time, now it's a bit different, but at that time, most of the French podcasts that I found were about teaching grammar or teaching vocabulary, like explaining some French phrases, etc. But they were not really tackling interesting topics in my opinion. And so I really wanted to give people the opportunity to have a podcast, not really to learn the language, but to use the language as a tool to learn something interesting. And really for me, the best compliment is when someone tells me that they would listen to the podcast even if it were in their native tongue. Because it means that, yeah, they really enjoyed the topics and they really want to learn more. They find them interesting and engaging. And for me, personally, it's the best way to learn a language. I know that there's no one size fits all for when it comes to language learning or any type of learning in general, but this way really works for me. And I know that it works for some other people, so I just wanted to create this podcast, basically. So, you yourself just mentioned that there's really no one size fits all approach to language learning. And I think the same can be said for like the types of stories that people are interested in. So, I'm curious to know a little bit about how you choose the topics and conversations for your podcast. Yeah, that's a good question. Because at the beginning, it was a lot easier for me since I didn't really care if the topic had a broad appeal. Because I had a very small audience and I just thought that, yeah, if I don't know, 20 people are interested in this topic, it's going to be, yeah, it's good enough. And at the beginning, I was mostly using the same topics that I used in my conversation classes at the French Institute. Because when I started the podcast, I already had three years of experience teaching at the French Institute. So, I knew more or less what topics my students there were interested in. So, I just reused the most popular ones. But now it's a bit trickier because we have a broader audience and we are trying to make episodes that are going to be interesting for most people or for most of our listeners. And, yeah, no, it takes a lot more energy to really think about what we're going to talk about next. But really, I mostly try to talk about things that are interesting to me. Because then I think it's easier to make them sound interesting to other people. And very often, we get emails of people saying that they didn't think that the episode would be interesting just by reading the title. But then they really liked the way we approached it and we talked about it. Yeah, now I'm saying we because it's not just me. We are a small team of three teachers. So, I'm not the only one coming with the topics anymore. So, like you said, you got inspired to do this from the Polish podcast that you were listening to. And I'm curious, like, if beyond that Polish podcast and beyond, of course, for people learning French that you'd recommend your podcast, what do you find are good resources for people who truly want to use the language as a tool to learn something else without it being far too complicated. Because, you know, we can all try to turn on the news or we can try to read complicated articles. But if we're still in the intermediate stage, it may be far too difficult for us. So, what resources do you recommend people use for some form of comprehensible input beyond the particular podcasts that you've listened to yourself and, of course, that you make yourself? Well, now, as I said, there are a lot, I mean, not a lot, but there are more podcasts even in French that are doing something similar and are using a similar approach. So, if you're using Spotify, you can just look for the inner French podcast and then you can see the recommendations, because usually Spotify will show you some similar podcasts. So, that could be a good starting point. And then, on YouTube, you can also find many super interesting YouTubers. The problem is that they often speak in a way that's quite informal and when you're still at the intermediate level, it's pretty hard to understand what they say. But you just have to try to a lot of different ones, because some of them speak a bit slower, speak a bit more slowly. Some of them use a bit less slang, for instance. So, it's really, you really need to spend some time looking for a YouTuber that you find comprehensible. It's the same here. There's not really one size fits all. So, some people find that the way I speak is very easy to understand. Some others don't. And it's the same with different YouTubers. I mean, of course, I'm making efforts to make it as comprehensible as possible. But, yeah, I think it's really, you really need to spend some time looking for the right person. But, yeah, YouTube and Spotify are the best places to start looking. Looking at the Spotify recommendations is a pretty neat trick for finding related content that you might enjoy. Are there any other kind of tricks like this that you've used successfully in the past to find resources that you found helpful in your own language learning journal? Well, for me, now it's mostly with Polish, because I can't pretty much understand everything in English. So, I actually spent most of my time listening to podcast in English and watching American series, etc. But, with Polish, the first tip I used was switching the language on YouTube to Polish. Because then, on my homepage, I would have mostly Polish YouTube channels recommended. And this way, I managed to find Polish vlogger, who's one of the most famous here in Poland. His name is Xichtoff Gonchache. And he speaks rather, yeah, rather fast. And he uses a lot of slang. And at the beginning, I could understand only, I don't know, 30% of what he was saying. But his vlogs were so cool. And they were easier also to understand because, you know, vlogs are different from talking head videos. Because you can see the environment, you can see what the person is doing. So, it's a bit easier to understand with the context. And this guy is really interesting because he lives in Tokyo. And I was really into the Japanese culture back then. So, for me, it was just interesting to see what he was doing, his daily life in Tokyo, etc. So, again, I started watching his videos daily. And after, I don't know, after a couple of months, I just realized that I was able to understand maybe 80% of what he was saying without doing anything more. So, I didn't have flashcards, I was not writing down vocabulary. I was not really looking up the sentences he was using. But so for me, that's really the magic of it. And the magic of comprehensible input is just that if you spend enough time with the language and you have content that is a bit challenging, but still comprehensible in some ways, then you're just going to make progress. And yeah, that's really the approach I recommend to my students. Very good. And when we actually shared with our three-month challengers that we were going to be interviewing you, one of the challengers is a fan of your podcast. And they had a particular question for you, which is, have you developed any resources for teachers or in general, do you have any advice for language teachers who want to use this approach of presenting comprehensible and interesting and compelling content for their students to start to learn in a more natural way? Yeah, I consider creating resources for teachers that they could use in the classroom also because it's something that teachers have been asking me now for some time. Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to do it yet. And it's not really the priority for the business because right now we want to create more courses for students. But I mean, they can already use the podcast. The only problem is that the episodes are quite long because they are between 30 minutes and an hour. So it's definitely too long to be used in the classroom. But usually, I mean, teachers told me that what they do is they ask their students to listen to the podcast before the class and then they talk about it during the class. So instead of giving them an article to read or a video to watch on YouTube, they send them an episode of the podcast and then they talk about it during the class. And I think we have a good format for this because usually I try to tackle topics that are quite controversial and I try to show arguments from both sides. So then it's quite easy to start conversation about this topic just by asking the students if they agree or not, what are their views, et cetera. Yeah, that's a piece of advice I would have for other teachers. Just don't be afraid to use topics that are a bit controversial. Those were really my favorite ones when I was teaching at the French Institute. I just, I really wanted students to be engaged and I don't know, it's hard to be engaged and to have an opinion on things like, I don't know, Jean-Pierre going to the bakery to buy a croissant, you know. So it's really, for instance, the topics we have on the podcast, we had on the podcast recently where why French people are anti-vaccine, what is stoicism and how can this philosophy help us in our daily life. And yeah, topics that personally I would be interested in learning more about even in French. So yeah, I would recommend teachers to not consider or to not assume that just because someone is learning a language, it means that you can give them some boring content and they're gonna be happy with it. Now we live in the era of Netflix and there's so much amazing content available everywhere that if you want people to really pay attention, you need to make extra effort to just make your content as appealing and interesting as possible. - Since we're on the topic of language teaching for you as a French language teacher, what are some of the biggest struggles you see French learners face and what are some of the things that you would propose to helping them break through those struggles? - At Inner French, we focus on intermediate learners because there's already quite a lot of materials for beginners and then for advanced students they can just use content that's made for native speakers. So usually intermediate learners are really struggling with the differences between formal and informal French and I know that you both learned French so it's probably something that maybe that was something that was difficult for you as well. But usually the French that is taught in language school is not exactly the same that you're gonna hear on the street if you visit France. And it's simply because this French that you find is in textbooks and which is called the standard French it doesn't really exist. It's just that at some point we had to come up with a way to teach this language so we had to make some decisions and it's, yeah, standard French is a bit made up in my opinion. And for instance, you probably know that, I mean, I'm sure you know that the negation in French is no par but when you listen to native French speakers they only use par. And until very recently it was something that was not mentioned at all in French textbooks. So basically learners were learning this nupa negation and then when they were visiting France they didn't hear anyone speaking like this so it was a bit weird for them. Luckily now it's a bit easier to access informal French so again, I'd recommend checking YouTube, finding some podcast on topics that are interesting for you and that's a way of getting familiar with informal French. - So you were saying that earlier when you started listening to this podcast and they were using informal Polish and speaking quickly you'd initially only get about 20% and with time you got better and now you're more than 80% 90% range. And I love everything you're saying that when you're at the intermediate stage you do want to have compelling content. The kind of stuff you're talking about sounds absolutely fascinating like the why is there resistance to vaccines? That can be a very interesting topic but an absolute beginner obviously wouldn't really be able to listen to a podcast about stoicism. So what do you recommend for absolute beginners who want to get around all of this boring content? 'Cause like you said, hearing about somebody going buying a croissant is not something that I jump out of bed in the morning, excited to I can't wait to hear that story. So it can be very tricky because there's so many interesting things that we could talk about but an absolute beginner is just so far away from that. How can a beginner make it interesting? Do you recommend they listen to things that I just accept that they for a while only have that 20% comprehension or is there something they can get a bit more comprehension and still be engaged with? - Yeah, that's a tough one. And actually right now we are working on a course for beginners and I'm still struggling to find a way to adapt this method and to create comprehensible, I mean, compelling comprehensible input for beginners. I mean, that's why I think when you're a beginner you can start with all those apps like Jolingo, et cetera. Just because it's a more engaging way, I think to memorize some very basic vocabulary because you can always read some short dialogues or short stories in very easy French to begin but apart from that there's not really there's not really much and I haven't really come up with the right answer yet, I think. So because when I started watching this Polish vlogger, I was already at the intermediate level but my comprehension of informal Polish was really bad mostly because I was learning using textbooks and this other guys' podcasts which was made for learners, but you can't really do this if you're an absolute beginner. So I wouldn't recommend, I mean you can do it just to start getting used to the language, but it shouldn't be the core of your learning, I would say, because it's just going to be discouraging. So you need something that's easier to understand. So at the beginning you have to use those materials made for learners, made for students, even if they are not really interesting. You can find some that are more interesting than others, and for instance in German I know that you had Anya Vinter in your podcast, and she has courses and materials for beginners based on Sony dialogues, and I think she does it pretty well. So it's not impossible, and that's something that we're going to try to do as well in our course. So instead of tackling some topics like the vaccine and philosophy, et cetera, we're going to focus more on dialogues and just to help students learn the basic and daily life vocabulary, but we're going to try to add a twist to make those dialogues more interesting than Jean-Pierre going to the bakery. Given that you like to use podcasts for both learning and teaching, it's a lot of listening comprehension and obviously you're learning vocabulary and other parts of the language as you're doing this, but going from doing lots of listening to speaking the language and using that language in conversations requires some extra work. So given that you yourself used podcasts to learn Polish, how did you make the transition from listening to using what you've learned in conversations? It's very simple. I had a private tutor, almost from the beginning, and even before I discovered that podcast, so at the beginning I was just working with a tutor and a textbook and we didn't really have, I mean, I really want to focus on speaking from day one, actually, because I had this problem with English that I learned English at school, but the first time I traveled abroad, it was when I was 19. I went to Glasgow, Scotland, and there I realized that I couldn't have the most basic conversation in a pub, and it was also quite hard to understand Scottish people, so I mean, they don't have the easiest accent to understand, and I think even other people in the UK sometimes have troubles understanding Scottish people, but still I realized that I waited way too long to actually start having conversations and using the language. So when I started Polish, I wanted to have a different approach, and I really wanted to start speaking from day one, which I did, but it was really, I don't know, those lessons were still quite traditional and formal, so yeah, my teachers were not really interested in listening to my broken A1 Polish, but it really changed when I started listening to that podcast, because then it was a lot easier for me to build sentences, I had more vocabulary, I was speaking in a way that was a lot more natural, and I mean I think that my accent in Polish is actually a lot better than my accent in English, just because I spent so much time listening to the language instead of simply reading it, like I did with English. So if you want to, I mean, you should practice speaking and conversation because you're not going to become super comfortable just by listening, it's really a skill that you need to work on, and yeah, listening is going to be helpful, but at some point you really have to put it into practice and to actually have conversations with people, so it depends on how much time you have, how much money you have, what language you're learning, but yeah, for me, I just found that the most efficient way to practice speaking was to have conversations with a tutor, so at the beginning it was in person, and then I switched to classes on high-talkie. So you've said that you're going to potentially get into making beginner courses as difficult as that is. I'm curious, what other plans do you have for InnerFrench moving forward, because you recently passed a hundred episodes, how do you see that podcast expanding, and what's going to be your own language learning futures you continue with Polish? In the podcast we started experimenting with different formats, so instead of only having monologues, now we also have conversations, so between the other teachers from the team and I, or we also had a few episodes with some experts in different fields to talk about French history, and yeah, topics like that, so that's something that we're gonna keep doing, because listeners have made a lot of progress listening to the podcast, so now they want something that's a bit more challenging. Also, I mean, for most of them it's pretty easy to understand me now because they've listened to me for over 50 hours, so they're used to my way of speaking, to the phrases I'm using, etc. So yeah, we're gonna try to bring on more people and to do more interviews in the podcast. We are creating those new courses and we also want to have courses about specific topics, so for instance, we want to do philosophy for B1 or the history of Paris for B2 to talk about urbanism and different topics like this one, and when it comes to my own language learning journey, well, I'm still working on my Polish to be honest because my girlfriend's Polish, but when we met we met at the very beginning when I just moved to Warsaw, so I couldn't speak Polish at all, so we just started dating in English, and it's been really hard to switch to Polish, so that's really one of my goals for next year because yeah, it's gonna be better if I can practice daily with my girlfriend instead of just having classes on eye-tocky, but apart from that, I would like to learn Japanese at some point, but it's really, I don't really have, it's not my priority at the moment, and I know that I don't have enough time to dedicate to it, and instead I started learning the piano at the beginning of the pandemic, and that's something a bit different, but it has also some similarities with language learning, so I'm really enjoying this process, and yeah, that's something I'm gonna continue next year for sure. And given that this is the Language Hacking podcast, there's one question that we like to ask all of our guests, and that is what is your definition of language hacking? So, well, to me language hacking sounds a bit like trying to find a shortcut, and I think that it's better to just focus on the journey rather than on the destination, so just try to enjoy the journey, find some things that you enjoy doing, that you enjoy learning, forget about B2C1 or the goal that you want to reach, because it can be discouraging, and it's not, I mean, it's not gonna make a big difference when you're B2 or C1, and what I mean by that is that it takes a lot of time to learn the language, so you might as well try to enjoy the journey, and at some point you're just gonna realize that's yeah. Yeah, you've made a lot of progress and now you're able to have conversations and to watch or listen to meaningful things in the language that you're learning and yeah, you're just going to realize that now this language is part of your life. So yeah, it's really about enjoying the journey, in my opinion. Very good. Also much for sharing all your thoughts with us, we'll make sure that people can find inner French, they can obviously just search for it on whatever tool they're listening to this on or in our show notes, we'll be linking to your podcast, your website and your YouTube channel and people can find your very compelling, interesting content if they wanted to learn a little French and they have the intermediate level themselves. So thanks so much for sharing all of your thoughts with us and I hope that people check you out and until the next time we're going to wish everyone listening a very happy language learning. Happy language learning. So at the end of each podcast episode, Benny and I like to share something that we took away from our chat with the guest and these are things that you can implement into your own learning, try out this week, see how they work for you and do something new with your language learning, give it a little bit of a refresh. So Benny, what was your takeaway from our chat this week? I really like to tip about using recommendations from especially the likes of Spotify and YouTube because sometimes we can find out one channel or that one resource that we like a lot but a lot of especially social media-based tools do have these great recommendations and I do this a lot with TikTok whenever I find a new TikToker who makes content in a language that I'm learning that I'm following from a language-specific account. When I follow them, it pops up with other recommendations for people I follow and the same happens on Instagram whenever I find somebody interesting who has content that I like in the language I'm learning. I let the little pop up happen and I click to see more option to see who else that other people follow have similar content to this person and I didn't even think to do that with podcasts and that's a great suggestion that in Spotify, you find that one podcast then it'll recommend you some other really good ones so that can take a bit of the pressure off because maybe rather than trying to find 10 good sources of content, you just really need to find that one and then the algorithm may well help you to expand upon that. What about you? I would have to say what I took away from this chat was when we were discussing learning the languages the way that it's actually spoken when we were going over one of the biggest challenges French learners faces and it's true for most of the resources that we use as language learners the way that the languages are taught are very textbook approach and not the way that the language is actually used out in the wild and so preparing ourselves for those differences and I know you recently did this with your Spanish learning where you picked up a slang phrase book and learned a whole bunch of local slang and I think that this is really important is not just to learn the language, I mean it's good to learn the language the way that it's taught in the textbook but also learning the language the way that it's actually spoken and having a background and understanding of both like what is technically correct but also what is correct in actual usage and so getting familiar with the language the way that it's actually spoken and not just the way that it's taught and so finding resources and listening to people have conversations in the language are both really effective ways to do this but just keeping that in mind that you know the way the language is used versus the way that it's taught there's often quite a big difference there so if you enjoyed this episode of the podcast or the language hacking podcast in general we always appreciate hearing from you let us know what you enjoyed most about the podcast what you would like us to discuss or who you'd like us to chat with in the future over at languagehacking.com/review and once again as always the show notes are available to you as a part of this podcast and until the next time happy language learning happy language learning we hope you enjoyed this episode of the language hacking podcast subscribe on apple podcasts Spotify podcast addict or wherever you get your podcasts if you found this episode valuable and want to help us out please leave a review at languagehacking.com/review the language hacking podcast is presented by Benny Lewis Shannon Kennedy and Elizabeth Fruckner and produced by Katie Pasco with special thanks to the fluent in three months team the music was written and performed by Shannon Kennedy find the show notes at languagehacking.com/podcast thank you for listening and happy language learning.