Expert Secrets with Lýdia Machová #154

This is Rock and Roll English. Real people. Real English. Here's your host, Martin Johnson. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Rock and Roll English. Episode number 154, baby, oh yeah. And boy, oh boy, do we have a fantastic episode today? Something a bit different, okay? I know it's Monday so you're probably thinking, oh, down the man's here, boom, boom, cannons here. No, we have something different because we have an incredible guest. As you know, I usually do these expert secrets episode on a Thursday, but as we have got such a big name, I want to put her on the main stage on the Monday podcast so everybody listens. So in today's episode, I speak to Lydia from Language Mentoring. She's a big inspiration for me. She spoke at the conference I went to recently in Berlin and she does lots of these speaking events at important events. For example, she did a TED talk and the TED talk has over 4 million views. That's right. You heard that correctly, over 4 million views. In fact, the day we recorded this episode, she was actually speaking at the Polygloc conference in Bratislava, but she still took the time to speak to us and share some of her secrets of language learning. And there are a lot of secrets in today's episode. But there is no Rock and Roll vocabulary today, but I will speak to you again at the end, just to recap on all of the best points that Lydia gives us. So here is the conversation. Happy listening. So hello, Lydia, and welcome to Rock and Roll English. Hi, hi, Martin. Thank you for having me here. No problem. Thank you very much for accepting the invitation, because I know you are a very busy person. Just to give listeners a very brief introduction, I know that you have worked as an interpreter for some very famous people. Your public speaker, a polyglot, and you have done a recent TED talk, and the last time I checked, there were just the 4 million views, so, you know, not bad. That was a very quick introduction, but filling the gaps for us and tell us the other things. Yeah, so you mentioned I'm a polyglot, so language learning has always been my greatest hobby, and so first I worked as an interpreter, but then I changed my profession. And now I do a thing called language mentoring, which means I help people learn languages by themselves, and that's, yeah, that's what I do right now. Okay, yeah, we're going to talk a lot more about that in a minute, but first of all, I know that you speak 9 languages, is this right? Yeah, that's right. I'm learning my 9th language right now. Okay, so how explain to us normal people how that is possible? Well, that's the thing. I don't think I'm special in any way. I mean, it's not normally in the way that people don't normally need to learn so many languages, but I honestly believe that it doesn't take any special skills or talent or anything. It's just, I've spent 20 years of my life learning languages because I loved it so much, and I usually take a language for two years, I learned very intensively, and when I achieve a level that I'm comfortable with, that I'm, like, fluent in, then I move on to another language. Sure, yeah, I really like that actually because I hear so many times people say to me, you know, I'm just not, I'm just not good at languages, but that's a very freaking thing. I think people believe this because it's cool. If you, if you had any, any foreign languages at school and you were not good at it, that's what you would believe, right? That's what maybe the teacher told you, you are not good at languages, but actually, I know so many polyglots and the usual polyglot story is that they really suck the languages at school, and then they started to learn by themselves, and suddenly it started working and today they speak 15, you know. Sure, yeah, that's what I tell students as well. It depends as well. Well, the main thing is the motivation, I always tell them how much they, how much time they spend with it because well, obviously work as an English teacher. So I get some people that come like twice a week, do nothing else for the rest of the week, and then we have other people that do a lot of work outside that obviously do better. So, you know, it's not rocket science at the end of the day. But I believe this is the problem. If people just sign up for a course, they believe that's it. You know, they check their box of, okay, I want to learn this language, I sign up for a course, and that's it. And unfortunately, many, many language schools even make their students believe that that really is it, and they even tell them you will have no homework, but I believe if you, if you don't do anything besides those lessons, it will take you ages to be able to say anything. And it will not be fluent anyway. Absolutely. Yeah, because I have sometimes had this impression, people just want me to put the knowledge directly into the brain. Which doesn't really work. And I know you're quite big on this as well. You have something that you say that you believe you cannot be taught a language. So explain more about that because that's very interesting. I believe that language is going to only be learned. They cannot be taught. And by far not the only one saying this, there are a lot of other people, polyglots, people teaching languages who say that. But I made this the most important thing in my courses. So when people join my courses to learn a language, they don't expect me to teach them because they can learn a language I don't even speak. This is the best thing about it. So far we've had people with 25 languages, most of them I don't even speak. So I can help people learn, I don't know, far see Chinese, Korean, whatever language that I don't speak. Because it's about the work that they do. My job is to tell them about the methods that work and to help them with the motivation. That definitely is quite important too. But otherwise they need to do the work. They need to find the resources that suit them and just find a way to have fun with the language. That's like the most important thing. Sure, absolutely. Yes, certainly motivation and fun. Well, I mean, if you're not having fun, then you haven't got the motivation generally. So tell us specifically, give us maybe one or two specific things that you do. So you said for example, you help people that are learning languages that you don't even speak. So just give us a couple of things that you specifically do to help them. So when we speak about people who are not complete beginners, who have already had some basics and maybe want to refresh them, the first thing I ask them to do is to decide what they want to focus on in the next two months. Because I think one shouldn't try to improve reading and writing and listening and speaking all of these at the same time. While doing grammar exercises and working on the pronunciation, I think people should pick two or three areas and give all their focus on those. Because if you, for example, if you want to improve your listening skills and you only listen, I don't know, five minutes a day, it will take you so long to see any progress. But let's say you do one hour of listening now for two or three weeks and I assure you that after three weeks, you will definitely see an improvement in your listening skills. So I think this really helps to put all your effort into a few skills and then work on those because the only thing that motivates us most is our own success. So if we see some improvement after two or three weeks, then we definitely want to continue. Of course, yeah. So let's say someone comes to you because the most common one, I suppose, is speaking. Because you said you give them the method, the techniques, what maybe one technique could you give us that maybe you give to your students? So obviously if you want to speak, you just need to speak a lot. There is no other way. There are no special techniques or games or anything. You just need to get a lot of speaking practice. For many people, it's intimidating if they don't have a lot of experience speaking to native speakers. So for those, I usually suggest to start with self talk, which is a wonderful method where you basically talk to yourself. It seems pretty simple or maybe even weird, but if you turn it into a regular thing which you do every day, maybe while you, I don't know, wash the dishes or you're in the shower or you're walking to the bus station or whatever, you can actually get a lot of speaking practice. Because you just tell yourself, I don't know what you're going to do today, what you do yesterday, what are your plans for the summer? Or for example, if you don't have any topic, then you just take your phone, you look at a random picture in your gallery, which you took two weeks ago with your family reunion, and you tell your imaginary friend who was there and what was happening. So you pick any topic you like and you make sure you practice speaking. And if after a few days you realize that you don't know some words, then it's easy to look them up because this is the word that I always try to use and I just don't know it. Just to see what vocabulary you're missing. Yeah, exactly. So you kind of fill in the gaps in your vocabulary. And this is a really great way to start speaking and to improve your speaking skills. So do you give students kind of specific goals to say, for example, this week, I want you to talk to yourself for at least three hours, I don't know, something like this. Yeah, we do a little challenge challenges like this, but most important thing is everybody has their individual plan. So we don't do things which are common for everyone because some people join, they don't really need to practice speaking. Maybe they just want to understand the language when reading something. So for those that they concentrate on their own methods and goals. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, it sounds very motivating having someone follow you just to basically keep you motivated. Yeah, I think it's very important. The most difficult thing about learning by yourself is if you are really doing it by yourself, motivation will struggle after a few weeks. So what we are trying to do is build a community of people who are learning by themselves, we put them into online groups of 50 people, and then it's a very lively community that supports each other helps each other. Okay, fantastic. Yeah, very nice. So obviously, you yourself, you've learned, well, you said you're on your ninth language now, I saw in your TED talk that you like to vary all of your language learning methods. I saw as well you, for example, read books that you've already read. I think you spoke about Harry Potter in your TED talk, which I'm actually reading in Italian now. Cool. I just thought I would-- How is it going? Yeah, well, I've read the first one and I'm on the second one, but I've actually never read them in English. I knew to the Harry Potter game, although that does sound quite strange, I suppose. Well, you will know it in Italian, right? Yeah, exactly. So what other methods do you do, do you recommend? I know you've got some language learning principles that you stick by, so what are they? Yeah, so basically all the methods that I use are always based on four main principles. And whatever I do in language learning and whatever I advise my students to do is to make sure you have fun when learning a language. Use effective methods, use them systematically, so create a system, plan in your learning, and make sure you have a lot of contact with the language, so spend a lot of time with it basically. And if you-- Whatever you do, like, for example, the Harry Potter book is a good example. It was a text that I really liked reading because it was my favorite book as a child. I did it every day for, let's say, half an hour, so that was the system. It was a very effective method because I combined listening and reading at the same time. So it was an audiobook together with an e-book, right? Yeah, and I've read several books in Spanish, so that was enough contact for me to actually help me improve my Spanish a lot. So other methods that I like to recommend, for example, for vocabulary, that's also quite a, like, with speaking, that's the number two usually, that people want to-- The second priority that people want to improve. I really love the gold list method. I don't know if you heard about it. No, I haven't. Tell us more about you. It's a really interesting method, quite popular with polyglots, and it was-- it's a method created by one of the polyglots, David James. It's basically a very simple method. You take a notebook, and you write a list of 20 words with their translation in your language, and you just write a list every day, and you keep doing it every day for two weeks, and you don't look back at the words in the previous lists. And then two weeks from the first list, you look at them and you test yourself how many you remember, and you will see that you actually remember 30%, they say in your long-term memory, because whatever we learn, if we are, you know, at ease, if we are feeling comfortable, we simply remember 30%. But when you are-- when you're actually learning it, you don't know which words are those 30%. It's very subconscious. Yeah. So you want your long-term memory kind of big the things that you want to remember, and you rewrite the rest of the words, and then you do it again in two weeks, and again in two weeks, and you kind of filter this list of vocabulary, and it seems like magic, because you're just rewriting lists of vocabulary, and it's learning by itself, you know. You don't need to do anything, you don't need to memorize, cram it, do flashcards, anything like that. Fantastic. Yeah, I mean, obviously, this is like a proven method with polyglot, so, you know, if it works for these people, then it's definitely worth trying. One thing I-- a question I just popped into my mind, actually, when we were talking about Harry Potter, for example, just last night I was reading it, and obviously there were a few words that I don't understand in Italian. That's your sort of advice on that, because I just kept going. I didn't have the energy to stop. It was quite late at night, to go and look up the words, but what do you suggest? Because I was thinking, I will come back, but then if I think about it, I probably won't, because I'm a bit lazy, but what's the advice you can give for this for reading? Right, it's very important that you keep going, and that it's still interesting for you. So, one thing that people often do, and I think that's a mistake, is underline every word that they don't know, right? And after the-- and maybe even look it up, maybe write it down somewhere, but they usually get to page three, and that's it. You don't want to continue, because it's a lot of the beginning, right? And that's normal. But I always suggest keep reading. Don't worry if you don't understand everything. It will become clearer later. And if you want to grow your vocabulary, I would suggest a systematic way to do it. So, for example, underline just two new words or expressions on each page, right? Or maybe have, let's say, I will read ten pages without underlining anything, and I will do four pages underlining new expressions, right? So, you always need to find this balance, because you want to make it fun, and it's not fun if you stop it every word you don't know. Right? But at the same time, you want to make it effective. So, underlining with the combination of faster reading, I think it's a perfect way to do it. Okay, yeah, now I like that. Again, it comes back to one of your four principles of having systems in place. That's so important, yeah. Yeah, I suppose, yeah. So, when going back to that principle as well, what other systems would you recommend, or would you have a weekly plan of, for example, Monday, I'm going to do this on Tuesday. Okay, how would you organize this system? So, I don't suggest doing different things like Monday this and Tuesday this. What I usually like to think of a week, the week as a unit, and to give myself a plan for the week. So, for example, I suggest spending one hour a day with the language. Like, if you manage to do that, you will improve quite fast. It's very motivating. If you can do 15 minutes or 20 minutes, that's okay. But if you can get it to one hour, even if it's like 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, 20 minutes there, that's perfect. That's the best. And so, if you realize what your three priorities are, let's say it's speaking vocabulary and listening, right? Then you want to have, I don't know, two, three hours of conversation with someone. Maybe some of them will be self-talk. For vocabulary, you want to do your gold list for 20, 30 minutes a day, maybe. And for listening, you just want to use the dead time of the day when you walk to work or, you know, you do something. So, just listen to podcasts or some YouTube videos while doing something else. You don't even need to find that extra time. And in this way, if you have these three methods, then that's a perfect plan that you can keep for two months and then you will definitely see improvement. Sure, absolutely. Are you still doing this at the moment with your ninth language? I'm having a little break with my Swahili, because actually, so I decided to learn Swahili because I wanted to go to Tanzania. And I have everything planned, but the thing is, I'm having some health problems, like coughing for six weeks. And I cannot take the yellow fever vaccination, so I need to wait and see if I even get to Tanzania in August. And if I don't, so my motivation right now for Swahili is kind of waiting, you know. If I don't go to Tanzania, I don't really have the motivation to keep learning just for the sake of it. I mean, after 20. Yeah, especially after 20 years of learning a language, you don't just learn a language for learning sake, you know. Sure, absolutely. But it's very motivating to know that someone that's had all the success that you have had in language learning, that you still do that though. I mean, because obviously you've done that for all of those eight languages. And again, if you've got someone with proven results, I mean, the simple thing is just to follow the advice from these people. So that is exactly why we are so grateful that you've taken the time to speak to us. Oh, my pleasure. And one other thing, when we spoke last time, you gave some great advice about moving from B2 to C1, because many people that listen to this podcast, I know, are in that level. And I kind of class myself in that level in Italian. I always think if I've had two beers, only two, I'm C1. If I have more than two, then it's a problem. But if I have only two, I'm C1, but I'm very much on that on the brink kind of thing. And so what's your advice about how to move from B2 to C1? Right. Well, before I say the advice, I need to say you need to ask yourself the question, what do you really need the C1? Because I personally believe that having a good solid B2 is a perfect goal for any language learner who doesn't want to work with the language professionally. So if you don't want to be a translator, interpreter, language teacher, then I think if you aim for a really good B2, you're good. That's actually what I try to achieve in all my languages. I mean, I have a few C languages, but right now if I learn any new one, I'm just going to get them to a B2 level. Sure. Yeah, I remember that you mentioned this last time we spoke about to get to C1, you'll have to read like legal contracts. So the fact that like B2 is enough because you can have a conversation with anyone about almost anything, right? And exactly, if you want to have a C1, that's for professionals, right? So you do need to make sure you read legal tax and tax about IT and healthcare and agriculture, you need to know a lot more words. And many people think of getting from B2 to C1 as a little step, you know, like, oh, I just need to, as you said, I just need to spend a little bit more time. But actually, if you take the time that it took you from zero to B2, that's exactly the time you need from B2 to C1. So it's kind of doubled, right? Sure. That's really interesting. I'm sure it's almost a relief to many people because I've had so many people that, as I said, listen to this podcast around that level saying, well, I'm just not making any progress. But I mean, as you just explain how difficult it is to make that what seems like a little jump, like if you go from A2 to B1, that's not such a big jump. But as you just explained, that B2 to C1 is a big jump. It is, yeah, definitely. So that's why I tell people not to worry too much about it. I know many people want to take a certificate and just have it on paper and feel like they're progressing. But if you can keep your B2 fluent, then you're really definitely a winner at language learning. It's not easy, right? So make sure you stay in touch with the language and enjoy it, especially. I think if you get to a good B2, that's your time to really start enjoying the language. Watch films and movies and series and read books, speak to people, right? Absolutely. Fantastic. Okay, well, Lydia, thank you very much for coming on the show and giving us all of these tips. But before you go, tell us where we can find out more about you. Right, so my website is languagementoring.com and you can also find language mentoring on Facebook and on Instagram and YouTube. Or you can watch my 10-minute TED Talk to have a shorter version of what language learning is for me. Sure. Absolutely. Everything that Lydia just mentioned will be on the show notes, though, to this episode, so you can go there and find all of the links there. But thank you again, Lydia, for taking the time. Well, we really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. No, thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Okay, so thank you very much again, Lydia, for taking the time to talk to us. Let's have a look at the main takeaways. I thought one of the most important points was that she said there are no special skills in language learning. Even if Lydia speaks eight languages and is learning her ninth, there is no magic trick. She said that she has been doing this for over 20 years and she learns the languages very intensively. So just have a think for a minute about how much work she has put into learning these languages. Another really important point was when she said languages cannot be taught, they can only be learned. That I think is fantastic advice. You can have the best teacher in the world. The end of the day, you are the one that needs to internalise it in your brain using systems that she mentioned. Her four basic principles of fun, effective methods to do it systematically and to have lots of contact with the language. She also spoke about motivation and said how important it can be if someone is just following you. Because if you do this completely on your own with no other help, it can be difficult. It can obviously be done, but it can be difficult. She gave us a great method for learning vocabulary, the gold list method on the show notes. Episode page 154, I would have a link that takes you to a site that explains that in more detail. She gave us a good technique for reading as well, just underline maybe two words on a page. Then go back and look at them later. Also to look at each week as a unit, don't think I'm going to do this Monday, this Tuesday, this Wednesday. Because that can be a bit difficult. Look at a week as a unit and decide what you want to do. I also thought it was great advice when she spoke about going from B2 to C1. First of all, ask yourself the question, do you need this professionally? Because as she said, to get from 0 to B2 is the same amount of effort to get from B2 to C1. So again, don't think, oh, I've been trying to get from B2 to C1 for such a long time. I must be terrible at languages. We've just heard from an expert, a real expert, how difficult it is to make that jump. And she said, enjoy the language at B2, the level you are at now, have fun with it, listen to podcasts, watch films, and just have fun baby. I would like to thank Lydia again for taking the time to speak to us here at Rock and Roll English. I hope you enjoyed the episode everyone. I will speak to you all again next week. But in the meantime, just keep on rockin, baby. Thanks so much for listening to Rock and Roll English for more great content and to stay up to date. Visit rockandrollenglish.com and facebook.com/rockandrollenglish. We'll catch you next time.