Welcome to the Listening Time Podcast.
Hey English learners, this is Connor and you're listening to episode 236 of the Listening Time Podcast.
I hope you're ready to practice your listening with another episode, and I'm really excited for this one because today I'm going to talk about trying a new language learning method.
I'm talking about myself here.
I'm gonna try a new language learning method with Greek.
I already mentioned that I'm relearning Greek.
This is a language that I studied many years ago.
I did not reach a high level.
I still had a low level when I stopped learning.
And now I'm relearning Greek and I hope to actually reach fairly decent level, and what I'm going to do this time is I'm gonna experiment.
I'm gonna do something very different from what I did on with French, for example.
That is, I'm going to speak early.
If you've been listening to me for a while now, you probably know that I'm the listening guy.
I make content for listening and I always talk about how important it is to listen a ton and to focus on understanding the language and that when you can understand well, it will really help you to speak well.
And I have previously... with French, for example, waited to actually speak.
I waited until I could understand pretty well and then I started speaking.
But this time with Greek.
I'm going to start practicing speaking Greek before I can understand Greek well.
So this is going to be a big experiment for me, and I'm going to talk about that in today's episode.
Remember that if you can understand me pretty well in these normal episodes, it's time for you to also start listening to my advanced podcast episodes, in which I speak fast.
So the link to sign up for those is down below.
And, of course, also check out my US Conversations podcast, in which I talk to different English teachers from all around the US.
It's tons of fun.
It's great practice for your listening.
And you can also find an English teacher there.
You can take classes with those different teachers that I talk to.
So that link is also down below.
All right, let's talk about my experiment with this new language learning method.
So what am I going to do exactly?
Well, as I mentioned, I'm going to speak early.
What I mean by early is before I can understand well and not just understand well, before I can even understand almost anything in Greek.
So even though I studied Greek years ago, I do not have the ability to to understand spoken Greek.
I've forgotten many, many things and, like I mentioned before, this doesn't mean that those things have disappeared.
They're just deep in my brain, and I'm relearning them now, and it's been really fun so far.
But I simply can't understand Greek at this point.
I haven't done any listening practice yet and I've only been relearning Greek for a few weeks now less than a month, I think so I can't understand Greek.
I just tried to listen to a very basic podcast made for Greek learners.
It's really basic and easy and I still struggled to understand what the person was saying in that episode.
So that should give you an idea of my level of comprehension.
I can't understand Greek.
Of course, I can understand very basic sentences.
Yeah, but I can't understand greek in general.
So, even though i don't have any comprehension skills yet, i'm gonna start speaking.
I'm gonna start practicing talking.
So why am I doing this?
Let me talk about my reasons.
I have three main reasons why I'm doing things differently this time.
Number one my pastor and I are both learning Greek, as I already mentioned, and we kind of want to talk to each other in Greek and encourage each other like that practice with each other.
It's going to add a level of motivation and fun to our learning if we can talk to each other a little bit and motivate each other like that.
It's really cool to communicate with someone else in a new language.
So we want to do that together, and so that is motivating me to actually start speaking early.
So that's one reason.
Another reason is because I really want to go to Greece and now I'm actually pretty sure that we're gonna go.
I don't want to say sure, because that's a strong word, but I'm really trying to make this possible.
And if we go to Greece and I say if, but I really want it to be when when we go to Greece, we will probably go in less than one year for some different reasons.
And if we go to Greece, I want to be able to communicate with people there.
And And if I do my normal method, if I follow my normal method and process of learning how I'm comfortable with learning a language and what I think works well,
I probably won't have time to do a lot of speaking practice before I go because traditionally I usually advocate meaning.
I support really working on your ability to understand the language before you focus a lot on speaking.
So with French, before I started speaking regularly, I reached a pretty high level of comprehension.
I knew a lot of words.
I could understand native speakers.
When they spoke to me, for example, or even when they speak with each other, I already had a decent level of comprehension.
Not fantastic, but pretty good.
So when I started speaking to tutors in French, I could understand like 99% of what they said to me.
Almost.
That sounds a little high.
Maybe it was a little less, but I understood almost everything and that really helped me develop my own speaking skills, because I
I didn't have to focus on understanding the other person.
I just developed my speaking ability.
I like to do language learning like that and I've had many students who have done it like that.
And they have a class with me.
It's their first class.
And they've never spoken English with anyone in their whole life.
And yet they can have a really good, fluid conversation with me.
Maybe not a super deep intellectual conversation, but they can talk talk, even though it's their first time having a conversation with a native speaker.
So i know that this works because i've done it and many students of mine have done it, so i really like this.
But if i do this, if i use this process to learn greek, then i won't be ready to speak when i go to greece, because we want to go in less than a year and it's gonna take me a long time to understand greek well, and then If I only start speaking after, I can understand pretty well.
That's a lot of practice and I won't be ready to speak fluidly in Greece when I go.
That's another reason why I want to start speaking early, so hopefully I can actually say more when I go to Greece, if I go to Greece.
And the other reason, perhaps the most important reason, is for my job.
Of course, I don't have a traditional job.
I have this podcast and a lot of other content that I make, and I help people with their English listening, comprehension and, of course, their pronunciation in my pronunciation seminars.
But I talk a lot about language learning.
And I give advice.
I talk about my own experience as a learner.
I talk about what works for me, what doesn't work.
I talk a lot about this process.
And I feel like it's my job to constantly learn, learn a language or languages and develop my understanding of languages, language learning, the processes, what works better, what doesn't work as well.
I want to be able to give better advice and have more experience to draw from when I talk about this.
And so I view this as part of my job nowadays.
I don't just treat language learning as a hobby.
I treat it as part of my career.
So now that I have this mindset, it makes me want to experiment more and try different things, gain more experience so that I can also help other people with their language learning.
So I want to try this method so that I can help other people better and talk about language learning in a more complete way.
Let's say
So we hear a lot of different opinions from different learners, different polyglots, different teachers about the best way to learn a language, And it's confusing because people say different things.
They contradict each other.
And the thing to remember is that, in the majority of these cases, these people are talking about their ideas and their theories, their opinions, their preferences.
They're talking from their perspective, and they're not actually talking based on experimentation.
Most of the people that you hear that talk about the best way to learn a language are haven't done strict experimentation and tried methods that they don't actually believe in, just to try them out and see the results.
And because they don't do that.
They're talking based on their personal experience and what has worked for them.
But if they haven't tried opposite ways to learn and experimented for a long period of time with different methods, if they haven't done this, then
They're talking based on what they think, their ideas, of course, their experience.
But that's a little bit different from just experimenting and saying even though I don't think this specific method exists is good, i'm gonna do it anyway.
Almost nobody does that, because they don't want to waste their time.
They want to actually use a method they believe in to learn the language they want to learn.
I'm going to take a different approach to this.
I'm actually doing this experiment and I'll be honest with you this is not the method I would use if I just wanted to do the best things to learn Greek.
I'm actually agreeing to do things that I wouldn't normally do and that I don't necessarily agree with, because I want to experiment, because maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe my ideas are Aren't the best ideas and I want to test them, and I'm not doing this so I can prove my previous ideas, or whatever.
I just want to experiment and do things differently, and even do things that I don't necessarily think will work better than other things, just so that I can have a more holistic meaning, complete view of different processes of language learning.
So hopefully my experimentation can help me and help other people understand the language learning process better.
And I'm not going to answer this big question what is the best way to learn a language with just this experiment?
That's not going to happen because...
I believe that different ways of learning work better for different people.
And there are other factors that are really important, like motivation and even the language itself which language you're learning?
This time I'm learning Greek. not French.
And Greek is way harder than French for an English speaker.
But my motivation is probably higher this time with Greek.
So you can see these different factors can affect my learning.
And like I said, I don't think there's one best way to learn a language.
But even though I won't be able to answer this big question, I'm going to see the results of my experiment.
I'm going to see what worked well, what didn't work well, how I felt throughout the process, difficulties that I had.
And think all of this will help me refine my own method like perfect, make my method better, right and in the future I hope, to experiment with other languages and try other things, so it's not like after this experiment I'm going to know exactly what I need to know about my personal language learning process.
I'm going to have to experiment more with other languages and maybe learn a language that's completely different and try something else.
I think that this will always be part of my job, so to say, and i have a big audience, and i don't want to just give you my theories about what i think works, what i think is best.
I want to try different things and tell you how they were, how they worked for me.
Like, for example, I talked some months ago about how I improved my French speaking.
This method where I just tried to fill in the gaps in my speech.
Whenever I didn't know how to say something, I learned how to say it and I spent and am still spending the majority of my French practice speaking to myself and trying to fill in my gaps.
That's not something I did before when I studied in previous years.
This was a new thing that I tried and then it worked and I told you about it.
So this is kind of what I want to do now.
I'm announcing publicly that I'm trying a different method for Greek and in the future, of course, I'll report back to you and tell you how the process went.
Of course, I probably won't tell you very soon because I need time to actually do this, but that's my idea.
And lastly, how will I do this?
How am I planning to practice speaking early?
Well, I already completed a little course, I guess I'll call it, a grammar course specifically.
It's fantastic.
It's language transfer.
It's from this guy who has a real talent for explaining grammatical concepts in an easy to understand way.
And he has this Greek course that I finished.
And he does this for some other languages as well.
You should check it out.
It's Language Transfer.
This was really helpful.
So I did that to understand grammar in Greek which, if you know me, this is not necessarily something I always tell people to do like to take a whole grammar course in a language but I did this for Greek.
So I'm already experimenting and I've done a little bit of reading and vocabulary study just to have some basics, like basic words and phrases, and have something.
I can't start with nothing.
I need some words.
So I've done a little bit of that and I scheduled my first Greek class for this week.
And my idea is to take Greek classes regularly with a tutor.
And I'm going to try to speak Greek when I can and when I can't say something.
I'll switch to English and then I'll switch back to Greek.
And then when I can't say what I need to say, I'll switch back to English.
That's my idea, because, of course, I'm not going to be able to have a conversation fully in Greek.
I'm just starting.
So I'll need to do that.
And hopefully the tutor will speak slowly to me in Greek and switch to English when I can't understand what they're saying.
And of course, this requires a teacher who speaks your native language.
So if you do this, then you'll need an English teacher who also speaks your language.
So, thankfully, pretty much all the Greek tutors I've seen speak English as well, so that shouldn't be a huge issue.
And, in addition to that, I'm going to speak to myself, like I do with French, and fill in my gaps like I do with French.
I'm going to talk to myself, and when I can't say what I need to say, what I want to say, I'll need to look up that phrase and hopefully learn that new vocabulary.
I'm thinking that I'll probably use flashcards because I use flashcards for French.
And I've found them really helpful.
That's another experiment that I've done this year, because I never really used flashcards before this year.
I tried them but I didn't use them for a long time.
This is the first time I've used them daily for months, and I think they've worked well for me.
So I think I'll also use these for Greek.
And so all of that is to help me learn words.
Say words that I want to say, say phrases that I want to say.
Talk to my tutor.
And while I'm doing all that, I also need to work on my listening comprehension.
Just because I'm trying a new approach of speaking early doesn't mean that I'm not going to practice my listening comprehension.
I need to do both.
The difference for me now is, instead of just practicing with listening and reading and and maybe vocabulary practice, I'm also doing speaking and I'm spending a lot of time speaking early on.
So I'm also going to do a lot of listening practice.
I don't know how much.
I'm not sure how much time I'll spend every day learning Greek, but I've been able to spend a decent amount of time so far.
So hopefully I maintain this rhythm.
And so I'm also going to do listening practice with very simple podcasts and YouTube videos, kind of like what you're doing.
You're listening to me and this is not a native level podcast, so it's helping you understand while you're still at the level where you can't just use native content comfortably.
So that's what I'm going to do as well.
So this is going to be pretty hard, I'll admit.
I've never liked to talk to a tutor when I can't understand them well.
So this is going to be a big challenge for me, but I want to experiment.
I'm committed to trying this.
Of course, after a couple months of doing this, if it's like torture and I'm not progressing and it's really terrible for me, then of course I'll stop and I'll tell you what didn't work for me.
But I hope that this actually works pretty well and I'm hoping that I can add to my theory, my theories about language learning, and hopefully change some things, because I
I learned that some things are better about this method and hopefully that helps me improve my theories.
So we'll see.
But this is going to be a lot of fun, I think, but very challenging.
So I'll talk to you in the future about this.
Probably not very soon, but at some point.
So hopefully you enjoyed this episode and I'm sure it was good practice for your listening.
Remember to sign up for my advanced podcast episodes so you can challenge yourself and move up to the next level, because in those episodes I speak fast.
So to get those, click on the link down below and sign up to become a Listening Time family member and also check out my US.
Conversations podcast to practice listening with my conversations with other English teachers.
That link is also down below.
All right, thank you all for listening to this episode and I'll talk to you on the next episode of Listening Time.
