Since I couldn't find a transcript anywhere (about Mass Sentences by Mike Campbell) and the points covered here are very relevant to a lot of language learners, especially Chinese who want to learn English, I decided to transcribe this podcast in its entirety.
I think I spent about six to eight hours in total, of which four were done in a day in late 2014, and the rest over two two-hour sessions spread out over two days July 1 & 2, 2015. So instead of spending one hour listening, you can read it in twenty minutes.
If you have an hour to spare, you can listen to the original interview here at
http://www.languageisculture.com/episode18/
In case of any discrepancy between the transcript and the audio, the audio takes precedence because it's the primary source.
-[START]-
[0:00]
Welcome to another episode of the Language is Culture podcast. I'm your host David Mansaray! If you're new to the Language is Culture podcast, I first want to say "Welcome"! Welcome to our community. Welcome to our podcast!
Y'know, it's always great to receive email from people who appreciate the conversation that I record here on the Language is Culture podcast, and who let me know that they find what is fun and how podcasts can be very useful. You can always contact me at David at language is culture dot com. I'm always, always very happy to hear from you guys.
So today I'm introducing another very special guest. I know I say that at the beginning of every episode, and that's because I really do believe that all of our guests are special.
Today I'm gonna be introducing Mike Campbell! Mike Campbell is a special man. He's a polyglot, he's a linguist, he's a very enthusiastic language learner with lots and lots of passion, and knowledge about the language learning process.
And we spoke about some really interesting things from muscle memory to improving fluency, and we spoke about the different levels of language competence A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2. And he made an interesting point about why we should focus on the B levels rather than the C levels. Which is something I think you'll find very useful.
[1:26]
So we spoke about skill development, and y'know Mike is a musician so he talks about the relationship between language and music and how he has, y'know developed his competence as a pianist, and so much more. So, right, and you definitely want to listen to this one.
Mike has also developed a method he calls "The Sentence Method" and we speak about it today. And he has been kind to give to me three of his courses. Away to three of you. And all you've to do is listen to them, so you'll get the instructions at the end.
But before we get into it today this episode I want to give a great shoutout to our sponsor, italki. italki is the number one place on the Internet for finding yourself a language exchange partner, or a professional teacher in just about any language you can think of. I use the service myself and I'm a big fan of the service.
I use italki to improve the languages that I learn and I want to recommend it to you. Go over to languageisculture dot com forward slash italki. That's I-T-A-L-K-I. languageisculture dot com forward slash italki. That's I-T-A-L-K-I.
[2:44]
And the reason I want for you to use that link is that it will redirect you to their website and it would just let italki know that we sent you. And so I help people with my service and you help me. [Chuckles] Right. So, we're gonna get into today's show and you are going to enjoy it. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. You're gonna hear me say that later. Heh heh heh... Enjoy. Let's go.
I'm your host David Mansaray and you're listening to the Language is Culture podcast. [Background music] Provided to help you learn a language and connect with cultures around the world while enjoying yourself in the process. Process process process ... [Music]
Enjoy enjoy enjoy ...
[3:33]
David Mansaray (DM): Hello Mike! How are you today, Mike?
Mike Campbell (MC): Yes, I'm doing great, and it's really, really a great honour to be on your show. Thank you very much.
DM: My pleasure. Alright. Many people who are listening to the show are going to know who you are already. But there are going to be some of our listeners who are not going to be aware of Glossika, Mike Campbell and what you are up to, and your experience with languages. So before we get started with our questions today, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your history with languages?
MC: Yes. I've always been interested in languages since I was a child. And when I grew up, I've been working ... I actually moved around quite a lot as a child, I've been in both North America and Europe for extended periods of time. However, I didn't really consolidate any of those languages that I had experience or interaction with at the time very well. So it has always been one of my goals as an adult, how can I make these languages much better.
And so I ventured off and went off to learn Chinese. I gave myself a challenge. I always thought that if I started with, I wanted to learn both challenging and unchallenging or simpler languages, and I thought that if I start early in life with the harder ones, the other ones would come easier later on.
[5:03]
So the hardest one that I could think of was pretty much Chinese. And I thought it would be a good place to start because it has so much influence on its neighbouring languages that would make it easier to learn neighbouring languages. And it really is true. I mean, sixty to seventy percent of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese vocabulary is derived from Chinese through borrowing. It's kind of like learning Greek or Latin in Europe.
So ... And so it took me over a, y'know ... It brought me into a ... I came to Asia at quite a young age, and really focused on learning Chinese. And so I found that my lifestyle is quite different from my parents, and I'm not very into moving around a lot. So I kind of like the stability of living in one place. It's always nice to meet other people and polyglots that are moving around, who get to live in a lot of exciting different places, but to tell you the truth, I don't ... I don't do that very often.
[6:10]
I always look forward to travel, but it's just not something that I've been doing a lot. So here I am. I'm still in Taipei. Taiwan.
DM: You mentioned that you moved to Asia at a very young age. Can I ask how old you were when you moved there? And how long have you been in Taipei at the moment?
MC: Right. So I was here just before the age of twenty. [DM: Mm.] So I've been here, er, a few more years here and I'll be up to almost twenty years.
DM: Wow, long time. Long time. And, when we think about, erm, y'know, language learning and we think about learning a distant language. Mandarin is often thought of to be an impossible language to learn for an English speaker or something that is not achievable. Fluency in this language is not achievable, and this is what lots of people think.
But you are someone who has lived in Taipei for twenty years or almost twenty years, and you have achieved fluency in this language. And I always thought the language learning process is something that involves a series of epiphanies in our mind. As time goes on we learn more as we learn more about the language learning process. So I'm really curious about how Mandarin transformed the way you think about language learning in general.
[7:32]
MC: Right. Yes. I understand what you're getting at here, and I think that's ... To answer the question the way I would like to say is that I wouldn't put so much emphasis on Mandarin itself. I don't think it's just Mandarin. I think it's an exposure to a lot of different languages that are extremely different. I studied languages from Afro-Asiatic, from Austro-Asiatic to Austronesian, Sinitic, Altaic, Indo-European.
So I think that the mix of all these different language families. And recently I started looking into Niger-Kordofanian languages, Bantu languages, they have different classes, and all of these things that are very interesting in the way they express the world, express human emotion, and all of these things. And so you build up a sort of understanding of how human emotion is expressed.
I remember a few years ago I noticed somebody had made a conlanguage that seemed to break down all of these semantic categories in a very organized way. But it seemed like an extremely difficult language to learn. So I just thought that's a kind of an interesting concept, but I don't think it would really help me anyway.
[8:54]
But it looks like somebody has actually done that work already. But I just kind of, I work with natural languages and I like to think of how thought is broken down into pieces and are syntactically reconstructed. This is why to me the sentence method means so much more than vocabulary.
Senselessly memorizing thousands of vocabulary words to me makes no sense at all. I mean every vocabulary word has its own use and its own way of using it in different sentences. So it doesn't make sense to me to do that unless it's in context and therefore it has a meaningful context which you can pull it out of the story. That's the only way that I would learn vocabulary.
DM: Mm, mm hng mm hng. And let's talk a little bit about, er, emotions and how they are expressed differently in different languages. Could you maybe tell me a little bit more about your insights into that?
[9:50]
MC: Y'know, in Chinese one of the biggest things I think when I first encountered the language was just how to express the word "can". "I can do it" or "I know how to do it". And it's actually a construct inside of the main verb. And when you're putting the ability inside of the main verb, and it just sounds completely alien of all, I guess to a European where "can" is a separate entity in a sentence.
And so there's all of these kinds of syntactic structures that can be quite different from language to language. So you get an idea that, the idea of ability where "can" is not something that is explicitly separate in a sentence, but it can be combined together in many different ways. And so you learn that by deconstructing.
I mean if you look at some Uralic languages or some other Austro-Asiatic languages, you'll find that these concepts are expressed in vastly different ways. But the feeling that you get from the final result, the final sentence, really it's, it should be the same in exactly what was expressed in the original language.
[11:03]
So if you're expressing like, "Ya, I can finish this job today", y'know, in another language, it might be something like "Finish-(perfective ability) this job." And then y'know, from that you're able to get the idea that that is an ability thing. "Oh, I can finish this today". And it's combined with this word "today".
So that's why it's so important to learn sentences with the syntactic structure in place rather than just vocabulary words. Vocabulary words don't help you if you're trying to go across languages that are completely different.
DM. Uh hmm. And so you're, what you're saying has my understanding is that when we are learning languages we need to pay more attention to ideas and, y'know, learn [MC: (interjects) Yes.] how to express ideas in chunks. [MC: (interjects) Yes.] And because if we learn individual words, then we're going to be confined to the structure of our native language. [MC: (interjects) Yes.] and then end up constructing, and how would I put, constructing unnatural, or in many ways probably won't make sense at all.
[12:07]
MC: Very unnatural. And, of course, I mean, the problem that I've seen a lot of people learning Chinese fail at, is just that they can't step out of their box. There's stuck with this way of thinking and they're not able to deconstruct the emotions and feelings and the expressions they want to say.
And so you just get, the only response they get from a Chinese person is "That's it. Hey, let's speak English then if you can. I have no idea what you're talking about." Yeah, so it's ar, you kinda get frustrated there if you don't know what you're doing wrong. You have to step out of that box.
And I think that I would take a step backwards with these types of students who experience this and I would say "What you need to do first is learn how to translate everything inside of your own language." You understand what I mean by that?
[12:54]
DM: Er, tell me, tell me a bit more about what you mean exactly.
MC: You're using transformation drills inside your own language. So instead of saying "Lemme give you a hand with that", y'know, if you said "Give you a hand" in another language, who knows what the other person just heard? They think you said that you're gonna cut off your hand and even do that? Or do they hear something like you're going to help them?
So learn how to translate everything that you're saying in your own language into many different ways. What are all of the different ways to express the same thing?
So like I was saying the word "can" in Chinese, there's actually many ways to express "can", so you can say "I can do it", and you can also say "verb-(can ability) something". Er, so there's many ways to express the same thing, and you just have to get used to how native speakers use them. Sometimes they use one form, sometimes they use another form. Which one is the more, the most common? So there's a statistical frequency of certain types of same sentences.
[14:00]
So the exposure really is important to the language. Exposure to real sentence structures. And I would like to add to that, is that you get so many language learners that are just thinking "I'm stuck with the grammar. Is this dative? Is this instrumental? There's this plural, what's the plural form? What form of the article should I be using?"
And y'know they're getting lost in all the details. They don't see the forest, they're all looking at the trees and the details. They can't see the whole picure. And sometimes when you're focusing on those grammatical details, the final result you get is grammatically correct but nobody understands you. Because you didn't construct your sentences the right way to begin with.
So all those grammatical details should come later. They should come after you're able to learn how to transfer your expression and then add on the grammatical details. And learn them as they should be. So I think a lot of people, they start off like, "This is how I make the past, this is how I make the future, this is how I make all of the different cases and conjugations". And then they fail and they trip up, because they don't learn how to express.
[15:15]
And that's the problem that I have in the early stages of learning foreign languages.
DM: Mm hmm. And I think what you're saying here is spot on and it's extremely interesting and, those beginners and intermediate learners who are listening right here should be really taking note, because where a lot of people fail is as we've mentioned earlier on, is that they focus on translating things syntactically, and they end up producing unnatural sentences which sometimes don't make sense at all.
So let's start a little bit deeper into this. How do we actually go about translating ideas? What are the methods for learning how an idea that is expressed in one language is expressed in another language?
[16:03]
MC: This is getting pretty deep. I mean you have to work with vocabulary and words, syntax patterns at the sentence level. Understand what the parts are in there and how that makes it that particular meaning. So we can start by doing that, practising that in our own language. Translating everything that I say.
For example I say "John's in the hospital. John's lying in a bed in the hospital. John got hurt and now he's in the hospital." So if you expand your sentences out and you put more explanation in them, and then you translate that into another language with the extra explanation, you're less likely to have misunderstandings.
DM: This is interesting. Erm, you said that we have to work with what, you suggested that we learn how to do this with our native language, so let's go a bit deeper into this. So you're saying that we compare our native language with the foreign language and maybe can talk a little bit about this, why this is important?
[17:03]
MC: Sometimes I ... Well you know I don't really do that much comparison. I just try to see how foreign languages work. And what I like to do when I'm working with full sentences in a foreign language is figure out what are the parts of speech. I should be able to rapidly recognize the nouns from the verbs and the adjectives. All languages have these parts.
And so this is a very important skill. It's to recognize what those parts are. How they're interacting is a completely different matter. This is for grammatical explanations. Grammar books can explain it, sometimes it's hard to grasp, but sometimes what I tend to think about it ...
I remember I was going through some Georgian a few years back, and then all of these ergative stuctures and they have a lot of these endings of verbs. They have a V and a D and a B, and putting those structures together for me would make a lot more sense if I get comprehensible input, so I know the following sentence has this particular meaning.
[18:01]
And then I practise the full sentence with that complex verb form. And then I practise saying it to fluency. And then while I'm saying it, I put the meaning at comprehensible input over that sentence and I recognize each part of speech.
So the verb has all of this complex grammar written into it as a native speaker of the language would say it, and I'm just absorbing it. Like okay, now I'm saying the verb, and I recognize that it's a verb, it has this complex structure. I'm not thinking about the structure, I'm just saying it like a native speaker would say it.
The next time I run into that structure, sentences later, it reinforces the structure. It reinforces it again and again and again. Small variations of that structure help reinforce my comprehensible input. So after a period of several iterations, after a few days practising that dozens of times, that pattern becomes a muscle memory.
If I've been speaking a lot, my tongue's been practicing the motions and that becomes a muscle memory to the point where it becomes natural. When I'm in one language I'm able to transfer to another language even though the structure and the grammar is completely different.
[19:19]
DM: What I really want to get from you now is some practical tips that you can maybe suggest to our listeners so that they can find ways of extracting sentences from native speakers so that they can get better at translating ideas.
MC: For major languages even for Chinese and East Asian languages, Chinese and Japanese, Western languages like Russian and Spanish, Portuguese and French and German, there's already so much available content. There's already so much available on the Internet. And so make use of that material.
It really disturbs me that when I see people going through decks of flashcards, when there's so, how should I say, it kind of worries me that these decks of flashcards are so far removed from the syntactic structures where they appear that it really doesn't do any good. I've seen Chinese students do this for years and I've seen the results of their tests.
[20:30]
They score very well on tests for memorizing, rote memorization, they have no idea how to construct a sentence. As soon as they put the vocabulary word into a sentence, they have the wrong form. It's not the right noun or the verb.
They might say "synthesis" instead of "synthesize". They might say "activity" instead of "active" or they might have the verb, the past tense "acted" instead of "activity". They're changing haphazardly, they're changing nouns into past tense or past participle forms. And they just don't understand the interaction of words in a sentence.
So I'm working with people that have a different kind of a handicap, which means they're coming from a language, Chinese is called an isolating language. Not because it's a language isolate but because it's the words in a sentence, all the words in Chinese are individual components that can be assembled.
And when they're assembled next to each other, they don't influence the other words very much. So word order is very important, but the word "active" in Chinese is always "active". It has no other changing forms in that word.
[21:43]
So if I say "active", "huo de 活的" in Chinese, for "activity" I'm gonna use the word "huo 活" and then add "dong 動". "Huo dong 活動" which means "alive movement". So the word for "active" is "alive", "life" plus another adjective ending. "Huo 活" and then "de 的". And that's the word for "active". So that's just an example.
A lot of people, they just don't understand how that interaction works in sentences. So they end up creating lots and lots of ill-constructed sentences. So stay away from them. Stay away from the flashcards unless your flashcards are drilling full sentences.
Memorizing thousands of Chinese characters does not help you read Chinese language. It doesn't help. Chinese is not one character at a time. One character has influence over other characters, it changes their meaning.
[22:43]
DM: So just to make sure I've understood what you're saying here, you're recommending that our listeners go out and find full sentences and then ask native speakers as well how to express ideas that they want to express in a foreign language, and then use these sentences that they find whether in text or from native speakers or from TV programs, movies whatever, and then they can use these sentences for learning how to express ideas. Is this correct?
MC: Yes. And I just thought of an example when you said that. Think about little children in your own country. Little children will always say something like this: "Mommy mommy! Der litter litter boy hit der dawg! Litter boy hit der dawg!" Y'know, they're saying a full sentence but their pronunciation is quite off.
Then when the child grows up a little bit, maybe five or six years old, there's a "Look, Mommy, the little boy just hit the dog!" Then you're hearing a much more complete ... You're hearing a pronunciation that's much better constructed. But even from the very earliest age you'll find that the children are creating the syntactic structures more or less intact. More or less correct.
[23:56]
And so it's the other details, for example the grammatical endings. Maybe the child is not adding the plural "s" or they're adding the past tense incorrectly. These other details they have added on after their fluency has already arrived. They're already fluent in the language. They know how to express themselves in the language. The pronunciation and all these other things, they come later on.
So the thing is when you're working with full sentences, full syntactic structures, as an adult you're able to control your tongues and get all those grammatical parts correct. Experience them. Experience the grammar as it happens. Don't try to memorize it in tables. Memorizing it in tables never helped anybody. Experience it as it happens. Absorb it as it happens and you'll be much better off.
[24:47]
DM: Okay, fantastic. Now Mike, you've been living in Taiwan for ... Have you been in Taiwan for the whole twenty years, or have you been in other places in Asia?
MC: No. The whole time.
DM: The whole time you've been in Taiwan. So you've been in Taiwan for twenty years and ... What I know about moving and living in other countries from my own experience, and speaking to other expats who have also moved around, is that you immerse yourself in a culture that's different to your own. It can be difficult. Really difficult sometimes.
And I'm wondering, one of the things that we need to do in order to become a little bit more integrated into a new culture is to learn to think differently. And this goes for foreign language learning as well, doesn't it? And I'm wondering, y'know, how this is related to language learning, y'know, immersing yourself in a new environment and learning to think differently and integrate. And also learning to think differently, erm or in the way you express yourself, or languages?
[25:55]
MC: Well, you and I might disagree on this particular point. But I personally believe, and I've been in contact with a lot of languages from different language families. But I personally believe that language is a part of human nature and that syntactic structures ... What I believe is that language is actually something quite separate from culture.
And that language itself, the way that language works is syntactically. It's completely different than culture. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna answer your question in regards to culture, it's completely independent from language. I don't know if we agree on that point. We may not agree.
DM: That's okay, we can disagree, that's fine. Hoo hoo.
MC: Heh heh. Based on my understanding on your podcast, it's language and culture, and I think a lot of people, they do wanna learn languages because of interest in a culture, and the culture attracts them. I think that's a wonderful thing. But when it comes to a language itself, you gotta treat it as a language. The culture is something you can overlap. The language gives you a tool to access the culture.
[27:03]
So culturally speaking, I'm, I'm ... I'm the same person when I speak Chinese. I express myself in more or less the same way. So I don't feel like there's any difference in my personality or who I am. There are some things that I would say in Chinese that I may not say that often in English. Maybe it's just because I haven't thought about how I would say them in English.
I am, I guess I am kind of responding to my environment and there are certain things that I would say that I wouldn't say very often in English. I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I find that most of my communication can be mirrored in whatever language that I'm taking. It would be I'm saying the same things.
[27:58]
So, culture ... When you're learning foreign languages you need to open your eyes and be aware. Be aware of changes and be aware of things that are happening. Not just in the sentence but we can apply this to culture as well. I think awareness helps you stand, helps you step out of your own cultural box and allows you to look at things.
I really enjoy actually, when I just sit on the bus all day and I really enjoy observing people. I really enjoy observing people and how they act, and I like the psychological factor of that and how it plays into how people express themselves.
And this may or may not be related to culture because when I'm in the Chinese culture, I see all of the same types of people that I would see in my own culture. They all appear and I think it's wrong to assume that a certain country or a certain people are always acting a certain way.
[28:54]
It's completely false. You have all range of personality types, you have all range of types of expression among the various people of a culture. So I think it's just really fascinating to see how the human experience plays itself out in another language. And how those interactions get expressed in a language. To me that's the most interesting thing.
So when you keep an open mind you're not really prone to having culture shock. Because everything, you'll find that the more you look for differences, the more similarities you'll find. Because y'know, human nature is human nature. That's what I believe.
DM: I know that you're also a musician, aren't you? I've seen some videos of you playing the piano. And I'm really curious about how learning to play a musical instrument, the piano is like learning a foreign language, if there are any similarities? Because I've heard many times that language is like music, learning language is like learning to play an instrument. So I thought that you'd be the perfect person to give us some insight as you have so much experience with the piano as well.
[30:08]
MC: Yes. I'm a big fan of actually Susana Zaraysky and I think she does a really good job with, er, disseminating this information to people around the world. A lot of people are very musical and they like using music as a way to learning another language. It's an excellent approach.
And if you've read anything by Malcolm Gladwell you'll know that the ten thousand, this rule of ten thousand hours of actually doing real practice. It's deliberate practice we should say. This deliberate practice of over ten thousand hours produces real results. And so sitting down and tinkering around with the piano or violin or something isn't really going to be producing results.
But what I found is that if you practise the same muscle movements with what you're doing with the piano, I don't have much experience with other musical instruments, I really like playing the piano only, so I assume the guitar, violin or some other ... If you practise the same movements, the same ... And I would say the same voice practice with phrases in full phrases, just like sentences.
[31:18]
You practice the full phrases. You practice the same things over a period of five days, repeating the same practice. These become muscle memories. It's like if your tongue is practicing the same sentences over a period of five days. These become muscle memories. And to improve it more, try to practise without looking at your hands. Try to practice them without looking at the music.
Once you've played something once, look up a page, try to play it without looking at your hands or the music. And if you can't do that, split it up into smaller parts and try again.
And do the same thing with learning languages. If you're saying a full sentence, repeat the sentence in full or split it up into smaller parts and do it again and again until you're saying it fluently in the full sentence. That helped me like really, really lots of sentences. We're just talking about phrases.
So that's the general idea. If I continue to do that over five days, these things become muscle memory. They become long-term memory. Things that I can re-use all the time. In the last couple of years I have practised and almost completed learning Chopin's "First Piano Concerto in E minor" and Rahmanonov's "Second Piano Concerto in C minor. All three movements in both.
[32:32]
Massive, massive works of music, extremely beautiful and I think every time I played it, it almost moved me to tears. They're very, very beautiful pieces of music, and I just love the challenge of being able to play these, and reach the point where I can almost perform them. So hopefully someday I may have the chance to perform them.
So I really put a lot of effort into understanding muscle memory. The sleep patterns that we need in order to consolidate muscle memory. You need to have sleep between each practise session. The practise session should not be long. Twenty minutes for anything that you're learning. Practicing old things that you know, you can go on for hours and hours and hours.
Like I'm speaking English right now. English is an old thing that I've already got and I could go on for hours and hours and hours. But if I'm practising something new like a speech. Practising something at the C1 or C2 level, I'm trying to train new vocabulary and new things that I want to say. Just do it in small chunks twenty minutes a day. Come back and do it five days in a row.
[33:44]
And when you do that, these memories consolidate. The muscle memories become consolidated.
DM: As you were speaking I'm just thinking about the fact that ... This is my experience and I've also seen it in my students as well. It's that you can practise something in one context and you can practise it repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly and get it right in that context.
But when it comes to live conversations or, y'know connected speech, then we face some problems. Do you have any insights to the fact that practising something in an artificial context may not always carry over to real-life situations and conversation?
MC: This is, this is what I believe is Malcolm Gladwell's focus on deliberate practice. "In the moment". A lot of people call it "In the zone". You're absolutely focused. When I'm saying a sentence I'm focused on what is, what are the parts of speech. I'm not just repeating sounds that I hear.
[34:51]
There's a "Hubbadoo... Hubba yubba babbada..." Okay, I said. And I can "Hubba, yubba bubba daa ..." I can say it five times, I can say it twenty times but I don't really understand what I'm saying. So my tongue can wrap up sounds. What does that mean?
If you don't put any meaning to what you're saying, if you don't understand the part of the word you're saying, if you can't even dictate them down into a sentence that you can actually see what those individual parts are, then it's meaningless!
I mean if you're practising music, it's one thing to just copy and practice all the parts. But if you understand, "Oh this is an F minor, and a diminished chord moving into a C minor, and that's a fourth to a first." If you understand the "grammar" behind it, and even if you don't understand that, you kinda have an idea of the distance it's travelled over the keyboard.
And on the guitar it's not distance it's maybe a sliding movement. But if you can absorb what are those distances or movements as a part of grammar, because grammar itself is just describing muscle movements. There's nothing "grammar", we can write "grammars" for basketball or baseball by saying "Move your feet in this angle, move your arms and thrust the ball at this speed", that's all what grammar is.
[36:08]
Grammar is just describing muscle movements. If you can take control of your muscle body movements and understand what they're doing, now you're heading to empowering yourself with the ability to describe in many different situations. The problem with the students who are unable to transfer those skills into new conversations and I also fall prey to the same problem, I'm not putting myself above this. We all fall prey to it. It's difficult to be "in the zone" if that's the real problem. We have to be in the zone and you have to, it's hard you know.
The concentration is really, really, really challenging. But that's what it comes down to. It's to really understand what you're saying and to understand the parts and how you're using them. And can you transfer them, and can you substitute and transform those sentences into another way of speech? And the same thing with music.
[37:04]
Just because you can play a piano concerto doesn't make you, in my definition it doesn't make you a musician. If you can sit down and like, you knew the piano concerto, if you can sit down and play jazz on the spot, then I would consider you a musician. There's like a difference between somebody who stands up and recites poetry in Persian but they can't hold a conversation in Persian. Does that make sense?
[37:27]
DM: Yeah, makes perfect sense. This is... And you're touching on something I think is very, very important because it just... I used to make a lot of music myself and various one, you know, some people can, you know, they can copy pieces of music that have been created by someone else so they can play them, but it is a completely different skill when we have to create music ourself. Compose music.
And one could say that this is similar for languages as well. We can learn set structures, we can learn grammar rules and ways of expressing certain sentences, idea sentences. But then it's completely different when we want to create something new ourselves and say, knowing how to put all of the pieces in a way that, you know, fits into the overall system.
[38:19]
MC: Yes, and this is part of the... part of what I'm trying to tap on when I'm creating this Glossika Mass Sentence method is, er ... You have a lot of input, comprehensible input, how do you create well-structured output? And there's a lot of misconceptions about these levels like B1, B2, C1, C2. In fact, from my experience I can go onto Wikipedia and pretty much read any text written in C1 or C2 in probably a dozen different European languages and languages I don't know how to speak.
Just because it's comprehensible input I recognize the vocabulary. I can recognize the sentence structure. I can almost pretty much understand what I'm reading. Now if I was to actually stand up and give a speech on Biology or Chemistry in one of those languages, how well would I do, producing that out of my head? Probably not very well.
Okay. So then you get to the speech of the people that are actually speaking on the street. So what I create like a book like this, a Chinese method or whether it's a Russian book, I'm really focused more on the B1 and B2 levels of real spoken speech. Because all of the complicated use of prepositions and phrasings and languages, you can't learn them from vocabulary words alone. You have to learn them in context of the sentences and in context of what is trying to be expressed.
[39:42]
So there's a completely different meaning with "It's supposed to rain tomorrow" and "I was supposed to call him". These two words "supposed to" would actually carry very different meanings. And so they would be expressed differently in different languages. And if you're not able to deconstruct meanings in that way, then you'd probably fail at trying to express yourself in other languages.
So, you know, I read a famous lexicographer who said that "Languages, they don't ... Vocabulary, they don't really have meanings at all." It's all collocations. You have to put vocabulary into context of collocations, in the context of other words, and that's when they take on meanings.
So, "to commit" is something very challenging in Chinese. It's how to say "commit suicide", and "commit to a relationship". In English we don't think twice about these two words. But they carry completely different meanings.
[40:40]
DM: Ng hng, ng hng. And this is, this is what I believe to be one of the big challenges that language learners face indeed, because there are lots and lots and lots of different collocations that we have to internalize in order to really have, let's say, I'm gonna use the word "mastery" of language here.
And there are a lot of things that, you know, what do you think it takes to really get to the other side where a person has mastered all these collocations and is able to combine everything together in a way that helps them produce, you know, fluent language, you can say?
MC: Well let's look at a parallel. Let's look at somebody who's just got up on stage to perform on the piano. We can think of two different situations. Think about a child's piano recital. And let's think about some old guy who works in a bar playing the piano. Now neither of these two will be able to sit down and play the piano in a jiffy unless the guy really pulls up something that surprises us.
But we wouldn't expect them to either. We both would acknowledge the fact that these two people play the piano. So the little girl sits down at the piano and plays the sonatina by Clementi. Everybody says "Wow! She plays the piano." But think about it. How many concepts does she actually know to perform that in the whole wide range of what's available in music and music theory and expression? She's making use of maybe one percent but we're all going to applaud her and say she plays the piano. It's an accepted fact.
[42:24]
We can see that she sat down and she did it, right? Even if it is just a recital, she's reciting someone else's music. Okay so what about the jazz performer? Some old guy at the bar? Well he's got hold of his set phrases and things that he reuses over and over and over again. So he's using a kind of muscle memory. He hears something and he reacts with some other sound. So what I'm saying here is that "What is your goal with learning language?"
When you're talking about all these collocations, I'm sitting here and I'm trying to count. Well if I'm going to make a collocation dictionary, am I going to have ten thousand items? Am I going to have twenty thousand? Maybe I'll have a hundred thousand items. Maybe it might go up to a million. I have no idea. How many sentences do you really need to go through to master all of these different collocations?
The problem is not how many you do, but how much syntactic exposure do you need to a language where you can acquire all of these through living your life? The one thing that I try to get my students of English to learn is "How to get to fluency in as little time as possible?" Because they can all do it. Because they've all studied English in school. The only thing that's keeping them from fluency is assembling all the vocabulary they've memorized their whole life, saying them in full sentences.
[43:42]
What they need is syntactic structure. Through going through a thousand and three thousand sentences that go through all the different patterns of syntatic structures. And you get them to say them fluently and walk away with the ability to innovate and make new sentences on a very limited number of vocabulary and syntactic structures. And then from that tool they continue to learn from their environment. Just like a child would learn.
So it's not just sit down and try to memorize thousands of collocations. What you need is fluency so that you can now use the language to interact with native speakers and acquire more of the language. That's what we should be trying to go after. So I would say to all those that are listening, if you're trying to learn a language, focus on the most frequent syntactic structures you need to use.
Talk about your everyday life. Figure out what you're trying to express. Your love and your hate, your feelings and your disgusts and, you know, your down times, your happy times. Whatever you've been doing in your life. Whatever that's been happening. Learn how to say the basic core human expression, right? Forget about memorizing how to say chair, table, and all of these objects that appear in our life.
The objects, they're going to appear later and you're going to meet them as you need. You can learn them as you come across them. As you need them. So the point that I'm trying to get across is, focus on the emotional first and what you need to really express yourself in a language and then build from there.
[45:25]
You can build all of the nouns and the adjectives in that language and then all of the collocations that come with it. Through living. Living the language as part of your life. That's the message that I would leave for all the people that are listening now.
And stop trying to achieve a C1 and C2 level. The English that I'm speaking now, as long as I keep out all those tough vocabulary words, I'm nowhere close to speaking at a C1 or C2 level right now. "I'm speaking at a C1 C2 level." What did I just say?
I'm speaking at. I am speaking. It's a present continuous tense at a B1 level. And I use a location at a B1 level. There's nothing in my speech right now that puts me beyond a B1 or a B2 level.
A lot of linguists probably argue with people like Benny Lewis. But Benny Lewis is really, really correct when he says that you only need a B1 or B2 level. When you try to go for those C1 and C2 levels you try to sound like a diplomat. You're trying to sound like an author of a book.
[46:26]
You're trying to sound like a scientist. You're trying to sound like a politician. You're trying to sound like a newscaster. Don't listen to the news. Don't listen to the politicians or newscasters. Focus on real life language and how it's spoken at B1 B2 level. Don't try to beat yourself up when you're trying to achieve a goal that is not even attainable.
So many Chinese students think that they need C2 to pass their test and they can't even get on the phone and say "Hey, what's up? How's it going? Why don't I see you in a lil' bit tonight?" They can't even say that, but they'll still pass these hard, hard, hard tests with twenty thousand vocabulary words or more. And I don't understand it. Why try to achieve a goal that doesn't ... that completely over jumps, completely jumps over the key skills of the language, which is fluency?
Fluency comes at the B1 and B2 levels. Focus on that, get those right, and don't worry about C1 and C2. C1 and C2 is on comprehensible input. You get that from reading magazines, reading books, listening to news. You're not reporting news. Who says that you're going to be a newscaster?
I don't like to use news language because it's always constructed in a fake way. They're reporting something in a way that is not even how normal people talk. It's journalistic. In journalistic language it's completely different than how people talk.
[47:55]
DM: What you're saying is really interesting, and I can agree with a lot of what you're saying. And that is, the language that's used in news is not language that you're going to hear a typical person on the streets of London, Barcelona, Rome and wherever using, right?
What I get from watching the news or listening to the news is vocabulary. That's what I learn, and the vocabulary that I do learn is often only being used in that context there.
And so you've said something really interesting, it's that we should focus on the language of the native speakers, the average person on the street, of towns and cities or whatsoever. And so how do we go about targeting the right vocabulary and the right structures that are important for us?
[48:44]
MC: Another thing to think about is that I've also worked with a lot of languages that are not written down. We all probably know of a certain gentleman who calls himself a linguist and he's been kind of aggressive in the YouTube community for the last couple of years. He's always telling people "Oh, you're not a real linguist unless you go and get your degrees in linguistics" and all these. But he does have one point that I could agree with.
It's that if you go and if you learn a language that is spoken so called in a forest you'll learn how to acquire a language that way. You'll soon find out a lot of the secrets to what is important in learning a language.
And most of those things are not in news broadcasts because people they don't broadcast the news. A lot of the important things are in storytelling because this is an oral tradition from the ancient times of humans.
[49:42]
Telling stories and what's happened throughout your day or what happened yesterday, what you saw and what happened. Now telling stories is probably one of the best ways of learning a language. Reading stories, re-telling the stories. Every time you read something, re-tell it, paraphrase it in your voice.
Now this is if you're working with a native speaker, have them read a passage, have that person tell you the story again, and then try to tell them that story again. This is a really, really interactive way to work with your tutor.
And so I may not agree with everything that "Clubston" says, but not to get off the point. What I think is that if you're learning broadcasting or journalistic in the foreign language you're learning, I would say that's because of your own personal interest. They do tell stories, but it's usually in a very journalistic voice. So I would still, if you're working with a tutor I would still say "Read this article now tell me what happened in your own voice."
[50:51]
You'll find that immediately the language changes so much it's no longer in C1 its now B1 or B2. Learn how to communicate at B1 or B2 to the best of your ability. You'll never need C1 or C2 because all of that vocabulary and things that are used in it, you'll still understand but it's just not that applicable. Unless you need it for your job then maybe you'll need specialized training.
[51:21]
DM: Fantastic, fantastic. Em, but one thing I want to sort of, ng, ng, drill you on or question you on, is um, when you're talking about C1 level what you're saying, you're saying that you don't need it, it's not something that's necessary, of course with languages we only sort of need the language to the extent that we're going to actually interact with the language.
And even if you live in a country where you don't need to do certain things then you won't need certain vocabulary or certain ways of speaking. But don't you think that at C1 and C2 level that there's a certain finesse or certain accuracy of expression that doesn't come with level B2 or B1?
[52:12]
MC: Perhaps ... You mean that ... What do you mean by accuracy? What's expressed in B1 or B2 that is not accurate?
DM: What I mean here is that at a C1 level or C2 level people are able to express themselves in more detail. Let's say what I mean by accuracy, that's what I mean. Erm, to be more specific about the way that they express their ideas because they can use an extended vocabulary and they can use structures which a speaker at B1 B2 level is not going to be familiar with so much.
MC: Do you mean "about a better choice of words?"
DM: Choice of words ... And some grammatical structures.
MC: I haven't thought about that research in what differentiates B1 B2 C1 C2. But I would say that all of the syntactic structures that exist in a language should be introduced before you get to the C level.
I work with, I've worked with a lot of professionals in my work in Taiwan where people are trying to train themselves to speak. They're doctors and lawyers or businessmen. They're trying to speak at a very high level of English. And I would consider these professional levels of English at the highest realm.
[53:28]
And that C1 or C2, maybe it's not, maybe I'm misunderstanding this and it's actually a D1 or a D2, I just think that all of this professional way of speaking is something that you need to target and train specifically from the industry you're in. If you're a pilot, you need to understand the language of that community and of that industry. If you're a businessman, you need to understand that one.
So it's very specific by industry. It has specific setup words, and I think that if you want to be able to express yourself better in terms of literature or philosophy or psychology whatever, it's your personal interest and so you take that to that level.
I can express myself linguistically in Chinese at that level, or in English. But how many people in English can express themselves at that level? Most people, they don't. They never speak at a C1 level unless it's a very professional setting. And I want to say that they usually need to prepare for it. It's not something that they can just do off the top of their head.
[54:35]
Most people if they're speaking at that level and if somebody does speak that well, a lot of politicians are very good with their words and their speech, it's because they've had a lot of training to get there. And so I think it depends on the individual's needs. If they want to go for that, I would say go for that but I don't think that it's a necessary part of language learning. A lot of the languages in the world do not have C levels. And that's vocabulary and I ... y'know ...
I speak Southern Min. And now I can turn on the TV and I can watch news broadcasts in Southern Min. But to tell you the truth a lot of my friends, they listen to those news broadcasts and like "Wow, that one's using a lot of advanced vocabulary I never even heard of."
Now these are people that grew up speaking the language with their families their whole life. Now who's to say that they can't speak their language? They're not fluent in the language? They're obviously fluent and can speak the language well. Why can't they understand the news broadcasts when the news broadcasts are just pulling out words from a dictionary that people have never heard before.
[55:39]
The next point that I'm trying to make is that those news broadcasts or whatever they're doing in a very professional form is a specific niche of the language. It's not part of the whole, it's not part of the collective knowledge of the language.
DM: And this comes back to the fact that our language abilities sort of expand to the extent at which we interact with the language in the real world. So if news is part of that, then you're going to develop the vocabulary that is needed to understand the news.
And if it's just spending time with some friends on the streets or the cinema or whatever, then you're going to develop or you're going to interact with the level of language that is needed for that function. So it all comes down to the goals that you're having to -
MC: David, I don't want you to misunderstand me. I don't want you to think that I'm trying to discourage people from achieving their goals. It's just what I'm saying is that so many people put such a lofty goal in place and they fail to realize the importance of fluency at the B1 B2 levels.
[56:51]
And when I say the word fluent, I mean to say full sentences in fluent speech. My definition of fluency does not equal expression. It means, it's like how you can play a piano sonata fluently, but it does not mean that you're able to express yourself with much, much more complex things.
So my idea, my definition of fluency means you can be fluent at A1, you can be fluent at A2, you can be fluent at B1 and B2. It's just are you able to express those levels at a fluent, are you able to pronounce them, and say them fluently?
Okay, so when it gets to C1 and C2, I think that a lot of students, they set that as a goal for passing tests. And they, it's a wrong assumption to say that those levels on those tests will prove your fluency in a language.
I've seen it fail many, many times. It's over. That does not prove fluency. It does not prove that you're able to function. And we're not talking about this functional ability at the B1 and B2 levels which is what the mass of humanity every day uses in regular speech.
[58:05]
DM: Fantastic. Thank you very much, Mike, can I have one last question for you before I let you go to the end? That is, in any field, any discipline we have those who achieve at the high levels and we have those who really struggle to make any sort of progress.
So we may have some learners listening to this podcast who struggle to learn one language. And it may be a similar language to their own language. And they just feel that no matter how much time they put in, or at least in accordance to the way they feel that they're not making much progress and they may feel as though they're stupid.
Or you may have, and then on the other hand we have learners who are able to learn in a language in a shorter period of time compared to others and they go on to learn two languages. Three languages. Four languages et cetera, et cetera.
I always think that we can learn something from those who achieve really at the high levels and what have you to help those who find it more difficult. We can all learn from each other.
So what do you think those high achievers are doing? Or what sets these high achievers apart from those who really struggle and make very little progress?
[59:15]
MC: I love addressing the obstacles that people face in language learning because I've spent my lifetime trying to iron out all of those, the problems that people face. I've collected literally hundreds and hundreds of different cases. Kind of like a doctor who will collect cases and case studies. So it reminds me of a certain gentleman that I once knew.
He came to me just to seek assistance. He was a professor at National Taiwan University. He probably still is. He has to give up and give English teachers all the time. You would say that his English ability is probably at a C1 or C2 level. However if you met him on the street you probably might be sceptical. Sceptical of his English level like he was probably at an A2 or B1 level.
[1:00:07]
So he was really, really frustrated because he went through the traditional system. So this is one individual that has reached a high level of English ability but very poor fluency skills. And then in a moment I'll address another situation about a low-level student who's trying to breakthrough out of the A level into the B level of fluency.
Okay so addressing this professor. The first thing we focused on was fluency of words. Putting them together in sentences and making sure that the sounds flow correctly. The intonation of the sentence. And then we focused on syntactic patterns and placed all of those that flow over many, many, many sentence types. So at the end of the training program he told me that when he's on stage giving a speech he can speak now like a foreigner or like somebody from the West.
And then a lot of the people that he works with at the university they can't understand his English anymore, it just sounds like two ... It's just in Taiwan there's actually a Taiwan pronunciation, Taiwan type of English that's quite different, even hard for us to understand. And that pronunciation of English that he learnt from me was now completely different from his colleagues. And they had trouble understanding him so he found himself code-switching between two different kinds of English.
[1:01:26]
One that was completely fluent and he went by easy with them, and another kind that the Taiwanese could understand. So what I want to talk about here in his particular problem, was what I call the professor, a very smart person, a very smart person's brain. A very smart person's brain tends to overthink everything. So when they're learning something they tend to over-analyze it, and he had this exact problem. How did I help him overcome the problem?
I told him to relax and stop thinking. Stop over-analyzing. He asked me in one case I remember specifically this event where he said "I looked at my grammar book and I couldn't find any explanation of this sentence where you have four verbs in a row."
And I think the sentence was something like, "The first thing I did was go to a meeting." And it was just that "The first thing I did was go", or it was maybe something a little bit longer than that. Um, "The first thing I did when I got the job was", "The first thing I did was to prepare or go", but anyway it was something like that.
He said "I couldn't find anywhere in my grammar book this sentence where 'did was go' can be listed together as three verbs in a consecutive sequence." I said "What are you talking about? This is completely natural, this is something we say all the time." He said "But it's not in the grammar book."
I said "You're over-analyzing everything. Stop over-analyzing everything. Absorb the sentence. Repeat the sentence. Understand what you're saying and it will become part of you. It will become second nature to you."
[1:03:00]
And when he was finally able to let go of over-analyzing everything, he became fluent. He was able to use these structures himself. I mean you and I would think that what was, you know, that structure I just mentioned is something that we can all handle very easily even though it's not expressed in the grammar book. So what does that mean?
Grammar books, they don't give you everything, they don't explain everything. They're not the one and all. They're just guides. They're just a record of a few things that happen in a language. They're not telling you how you should speak a language. They're descriptive. They're telling you what the language is doing, and they're not, it's not a hundred percent. So that was one of his problems.
Okay let me go back to another situation. A young girl, maybe not a young girl but not necessarily young girl, but a lower level student was trying to breakthrough to fluent C with a very basic level. Which probably makes up the majority of language learners out there.
You have an A1 or A2 who wants to break out and break into that B2 B3, sorry B1 B2 level. So when we do that, and what I've found it's the same thing. It's relax. You wanna be able to recognize the parts of speech, like you know that's a verb, you know that's an adjective or whatever. But you really need to relax and stop analyzing everything.
[1:04:24]
Work on saying full sentences as swiftly and as fluently as you can. I don't mean fast. I just mean it needs to flow. To flow you need to copy the intonation of a native speaker and let it flow. And when you can do that, and you do it and you copy that same practice routine through hundreds and then thousands of sentences. I would recommend doing two hundred sentences per day.
Now review a lot of those sentences over the next three days. Do the same sentences again, that's what I mean. And then you can add a few new sentences every day. So you should have a majority of your sentences that are being repeated over a four to five-day period. And then add a little bit every day and then drop off some at the end. Then you've already done for five days.
And through that process going through, you can easily go through a thousand sentences a week. I've worn myself out, but I've done probably ten thousand sentences a week. That's real tough. It's not easy to keep up. So if you do something that's easily and easy and managable, I would say doing two hundred sentences a day is enough to give your brain some input and ability to start grasping the structure and fluency of the language.
[1:05:36]
When you start doing that you go through a few thousand sentences, and that can take anywhere from two to three months. But I mean it's possible to pick up fluent in three months when you follow that method.
DM: Fantastic. Umm... And the last thing I need to ask you before you go is where can our listeners find you on the web, Mike?
MC: Well er ... Recently I started posting a lot of things on YouTube and I was like scheduling them into the future cos they had this function on YouTube and I thought that was interesting. I started putting a lot of my new training sessions, daily training sessions up on YouTube. And then YouTube found fault with what I was doing and they deleted my channel.
So three and a half million views, thirty thousand subscribers, all gone just like that overnight. And I don't know what I did that was wrong. And they don't want to tell me what I did that was wrong. So we lost that and I'm dearly sorry to all of the followers of that channel, you know, but we'll probably put something else up on another channel someday.
[1:06:47]
Anyway so my website is called glossika.com. It's glossika like the Greek word for language or linguistics. G-L-O-S-S-I-K-A, that's glossika dot com. Er ... I provide all my training materials there. I'm also building a sound and a sentence database with recordings. So it's sort of like a database of sentences but with sound. You can also browse on our website.
And er ... Yeah, so if there's anything that I can help anybody with, help to understand what their problems are, I really love tackling problems and trying to find a solution in different cases of ... and trying to test and figure out new ways that we can help people overcome the barriers in learning languages. I assume that people have the interest, they have the motivation to do it, and a lot of people are telling me that they need the motivation.
So I a few things I start with as a given, and then I work with them through the handicaps that they have. Do they have a pronunciation handicap? Do they have a fluency handicap? Do they have a vocabulary handicap? These are all the different things that I have thought about a lot in developing my method.
So you're welcome to come try some of my stuff, and I think if you're willing to, David, if you're willing to do a giveaway, I'd be willing to give away. I'd be willing to give away ... I'd be willing to give away three copies of of my products, I mean to three different people, three listeners to let them sample and try our products. And they can choose from any of the training programs on our site.
[1:08:32]
At any level they want. So I'll give you one to each of three people.
DM: Okay. Fantastic. I'm sure that I'll come up with a way to get the listeners to qualify for that. But definitely that's very generous of you, Mike.
MC: I think I want people to try it and see how they like it, and we price it at a pretty low price point too. You can try something small if you want and get a feel for it. So yeah, I welcome people to come try and I will, I'm always willing to give away free copies. So yeah. Thank you really for this interview, it's a real honor.
DM: Okay no problem. Okay. Well thanks again Mike and we'll catch up soon. Bye.
And that's today's episode of the Language is Culture podcast. I'm sure you all agree that Mike has some really interesting things to share with us today. And Mike has a free giveaway to three separate listeners, an access to any of his courses of Mass Sentence courses that he has provided.
So all I want you to do today is to send me a message at david at languageisculture dot com. So that's david at languageisculture dot com, telling me what you really took away from today's episode. What you really learnt. As simple as that. I will select the best answers and you will get access to his course. And I'll forward your email address over to Mike and he will let you know how you can select the courses. It's as simple as that.
Send me an email at david at languageisculture dot com telling me what you have really taken away from today's episode. Alright. So ... Make sure you check out our sponsor Italki, the number one place on the Internet to get yourself a language exchange partner or a professional teacher in just about any language.
And just head over to languageisculture dot com forward slash Italki, that's I-T-A-L-K-I. languageisculture dot com forward slash Italki, that's I-T-A-L-K-I. Thank you very much for listening and have a good day. [Music]
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