Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

everybody. Welcome to Creativelive. My name is Lily Crystal. I'm your host today for our class. How to learn a language with Babel and Matthew, you Olden. Now this is a special treat. Today we have a two day language learning event for you. So if you ever wanted to learn a language, this is for you, Matthew. You old is going to be teaching us today how to learn the language and the tomorrow, how to build on that foundation to improve your skills. And finally, tomorrow afternoon how to raise bilingual Children and teach others a language I want to tell you about our amazing instructor, Matthew. You'll Din is a man of many words. He's a linguist, a lecture and a polyglot from Manchester, England, who knows 20 languages. That's 20. Count them. He's amazing. And he's also language ambassador for Babel, the groundbreaking language learning app. Please help me in welcoming to our stage in after you you old in Theo, You good. Thank you. Wait. We're so excited to have you here. It's just reall...

y amazing. Teoh, do this class, you know it's New Year's A little after New Year's 2016. A lot of people probably made a resolution to learn a new language this year. And so I'm wondering, I have a question for you. What is the main obstacle that people face, and how can we help them to get over the obstacle? Well, it's a very good question, really. There are very many obstacles. And I think the main obstacle is definitely discouragement. Not feeling motivated. And I hope that by the end of this class you'll take away the feeling of not only feeling confident but actually to able to use the language, any language you like with confidence and to really go out there and master it. So, yeah, that's the objective. Today and quickly, right? Exactly. Quickly and efficiently. Well, I want that we want all want that. So let's get started. I know you have a lot to cover. Thank you. Thank you. So hello, everyone here and online. Welcome. I thought I'd put it in a few different languages to maybe spice it up and make it not so English because there are so many languages out there, they're actually estimates suggest there are approximately 7000 languages spoken currently throughout the world. English is there for just one of them, and this is only a small selection of the many languages out there. I am. Lily introduced you to me, spoke a tiny bit about me and myself. I'm I'm from Manchester, England. You might recognize by the accent that I'm clearly not American will be doing something concerning accent later on about how maybe I can try to speak with an American accent, but we'll see that we'll get to that later. And I think it's rather simply spot that I adore languages. Andi. That's also something that's not very usual from an English person when we not really renowned for speaking any other language apart from English, this awkward idea of going abroad and trying to communicate with people using your hands, maybe making silly noises and gestures in order to get the message across on. I was fortunate that I was brought up in a bilingual setting, which is also something that I would like Toa speak with you tomorrow about how to raise Children bilingual. It's a topic that is very close to my heart, and I think it's something that is definitely important to all of us, because on languages are really not just important to people that speak other languages, but they're important to everyone. They have such a fundamental part to play in our lives on bond. They're incredibly enriching, incredibly vital on it will be my task to show you how language learning is not only fun and rewarding, but it can with the right techniques. The methods on especially the right mindset, be very easy to pursue on to master. So over the course of the next lessons, my mission will be to teach you the techniques, the tips and the skills that you will need to ensure not only a great start on your language journey I like to refer to as a language journey because it's something is a path that we're going to be tight taking together. And it's an individual path because, as we will see, it's an event in an individual choice. There are so many languages to choose so many reasons why we want to do this. So this is something we'll be looking at right in the beginning as well, Andi. Unfortunately, as I said, it's only where there's only having two days. That means that we've got a lot of information to go through and also on a lot of information can be off putting. So I think it's really important for me to keep the information is transparent as simple as less technical assed possible. I'm going to roof refrain from using a lot of words and jargon that you might find in linguistics because we all ended up speaking English without anyone telling us what a case was. What an adjective. Waas. So that's gonna be the name of this lesson, definitely on to make the information relevant to you. To anyone out there that's learning and most importantly, most importantly, toe have fun doing this because language learning is really something that everyone is able to do. We all speak one language, so there's no reason why we can't go on to master 2nd 3rd 10th Even Andi Andi, this class is really aimed is aimed at anyone anyone that's interested in learning the language. But it's specifically, or maybe particularly geared towards those of you that I wanted to learn a language, maybe even started to learn a language in the past on but have been somehow felt. It felt intimidated. They felt threatened they've been worried about their progress. They didn't really grasp it on day. Were starting to think that it was maybe their fault that they didn't understand it. They weren't may be clever enough. None of us are clever enough to learn a language is really to use a nice raising English. It's really child's play. So I would like to show you how to learn efficiently and how to overcome this discouragement, the lack of motivation that many of us feel are commonly feel when we embark on this language journey and how to really learn with confidence, to go away after watching this and to understand what it really means to learn a language to be on this journey and to think at the end that we're actually going to go out there and we're going to be able to do exactly everything we do in English but say in Hindi, in Bengali, in Chinese, in Navajo, any language you choose, the world is your oyster. So as they said, it's really open toe everyone on, especially those with no previous experience, because no previous learning language experience is necessary. So as I pointed out, language learning is a journey a bit like the billions we can see on their floating around in the sky. And that's what I would like you to be doing at some point, maybe in Turkey. So maybe in Arabic, whatever you choose and it's also not a it's a journey, but it's a personal journey, and I can't state that enough. It's really something that we decide as individuals, and sometimes you may be feel coerced our way learned another language safe school because it was something that the curriculum said we were going to learn, but most often, and it should always be something it should always be a personal journey, an individual journey that relates to ourselves, to our lives, to our wishes and to our goals. My personal journey started way over 20 years ago. That sounds quite a long time, but for me it seems like it was only a few years ago, and I am backed on this journey with a special person, and it's my brother, and you'll see a picture of him in a minute. We'll see him quite often throughout this class. The thing is, don't think, Oh, it's too early in the day I drank something last night and I shouldn't have cause I wise the mirror image. What's why the two of them? It's my twin brother is identical. I don't think we looked identical, to be honest, but my grandparents used together is mixed up. So I guess maybe we are really identical. And in our personal journey, apart from the bilingual household we were brought up in, we a two grand old age of eight decided upon finding out that our parents would be taking goes on our first family holiday, a vacation on abroad, and we were supposed to go to Greece. So at the age of eight, armed with but a phrasebook and a dictionary, we undertook the task off learning Greek approximately a month before we went to Greece. Now the story gets better because you can imagine if you will to small Children without ginger bids running around the house with the bulk and a dictionary trying to think of. Oh, how we're gonna play with your the Children in Greek when we get there. And are they going to understand us? Or is it Ah, they're not going to understand this? What are they going to think on. Why were these two Children that are clearly Greek running around trying to learn quick? As I said, it gets better because unfortunately for ours, the holiday the vacation was canceled. So we put all that effort in tow learning a language and then all of a suddenly Mom knocks on the door and says, Hey, guys, really sorry. Not going to Greece after all. So we were kind of upset about that. But they said, Hey, never mind, you know, we're gonna go to Spain instead. So was, you might think. Or you might not think the logical step Waas to learn Portuguese, not Spanish. It was Spanish. So we thought, Yeah, OK, we've done Greek and we did a bit Andi were writing songs at some point in Greek, obviously completely, dramatically wrong. But we didn't care, because the idea was really it was our personal journey. It was our relationship friendship, the bond that we'd had with Greek. We put that aside for a bit and then carried on and went on to do Spanish. So there are clips of us somewhere. I hope my parents have destroyed them of me and my brother on the beach speaking, going very high voices. Well, like always, there's more yen on duh. Basically, we've gone on from then from the right old age of eight to study and learn several languages, often together. I admit there some languages that he speaks in some ice speaking, and he doesn't base versa. But it's always been this passion about about yeah, learning Mawr, knowing that there's so much more out there. And there's nothing that stopping us that sometimes the only thing that's stopping us is actually ourselves. Our self confidence and she's there is I wasn't lying, although he actually has glasses on that. I do wear glasses as well at times, but I decided to make it a bit more so we look a bit. This is likely more different. Let's say so That's me, and that's my brother. He's called Michael, So Eminem on. And as I said, you'll see quite a bit of him over the next few hours because he'll features regularly and a few clips that we've done together. Andi, obviously the tips that come up together and so on. So this was my language learning journey off the language learning journey of me and my brother. And as I said, you will have your own or soon are you maybe have already embarked on your you've already started your language journey. I can say it's an amazing journey that you're going to have a lot of fun. You might encounter some obstacles, but that's what we're going to be dealing with here. How we can do with obstacles efficiently. How we couldn't prevent these obstacles from from preventing goes to from losing motivation from feeling this not to end up feeling discouraged. Ondas. I said. It's a very raw, rewarding journey, a very rewarding path that we find ourselves on on. At the end of it, we will inevitably be able to master perhaps one of the most fundamental on important cold of a human being, which is the ability to communicate because essentially, if we can't communicate, then nothing literally happens. I mean, the idea of speaking your language is being is being able to communicate, to interact, to understand Teoh, get knowledge from other people, and if we're not able to do that, then virtually nothing takes place. And as I said, many people sometimes feel that this can be a burden. And as I said, I'm here to show you that language learning is a complete holistic process with multiple benefits and multiple advantages on that. Despite these obstacles, we will go on to master a language, a new language or several other languages.