The video owner has disabled playback on external websites.
This video is no longer available on YouTube.
This video cannot be played right now.
Watch on YouTube
Unlock AI-Powered Learning Tools
Sign up to access powerful tools that help you learn faster from every video.
The secrets of learning a new language | Lýdia Machová | TED
Learning Stats
CEFR Level
Difficulty
Subtitles (213 segments)
I love learning foreign languages.
In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years,
currently working on my eighth one.
When people find that out about me, they always ask me,
"How do you do that? What's your secret?"
And to be honest, for many years, my answer would be,
"I don't know. I simply love learning languages."
But people were never happy with that answer.
They wanted to know why they are spending years trying to learn even one language,
never achieving fluency,
and here I come, learning one language after another.
They wanted to know the secret of polyglots,
people who speak a lot of languages.
And that made me wonder, too,
how do actually other polyglots do it?
What do we have in common?
And what is it that enables us
to learn languages so much faster than other people?
I decided to meet other people like me and find that out.
The best place to meet a lot of polyglots
is an event where hundreds of language lovers
meet in one place to practice their languages.
There are several such polyglot events organized all around the world,
and so I decided to go there
and ask polyglots about the methods that they use.
And so I met Benny from Ireland,
who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one.
He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook
and goes to meet native speakers
and starts having conversations with them right away.
He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day,
because that's how he learns, based on the feedback.
And the best thing is, he doesn't even need to travel a lot today,
because you can easily have conversations with native speakers
from the comfort of your living room, using websites.
I also met Lucas from Brazil
who had a really interesting method to learn Russian.
He simply added a hundred random Russian speakers on Skype as friends,
and then he opened a chat window with one of them
and wrote "Hi" in Russian.
And the person replied, "Hi, how are you?"
Lucas copied this and put it into a text window with another person,
and the person replied, "I'm fine, thank you, and how are you?"
Full subtitles available in the video player
Practice with Exercises
Generate vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension exercises from this video
Comments (0)
Login to CommentSign up to unlock full features
Track progress, save vocabulary, and practice exercises
Interactive Mode
Quiz
Correct answer:
Related Videos
spirited away clip
Ricky Gervais On What Counts As An Act Of God | Universal Comedy
Mad Max Fury Road 2015 Intro Scene
Gordon Ramsay Can't Find The Patty In His Burger | Kitchen Nightmares
John Wick VS His biggest fans | John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum | CLIP
TED
Quiz
Correct answer:
Quizzes appear as you watch the video
Memory Tip
From this video
Start learning languages for free
