Hi, I'm Barry Kahn.

In this video, I would like to talk to you about how I would learn a language if I decided to start learning another one.

Let's say Italian or Thai, the language of Thailand.

One thing I should mention, I'm assuming in what I'm about to tell you that I am not in the country of the language I wish to learn.

So if I want to learn Italian, I'm trying to do it from the United States.

Or if I want to learn Thai, I'm trying to do it from home in the United States.

If I were in Thailand or I were in Italy, I would learn differently.

Some of it would be the same.

I would still try to learn the sounds of the language.

But I would probably hire a native speaker teacher immediately if I had the money.

Because I would be like the baby listening to the language all the time.

I could sit in cafes or just hang out with native speakers and pick up the sounds of the language that way.

So the rest of this video is based on the assumption that I can't do that.

I'm not in Italy.

I'm not in Thailand.

I'm sitting at home in Maine trying to learn a new language.

With that said, let's continue.

My first step would be to listen.

I would find high quality podcasts.

When I say high quality, I mean clear sound so that I can hear the sounds of the language.

Clear sound.

It could be videos, it could be shows, it could be podcasts, it could be TED Talks.

It really doesn't matter.

The important thing is that I'm listening to native speakers and that I can hear the sounds of the language clearly.

In my personal case, I don't need to understand in order to start learning the sounds.

It doesn't bother me to listen to the sounds of a language that I don't know.

And in a way, it's less distracting because I'm only paying attention to the sounds.

I'm not trying to memorize vocabulary yet.

I just want to hear the sounds.

And I've done this, I did it about a year and a half ago with Turkish for several months.

My goal was to learn the sounds, not to learn to speak Turkish.

And it worked out pretty well.

So that's how I would start.

Why?

Why start with the sounds and not with learning to speak?

My answer is that learning the sounds of a language, listening to the sounds and listening long enough and carefully enough is the best preparation for beginning to pronounce correctly.

So I would listen first.

How much?

In my case, depending on the language, I would say a minimum of two hours a day if it was a difficult language with sounds that were very unfamiliar to me, as much as four hours a day.

And if that seems like a lot, when you're a baby, you're listening probably anywhere from five to ten hours a day, depending on your family, how old you are.

Babies sleep less during the daytime as they get older.

So babies do a lot of listening.

They can't do anything else.

So if there's language around, they're listening to it.

I would want to, I would think about the sounds that I was hearing.

For example, my brain would be thinking, "Oh, I've never heard that sound before.

How do they do it?" If it was a language like Arabic, and perhaps I hear an H sound, a "ha" sound, like "habib," I don't know if that's an Arabic word.

And I would also hear a harder sound, a "h" sound.

And my ears and my brain would identify those, one as being perhaps very close to the English H, and the other one being a sound that we do not have in English.

There's no "h" sound in English, a harsh one.

So I would keep track of that, at least keep mental track, because the sounds that are unfamiliar are probably going to be the ones that I have to practice the most.

I would also be paying attention to sounds that sounded like English.

So if I hear a "b" sound or a "p" or "k" or "t," I would also be making notes of those.

I would listen to the vowel sounds.

Is there an "o" sound?

Is there an "e" sound?

Is there an "i"?

Every language has its own collection of sounds.

Some of them might be very close to English, which is my native language.

Some of them might be very difficult, different and difficult.

And that gives me an idea of what I'm going to have to work on if I want to learn to pronounce the language reasonably well.

And the whole point of learning to pronounce a language correctly, I'm not saying perfectly, but close enough is so that when you communicate, your pronunciation is not causing problems.

It's not causing confusion.

Native speakers listening to you will be able to follow what you're saying, understand what you're saying, and when you listen to them, you will understand them also.

If you don't have good enough pronunciation, I'm not saying speak like a native speaker, I'm saying good enough so people understand you.

If your pronunciation is below that level, then your life will be difficult.

I'm sorry, but that's the truth.

If you ask people, "What is the biggest problem that you have when you speak to somebody who's a non-native speaker of your language?" They will tell you it's pronunciation.

They might call it accent.

But what they really mean is pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, anything that interferes with communication.

And you can tell if this is going on because if I were trying to speak German, for example, and people said, "I'm sorry, could you say that again?

I'm sorry, I didn't understand you.

Can you repeat that, please?" If people say that to you often, then there's a problem with your pronunciation.

People often think, "Well, I can't speak because my grammar isn't good enough." That is simply not true.

Native speakers are experts at figuring out what you mean, even if your grammar is terrible.

Even if you're missing vocabulary, we can help you if we can understand the words that you're saying.

So if you say, "Hungry," "Hungry" is not a grammatical sentence in English.

But if somebody looks at me with a sad face, "Hungry," I would understand immediately that they were hungry.

"Can I get you something to eat?

Come on, let's go make something.

Let's go to a restaurant and get a sandwich or something.

You're hungry." But if they say "Hungry," or if they say "Hungry," which is the name of a country, I will have no idea.

I will have zero idea.

And I'll be guessing, what is this person trying to communicate?

So we can fix your grammar.

We can, we can deal with a small vocabulary.

We can't deal with zero, but we can help you with vocabulary problems.

Pronunciation is the mountain that you have to climb at some point.

So speaking for myself, I would start by listening a lot to the language that I want to learn.

In my case, I don't care whether I understand what I'm listening to or not, because I would be listening for the sounds.

And so it doesn't matter.

When I studied the sounds of Turkish for a while, I listened to people speak for 15 or 20 minutes in a TED talk.

And then I'd listen to it again.

And I didn't worry about not understanding.

But there's no reason why you have to do it that way.

You could get a native speaker to record beginning sentences and phrases.

"Hello, how are you?" "I'm fine, thanks.

How are you?" "What's your name?" "My name's Barry." "What's your name?" "My name's Jane." "Where are you from, Jane?" "I'm from Serbia." "Oh, how long have you been in the United States?" "About six months." You could have somebody write little conversations, or you could find them on the internet.

And if you have a good recording of that, you could listen to it and begin to memorize it.

I personally don't care, but it's a perfectly valid way to begin.

The main thing again is you want to be listening to a native speaker, speaking at normal speed, and pronouncing the words the way they would in regular conversation.

So that's step one.

That would be my step one.

Listen, listen, listen, and listen some more.

If the language is harder, I might listen for two or even three months.

That might seem like a long time to you.

To me, it doesn't seem like a long time.

But everybody's different.

Step two, find a native speaker, or more than one.

And then begin to practice saying words, saying phrases in the language you want to learn, and have them correct you.

So a word that I had to correct today for one of my students was "podcast." Pod-cast.

Ah-ah.

People who see that word, speakers of many languages, if they try to read it, they will say "pud." Pod-cast.

Pod-cast.

Because the letter O in their language, when they see a written O, they pronounce it as O, or some version of O.

And when they see the letter A, they pronounce it as "ah," like "father." So "pud-cast." "Pud-cast." But in fact, it's "pod-cast" in English.

"Pod-cast." I just did a short video about this, so you can practice it if you want to.

So I would get corrected by a native speaker.

If I'm mispronouncing a sound, if I'm saying "oo," and it's supposed to be "oo," I need a native speaker to correct me, to tell me, "No, that's not the right sound." If a Spanish speaker says "isi," that's "isi." No, it's not "isi," it's "ee-zee." "Ee-zee." We have a "zee" sound in there.

But in Spanish, the letter S and the letter Z are pronounced S. So when they see an S in a word, they want to pronounce it as S.

The native speaker's job is to help you fix these things.

So you say, "Oh, okay, it's not 'e-see.' It's 'ee-zee.' 'Ee-zee.'" If there are sounds in their language that do not exist in your language, those need extra attention.

But you want to get somebody to guide you in the right direction, so that you are hearing the right sound and pronouncing it correctly.

The "a" sound in English, one of my students says she feels fake when she says it.

She's a Spanish speaker.

There's no sound in Spanish where you have to open your mouth in that way.

"A." I feel funny doing it.

"A." That's the sound in "man," "can," the name "Daniel," "a," "cast," as in "podcast." So if it feels normal and you're a Spanish speaker, you're not doing it right.

You should feel like you're making your face, your mouth, do something strange.

I don't know if I would call it fake, but it's definitely not going to feel natural, because the natural sounds of your language are super easy for you.

They're automatic.

And the sounds of a new language are not automatic.

The native speaker is the person who can help you with this.

All right.

Why all this attention?

Well, I told you, but let me say one more thing about it.

Yes, you want to pronounce the new language well enough to be understood.

The good news is if you put some time in in the beginning learning to pronounce correctly, once you've got it, once people say, "Wow, you're Polish is pretty good.

I can understand everything you say.

Your Thai is good now.

You're getting the tones right." You have lots more work to do, but when you pronounce these phrases in Thai, I as a native speaker of Thai can understand you.

If you're learning English and you come to me or any teacher, any native speaker, and they have a conversation with you, and nobody has to say, "Can you say that again?

Oh, you mean blah, blah.

Sorry, you were pronouncing it wrong." If those events don't happen, if nobody says, "Wait, stop.

I don't understand what you're saying." If the conversation flows because you understand the other person and they understand you, you've got it.

You basically have the sounds of this new language.

It's not like vocabulary.

With vocabulary, it never stops.

There's always more vocabulary to learn.

Even in your native language, there are words you don't know.

There's technical vocabulary.

There's jargon.

Listen to doctors and nurses speak, at least in English, and there's all sorts of abbreviations and special terminology.

If you don't work in medicine, you might learn some of it from TV shows, but you're not going to know all these things.

If you're not an engineer, if you're not a mechanic, there's going to be vocabulary that you don't know.

That goes on forever.

Grammar doesn't go on forever, but it takes a long time to get it so it's automatic.

You need your grammar to be automatic if you want to speak grammatically.

Like I said, people will understand you even if you make grammatical errors.

It doesn't matter.

The pronunciation is the key to the communication.

Once you know the sounds of this new language, you don't have to keep studying them.

Sure, you keep listening and you try to pronounce correctly and you pay attention to see if people understand you, but it's not like German is going to add more sounds next week.

It has a certain number of sounds.

Every language has a certain number of sounds.

If you learn them, you've got them.

You have learned them.

They are in your head.

And then you just use it.

You just use them.

You don't have to keep studying and studying and studying these new sounds.

I mean, imagine you spent three years learning German and then one day the German government says, "We've decided to add this new sound to German." And you go, "What do you mean you're adding a new sound?

I already learned all the sounds." No, we think it will help the language.

And in fact, we're going to add a new sound every month.

What a ridiculous idea.

Nobody does that.

You might have to learn a new sound if some new foreign word is brought in to German or English.

English is famous for having words from other languages brought in, but we've been doing it for… English speakers have been doing it for hundreds of years.

But basically, if you learn the sounds, you've learned them.

You've got it.

They're there.

They're available for your use, and you just have to continue practicing them so that they don't suddenly get worse.

If you stop speaking the language for 10 years, you might forget how to make the sounds.

But in general, learn them and then they're there.

They're like your friends.

The grammar, the vocabulary takes a long time, and it doesn't matter, like I said.

Learning to read and write… Excuse me.

Learning to read for me would come before writing.

Once I have some vocabulary and I've learned the sounds, then I would be ready to begin reading.

And let me mention something because I am an English teacher.

English is… I don't know if it's the worst, but it's certainly one of the worst languages, I think, in the world for having a useless alphabet, a useless writing system.

For historical reasons, English is incredibly inconsistent and un-phonetic.

So you can look at the letter O, for example.

In Go, G-O, Go, it's pronounced O. In podcast, P-O-D, Pod, is pronounced I.

A-P-O-D, Pod, like father.

So you can't tell just from looking at a word, is it pronounced one way or another way.

This is very inconvenient.

If you've heard a word, or let me take another example, how about the word How or Cow?

How H-O-W, How, pronounced with an Ow sound.

Ow.

If you hurt yourself, you might say Ow, that hurt, Ow.

Again it's just the letter O.

So you've got O like Go, you've got Ow like How, and you've got Ah like Pod.

You cannot tell if you're a beginner and you look at English.

You don't know how to pronounce these letters when you're reading without some help.

And that's another reason why I think it's so important to start with listening.

It's what native speakers do, American and English-speaking children, listen and learn to talk before they start to read.

Usually kids start writing and reading in school around the age of five, six, seven.

By that time they have a huge vocabulary.

They're very, very comfortable, basically fluent speakers of their language.

They're not proficient.

They're not advanced speakers.

They don't have the vocabulary that they'll have in high school or in college, but they can speak the language.

They can communicate, no problem.

Everybody listening to them would say, "Yeah, native speaker.

Clearly this person is a native speaker." So the writing, reading and writing in languages like English should come later.

Do they have to?

No.

But if for me, I would wait.

I would master the sounds of the language as best I could.

I would practice pronunciation until my native speaker teacher said, "Yep, your pronunciation is good." Then I would begin reading first and I would try writing last.

Again, the more you read in any language, in general, the better you will be at writing later because reading is such a great way to acquire vocabulary and to pick up the style of writing.

Most of the people I know are more concerned about speaking than they are about reading and writing, with exceptions.

But that's the order in which I would learn a new language.

I would listen first a lot.

I would hire a native teacher, a native speaker to help me correct and improve my pronunciation.

So I was really familiar with the sounds of the language.

Then I would move on to reading, while continuing to listen, of course.

You never stop listening.

Speaking once I'm comfortable with the sounds and writing, if I was interested in writing, would come last.

That's it.

That's how I would learn a foreign language.

Let me say again, I can't remember if I said this at the beginning, this is how I would do it.

It's for me.

This is how I personally would learn a new language.

It's not the only way.

I'm not saying it's the best way.

For other people, it might be terrible.

I can't judge that.

In the end, the best way for anybody to learn a new language is the way that works for them.

If it works for you, if you say, "I start with grammar.

Every time I learn a language, I start by learning the grammar." Okay.

It's your decision.

It's your life.

Why not?

I wouldn't do that.

But that doesn't mean that it's impossible or a bad idea.

If it works for you, and after a couple of years, maybe you starting with grammar and me starting with listening, maybe we end up at the same place.

It turns out that it doesn't really matter.

I don't know that people have done any kind of formal studies of this.

In fact, I tend to think they haven't.

Lots of people will tell you about bad language instruction, about how they didn't learn anything.

They studied English in school for five years, and they feel like it was a waste of time, particularly with learning to speak.

If you talk to other people about their language learning experiences, you will hear often you will hear very many sad stories.

So I didn't talk much about Italian and Thai, but it doesn't matter.

It's okay.

So I'm done.

Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you soon.

Take care.