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The BEST way to learn a language QUICKLY with books | languagejones | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: The BEST way to learn a language QUICKLY with books
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Core Theme
This content presents a highly effective, science-backed language learning method that leverages modern technology and cognitive principles to optimize learning efficiency and long-term retention.
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Welcome back to the channel everybody.
I've been learning languages
recreationally and later professionally.
Ever since that day when I was 7 years
old and I learned that if I asked my
French great aunt for ice cream in
French, I got ice cream. Like Nelson
Mandela said, if you speak a man's
language, you speak to his heart. And we
all know the quickest way to a man's
heart is through his stomach.
Anyway, that's more than 30 years of
experience trying to learn languages.
And I've tried literally everything. And
I do actually speak a few pretty well.
I've tried classrooms, textbooks,
television, apps, a PhD in linguistics.
Do not recommend. Even traveling to
foreign countries, and just trying to
talk my way out of situations. That last
one is how I ended up jumping from a
moving train in China. Also not
recommended. Lately, I've been really
thinking about how to optimize my
language learning. This is in part
because looking back at some of the fun
diversions I used in the past, while
very fun, they did not stick. And with a
child running around, don't worry, it's
my child. I don't feel like wasting time
anymore. A couple of years ago, Jesus
has it already been that long. I did a
3-month Persian challenge because I've
always loved Persian. And I thought just
buckling down for a few months before a
trip with a goal would finally get me
there. Third time's the charm, as they
say. Well, third time was not the charm.
But that really got me ruminating on
what went wrong and what I could do
better. And I used those lessons learned
when I found out I was going to Italy
with only a few months to prepare to
great success actually. And I've hit on
by far the most effective method for me.
And I think it'll work for you, too. Not
just because I like it, but because I
built it based on the newest technology
using things that weren't available back
when I was trying to, for instance,
memorize Chinese words from a paper
dictionary. And I built it based on
science. specifically a nice little lip
review of the academic research on
second language acquisition, on learning
and memory, and on neurallinginguistics.
If you look behind me, you'll see I have
a ton of textbooks, and most of the
words and knowledge in them has
basically stayed in them and not in my
head for 30 years in some cases, no
longer. Oh, and I also added just a
little light optimization theory because
it turns out that time spent on the
tedious, ancillary, busy work of
learning is time that you're not
actually learning. So today I'm going to
show you what I'm doing now, what I
recommend, and why it works. Although,
full disclosure, the why it works is
going to be a summary because it really
deserves a deep dive in a video of its
own. If you're new to the channel, I'm
Dr. Taylor Jones. I've got a PhD in
linguistics from the University of
Pennsylvania. And on the channel, I
discuss everything related to language,
linguistics, language learning, and
culture. If you're into those topics, be
sure to subscribe and ring the bell for
If you haven't seen my video on how to
learn from a textbook, I'll link that at
the end. This will cover some of the
same material because of course it will.
But today we'll get into the
nitty-gritty of how to go about learning
from all different kinds of resources
primarily that are textbased. I've been
using a pipeline involving textbooks. I
like Google Sheets, Anki and Hypert and
Google images. But the pipeline is what
matters, not the specific details. So
you could just as easily use the same
pipeline with, I don't know, the
transcript of a podcast, Excel, but
you'll see why I like Google Sheets in a
second, some SRS that isn't ANI, and an
AI image generator. I need to explain
both space repetition software, that's
that SRS I mentioned, and my specific
method. But if you've seen my other
videos on that, and don't want a
refresher, bad choice based on
neuroscience, skip to whatever time
stamp this is for the details of the
workflow. If you're not familiar with
ANI or SRS more broadly, ANI is a spaced
repetition software. It's basically
flash cards on steroids because you can
make digital flash cards with images,
sounds, fill in the blanks, and all
sorts of other formatting. You name it.
And the simple innovation on top of that
is that it asks you how hard or easy it
was to remember the thing you were
trying to remember and then shows you a
card to review at different times based
on how difficult it was for you when you
were trying to remember it. It's
optimized to help you actually retain
the information in the long term and to
make that information quickly, readily
available. I first learned about it, I
think from Gabriel Winer, whose book
Fluent Forever was an excellent resource
for me and I've got a link in the
description if you're interested and
I'll link my video about it at the end.
Before I get to the details of my little
workflow, I want to just quickly explain
how I personally use Anki now because a
good ANI deck is the end product for me.
The neuroscience is unequivocally clear.
We learn words better when they are
accompanied by audio and by images. It's
better when the audio is the target
language spoken by somebody you'd like
to speak like. But even recordings of
your own pronunciations are better than
nothing. And saying a word out loud is
better than thinking it silently.
Similarly, images that are related to
what you were trying to learn boost word
retention. That is when they're
consistently shown with the same thing
that you're trying to memorize each
time. Neuroscientists hypothesize that
this is because it's multimodal and you
make more neural connections, but that's
above my pay grade or below it, I guess,
if you're an adjunct somewhere. In
addition to those things, images that
prime some part of the phenology of the
word you're trying to recall can also
boost recall and retention. Lastly, I
find personally that memorizing words
and small multi-word phrases is far more
effective for me than attempting to
memorize words in the context of entire
sentences, as I did with Persian last
time because it was the easiest way to
cut up the audio. You can do both, and
I'll explain how later in the video. So,
right now, be honest with me in a
comment. Does this even remotely look
like what your current routine is? The
last piece of neuroscience I'm drawing
on is about motivation. I use Anki as a
motivator. I remember back when I worked
for Rosetta Stone, I was all in on their
immersion only approach and I just sat
and did Rosetta Stone all day. The space
repetition was theoretically built in
just as it's theoretically built in for
Dualingo and other resources. But it's
hard to say what the actual system is
because they're all opaque and
proprietary. Ani on the other hand gives
you tons of statistics which is the real
benefit I had been sleeping on. You can
see how many items you've learned
already, how many you're learning but
should not expect yourself to have at
the tip of your tongue when needed yet,
how often you're reviewing, and even how
difficult a given card is, maybe
indicating you should make some changes
to it. It's incredibly motivating for
me, even more so than a multi-day streak
on Dualingo, because I can see the
optimization happening. So, my ideal ANI
card right now is a word or small chunk
of language. I have English on the front
accompanied as often as possible by a
thematically related image. The more
interesting the image, the better. On
the back, I have the word or chunk in my
target language accompanied by the best
audio I can manage and sometimes a
priming image. For instance, I have a
card in Hebrew for an office with a
picture of an office and on the back it
has misad spoken by Azure generated text
to speech and an image of the Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles. Leave me a comment
if you know why that's my partial
phonetic priming. But the question is,
how do I get a good card like that or
even a whole deck from a book or a
podcast transcript or a news article?
Well, you got to do it yourself. Here's
what I do. I start with a document. If
it's already on my computer, so much the
better. I found that OCR, optical
character recognition, is hit or miss
for this. So, even with actual textbooks
I have, I will just type them in myself
if I don't have a digital version. Not
the whole textbook, mind you, just the
examples. For the things I want to
learn, I add them to a Google
spreadsheet. The most basic is to add
front and back to a card. Now, I could
type all this in, but that's tedious and
timeconuming. So, I copy and paste the
words, chunks, or sentences I want to
have, and then I use the Google
Translate formula in Google Sheets. Now,
you're seeing why I specifically said
Google. Theoretically, you could try
using something like Chad GBT, but that
seems both timeconuming and wasteful.
Then I correct the output of the
formula. Usually there's probably like
5% of the cards that have an error or a
translation that's different than what I
wanted and I manually correct those. I'm
trying to learn the language after all
and this is exposure to the material and
it helps build memory. The goal is not
to have the fastest completed
spreadsheet after all. The goal is to
learn the content in it. I'll cross off
material or make a mark next to it as
I've gone through it in the textbook.
This is why my Italian textbook looks
like this. And crucially, I mentioned
that sentences on their own aren't great
for me. So, let me give you an example
of how I break that up. Let's take this
sentence in chapter 12 of the routage
colloquial Italian. See, I said it
I know my accent is my accent. Now, I
already know a fair number of these
words, but clearly not all of them. So,
let me show you the linguistic trick
here. Contrary to what your local
generative syntax grad student tells
you, we do not actually think in
complete sentences like this. I've got
my own wellsupported pet theories about
this that I should probably make a video
about some other day, but my view on
this is basically that we think in much
smaller pieces and the pieces that we've
already activated or even said put
increasingly narrower constraints on how
we can say what's left of what we're
trying to communicate. Basically, if
like me, you've ever started a sentence
without knowing exactly how you're going
to finish it, you know what I'm talking
about. So, for that sentence, I'd
identify the main clause or clauses,
then the implied sentences, things that
kind of relate back to one another, and
then all the little bits that modify and
add color. If you're starting from
scratch, you might just go with verbs,
nouns, and adjectives. I don't know.
What I actually did was I added cards
for sew, which is a stock phrase meaning
more and more. pero which means however
the verb to flee or to escape and the
preposition that always happens after ital
the Italians want to escape from the big
city. This was more to have the verb in
context and for a feeling of having
actually added everything in the textbook
textbook
peripheria to live in the suburbs. You
could break this up if you wanted to
into smaller pieces. I'd already learned
pedophidia, so I didn't ad even. I knew
the rest, and I'd already had cards I'd
learned for things like pico. For
Italian, I copy the content, paste it
into my Italian column in my sheet,
automatically translate to English for
the front side, and then correct that. I
do as much of the content of the
exercises as well as I find useful, but
not necessarily all of them. Hopefully,
you can already see that this will work
just as well for a novel or a
non-fiction book, too. you have to copy
and paste or manually type things in.
And when they're not textbooks, they're
not trying to give you a lot of examples
of specific words or conjugations. So, I
might also go to something like
wictionary for more conjugations and
reverso context for a handful of further
examples using those conjugations. And
of course, there's still no need to use
the full sentence provided by Reverso or
whatever. I'm a huge fan of DK
Publishing's visual encyclopedias. And
when I travel next, I plan to pick a few
up on topics I'm interested in as a way
of learning topic specific content, but
I could of course just get started with
Wikipedia. And if you're interested in
the news, you can just get started with
something like Euro News or whatever
your preferred source is for your target
language. The fact that everything in
language follows a Zipfian distribution
means that you'll get a huge bang for
your buck with your first few news
stories. But Jonesy boy, I can hear you
asking, "What about languages with
different scripts?" And yeah, they suck.
You can't copy and paste Hebrew from
PDFs or Persian or a lot of other
languages all that reliably. So for
those languages, my first step is to
either use my own keyboard or to use the
keyboard input on Google Translate to
type the content. It's more
timeconuming, but it's also good
practice. The other option is to use the
English as a starting point and then
correct the translations, but I find as
far as time consumption is concerned,
they're about equivalent. So whichever
makes you least likely to pull your hair
out and scream. Once I've got a
spreadsheet, I'm ready to make cards.
For route Italian, I found this was
approximately 150 to 200 cards per
chapter. For Hebrew, more like 300 to
350. It's just more differenter. I
create a deck with subdecks in Anki and
then do them sequentially. You don't
have to, but it allows me to get started
on learning before I finish the process
of dumping information into my memory
box. For each subdeck, I then just
import the CSV. It populates an entire
deck. Next, I use Hypert, an Anki
texttospech, hence TTS add-on. I pay
something like $5 a month for it, and it
is worth every cent to me. It draws from
all different sources to provide audio,
including 11 Labs, Google, Azure, my
favorite right now, and even Forvo,
which is real recordings of actual human
people. I get my presets the way I like
them and the voices I like. I do a quick
preview to make sure I like how it
sounds and that there's no obvious
errors. And then I add audio in batches
to each subdeck. Then I go through the
deck and add images. This should be a
quick process. Copy paste the word into
Google images and pick something. Don't
overthink it. If there's literally
nothing that makes sense, you can either
pivot to asking an AI to draw something
for you, which is kind of a waste of
time, but I've done it occasionally with
great success by building in phonetic
priming, or you just go without pictures
and use your imagination. All that's
left to do then is actually study the
cards. If I have a trip, I'll actually
do some rough back of the napkin
calculations. So, for instance, I have a
trip coming up in about a 100 days and
I'm using a 14 chapter textbook and I
average about 300 cards per chapter so
far. That means approximately 4200 cards
total and 100 days to learn them for 42
new cards a day. Ani will tell you in
the settings that you should be doing
420 reviews a day. This is doable, but
you can also just say I'm going to learn
most of it and do like 15 and 150 or 20
and 200 or whatever works for you. It's
more about what you can actually do than
what's ideal. With this method, I find I
can cover a full chapter of a textbook
like the routage colloquial in a sitting
of about an hour or so, like getting it
into an I. I plan to use it with the
ultimate French review and practice, the
ultimate Italian review and practice
once I've absorbed the colloquial
textbooks. And I'm currently using it
for Hebrew where I will move on to
content from piece of Hebrew and Zmanit
and this children's encyclopedia that I
like. And I'm very tempted to start
Persian again in January and see if I
can't actually get it to stick better or
if I'm being honest, get my ability to
recall and correctly produce the
appropriate words in the right order
better. Now, if you're a fan of closed
deletion and sentence mining and so on,
this works with those. Using this
approach with books and articles and so
on is honestly just doing sentence
mining but better. I kind of hate the
term sentence mining anyway, but that's
another video for another day. So, let
me know how much of this were you doing
already. I've been doing this now for a
few months and the improvements are
really stark. I'm learning non-endouean
content faster than I was learning
related languages like French and
Italian before. And the related
languages feel like I'm just downloading
it from the Matrix. I'm going to learn
jiu-jitsu. Jiu-jitsu. If you're not
already doing this, and most of you
aren't, I'd love if you do try it. And
if you leave me a comment in a few
months, and let me know how it's working
out. I'll make starter decks, just front
and back of content, maybe with audio,
for some of the things I'm using
available for patrons. So, for the like
12 of you out there learning Italian,
you can grab a copy of the Route Italian
to actually get the explanations and
then add pictures and your own
pneummonics to a starter deck. If you
like what I'm doing with the channel,
you can support it on YouTube with
superthanks or over on Patreon at patreon.com/languagejones.
patreon.com/languagejones.
Please leave me a comment. They are
fantastic for the algorithm. And
subscribe if you haven't already. Until
next time, happy learning. [Music]
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