Learn Languages with Steve Kaufmann

Someone told me they can speak their second language but cannot understand what people say back to them. I know this one well, because my wife can hold a social conversation in French and Spanish while missing most of what she hears. The fix is not more speaking practice, it is a much wider base of listening and reading. Comprehension is what lets you talk about more than a handful of familiar subjects. Which side are you on right now, speaking or understanding?

I meet a lot of people who tell me, almost with pride, that they understand a language well but can't speak it. Usually two things are going on. Their comprehension isn't as broad as they believe, because they only follow the familiar topics they hear again and again. And they have made "I can't speak" part of their identity, so every meeting they sit through in silence confirms it. Which language do you understand far better than you speak?

When I start reading in a new language, I accept that I am not going to understand most of it. My brother compared it to mowing a lawn: if the grass is high, you set the blades high on the first pass and lower them the next time through. I go over the same content again and again, and each time I pick up something I missed before. Do you push through content you only half understand, or do you wait until you feel ready for it?

Spanish is spoken across three continents, and learners worry constantly about picking the wrong version. But compared to English or Portuguese, the variation is surprisingly small. The vowels stay consistent whether you are in Mexico, Colombia or Spain, and most of what really changes is slang, rhythm and a couple of consonants. I have found that after a day or two in a new country you stop hearing the accent at all and just hear the meaning. Which Spanish accent do you find hardest to follow?

I have somewhere between 60 and 70 shelves of books in this house, well over a thousand of them, in several languages, and I have finally started cataloguing the lot. Going through them reminded me why paper still matters to me. The research is fairly clear that we retain more from paper than from a screen, and I think the reason is simple. When it is just you and the book in your hands, there is nowhere else to go, no pixels, no navigating, no temptation to scroll away. When did you last read a paper book for three hours straight?