Transcription
What's up, grinders? Welcome back to the channel. Every now and then, I'll get a comment down in the comment section. Someone's like, "Evil Dear, please tell me what is the best method in the world? What is Evil Dear TM patented method? Uh I just want to know, okay? Because, you know, you do all these public experiments and trials. You do these reacts where I have to watch like 30 minutes to get like 2 seconds of like good information out of it. Like, please just make one video called Evil Dear Best Method TM."
Now, the problem is, guys, and the reason why I never say this is the best method is because it's dependent on a myriad of data points. Like, you can boil down language learning into like a couple of basic things. But, realistically, one, what's the language you even want to learn? That's going to make a big difference. If it's a sign language, like most stuff that I speak about on this channel just does not apply.
Now, let's assume it's a language that can be spoken. Even then, is it a language like Latin, which is, for the most part, a dead language? Although, there is living Latin communities and stuff like that. So, there, I'm assuming your wants and needs are probably different to most of those people who are learning to speak a language. Is it a minority language with very limited resources? Or is it a massive language with just endless amounts of resources?
Now, that's when it comes to the languages themselves. Now, what happens then if you're the type of person who just wants to watch content or just wants to read or wants to do everything, read, write, you know, the whole works? Or actually, you're just the type person who just wants to understand and just speak, and you don't care about reading. Like, all of these things can make a big difference on the method you should like take up and use.
Now, the final question is, and this is the one that gets a lot of people, is are you the type of person who actually likes to study? Or do you freaking hate everything grammar-related? Because again, that's going to narrow it down to like a bunch of different proposals that I can give to you. Are you the type of person who likes to sit at home and solo study? Or are you the type who likes to get out there or at least get online and speak with others? Again, it changes things. Like, so I can't say this here is the best method because it depends on you and what you want to do.
Now, I know that sucks because you're probably sitting there and going, "Oh man, I was hoping this was the best method. No, [ __ ] now I'm going to have to listen to another 30-minute reaction and then another one and another one and another one to try and figure out what I want to do. I just want to know." I get it, guys. I get it.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to propose a method now based on my experience with language learners, the vast majority that I do encounter. This is based on that group. So, if you are not that group, this doesn't apply to you. Okay? I'm just getting that out there. So, I'm going to assume that you guys want to learn one of the most common languages out there. Like, most commonly learned secondary languages. Let's say French, German, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, one of these languages, okay?
Now, let's make a second uh judgment call here. I'm assuming your priority is to understand content, uh but also to eventually speak. But, you you you don't prioritize speaking as much right now. Now, I know this is going to cut off a bunch of you guys, but the reason I'm focusing on that is because I have a fair fair number of people in my audience who are that's the route they're chasing. So, now we're we're going for a common language with lots of resources, and we're more focused on understanding the language as opposed to speaking, but we do want to speak eventually.
Now, the third one, you hate grammar. You don't want to study grammar. You're not a grammar person. You would you know, back in high school, you and Spanish in the back of the locker room, Spanish felt you up and you felt all weird about it since, and it was whispering sweet grammars into your ear, and you just you can't do that anymore. You don't want any grammar in your life. I get it, okay? Traumatic memories, we'll push that stuff down, we'll let it all come out later on when you're 50 and you're talking with your grandson or something. We're going to talk about now a common language, you want to understand, later on speak, and then you're not interested in going a heavy grammar approach.
And finally, you don't have endless time. You're not a YouTube polyglot. You don't have eight hours to 12 hours in a day to dedicate to this. You got one to two hours max. If you don't have one to two hours a day, you're really limiting your options right now. You could do it on one hour a day, but this is going to take you years. And when I mean years, I mean like five, six plus years. This is going to be a long journey if you don't at least have two hours a day available. Assuming you fill all of that, okay? If that's you, great. Let's keep going. If it's not you, then you might want to bugger off and do something else.
What I would approach this problem with is I'd say, "Okay, based on all of this, you want an immersion-based approach." Uh an approach where you get down and dirty with the language as fast as possible, so you get to enjoy the language literally from day one. Uh but I'm not going to hit you with any form of grammar. But that doesn't mean I'm going to be like, "Oh, well, all you're going to do is sit down and watch content." No, that's that's not good because you got limited time. You got one to two hours a day, right? You You don't want to be doing this for like five years and then only reach like an intermediate level. No, we want to we want you to reach a good level in a couple of years at least, okay?
So, in this instance, I would say from day one, the very first thing you need to do is actually research the language you're looking into. The best way you can do this, and the simplest, is just to go to ChatGPT or Gemini or something and go, "Hey, you know what? I want to learn, let's say Japanese, what are the things most people have struggles with?" And just read. Don't study grammar. Just do a little bit of research. You only need to do about an hour's worth to know everything that you're going to encounter. For example, with Japanese, it would say, "Oh, well, if you're an English learner, there's going to be three scripts you're going to have to tango with. Apart from that, there's a bunch of unique sounds you're going to have to worry about."
Now, I'm not saying go out and learn those sounds, okay? Cuz like, obviously, you're the type person you you're a little bit scared about doing all that stuff, okay? From day one. So, we're going to start soft. We're going to start with understanding the language, and then we'll move into speaking a little bit down the track, okay? But you don't have to learn the grammar. You're just asking it questions. Give me an example of how it's different. If it was literally, you know, two sentences in English where there's a big difference. Just show me. Just get a bird's-eye view of what's different between the two languages. This is not you studying grammar. This is just you visually seeing on the screen where the differences are. Spend about an hour. Just ask it some questions. You know, get a get a bird's-eye view. That's pretty much it.
Now you've done that, cool. Let's actually start. So, the first thing you're going to want to do is download an application called Anki. It's a free piece of software you can find online. Tons of videos on how to use Anki. I've got videos on my channel and other people have made videos, but you'll get that.
Now, what we're going to do is we're going to spend the vast majority of your time literally with the language. So, if it's Spanish, you can go get a service like Dreaming Spanish. If it's Japanese, you can go get Comprehensible Japanese. It's another service. If it's freaking Chinese, I think there's like Lazy Chinese. Like, there's lots of different services out there which just provide you lots of content at a very basic level, basically from zero, and then slowly moving up. But, you do not follow the recommendations of those websites. They will recommend a process that will keep you on those websites for a very, very, very, very, very long time, for years, locked into a subscription service. However, their content is great, but the way they propose you use it, not so great.
So, you're going to get one of those services. So, let's say the the Dreaming Spanish one, okay, for Spanish content. And you've got your Anki sitting there. Now, what do you do with Anki? The first thing you're going to do is you're going to basically start creating, let's say, six flash cards a day. Don't go more than that. You may feel like on day one, six is freaking nothing. But, you've only got two hours. If you start building about more than six cards, that's going to, with the reviews in the next few days, start stacking up major time. Like, you do 15 and you're going to start having like 50 reviews within a week, okay, like every single day. And for most people, they'll [ __ ] out at that point. So, let's We're going to start simple. Six. If that even sounds a little bit traumatizing for you, pull it down to five. Six is a nice number though. You you're not really going to feel six.
So, what are the six cards you're going to make? Well, what you're going to be doing is you're going to be watching a lot of input on these services such as Dreaming Spanish, Comprehensible Japanese, Lazy Chinese, whatever it is, okay? However, in conjunction, you're going to basically optimize that path. So, you're going to create some flash cards. The flash cards you're going to create are audio flash cards. You're just going to listen to the language. We don't bother with the scripts or anything right now.
So, how can you create these flash cards? Well, let's think about the types of cards that you're going to need. When you watch that content, you might be thinking, "Oh, well then, the best flash cards I can make that I could listen to, audio flash cards, would just be based on a frequency list, right? I should just go look for the 1,000 most common words." No, don't do that. Instead, what you want to do is focus on the words that are hard to pick up from input. So, words like dog, cat, these things are super easy to pick up from input. Like literally in all of these services, they will point to the cat and they'll say, you know, cato. Well, in like Esperanto, gato or mal, you know, like all these different words. They'll just point at it and you'll know straight away what they're talking about. What you want to do is get those hard words, the words that would normally take an immersion approach 1,000 hours to get and shove those in from day one.
So, the first six words, they might literally just be the pronoun for I. Now, I know you guys are freaking out and you're like, "Oh, I don't want to learn grammar. You just said pronoun." You don't need to learn grammar, okay? You just need to recognize basic words. So, you go to Gemini and you say, "Okay, how do I say I in this language?" Now, in some languages there'll be one word. Other languages, like, you know, for example, um Japanese for instance, there's many ways to say I. You just say, "What are the most common ways to say I in this language?" Okay? Now, if you did your research beforehand, you will know whether this could be a stand-alone word. In some languages, the pronouns are completely attached to, you know, the rest of the language in ways that you can't pull out. And in that case, fine, don't do it. So, just remember, research first so you understand the differences.
Now, if this is like most languages where the pronoun is an independent word, then you can just say, "Okay, it'll give me five words." Do you need to learn the differences between those? No, don't bother with that. Just grab all five of those, run them through a text-to-speech engine uh for whatever language you're learning, crop that audio, and whatever way you want, put it in the flash card on the front, and on the back just write out the word I.
Now, what you're going to do is you're going to run through those six cards, and you might want to review them several times over until you can hear that word and you know it means that word. Now, you might have on your first day of six cards four words for I. So, what do you do for the other two words? Start picking out the most common things that you're going to start seeing in content. So, you're going to do a feedback loop on yourself. So, the first video you watch on that Dreaming Spanish whatever or comprehensible Japanese website is, uh it's just going to be, I don't know, it's probably it's going to be something like someone's going to pick up some glasses and be like, "Hey, this is glasses. Glasses, you know, I've got glasses. These are my glasses." And you're already going to hear that pronoun I I I all over the time because you just practiced it a bunch of times in your flash cards. So, everything else in that video is not going to be recognizable to you except for the thing that they keep repeating over and over, the glasses, the glasses. So, by the end of that video, you're probably going to recognize the word glasses when you hear it. You're not going to be able to say it, but you're going to hear it. So, there's no point you putting that in your flash cards. That's just a wasted flash card. But the pronoun I, that one will trip you up cuz you won't know what you're looking for cuz it could come at the beginning, it could come at the end. The finger pointing is not really going to do it. Sometimes, maybe when they do this, you can, but it's it's very hit and miss, okay? Especially when they can change in different ways.
So, you're listening to that and you're like, "Okay, cool, I've got that. I can hear the word I popping up in its different context here. Uh What other words? Well, what's the words that have been pointing that have been going this that. Now, some languages have many ways to say this and that. Like there may be one word for this and three words for that, you know, like it could doesn't really matter. Again, just go to the AI and say, "How do I say this and that?" And it will tell you, okay? You can ask it a couple of questions and be like, "Can you give me an example of like where they might be different?" Like this is not you studying grammar, this is just you getting a bird's-eye view of how this works. Once you know whatever the words for this and that are, then do your flash cards. That's day one. Watch a bunch of content, try and listen in for the this and that I.
Day two. Okay, well, you're going to go back to that content. Before you do, you refresh your flash cards, you do your practice, then you watch the content again, okay? Now, the content you're watching is going to be some other random video on one of these services. In the next video, you're probably going to see them going this I that I. And you might notice that they're like because in pretty much all of these services, the first things they're trying to teach you is questions and how they work. What do you think would be the best thing to go put in your flash cards? Questions. How to say who, what, where, when, how. Just ask the AI. Again, they may not work like English. They may be things that go at the end of the sentence, like a random piece that goes at the end. They may come at the front as independent words. Again, this is not me saying you must add these words. This is me saying go do a little bit of research, find out what they say, how it works. Just ask some basic questions. This is not you memorizing any rules. Find out what the way it is done and if it is a standalone word, into the flash card.
Now, you've got the most common words like the who, what, is, where. You've got the pronoun, you're going to add the other pronouns in, you know, for him, her. And you're going to do this day by day. But I don't want you adding nouns in. Nouns as in, you know, bottle, table, chair. All of those things you will pick up from the content very, very fast. I also don't want you to worry about adjectives. Don't bother with that stuff. But things like only, um actually, and or, these things would make sense to put in there because they're very, very hard to pick up from watching a lot of content. And in no time, you've done six day you've got six cards first day, 12 cards second day. You will find very, very quickly that you're acquiring the essential glue of the language and all the other words you're picking up in context.
Now, how long should you do this for? I can't give you a deadline, but there's going to be a point where you feel comfortable and you understand the beginning type of stuff pretty good. And you're starting to power through and you're starting to get a lot of more words. And at some point you're going to go, "Okay, now I want to speak."
Now, before you open your mouth and you just start speaking, which is what a lot of these services recommend, don't do this, okay? You're going to start what they use in the the language community, fossilizing bad habits. You're going to you're going to screw up your pronunciation from day one. What I recommend you do is find a native, a tutor, someone, okay, to help you with those sounds. You can start on YouTube, look up the sounds of the language. How do you know what sounds are different? Go to AI. "Hey AI, what sounds exist in this language that are different to my native language?"
Now, if you've already done 100 hours, maybe 200 hours, I don't know, of content where you've brought in a whole heap of words, okay? Then you've probably got a pretty good ear for it. Now, you may want to start at 50 hours. You may want to start speaking. This is again, it's depending on you. How much do you want to speak? Some people want to wait a bit so they can get an ear for the language so they can hear the differences in sounds. It really depends on you. There's no good recommendation for how long you should wait, okay? Some people don't even want to wait at all and that's perfectly fine.
So, you will want to maybe go to YouTube and look up those sounds I just talked about. And watch some videos where they actually give diagrams inside the mouth where the tongue's moving around and how it's different like for example, um I saw a video a while ago where they were talking about the T in this language and how it's different to English, but it looks and sounds very very same, but it's just slightly different. Basically, the tongue is just in a slightly different spot, and they literally show you a diagram, and I was like, "Oh." And I moved my tongue there, made the sound the exact same sound. It's like, "Boom, got it. Okay." But if I just tried speaking without looking that up, I would have just done the English T, and then every word that had that T in it would have been just cemented permanently that way, okay? Until I went back 2 years later after someone kept pointing it out to me, and then I spent an obscene amount of time correcting it. You can correct things, don't worry about that, but just for pronunciation sake, this is the one time you want to try and get things down is before you start speaking. And the best way is go watch some videos, understand it, then go grab a tutor. You're not going to need long, couple of hours of tutoring, okay? Where people just correct you if you're doing it wrong, even after watching the videos. This is kind of critical, okay? This will make a massive difference down the road. So, you don't have to worry about many things in language learning, but this is the one spot where you you want to spend a little bit of time. Just Those tutors, they can they will give you some example words, and you try to say them, and as long as you can pronounce them, you're fine. You're good to go. You can keep moving forward, okay?
Now, learning scripts, it's it really depends on you guys when you want to do this. Like, you may want to do this as like a side thing from the beginning, or you may want to delay it until ages away, cuz like reading is it's very dependent on person to person. Some people you want to read right away. Some people don't even care about it at all, okay?
Okay, so you've learned the sounds, should you start speaking? No. Okay, so there's this concept called shadowing, chorusing, they're all slightly different, okay? Mimicking, doesn't matter. Go look it up. Basically, it's where you listen to some actual someone actually speaking the language, and you try to repeat after them. You know the sounds now, okay? And assuming it's using a Latin-based script, it should be pretty easy to superimpose those sounds upon, you know, what you're seeing. Now, if it's like Chinese or something, this is harder, but you can work off of things like Pinyin. But, you want to try and do a little bit of this. And by a little bit, I mean probably a fair bit, okay? You want to You want to do like hours worth of this. And this is probably the most boring part for a lot of people, but what we're trying to do now is to get you into a natural flow of the language before you start generating your own sentences. So, you want to practice these over and over and over, okay? And like certain sentences here, there, just just keep just do this a fair bit.
Now, you're at a stage in the language where you either like an advanced beginner, or maybe you're intermediate, or maybe you're even right at the beginning, but you've got a basic understanding of the language. You haven't had to study any grammar. You probably got anywhere from a couple of hundred words down to a thousand words you already understand, and then lots more that you can passively kind of understand. Now, that deck that you created earlier, you could then go back and just practice all those words in it. You could just create a separate deck, and rather than just listening to it, now you try and practice speaking with them.
But, when it comes to output practice, this is where you want to start speaking, okay? So, you're going to work with another type of card system, which is called a close card system. And I know I'm throwing out lots of information right now. This is like super freaking dense, okay? And if people want specific videos on specific parts, I may have that video already on my channel, or I may drop it. We shall see, okay? But, my point being is you're going to start using these close cards. And close cards are basically where you have a complete sentence in the language on the front of the card, and one part of it is hidden. And the job is you read it, and you need to fill in the hidden part. So, the idea here is that by reading it, your brain will predict what that missing part is. And if you do this for a lot of basic sentences, and how can you get these basic sentences? You You go to AI and ask it. And by this point, I'm assuming you're an advanced beginner, maybe an intermediate level. You are able to tell when AI is already making some stupid mistakes. If you're worried, you can just keep a tutoring session going with, you know, one of the the natives and ask them to just check the sentences that you're adding in before you add them in in practice. But there there comes a point where you're able to ask AI and be like, "That looks wrong. There's something wrong with that. There's something fishy going on here, okay?"
But anyway, you're going to get these sentences and you're going to start adding these in. And you're going to focus less on listening to those uh audio cards. And you may even get to a point where you just straight-up delete that and remove it. Because now you you have the pronunciation. You have the ability to speak the language, okay? You just need to practice lots and lots of sentences with components missing so that your brain gets good at making that fill-in. It gets good at filling in those gaps. What kind of sentences you want to add? Again, this depends on what you want to achieve. There's concepts called language islands, templates. All of these things have been popularized all over YouTube. Basically, you pick sentences around topics that you care about. For me, it's gaming. So, I want to be able to talk in a like a gaming context quite a bit. So, I'm going to build out sentences that are based around that. For example, "What's up, guys? Welcome back to the channel. Today, we're going to be playing." You know, these types of sentences that are kind of run-on long sentences. Get it from a native. You can mine them from videos. Mining is another concept where you basically go to a video, you find a sentence you love, and you're like, "This is exactly what I want." Take the whole sentence, put it in your Anki, close out certain parts of it, practice it over and over.
Now, obviously, depending on what you want to achieve, you're going to want to at this point also not just be watching content, try and make goddamn friends in the language. The more you make friends in the language, the more the language just becomes part of your life, okay? You can do this in many different ways. Like, I've made friends in, you know, for example, in Spanish. And the way I do that is just over YouTubers. I just hang out and I play games with them. There's plenty of places you can go to make friends. And from there, it's really up to you how you want to take it.
Now, I know this is not all-encompassing. I haven't given you all the information. This is more specific to a certain type of person, and you may not be that person. This is why I cannot make the ultimate language learning video, because there is no specific way. Certain things I spoke about in there may not apply to you. You may not even enjoy it. If you don't enjoy it, then it doesn't matter how [ __ ] optimized it is. It's a terrible idea for you to do. This is why I have so many videos on my channel where I just give input, because realistically, you need to find what works for you.
However, talking about that specific method I spoke about just there, I am thinking about maybe, in the future, using that to make a series where I actually learn another language using that method for that specific individual, cuz I think that does cover a large amount of people, but not all people. And then you can like walk through that whole thing with me. If you're interested in that, sub to the channel, because I am looking into another language challenge, which will start sometime soon, which could mean anytime in the next 6 months. Uh and I may end up using that method uh if that's what people want. At that time, you'll know when it comes to it, because uh I'll let my community vote on what happens next.
Okay, I hope you guys have enjoyed this video, and I'll see you all in the next video. And if you're not there, you better be grinding your language.