Hi, Steve! How can I know the Real meaning of a word? Many times I look up the meaning in online dictionaries and google, google tranlator and chatgpt, but I feel so lost and confused, because the meaning of the word in a particular context, doesn't match with the context. There are many meanings for only one word. 😥 What should I do?

I'm learning English, and I was watching the movie Fast and Furious 1, a movie about races, and the sentence was: I used to drag here back in high school. To drag in that context is to race for a short period of time, in my language Brazilian Portuguese We say🇧🇷: Tirar um racha. São corridas de arrancada. Drag race! To drag is a slang in that context? Even if a word is a slang, when I search for the meaning on Google, still there're a lot of meanings, and again I feel so lost and confused about the Real meaning to that context.

Здравствуй, Стив! У меня есть вопрос для твоего стрима. Я смотрел твоё первое видео в этом плейлисте, где ты даёшь новогоднее обещание себе, что будешь получать удовольствие от процесса обучения языкам. Ты указываешь, что на Lingq существуют системы мотивации, например, челленджи и монеты, но это всё не главное. Я полностью с тобой согласен! Может быть ты читал книгу Альфи Кона "Наказание наградой", в которой рассказывается, что наше общество во-многом построено на ошибочно представлении о мотивации - что внешними стимулами можно повысить мотивацию. На самом деле это два разных типа мотивации: внешняя и внутренняя, и внешняя мотивация не поддерживает внутреннюю, которая обычно сильнее и и стабильнее, а наоборот, подавляет её. Некоторое время назад я занимался на Lingq, но потом заметил, что стал выполнять минимальное количество заданий, только чтобы сохранить прогресс, при это совершенно не получал от этого удовольствия. Так вот, мой вопрос: не хотел бы ты рассмотреть вопрос пересмотра системы мотивации на Lingq? Я много размышляю на эти темы и был бы рад обсудить с тобой то, как можно это сделать. Можно создать локальный проект, чтобы проверить эти теории, а в случае успеха, мы смогли бы помочь огромному количеству людей осваивать языки успешнее и привлечь на Lingq больше пользователей. P. S. Спасибо за то, что высказываешься по поводу войны в Украине! Я из России, но после начала войны мы с женой уехали из России в знак протеста и ради своей безопасности. Сейчас мы живём в Аргентине и мы очень благодарны всем тем добрым людям, которых мы встретили за границей и которые помогали нам.

@@berlin3918 My suggestion would be: use academic dictionary. A book is a book. Online translaters are only shortcuts, which can be good but not in a long term.

@@berlin3918I feel your pain because I was going through the same situation back in the days,but I can give a piece of advice about it.For example,if a word has 5 different meanings you can try to familiarize yourself with them 5 one by one .Like today,you can challenge yourself to use the word in only one of the 5 different contexts until you master it well and tomorrow,try to learn it in a different context and so on. Never try to learn them all at the same time at the beginning

And you can't do it all in 6 months. There's just so much your brain can retain at a time. It needs rest. So, realistically, to get good in a language one needs at least 2-3 years. Many become great talkers before that, but acquiring a large vocabulary takes time.

It possible drastically cut learning time if hit with a club every time said wrong)

Sort of, the shortcuts only really apply to the early stages when you don't know anything. You need a few shortcuts to get good enough to where you're not miserably using the language. When I was living in China learning Mandarin, I had to get from basically zero to some usable level of fluency as quickly as possible. It was a practical thing that I couldn't just spend a bunch of time with my head in books or watching movies. So, I memorized entire sentences for basic things like eating. I'd learn sentence frames and the things that were allowed to go into them and it got me far enough in a matter of a few months that I could largely function. That being said, that's about as far as you're likely to ever go doing that. Beyond that memorizing phrases and sentences benefits you at most in terms of helping you to follow along with the things you're reading and hearing. You get a bit like that, but not really that much.

​@@borissapron6696Ah, the French Foreign Legion method of language learning. Aka "beating the B1 into you."

It can be argued that starting to learn a language at a later time than childhood requires shortcuts

In defense of Anki: I use it ~10 minutes a day and feel it works pretty well for me. But I use it for words that I have looked up (encountering them in a book or tv-show), and want to be sure I don’t forget again. Small but key difference in my opinion, trying not to forget something that appears useful to know, instead of using Anki as a main source of learning new things/words.

@@PeterSmitGroningen what's so bad about forgetting? Forgetting is an important part of learning and if the words are relevant and frequently used in your TL, then they will come up often enough anyway.

@@Syssn3ckDepends. We forget things all the time, that’s normal. But when I read a book, and I realize that it’s already the 3rd time I’m looking up the same word… that just feels useless to me. Also I realized after reading a lot that I didn’t know how certain a words sound (especially words with irregular accent), so I add some audio (from a Text-To-Speech service for instance) to the Anki card. Two birds in one stone. I’m not saying everyone should use Anki, or that it should be your main tool. Just that I like using it to keep newly learned words and concepts stick a little better in my head. Steve doesn’t like it, that’s clear, but he does like other tooling to help with learning like LingQ. What is your approach? What works for you?

@@PeterSmitGroningen fair enough and it seems like you found an approach that works well for you. Personally, I don't have the discipline and motivation to do that (that's probably the main reason for me 😅). For my Spanish, I currently don't worry about output too much and just get more input via intermediate podcasts and the occasional graded reader thrown in to keep things fresh. I started two video games in Spanish over the past few weeks, just to test the waters, and I was surprised that I could mostly follow along, but my comprehension is still on the low end and so I put it aside for now. My English will go into maintenance mode in the next few months so I can ramp up on my Spanish input. I'm at a point, where the curse of diminishing returns leads me to think, that my time would be better invested in another language. I help kids with their reading fluency in German and it's interesting to see the similarities of struggles that we have to overcome. All in all, I think nothing beats the amount of time we spend in contact with the language, but how we do that and what is enjoyable may differ greatly from person to person.

I agree 100% that time spent with the language is the main driver. The tools are just there to make the process a little more enjoyable or frictionless

Well thought out. It is the practical suggestions and experience that speaks louder.

Bro, I'm studying Japanese 1 hour every day . some days I study 2 hours but it's becomes boring and stressful. I still think that 1 hour is not enough for me😢.I'm learning English too, I'm trying to do my best every day, when I find a video in Japanese on you tube there are a lot of unknown kanji an vocabulary. I started learning in 2022

@@fillipe6732It might help you to accept the fact that there will be a lot you won’t understand for a long time and it’s totally fine. You’re learning it, it’s necessary and natural to not be able to do something for it to be learned. But you can still enjoy content where you don’t understand many things. A lot of communication goes through context, tone and mimic I found, even in anime where you can’t see real faces at all. Be patient, I am sure you’ll do fine 👍

He had spend six hour per day with chinese but because he was pay for that. ( It's in his book )

@@fillipe6732 Do you vary your study methods? Using different resources helps break it up a little.

@flashgordon6510 Yes, I read and listen to a large variety of subjects that I can understand a little bit. Generally, I'm watching KZfaq videos , interviews and online newspapers in both languages:English and Japanese

yep,when i begin to learn a new language,sometimes just like,you know,jues like i am a little baby,but a adulted baby, so when someone gald to answer to me the same question over and over again,it to me is very helpful.

Memorized sentences is where I usually start when I've got a new language that I need to be able to manage in. It helps me know that if I pronounce that correctly, I can focus on the response that I'm getting rather than just on what I'm saying. After that, I'll usually learn a bunch of sentence frames and what's allowed to go into the blanks. Then, it's just a lot of practice and exposure for the rest of it. The first two bits are definitely shortcuts as there are longer ways of doing it, but I got a ton out of doing it with Mandarin when I was living in China and needing to get things done on my own. I started with effectively zero Mandarin and within a couple months I knew enough to be able to feed myself and get around. I could even travel city to city by bus without too much trouble. That being said, there's still a ton that I don't know because I haven't really studied long enough, and that's basically just going to be a combination of book learning and exposure to the rules alongside actual exposure to real media and learning whatever grammar and vocab makes that easier.

can i ask you,when your beginning stage to learn spanish,what did you do for it,i mean,reading Harry potter in a new language is very difficult.because it is not very easy for beginner. i am a native Chinese speaker,i tired to read harry potter in english two months ago,but it is too difficult for me,so many difficult adjective and some difficult words.i fell that reading it in a foreign language is to hard.so i can't consist to read it. can i get some experience about how to improve reading skull of a foreign language from you?

@@user-mu4qw5dv5mGo slow. Reread chapters as needed. Sound it out and say it.

@@user-mu4qw5dv5m . Sorry I just saw this. Well English and Spanish were similar enough. And Spanish is easy to pronounce and is spelled very much like it sounds. This is not the case for french. To go from Chinese to English seems like a tough crossover with Harry Potter. For french I'm watching more tv and movies and trying to not have subtitles on at all after I've seen it once. Then I retry reading every couple weeks. Sorry I don't have better answers. But I'd say do anything that you will keep doing every day and you'll get somewhere

@@lazstan Thinks for your reply.I am very appreciate it!Since i've send that comment to you,two months have been pass. Even thought i've said that reading harry potter in english was too difficult for me four months ago.But now i can almost understand the first book of harry potter series.Harry potter and philosophy stone.Due to keeping learning.Not only my reading ability but also my listening and writing and speaking capability have a great breakthrough.According my own experience,I one hundred persent agree with what you have said in the comment applied to me.Keeping do it every day will make you better and better.

I think I recall him answering a similar question about Russian.

I agree 👍

@@imoliver2822 🙏

I've also been learning Japanese, and mnemonics have been a tremendous help when learning kanji. Especially for the more complex ones, being able to break them down into parts and create a mental image or story has really helped me recall new characters. I've been using Wanikani, and it's been great for those reasons. It doesn't focus as much on vocab or sentence structure, so LingQ has been helpfully for that.

​​@@justjordan1300Hi, could you please explain to me how it works? thank you.

@@oswaldocaminos8431Which part? Wanikani?

@@oswaldocaminos8431 If it's for the Kanji, the correct way to do that is to learn the components and what sort of components they are and structure the mnemonics around that. Kanji is pretty annoying compared with learning them as part of Chinese because they have more possible ways of being read. Chinese characters rarely have more than 2 possible ways of being read, and it's usually because the character is the result of multiple characters having been merged at some point. Outlier linguistics has some pretty good resources for characters whether they're being used in Mandarin or Japanese.

Personally, I recommend minimal pairs and working to identify which one it is until you can hear the difference. (A minimal pair is just a pair of words that are only separated by a sound. For example, that and fat, they only differ in that initial th versus f) Once you hear the difference, then you should be able to focus on making the correct sound and identifying it as you speak. And yes, that works with tones, it's just that the tones are another layer. You'd learn the 4 tones of Mandarin, then you'd learn the pairs of tones, then you'd work to replicate entire sentences in the language to get a more natural tone sandhi. It didn't take me that long to get that down to the point where I could get myself in trouble because the folks I was talking to thought I knew far more Mandarin than I needed. (Having the language on in the background at all times will help that as well, this is an exception to the rule about not being able to learn by mindless exposure)

I do support that Thai should be added to LingQ! 😊 Same second question, different wording : does it make sense that we as adults use the same way of learning as toddlers?

Greetings from a fellow Brazilian! It's quite hard to find those of us who also like learning languages, but just in this comment section I already found three - excluding myself, of course. Our language sets us in a good spot for learning other ones, structurally and phonetically. It's a shame many Brazilians don't even give themselves a chance to language learning - or just fall in the whole language, mostly English, course scams - e.g. in my school, besides me, only two other students speak English. Eu podia ter respondido em português, mas segui no inglês só por coêrencia mesmo. Fora que é bem provável que outros que leiam esse comentário não falem Português, enfim

I will try to answer this in my video/But a quick answer, don't expect your wife to be your teacher. Learn the language on your own, then when there are opportunities with Polish friends, relatives or in Poland you will find natural occasions to speak Polish with her. Meanwhile you will probably mostly speak the language you are used to using.

IMHO, the best way to learn is to build the bridge from both ends. A lot of exposure to the language and book learning of possible vocabulary and sentence frames. Over time, you should be able to shift more of the effort to exposure and use with only occasional memorization of vocab and grammar.

That makes sense. I struggled with l’argile, meaning the clay in French. So I remembered this: Ahhh Gilles, you have a clay soil. It worked.

We have no immediate plans to do that.

you will learn almost nothing with that strategy. it needs to be active listening. It's the reason why people can move to a foreign country and live there for years without ever learning the local language. Unless you intentionally try to decipher what you're hearing you won't make progress. Google "is passive listening effective?" for more insight on this topic if you want.

@@sorted7405 Ok, thanks!

I gave them a shot but most of the words in my language have similar sounding syllables therefore it took me more time to create associations. Do they work for grammar and corrections?

I think they work for those words that I keep blanking on. But I avoid it for almost all other words.

Read online including comments by advanced users of that language. Reading can be done in little chunks .