3. Practice

1. Model of Learning

So now it's time to go to the stage room.

These will actually change their names once we actually started the program.

Once you switch that down for now it's all gonna be the mystery for you.

You don't know what's gonna be there, so it's a little cliffhanger that I decided to leave here.

So if you take a look at the model of studying, it's basically how it's all going to look like, when we will actually study in those 10 days.

I'll give you the basic image of that, and then we'll go more into details.

So our main strategy is that we are going to do sentences, and stories.

What we will do is we will just speak to ourselves.

We will talk out loud, and we will create sentences all the time.

That is all the magic here.

And so by creating these sentences, and doing that all the time, applying the new vocabulary, and practicing the grammar, we are learning the language.

Creating sentences is actually what helps us here learn the vocabulary faster because the sentences, they actually give the context of the situation to the words that you learn, and more than that, you also get used to speaking, you get used to thinking in that language.

And also grammar.

With grammar is going to work the same.

You create sentences, and you use the grammar practically.

You apply it from the start.

So again, it's easier to learn the grammar because you have the context of the situation.

It's easier to memorize that this way, and you use it practically from the start.

You practice it.

You don't forget that, and you actually make your brain used to that.

So it's just gonna come up naturally for you, when you speak later on because if you learn the past tense, but you don't put enough time into that, you won't really be able to use it actively, when speaking.

But once you actually use that enough, once you use that for a couple of days, that is when you will really start to be able to use the past tense, and that is our goal.

So that is why we create sentences all the time, and that is why we apply the grammar as fast as possible to actually make you able to use that actively, not just when doing exercises in a book.

That is why we have to apply that from the start, and that is our goal.

So by creating sentences we practice the vocabulary, we make it all interesting at the same time, and we also practice, and learn grammar.

Creating sentences, and speaking to yourself is what's going to transfer the things from the short-term memory to the mid-term memory and then to the long-term memory.

Maybe you can still remember the example that I've actually gave you with philology students: that they learn grammar in big numbers and then they can really apply that.

It's because they go for a new concept with every class, and they don't have enough time to process that and to get used to that when speaking.

They sort of know that in the short-term memory, but they are not used to that.

They can apply that on paper, but they can't actually process that in head when speaking.

You don't want that.

It's better to know less grammar, but to be really able to actually use that.

And everything in grammar will come with time.

It took me like eight or nine months to actually get ready for the subjunctive in Spanish.

Everything comes with time.

You can force it before, but it will eventually come with time anyway, so maybe there is no point to actually force things.

Especially, if you feel like you can't learn it at a given point.

So that is the whole premise of this method.

That is actually what we are going to base ourselves on.

That is what helps us memorize things in a proper way, that is what helps us actually develop this active vocabulary.

But to make it more clear, and to actually make it understandable because I know that it might seem confusing, I prepared this example for you.

So if you take a look at our schedule here, this is the example of schedule that you will have to make yourself, by the way.

You can see that there are different blogs here, that are present, let's say, time frames.

The amount of time that you have to invest for a given activity, if you want the challenge to work.

So we are going to have different activities here, we are going to have things that are purple.

Purple, for example, represents learning the conjugation in the present tense.

This score represents learning the past tense.

This is what represents other things, but what we really want to actually focus ourselves on? We want to focus on pillars now.

We have two main pillars of this program.

So these pillars are the real bones of this program, I would say.

Now I'm going to explain what you're supposed to do exactly in those.

So, the pillar number one is where we actually start to some extent.

This is where we look for new words, and where we also look for new elements of grammar.

You can just think about words that you want to learn to create sentences and you will look for these words you will write them down in your, notebook, and you will try to actually learn them.

What do I mean actually by learning them? Pillar number one is where we try to put the vocabulary in our short-term memory.

And so what I mean by that? I mean that we have to put enough time to every single word here.

We can't just write words afterwards, one after another.

Because if we do, then we are going to confuse them.

We can't do that.

We have to put enough time.

We have to spend like three minutes, something like that, with every word that we find.

We have to create sentences with them.

We have to repeat that out loud.

Maybe we can sing some songs with that word, but the goal is to actually introduce this new word, this newly learned word, to our memory so that it stays there, in a clear way.

That is what you do here.

You look for those new words, but from the start, you try to actually pay attention.

You respect them.

The second thing that we do here is we learn grammar here.

So we look for new things that we will need to create sentences.

That's why we also look for these words because we need both: we need the words, and we need the grammar.

And so, we already have words, you already know how to look for them, you already know how to learn them.

You know that you have to have them in the short term memory for now.

Then, let's say, you were starting, so you need to know the pronouns, so you look for the pronouns, you read how they work, what they are, and then again, you try to memorize them, and you try to create sentences with them.

So this is what you're doing, basically, in the pillar number one.

You're mostly gonna focus on looking for new words here, but you will also have to look for that grammar, and this is going to be necessary just to be able to create the sentences.

So looking for new things to expand your sentences: that is what you do.

But you also have to spend enough time with those things so that you have that in the short term memory.

It's not like you can jump from one thing to another.

Please, remember that, and at the end, I will also talk about the revisions that you will have to do in the pillar number one.

But I want you to get this basic idea.

The pillar number one is where we mostly look for new grammar, and new vocabulary.

For example, in my case it was with an exception of the past tense, and conjugation because for the conjugation I have those other blocks.

Why did I do that? Well, it's because conjugation, and the past tense and, for example, future tense, these are the concepts that will require more time, and that you will have to focus on them more.

For example, if you go for the conjugation, you will already have to learn a lot of new vocabulary there, and so there is no need to also learn words that are not connected to those verbs because you already have a lot to learn.

I think that you get what I mean.

But obviously, if you're, for example, learning the conjugation, and you're just doing that, you are not doing the pillar number one.

You can still look for some new words, and you can still create sentences.

It's up to you.

But I do have them both separate here because with learning the conjugation or, for example, learning the past tense, you focus mostly on those forms.

Whereas, in pillar number one you do look for new things, you learn new grammar, but you do that only by creating sentences.

Whereas, for example, in the conjugation, you can do other things that we will talk about later.

Pillar number one is creating sentences.

You create sentences, you speak, you talk to yourself, and you look for new words.

So at start on the, for example, first, second, third day you can't really express yourself, so you create simple sentences that you would like to create, and out of curiosity, let's say, you look for new words that you could add to these sentences.

You try to create different sentences.

Maybe you try to do small monologues, and you just look for the words that you lack.

But the most important thing is that you write the vocabulary down in your notebook, that you spend enough time with that, that you don't jump from one word to another, that you also practice the grammar by looking for new grammar, and also by putting the new learned grammar into sentences, in which you also practice the vocabulary.

Once again, you look for things that you will need to create sentences in terms of grammar, you look for a new vocabulary, and you practice that when creating sentences to really make it stay in your short-term memory, so that you don't confuse it.

Remember, those three minutes are very important for every single word.

And pillar number one will also have a revision in it.

It might be surprising for you because you might be thinking that it's only about learning new words.

Not exactly.

To some extent yes, but the revision is also going to be important there to actually keep the vocabulary stay in the short-term memory.

So when we think about doing revisions in the first pillar, you do the revision of the two previous pages, once you finish a page.

We are counting that finished page to that.

So I will actually give you a simple example.

Let's say there is a word that you want to learn, and you are in the pillar number one.

You take it, you repeat it like three, four, five times, you create sentences with it, you speak out loud, you do all those things.

That is what I mean by paying attention to that word.

That is what I mean by spending time with it.

After that, you write that word down, for example, and you go for other words.

Once you finish that page, once you have like 10, 15 words on that page, you are doing the first revision so that word that I mentioned is gonna get a first big revision here.

After a break, after you were both separate.

Once you finish the next page, it's gonna get the second revision.

Now I will talk about the pillar number two which will actually help us transfer the vocabulary from the short-term memory to the mid-term memory so that it really becomes active, and so that it stays in our head for a longer time.

Pillar number two is going to be based mostly on revisions.

What you will do is you will take the notebook that you write the words in, and then you will go over every single word that you have there, and you will try to create a sentence out of it.

One, two sentences with every single word that you have there.

That is your main revision of the day.

You go over every word that you have in your notebook.

By doing that you revise the vocabulary that you have learned in the pillar number one, but you also revise the grammar by creating different sentences and more than that: you also practice creating sentences.

At start it will be very simple to actually make like three, four full notebook revisions because you will not have a lot of words written in your notebook,after like one or two days of studying.

Later on, it will take a lot of time because you will have a lot of words there already.

At the end, you should have something like 300, 400 words, so you can imagine that creating sentences like that will take time.

It gives us the space repetition.

You have to stay focused here.

You can do mistakes.

By the way, you should also check, if you are correct, especially at start.

You need to verify, if your sentences are correct.

For seeing, if you are correct you can do three things.

You can either use context reverso - that is a translator that actually shows you the translations in context, so you can use that.

You can write your sentences there, and if you will find sentences like that, it means that they exist and so that they are correct.

The second thing that you can do is you can have a language partner who will help you correct the sentences that you make, who will tell you where you do mistakes.

And the third thing is that you can actually get yourself a tutor that will do that for you.

What I did? I basically used context reverso, and I asked people on the discord channel, if these sentences are correct or not.

Then I just wrote that down and tried to actually fix those mistakes on the way later on.

You should try to actually correct your mistakes in both pillar number one and the pillar number two, but just make sure that you don't get too crazy about that.

You should be like eighty percent correct.

You don't have to be perfect because if you just try to create only perfect sentences, then you will lose your motivation, and you will spend too much time on that.

At least try not to make simple mistakes, respect the word order, do questions in a proper order.

You know, these are the things that are easy to spot, and you should pay attention to that.

But let's focus back on the pillar number two.

With the pillar number two you do these revisions that I mentioned, and these revisions here are based on the space repetition.

Contrary to the pillar number one where you actually repeat words many times at start to actually make them stick to your head in the beginning.

Here you don't do that.

You only create one or two sentences with a word.

The first few days maybe you will actually manage to do more than two sentences because you will manage to go more than once over your notebook since you won't have that many words, and after that you're done for the day.

Why? It's because to really memorize the vocabulary and to really transfer it to the mid-term memory and to the long-term memory.

You have to forget words.

Yes, you hear me well.

You have to forget words.

With words is a little bit like with relationships.

It's great when you spend time together.

When you actually do things together you feel great.

And that is what you do in the pillar number one.

You're both getting to know each other, you and the vocabulary, and you're spending the time at start to actually develop some connection, this little link.

But the real feeling, and the real love develops itself when you're both separate, when you're actually missing each other.

And so that is how it works here as well.

Spending some time without these words, forgetting them a little bit and then reminding them in that full notebook revision (once a day) is what makes you transfer the vocabulary into the mid-term memory into the long-term memory.

You have to do it two, three, four times, and then these words will transfer themselves At start, you will do, for example, two or three revisions like that because you won't have so many words, but later on you will only be able to do one or maybe you won't even be able to actually finish that, and you will have to finish it next day.

So that is the pillar number two.

Going over every word that you have written in your notebook and doing the revision, doing the main, the most important revision and doing that every day.

Putting most of the time for that, repeating every word that you have learned before, every single word that you have in your notebook.

And there is one last thing that you have to remember here.

Even though we are not focused on looking for new vocabulary here you still should look for those keywords that you need to create sentences with.

When you're doing this revision, when you're doing this full notebook revision, and you're creating sentences, and you miss a given word to actually create that sentence then you should also look for that word, and put it to your notebook, as if it was in the pillar number one.

So that was the last thing.

Thank you for listening, and see ya in the next lecture.

2. Phonetics II

So this is an important part, and you also know that.

If you neglect phonetics, you will have a lot of problems later on because you know how it works.

If you actually learn the pronunciation incorrectly at start, then it's going to be very difficult to fix those mistakes later on.

You will be already used to that way of speaking.

So don't neglect the phonetics.

We also have different possibilities here, and these are also gonna depend on the languages that we are going to learn.

For example, if a language has a difficult pronunciation, then we will have to put more time to that, so we will have to actually choose whether we want to do that or that.

It's like with alphabets.

Whereas if a language is simple, is very phonetical, let's say, like English, then we don't really have a problem.

We can just do everything in a regular fashion.

With those more difficult languages that either have a very difficult alphabet or just have a very strange pronunciation, you have different choices.

If you choose the language of a difficult pronunciation, you can actually first put like 10 days to actually learn the pronunciation, the articulation, every rule.

Just basically learn how to read in the language, and how to articulate different sounds.

That is one thing that you can do.

That's going to be the smart way.

The second thing that you can do is try to do all at once in those 10 days, if you really want to do it in 10 days.

That's gonna be worse because you will be confused.

That is not what I would actually suggest you to do, but again, if you had time, if you had like 12 hours a day, then you could both learn the language and the pronunciation.

I would imagine it this way: first you spend one day learning the pronunciation, and then the second day, the third day, you will try to do both learning the pronunciation and the language, doing both things at the same time.

Maybe studying 12 hours a day would have good results at the end, but that would be just very difficult to do.

You would really have to strain your brain, you would need a lot of motivation for that.

The better thing that you can do is to actually learn the pronunciation first.

Do it without rush.

Learn how to articulate everything properly and then do the challenge.

However, if you don't want to go for that, you can also do it at the same time.

It will work, but it will require a lot of effort, and it's gonna be just pain in the arc, and you might end up actually mispronouncing words a lot.

So that also depends on the language that you are going to choose.

If we think about languages that are rather simple like Spanish or Italian, these languages are gonna be perfectly fine, if you do it all at the same time in those 10 days.

With the languages like German you don't really have to wonder about that because it's also simple.

With French, on the contrary, you can do it in with a guy who did that in 10 days, but his pronunciation was just so bad.

I don't know, if you want these kind of results.

It's gonna be possible.

People will be able to understand what you're saying, but I would really reconsider that because languages like French are very subtle.

You really have to articulate sounds properly, otherwise it will be a problem.

We've talked about that.

I actually told you the story of my friend, who I met in Belgium, who mispronounced French a lot, so it really depends on the language.

You have to think about it, you have to do your own research, and you have to make your choice.

Maybe it would be worth to actually extend the challenge for like five days and have better results.

If I were to study French from the start, what I would do is trying to learn at least the articulation and then write things phonetically, if I only wanted to speak on the level B1 or B2.

Overall, French is going to be troublesome here, I know that perfectly well because it was very hard for me to actually start learning French by myself.

you just have too many rules to memorize, and that will take time.

I will show you how to actually memorize that in a proper way, but again, if you want to do it properly, if you really want to actually learn it from soup to nuts, if you really want to learn phonetics correctly in French, for example, then you will have to put more time than 10 days, so you can give yourself some time extra before starting the challenge or you can just write things phonetically, but you still have to practice the articulation for like one day or two with languages like French.

You don't have too many languages like that, so I don't think that the choice will always be that difficult.

I hope that you get this choice and what are the pros and cons of that, obviously.

Now we are going to talk about the things that you can actually expect from learning phonetics.

With languages like Spanish or German you don't really have to go for the phonetic writing, you don't have to cheat because these languages are easy.

It's worth to actually learn properly because you can read books, you can use a lot of tools, and so on and so forth.

You already know that we tend to have certain sounds in languages that actually repeat themselves from one language to another, and they just have a different letter.

Learning those letters, and finding out what they actually correspond to is what I would call personally learning the pronunciation.

The example of that is what we have here, in Spanish.

The sound that you see here the sound 'h' is actually the phoneme /h/.

This is a common sound.

You have that in many languages.

In Polish, for example, you would write that with the letter 'h', but in Spanish they don't actually do that.

They write it with the letter 'j'.

This little thing here it's phonetic transcription, connected with the phonetic alphabet, if you were wondering.

That is a perfectly usual phoneme that you meet in languages.

It's just that in Spanish it is written with the letter 'j'.

Now the example of that letter: 'jardín'.

That is how it sounds.

It's a perfectly normal sound.

You just have to learn that whenever you see the letter 'j' in Spanish, it's gonna be pronounced this way.

The other way around.

If you want to write that sound down, you will need the letter 'j'.

If you want to, for example, create the phoneme /j/, I repeat: /j/.

Like in 'llamar', 'lleno'.

Then you will have to use this letter here like 'double l'.

That is how it works.

And so every time you will see this letter, you will know that it's supposed to be pronounced /j/: 'llamar', 'lleno'.

Sometimes it's going to be more complicated than that.

As you can notice here, we have these two letters 'c', and depending on the letter that is gonna be after the letter 'c', the letter 'c' will change its pronunciation, so if you actually are in a situation in Spanish that you have the other 'c' followed by the letter 'e', then you pronounce the letter 'c' like 's'.

It's a phoneme /s/, as in 'cenar' and 'Cicerón'.

However, if the letter 'c' is followed by the letter 'a', then it's pronounced as 'k'.

It's the phoneme 'k', as in 'caer' or 'cada'.

So this is going to be a little bit more difficult because you will have to memorize that depending on those letters that actually follow this letter, you will have to change the pronunciation.

That is the kind of rule that you have to learn when learning Spanish, when learning the phonetics in Spanish.

When it comes to articulation, for example, when it comes to actually recreating sounds properly, sounds that are difficult, that you don't really have in many languages, a letter that would actually show us that is the letter 'r'.

So the letter 'r' is going to be pronounced as 'r' or as 'rr', depending on the place that this letter has.

So, for example, when it's at the start of the word, it's going to be pronounced like 'rr', so that is the difference in articulation, and you will have to get used to the fact that whenever you see this letter at start, you have to actually do that 'rr' instead of 'r'.

And so in that case you will not only have to memorize the fact that the 'r' when it's at start it's gonna sound a little bit differently, but you will also have to get used to the articulation.

So in Spanish you don't really have a lot of that, but that's the moment, when French is going to be handy to explain that.

Because in French you will just have to learn both the pronunciation and articulation.

You will really have to get used to different tongue placements, you will have to get used to different shapes of mouth that you will have to do in order to create proper sounds, and I will actually explain why French is going to be troublesome to learn in 10 days.

So you can see that we have many different examples here, and whenever you see these two letters together, by the way, if they are followed by a consonant then they are gonna be pronounced as [ɑ̃].

So when you're studying French, when you're learning French, you have to remember that whenever you see that, and when it's followed by the consonant then it's going to be the phoneme [ɑ̃].

However, when you see these two letters: the letter 'i', and the letter 'n' together in French, they will give you a very similar sound, they will give you a sound [ɛ̃]: [matε̃], [latε̃].

So i don't know, if you can hear the difference: [ɑ̃], [ɛ̃].

I know it sounds quite funny.

I wonder what my neighbors think.

So it's gonna sound like: [matε̃] -[dɑ̃se], [latε̃] - [mɑ̃ʒe].

This is the subtle difference, and you have to be able to tell the difference.

What makes it even more difficult is that you also have the third sound here, and it's actually gonna be created by the letters 'o', and 'n' and again, if they are followed by the consonant, as it is in the two cases before then they're gonna create the sound [ɔ̃].

That is also tricky because there is not much of a difference in between [dɑ̃se] and [ɔ̃].

This is a little bit closed, and this is more open, I would say when it comes to mouth: [ɔ̃] - [mɔ̃], [dɑ̃se] - [mɑ̃ʒe].

So maybe, if you actually mistake these two sounds, the sound [ɔ̃], and the sound [ɑ̃], it's not gonna be a big deal, but if you mistake these two sounds, well then it's gonna become kind of rusty, I would say.

And so the thing that you would have to do here, if you were studying French, is you would have to actually learn how to create these sounds with your mouth.

That might be not the hardest thing.

I think that these sounds are quite simple to create.

Although, if you don't have nasal vowels in your language then it's gonna be maybe more difficult.

In Polish we have that, so maybe it was easier for me because of that.

Well, I just think that these sounds are actually quite simple, and it's easy to spot them.

You just have to learn which letters represent them.

It's gonna be more difficult when it comes to the letter 'e' in French.

And so we have three letters 'e' here, as you can see, that represent three different phonemes.

That is where it gets tricky.

And so the letter 'e'.

When you see the letter 'e' in French, it can either be pronounced as [e] as in [dɑ̃se], [mɑ̃ʒe]: [e] It can be also pronounced as [ə] as in [ʒə], [p(ə)ti]: [ə] so we have [e], and we have [ə] and we also have the third option which is gonna be pronounced as [ε] as in [bεl], [ʒəpεl].

So you have [e], [ə], [ε].

And you have to be able to distinguish that and know why this letter is gonna be different from that letter.

Well, if these letters were alone then obviously we wouldn't have that problem, but there is no such a word in French.

Obviously, they have to be with some other letters and so that is, for example, the sound of the letter that you have at the end, if it's with the letter 'r'.

That is very common in French that if you have, for example, verbs, and they are ended by these two letters 'e', and the letter 'r' then it's always gonna be [e].

That is one of the examples.

Where you can have this sound? Also, for example, if you will have an accent that will go not this way, but the other way around, it's gonna give you that sound: [ə].

That is what you will have in, for example, open syllables.

So open syllables are the syllables that are actually ended with a vowel, but not in terms of writing, but in terms of pronunciation.

You have to actually distinguish that in French because sometimes you will have words that if you actually look at the way they are written, you will have words, you will have syllables that will be ended with a consonant You might be wondering why is it actually pronounced this way, if it's supposed to be a closed syllable.

Well, it's not a closed syllable sometimes because sometimes you don't pronounce different consonants at the end of the word in French, and so we are talking about an open syllable: a syllable with a vowel at the end in terms of pronunciation - when this word is pronounced not how it is written.

And so that is what we have here.

This word has a vowel that is pronounced at the end: [ʒə].

This word you have two syllables here: [p(ə) - ti].

So the first syllable is also ended with a vowel, so we know that it's actually opened, and so we go for the [ə]: [p(ə)ti].

This sound sometimes, I think, you will have to actually feel.

I'm sure that there are some rules, but I can't really recall them right now, but usually, you will have this little thing here facing left.

That will actually indicate this phoneme.

So this is what I mean.

French is gonna be very troublesome here.

There are a lot of rules and also being able to articulate these sounds.

It's not gonna be simple.

You will do mistakes a lot.

You really have to get muscle memory going here.

So you can, again, either do it properly and put more time, definitely more time than 10 days or you can do it in a improper way and speak French like the most people speak on the internet, actually.

Again, I don't want to be criticizing anybody.

It's not about criticizing people because it's also a good thing that you learn languages just to speak them in a very basic way, but if you actually take a look at the videos with polyglots, they always speak French with a very bad pronunciation, and that has to do with the fact that they haven't spent enough time with that, that they didn't invest enough time into actually getting used to that and to actually being precise here.

That is not a bad thing.

That is just their choice.

They want to communicate, they don't want to be perfect.

To be perfect you need more time.

Because of that you have to choose.

It's just that you can see the example of how it's gonna look like, if you actually want to save time here with French.

But let's go to the German.

I think, it's enough of French.

Just bear in mind that you have so much more to learn, if you want to actually learn the pronunciation in French.

In German it's gonna be very simple.

It's not going to be a problem.

You only have like few phonemes that may actually give you hard time, but it's nothing overwhelming.

One sound that might be actually difficult for people to articulate is the sound 'ü'.

That is actually what you also have in French.

It's just that in French it's actually represented by a different letter.

how do you say that in English? I think in French, it's represented by the letter 'u', but in German it's represented by the ü.

So whenever you see that in German, you know that it's pronounced 'ü': as in 'für'.

And this colon tells you that you need to stress that.

It's not [für] - it's [fü:r].

The other thing to learn in German, for example, would be this.

Whenever you see these two letters whenever you see the letter 'i', and the letter 'e', they are gonna be just pronounced with the [i], as in 'viel'.

So we don't have anything like [fjel], just [fiːl].

But this is gonna be simple.

So with languages like German you will need like two hours to learn that, I think.

Maybe if you are English, then three, four or five hours.

It's gonna depend on your experience with other languages.

With languages like Spanish you will probably need maybe a day, if you want to actually learn properly.

It's also gonna depend on your experience.

Maybe you can do it like few hours and then maybe repeat that over like two next days a little bit to actually make it stick to your memory.

In French it would take like five, ten days, I would say.

It's really difficult for me to tell.

It's gonna depend on your experience a lot here.

But I think that like 20 hours would be enough for that.

For me, it took like a month to actually learn that quite properly, but I didn't study it day by day.

But it's definitely gonna take a few days, I would say, like four days, if you study five hours a day.

It might be not enough if you, for example, would study like hour a day.

But if you did that for like two weeks, and if you actually gave yourself some time to get used to that, then maybe it would work.

So it's really difficult to tell.

French is not gonna require like hours themselves, but you will have to follow the 'space repetition rule' here and actually expand that in time to get used to that.

Well, the muscle memory is going to be important here.

You can really learn it that quickly.

It will be very hard to actually learn it in like two, three days.

You should be able to do that, but you will do mistakes.

It will be very overwhelming for your brain.

You will easily get confused and so on.

So bear that in mind to do it properly.

You have to invest time, and it would be the best if you expanded in time, if you actually study like an hour a day, and if you just let your brain get used to that, if you just develop the muscle memory a little bit here.

It's the best thing here because you have many rules.

It's not like with Spanish that you only have to memorize like few things.

You have really a lot of things to memorize here.

And by the way, at the end of this section here, I will also tell you that if you want to see how it can sound, if you actually totally neglect the phonetics, if you totally ignore that part, then you can google 'Korwin Mikke and Piers Morgan'.

So it was a quite famous interview, I would say or maybe infamous interview.

Korwin Mikke is a Polish politician, sadly, and he speaks many languages.

He's not really that bad at them, but he just has a very bad pronunciation, so you can check that, and you will see what happens if you ignore the phonetics, and maybe it will be also funny or interesting for you.

For me, it was interesting from the linguistic perspective actually.

So up to this point we know what to actually learn, what we actually mean by learning phonetics, what we mean by learning the pronunciation, and articulation.

Now let's talk about how to learn, how to memorize phonetics.

I will give you the example of French here because it has a lot of examples, and so it's gonna be easy.

You can do the same with Spanish, with German.

It is the best thing that you can do to learn phonetics.

I have tried many other things.

I have tried many other ways, and this is the best thing that is possible.

It's a very old-fashioned way of doing that, but chances are if you have never been at the university, if you have never studied languages at the university, you might not know that.

It's actually what you do at universities.

This time I'm not criticizing and telling that it's a very good thing to do.

Maybe it will take a little bit more time, but it will really help you learn everything precisely, properly, thoroughly and so later on, it will not be confusing for you.

And so these photos, they show how I learned the phonetics in French myslef.

So as you can see, I would write different words and, for example, here you can see that the letter that was the most problematic for me was the letter 'e', so the phoneme [ε], [ə], [e] in French.

They wanted to actually practice that so what I would do is just look for different words with the letter 'e'.

I would write them down, and then I would think about the phoneme that they have.

So you can see that it is also connected to the query-based learning here.

I was quizzing myself.

So I would think about the phoneme that they have, and then I would also write the explanation.

For example, here we have the phoneme [ε] because the letter 'e' is in a closed syllable.

Here we have, for example, the word 'ceci'.

And so I wrote the phonetic symbol, and I would recommend that you learn those phonetic symbols because with them you can also check your pronunciation using different phonetic translators, and that is going to be important when learning phonetics.

So don't confuse it with your own language.

Learn those few symbols.

It's not going to be difficult.

For example, in Spanish we only have like few of them, so here I wrote that.

It's a phoneme [ə] because it's a closed syllable: [səsi].

Here we have the sound [ε] in the word 'père' because we have an accent on the top of the letter.

So this is one of the things that you can do.

You look for these different words.

Obviously, before that you have to read about the rules, but that is how you actually practice that, and that is how you actually put it into your memory.

That is how you memorize that.

To actually help you memorize those symbols, what you can do is you can actually mix those exercises and do something like here.

This is actually what I did.

I also prepared words here, and what I would do is I would also first write the symbol, but then also how to pronounce that in Polish to see if I remember the symbol correctly.

So if you actually learn languages like French, you have more than few symbols to learn, so therefore you can also do that: quiz yourself in terms of those symbols.

If you actually know them properly.

And at the end, once you're actually comfortable with the sounds, once you're comfortable with symbols, once you're comfortable with rules, then to practice all of that it's very good to actually write phonetic transcriptions.

So just take different texts, and you just transcribe them.

It's a very good exercise.

After doing it for two or three hours it's gonna really start to become clear.

So that is how you actually learn phonetics.

In French it might seem overwhelming, but in languages like Spanish or Italian it's gonna be simple.

At the end, I also want to show you a different tool.

This is gonna be for the languages that are less popular, that you don't find a lot of resources about on the internet.

Because for the previous part, for languages that are popular, you have a lot of videos on the internet, and people will just explain how to articulate things, people will tell you what the symbols are.

You'll just have a lot of things to learn from, but they're also going to be languages that are less popular with no content on the internet whatsoever.

If you are that kind of person, if you want to learn those rare languages, then you also have a thing to use.

Obviously, it's going to be time-consuming, but it's there, and it's worth to know that.

So it's actually connected to the symbols that we have talked before.

They actually come from the phonetic transcription alphabet.

It's actually an alphabet that is universal for every language.

So it takes all the sounds that you have in languages, maybe with exceptions of some very rare languages, but usually it takes all the sounds that are there and it puts them here, and it gives them different letters that are universal.

So no matter if you are Spanish, no matter if you're English, no matter if you're French no matter if you're Russian.

These sounds, they all have the same symbol, if you look at them from the perspective of this alphabet.

And so using that you can actually decipher different sounds.

For example, you choose a very strange language, African language, with no videos on youtube.

You only have those symbols on the internet, so they give you the phonetic transcription of that.

This is actually gonna be way more often seen.

What you can do is take those sounds, you can take those phonemes, and you can actually find them here and see how to actually articulate them.

So this is the place of articulation, here.

This is the manner of articulation, the way of articulating that.

Maybe let's take something easy here.

Just to give you an example.

If you take a look at the sound /d/, it's a very common letter, so you shouldn't have problems with that, but the sound /d/ is alveolar.

Alveolar means that it is placed somewhere in your mouth and where is it placed, where you can see that if you actually take a look at this little photo here.

So alveolar is actually number four, and you can see that this letter four is placed here, so it tells us that the pressure is gonna be focused on that place.

The sound is gonna be created somewhere here.

And when you actually try to create this sound: [d], this is actually where you put your tongue on.

We know that it's going to be alveolar, but we also know that it's going to be a stop.

And stops are these kind of letters that are just pronounced in this very funny way that you actually gather the air in your mouth, and then you blast that air: [d].

You can hear that little blast, you gather the air in your mouth, you close the air with your tongue, and then you release that, and the air puffs.

These are stops: [t], [d], [p].

If you actually try that, you will see how the steps work.

You can also have different things.

For example, the fricatives.

So these are gonna be working in a different manner: [s], [z].

So here you actually let the air flow through the tiny hole, I would say.

It's hard to explain that in English for me, so sorry for my childish explanations.

Nasals, for example, are created to some extent with their nose.

If you actually pronounce the phoneme [m], [n], you can see that your nose is taking here: [n].

And we have different things here.

You can read about them.

You have, for example, the trills with the letter 'r', and other little things that you can find.

You will also have the same for vowels and for other different, strange things like, for example, clicks that I've mentioned before in african languages, and for many other things that can happen in terms of phonetics.

So this is not like the whole phonetic alphabet.

This is just something that I wanted to show you here, and this is how it works So obviously, if you want to learn languages that are gonna require that, then you will have to put some time and learn mostly how the manner of articulation works, the way of articulation.

But you will also have to know how to locate that.

It might seem simple, but it's maybe not that simple.

For example, bilabial.

This is gonna be simple because it's gonna be in between your lips.

But, for example, if you go for retroflex, palatal, it will start to be a little bit more complicated.

This will just take time.

I'm telling you, it's not very difficult.

It's not something that is very difficult to overcome, but it's gonna take time.

It's gonna be worth it, though.

So that's all about it when it comes to phonetics.

I hope that you enjoyed this part, and see you in the next lecture!

3. Conjugation

Now we are going to go to the, I would say, the most important part of this program because this is where I will give you examples of creating sentences.

What do I mean by creating sentences? This is going to be like the model of learning, but from the practical side with examples, so with that it will be easier for you to understand that, and also you will know what things you will have to look for, how it's gonna work to some extent.

Once we actually zoom here, you can see that we have different things.

It's obviously not all of that we have also a lot of different things here here, and so on and so forth.

But this is like the starting point for us.

So when we are doing our challenge, we are creating sentences, we are talking to ourselves, and that's how we are building the language.

And so when we actually start, we start with personal pronouns.

So it is very simple.

To actually create simple sentences, we need pronouns.

Without them we won't be able to create these sentences.

This is like the starting point for us.

Once we know that, then we can go and learn the conjugation.

This is the very, very first thing that we do.

We learn pronouns, and we learn the conjugation.

As you can see on this schedule here, I did that all on the first day, so conjugation, pronouns, this is a starting point.

The next thing that you do at start is that you actually read about the word order.

Again, how you create sentences, how you actually ask questions, where is the verb gonna be, and all those things you have to actually learn to start to create proper sentences.

Without that, you will just create sentences that are completely incorrect, that are not in the language that you're learning.

Once you actually do those three things, once you learn personal pronouns, once you learn the conjugation, once you actually learn the word order, then you are ready to create sentences.

With sentences you will also do many different things, and we will talk about that in details when the time comes, but just to give you a basic view on that.

This creating sentences as you know it's gonna be with us until the end, and we are just going to add different things gradually to that like, for example, possessive adjectives, like object pronouns, like reflexive verbs.

We will add articles, we will add different nouns, we'll add different words, so these things they are all, I would say, in the range of creating sentences.

First, we start with conjugation, with pronouns, we read about the word order, and then we just create sentences, and we expand on the grammar, we learn past tense, future tense, we learn all those things that we need to create more complex sentences.

That is what we do here.

Now I will talk about different things thoroughly.

First of all, we are going to talk about the conjugation in this lecture, we are going to talk about the word order.

I think that this is going to be especially interesting for people.

Then we will talk about creating sentences, the elements that you will need how it's gonna work, and that is pretty much how it's gonna look like.

So let's start with the conjugation.

As you can see, for the second time on my schedule, this is what I did separately.

I didn't actually mix it up with the pillar number one because I think that conjugation is very important, and it's actually a lot to learn.

You have a lot of verbs, and they're going to be irregular, and it will just take more time because of the fact that it's very important, that it's actually what you use the most.

You have to do it separately.

You can invest the first day, maybe like the first two days to actually learn the conjugation in the present tense.

Obviously, you don't have to conjugate the most difficult verbs, but the verbs that are gonna be important like, I don't know, 50 verbs, have to actually know how to conjugate them, and obviously, you don't do it in the way that you actually learn them all by heart.

You have to find some life hacks here, I would say, and I will talk about these things that you can actually use, that you can actually use to make it a little bit easier for you.

These are maybe not some like special techniques, but just the things that will help you understand the conjugation better overall and help you actually memorize that easier because there are some patterns in that.

So if you take a look here, you can see that we have both French, and Spanish here, and these are actually languages that show the conjunction very well.

Obviously, you have languages without the conjugation like English, like Swedish, like Norwegian.

With these kind of languages you don't have to worry about that.

You just have to learn verbs by heart, and you have to do that because you actually use verbs a lot.

You actually use verbs more than you use nouns, so even with languages like Norwegian, like Swedish, you have to learn verbs but you don't have to conjugate them.

So that's gonna be a safe time for you.

And this is actually one of the reasons why English is so popular: because of the fact that it has no conjugation, so it's easy to learn that.

You don't have to put time into the conjugation.

It's actually easier to speak in the language properly.

It's easier to adapt to English, but most languages, they tend to have conjugation.

I'm not sure right now, if for example, the old English had that so that is also an interesting thing to to read about.

I will maybe do that, but that's for later.

For now we focus on modern languages and in modern languages, in English, we don't have the conjugation, but in Spanish, in French, in Chinese, in German, we do, and we have to learn that.

So conjugation in the present tense is gonna be important, but I think that conjugating in the past tense is going to be more important for you, but nevertheless you have to know them both very well to actually be able to use the language properly.

And so if you take a look here, this is the example that shows you how the conjugation is constructed to some extent, how you can actually learn the conjugation t.

This is a verb 'beber' in Spanish.

It means 'to drink'.

As you can see, we have different pronouns here.

we have I, you, he, she, we have we, we have you, we have they, and these different pronouns, they obviously have different forms of the verb.

That's how the conjugation works.

So in English, for example, you have that with the verb 'to be': I am, you are, he is, she is.

That is the conjugation.

This is the only conjugation you have in English, whereas in Spanish every verb is gonna have a different form.

That is gonna be connected to a given pronoun.

And so what you do with conjugation, is you basically just take a look at the infinitive of the verb, so the infinitive is what we have here, and we cut the ending.

We cut the ending.

The ending in this case is the letter 'e', and the letter 'r'.

And we just add different endings that are corresponding to pronouns.

For the first person singular it's gonna be the letter 'o' - bebo for the second person singular it's gonna be bebes for the third person singular is going to be the letter 'e', so the phoneme /e/.

In Spanish you just obviously pronounce that as 'a' not as 'e', and like we do in English for nosotros, so for the first person plural, for 'we' it's going to be the ending 'emos' - bebemos.

For vosotros it's going to be bebéis and for ellos, so the third person plural it's gonna be the ending 'en' - beben.

So these endings, they are always regular.

They are always regular.

I don't think that there are any languages that work differently here.

If there are then let me know.

But usually the endings are always going to be the same.

The only thing that will change is the base.

So this example that we have here is very simple because the verb beber is regular.

But you will also have to learn irregular verbs.

And sadly, verbs that are important, that you use a lot, tend to be irregular.

There are many reasons behind that, but one of the reasons that actually speaks to me the most is that with the verbs that you use a lot you really want to understand them well.

You don't really want to misunderstand them, when hearing somebody, and so for that maybe people just wanted to differentiate different forms better to make it easy for people to catch what they mean and to just prevent misunderstandings.

So that is maybe one of the things that may be actually the reason for that.

So you will have to learn those irregular verbs because they are going to be very important, and what you can do, and what's gonna be the best, is you first learn regular verbs.

You learn the endings that they have, you learn how it all works, and then you practice that.

You practice with regular verbs, you get used to all of that.

Once you're actually used to that then you start learning irregular verbs.

So you can, for example, do a list of regular verbs, and then once you understand that, once you know how it all works, once you're used to these endings then you go for the irregular verbs.

But a very good thing that you can do is you can actually look for some videos on youtube about the conjugation of irregular verbs.

Why is that? It's because people will give you tricks to learn irregular verbs quickly.

So yes, you have irregular verbs, but these irregular verbs, they have some regularities in between them.

They have some patterns.

You learn those patterns, those three, four or five irregular patterns that you have in the conjugation of those irregular verbs, and then with that it's gonna be way more simple to really use those verbs.

So that is the first thing you do.

You try to look for some videos that explain the conjugation in the language learning.

You can maybe read about it on the internet, but you look for these patterns.

So maybe a small example of that.

We have the verb 'tener'.

It's a very, very important verb.

It means 'to have' in Spanish, and obviously, it's irregular.

And we have different irregularities here happening.

The first irregularity that we actually have here is the letter 'g' in the first person singular.

So again, how do you actually conjugate the verbs in Spanish? You take the base, you cut the ending, so we have 'ten' left.

Then we should add the letter 'o', just like we did with the verb 'beber'.

However, this verb is irregular, and its first irregularity is that you have to add the letter 'g' before the letter 'o' in the first person singular.

So that is the first pattern, and you will have many verbs that will work the same.

So we'll just have to learn which verbs have that.

So this is how it works.

Then we also have the second irregularity here, in the second person singular.

So as you can see to conjugate that verb you actually modify the base.

So you go from the base 'ten' to the base 'tien'.

And that is what's going to happen a lot in Spanish.

So we don't say tú tenes, but we say 'tú tienes'.

And that's also what's going to happen here 'él tiene', and that's also what's going to happen here, at the end, 'ellos tienen'.

However, there is also a third thing that you can use to help yourself learn the conjugation.

It could also be called a pattern or a regularity, some sort of that because every time you go for the nosotros, and vosotros in Spanish, so 'we' and 'you'.

Every time you go for that you will always have regular forms in the present tense.

So we can see that here.

We have the verb 'beber': bebemos, 'tener': tenemos.

Vosotros bebéis, vosotros tenéis.

We don't change anything.

We don't add the letter 'g', we don't change the base.

It's gonna be perfectly regular here.

So you have three different things that you can memorize here that will just make your life of conjugation easier.

There will be also maybe people that will explain how to create imperative mode from that, and maybe different forms, maybe the past tense, maybe future tense.

You will be able to use different forms here to create different things as well.

For example, for the past tense you will use the infinitive, for the imperative you will use, I think the first person, but I am not sure about that after time I actually do it automatically, but there are definitely a lot of things that you can support yourself with here.

You have to look for them.

You can't learn that all by heart.

At start, you have to help yourself, and then with time, you will actually learn it all by heart.

You will get used to that, but also, even if you know those patterns, even if you know the regularities, even if you know all those tricks, how you should actually memorize the conjugation properly? Well, you should also apply the query-based learning: you should quiz yourself.

So the way I would actually quiz myself is very simple.

I would just go for different verbs and try to actually conjugate them from the memory, without looking at their conjugation, without using books.

So let's say we have the verb 'tener'.

What I would do is I would first read it like once, twice, three times.

I would try to actually memorize the melody, I would say, and then after like two, three minutes I would quiz myself.

I would see if I can remember that.

I would actually try to conjugate that without using the book, and that is what I actually did with German as well.

You can see that here: Ich antworte, du antwortest, er, sie antwortet, wir antworten, ihr antwortet, Sie antworten.

Ich glaube, du glaubst, er, sie glaubt, wir glauben, ihr glaubt, Sie glauben.

So that is how you memorize the conjugation, and you should also mix that with writing.

So actually, it's good to not only speak and conjugate verbs out loud, but but also to write them.

It's gonna be also good to stimulate your memory.

From that perspective it will clarify that a little bit.

It will be easier to see the patterns, and so on and so forth.

So not only conjugate the verbs out loud, but also do it on paper.

But the same way with the query- based learning, increasing yourself as we always do.

So with that you are pretty much ready to go, but I wanted to give you some examples now.

So with that you are pretty much ready to go, but I wanted to give you some basic examples now about all those things.

Like I said, we can use different forms of the verb to actually create different things like the past tense, like the imperative mode, and so on and so forth.

And that is actually an example of what you have here.

You can actually take the first person plural for the verb 'tenir' in French.

Its form is gonna be 'tenons', and then you take the ending '-ons'.

It's always gonna be the same like the ending 'emos' in Spanish.

You take that away, and then you add the ending '-ons'.

So there is not that much of a difference in terms of sound, if you don't know French, but French speakers they can actually tell that nous tenons, tenant.

And so that is called participe présent in French, and it's an important thing to use, and I remember when I was actually learning the conjugation at start with French, and we would actually write different tests every week at the university.

We would have to learn all those conjugations, but also that.

And people would always learn that by heart.

They would always learn the participe présent by heart.

It was just so much easier to take whatever verb, look at the form 'nous'.

Here.

The form 'nous'.

Take away the ending and then add this ending.

And you don't have to memorize that.

There are gonna be like two, three, four exceptions, but mostly all verbs are gonna have the same participe présent.

That is gonna be created like this.

And so maybe it might seem strange for you that people did that, but once you actually learn conjugation, once you learn a lot of different things, once you learn the imperative, once you learn the past tense, the future tense, conditionals and many other things, you just get confused, and you don't see these kind of patterns that easily.

Everything seems just like a pile of words, everything just seems overwhelming, and you just try to learn it by heart because you you think that it's gonna be easier for you, but in reality it's not gonna be easier.

So that is one of those things that you have to keep an eye on, and at the end here I also wanted to mention that some irregularities are easy to justify.

So these are not just the things that people came up with, and it is there because it is there, especially when you think about writing.

As you can see here we have the verb 'escoger'.

It means 'to choose' in Spanish.

And so it's quite a regular verb with the exception of the first person.

So as you can see, all the other forms are gonna go in the same way as the verb 'beber', so it's gonna be regular.

Just the first person is gonna vary here, but it's not gonna be different in terms of sound it's just gonna be written differently here.

Because these two letters in Spanish, they are pronounced the same.

In this case: escoge, escoges, escogemos, escogéis, escogen.

So if this is pronounced as 'h', why don't they put that here as well then? Well, if you actually have the letter 'g' followed by the letter 'o', hen it's going to be pronounced differently.

It's going to be pronounced as gi.

And so they would have to go for the sound escogo, escogo, and since you have some verbs that have the letter 'g' it wouldn't be that strange, but they prefer to actually maintain that 'h' there because escogo when you think about it, it actually sounds not Spanish, I would say, and so they prefer to go with their regular sound here, and they say [escoxo] because this is always going to be giving you the sound [x].

The letter 'j' in Spanish is always going to be [x], no matter what you have: 'escogo' keeps this verb regular when you actually conjugate it out loud.

So, for example, while writing things you will be able to actually spot these irregularities easily, and I'm telling you that to inform you that there are usually reasons for irregularities in languages, especially here, in the conjugation, and so once you understand that, then it's gonna be more understandable I think, for you.

So that is pretty much all about that here, and we are going to talk about model verbs and supplementary words in the next lecture, so thank you for listening and see ya!

4. Supplementary Words

Now let's talk about modal verbs and supplementary words.

We have that all here.

This is gonna be connected to both the vocabulary, what actually words we have to look for, but also to verbs and conjugation.

So it's gonna be the mixture of both.

Why I decided to put these things together? It's because modal verbs, they will have a function of supplementary words.

Okay, this will be like those filler-words that we'll use to actually seem more fluent and also to make the conjugation easier for us.

But, from the start.

As you know, we are trying to learn 300-400 words in 10 days.

It is a very difficult goal to achieve and to be honest, quite frankly, I think that you actually might fail with that.

Ithink that if the language that you are going to learn is going to be a little bit more difficult, then maybe you will be able to learn 20 words actively per day.

You know, that number is actually coming from the amount of words I had in my notebook, but it's not like I knew them all perfectly.

I was able to understand them.

I knew most of them actively, but there were also words that I didn't manage to memorize.

At the end, you don't have to know every single word.

Obviously, you have to know as much as you can.

Your results therefore will also vary a little bit, and that's a normal thing, but still, even if you manage to learn like you really study a lot, if you really study many hours and you manage to do that, then it's still not going to be enough, if you choose actually words that are not gonna be useful.

It's very important that you actually learn words that are gonna be frequently used and that are gonna be universal.

So if you actually go for words like this it turns out that you don't really have to know a lot of vocabulary.

So I decided to call these kind of words "universal words" and maybe "supplementary words".

It doesn't really matter.

You get the idea.

These are the words that you can use in different contexts, no matter what topic.

You can always apply them.

It's like with nouns, for example with nouns.

Yes, maybe the word 'dog' is gonna be used quite frequently, but it's usually gonna be used in like two or three scenarios, and then you're not gonna use that word.

However, with words like, for example: 'more', 'less', 'better', 'difficult', these are the words that you will use no matter what the topic of the conversation is, and knowing 20 words of this kind is gonna give you so much more than knowing for example 20 nouns.

So you really should look for all the "supplementary words" that are in your range.

Maybe you don't really have to go for like the super difficult ones, but all the words like: 'more', 'less', 'better', 'difficult', 'worse', 'simple', 'a lot of', 'every', 'at one', 'never', 'only'.

So these kind of words.

You have to learn them every time you're learning a new language.

It's actually a very funny thing, once you learn how to conjugate in present tense, once you learn how to actually do the past tense and the future tense, once you learn like those.

That is where you actually realize that you can speak and create sentences and you can really actually talk with other people.

So you don't really need a lot.

You need the past tense, you need the future tense, you need to know some nouns, obviously, and you need to know some verbs and these.

And whenever I actually learn those, I see very big improvements in my communication.

So, "supplementary words" are gonna be crucial for us, and obviously you should look for them yourself.

Don't just go for these.

Go also for other things, also look for the things that you tend to use a lot, yada, yada yada.

Let's go to the next thing because that is simple.

Modal verbs, something that you might have never heard of before, for example, I have realized that myself.

I have never read about that.

Maybe it's not that much of a secret knowledge, but I don't actually hear people really using modal verbs that much, so I don't know, but let's put you in the picture.

Let's actually explain that.

What are modal verbs? These are basically verbs that don't have a particular meaning themselves, but they actually are used in conjunction with other verbs to express different meanings, I would say so.

For example, the verb 'can' doesn't have much of a meaning itself, but if you actually add a verb 'swim' to that, and it's gonna work perfectly well.

"I can swim", "I can't swim".

The next verb that we have here is the verb 'must'.

You really can't use it without having a second verb, for example : "I must book".

It has no sense.

It has to be always with a second verb.

"I must read a book", for example.

"I need to read a book", "I should read a book", "I used to read books".

.

.

So, these are the modal verbs in English, and you have to find modal verbs in the language that you're learning.

This is just to show the example why the modal verbs are so important.

There are like two or three reasons for that, I would say.

First of all, you actually seem more fluent when using them because it's just another word that you add to the sentence, and you just seem more fluent with them.

So it sounds good.

You also have more time to rethink what you want to say, when you are saying them.

It's a subtle thing, but it also matters.

The second thing why model verbs are amazing is that it's actually very hard to conjugate every single verb properly when speaking, even though I gave you the techniques to learn that, and you will be able to conjugate more of the things properly on paper.

While speaking, it's always going to be harder because you won't have time to actually analyze that, you won't have time to think about that, and that's where modal verbs actually save us because it's going to be difficult to learn the conjugation of like 80 verbs, but what if you don't actually have to conjugate them after all.

If you actually use modal verbs, then the verbs that go in pair with them, the verbs that are after modal verbs, they are always in the infinitive form, and so they don't need to be conjugated in that situation.

So if you use modal verbs in a sentence, then you only conjugate modal verbs .

Right now you might be wondering - what is this guy talking about, if I still have to conjugate modal verbs then nothing changes?! That is not true because you don't have simple to learn those eight modal verbs by heart, actually learn it perfectly, and then to actually use it over and over and over again.

Using that all the time will trigger the muscle memory very quickly, and those verbs will just come up very naturally.

Not only it sounds better, it sounds more profound, but it also helps with the conjugation.

And now let's see some examples.

We have the sentence: "Buy bread".

that is the second person plural here by the way.

"Buy bread".

In English you can't really tell.

In Spanish, if you want to say that, you actually have to do the imperative, and that is not that simple because you need to know how to conjugate that in the imperative.

You need to know what forms you will have, you need to know what endings you will need to use, and so that is gonna require two things.

First that you will know how it works, that you will know how the imperative works, and the second is gonna require you to think about that when speaking.

Obviously, after like two years of using Spanish, you will get used to that.

You won't have to think about that, you won't have to analyze that, you won't have to put energy to that, but before, you actually get really fluent in the language before you get advanced.

These things are gonna just drain the energy from your brain.

You will have to think about that.

It will take time.

You won't be able to create sentences quickly, and you will just be fighting with yourself here.

However, what you can do is you can actually stay in the present tense here.

So, what you can do is you can just go for the verb 'poder'.

'Poder' that is like the English 'can', i would say.

Use the model verb 'poder', 'you'.

Conjugate that.

You can see the conjugation here 'podeis'.

That is here 'podeis'.

The main verb 'to buy' so 'comprar', goes after the verb 'poder'.

You can see that it is in the infinitive form.

The ending '-er' is not conjugated.

Then you go with the noun, and you have the sentence: 'Podeis comprar el pan'.

'You can buy bread.

In English you don't have to conjugate anything so it's not a problem, but in Spanish, while speaking, you will have to conjugate the verb 'comprar', and it's actually not the hardest verb, but using the modal verb 'poder', which you are used to since you repeat that a lot since it's a modal verb, it's gonna save you a lot of energy here and will save you time.

This is the first example.

The second example: 'Will you study russian?' 'Estudiars ruso?' Here we have the future tense, and by the way, in English you always have to use pronouns, you always have to actually use pronouns, but in Spanish not really.

That is also a common thing for the romance languages, with an exception for French, that you actually skip pronouns, if you were wondering.

That is why you don't have that here, and this why I actually made it like this and, this is also why this is like this here.

So, "Estudiaras russo?" "Will you study Russian?" You need to know how to conjugate the future tense.

It's not that difficult in Spanish, again.

But if you don't know how to do that then you can also use the modal verb.

"Quieres estudiar ruso?" "Do you want to study Russian?" Can you really tell the difference between these two sentences? "Will you study Russian?" "Do you want to study Russian?" Well, there is definitely a small difference, but you will do worse mistakes before getting advanced.

These are like subtle things.

You can actually accept these little things.

It's not that much of a big deal.

It's actually better to actually cheat that a little bit, to modify that a bit then to actually make a different form that would be incorrect or maybe to actually not say anything at all because you don't remember the form.

So that is the example number two.

And again, the verb that you have here 'to want' is 'querer' in Spanish.

It's a modal verb.

You learn how to conjugate that, you get used to that and, you can actually use that a lot while speaking.

If these two examples, they don't convince you, I have the third example.

It's gonna be a little bit more difficult.

Let's see, when we think about subjunctive in Spanish it's really not that much of a big deal, but it's definitely scary for some people.

There are different reasons for that.

Sometimes people don't know when to use the subjunctive, sometimes people, they can't really memorize the forms because it's a little bit irregular, I would say, or you actually have like strange forms in subjunctive in Spanish and French and in other languages.

What you can do to actually make it a little bit easier for you, as you can do the subjunctive with modal verbs to make the conjugation easier for you we can see the sentence: "so that he translates" The verb 'to translate' in Spanish is not the easiest verb that is there, and so you might not know actually how to conjugate that in subjunctive.

It would be 'para que traduzca', 'para que' is gonna trigger the subjunctive here.

We know that we have to use subjunctive after this.

"Para que traduzca".

"Para que" is maybe not the first thing that will come to our head, and we might start to stutter and we might not remember that, so what you can do is, instead of saying: 'so that he translates', we can say: 'so that he could translate'.

Use the modal verb and instead of conjugating the verb that we don't use a lot, that we are not used to, we use the verb 'poder' which we know very well, and we conjugate that.

Modal verbs are verbs that you will hear a lot as well, so we'll get used to how they sound.

You won't really have to read that, you won't really have to read about some of them, maybe even because the sound "para que pueda" is just very very very common in Spanish.

"Para que pueda".

This is just very very frequently used, I would say, something that you hear a lot.

That is actually a way to make your life a little bit more simple with the conjugation, and it just helps you in those difficult moments, when you just can't find the proper conjugation for a verb that you want to use, but you don't remember the conjugation of it.

I hope that you will apply that because it's also going to make you sound more fluent and you will just feel better when using that, you will just feel like you're really speaking, like you're creating some complex sentences.

Thank you for listening and see you in the next lecture!

5. Word Order

Okay, and now let's talk about the word order.

We've covered the conjugation, we've covered the modal verbs and supplementary words, and now the last thing that we have to do at start, the first day I would say, like the first two, three days, is read about the word order and understand the word order in the language that we are learning, okay? So let's take a look at that, and I think that it's gonna be quite a fun part actually.

I think that these things are very actually surprising for some people.

It was for me when I first learned about that.

So as you probably know, languages, they tend to be different in terms of order.

Sometimes you can put for example the subject at the start of the sentence, and in some cases it's going to be followed by the object, but in other cases it's going to be followed by the verb.

So as a summary, mostly you have languages that actually have the subject before the object.

There are very little languages that have the object before the subject, okay? As you can see, it's like one percent only, so let's take a look at different languages here, and let's talk about different word order patterns, okay? So the word order, that is composed of the subject, object, and then the verb, is actually the most widely used and that is actually quite surprising because one could probably think that the English is the most popular one, but when it might be really the most popular one, and the most widely used because you have a lot of Chinese speakers, English speakers, French speakers, Spanish speakers.

Is that going to be the most popular word order in terms of languages, in terms of how many languages use that, okay? So the first place is for the languages that sound like this "she him loves".

Okay? So that is the most frequent word order, and you have that in languages like Japanese, Korean, Latin Sanskrit, Greek Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, obviously.

And so you can see that those especially popular in older languages.

Now languages actually evolved.

For example from Latin Spanish, French.

They have evolved, they have changed, but that was really the case in past, but there are also many languages that use that and that are not here.

One of the examples of that would be for example Polish, also in Slavic languages you have different word orders that are acceptable, but this one is like the most natural one, I would say.

Or like the most passive one, so that is what you have here The second pattern that we have here is subject, verb, object, so it's like "she loves him", okay? So it sounds perfectly normally in English because it's what's used in English.

But if, you for example, took that and used that in Japanese, then it would sound strange.

And languages that use that, again English, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish, Thai, these are the languages that are going to use that word order.

Here is where it's going to start to get interesting.

Languages that use the pattern: verb - subject - object.

It would be like "loves she him".

"Hates she him".

"Buys she it".

Okay? That is how it would sound in English if you had that word order in English, and languages that use that are as follows: Hebrew Biblical, Hebrew, Arabic, Irish, Filipino, Welsh, I don't really know how to pronounce that so I won't even try, and I think that the most widely spoken is gonna be Arabic here.

And so if you want to actually learn Arabic, you will have to always remember that you have to put the verb at start, and you will have to actually respect that word order and avoid doing calcques to English.

So that might be actually one of the reasons why Arabic is so high on the FSI research.

Because the word order is gonna maybe be difficult to get used to.

The next thing that we have here is the pattern verb - object - subject.

And here we have languages like Malagasy, Baure, Car.

And it's very strange here, when you think about it, because you put the subject in this case you put the pronoun at the end of the sentence, which works in a completely different direction than how it works in English for example, or in Latin, or in Japanese, popular languages.

Here, it's at the very end where you put the pronoun.

And it's actually very fascinating that people are actually used to that way of creating sentences, that they actually put, what for me is one of the most important things in the sentence, that they are able to actually put that at the end.

Think about that, try to create the sentence like that and wait with the pronoun till the very end of the sentence, okay? You will understand why it is difficult to actually think in this way.

But, well, if you choose languages with that, then good luck.

Okay, after that we have the pattern: object - verb - subject.

Okay? And it's what you have in languages such as Apalai, Hixkaryana and Klingon.

Hixkaryana is a language in Brazil, I don't think that it's very widely spoken there, but it's actually the representative of that pattern, and this pattern is going to be also quite strange when you think about it.

You also have the pronoun at the end, but here, instead of actually starting with a verb, you start with the object, okay? So first you have to think about, I would say, like the recipient of love, and you leave the person who actually loves somebody for the very end.

It's just so amazing that you can actually create sentences like that.

But again, if you actually do that as a native speaker you use that all your life.

Then it's the only natural way of speaking for you, and other world orders are gonna be strange for you, okay? The last pattern that we have here, and this is the structure: object - subject - verb, okay? "Him she loves" So I think that this is maybe not that difficult because at least you don't have the pronoun at the end, but yeah, you don't really have a lot of languages like that.

They actually give us Warao language.

I think it's actually Venezuela, where they speak that.

It's gonna be maybe spoken by like 40 000 people, and there are really not a lot of languages like that.

I think that there are also some languages that use that in the Caucasian area, but that's pretty much about it.

Maybe there are some others that I don't know about them.

So that is how it looks like when it comes to the word orders.

That is how languages can be actually created.

That is how sentences can be created.

But it's not always going to be that simple.

It's not like you will always have a very stable word order that is, for example, what you have in this example; in the Hungarian language, as well as for example in Polish, you can change the word order, and in this case it's not going to be a problem because every sentence will be correct to some extent.

It's just going to have a different emphasis on a different word, but it's going to be correct.

It's going to get worse with other languages, like German for example, but we'll talk about German in like two minutes.

For now let's talk about this language here.

So we have the example "Kati megevett egy szelet tortat", okay? Pardon my pronunciation, I have never studied this language.

And so what we have here is a very common word order Subject - verb -object, okay? And it would be something like "Kate ate a piece of cake".

Okay? Very, very regular thing.

However, we can actually turn things around and say "Megevett egy szelet tortat Kati".

So here we actually put the emphasis on the fact that we actually completed the action, that we ate that cake.

You can hear that Megvett egy it's at start, so it is more important.

"Szelet tortat Kati" ate the piece of cake Kate.

Ate a piece of cake that is the most important here because it tells us that the cake is finished.

And who ate that, that is actually less important in this situation.

So we have that at the end, okay? And so for example, you could say that in languages like that, you tend to have the most important information at start, okay? Whereas, for example, if you take a look at Japanese, it's gonna work the other way around.

So in Japanese, new or important information should appear later in the sentence.

Okay, let's take a look at our example in English, we have "he bought food at the restaurant near his house".

In Japanese it would be like this "he at the restaurant near his house bought food".

So obviously buying food is the most important here, we put that basically at start in English, that's what we do in most of the languages, but in Japanese we are going to put that at the end, okay? So this is how it all looks like in Japanese.

First we have the topic, it's like a subject, then we add "wa", it indicates that it's a topic, then we put other information, and then we have the verb at the end.

Okay, that's how it works in Japanese, although, I'm not an expert here.

I have never studied Japanese.

Maybe there are some exceptions, obviously.

What I want you to know is how the word order can actually change, how it can all work.

This is why I bring you these examples.

If you want to actually study Japanese then you have to read more about that and get a more thorough idea of that, okay? This is mostly just to make you understand how this concept works.

With German, however, I'm more familiar, but I still actually struggle with that and the word order is still quite confusing for me in German.

Even though it's not that that much of a, I mean there are not many rules about that, but it's still very confusing for me and just a basic example in German to give you a brief idea, you have the sentence: "can we help them?".

In German it will be "Konnen wir ihnen helfen?" "konnen" - can.

"Wir" - we.

" But then you actually swap "them" with the verb, and you say "ihnem", so that is "them", and "helfen".

So you have the verb at the end.

"Konnen wir ihnen helten?" The verb is at the end.

So that is for example what happens with modal verbs in German.

Also for example if you have composed sentences, and you have to change the word order, there are different words that actually indicate that.

For example "weil", you always change the word order after "weil" There are different things that actually don't change the word order.

You have to memorize that, and this is one of the things that is difficult about German.

And then you got the clenched into that then it's getting worse.

However, mistaking these two things; the declension and world order, from time to time will still not destroy everything.

You will still be understandable to some extent, okay? And the last thing that I want to talk about here is the place of the adjective, okay? So that is going to be very brief as well.

Just be aware of the fact that in different languages you do place the adjective in a different position.

For example in English you always place it before the noun.

You can see that here: "I have a fast car".

You couldn't really say "I have a car fast", okay? That wouldn't work this way in English, but that is actually what works perfectly fine in French.

"J'ai une voiture rapide".

Okay? And that is also the case in Spanish.

"Tengo un coche rapido".

So in languages like Spanish and French you usually tend to put the adjective after the noun, but if you actually take a look here, you can see that in French they have different adjectives that work in a irregular way, that actually are supposed to be used before the noun.

And these are the things like "jolie", "petit", "grand", so "beautiful", "small", "big", and these are the things that will have to go before the noun and you will have to memorize that.

In Polish the adjective is gonna go usually before the noun, but if you actually put it after the noun then sometimes it's gonna work, sometimes it's not gonna work.

So this is just to show you that adjectives are also gonna be quite complex here, and you will also have to put some time to actually study that and study different parts of speech.

You will have to read about other verbs, about prepositions, about conjunctions.

You will have to read about adjectives, and how they all work in different languages.

It sometimes can be really surprising, depending on the language that you choose, okay? So you also have to to check, to verify that.

Okay? So this is pretty much all I wanted to cover here.

And now we are going to talk about creating sentences, what we actually, what kind of elements do we need to create sentences.

Okay, so thank you for listening and see you in the next lecture!

6. Building Sentences

Okay, so since we have already covered the things that are very important at start, we can start talking about the sentences.

And so again, creating sentences, talking to ourselves, speaking asap in the language that you want to learn, is gonna be the main premise of this program.

Because when speaking we will practice the vocabulary, and we'll practice grammar.

So obviously you will have to learn the grammar before, you will have to read about that, you will have to look for vocabulary, but then you practice that over and over and over again, when speaking, when creating sentences, when talking to yourself.

That is how this program works.

You know that already.

Now I'll give you an example of how it would look like.

It is obviously going to depend on the language and, as you already know, some languages may work in a very different manner.

For example pronouns can go at the end, sometimes you can have verbs before pronouns.

You have to adapt to that.

That's gonna depend on the language that you choose, but nevertheless, this is gonna be a good example for you so we'll get the idea what I mean by creating sentences by adding elements and just by expanding your capacity of speaking.

So for example if you were studying Spanish, at the very beginning what you do is you learn pronouns.

We already know that, you learn personal pronouns, and then you go for the conjugation, so we learn how to conjugate different verbs and that is the example here: pronoun - verb: "yo tengo".

Okay? That is already a simple sentence that you have learned.

Then, once you know that, you can expand these kind of sentences instead of just saying "yo tengo", instead of just doing the conjugation, you can add different nouns as we have here: "yo tengo "coche", and you remember that if language has a different word order then for example "coche" might be at start.

If you actually choose languages from this word order pattern, then the then "coche", so the "car", would be at start.

So keep that in mind.

So once you make a sentence like that you can still make it better.

You have your grammar textbook, that is where you will find out that you need articles in Spanish and how they work, so you will read about them.

You will learn how they work, if you don't know yet, and then you also apply them to sentences.

So now we have all the elements that we are practicing here; we have pronouns, we are practicing pronouns, we are practicing the conjugation, we are practicing articles, and we are practicing nouns.

We are practicing the vocabulary.

And we put them all to the sentence, you can create many, many different sentences just to practice these pronouns, verbs, articles and so on.

And then you also have an example with the definite article.

So here we had the indefinite article, whereas here we have the definite article.

Just to give you a basic look on that.

However, with articles it's not always gonna work the same way.

If you're used to the way they are in Spanish, in English, in French, and then it's obviously gonna help you, but just be aware of the fact that for example in different languages you can have a situation like this.

So I think this is actually an example from Norwegian.

And in Norwegian the article is "en".

And it can be both: definite and indefinite.

And whether it's going to be definite or indefinite, that is what depends on the place the article has in a sentence.

So here the article "en" is indefinite because it's before the noun.

Whereas here the article "en" is definite because it's after the noun.

So it doesn't work the same way like in Spanish or in French where you actually have different forms of articles.

If you take a look here you can see that we have obviously a lot of options.

In English you don't have to distinguish feminine and masculine nouns.

You only need to distinguish whether they are definite or indefinite.

In Spanish and French you do have masculine and feminine nouns.

So that is gonna be quite difficult sometimes to distinguish.

There are some rules, but there are also a lot of exceptions here, and it's just gonna take time for you to distinguish those.

Languages like Norwegian, like Swedish, like German, will have free articles.

And that is masculine, neutral, and feminine.

And that is gonna be even more difficult to actually tell whether you should use one or another.

And even people that are actually learning German for a long, long time, they still do mistakes here.

And what's even worse about German, for example, is that whenever you actually want to inflect a noun in German, it doesn't work like in other languages.

It doesn't work like in Slavic languages where you inflect the endings.

Now, in German you inflect these articles.

And so sometimes if you don't know whether the article is going to be masculine or feminine or you for example are incorrect, then you will also make an incorrect case inflection.

That is gonna be just problematic, and also it will be more difficult for you to get used to articles by listening to them.

Because in Spanish, in French after like two years of studying these languages, I can tell you that, you just get used to how it all sounds, and you don't really have to think about the rules and so on.

But in German once you have the declension, sometimes things that are actually feminine can sound masculine.

That is how it works.

I won't go into details here because there is no point, just, I'm just telling you why it is so difficult in German and what you would have eventually to focus on later on.

At start don't go that far.

You won't be able to master that.

And you will be perfectly comprehensible for people, people will be able to understand what you're saying if you actually do these mistakes here.

As long as you don't have articles in your languages you will do a lot of mistakes here.

For example, from the perspective of Polish native speaker, I don't have articles in my language, and so for me it's even difficult to understand the difference in between definite and indefinite articles sometimes.

And so for Polish native speakers it is as often to actually mistake articles as it is for example for English native speakers to mistake the declaration in Polish.

That is how it works.

These are just the things that you have to accept to some extent.

You obviously have to work on them if you want to perfect the language, if you want to master the language, but you will do mistakes here.

No matter what, no matter how long you study, you will have to accept that.

Just be over the fact that it's not a.

.

I mean, it's not that much of a big deal because you will be understood.

So that is basically how it all works.

You create sentences like that, you actually talk to yourself, you can do many sentences at once, you can do questions, and you add those different elements, you add articles you add nouns, you practice them, you practice the conjugation.

First in the present tense, then in the past tense, in the future tense.

You can practice for example conditionals, subjunctive if you want, but that is probably going to be for the later time.

And another thing that is going to be very important to add to your sentences are going to be prepositions.

And let's take a look here at our example.

So prepositions are going to be very, very important and without them we won't really be able to create sentences.

However, if we do mistakes here and there, it's not gonna be, it's not gonna be the end of the world.

People will be able to understand us to some extent.

But we should try to work on that because.

well, I think that it is maybe out of all those difficult topics that you will have to overcome.

This is rather one of the easiest, I would say.

It's not easy, don't get me wrong, but it's one of the easiest to overcome.

Maybe you will do mistakes after those 10 days but it's definitely worth to work on it and actually fix those mistakes that you do with prepositions.

And so what are prepositions? For these people that don't know.

Well, if you take a look at this sentence: "I go to school".

So this is the pronoun, this is the verb, school is our noun, this is the object and the word "to", this is the preposition, okay? And we have a lot of different prepositions such as "to", "with", "for", "at", "on", "in".

These are all prepositions.

And now let's take a look at different languages and let's see if we can do calques here.

"à l'école".

Okay, so "à" it is indeed very similar to the English "to", and so it does work in the same way here.

In Spanish "voy a la escuela" is also the same thing.

And in Polish you have the sentence "idę do szkoły", okay? "Do" in Polish is also like "to" in English.

So in these three examples you can actually do a calque from English, and it will work because "to", "à" in French, "a" in Spanish and "do" in Polish is corresponding to the preposition "to".

Obviously in Polish you also have to add the proper ending here.

You can see that "szkoła" is actually "school", and you can see the nominative of that "szkoła", and then you have to check the proper ending which is here.

And you know that it's going to be this letter at the end.

So in languages of the declension you will not only have to think about proper positions.

Here we didn't have that problem because we did cultivate English, but you will see later on that it's not gonna be that simple, but you will also have to focus on the proper declension.

However, we can't always do these calques and you will see that very, very quickly when you start learning languages.

For example we have a very, very, very common sentence that people, that Polish native speakers, actually mistake often.

It's the sentence: "I am on a bus".

Okay? "I am on a bus".

That is a correct sentence in English, but Polish people, they actually prefer to say "I am in a bus".

Okay? "I am in a bus".

Well, obviously you could use that if you wanted to talk about you being inside of the bus, but mostly when you're taking the bus you will say "on a bus".

In Polish if you want to say that you're taking a bus then you have to use the preposition "in" so that this "w", okay? So you can't do that calque here.

In English if you said "I'm in the bus", "I was in the bus for like 10 minutes", I mean, for me, I think it's strange, but I'm not an English native speaker so I might be not correct here but, in my opinion, it would be incorrect.

And so if you want to learn more about that, about these differences and why sometimes you will be able to do calques, and you should try to do those calques, especially at start to have something to start with, but later on you will also see that sometimes it's not going to work.

These are the examples of that.

And to learn more about that you can actually check whether you can do calques and where in the language that you learn.

You can google that on the Internet, and people will be explaining that, maybe from the perspective of English native speakers.

Read about that more if you are interested in that.

What I am trying to say is that you should try to do calques, but also be aware of the fact that sometimes calques are not gonna work here.

But do them to have something to start with.

And then we also have to go back to the topic of the declension.

And we have a very nice example of that in German because, I have mentioned that briefly, that you will have to know what's the ending.

Here, in Polish, if you actually use the preposition "do" which is "to" in Polish, so you you have to know whether it's gonna be this ending or this ending or that ending or those endings, and if you listened closely during the lecture about the declaration, you know that you don't have to, you know, look at those tables all the time or maybe, I don't know, learn how these things work from a very technical point of view.

No, you just learn which prepositions work with which endings, okay? And we have a very good example of that here.

Different prepositions will trigger different cases, and you can see that here.

So, the dative is always going to have "the", article changes the form to the these forms that you see here.

So when the noun is masculine, its article is going to be "der", but if it's going to be indicative it's going to change to "dem".

When the noun is gonna be feminine it's going to be "die" so then we'll have to change that to "der", okay? That is what I mentioned before, that actually "der" is masculine in nominative, and so you could think that the given noun is gonna be masculine all the time, but it's actually feminine here.

It's just that it's indicative.

That's why it's so annoying in German.

If it's going to be "das" in nominative then dative is also going to change to "dem", and so this is basically how it works.

We won't go into details here, but you know now that these prepositions "ab", "zu", "nach, "bei", "von", "aus", "mit", that these prepositions always go in pair with the dative.

Okay? And so you just learn that like this.

You don't have to think about you don't have to analyze the situation that much.

You just learn it by heart.

That for example "nach" is always going to require that kind of articles.

Accusative is going to go always in pair with "bis", "durch", "gegen" and "fur", okay? So that is the same thing here.

And the accusative the "der" changes to "den", "die" changes to "die", so it stays the same, and "das" stays the same, so it just "das".

And you obviously have examples where you can actually have both, dative and accusative, "in", "an", "auf", "neben", "zwischen".

So good luck with that.

It's gonna be problematic, but there are not so many.

I think that if you actually know this, and it's always gonna be a lot, and later on maybe you will be able to actually distinguish these two.

So this is basically all that I wanted to talk about here, to give you a basic view, to put you in the picture a little bit, to make you understand what are problems with prepositions, that sometimes it's gonna be possible to do calques, sometimes it's not gonna be possible to do calques, sometimes you will have to use also case inflection.

And also another thing that comes to my mind is that also you can have problematic word orders, that are gonna make prepositions work strange, but I'm not sure about that but, this is over all I wanted to talk about here.

So thank you for listening and see you in the next lecture.

7. Past Tense

Okay, now let's talk about the past tense.

Let's talk about the past, it's going to be very important for you.

We can already tell you that because the past tense, also the future, tends to some extent but mostly the past tense is what we actually use a lot.

We actually used the past tense the most.

It is a curious thing that we actually tend to speak more in the past than in other tenses, it just goes to show how much we are actually living in the past nowadays, how much we are directly into that.

And it's important that you actually use that correctly it's important that you don't do too many mistakes here because you are going to actually use that a lot, and it's good to actually invest time here.

We obviously have different languages, some are gonna have more tenses to choose, some languages are gonna have less past tenses, some languages are going to be more difficult in that matter, some languages are going to be less difficult, it is going to vary, I can definitely tell you that, but the fact that I want you to understand, and what I want you to keep in mind is that - "let's start", if you actually start learning languages, and you're doing this challenge or even if you're not doing this challenge but that's but at the very start you should actually choose one single sentence for you to learn, one single past tense for you to learn.

So, if you were, for example, to learn English from the start, I would actually tell you to learn the Past Simple at the beginning, okay? You're only going to use one past tense at start, you're not going to go for other tenses because it would just confuse you.

The point is to actually start speaking, creating proper sentences, even if you actually choose a tense that would not be perfectly correct, it's not going to be a big deal after like 10 days of studying or 20 days of studying your language you can expand on that and learn other tenses but let's start I want you to use only that tense and to get used to that.

It would be the best if that tense that you choose had a lot of functions, that if it would actually work with many situations, and it also would be very good if it was simple to create.

And the reason for that is obvious.

The less difficult it will be, the easier for us and will be to actually speak.

Since we are going to learn all the things that start we don't want to get overwhelmed, and that's why we are choosing this option.

So we are trying to choose the most frequently used tense in the language that we are learning, it is good if it's simple, and then we just overuse that.

At start we can actually speak with mistakes we, accept those mistakes, we accept the fact that we don't actually distinguish tenses.

Once you get comfortable with that tense then we go for another tense, that is just how it works.

The goal is to express ourselves at start and not to wonder about what you want to say for like two minutes.

When I was learning English, at start, like many many years ago, what I did is I only use actually the past simple when I was actually chatting with people in games and they, well they were able to understand what I was saying, and gradually with that I actually started to adapt more grammar, more constructions, different tenses to that, but it was all with time.

At the very beginning I only used the past simple, it was like when I was eight years old.

And now I will explain how to choose a proper tense.

I will actually elaborate on what I have just said.

I will give you some examples.

Maybe we'll actually start with Spanish.

Here we have preterito perfecto simple, which is something like "I had" in English.

"I played basketball".

We have preterito imperfecto, which is something like "I was having", "I was playing basketball".

And we also have the preterito perfecto compuesto, which is, again, something like "I used to play basketball".

Maybe not exactly, I wouldn't exactly agree on that, but that's the closest translation that I could give you.

So we have these three different tenses, and obviously, depending on the situation, you have to use a different tense.

So this tense in Spanish, is always going to be working with words like "ayer" which is "yesterday" This tense, on the other hand, will go with words like"this day, today, this month, this year", these kinds of things, so something that is not yet finished, something that is not closed in terms of time.

"This year" means that the year isn't finished yet.

Whereas, for example, "yesterday" so, "ayer" in Spanish, it tells us that it's actually finished.

And for the pretérito imperfecto, it's something that happened in the past, and it was repeating itself.

That is how this tense works.

So these are pretty much the tenses you have in Spanish.

The past tenses you have in Spanish.

You don't have to know that, if you don't want to learn Spanish.

It's just to show you an example, so that you can visualize that a little bit.

So what I would do when starting to learn Spanish, if I were to actually learn Spanish right now, is I would just go for this tense.

And the reason for that is that it's used a lot.

Actually, I feel like people use that more, than, for example, this one or this one, and that probably has to do with its functions.

And also, it's just very simple to create.

For example, pretérito perfecto simple, you'll have to learn many different irregularities.

The conjugation is going to be just complicated, you will have to learn irregular verbs, patterns and so on.

Here, you don't really have to actually dive into that because it's gonna be simple, it's gonna be a very simple tense to create.

All you have to do is conjugate the auxiliary verb which is "haber".

It works a little bit like with modal verbs, to some extent.

We only have to conjugate that verb, and then the main verb is actually gonna stay, not in the infinitive, but it's gonna have a very regular form.

That is basically how it works.

So what's amazing about this situation, is that we pretty much have the same form, and we only need to know how to conjugate the auxiliary verb, which is a single verb.

It's not going to give us any problems.

It's going to be very simple to use that tense, and we'll be able to use that early on in the conversation.

We won't have to analyze a lot, that's why it is amazing.

We want to start here, and we won't have to take breaks, we'll have to check the conjugation very good and very beginner-friendly tense.

This is why I'd choose that.

And the fact that it's quite often used, is what makes it even better.

I would, maybe, also go for this tense too.

If you know tenses like that, if you know how they work, then you might also mix those a little bit, if you are really experienced.

For me, it's just easy to use that because it works the same in French, for example.

Imperfecto in Spanish - you just do the same thing that you do in French, and well, for that it will just be very simple to to use that and to add that.

I know how to use this tense, I know how it works, I know the theory behind it, and I also know that the forms this tense has, are very irregular.

They are not different.

It doesn't have any difficult forms to learn.

And so for that, I could also add that, maybe.

Just because this is also a very simple tense.

Spanish is simple when it comes to these two tenses, I would say, overall.

As long as they are quite regular, as long they are not having a lot of irregularities, then maybe you can actually mix if you know the theory behind them.

So you learn your tense, if you know the other tense, then you can also learn that, it's up to you.

You have to make your choice.

Maybe if you know the experience, then don't actually do that, don't overwhelm your brain.

Then, you just apply that, you actually use that practically, and you train.

You put it into the sentence.

Obviously, the way you learn that is basically how you deal with the conjugation, in the present tense.

You just do the same thing here to memorize that .

You quiz yourself, you see if you remember the conjugation, and you'll just learn it by heart.

You Also with tenses that are irregular, you just go for the exceptions, you make a list, and you do the very same thing that we did in the present tense.

It's not difficult and it's the same situation.

With German, however, when I was studying German, it was a very interesting situation because in German, you actually have a very simple choice.

Because in German when you are writing you usually use this tense: Präteritum, but when you are speaking, you only use this tense.

With some exceptions because modal verbs actually gonna require the second tense.

But most of the time you only use this tense when speaking, you only have to learn those couple of modal verbs in that second tense, and you are just perfectly correct in terms of past tense.

So for me, I only had to learn those irregularities, those irregular forms here, and since it has worked as in French with "passé composé", it was just very simple for me to learn that.

So in German, you can just learn this tense, learn those modal verbs, and you're gonna be perfectly fine.

And you can actually see, also, they have "Plusquamperfekt".

A lot of languages have that - French, Spanish as well, so in this situation it was very simple to actually create that in German, so I would also try to use that.

I didn't really focus on that, I didn't really practice that because it's not that useful, I would say when speaking.

But knowing how it works from Spanish, from English I also went for that it was just very simple to create as well, so I didn't see the reason why I wouldn't do that.

You can also do that if you know how tenses like that work.

Because here, the only thing that you actually have to change, you don't conjugate the verb "haber" in the present tense, but you actually do it in the " Präteritum".

That is the only difference that happens here.

And you are ready to go and use this tense, that is the only difficulty.

So instead of, for example, saying "ich habe gelernt", you can say "ich hatte gelernt".

And that is all.

So you can see, that it's very simple, but only these simple tenses you are allowed, if I may say, to learn at the start.

I not, then only go for a single tense.

So you just have to analyze the situation you are in.

Depending on your experience of other languages, whether you can do colleagues or not, you will have to make a choice.

You should always go for the simple tense, for the one that is not gonna have a lot of conjugation, if you can.

If you can't, if you don't have that choice, then you can do nothing, but as long as you have that choice, you should actually go for it, just go for the simple choice.

Maybe if that tense would be used very rarely, then maybe not, but if it's like fifty-fifty, then always go for the simple tense.

Learn it, get used to that, learn the future tense, practice different forms, get used to them, that is going to be so much better than learning both past tenses at the same time, as long as the second tense is difficult.

Because if it's going to be regular, like in the example of Spanish, then you can also do that, as long as you are experienced with that tense, as long as you know how it works, as long as you don't have to go over that theory.

Because if you start to actually use two different tenses, you need to know when to apply them, you need to read about different situations they go in, and so that is what you can't afford, because you can't invest your brain energy into that in those 10 days.

Later on, it's gonna be perfectly okay, but for those 10 days, we have to save the energy, we have to save our brain a little bit, I would say, and so for that, we can't afford to think about what's going to proper or not in this or the situation.

We need to get used to the language, we need to get used to the vocabulary, we need to get used to the word order.

That is gonna be more important.

Choosing past tense is important, but we can leave it for a different time, after those 10 days.

If we mix everything together, then we'll just be confused, and nothing will actually pop up from our effort.

That is pretty much all that I wanted to talk about here.

I think that you know how it works, it's not very difficult.

I just wanted to record that lecture because I know that people are confused with the past tenses, that they go over, that they actually learn every past tense at start, and it's a very bad choice, because you just make it difficult for you to use.

We want to speak ASAP, and for that, we need to actually simplify our situation, to practice other things properly.

Because it would be either past tense or other things, we don't want to do that choice, we don't want to go for the past tenses at the start.

Okay! So I hope that you enjoyed this part, and see you in the next lecture!

8. 100 Words List

Okay, so this is the lecture called "One hundred words rule". What we have to do here is we have to think about ten topics that we find interesting, things that we usually talk about with other people, things that we are passionate about, things that we just like to talk about, you know.

These are, let's say, topics like traveling, clothes, work, politics, games, nature, sightseeing, science, philosophy, martial arts.

All those kind of things that you just find like you're genuinely interested in.

And then for every each of these topics that you choose you you list down those first you list down those 10 topics, and then for every each of these topics, you look for ten words that would be very useful when talking about them, okay? So you list down those ten topics, and then you look for ten words for every each of them.

And you should look for a very basic vocabulary that would concern these different topics.

For example, for traveling it will be just simple words like abroad, sightseeing, museum, plane, train, bus, and so on and so forth.

Not very, very advanced words that you don't use often.

You have to look for those very, very fundamental words that will just come in very handy for you, okay? So this technique, we can call it technique, I think, is very good because it helps us stimulate our memory from a different direction, from a different perspective.

Let me explain it this way.

Usually when you're learning words, when you're learning vocabulary, it should look like this: if you do it in a proper way you take a book or a movie, a video on youtube, and watching that you look for words that you don't understand.

Once you hear something like that, you search for the definition of that word, and then you write it down.

And then you learn it by quizzing yourself later on.

This is actually what I spend the most time on when learning languages later on, to get advanced and to expand and to really get, to really become proficient in a language.

Watching videos on youtube is very fun and at the same time you get used to the spoken language.

So it's easier for you to actually understand people speaking, but you also have the context from those videos, and this context helps you memorize the vocabulary faster.

And once you actually put those words to your notebook, you do like few revisions if you're going to sleep like three four or five revisions.

You can really quickly cement that vocabulary this way.

However, at start this is not gonna be that effective, it's only gonna be good when you understand videos, right? It's not like you're supposed to watch anything and just write down every single word that you have there.

You really have to understand those videos, okay? Maybe you should at least understand 80 percent of a video to actually use this context from those videos properly, otherwise it's not gonna give you a lot.

So at start we can't really do that.

We will have some videos that are gonna be on YouTube for language learners like the easiest one is gonna be "Extra". This is actually a series called "Extra" and they have "Extra" with French, "Extra" with Spanish, "Extra" German and that is actually very simple.

You can you can actually watch that very, very early on, and we will actually talk about that in the next lecture, but there are not so many videos like that.

And to really talk about watching videos we have to have some base, I would say.

If you actually know, I would say we need to know like a thousand words or maybe a little bit more to understand videos that are actually for people that are intermediate, I would say a thousand, like thousand and a half.

Something like that.

What do I mean by these videos? These are for example, you can google that: "Inner French". There is a guy who actually makes videos like that, and he speaks very slowly.

He uses a simple vocabulary.

And so once you're actually on that A2 level, you can start watching that and actually learn using those videos.

After like a couple of months, you can then swap to watching some more advanced things.

For Spanish it would be for example "Darios de Gordon". For the light speed Spanish you can also check that, so these are the kind of videos that I talk about here.

But even those kind of videos, you want to watch them, and that is going to be the main tool for you to learn languages.

But at start you can't really do that.

You don't really understand the language, and that is the problem here, that people are just very lost at start because they know what to do later on, but if you have nothing to actually start with, then it is where you have problems.

And so we can't watch videos at start.

We are going to do something different.

So we are not actually going to look for random words from the outside at all.

It's not like you have those books with words, and you just translate them.

This is also good, you can do that, but I think that it's worth to actually do this technique more and spend more time on that, then actually look for words in like books for beginners and so on.

We are not going to look for random words.

We are going to translate the words that we have inside of our head, so we don't find them by accident.

We just ask ourselves what words we want to learn and use ad hoc, okay? It's simple as that.

Imagine, if you like to talk about politics, ask yourself what words you would need in that discussion about politics for example.

And then you just look for these words.

And it's a completely different perspective on memorizing words.

If you actually know what you want to say, and you just look for those translations you have a very strong image of that given word.

It gives you a very cemented idea of what actually you are learning, and with that, the vocabulary doesn't blend, you don't mix words in your short-term memory.

I hope that you understand that.

It's actually not so simple to explain that, but I hope that you get the idea.

Instead of looking for words on random tags and finding them, doing exercises, you can actually ask yourself what you want to learn what words you need.

And with a little guidance, with the guidance that you have here because you know already what words you will need, you can actually learn them, and it's gonna be easier for you to do it from this perspective because you will already have that word anchored in your head, you just have to find the translation for it, okay? So that is basically it.

So again, you choose those ten topics at start.

If you are into politics then you choose politics, and then you look for ten words that are connected to politics that are very fundamental.

If you like to travel then the second topic after politics should be traveling.

And you also look for 10 words about that and so on and so forth.

That is how it works.

But bear in mind that this should be important words, simple words that you want to use really in a conversation.

Don't waste your vocabulary slots on the words that you are not going to use because otherwise you will just forget them.

You have to use... you have to look for words here that you will really use over and over again to not forget it, okay? There's also a second thing that you have to remember.

That this technique is for learning nouns especially.

We already have like a bunch of universal words that I mentioned before.

We already know some verbs, we obviously still need to learn that, but our priority now is to extend our vocabulary in terms of nouns.

Because it's really difficult to learn those nouns properly.

And this is what helps us because the context of those topics also helps us remember these words.

Because for example, if you learn words connected to traveling, and you go with words like: sightseeing, plane, car, then it's also gonna help you actually memorize these words because they are gonna be put into this category.

I don't know if you can see that, but having those words collected all in this group and having only those 10 words in this category helps you actually trigger your memory from time to time.

Let's say you have those forget one of them.

Thinking about other words that you have there, thinking about the order of those words that you had on the list, might actually trigger that word in your memory.

It's a little bit like with people that actually retrieve, restore their memory, like the long forgotten memories, from smelling something, okay? Like a given smell can actually trigger some pictures in your head from the past, and this is also how it works to some extent .

Thinking about those other words that you have learned in this category will help you also trigger that word and will just make it easier for you to learn a vocabulary.

If they are sorted out like this, if they are put into these categories, okay? So we learn those nouns especially because we need nouns.

We lack nouns.

We can also learn verbs, it's not a problem, but focus especially on nouns here.

And you really want to have a wide spectrum of topics.

That's why we are also doing that.

Let me give you an example, I don't know much about clothes in English because I was never really interested in this topic.

I never really cared about fashion that much and so I never had the opportunity to talk about that and to learn different words connected to clothes.

However, I still have some basic vocabulary as you can see, like those things that I mentioned in this topic, and if I were to talk about that I would actually manage to improvise if I had to, you know, if I were abroad and someone would ask me something about clothes, I would be able to improvise.

And that is important here, you need to have those very basic few words in every topic to be able to communicate with other people.

Because if you don't know that kind of basic vocabulary, those few simple words that are really simple to learn, then you won't be able to improvise.

And, you know, hand gestures might not be enough here.

But let's say you actually know those couple of words, and you want to buy a shirt, and you don't know how to say "a shirt" in English, you could actually ask a shop assistant if he could actually give you some long t-shirts, some long t-shirts, and he will probably understand that you mean shirts because they have longer sleeves.

And this is my point here, it's about being able to improvise.

Once you know those couple of words you can actually do these funny things with the language, maybe actually help yourself that with the hand gestures and so on, but you need to know those few words to actually make that work.

Without no vocabulary at all you just stay silent or you would just have to use for example English, and we don't want that because we want to actually practice our language by speaking.

If we use English then we don't practice the language that you want to learn, okay? It's very important that you also remember that don't use English to simplify your communication.

If you really want to learn the language.

When I went to Belgium, I promised myself that I won't use English like that.

I obviously use that with other people that didn't speak French, but whenever I actually spoke with someone who spoke French, I used French only because I wanted to practice French.

So if you want to communicate with other people, then you need to have this basic vocabulary, those different subjects that you actually know like few words, and with that you can actually manage.

So that is why we do this "100 words rule". This is actually why it is a very good thing.

I was actually able to memorize the vocabulary super quickly, and it surprised me as well how good it worked.

It might seem like not a lot of vocabulary like those one hundred words, but it is actually a lot and I think this is actually a game changer, especially when you're starting to learn languages, and when you don't have a lot of nouns in your vocabulary, I think that it is especially good at start, and it just helps you build your vocabulary from nothing.

And again, we will not know a lot of words after those 10 days you know three, four hundred words at best.

And we will therefore have to improvise.

And it's actually all about being able to improvise, about actually putting ourselves in that situation where we can actually fill those gaps of our vocabulary, okay? So we actually talk with other people, we lack different words and we look for them.

That's how we actually learn them.

That's how we learn languages.

It's all about being able to actually fill those gaps.

That is the whole point of this program, to make you able to communicate with other people.

And then you just fill those gaps, you actually look for words that you like, and that's how you get better, and better and better.

If you don't communicate, if you don't speak.

then you have no gaps to fill.

And so with that you make the entire learning process that much more time consuming, okay? This is important because those conversations with people, they give a lot of context, they just help you memorize words super quickly.

It's very important that you do it like this.

And maybe at the end I will give you some more examples of how this will actually let you improvise because maybe the example with t-shirt was not the best.

So I will just give you two more and then we'll finish.

Let's say you wanted to buy a newspaper.

Obviously you could look for the word "newspaper" and then go and ask shop assistant if they have newspapers.

That is a very good thing.

But sometimes you can't do that, sometimes you don't have enough time to prepare yourself, most of the time you don't have that time, and so what you do is you go to that shop, and you say "Can I have that book with information?" Okay? "Book with information" and obviously the shop assistant may smile, and it might be strange for him, but he will get what you mean, and then he might say "oh, you mean newspaper?". There you go.

And that is how you learn the vocabulary.

If there is a topic that you are not familiar with, that is how you improvise, okay? You can't really check every single word because the conversation would be just very boring, okay? You have to improvise.

Second example: when I was actually living in Belgium I didn't know much about food at that time in terms of vocabulary.

But I obviously had to buy that, and as you know, I promised myself not to use English there, and I don't think they would like that neither, but I promised myself not to use English, and so I had to use French, but sometimes I had no time to actually verify the vocabulary that I am going to need.

Sometimes I just didn't feel like it, so I would just... I actually remember that this was one of the first days that I was there.

I went to a boulangerie, and I saw those like small rolls, those very nicely looking small rolls, and what I did was I actually said "could you give me this tiny bread there?" "Could you give me this tiny bread?" And the shop assistant, he said "Voila, vous voulez dire les pistoles?" And that is how I memorized that.

Those little rolls they are called "pistoles". "Pistols" for some reason If I didn't know how to say bread then then I wouldn't be able to ask that.

And with that I actually leave you.

Thank you for listening and I hope that you have enjoyed this lecture.

9. Filling The Gaps

Now let's talk about different ways we can actually fill the gaps of our vocabulary.

Let's talk about different ways we can actually look for new words because overall up to this moment, we know that we learn new vocabulary that we knew that we look for new vocabulary when we are creating sentences, and we just look for different words to finish our sentences.

We also know that we get a lot of new words from "the 100 words rule", but there are also different ways of searching for that missing vocabulary, of searching for that important vocabulary and different important expressions, and we will talk about them in this lecture.

The first thing that we can actually do to find new vocabulary is we can use youtube.

We can just watch very simple videos on youtube with subtitles and for example this is where the series extra come in handy because they have very beginner-friendly vocabulary they have a very beginner-friendly language and they are just very easy to understand, you can basically watch that, maybe on the fourth or fifth day.

I think that is when I actually started to watch that in German.

Sadly, this program, the extra program is made only for like few languages and if your language isn't there, then you can actually try to look for some other beginner-friendly videos on on Youtube, or maybe on the Internet.

Videos that will just be interesting for you to watch and at the same time simple to understand.

I think that the best thing that you can do to understand what I'm actually referring to when I talk about these videos is that you can actually type extra English on Youtube, okay? Extra English.

And then you take a look at how this program is created, how different episodes are, and with that you will know what I'm actually talking about what kind of videos you should be watching at this point when you are starting to learn a new language.

These are actually the videos that I watch all the time where I'm starting to learn a new language.

That's what I did with Spanish, that is what I did with French and that is what I did with German.

I do it all the time.

It's actually very cool to watch it for the first time, understand like 70% of that at the start, maybe 80% after some time, and then be able to actually come back to that after a long long time and be able to understand every single word.

You just see your progress.

Well, now I'm able to watch lectures about Heidegger Hegel in French, which is just showing me that I did manage to reach a good level, in terms of comprehension, in terms of understanding the spoken language, but that is where I started two years ago.

I actually watched first French extra.

So that is a very good thing that i can recommend you to watch.

You can obviously also watch those videos, like this type of videos: "How to say 'hello' in japanese", how to say that, how to say that, how to do that, those like guides.

You obviously watch that in terms of pronunciation, you watch that in terms of conjugation, you watch that to actually understand different difficulties in terms of grammar, different concepts, but you can also watch that to actually find a new vocabulary, if you watch it in the language that you're learning.

So you can actually maybe try to do both at the same time.

But I didn't do that.

Personally, I would just watch extra German that is all i needed because I couldn't actually afford to watch it all.

I couldn't really afford to watch it that much, I had to do other things as well, to actually learn the vocabulary using different techniques, but this is one of the things that i that i did.

I think I watched like... I think that I have watched it like is a good thing, that is also a fun thing to watch.

After watching it for like 40 minutes I would write down like 10-15 new words that I would learn then over the day.

Just an interesting thing to do so as not to be bored.

It is refreshing.

You can also do that with the videos that talk about the language itself, that explain the grammar.

That's gonna be okay, although I think that this is gonna be less interesting for you.

Maybe the context is not going to be that strong, but you would have to actually make a research to know that you can maybe guess.

But overall, searching for new words and phrases while watching videos is a very good way of broadening your vocabulary.

As long as you write down these words in your notebook, and then you memorize that and repeat that because a lot of people say that if you want to learn languages, you have to watch videos and it's all.

Just watch videos.

Obviously you can learn by watching videos.

If you put five years to that, or 10 years, then maybe you will be advanced after those 10 years if you actually have a good starting point, if you are already intermediate, but to really have good results and to really learn by watching videos properly, you have to write things down, and you have to do revisions.

That is how it works.

Watching videos is where we start.

That is the starting point of our process.

We actually find words in context, but that is what makes it easier to memorize, but then the revision, the notebook, that is where the real learning happens.

We have already talked about that, so I'm not gonna go into details.

Here, I just wanted to mention that to make sure that you know how it works.

In addition to videos, we can also use songs.

We can actually look for songs that we like, make sure that you like them, and then we translate their lyrics.

Once we understand the songs, once we translate the lyrics, we write the vocabulary down and then, once you actually write it down, we repeat on these songs, over and over again.

And that is how we actually learn, memorize and make our vocabulary just stronger.

While listening to these songs, you can even play the guitar and sing them.

Do whatever is fun for you.

Do whatever is convenient for you.

This is just one of those things that you can do.

Both watching videos and listening to songs has also one more significant advantage, obviously besides being a source of vocabulary, because it allows you to gradually become familiar with the language, with the nature of the language, with the flow of the language.

You just, after being exposed to that, after being exposed to videos, songs, music, you start to feel how the language works.

That is also why you should do that.

You get used to different expressions, you get used to the word order, you get used to the intonation, and so on and so forth.

This is also very important.

Not to mention that you actually train your ear, and that you're able to understand more in the spoken language.

In addition to these two things, in addition to videos and songs, we use the 100 words list.

So even though I do criticize lists like that, I still have used that in my program.

I still use that in my program.

If you don't know what's that, it's just a list of the most frequently used words in a language.

You can google, that and you will see how it works.

We do not learn all the words from this list.

People, a lot of polyglots, they just go for this list, and they just learn every single word that is there.

That is not what we are going to do.

We are being selective.

We choose only those words that seem the most useful for us while forming sentences and speaking.

Only the best words that you see them.

That is also one of the ways you can look for vocabulary.

And, of course, we keep that all in our notebook, we do revisions, as it was explained before, we actually make revisions by creating sentences and by applying all the previously acquired knowledge in order to consolidate it.

We do not search for large numbers of words, we do not search for a lot of vocabulary at once when watching videos or listening to songs because we don't want them to get all mixed up.

You really have to go for quality not quantity, learn the vocabulary clearly so that it stays in your head.

For example, if there are words in the beginning of your notebook or even a few pages back from the last page you wrote, if you see some words that you no longer remember, it could mean three things.

Either you are doing too few repetitions, too few revisions, or your revisions are sloppy, so you don't put enough attention to that, or last thing - your brain is not able to process all of that, because you're just overwhelmed, you're just too confused with grammar, with words, with the word order, with the language structure, and so on.

In such situations you should stop looking for new things, you should stop looking for new grammar, you should stop looking for new vocabulary and just consolidate what you have learned so far.

Especially with grammar.

If you, for example, learn personal pronouns, and you feel like you're not used to them, if you feel like you haven't mastered them yet, you shouldn't go for next thing, especially for different pronouns that are similar to personal pronouns.

It's also important that you learn the grammar in a proper way, that you don't actually learn personal pronouns and possessive pronouns close to each other because that is where you will start to blend these words.

It's important that you don't actually learn the conjugation in the present tense and the conjugation in the past tense on a single day.

So you have to actually also be aware of that and you have to remember that you shouldn't learn things that are actually similar together.

And a similar situation happens with vocabulary.

If you go for too many words at once, then you will just start to confuse them all together.

Sometimes I wrote down too many words.

I have to say that I wasn't perfect neither, and so, for example, it was like I really liked the song, I didn't want to stop listening to it, or for example, I really liked a given episode of extra.

I was watching that until the end.

It was just very interesting for me.

I couldn't stop watching it and therefore, at some point, I had too many words.

So what I had to do is I had to pause the pillar number one and just walk through all the words I have learned so far because I just went for too many words at once.

And that is gonna happen to you.

Don't worry, because you really have to be very, very careful and very experienced to actually avoid that.

It's very simple to actually go for too many words at once.

These mistakes, they don't mean that you won't be able to learn the language.

They will just slow you down a little bit, and you will have to do the pause, and go back over the things that you have had before, to actually consolidate that properly.

You need to have a very good balance here.

Also try to make it all fun.

If you just feel like you're not having fun, you feel like it's not giving you any joy anymore.

Maybe it would be worth to actually lessen your time for studying a day a little bit maybe, from going from eight hours, you could actually go to five hours and then expand your time limit in terms of days because it also requires you to be patient.

As for me, I don't really care.

I can study the whole day.

I like to study "normal" languages, philosophy, literature, linguistics... I just like to study.

That is just how it is for me, so i'm able to study for a very, very long time without feeling tired, without feeling annoyed, without feeling lazy.

Maybe that is also what helps me a lot.

If you feel like it really starts to be annoying for you, then you should maybe actually give yourself some space, give yourself some time.

It's important that it is not a pain in the arc for you... This is my personal expression.

I don't know if it exists.

It's important that it is not a pain in the arc for you because you have to have a proper head in all of that.

If you just have a very negative way, if you have a negative way of thinking, then your memory is not going to work very well.

We have already talked about that.

And also for that, listening songs is good because songs can also refresh your motivation and the love for the language.

I would say even so in those moments that you just feel down, that you don't want to continue, listing to songs may actually help you.

Videos also, once you actually start to understand them, you can really have a very big boost of motivation.

This is also a good thing about that.

And the 1000 word list maybe is not gonna give us a lot of motivation, but it's gonna be good if we actually introduce it, like on the last few days, because then we will be actually running out of words to learn.

We might start to feel the monotony and this list is actually gonna help us with that a little bit.

I think that you get the idea.

Thank you for listening and see you in the next lecture!

10. Cicero Mod

Now let's talk about "Cicero mode". It was like the first name that came up to my mind.

This is like the most pleasant part of this program, I would say.

It's very important.

What is this all about? Well, what you have to do is you just have to actually talk to yourself for a long long time, not only for like five minutes, but for a very long time for like a couple of hours at least.

Just talk to yourself, you try to think only in the language that you're learning.

You try not to use different languages, you try to enter some sort of like a immersion like in linguistic immersion, I would say.

And why we are actually doing that? We are doing several modes to consolidate our knowledge.

Obviously, you can do that before, for short times, like for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, but especially here, at the end of the challenge, on the ninth or on the eighth day when you have like should stop looking for new vocabulary.

You should stop doing pillar number one and just talk to yourself.

You can actually even stop doing pillar number two.

The main idea is that you just talk to yourself, and whenever you need a given word that you don't remember you actually go back to your notebook and check that.

The goal here is not to look for new vocabulary, but obviously, if you want to express yourself, you will need some words here.

And there some new words.

That is where you should also google them.

It's not like you are supposed to do that without any help, but only look for those words that are very crucial, that are very important and write only those that are important to your notebook because this is the part where we actually consolidate what we know, where we practice, where we learn the words that we have not yet transferred to the long-term memory, the words that we have in our notebook, and only the words that are very crucial for us to actually express ourselves are the words that we should learn in terms of new words.

And as i said, at the end we do that for a very long time.

We can do it like for like a couple of hours at least, maybe even two days, but you can also do that before, and I actually did that before as well.

It's just that I didn't put so much time into that.

I would do it for like 20, 30 minutes.

So this "Cicero mode" is actually something that you do all the time.

It's just that before you actually use your notebook to think about what you want to say.

You actually start with those words, you actually quiz yourself, you see new words, and then you create sentences.

You actually add things to those words whereas here you don't really start with a notebook, but you actually talk to yourself about whatever you want, but the rest stays the same.

We can say that we also do that before.

It's just that here we don't use the notebook to actually guide us in terms of what we are going to talk about.

We talk about whatever you want, we look for words that we lack, and we just try to consolidate our knowledge.

We really try, we just try to get used to everything that we have learned, we just practice our conjugation, past and future tense, all that in this part where we actually talk to ourselves in the "Cicero mode". Obviously, if you feel like you lack some knowledge, if you, for example start forgetting, let's say, irregular forms in the past tense, then you will find out that you have a problem doing the "Cicero mode" with that, and so you're supposed to actually at least try to fix that.

Look at the forms that you don't remember and catch up on that.

This is basically it and maybe the last thing if you haven't found words like that before, maybe you can actually look for them doing that.

Words like expressions, in my opinion, to be honest, these kind of expressions, that is a good time to look for them and to add them to your speeches, to add them to your speaking and practice them.

If you haven't found that before, that is a good time to add this, to make your monologues better.

That is a good moment for that and as you know, these are very important.

They make you seem more fluent, they just give you extra time to think about what you want to say and overall, they are just very nice.

And it would be also very good if you actually find some people on the like discord channels and talk with them.

If you have a language partner, then you can do it with your language partner.

It will be very good if you also talk with other people, but that is not the necessity, I would say.

You should be fine just talking to yourself.

Also when you talk to yourself, you have more time to talk, whereas with other people, for example, on the discord channel you won't be able to talk a lot.

So if you actually went for a discord channel then make sure that you find a single person to talk with and not like a group of people.

On the discord channel you might have people that will not adapt to you, therefore you might have problems with understanding them.

So it's important that you find the person that will actually speak with you one by one, that you will speak into, and that will actually adapt a little bit, that will speak slower that will use easier expressions.

And maybe one more thing actually.

You don't have to do that only like in your house, sitting on the chair and having a computer in front of you.

You can also just use your phone, go to a park, take a walk.

You can do whatever you want.

You can do that while doing these things as long as they will not actually require you to be concentrated.

You can do them and speak at the same time.

And that is what i was actually doing.

I would actually go jogging and I would, for example, just talk to myself, obviously without using my notebook.

I would just run and just talk to myself and whenever I would not be able to actually finish my sentence, wherever I would have to look for a new word, I would just use my phone.

I would just use google translate.

So you don't have to have a computer for that.

You can also use your phone, you can do whatever you want.

You can go to a park, have a nice day and just talk to yourself like you were, a little bit like you were crazy, actually.

I know that people may look strange at you, but you shouldn't really pay much attention.

You're doing that for yourself.

You have to speak out loud.

It's very important that you speak out loud, so if you feel like going to parks, then just talk to yourself in parks.

You can get yourself some headphones and people will think that you're on the phone ,and they will not even pay attention if that is bothering you.

That is what you do here - you speak to yourself, you do long monologues, you talk about many different things, but most importantly - you freestyle.

This is pretty much all that i wanted to cover in this lecture and see ya in the next lecture.

Thank you for listening!

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