Learn English like a baby | 1 trick to become fluent

hello and welcome to kangaroo english

my name is christian and today is sunday

the best day of the week

um today i'm going to be answering the

question

how can you learn

english like a baby how can you get

fluent

like children do in in english

and and actually this is one of the

great big important questions in

linguistics

why is it that children are just

so good at learning languages i mean

think about it as as an adult you have

an incredible cognitive advantage

right you're better at problem solving

you have more general knowledge

you um have more cognitive power

uh you you're just smarter

in every single way than a baby in every

single way so

why can't you use this power to learn a

language

well actually the reason

and this is probably the surprising

reason the reason is that

you know too much

especially you know too much about

language

right especially your own language so

first let's imagine language from the

perspective

of a baby

you say mama mama

mom baby you're making the movements

just say mama

mama mama

mama

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so babies don't know

anything about language they don't know

the difference between

nouns and verbs and adjectives and

prepositions they don't understand about

future tense and past tense

all they hear is sound

continuous sound this big

long noise

right and think about it maybe it's a

question you've never really thought

about

how do babies and children how do they

know

what you're talking about right how do

they know

how to take a noun a word for a thing

how do they know how to take that out of

a sentence

how do they learn verbs when it's all

just joined together

right the answer is that they don't

so i i want to

talk about another language which is

very

alien not just to people who speak

english or another european language

but it's alien to almost

everybody on the planet okay because

there's there's a group of languages

that is the way they work is very very

very rare

okay they're called polysynthetic

languages and

one of those languages is cherokee which

is a language spoken by

some native american people in in

in the united states in north america

and

i want to give you an example of a word

from that language okay the word is

diti yohihi i love saying that word it

sounds great

okay now ditty yohihi

is a word that means lawyer

it's a word for lawyer you go to court

you know

there's the judge you're in the

courtroom and standing next to you is

your diti yohihi right the person who

represents you but what is the actual

translation of that word into english

like the literal

translation well it means

a person who argues repeatedly

and deliberately and for a reason think

about it

all of that information right and that's

a lot of information all of that

information is contained

in that one single word

five syllables

the ten letters how

because the way the language works is

very different

they don't have words okay

the way that it works is you have um

you know this this kind of base which

you manipulate

with suffixes and prefixes and

and and you manipulate the the phonemes

and and

and you create this one continuous word

with all of this information inside it's

incredible

okay so to

to a baby hearing that language

that they will never learn about words

because words don't exist not in the

same way that we know them right

they're never going to learn about verbs

the way that we understand them because

it doesn't exist

they're never going to learn about

tenses past and future because it

doesn't exist

in the same way in in the cherokee

language right

so really

and this is this is the kind of you know

controversial

or strange way of looking at language

you know

the way that we have decided

to divide language the way that we have

decided to categorize

language really is is kind of arbitrary

you know it's a decision we made

to say well these are nouns these are

verbs and and we do this and that you

know it's

it's not necessary to do that

to learn a language and

if you were trying to learn cherokee

you would have to radically change the

way

that you think about language

and a cherokee baby trying to learn

english would have to radically

change the way that they think about

language

so what's the solution um what does this

tell us

about the question is how can you learn

a language like

um like a child like a baby well um

i want to talk about this great piece of

research okay

from the journal of memory and language

uh the paper is called the advantage of

starting big

learning from unsegmented input

facilitates mastery of grammatical

gender in an artificial language

by noam siegelman and in balan and

this is just an example of lots of

similar work okay this is not isolated

there's lots of work about this subject

okay so what they did was

they had different groups of people and

they wanted to teach them an artificial

language

they wanted to teach them a language

that they invented

and this language has grammatical gender

like spanish which is

a language that i speak and as a native

english speaker

learning spanish i have a problem with

grammatical gender

right it's like the masculine feminine

of the

noun and i always get it wrong you know

and and

also for me it's difficult to accept

that it's necessary

you know it's not necessary to know if

this is masculine or feminine it doesn't

need

right so you know i have to adapt

to to the way that that that spanish

works

and the way that most people

approach language learning the way that

it's taught in

a lot of classrooms the way that it's

taught in grammar books

okay the way that they study your

success at language learning in exams

the whole system is designed for you to

break language into basically words

into chunks right so we're like okay

we're gonna

test you on articles do you know the

difference between ah

and the we're gonna test you on um

your tenses do you know which verb

to put in this whole is it present

perfect or past perfect or

you're right right so

most students are accustomed to viewing

language

in little chunks little pieces right but

what they did in this experiment is

they didn't they taught adults

um chunks whole chunks instead of

teaching them that

you know mano is the word for hand in

spanish

and that it's a feminine word so when

you think about manner you have to say

la no

they taught them that this is la mano

all together

in one chunk and guess what you ready

we show that learning from unsegmented

input

leads to more article noun units

and to better learning the findings

provide

novel evidence for the advantage of

learning grammar

from multi-word units

that's how children learn language

because children don't know what words

are they learn that later right

children learn chunks big long chunks

and so your your advantage

of knowing more stuff your advantage of

understanding the categories of nouns

and verbs

is actually your huge disadvantage

because

you focus on the little pieces of

language

but what you should be doing is pulling

back

and looking at language

in in in chunks right or as they as the

name of the paper says

starting big um and i'll give you a

simple example in english right so

in english we have this structure to

make

equal comparisons okay and the structure

is

the something

the something for example the bigger the

better

the faster the more dangerous

the hungrier the more

angry right okay so it's about equal

comparison

when the first thing goes up the other

thing also goes up

when the first thing goes down the other

thing always goes down

where does the meaning come from okay

does the meaning come from

the article the no

does the meaning come from the

comparative

adjective that you use in that position

no the meaning comes from

the whole construction put together

analyzing the parts of the construction

don't help you to really understand

understanding is the key here

not superficial memorization but

real true understanding

and understanding that

the structure the construction

is what gives language the meaning not

the individual pieces okay

so if if you want to

if you want to to get fluent if you want

to

try to to regain

some of that advantage that you have as

a smart adult

then please stop looking at language as

little pieces okay because it's not

that's something that you learned to do

at school

something you learned to do from the way

the language learning

industry works but it's not it's not the

best way

okay not the most efficient uh

and it won't lead it won't lead to

success

and just just one final thing okay which

is

maybe the biggest advantage that

children have

over adults apart from this is that

children have curiosity they're always

asking why

you know anyone who's had a

five-year-old

in the house is is very quickly annoyed

by why

but why why is it like that why why why

why

that that's how you need to approach

your language learning why why

it's not enough to know you have to know

why

and the why questions

the the more you ask why the deeper you

go

is actually where you find the most

interesting things

you know the most important

fundamental parts of the way that

language works

so please be curious

and start big not small

i'm christian this is kangaroo english

and i'll see you in class

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you