So if you are looking for a language
tutor you want to practice your language skills especially if you don't live in
the country where the language you're learning is spoken or if you're
traveling a lot like I am then I recommend you go down to description
below the video and check out a link there for italki or italki because
that is the service I have used an awful lot over the last few years as many of
you know who are regular viewers to the channel and there you're going to find
tens of thousands of language tutors and you can have classes with them
one-on-one individual classes via Skype you don't have to meet them in person
and you can do all the payments online and it's something that I have used
regularly over the last few years to learn my languages and of course you get
a special discount if you go through my link there is some starter credit of ten
dollars towards your first lesson so go check out the link to italki or italki
depending on which way he want to pronounce it.
Всем привет! ["Hi everyone!" in Russian] Salut! ["Hi!" in French] and
welcome to this second episode of the Tsar Experience podcast with me Conor
Clyne. I'm delighted to have you back here today I'm speaking to you from a
very very nice park called L'Abbaye de la Cambre in Brussels (Bruxelles) in
Belgium and there is a particular reason why I chose this location to have the second
episode of the podcast. Unfortunately you can't see it if you're listening to this
just in the audio on the podcast version but if you're watching this on youtube
be able to see this beautiful Park. It's one of my favorite places in Brussels I
actually come here kind of to take a run or just to have a stroll it's right in
the city center a little bit of an oasis of calm here in a big European capital
and in today's episode of the podcast I'm going to discuss my own language
learning journey and how it can inspire and help you and motivate you to learn
lots of languages and this city is actually important to that story because
I actually lived in Brussels for a few years but to get started into the
podcast and to explain my background my name is Conor Clyne you might be able to
detect that that is a Irish name so I was born in Ireland in
Galway on the west coast of Ireland and you probably if you're listening
to this especially on the podcast version you will notice that I don't
have a particularly Irish accent when I speak I've lost that I
brogue to a certain extent unfortunately a lot of people find it charming and
that's because I've lived in lots of countries since being born and growing
up in in Ireland so you can probably hear different influences on my in my
accent I lived in the US for a while also in France in Belgium here in
Germany in Italy in France if I haven't said France already the Netherlands was
the other one and recently I'm spending a lot of time is probably a lot of you
know and that's probably why you're watching this video I spend a lot of
time Eastern Europe so countries like Ukraine Belarus Romania Moldova and
occasionally I've been in Poland and in Russia the Baltic countries: Latvia, Lithuania
and Estonia so if you were watching this channel before I started a
focus on Eastern Europe you will have seen that I did a lot of videos about
learning languages and being a polyglot now a polyglot is someone who just makes
me someone who speaks lots of languages it's not very complicated. It may sound like a very an
elitist term but that's basically what it describes and I actually started out
in Ireland a country which of course is not known for its linguistic prowess I
mean we don't have a very good reputation like the same inUnited Kingdom
or in America for learning foreign languages and I was definitely a very
good example of because in high school my three worst subjects my three worst
results in my high school final exams the state exams were actually in the
languages although those three languages I had to learn like English obviously as
my native tongue Irish because that's the official language of the country of
Ireland it's not English with an Irish accent it's completely different
language from the Celtic family of languages and I don't actually I don't
really think it's that hard to learn but it is completely different to English
and then I had French that was my like foreign language in that sense and they
were my worst three subjects I really couldn't master pronunciation obviously
you know English is my native tongue so that's not an issue but in French for
example I could not get the pronunciation down at all and I just
really struggled vocabulary grammar terms actually found a really boring
when I was a high school like languages were something that I just felt like not
for me they're from other people at class seem to get the good results right
because at the time I equated being good student with being
a good learner of languages and it's only later on that I realized that's not
always the case and in fact it's actually maybe never really the case for
if you look at people who actually go on to learn lots of languages first people
who were students of languages and get really good exam you know results in
those high school high school exams in particular so I was there and I just
thought languages were not for me they're my worst results I was really good at
things like physics chemistry mathematics
I got like top grades and all those kind of things I also accountancy so anything
with numbers it seemed like I get a good result on so I actually then studied law
which of course involves language because gotta speak it you gotta read
all the time admittedly it was in English I did have legal French at university
but I really was like the worst student in the class again student in the class
and actually only passed my second year French exams we had legal French was
very specialized I couldn't even speak French so learning legal terminology was
obviously really really difficult for me and I remember I was basically just
passed out of sympathy because I agreed to go on a language exchange in my third
year spent the entire year in France and actually learned some French so the
teacher was like okay fine I'll just give you a passing grade just so just we
can go to France and actually learn the language so I arrived in France to do
this university exchange the exchange program in Europe is called Erasmus and
it was definitely a really transformative year for me because you
know I had never lived in a foreign culture and had to adapt to it so it was really
a challenge in the beginning and I could not and this is I'm not joking I could
not order a sandwich on the train from Paris to the city I was actually
spending the year on the exchange program in. I had the point I had to grunt because
yeah I just didn't even though I tried to say like can I have whenever a
sandwich please and the guy didn't understand me this is the bottom line so
I had to point at it and grunt that's how terrible my level of French was and
remember I've had this for five years in high school
followed by two years in University where I'm suppose we learn Legal
French to be a lawyer in French and I cannot even order a sandwich so any notion
that you have that people who learn lots of languages in general are
talented or have some special like gene for learning languages well I don't
believe it exists but if it does I certainly wasn't blessed with it because
I started out in the bottom the worst student and during that year in France I
mean has basically spent the first I would say month to two months completely
mute I couldn't partake in any of the conversations everyone else was having
around me because yeah I just didn't understand anything and I couldn't say
anything over extremely basic so my friend I had a friend who's with me
there are several friends with me but one in particularly he actually
interpreted for me a lot so I didn't end up completely left out but obviously
he couldn't do that I couldn't do simultaneous interpretation for me every everyday 24
hours a day so basically I was very isolated because I couldn't communicate
with people of course some people were other foreign students spoke English but
in this region of France people did not speak very much English I did have other
English speakers on we're staying in these dorms in these residences not
really dorms they were like because we had our own rooms but we were saying
this residence and there were of course other foreign students on my floor so I
was able to communicate with them using English when I first first arrived but
over the year basically I managed to adopt and survive and I got to a really
basic level in French and I became a lot more confident but it still wasn't very
good right and this is after living in the country for one year well this stage
maybe about 10 months the academic year and I even went to the south of France. I had gone on a
little bit of a traveling trip and I arrived back in France on my own I said
okay now I'm gonna spend the summer here and I think I have enough French to at
least be able to communicate on a very basic level of people like high beginner
probably was my level at the time maybe low intermediate just about that and a
chance occurrence then happened I was in Cannes which is very
famous for the Film Festival in the South of France I went there in a trip
on a day trip and there was a guy who was sitting with a girl we're
sitting on a terrace beautiful days the South of France you can imagine the
seaside Cannes and he was there and he was ordering in French talking in some
language I think I mean I figured out it was German from listening to it with
the girl he was with and then he he turned to me and he said
yeah hello are you British and yeah
he had a slight accent German accent in English when he when he addressed me and we
started to chat and he was telling me that he had actually just come from
Spain that morning where he spoke in Spanish and then he was going to Italy
in the evening where he's gonna speak in Italian and he was speaking to his
girlfriend in German and he was ordering in French and speaking English to me so
I was like man that's like five languages and he said yeah I'm a
polyglot actually so I'm just someone who speaks lots of language in it he was
explaining to me that he had played table tennis at a high level when he was
younger and he also had the matches the tournaments in the different countries
around Europe so he was really fascinated by languages because when he
would go and play he would you know encounter the different people who speak
the different languages across Europe as he went to play in the tournaments for
the German national team if I remember correctly so he was like you know comes
constantly moving around throughout Europe and he had a need and a
motivation and but I was just completely taken aback because I'd never met anyone
who spoke more than maybe two or three languages and this guy's spoke five right I
think it means but more than that maybe six and I never even heard of this word
polyglot and understood what it meant but I mean basically just means someone
who speaks lots of languages I do have an article on my website that I'm going to
link in the description below this and YouTube and also put in the show notes to
the podcast where I actually go into depth to what you know how many
languages is someone a polyglot the different types of categories and all
that kind of nerdy stuff so if you really want to geek out on this then you
can go check that out. I'm going to link it below in the show notes and in the in
the description in YouTube here and so I said him like well do you spend all
your time studying because like to speak that number of languages is like insane
for me and he was like actually no I'm just kind of like motivated I'm really
curious because I get to use them a lot and I want to be able to speak in French
in France and you know in Italian in Italy so you know I read about the
grammar and I studied it a little bit but actually I just kind of talked to
people a lot and I read a lot in the different languages I watched the TV
because here at the time in Germany I guess you had a lot of foreign TV
stations so I can kind of watch the news or watch a documentary in French and
it's pretty easy for me so I found this like amazing I was like man this is like
really just something that astounds me because you know growing up in Ireland where
people spoke English and Irish maybe one other foreign language this was like
something I never encountered even on my year as an exchange student so I came
back from that you know meeting and I was I was working for the summer in Nice
and yeah I was really made me a lot more curious about the other languages that
we hear because we were very close to Italy so there a lot of Italians were
coming into the restaurant I worked as a waiter for the summer to get some money
to go travelling at the end. I went around Corsica which is really beautiful
Island see if we get the chance to go there and I took that trip and I learned
a lot of French of course over the summer because I was having to deal with you
know the public I was waiter so I had to of course serve people and wait the
tables and talk to the customers and and I started getting exposed to Italian I'd
take a little trip there so I was really like curious about Italian and having
met this guy who's a polyglot it really kind of made me think right over the
last year I didn't really have language classes very much I did have them a little
bit in university and you know I sucked at them I did the exams I think I failed them
all so again another another example where I sucked as a student and I
started to think well well this guy wasn't taking exams right I mean he was
just learning because he was really excited and you know he enjoyed it and
he was like reading lots in the different languages watching TV and just
talking to people so it seemed like he was a master all these languages and you
know the people who were getting the high grades in the class
they think they would do well in that exam and they would be able to speak to
people obviously better than me outside but they weren't people were like
speaking four or five six languages so this guy's on to something
and after I spent that summer I did improve because I also had a lot of
contact with the language at travel around Corsica on my own for
the week and I had a great time there and I did you know really talk to a lot
of people and also my at my job as a waiter that had happened so I came back to
finish my law studies in Ireland and I started to get really curious about
finding some sort of alternative method I remember I went to the local bookshop
and they had you know the kind of classical language books there and none
of them really inspired me because it seemed like it was good just gonna learn
lots of grammar and vocabulary and it was the same old same old I've been
seeing in class and now I still can't pronounce things properly this isn't
gonna help me be any different right in terms of a learning experience and there
was one course that kind of caught my eye because the cover to it had these
words like something like no memorization no homework I think there
were the two things that caught my eye and they really appealed to me because
having followed ... that kind of like rigid classroom regime at
school that had been absolutely ineffective to teach me languages so I was I am willing
to try anything else at this stage but it was actually course from Michel
Thomas I like I'll link to this below as well of course in the description to the
YouTube video and you show notes to the podcast so you can go take a look. Michel
Thomas was originally from he was from modern-day Poland he may have been born
in Lodz and he had grown up in Germany a little bit and Breslau at the time
I think that's Wroclaw today if I'm not mistaken in Poland and then he he had
this incredible life story you know during second world war he was Jewish and he
was living in France and of course you had the Nazi Germany invaded France and
I'm yeah the Vichy government the puppet government in the part that he was and
he had all these he even you know he was interrogated and he had to pretend that he
didn't understand German even though of course he spoke fluent German
to avoid being executed by the Nazi regime
pro-nazi regime where he was and after the war he had even testified at the trial
of a leading Nazi so he had this incredible life story and then
afterwards he had opened a language school in California in LA and became
this big celebrity teacher to a lot of stars so we had this course and it
seemed very different and I remember he had this kind of crackling voice on the
old recording and it was kind of imperfect but it really helped me get
the basics down in terms of learning how to open conversations and I was really
hooked on this I think I bought it in several language and I had it in like
German Spanish Italian French and Italian I think at the time so I bought
them ... I may have may have bought in the space of a few months actually
bought them in all of them even though I wasn't learning all the languages I was just
like so excited and I was motivated to learn Italian because I had had this great
trip to Italy and I was really like yeah I want to live in Italy for at least one
year of my life I was not sure how I was going to do it at the time but I was really
determined to at least start on that path so I bought the about the course and I
listened to it and I remember my family some of the family members making fun of me
because I was like listening is when it was dark and repeating the sentences and
building up the structures and that not memorizing and doing anything or being
in a classroom environment right it took the traditional learning approach and
they were kind of making fun of me for doing this kind of crazy thing like it
seemed the insane to them and then I think it was like the following year I went to
study in the Netherlands and I invited an Italian girl out on a date and yeah
it was kind of funny I had had a 20-minute conversation only in Italian
and remember I just taken the Michel Thomas like 8-hour course up
until now like the audio course and that's all the Italian I had right and
it was exhausting but I lasted 20 minutes in Italian and I later dated
this girl we went out to get her for a couple of years so then I would see my
Italian improved dramatically afterwards because I had an Italian girlfriend and
that's again part of the philosophy I guess to learning languages I had
high motivation and a lot of exposure to language when you have obviously a
relationship and an intimate relationship with someone but that just shows like this
allowed me to have a 20-minute conversation remember when I
was telling you about French and my experience out of five years at school
in two years University I couldn't order a sandwich on the first day never mind
have a 20-minute conversation I was living in France in that Erasmus year
and it was months before I had a 20-minute conversation with anyone and to have a
one-on-one in Italian was like obviously as I said tiring it wasn't very easy I
was struggling in parts but I got through it and it obviously had made a good
impression right because I ended up in a relationship as a result so this really
for me man I could never go back to like traditional language learning after that
so I continued I obviously learned Italian I actually lived in Italy I
achieved my goal I went to study at Johns Hopkins University SAIS which is
their School of Advanced International Studies and they actually had a campus
in Bologna in Italy so I actually went for the first year there and studied in
Italy got to live had probably the best year of my life definitely my university
life it was just amazing living in northern Italy eating just incredible
food the vibe at the time ... university it's a university city Bologna and it
was just amazing and I got pretty like really good Italian obviously having
lived there and having had this base that I had learned from Michel Thomas
also have a relationship with an Italian and I spent the summer in Sardinia if I
remember correctly which another great thing beautiful island if you ever get
the chance you should definitely go there and spend some time it's really
one of my favorite places in Italy during the summer just amazing beaches
and so I had this phenomenal experience and at this stage speak ok French I
speak ok Italian pretty good Italian I took the exams as part of my masters and
passed them and both of those languages so I was like officially competent
finally so we have three languages at this stage and when I was there in
Washington I started to do things like you know there was an Hispanic
neighborhood basically one street away from where I lived and I actually would
go there and I started learning Spanish using Michel Thomas had some classes
also at university I'd joined the class but I didn't need it for credit or
anything was just something to you know was on offer so
take advantage and just you know use that to improve another language at the
same time and I used to go like really regularly like every second day to the
Hispanic neighborhood so these people were immigrants originally from Central
America and primarily from El Salvador and I would just speak in Spanish of the
conversation and I didn't speak very good Spanish but I just just went a
did it right and some people were like because my Spanish was obviously very
basic they didn't really want entertain me but I would say about 80% of them of
the people in the neighborhood were just we're happy to speak to me they were
either neutral or really happy to speak to me in Spanish because they
could see someone who wasn't a native Spanish speaker opening up you know
making an effort to learn their language where they could probably empathize with
that because they had come to America and not speaking English and they had to
struggle and learn it themselves so they obviously respected that and by god
this guy is in the same position as us trying to learn our language and I remember
I used to go to a taco stand every Sunday the same one one of these small
vans and I would like hang around and chat to the people there for like 10 15 minutes
and they were really delighted because I was probably when a few people came by
and actually bought a taco and spoke in Spanish as a non-native speaker and I
also had a cafe my favorite cafe right near my university and some of the
people worked there were El Salvadoran as well and there was some there was a
french-speaking guy from West Africa and then there were some Swahili speaking
guys and even taught me some Swahili so I used to speak every day like French
and Spanish and so it was a bit like having a language class but you know it
was no extra effort and what was really important was like I actually liked the
people genuinely who I was chatting to every day in Spanish and French in this
week and I hadn't really learned so they just teach me so in terms of when we
talk mainly in English but even if I had to do in every everything in English I
would have spoken to those people and formed that friendship and relationship
with them but here I was doing it in French and Spanish so like my French got
really really good not because I was taking classes not because I was
studying grammar it's because you know everyday based I was going this cafe and
maybe the guy was working there every second
is every second day I basically chatted for like half an hour in French I was
like I'm in a French class and same for Spanish I got up to a decent level I
didn't get a remember they tested me in Spanish from you know obviously I start
beginners and it's a little bit of overlap of course with Italian and
French cuz they're from the same family of languages the romance family so it
wasn't like it was completely foreign to me in that sense so I did have a little
bit of a head start but you know it's funny because they tested me at the
school right so it's students do I know the grammar and all this stuff and they
didn't pass me anything just about how many people below the passing passing
rate after you know two semesters of the language upto proficiency level which
was very high very high standard to have reached anyways but I found it
interesting because the people that they were passing in the exam had learned all
these grammar rules and you know the vocab
in reality you don't need when they're communicating 99% of the time but when
they would come to me the cafe they would struggle to have a natural
conversation with the real native speakers and for me it was like well the
goal of learning the language is actually to communicate with people
right so they've been good students and had passed the exam but they can't have a
conversation and actually or really engage in the subject matters that they
really want to talk about naturally so they may pass the exam but are they
going to continue to maintain the language are they going to improve it's
very unlikely right because without that motivation that curiosity and those real
genuine relationships in the languages it's just like it's too much work right
I'm not gonna be studying grammar if you don't have the exam any more because
that's the thing they have a goal pass the exam it's useful for my career I
have to pass one language in order to get my final diploma while I didn't have
that pressure I was like I think this kicks ass right I mean this is this
excites me that's like challenge of like starting from position of a
five-year-old in terms of my ability in the language and I'm gradually increasing and
you know that progress is addictive and you know I'm talking to people you know
learning about that culture at the same time now I want to go visit their
country so the whole thing was really exciting so this is the end of the first
part of this two-part episode of the podcast. It was actually so long that I decided
to split it into two parts now that we're doing the
editing as you see I'm no longer in Brussels I'm actually in Odessa, Odessa
on the Black Sea in Ukraine just standing at the entrance to Park
Shevchenko you can see the statue of Taras Shevchenko there if you're watching it
on YouTube if you're listening to it well you just have to imagine where I am
you should go below to the description of this video or the show notes if
you're listening to this and there I have a free video course for you guys
three part video course completely free you just sign up by email and then you
get that for completely free for you which will help you 3 my secrets for
learning languages and then at the end of that there's the chance to join my
premium course Language Up Your Life so until the second part of this episode
next week до свидания! ["Goodbye" in Russian] from Odessa Ukraine!
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