Luca Lampariello On How To Master Any Language

Wanna Know Exactly How To Master Any Language?

I got good news for you. The amazing polyglot Luca Lampariello showed up in Berlin and we had a good long chat about language learning. And the best part is …

We've got it on video!

Take a look on YouTube or download the full MP4. You'll find the full transcript below and can also download it as a PDF for future reference.

Anthony: Hi, this is Anthony Metivier. I'm here with Luca Lampariello, and we are doing a very special interview. We are here in Berlin. I live in Berlin but Luca is visiting.

Luca: Yes.

Anthony: We thought, "Well I'm the memory guy and he's the language-learning guy." We both operate in the same sort of industry so to speak, because his business is memorizing words and my business is helping you memorize them. It's really not a business. It's more like a passion.

Luca: Yes.

Anthony: For people who don't know you, you've got dozens upon dozens of videos on YouTube that train people in a particular brand of language learning, but for people who do know you, which I think probably many, many people who are watching this already do, one thing I've noticed is that we have never heard much about your personal life and I mean I don't even know if you have a ‑

Luca: You meant to pry. You want to know the real secrets.

Anthony: The real stuff, like the dirt; for one thing, I've never asked you if you have a middle name.

Luca: Yeah, actually my name is Luca, everybody calls me Luca, but my other name is Vittorio because my grandfather, that's my grandfather's name. The Italian tradition is to call a son or a daughter after your grandmother. It's an old tradition coming from the south. I don't know if it's the same thing in Canada. He is actually my father's mother. His name was Vittorio. He was a physician, a doctor who used to be in World War II unfortunately, and he was in Africa. Unfortunately, I never got to meet him. My mother told me he had very interesting stories to tell about World War II. Because one of the things I like the most, apart from language, is history.

Anthony: Did any of those stories survive that you remember from your grandmother?

Luca: Yeah, I remember a lot of things that my mother told me. Not only my grandfather actually, my other grandfather as well and my grandmother, I got to know my two grandmothers and they were telling us about what happened in World War II. One is from Calabria which is deep south. The Americans and the Allies invaded Sicily and then went up to Calabria, and my other grandmother actually comes from the north of Italy. I've got the whole family from everywhere in Italy. So I have all these different traditions and also dialects. One thing that I never say is that my grandmother when I was a little kid just talked to me in Calabrese dialect. I learned that as well.

Anthony: Well that's a lot of different parts of Italy but I know you are living in Rome at the moment. Is that where you were born?

Luca: Yes, that is exactly where I was born and I've been living there for 34 years almost because I'm turning 34 actually in two days.

Anthony: Thirty-four in two days.

Luca: Thirty-four, I'm an old man.

Anthony: Well happy birthday in advance.

Luca: Thanks.

Anthony: But you've also lived in Paris?

Luca: I lived in Paris for three years. I lived in Paris and Barcelona.

Anthony: Okay so the three places. What strikes you as being some of the major similarities and major differences?

Luca: That's a very interesting question. Barcelona is very similar to Italy – the weather, the people, the traditions. I always say that Spaniards are a little bit like our cousins in a way because I believe that the language is like part of the culture and our languages are very, very similar and that reflects a certain kind of mentality.

Paris on the other hand, the French are similar to the Italians in so many ways but at the same time they're different. Paris is like a northern European city and the weather is kind of different. It's a little bit chilly there, like here in Berlin.

Actually Berlin is not as cold as I thought. It's like 6.

Anthony: Plus 6.

Luca: Plus 6 you know. So I'm kind of liking it.

A month ago I was in Russia and expected to be minus 20 and it was plus 8 and now it's plus 6 so I might bring good weather or maybe I'm just lucky. I tend to lean towards the second. I have to say that the French and the Spaniards and the Italians are very similar in so many ways. It's not easy to pin down these things because you have to live to understand, but basically I also believe that the language plays a huge role, and obviously history. We're all Latin peoples so to say so there is a common trait to our culture and the way we eat food and etc.

Anthony: You mentioned history as one of your interests. What interests you about history?

Luca: Well everything interests me. The thing that interests me the most is that if you know history, I feel that if you know history you know the world you're living in right now, because we've been shaped. We're the product of history. We are the product of all the things that happened in the last 4,000 years actually, the last million years.

So what interests me the most, if you want to be more specific is World War II, because I find it, I might be a little bit maybe naive to say that, it's really like I see it as a clash between the good and evil even if sometimes you think of it the Allies bombing German cities and so many people dying. Is that good? Does that serve a specific purpose? Was it strictly necessary? Yeah, obviously it served the purpose of defeating Nazi Germany but at the same time was it strictly necessary.

We're not going to delve into politics but I'm very interested in like how it was possible that all that thing happened and the fact that we're living in, I wouldn't go so far to say that we're living in a peaceful world, that is not true, but at least in Europe, if you think about it, that's the longest period we have had peace, 70 years. If you think about it, Europe has been ravaged by war for centuries and there's been a period longer than, I don't know, never been like 70 years. We're lucky. Canada as well. It's been at peace for a long time. So we have to consider ourselves lucky. We take it for granted but it's not granted at all if you consider all the wars actually right now in Syria and in many, many other places in the world.

Anthony: Absolutely. I want to ask you about some of your other interests but just not to abandon this for a second, do you think that the capacity for language learning has been involved in the peace that has developed over time not just in terms of as if anybody has any better abilities now to learn languages but the spread of language training both hardcopy things and online.

Luca: I believe so. I believe, for example, if we had a war right now it wouldn't be the same. People are biased in so many ways. For example, the Italians tend to (not all Italians obviously) tend to think that the French are a little bit snobbish or the Germans are a little bit close minded. It's absolutely not true.

Are We In The Best Period Of History For Learning A Language?

The fact that we live in a peaceful society right now, I'm talking about Europe obviously, has so many – for example yesterday I was at a party. There were so many people from everywhere around the world. You could talk about anything and people want to mix. There is not this, "Okay, you're a foreigner." No, you are part of the European community and this has revolutionized, I would go as far to say that it has revolutionized the way young people, this young generation is learning languages.

I don't know if you ever heard about the Erasmus project. Canadians and Americans might know about it, but it's a European thing, where a student can decide to live abroad and learn a language. It's not just because they go study there. Obviously they go study there, but the people who went there just completely change the way they see their own country and their own existence and their own traditions, etc.

So I do believe that peace has contributed enormously to the development to this multilingual society in which we live in. This is a fantastic thing. Obviously the Internet plays a huge role as well. But I do believe that the peaceful conditions in which we live do play a huge role in the way we live and we consider the reality around us.

Anthony: Okay so we've got history, and we've got language, and it seems that they're tightly wrapped up in one another. Do you have an interest that you would say has nothing to do with language?

Luca: Yes. Before I talk to you about my other interests, I just wanted to say that for me, when people talk to you for example talk about you and talk to you and say oh, you're the memory guy, they'll refer to you as the memory guy.

Maybe yourself you'll refer to yourself too as a memory guy, but the thing is that, and when they talk to me, the first thing they want to know is how many languages I speak, and the people who already know me treat me as friends as well. We talk about a lot of things but mainly they think that my main interest is languages. Now, actually languages is one of the things that I like but it's not just the only thing I do.

When I think about history for example, I'm very interested in World War II and specially the Eastern Front and what happened between Nazi Germany and, for example, the Russians. That helped me delve into this and actually sparked this interest in understanding how the Russians saw the war, and I've been reading a lot of books in Russian and a lot of books in German to understand how the two parts lived the war.

So this is just one event in the course of history but there are many other events which actually push me to read more and more in the languages. We have just spoken of the countries that were involved in the political-historical processes that I was trying to understand and read about. So history is actually contributed as other interests to perfect and improve my language skills.

And to go back to your question, as other interests that have nothing to do with languages, sports doesn't necessarily have to do with languages unless you want to read a blog about running for example in English or in other languages. Sports is one other thing that really interests me. If I think about it now, for example, I really like movies but this has to do with languages right.

Luca: So I'm trying to find something that has nothing to do with languages, and I would say sports. I like jogging. I've been trying to jog. I decided to jog in 2003, I decided that I wanted to try it. Have you ever run? Have you ever tried?

Anthony: I have actually. Unfortunately, I developed arthritis in my knees so I can't run. But I did run quite avidly as a young person.

Luca: And also football. I used to play football a lot as well as with my twin sister. Yeah, she's a professional now. Yeah, so this is for example one of the things that I'm interested in that has I would say not – everything potentially has to do with languages because language is the way we convey our thoughts, but yeah sports is one of the things I'm interested in and that's it.

Anthony: Well the sports thing is very interesting I think because there is a phenomenon of jogger's high and actually I've interviewed you before and you mentioned the relationship between joggers high and language learning as a kind of finding the zone or finding a spot where things really start to come together and happen and you mention that also in your master class.

Luca: Absolutely.

Sleep, Meditation & Fitness Can Make Or Break Your Language Learning Experience

Anthony: What I wonder, a question that I'm thinking is, and I'm not sure exactly the best way to elaborate it, but one thing I work on is meditation and finding this clear spot without thought, without thinking and, well that's not the best way to say it, but a place where thought is so focused and intent that it's sort of beyond language or one word, and I'm just wondering as someone who has dealt with so many languages and found mastery in so many languages how do you get silence in your head? Is it just the running or do you have any other kinds of personal practices?

Luca: That's a very interesting question. I've been thinking about mediation a lot recently. I've never done it, but I've been hearing more and more people actually trying to meditate because they have been overwhelmed by life. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by life, like myself. You were right when you said that sometimes I've a storm of languages or thoughts.

I think one of the most difficult things to do is actually to find a moment where you're not listening to anything, not even to your inner voice, you're just at peace with yourself. If find it a very difficult thing to do because we live in a world where we get stimulated continuously all the time. This is one of the things that I actually want to try because I've never tried it before.

I think that, going back to the running thing, you are right that when I run I think better for some reason. Maybe chemically because you've got a lot of chemical substances like serotonin and we release substances when you run and are more relaxed. When you go back home you take a shower and you are peace with yourself and with the world, but at the same time you still have this flux of thoughts and memories is stilled.

I don't know if it ever happened to you that you try to sleep and you have so many things that you can't, so many things in your head, whirlwind of things that you can't concentrate.

So this is the next frontier, the next thing that I want to try to achieve is actually silence. It might be strange for a polyglot or a multilingual person with a lot of speaking so much because I do like speaking, but actually this is one of the things that are the New Year's Eve resolutions.

Anthony: Well I'm working on a book right now actually called The Ultimate Sleep Remedy and I'll hook you up with a copy after and it gets into mediation and different strategies that you may be interested in.

Luca: I have an article on my blog myself. It's a guest post from a friend Joseph, he's Swedish who actually gives very valuable advice as to how to sleep because some people just can't sleep. Insomnia is one of the biggest problems. People don't talk about it that much, but actually there's a lot of people that can't sleep and not being able to sleep is a terrible thing.

Anthony: You know that's another thing that has come up when I've spoken to you before. You are talking about being with Richard Simcott, and he uses the story of him staying up so late at night and just being fascinated, and just not stopping. How do you, given all that you do and all that's required of your brain power, how to do manage to do so much and also be well rested. You're obviously a very fit and healthy guy.

Luca: Fit, I don't know about fit.

Anthony: But I mean what's with sleep, and your ability to retain and working memory and all these kinds of things that are required for learning a language.

Luca: I'll give you one very simple answer. My answer would be that I manage to speak and maintain languages because I live them every day. I found the best environment for me. There are a lot of people focused on the best method, the best approach and then they focus on getting the materials, etc., but first I believe that the human factor is one of most important things.

Language has been created in order to communicate. We convey thoughts through language and if you find the best conditions, your brain and your capacities are going to thrive. So what I did is I told myself when I started speaking more than three or four languages, I told myself that the only way I could maintain so many languages at a certain level was to live them.

On the one side you can structure your day so that can for example listen to the radio when you're washing the dishes or you can read books. But that's time you choose to spend on the languages. But on the other side, if for example you live in a city like Berlin or Rome or Paris and you surround yourself with what I call the microenvironment with foreigners. You live with foreigners, you go out with foreigners, and you tend to speak languages all the time. Like currently for example I am living with my friend Davie. He is from London, you know him, and a Dutch girl, and that allows me to speak Dutch and English on a daily basis.

I also go out very often with a lot of friends who live in Rome, and I tend to speak other languages. I have a lot of friends everywhere. One the one hand in real life I have this microenvironment where I speak two or three languages at home plus when I go out I speak other languages with other people, with my friends, and I work with languages.

Why Language Learning Is More About Managing Your Time Than Words And Phrases

As a language coach what I do is basically I give classes in the language about language but also about a structure, how to organize your time, etc., and I do it in various languages, for example in all sorts of possible combinations. For example, Americans want to learn Spanish, Spaniards want to English, Italians want to learn English, Americans want to improve their Italian, and so on, from Russian into English, English into Russian. So I've got to practice a number of languages on a daily basis and one of the best ways to learn is to teach.

If you teach you learn a lot. I guess it happened to you as well. You're trying to figure out ways to help as many people as possible and this means that you are going to do some research and you're going to apply it to yourself. So you're going to understand the process better. This is exactly what I've been doing in the last five years, trying to figure out ways to help as many people as possible, figure out their best way.

So it's not only a psychological growth, because you have to understand people better. It's not just understanding people better. A good language coach and even a good language teacher doesn't necessarily have to speak the language perfectly but has to have the capacity of understanding the student's needs and tastes, etc., being able to relate to him, and I think the psychological process, I've said it a number of times, is absolutely important to thrive in language learning, because without psychological aspect, you can try to nail everything but things probably will not work.

Anthony: So speaking of coaching, if I were to come to you and say, "Luca, I want a coach and I need that personal attention from an individual because nothing else is going to work." What is the first thing that you're going to say to me in response, assuming that we go through the mechanical stuff of transactions and filling out forms? What's the first thing that you'll say?

Luca: The first thing I will say is why do you want to learn this language? First I'm going to ask you about the reasons why you're doing this and then your personal story, you're personal history in so far as language learning is concerned, and I'm going to ask you about yourself. What do you do? What are your interests?

First of all it's about trying to figure out who you are, what you want, why you want it and all the lessons are tailored around your tastes and needs, and I take into account what kind of person you are. For example, let me give you a very concrete example. If you are a very shy person, and you have difficulty expressing yourself some reason, the very first thing that I am going to do is focus on the things that you are good at, for example, at reading or listening and small tasks to get out of your comfort zone.

I'm not going to talk to you immediately, okay, we're going to have this conversation in the language right now. Because it might be detrimental actually. So the very first thing that I do is to try to understand, you know language experience does count. Because I've noticed that the people who have never learned a language before and maybe they're in their 50s, struggle a little bit more than people who say have learned another language.

But it's not just about language experience. It is multiple factors that play a role and you have to try to tackle every single aspect and to try to do it from the very beginning.

Why Children Suck At Language Learning

Anthony: You mentioned people who are in their 50s, and you've said before and you mention in your master class that actually we often make the mistake of saying that children have some special advantage in language learning and older people are thought struggle more than children, but you kind of have an interesting take on that, and if you could say something about that kind of paradox about age and language learning.

Luca: It's a paradox because first of all I don't believe, this might sound absurd to a lot of people who have been claiming that the acquisition of your first language is different from the acquisition of the second language, I believe that the mechanisms and the way we learn languages as adults or kids are almost the same. There are differences in the way our brain is wired that's true. It's true that in a way that kid's brain develops fast and that it's a little bit different psychologically. They want to blend in so what they do is they tend to play with their schoolmates, etc. They develop the language in a certain way.

If you think about it, I've met in my life, I've met adults that speak a given language, a foreign language extremely well, because for example they have lived in the country for three years and they have family. Let's suppose a French guy living in the Czech Republic. He moved there maybe 30 years ago, and he's been speaking the language ever since, and he's got a family, and he speaks to his kids in Czech, to his wife in Czech. He might have an accent, but he might develop the nuisances that are characteristic of a native speaker.

I lived in France for three years. I've learned so many things. Not just about the language, the way they talk, the way they move their mouth. These are things that I actually do. When I speak English it's a very different thing but I digress. What I wanted to say is that basically I think that any person who speaks his native tongue well can learn any language.

Think about it, as a native speaker you can hold hundreds and hundreds of thousands of words, hundreds of thousands of combination of words and expressions and it's amazing. I strongly believe that our capacity of learning anything is not infinite but it is huge. If you think that we have more neurons than there are stars in the sky, there are millions, I don't know it's a mindboggling number. So I believe that you can accomplish anything in life if you put yourself in the right circumstances, conditions, etc., your brain is literally and your capacity is really going to thrive.

People think for example that it's exceptional that a person speaks ten languages. I would say it's exceptional because just a few people do it, but it doesn't mean that people can't do it. It's just because it's a combination of things. I do believe that talent can play a role. It can facilitate the process, but I also believe because I've seen it firsthand that, I'm talking about language learning but this goes for everything, you can do amazing things or supposedly amazing things that look amazing but actually they are within our brain's capacity.

You Don't Have To Be Talented To Learn Another Language

Anthony: Talk a little bit about talent. I mean we did some magic tricks the other night, and I just want to bring that up because you were saying teach me a trick. Some people show me tricks. They never want to teach me trick. That's true. There are certain things that I can do with cards that you can do too and there is nothing particularly talented about them it's just putting in the time and analyzing where the hands need to be and analyzing the audience and doing this and doing that and saying this at a particular moment and not another moment. But I think the number one challenge is actually sitting down and doing it.

But if there were more, what are some of the talents that you think that you have in particular that have gotten you this kind of success that another person could look at himself or herself and say I am lacking in that area and then they could actually build a talent.

Because we're talking about age and all that stuff, we know that neuroplasticity is a reality and the brain can change and certain activities that we engage in can cause new neural networks to form and that sort of stuff. What do you think that you have in particular that others may not that they could then work towards getting in order to put some stuff in their toolbox?

Luca: You ask very interesting questions. Thinking about language, language is a huge field actually. I would say that the thing that I have developed which may differentiate me from other people might be phonetics. It might be the way I pronounce languages. But I don't really know whether I have a talent for that or I have a knack for sounds.

I would say that I believe, I strongly believe that the reason why I pronounce certain languages well or supposedly well, that's what people tell me, is that I train. I train not just sitting down and thinking okay now I'm going to train. I train in every possible situation. Think about it, I don't know if you ever talk to yourself. That might sound a little bit crazy but everybody does. Once in a lifetime they've done it.

Anthony: I'm talking to myself right now. No I'm listening to you very attentively.

Use This Butt-Naked Fluency Secret First Thing Every Morning

Luca: What I do for example instead of sitting down and thinking okay I'm going to deliberately spend some time doing this activity, I just train while I take a shower or while I go walking. Once I was even in the metro, and I really felt like speaking. I couldn't talk to anybody. I just couldn't come up and say, "Hey, hi, how are you doing?" But start a conversation like in the metro would have been a little bit weird unless I had a specific purpose, right?

So I just got my phone out of my pocket and I just started talking as if I were having a conversation with my girlfriend. I was calling this imaginary girlfriend and talking with her in Dutch because I wanted to practice Dutch. So I was imagining and literally taking pauses as if I were listening to this person talking to me and I was replying. So I was imagining this conversation for the purpose of training. I was calling her. I remember that I was imagining in my mind imagining her sitting with her friends and talking about stuff. What are you doing? Where are you going? What are you going to do tonight? All sorts of things.

This helped me actually articulate the sounds. I don't remember how many facial muscles we have but you have to train your facial muscles as well as your mouth, etc., because it's like sports. When you start jogging, the very first time you go jogging you are like breathless and you tell yourself who made me do this. You're cursing yourself for going to the park, but actually it becomes easier. It is the same thing for languages.

When we speak languages we tend to step out of our comfort zone so far as sounds are concerned because we have to utter sounds that are completely different. Sometimes they are very, very different and difficult to pronounce at the beginning but if you do it consistently it gets easier and easier in a matter of two, three or four months and the way to go about this is not just – you can do some work at home sitting down but what counts is that you find a purpose. You tell yourself I want to communicate certain idea to somebody even if it's an imaginary girlfriend that you are talking to on the phone in the metro and you just talk.

People tend to consider, this has been my experience, tend to think and tend to focus too much on the small details instead of taking a look at the bigger picture. Imagine that you are taking a look at a picture and somebody tells you, you start looking at this picture and you focus on the small things instead of figuring out the message the picture wants to convey.

What I do is, in very specific terms, don't focus on the pronunciation of the single words but try to utter a sentence. If you want to practice one word say it within a sentence. This is called a top-down approach. Because if you start with bottom-up approach, what happens is you start with pronouncing single words, then might pronounce a word correctly or very well, but when you have to chain sounds one after the other in a sentence, then it gets a little bit difficult. But if you start from the very beginning with short sentences then it gets better and better.

How To Enter The Mazes Of Phrases And Get Out Alive And Fluent

For example, let's suppose an Italian wants to practice the word church because it is difficult for us to say church. So instead of telling him to try to say church, church, church, for ten times, just try to say I want to go to the church. You would practice it a number of times, and then maybe you can make your sentence longer and try to say I want to go to a church because I want to meet some people because I love God, etc., etc. So you start with a short sentence and then you make it longer so that if you think about it you're practicing the pronunciation of ten words instead of just one at a time. It makes a huge difference in the long run.

Anthony: So what do you do with someone who says but I can't memorize, I can't even get myself to memorize or pronounce "I want to go."

Luca: What I tell them is that don't think about the fact that you can't memorize, just do it. Meaning, what I would say, the meaning of the thing that I would say is that remember that you speak your first language. Why do you speak your first language, we talked about in another podcast that languages are just networks. What I would suggest and this is my approach, maybe yours is different in memorizing words, but what I do is I always tell them that if they build the network like a spiderweb then the flies, which are the words, are going to get stuck automatically in the long run.

One concrete example, this doesn't mean that it's necessarily super easy, when it comes to languages for example that are very different like Russian, Russian is a Slavic language so a lot of words have Slavic roots and they are difficult to remember. But when you start delving into the language you're just recognizing the small clues that are inside words. Once you memorize that it becomes so much easier to memorize words. Because some words even contain other words.

So when you start at the beginning, you might struggle a little bit but if you expose yourself, and you still consider the language always as an effort when you read, when you listen, when you talk, etc., things become easier and easier.

For example if you have to remember the word РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ, it's difficult to pronounce. You can focus on the sound. You can focus on РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ, which means common, but instead of just thinking wow this is like a long word. I'm not going to remember. You might remember it now because you are going to commit it to your short-term memory, but then you have to actually remember it maybe in a couple of days and then in a conversation it's going to get a little bit complicated.

So my suggestion is even when you have words like that, break them down into shorter pieces. For example РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ, you can divide into РАС-ПРОС-ТРА-НЕННЫЙ and then if you break it down, this is a technique called back chain, you repeat this word a number of times and then your brain will actually figure out the elements.

One other example, German is very famous for putting words – you can see these words are huge because they are made of four or five words. But actually if you spot the words or a pair it becomes much easier. They put an "s" to put these words together sometimes. So, everything boils down to how you see things.

If you see this word and you tell yourself this is too difficult, you're already lost, you've lost the battle. But if you tell yourself, hmm, let me look at this word actually. Take two seconds to look at the word and tell yourself actually this word is not so difficult because look at this. This is like spot the "s" in the case of German and you will see that the "s" separates two elements, and then you will see these two elements and maybe if you know one you just have to remember the other one.

Why You Need To Use All Of Your Senses (And Your Muscles)

And I always suggest this is probably how I figured out my memory works. My memory works visually meaning that I can – actually when I'm fairly advanced in a language I can memorize words also just by listening to them, but normally I strongly believe that if you want to commit any piece of information to your long-term memory, what you should do is you should try to use all the senses. Well not all of them but like sight, so you have to see the word. Then you have to listen to it and then you have to pronounce it so you're using your mouth, your using your ears and then you're using your eyes and the more you do that, instead of just listening, some people advocate that you just listen and it's great, but then if you don't have a base, being able to see the word might help.

So I just put all these elements together and then I don't sing in the shower, I just talk. Some people sing in the shower, I just talk for example and even in the car. I don't know if you ever noticed it, some courses just give advice and they say, you know, maybe when you're driving the car just talk to yourself. The person next to you and think you're totally crazy but maybe you're just talking on the phone. A person talking to themselves the first thing you're going to see is you're going to try to spot a microphone or try to spot a telephone to help them see maybe they're not crazy. They're just talking to somebody. And it turns out to be true like 95% of the time. Depending on where you go.

Anthony: That's hopeful anyway that they're doing something like that and not talking to themselves. But let me think here, so I'm not going to try and do the tongue rolls but РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ ‑

Luca: РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ

Anthony: Yeah okay. So, break that down a little bit. When you are learning that, that means common right?

Luca: Yes.

Anthony: And so, just the process that you, just quickly, you encounter that word. How did you encounter it and/or in what context and then what do you do next, and what do you next and what's going on?

Luca: Very good. What I do is just, if you want to memorize that word, I think that you not only understand and this is the first process, you first decipher it. You break it down.

You then get a text, not a list of words. So you just have to grab a text and it should be interesting to you. I believe that one of the reasons why a lot people fail learning languages is school and not only at school because they tend to be exposed to text or materials which stops and they're not interested in. If you're interested in something, you know, thing about five things you like. Then you just go and look. The Internet allows you to search for any sort of material. Then you just get exposed to it, preferably with an audio.

Then what I do is, I try to listen. I try to read at the same time and what I do, for example, I stumble upon a word like РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ, first I break it down into parts. The very first phase is to decipher and understand the text because you can't learn something you don't understand. If you understand you've got a higher chance of retaining the information.

Then what I do, I might have delved into this because this is very specific, but what I do is to use a system, a space-time repetition system. A space-time repetition can work/cannot work. I know that for some people it doesn't work, but it depends on how they do it. They have to personalize this process as well. If you hear that the best technique is to have a space-time repetition system in which you have to repeat a word every single day or every two days, it doesn't work.

Possibly Each And Every One Of Us Learns In A Different Way

Every brain is different. Possibly, each and every one of us learns in a different way. So you have to find the best way that adapts to the way you're learning and committing information into long-term memory.

Mine was to build a system where I found out the best intervals of time in which I'm not just repeating stuff but I'm using that word or attacking that piece of information from different angles. One day I read it, one day you listen to it and one day I use it.

The other piece of advice that I'll give is use this thing. Languages have been created to be used. If you can use these things you're telling your brain that this or that piece of information is important, and the brain is going to retain it. So this is kind of important.

So I've structured, I've built a system in which I tend to first of all put myself in the best conditions to understand something, and then to use it basically. Then to review it in a certain way and then finally to start using it. Obviously there are some words like РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ which is a common word in Russian but there are like very uncommon words that you might not use in your lifetime. The reason why we know it as native speakers is because for some reason we've been exposed to them, or when you read. But how many times are going to use words like "grate" in English. I don't know. It depends right.

Why Word Choices Are Personal, Context-Specific And Based On Practical Use

Anthony: I use it all the time.

Luca: Well you use it all the time but the point is that everybody is different. So some people and this I think this has not been tackled anywhere, my way of dealing with words has to do with – I believe that we have this core of words that that everybody uses because they're absolutely necessary. You can't avoid using these words. Some words might not carry a lot of information like "and, the, on," etc. These are common words. But there are other words that depend on the specific field of your work, of your life, etc.

Maybe somebody working in the lumberjack business, for example, might know some specific words that have to do with wood or their specific work. Screwdriver for example, somebody working the specific field. Some other people will never use that word. Screwdriver is another common word but if you think about rate, if you think about things that are very specific, once I saw in forum a person say if you don't know these words it means – I remember it was hot flashes. I didn't even know it at the time when I saw it, hot flashes, first I'm not a woman.

Anthony: Well you can get andropause if you're a man.

Luca: I can get andropause, that's true. But I didn't know this word and I found it a little bit shocking that some people really believe that fluency has to do with – it does have to do with the amount of words you know up to a certain level because you have to know a lot of words in order to speak fluently, but for some people advocating that if you don't know like ten words that are almost never used or it's going to be very unlikely that you're going to hear it, then you don't know the language.

If you think about it, even in your native English and my native Italian, we don't know a lot of words. We know actually a tiny fraction of the words that exist and our vocabulary is huge. There's hundreds of thousands of words. English has, I don't know how many words, a million words? It depends. Obviously some people want to know all the words but in most of the times you don't need to know all the words but you need to know who to use a tiny fraction of the words that you have to use in order to communicate.

So my idea is what a person should do is to learn how to put them together, syntax, how to structure a sentence and then you can learn all the words that you want. So to me it's first build the structure, and then add the content, the meat.

Anthony: Well we're talking about words and words and one of the things that I always get asked about is what do you do if a word has more meanings than one. So for instance grate which you were mentioning can also be to grate, to make something small, like grated cheese. So how do you contend with that?

Luca: Interesting question.

Anthony: Because many, many words have that quality of meaning more than one thing and the technical term for that, speaking of the million words in English is polysemy, the polysemy of words, the poly – the many-ness of the semantics.

Luca: Which is another aspect that is quite important. Well I would say the easiest way to tackle this is to get exposed to language as much as possible because with multiple contexts you're going to see that these words are used in a different way in languages such as Chinese, for example, they don't have many sounds and very often a sound, I'm not even talking about a word, a certain sound can mean not only different words but can be a verb, can be an adverb at the same time, to be a noun depending on where you find it. So you have to, if you want to tackle this, you better tackle it immediately and you have to tackle it with a certain mentality and tell yourself, when you look up a word, don't just restrict yourself to thinking okay this word has just one meaning but go and actually look at dictionaries, like online dictionaries such a word reference has this but many dictionaries offer that. Try to see the possible meanings or the possible uses of that word.

Okay this word РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ means common, got it. No, try to see it in two or three sentences where this РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ could mean different things. I'm not talking about РАСПРОСТРАНЕННЫЙ but another word. In English you use some words it can be a pronoun or can be a verb or can be an adjective depending on where you find it. In Italian it is the same thing. There are some special cases like in Chinese in which this is particularly important.

Language Is Almost Like DNA

But the idea, it all boils down to the way the mentality with which you approach a problem. If you think that there is just a simple correspondence between one word and the other words in language and that one word has just one meaning then you're missing out on the bigger picture. I wouldn't go so far to say that it's detrimental but it can slow you down because you have to see a language, once again I know that I insist on this, as a network. Like DNA almost. So a certain piece in a certain position has to be linked to other pieces around it in a certain spot. It's different in another spot.

Anthony: So given this kind of need to see things in a network sort of sensibility, what do you think is the number one thing that people do that prevents them from entering that network, to becoming a part of it and keeps them outside rather than in the field so to speak.

Luca: There are a number of things that can keep you from figuring that out. First is to consider words as isolated elements of the language and the other thing is that I think it is actually important is they don't use the language. They might think okay I just am studying this language and using books but they're not using it.

So my piece of advice, especially in languages that are similar to your native tongue, is to start using the language and make it meaningful to you. One of the best ways is to get to know people. Nowadays even if you live in Alaska or Australia or some places like in a small island near New Zealand you can still find people on the Internet or people you can talk to, and you better find people you want to talk to. If you find a person or stumble upon a person you don't want to talk to or people have the same interests or whatever, what counts is that you're starting to use the language and the language becomes meaningful to you and all doors open because your brain is going to absorb the information in a much easier way.

If a language is confined within the realm of just books or things that are not even interesting to you, you're going to struggle. You will see that the moment you start using the language, and using the language mind you doesn't necessarily mean speaking the language, you could even just type or you can listen. There's a number of ways you can translate. You can do a number of things to make it meaningful to you that don't necessarily imply speaking. Speaking would be the best option because by speaking you reinforce certain mechanisms and your brain learns how to use the language like live with people and emotions are involved and it facilitates the process.

But you can do a number of things once again without necessarily speaking if you are a shy person or simply if you don't feel like speaking to somebody.

Anthony: One thing I've always wanted to ask you, I've actually thought about it before, it came up after our second interview, and I just thought wow why didn't I ask this. Having to do with language coaching and so forth, I wonder if I were an actor, like I was going to be in a new movie with Tom Cruise and I had a pretty big part and I needed to speak Russian, and I don't want to learn Russian. I just want to be able to look like I can say 12 lines of text perfect, dead on and everything like as if it is just exactly my mother tongue. What would you do in that case and or would you even touch such a case as a language coach?

Like An Actor, You Need To Understand Why You Say Things In A Certain Way

Luca: Yeah, why not. Anything is feasible. What I would do first of all is to teach them how the language works, the basic intonation patterns. It's a very interesting thing that if you think about it every language has basic intonation patterns that can be reproduced, it can be easily spotted if you do a certain training and this is a training I've been doing for a number of years in five to six languages, and instead of just telling them you have this text learn it by heart, I would tell them first of all try to understand why you say things in a certain way.

Let me give you an example. If you are an Italian native speaker and you want to learn, for example, a sentence in English, you have to understand why certain things are said in a certain way.

If you say, "I want to go to church because I like it." Instead of telling this Italian guy, okay just listen to this and say, "I want to go to church because I like it." Think about it. You say you have two sound units. So as you attach all the words together the first thing that you say is "I want to go to church" and then you raise the frequency, you know the vocal cords vibrate. They have like a certain fundamental frequency and you go up, and I will tell them, the reason why you go up here and you say "I want to go to church" ‑ you can say it in a number of ways obviously, but the reason why you raise your tone is because you're about to say something else.

If you think about it we constantly raise and lower our tone to convey meaning and to let the other person understand what we're about to say. Every time we raise our tone in certain spots within the sentence, we are actually telling the other person that either we have finished delivering one piece of information, or we're about to say something else. All the sentences that have a secondary clause, something like "I want to go to church but," "I want to go to church and," "I want to go to church although," and I have this pattern. You build and you actually train people.

The first thing is I would train people in basic patterns. I would say every time you say a sentence, you should probably start with short sentences, you have a point where you have to lower you tone because it's a statement. Any statement, any possibly statement unless it's a question, has to end somewhere. So you see the end just by seeing it written. But the end in terms of sound is simply when you lower your