To Learn is to Explore

Hello there, this is Steve Kaufmann here The Linguist on Language.

I read an interesting article in the newspaper this morning, which I want to share with you. It was an article by George Jonas in The National Post and in it he asks “What is wrong with what one learns in school?” I have a link to the article in my blog post, so you can read it if you're interested. I like the article because it matches my view that learning is a voyage of personal discovery, not something that can be gained just by attending school or university or getting a teacher. The things that you discover on your own are worth much more than any learning that is taught at you by a teacher. This is also the fundamental principle of LingQ. That's how I go about learning languages and, of course, in the past when learning languages I used to prowl bookstores looking for new readers, new learning material that had word lists, something that would be at my level and interesting. But now it's become easier than ever to find content and other things that help. I can explore the Internet. I can even find, you know, grammar explanations if I want, declension tables, conjugation tables in different languages, I can go Spanish verbs and I'll see all the Spanish verbs. Everything is at my fingertips and what's more I am constantly making discoveries. When I was in Riga I bought a number of Russian language CDs. One that I have enjoyed is on Russian History for grades five to eight. It's a history of Russia for grades five to eight. It's an MP3 CD, so it's over six hours long and I've been listening to it over and over and always missing the same words. Then I decided to have a look if I opened the CD to see if there wasn't a text there. Sure enough there was, so I've now been importing the E-text into LingQ and I've been saving a whole bunch of new words and now I understand the text much better and it's just tremendous. What a discovery and what a bargain, one CD with over six hours of audio and the full transcript. I've now discovered that some of the other CDs that I bought in Riga – Russian CDs – also have the transcript on the CD. It's a lot of fun to make these kinds of discoveries. Also, I can't say how much I'm enjoying my discovery of Russian, this history, the literature, news, movies, videos, etc. and I'm exploring it. I'm discovering a new world. I am the one discovering it.

I started my Russian about a year and a half ago with a few introductory CDs and then I moved into the LingQ when it was ready and we had The Power of The Linguist there in Russian and other content created for LingQ by Anna. I listened to that over and over and over again and then slowly moved on to real authentic content. As a result, a whole new world has opened up just as was the case when I studied Chinese or Japanese or the other language worlds that I have explored in the past.

I always have the sense that I'm the one who finds these. I'm the one who explores them. I explore them on my terms. No teacher is dictating what I'm going to do in class, what I'm going to learn in class and that's what makes it so satisfying to me. And we're hoping at LingQ… I mean I've discovered some sources of content. We know we have to improve our dictionaries. There are going to be a lot of resources, more and more recourses, on the Web for learning and we hope that our members are going to share these and tell each other about resources that are out there for all the different languages that people want to learn, so that LingQ becomes a link, if you want, in this great chain of content and language learning help that's available now in the world. People can bring all of this into LingQ; they can listen to it, they can read it and save words and phrases; they can exchange information with each other.

A large part of what we're doing now, the work that our programmers are doing, is building up this community to make LingQ really the best place to learn languages and where we keep it simple. No complicated theories just get at the language; easy content to start with and then gradually more difficult content and enjoy it. Anyway, I certainly am, I'm enjoying my exploration And so, I just leave that with you and, hopefully, you'll find the article by George Jonas to be interesting. Thank you very much for listening. Bye now.