Welcome to the second day of our talks, really happy you made it all on time.

Did you guys have a good time yesterday at the Culinary festival?

and the Amos's concert? It was amazing, right?

I'm glad to hear that.

But today we're continuing with the talks and I would like to

share something with you which is really important to me

and something that I feel passionate about.

And that is the way polyglots learn languages.

As opposed to the way languages are often learned

in the traditional way, that means in schools and language schools

because I think there is a great great difference.

And I've been trying to deal with this problem for several years now

because I think that the ways that majority people learn languages

and the ways that polyglots learn languages could be combined.

And I think that clearly, the way that we polyglots learn languages,

that way seems to work, right?

So I'm trying to apply these methods also to help other people to achieve just that.

I have a special name for a type of people who are struggling

to learn a foreign language and cannot succeed even with one language.

I call them the time-keepers.

A time-keeper is a person whom you ask 'do you speak German?'

and they will reply 'oh well, I have had 8 years of German at school'

or they say

'I've been going to a course in French or whatever language for 4 years'

and they always tell you the time, have you noticed that?

But they hardly ever speak the language.

So I call them the time-keepers,

they always count the time that they've spent learning the language,

but they don't have many results to show for that.

And on the other hand, we have the polyglots.

People just like you, besides their name tags from last polyglots gathering,

who manage to speak several foreign languages fluently.

Now the question is how is that possible?

How is it possible that there are these 2 groups of people, that seems to be

so different which such different results when it comes to their language learning

and this is exactly the question that I've been asking myself

and trying to find the solution for that.

First, before I start. I'll quickly introduce myself.

First of all, I'm a passionate language learner.

I really really enjoy learning languages.

I learn usually a new language every two years,

this is the system that I've had so far

and I like to practice them anytime I can,

for example, at the polyglot gathering.

I also happen to be a professional conference interpreter.

And maybe some of you saw the talk at the polyglot gathering 2015, where

I talked about the pleasures and pains of working as a conference interpreter,

where I tried to explain what this profession is really about.

And I have a new profession, I'm a language mentor

and this is something I made up

because I realised that I want to help people learn languages,

but I don't want to teach them. And this is my approach

to teaching people languages,

I mentor them so that they can learn languages just like polyglots do

using the same techniques and strategies.

And finally,I happen to also organise the polyglot gathering this year

so you might know me in this role as well.

Now, I will start my presentation with showing a few examples

of how some polyglots learn languages,

I picked a few that I'm sure you would probably know of

and I will briefly introduce their strategies to learn their languages

so we can see what it is actually?

How do polyglots approach language learning?

And what methods do they use?

So the first person I'll introduce probably does not need

any introduction at all.

I'm sure we all know Benny Lewis from fluentin3months.

Well Benny has a very interesting method, an interesting way to learn languages.

It's called 'Speak from day 1',

so Benny goes out there, doesn't speak the language at all,

he just collects a few words,

phrases, goes among the people and the country where the language is spoken

and start speaking with them and learning what he receives as a return.

And so he collects more and more vocabulary and practices and practices,

makes a million mistakes a day and this is his approach of learning languages.

And I'm sure, well this is the languages he's learned so far.

It may be not totally updated. Maybe they are a few more missing ones,

but this is just to show what can be achieved with such a method.

I'm sure you all know Steve Kaufmann who is here with us as well,

at this gathering, who has a slightly different approach.

So he doesn't go for speaking right away, but instead he gets a lot of input first.

So he listens and reads massively before speaking,

before producing a speech and in this way he's been able to learn

a bunch of languages himself.

I think this is also not the complete list right now,

and actually I had a Skype lesson with Steve before the gathering

where he was learning Slovak.

And I was really impressed in his Slovak skills after just one week of learning

and he told me that he's listened and read a lot of Slovak stories

and clearly it works really amazingly.

Then I don't know if you know Lucas Bighetti,

but he's also here with us,

in this gathering. And Lucas has quite an interesting method himself.

I saw him at the last polyglot gathering with all these languages on his nametag

and I practised a few of them with him

and I was really impressed at the level that he was able to use those languages.

And I looked at them and I said,

''Lucas, you have all these languages there but I see no Esperanto,

have you ever really thought about that?'

He was like 'no, not really. I don't know'.

I said 'You know what? let's make a challenge.

I'll help you learn Esperanto

and I think it would take you maybe 3 days or so'.

It actually took him an hour.

In that 1 hour, I explained the 16 grammar rules that Esperanto has

that you need to know in order to really know this language.

So after an hour, we were speaking Esperanto and I said

'gosh, this is too easy'.

So I said 'OK, challenge number 2, I'll help you learn Slovak,

and of course this would be easier for Lucas than for many other people

because he already spoke 3 Slavic languages

very very well; Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian.

And it took us about a day before we did a recording on video

about how we speak Slovak,

it was just amazing. Whenever I show these to Slovaks,

the conversation after one day, they just cannot believe it,

they say 'this is impossible, no one can learn our language in just one day'.

And Lucas seems to have a method for that, it's a method that he developed

with Jan van der Aa,

who you might know as well, and they call it "Language Boost".

And it's about 500 most frequent words in a vocabulary, in a language

that they learn with example sentences and then using these sentences

and these words,

they can express many many things in very simple terms

and they can communicate with just this 500 words

and then of course they continue learning different vocabulary.

So this is Lucas's approach.

Then I don't know if you've heard about Gabriel Wyner,

and Gabriel has an interesting method based on flashcards,

based on space repetition system.

And what is interesting is that he doesn't use translation at all,

so he uses pictures of things that he can take a picture of

or he uses a cloze test; a word missing in a sentence

when he wants to practice grammar.

And in this way Gabriel managed to learn a lot of languages himself

and he has a very interesting story

about how he actually came up with this method,

but we don't have time for that today, unfortunately.

So this is the flashcard system with no translation.

And then we have Luca Lampariello who bases his learning mainly on translation

and this is interesting, because Luca doesn't use flashcards at all.

He's not a flashcard friend or a flashcard user.

And yeah, it works amazingly for him, he's learned a bunch of languages

to a very high and impressing level,

I think we all know that, and his method seems to be working just as well.

And then I would like to introduce 2 more people to you, Robin McPherson,

I don't know if you met this guy.

He was told several times by his parents, teachers, friends when he was young

that he doesn't have a talent for languages.

He's just not good at languages and probably should dedicate his life

to something else

because languages don't seem to be the thing for him.

Well he proved them wrong later on because today he speaks

a bunch of languages really well on a very fluent level.

And he does this by using a special method which I personally call the

"Dissection method".

I don't know whether he uses it particularly,

but he basically takes a recording on YouTube, for example,

a short video with subtitles in 2 languages

and he dissects it to very little parts, chunks of phrases

that he puts into Memrise

and he keeps learning them over and over and over again

and this way he manages to speak the language very well

after a very short time.

So this is Robin's method.

And finally I'd like to introduce David James who I'm sure many of you know,

"Uncle Dave"

who's not with us at this gathering unfortunately,

but you know him probably from the previous ones.

And David's method is called "the Gold List method",

have you heard about that?

If you haven't check it out, because it's really cool.

I love it and I've been using it for several years and it works amazingly.

You basically just write lists of vocabulary and you re-write them

every 2 weeks or more in order to distil the vocabulary

that you have in your long term memory

and keep re-writing the vocabulary that you still don't.

This is really a fascinating process which works because anytime you rewrite a list,

you find out that your brain has remembered 30% of the vocabulary

and you have it in the long-term memory. It's just an incredible method,

very simple, very easy to use and very effective.

Now we could continue, now this is David's languages that he's learned.

And we can continue with many other polyglots,

many of them are here with us today.

I took just a few random pictures from the last gatherings

and I could have a presentation about every single one of you

and describe the methods that you use and it would be very different, right?

Because everybody has their own system to learning languages

and all these systems seem to work clearly because all of you

have several flags on the nametags; the languages that we can speak.

So what I'm trying to say with this is that every polyglot has their own way

and the question is: "what do these polyglots have in common?", right?

and I'm going to discuss this in the second part,

but firstly I'll just briefly explain my own method.

I'm sorry the discussion would be right after the talk.

So just to briefly explain my methods,

I start with the "bidirectional translation method"

or "the back translation method" as I call it.

So I translate whole text from my mother tongue into the foreign language

so that I can use the phrases and learn them in context,

it's very similar to Luca Lampariello's method.

And afterwards I have 4 pillars of learning a language

and I always keep these 4 pillars

and it's helped me to learn all the languages that I speak today.

First of all, I make sure that my language learning is fun.

If it's not fun, if it's not enjoyable, it's not a method for me.

So that's why I work with materials that I pick myself, I like them,

I'm interested in reading the texts or listening to the recordings etc.

and I do it in a way which is fun for me.

So for example the Gold List method is fun for me,

flashcards, me personally not so much, so I prefer that method.

Secondly, I do a lot of that. I do a lot of learning.

So for example when I watch something, I make sure I go for a lot of TV series

because it has a lot of episodes and in this way

I get to see an episode every single day

and this gives me massive input that I can use

in order to improve my listening comprehension.