 Hey guys, so today I want to talk about how to get to a higher level in a language and I can only really talk in regards to say Esperanto because that's the language I'm most fluent in apart from English but the reason I'm bringing this up is because one of you guys commented in the previous video is about how do you like get to that high level when you're at an intermediary level especially in a language let's say like Esperanto or Latin or something where there is no like native country you can go travel to and you can go use it type of and that's an interesting question because I believe I've managed to get to that level but the amount of people who do get to that level is not like that big especially within the Esperanto community that's why you've got the whole phrase of the Atatane Comensanto you know the eternal beginners type thing and I'm just going to run you through today basically how I did it in a sense I'm going to need some books for this um the problem is I've just recently moved house if you haven't realized like I'm in a completely new location and my books are literally all packed up there so I'm going to like grab some books out now and then we will go through that why do books weigh so goddamn much okay that's the first time I'm grabbing my Esperanto books since I've moved here anyway we're going to pop open this massive ass box I've got right here you know I'm just going to lower this so you can see a little bit that did not help at all instead all it gave me was a hunchback so can I open this bad boy I don't know if anyone else is like me but I love collecting books especially in my target languages and then just not reading them I don't know why I just it's a really bad habit I should read them more anyway what I'm going to do is I'll show you what some of these books are because I think these like some of these books are there's like really good Esperanto books okay look see this this one here is like this is one of my favorites this is um this is about oh motto which is the Japanese religion where Esperanto plays a pretty good role within it and I find this book like it's just really nicely done like look at that paper man and then I got like a ton of other Esperanto books maybe I'll do like a um a what what's the a uh what would you call it it's like here's my book type of session anyway that's the thing in the future and I've got a random book of Mormon here uh okay so you know what this is probably a good one to do an example with okay my computer's starting up now but basically the way I would approach this if I want to do a study session using this book is I will jump into the book um possibly to a spot where I last left off I've actually done some of my study using this book already and what I'll do is I'll go to let's say I'll find a section so we've got International Edition of the um godly or heavenly like voice signal that would be like the signals of a path not signals that would be um right the English word is like it's it's escaped my head now it's four readers so now on the computer's on just give me a moment I'm just gonna log in okay so I've opened up the computer I've got my trusty notepad I've got my phone here with me because I've got an aspirant dictionary in here and I've got the book and this is literally how I study at a high level I'll just start reading so here's an example of let's say a sentence that I want to build out so we've got um it's talking about in 7 volumes so in 7 volumes automatically written by Fondantino de Omoto so she's the founder of Omoto containing the prophecies and the warnings about the destruction and reconstruction of the world but what I care about here is this use here because this here is actually linked up to here and volumoi and havante so it's in 7 volumes having the prophets uh the the prophecies so what I would do is I'll type out this entire sentence and then I'm going to wrap this part here inside a closed statement with an anki so we'll do that now okay so I've just typed out the sentence as you can see right here up on the screen now I'm going to go to my anki and I'm going to go into an Esperanto deck and I'm going to add this card in so basically all I'm doing is I'm copying this text I'm putting it right in there I might have to move this closer so I've put it in here and I'm going to grab this part and I'm just going to uh wrap it in that and I'm going to say just give myself a hint containing and that's it now you might be thinking well that's obvious that's like if you know the grammar of Esperanto you shouldn't really need to do that but the whole point here is that when I'm reading this card back I'm going to be like and set the volumoi blah blah blah and then I'm going to hit this closed statement and I don't even want to see the English like the English like at first I will need to look at the English to know what word should swap in there but after a while of doing this card a few times over my brain is going to automatically know what word should be just slotted in there and it's just going to say it and the whole benefit of that is that if you have thousands of these cards with like closed statements filling in specific pieces here and there and your brain just automatically knows what to fill without thinking about it in English at all what happens is then when you're in conversation actually speaking in the language you just start filling in the blanks without having to think about that specific thing and your brain knows what to choose because it's following a pattern so it's following a pattern of in seven of something or in a number of something and then you sidetrack which was done by blah or blah and then you want to go back to that thing which is containing rather than then going RQ and have us your brain's just going to know oh well I've seen this pattern before and Havante and it's just going to fill it in but it takes some practice of seeing these words filled in certain places and that's why when I speak Esperanto I can just randomly create quite complex sentences using these forms because I've practiced these over and over and over now here there's a few other ones like I know how to say that like in the moment I'd probably be like I could probably come up with it but it's not something I often say so I want to practice it a little bit so I'll just make a separate card just for that as well so I'm just going to go that one there I'm going to wrap that up and I'm going to say prophecies if I know how to spell prophecies oh god oh god how do I spell prophecies why would I not remember that let me just quickly check uh yeah there we go of course it's a ph sorry this often happens is when I operate in another language I suddenly forget the spelling of English because English spelling is just so I was going to use a bad word then but not good uh anyway that's basically how I go through this and I will do this for like 30 minutes I'll create a bunch of cards maybe 20 cards and these cards aren't even hard like these cards I will easily do the next day but it's not about the difficulty here for me it's just about training my brain to just know what to fill in in certain blanks in certain patterns or forms of sentences and that's how you get to a very high level of fluency because what is the difference between say an intermediate and a high level well I would say the difference is uh this the size of your vocab so how much words you obviously know you you chuck in like an extra thousand two thousand three thousand words um but you're not going to use the majority of those words but in those few occasions where you do use them that's where it the the high level versus the intermediate comes into play and the other thing is being able to use complex grammar forms and how do you practice those this is how and how do you know that this is a good sentence well this book has been edited and it's been edited by some really good uh well-known Esperanto speakers and it's an official publication so I don't have to worry about whether this is good Esperanto I'm putting in here or not especially at my level because I can just tell straight away um so yeah that's pretty much it uh if you've got any other questions about how to deal with high level stuff this is pretty much like the core of what I do at high level Esperanto like there's not much more uh the only other thing I would say is that helped me a lot was that I made hundreds like hundreds and hundreds of videos in Esperanto which forced me to practice speaking now I'm not proposing that you go out there and make hundreds and hundreds of videos in Esperanto although the Esperanto community will absolutely love you for it because they love videos um but that was the only other thing I did now obviously that contributed a lot to my speaking fluency but that I would say didn't necessarily so that would that helps a lot with speaking fluency but it does not help with expanding your abilities in the language now a lot of people will suggest that you just read a book you just sit there and use read a book read books read books and eventually you'll absorb the language I don't like that method mainly because there's no way of measuring it I like to be able to measure when I'm growing my language like by adding cards I can see that I've added a thousand cards over the last few months and I know all those so clearly I've grown in my ability anyway that's pretty much it I'll speak to you guys next time