 Hey guys, Richard here. So today I'm going to go through a day in my life of learning languages. Now the reason I decided to make this video after not being on YouTube for so long is because one of my students who I teach English to asked me about what is the best way to learn a language and it's really a, it's kind of a bad question but a good question in one way, well I guess in both ways. The reason being is because learning languages is kind of like going to the gym in a sense and I'm going to use the gym analogy here quite a bit because when you go to the gym you could be using the best forms in the world, you could be applying the most scientific methods, you could be like following the best diet but if you just stop after a few days it doesn't matter how good those first few days were, it makes no difference in the long run. So what I basically say is do whatever method ensures consistency. So if you're using a method and everyone on the internet, all the polyglots are saying hey you know what that's not a good method you know it's 10% slower you could increase by 25% here or if you focus on you know these thousand words whatever and you don't like constantly do that then it doesn't matter because you're just going to stop anyway. So my methodology to learning languages is constantly evolving and it actually is quite different for different languages and I guess what I'm going to try and do with this video is I'm going to show you a day in my life now I work full-time as a developer so this is going to be over like the whole day and as a developer it takes up a lot of my time and then also I have a life outside of work obviously with my wife so this is going to you're going to see spliced parts from the day. Now I'm going to give you a quick rundown of my day so basically it's 8.45 in the morning wow this went really long I start working about 15 minutes I've got my anky up on the screen here which hopefully you guys can see and you can see I've got a focus on Chinese, Esperanto and German I've even got English in there but I'll show that another day so basically what I'm doing with these languages at the moment is Esperanto I'm fluent in Esperanto and what I'm doing now is just adding layers of complexity to my fluency by basically learning obscure words or like interesting terms of phrases and stuff that I find while reading books and stuff so that's more a maintenance deck I guess in a way then I've got Chinese now Chinese is my focus language it's my active language it's the one I'm putting all my effort into right now and then it's kind of like a language I'm just doing on the side and I'm passively learning is German so if we were to put this into a gym context my Esperanto is I'm you know I'm bench pressing I'm smashing out I don't know what a good bench presses let's let's you know I'm gonna say on one arm I'm lifting 50 kilos you know I mean like and I'm doing two of those at the same time I'm doing really well okay so Esperanto is sweet now my Chinese is like I'm kind of new to the gym type of thing I've learned the basic forms I've got like all the basic movements down and now I'm just kind of going through the rhythm of learning piece by piece by piece and building up that muscle so I'm at a low stage at the moment now with German German I'm just passive so German is actually an interesting one for me I chose German purely because my mate is learning German and I just use it when I need to not do Chinese like my brain gets burnt out so basically all I'm doing is practicing listening comprehension at the moment and I'm not doing reading I'm not doing speaking and maybe in six months I'll start moving on to speaking and then eventually after that I'll move on to reading and stuff which is probably quite different to a lot of people but I kind of like to approach a language first by just listening to it quite a bit before I actually try and use it just to get an ear for the language and to try and get a natural feel for the language before I move into like smashing it now with Esperanto that was that did not happen at all like I went complete opposite direction that's because it was my first language and really there wasn't much listening comprehension or listening material for that language when I started out and with Chinese I have a very heavy focus on listening but I also have a secondary heavy focus on speaking reading I can read like pretty basic Chinese at this stage I probably got like a thousand plus characters under my belt but I'm not really focused on it and I'm kind of just absorbing those characters as I need it and it's quite interesting with Chinese because I have a very narrow focus on the type of vocabulary and stuff I'm learning at the moment and it's all based around fishing which might sound kind of crazy that I'm learning about such an obscure topic when I'm still kind of like a low level or mid-level Chinese speaker and the reason being is because my father-in-law who's Chinese his absolute loveless world is fishing like he would give up his daughter for fishing okay but he doesn't speak a word of English so the more I learn about this topic in Chinese the more he opens up and he talks about it and the more kind of like comprehensible input I get around this specific topic and also this teaches you a lot of day-to-day words that you would use and like I guess they're kind of like general general verbs that like a child would learn because you know you're talking about picking up things you know you're going to a place you're walking on certain stuff you're you're finding certain things these are things that you would learn early in childhood and then later on you'd learn the more complex stuff about talking about politics and things like that so I'm kind of like started in that area and I've expanded my way out which means I have this pretty good vocabulary now about marine animals and about things that happens down at the beach like I can even talk about the body parts of the fish now which is kind of crazy because you've got like um weighty which is like the tail fin and then uh baity which is like the back fin and you've got the limpien which is the scales of the fish in the side which is the gills and then I can talk about all that type of stuff like skinning a fish and things like that because that's stuff that's going to be actually useful to me but if I'm going to go speak to a random Chinese person on the street the majority of stuff would never be useful but it doesn't matter it really doesn't uh with German what I've been doing is I've been watching a lot of like movies that I love in English but with German um dubs and then I'm just taking words that I think are common or like I'll freeze frame the the actual German series that I'm watching and I will find out what that scene's about and then I'll create some vocabulary around that scene and then I'll put that into my deck and I'll show you later today how I go through and create all this type of stuff so this is going to be a long video and Esperano is basically I just pick up a book I do some reading find some interesting words or phrases that I haven't learned before and I just chuck them in there so we're going to start with the review first okay I don't know what happened there um I can't get that out of that really dark mode that I was going to use on the computer so I'm just going to quickly show you guys on the phone uh basically my review method so I've got Esperano here so the first one oh god it's in dark mode as well um I don't know if you guys like dark mode or not but like for example it's asked me the word here for Alma which is Kirasso so I'll just go yep cool and next I've got the sentence so it's like so here this is using a closed methodology where I need to fill it in and it gives me like an English hint broccoli brocolo brocolo yep cool uh a puddle this is actually an interesting word that I found the other day um it's flakko apparently I've been using lagetto like puddle for like forever or like aquebuyo or something like that so I don't know I was quite interesting about that one then I've got a lot of you'll notice that a lot of these are actually dictionary definitions if you speak Esperano so this is um bitumi estascovri al schmidi par bitumo so here I've literally just taken stuff out of the dictionary because that's where my Esperano levels that or I've got here one that's from um the prince of mars or princess of mars uh which is a book that I've read in Esperano I really enjoy anyway it's like donante al vi en libre forma la stranga manuscripto so yep that remarkable person so I'm gonna quickly smash through the Esperano because you guys and you don't need to see it all but maybe if I come across some like interesting tidbits I'll share it with you okay so I've just finished my maintenance deck with Esperano so now I'm going to move on to Chinese so with Chinese I've got actually two decks I've got a speaking deck and a listening deck the speaking deck is what I do first um that way I don't get like little hints from listening to stuff first so I've got 73 cards in the speaking deck so I'm going to quickly smash one way through this so as you can see this is what it is it's like that dog is looking at something yeah and then I just got the Chinese translation there and I've got black and dirty suit so that'd be like okay next one the hunter climbs the cage yep okay the man is standing on top of the container that man is standing on top of the container that man is standing on top of the container oh you could also say it's on top of the container the hunter is standing on the raft that man is standing on top of the container yep cool that dinosaur is looking at something so again I'm going to smash my way through these so I'm just gonna and if I find any interesting cards I'll share them with you and last one okay so I have done the speaking portion unfortunately now it's actually work time because I spent so much time setting up this video but what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab some breakfast wow you can see when I like study I like scratch myself I don't know why and now I've got like this red mark anyway I'm going to grab some breakfast from the fridge and I guess you guys can kind of come with me because this is actually part of my study routine as well now the reason this is part of my study routine is because I actually always just randomly try to talk in the language that I'm speaking please ignore the dirtiness of this house right now oh god the lighting here is terrible so for example I see my cat there so I'm grabbing some breakfast what do we got we've got zero loaded mac and cheese I suppose I should probably say that in Esperanto so he also has a Chinese name his Chinese name is hey hey which is just a little black I guess or it's uh Salde because he's always trying to steal food Salde's like thief anyway I gotta quickly grab some food so we're going to have lamb korama I have no idea how to say that in Chinese if you do know let me know because this is a common word that I'm probably gonna need quite a bit um and I've got these kind of prepared dishes at the moment because I'm smashing the the gym and I'm trying to get my health to a better stage than it is right now uh not because I want to get like muscly or anything but it actually stems from my love of languages because basically the better I get physically I've noticed that my mental clarity improves which improves my ability to learn languages so it's just kind of a brand thing anyway I've got two minutes here so while standing here I'll just do other stuff like for example uh I don't know how to say it so yeah I just spoke some Chinese I was practicing then so now I potentially practice speaking in Esperanto while waiting here and I'll do this I like to just code switch randomly so I'd be like so yeah that's that's another example anyway this is almost ready breakfast is served so I'm just having some lamb korma I forgot to mention that I work full-time from home so I'm a developer I work from home however like every two weeks I just go into the office maybe once or twice but today is a work from home day so yes okay so we've got the first break of the day and I usually take breaks with my colleagues who still work in the office go take a break they go grab a coffee it takes in about five to ten minutes so I just do some review for five to ten minutes now before I did the uh Chinese speaking I still got Chinese listening on my decks to do and I've also got German passive now I'm gonna do the German passive just because I feel like I don't want to do the Chinese right this second I just did Chinese so let's do the German passive so he's basically saying his knife is sharp her bedroom is dark you pick up the toy the window the bully is small um what is on the bed was on the bed va often bed va I notice with German that well this is the one annoying thing with German okay so with German there's a lot of similarities sounding words with English that actually don't have the same meaning at all a good example is the word um I think it's there which means uh who but it sounds like where and my brain just automatically always goes to where so it confuses tell out of me um he doesn't want it uh we know no no no uh the boy picks up the book now you're probably hearing quite an artificial voice at the moment uh what that is is I've basically I make all my cards myself I don't download decks or anything because I actually find that the creation process helps me to learn the sentences so this here is actually a recording of google translates a voice now how good is that voice like the quality well it seems to be good enough because especially for German because um these words want to learn them in here and I watch a German video passively later on I will hear the words randomly pop out of sentences or even short phrases pop out so I know it's good enough but if you guys can like recommend a good text to speech for German I would I'd really appreciate it preferably a female voice because I prefer listening to females over men um although all my uh Chinese is actually a male's voice fun enough so the Chinese deck is all male the German deck is all female and the Esperanto deck doesn't have any audio so um come you come out so come out basically okay so I'm just going to quickly complete this I've got basically 36 cards left in my German passive deck my audio deck and then I've got to get back to work because my colleagues will be back from grabbing their coffee yeah they'll definitely be back soon okay so I will talk to you guys in a sec okay so I've just got out of a meeting which gives me about five five minutes or so to myself before I should get back to programming uh I only have the Chinese deck left now if you have a look here um so I have I think that's 80 cards to do so I'm going to quickly smash this out let's begin mosquitoes generally live near rivers what is in the crab pot how many fishing rods do you have oh I started my Chinese uh review on the chair and eventually made my way to the bed I'm down to the last seven reviews now so let's just quickly finish these off so some crabs live in rivers oh no some crabs live on what was I thinking on land some crabs live on land at the end of like my Chinese study my brain starts getting fried stingrays are generally gray and that's an interesting the word for stingray is actually like devil fish in a way it's like devil uh where's mcdonald's my oh this one because it's a long one oh okay so this fish has silver tail fin this fish has a silver tail fin so um a mosquito is a kind of insect and they're using the more like uh written word or more precise word for insect so I want to upload a video to youtube hey I want to upload a video to youtube I want to upload to youtube oh I want to upload to youtube the surface of the fish's scales is slippery and you know I was talking about the whole gym thing before it's kind of like the gym at the end of like my review part of my day I literally review until exhaustion it's like at the gym where you're meant to push until you can't push anymore and you physically your muscles stop that's me right at the end of that like I pushed right until I physically could not push anymore like well mentally couldn't push anymore and I'm burnt out now um but the good thing is I get to go do programming which is more relaxing for me and then uh lunch time we shall actually start learning some new stuff okay guys it's now officially lunch time which means language studying time just gotta open my drink because this is going to get me through this sesh okay so basically what I decided I'm going to do today is I'm going to do active study of Chinese I'm going to create somewhere between 30 and 40 new Anki cards they will be audio cards um and I I was planning to do some German to create some German passive cards but it's been a pretty hectic morning this morning so I don't know if I'm going to get around to doing that today uh and also today is Wednesday funnily enough so the Esperanto house will be open tonight so I'm thinking depending on how I'm feeling at the end of the day I might actually head there and see if there's any Esperanto speakers to drop by and chat with so I have to pick a topic of study and yesterday my final topic of study was mosquitoes and they and mosquito related words and phrases and stuff like that so I think I'll continue on from there I'm going to pick and see animal some some other like common common Australian river animal let's have a look okay so I just found this random picture and here I can see an eel right in the middle and I can see lobster long so I can see some prawns or shrimps which is so I can see zuyu which is some mullets um jinyu uh which is a goldfish so I'm going to do something regarding eels so let's that's going to be today's focus we're going to learn about eels and meta in Chinese okay uh so first let's open up a notepad and the first and I always want to reuse vocabulary I've recently studied to build new sentences so I keep building on top of what I've learned so first up I say um how do I say a eel in Chinese um in Chinese and then I also say please include the measure word and use the most common term for eel the reason I ask chat GPT to include the measure word is because measure words are kind of like with um German dusk uh die uh dear you know these words um they're kind of linked to the actual noun itself but for uh Chinese a measure word is used for numbers so instead of saying a dog you'd say one dog e jerk or e tail go so some words have multiple measure words and measure words also change depending on um context in some ways but most things have a common measure word and I'm pretty sure an eel is just e because jure is used for like small animals especially ones that have limbs and stuff and water and what are they suggesting here so no they're they're suggesting e tail shang yu so tail means a long thin thing which I guess makes sense because an eel is a long thin thing um so I guessed wrong there but that's my first one so e tail shang yu and what I'll just do is uh I will grab that that would literally be my first card and I'll say and I'll just double check chat GPT because you're probably freaking out right now saying oh my god Richard you're using an AI to learn languages um that's not a not a smart move it's going to make mistakes and all sorts of stuff I've actually found with Chinese that it is really good so the reason being is because I'm at a state in Chinese where I can look at something and go no no that that seems fishy you know that that doesn't seem right and there's only been a few times with chat GPT where it's made suggestions and stuff for sentences well for grammar and stuff it's usually perfectly fine like 99% of time but for some words it will suggest words which aren't the most common forms of a word like for example I learned um hong yu and yau yu both mean stingray before I learned more guai yu I don't know why it decided to teach me those words for stingray and then eventually I learned more guai yu it taught me that like if you ask it enough times and different sentences and structures it will start suggesting words and be like hey you know I already learned a word for that but you know that's not lost vocab or anything it just means I know three different words for stingray now and yeah so and then there's like a few of ones like sometimes it would suggest um kun chong instead of chongzi like chongzi is the most common word for an insect and kun chong is like the technical word for an insect but the difference is also chongzi although it can mean insect it could also mean small things like worms and stuff so it's not necessarily just insects so you just got to be a little bit smart about how you use it pretty much so I've got my word for an eel and I'm going to also ask it so how do I say um eels generally live in shallow water I actually I'm pretty sure I know this it would just be um uh what's the word for eel so let me just double check but that's okay if I already know the structure so yeah so I was right um because what I'm doing is I'm wrapping this word eel in lots of other sentences that I do know already so I want to learn it in as I want to learn this word in context as much as possible so eels generally live in shallow water so all those words in that sentence I know except for the word eel so I'm going to learn it in context so I'm going to make three sentences now using words that I've already learned in the past and putting it in context so I'll say um what color it eels let's have a look I guess they're brown color so I'll say how do you say eels eels are generally a brown color and I'm guessing it would just say uh shan yu通常是 uh中色的 yeah shan yu通常是中色的 yep cool got that one eels are generally a brown color so I'm gonna do a couple more of these I'll cut until I've done them because you get the idea okay so here's a great example so the other day I learned the word for seaweed is hai tao which literally means ocean grass okay cool and then I just asked it how do I say um some eels live among seaweed and I was expecting to know what the rest of that sentence was and it suggested uh you'll see a shan yu sheng kuo zai uh hai tao zhong but I was expecting hai tao zhong so now I've learned that there's this other word for seaweed so we've got hai tao so I'm going to put this down here I'm going to say what is the difference between hai tao and and I also need to I'm just going to use google translate just so I can easily type out pinion I've actually got a pinion keyboard installed but I just can't be bothered like swapping constantly between them so I'm just gonna say hai tao yep that's the one seaweed so I'm gonna say what is the difference between hai tao and hai tao and let's see what it suggests hai tao uh refers to seaweed encompasses a wide variety of marine algae that can be found in oceans and other bodies of water okay and then hai tao is a more general term that translates to seagrass or marine grass refers to various types of underwater plants that grow in aquatic environments including seagrasses okay so I'm guessing that hai tao and hai tao so hai tao is just like a general term and hai tao is a more specific term for seaweed so if we quickly just go have a google look at these images so this is another way I can just tell us I just open up no I search for google images and I go straight to um I'm actually why is it on yahoo oh because I'm using edge hai tao so here we've got a pretty general looking type of seaweed cool okay let's go have a look at hai tao and go to images yeah so okay so it's definitely hai tao is like any type of seaweed that you would expect grasses algae that type of stuff while hai tao seems to be like a very special type of planted seaweed it looks like the one that you might eat type of thing so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to learn hai tao as well so I'm going to use the sentence to learn two words in context and I'm adding hai tao as a new word to the top of my list of words I'm going to learn today I should actually up the scale on this so you guys can see so let's just go so you guys can see that so this also means seaweed and then we're gonna go cool um some eels live among seaweed so now um there's two words I want to learn to describe water I want to learn muddy water versus clear water I'm guessing clear would it be something like ting ting because ting's like a blue or clear and I know the word for mud is me so I'm guessing it'd be like nishui and tingshui so let's just quickly check so I'll say how do you say clear water and muddy water so let's have a look okay I was pretty close so tingshui I was right about that one that means clear water hoon shui I don't know what hoon here means by itself let's just drop that one straight in the google translate hoon by itself uh apparently it's another word for muddy so there's two words ni and hoon so I'm going to learn both of these but I'm not going to learn them as standard words like this like I don't like learning like that so I'm going to say how do you say mud crabs live in muddy water because that I know the word for mud crab is nixia so you say nixia shenghua zai hoon shui zhong okay cool so I'm going to add that to my list so mud crabs live in muddy water now I'm going to continue doing this until I've got myself 30 sentences or so and then I will continue with the recording otherwise I'm going to lose so much time okay so I finished my active study and I've created what's going to be 45 new audio cards which consists of about 11 new words although a few of those words of variations of the same word uh in context and probably like maybe four to six like structures some of those structures I assume grammatical structures I mean I kind of already knew but some of them are kind of also new to me uh so I am now going to create some audio cards now I'll show you how I create my audio cards I'm not going to go through all of them by like I'll show you a couple so what I do is I grab this first one here obviously I'm going to need my headphones for this um I come up to this website I'm using which is just uh text to voice dot online I make sure I'm on the mail one I've got audacity open I just hit record although that should actually be set to digital loop back okay so that works so now I've created this uh audio card uh which you can't really see there well I haven't created the card yet but I've created the sound file so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to go grab that part go file export and I'm going to export it to an audio and you might be thinking damn this is a lot of work to create one card and in some ways you are right but this is also a practice session for me now so I hear this word and then I repeat it hi dal and I know what it is obviously it's a seaweed and then I go over to my anki and then I go into my chinese listen and I add it so I pull it in and this is just going to come directly from my downloads just copy that in I hear it again hi dal I put in the chinese characters so I visually see it and I just type seaweed and there we go that's the first card so that's basically the process and then I just repeat that about 40 times but by the end of this it means I've repeated each one of these sentences and phrases probably like a good six times and I actually know it by the end and the the anki cards almost become redundant but they don't because like in a few weeks when they pop up again it kind of refreshes the whole thing but I I take the card creation process is actually part of the learning process even though there's a little bit of like extra tedious work in here there's probably quicker ways to do this and people are probably screaming at me saying dude you're like the most inefficient learner in the world and you're probably right but I enjoy doing it this way and it allows me to just randomly in the moment create sentences that pique my interest you know like I decided today I wanted to learn about eels and like muddy environments and stuff like that like that was just what I wanted to do today some days I don't know other days I've got a like a really set idea about what I want to learn maybe based on some conversation but that's basically the process so I'm going to go through this now okay so I'm about I'm over halfway through creating all the audio cards for my anki deck and again brain is fried it's end of lunch break literally now luckily I'm not hungry so I'm going to go back to work for a few hours and then during the next break and possibly after work I'll have to finish off the rest of these audio cards I made quite a few today okay so I have now finished creating the listening cards what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to create the speaking cards so the speaking cards are quite easy and usually only take a couple of minutes so all I do is I go into my listening deck I grab 30 listening cards I flip them around and create speaking cards and I started the the oldest in the listening deck and I move forward and every time I move forward I put like just a tag just to show that's where I'm up to in the in the listening deck as having created speaking cards that way when I'm creating speaking cards I'm creating speaking cards for cards that I've already heard probably for a good month or so and it means that I already have a pretty good intrinsic passive like ability to just know the sentence and say it that way it's actually not difficult like I smashed through the speaking ones but it's a way of just ensuring that I am able to say what I can hear anyway I'm going to quickly create those and then that will be it during the work hours what is my cat to cats like scratching at the door that will be it for now and then later tonight I may go to the Esperanto house but I'm feeling a little bit burnt but we shall see it's now eight o'clock at night I ended up going to the Esperanto house but overall it was kind of a bust because one when I headed off it started raining and I got wet two when I arrived I realized I forgot the memory card for this camera so I couldn't really film anything even if I wanted to and three well pretty much no one else showed up a few people showed up but it wasn't like enough to make it like a worthwhile experience overall so yeah it was kind of a bust but I'm hoping that by making these videos here again the local Sydney Esperanto speakers may see them and start thinking hey let's head to the Esperanto house on Wednesdays so if you do live in Sydney and you're an Esperanto speaker start heading there again on Wednesdays and maybe we'll bump into each other so I also plan today to do some German study and adding cats to my Anki deck but it's a bit late now and I kind of just want to get this video done and uploaded so I'm gonna pretty much close it up here and I just want to get your feedback this is going to be a pretty long video it's going to be quite long form and it's not really going to be heavily edited it's really just going to be my experience through the grind of learning languages so yeah let me know if you've enjoyed this at all or if you don't like this content that's pretty much it catch you guys