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Time to Play: Speaking Fluently

We had a question over the break, actually before the break about music since we were talking about listening comprehension and that's a good place to start music is sort of a special case people like to sort of listen to french music and think, okay, I'm learning french and you are a little bit, but generally I don't actually recommend music for language learning that much, I think it's great, I think it's great from a cultural standpoint, I think it's great from it, like you're hearing the sounds of your language and hearing the music of that culture like it's, french music is totally different from american music is totally different from from british music is totally that I mean, not totally each culture has its own musical characteristics and linguistic characteristics that you'll pick up from the music, but I mean, even in english, uh, you listen to songs, and you've no idea what they're about. I mean, there's there's, you listen to the songs, and then someone says, oh, the lyric...

s or this, like what? I thought it was about elevators like you, you have these things where you're not actually listening for content don't listen to the story of the song necessarily, and so if you're not listening to the story of the song in english, we probably won't listen to the story the song in french you will pick up some words definitely and music is kind of sticky I mean if he does stick in your head and you kind of you have these things that go on looping in your head but the things that are looping your head or not necessarily even sensible I mean you could have just random words going on in your head that air not even what they're saying eso I find music good for some things, but in terms of I want to intensely trained my listening comprehension I think they're more efficient ways out there um but if you like it has sort of been a theme throughout this course if you like it if you were enjoying yourself or listening to music, do jamil yeah, yeah, I think I think I'm picking up a pattern there in the sense of the longer the content that you're consuming, the better it is for you to catch up because like it's the same that you were mentioning with the tv you have eighteen hours to catch up to whatever the story is, whatever the theme is, whatever the vocab is as opposed to a three hour film now if you re further reduce that if you make it on ly one episode of one tv show it's thirty minutes on if you make that five minutes on a song you're going to be lost for half a knauer and in a five minute song than it's not getting you know you're not gonna pick much other I mean, generally with music, you do listen to it a lot. You listen to the same song over and over and over again, and so there is some repetition there, but honestly, you're not looking for repetition. You're looking for repetition of words and new context it's not like you read one sentence you don't understand any of it when you just read the sentence again ten times and you understand all of it that's not how that ten percent contact, you know, getting words from context rule works you need to keep seeing words of new places and then you're like, oh, that word that I've seen like those nine, ten, twenty times like that must be what it meant and all of those locations so yeah, I think music is great for its own as music it was great because it's music and music is wonderful, but in terms of language learning you khun do better. You can use your time better by listening to films and tv really, it would be the best if you are interested is in writing song lyrics as some of the people in the audience were, uh yes. Write song lyrics, right them get them corrected on laying aids. Try to see if someone can choose better words for you. Uh, those words might not quite right in the way you want them to. Or you're choosing words that rhyme and they aren't the appropriate words. Well, the people on laying it will fix that for you. Um, one of the things I, uh I don't even think I mentioned I think I skipped that thing earlier. Um if you submit some textile a a and you find that you are not getting the results you want which are going to show up in two circumstances are going to show up. If you are doing something where you were producing so much text that the people on laying eight start to hate you, you just can't handle you. I had one student who was writing fifty example sentences in german per day, which is awesome. He was taking a frequency list, going through fifty words at a time and writing out like five pages of german text every single day and submitting this toe laying eight. And after a week, the people in laying eight stopped paying attention to him, he overwhelmed the german community on laying eight. Ah, and so he sent me an email saying, what do I do? I want to keep writing at this rate. I'm like bravo like yes, if you can handle this. Yes. Uh, he's, like, I want to keep writing at this rate, but the people are giving me corrections. I said, we're gonna need to start paying someone to do that. Ah, and the place you probably should do it is I talking dot com, which we're going to talk about again in this segment. But on I talking dot com, you confined tutor's basically paid tutors or just people who speak your language and are willing to talk to you for free, not for free. I talk to you for five bucks an hour. I mean, it's really affordable. Uh, and they're also willing to correct her writing if you want them to. And so this student went to I talk, he founds some german tutor or two, I think maybe think just one who was willing to correct all this german for seven bucks a week. So we sent them, like thirty pages of german got bacchus, thirty pages german made thousands of flash cars. As far as I can tell, I mean, this this guy was really intent on learning german fast, and, uh and got there so if you're all so that's one use of I talkie for that sort of thing but also if you're trying to do something really specialized like song lyrics, you might not get the results you want uh from just random people on the internet and so you may well want to contact instructors on a website and say, hey, I'm trying to write songs I want them to rhyme I want them to sound good, but I want them to make sense because I'm I'm not a native english speaker I'm not a native whatever speaker and I want my leader my songs to be good but you know the random people on internet aren't getting my needs met you will find someone who you can pay a little bit amount of money and actually get the result you want so it's ah there's some options out there for you let's get into speech speech is the holy grail of language learning generally generally people come into a language because they want to speak in that language I mean people, they're all sort of people who like to watch films and like to read things but speeches usually where it's at its I would say ninety percent of the people coming to of course like this are looking too speak fluently and maybe have additional goals in terms of watching film or something like that um and what's interesting about speeches that it's a learned skill I think people come into language learning thinking that speech is this thing that happens when I know enough and that's sort of true um it's also not true there is a game called taboo that we cannot picture here for copyright reasons it is not that um and taboo is a game a party game we're basically you get together with friends and you have ah card when you have people on your team you have the enemy team over here and you have this card and everyone there can read your card and the card says pain killer on the top and you see this car this is painkiller and on the card it also says head and take and hurt and had his medicine and drug and your job is to have your teammates say painkiller out loud but you cannot say the word painkiller or head or a core hurt or medicine or a drug and you have to say okay so I have this thing it's like uh it's like a sphere and you spare you put in your mouth and then like the thing on your thing on top of your neck it's like it it feels bad and so you take the sphere and then and no more bad feelings and then you did sits feels better that the badness is gone and then they're like uh painkiller hopefully or you keep going until they say pain killer and then you get a point it's a fun game it's a really fun game to do it parties uh but what it turns out to be is fluency in a nutshell taboo is fluent see it trains the skill of fluency when you are in germany and you are at the pharmacy and your head hurts but you don't know the word head or pill or drugs or medicine you just know that your head hurts and you go I uh ball I need I need a ball that I put in my face and I need to take the ball put it in my face and then the thing this thing this round thing on the top of my neck and it feels bad can the ball do you have a ball to make the bad feeling go away and they say, oh, you want a painkiller say that and then you learn the word painkiller very rapidly because you've set up this whole network actually ahead of time if you've gotten the oh yeah but not the oh yeah the like oh yeah that's the one I wanted um and so you'll actually retain that word pretty well uh but to you just practiced using the words you know, to get the thing in your head out into that person's head you wanted them to understand that the thing you're talking about is a painkiller. You don't have any of those words, and so you used words like ball and bad feeling and make go away, and now they know exactly what you mean. This is what you are trying to practice because you will not know all the words in the language is your learning. We talked earlier about how you have a probably thirty thousand forty thousand word vocabulary in your native languages. You're not gonna have that in your target language, certainly not the beginning, and so you're going to be missing words. Fluency is not me knowing every single word in my language fluency is may be able to use every single word that I know to get every single thought in my head into your head that's it. And so this is the game that we're playing. We are playing taboo whenever we speak this language and it's interesting, because when you speak, you're going to run into these mo ones where you don't know the word for painkiller, and every time you do, you have a choice. You walk into this pharmacy and you say, I need a, uh oh, and you have two options. You have option one which is I need a ball that makes the hurt pain the thing the bad pain go bad go no more no more pain in my head I don't want pain in my I don't want pain there can you give me a ball for that you have option one where you sound like an idiot but they give you a painkiller and they tell you the word for him or you've option to where you say I need a painkiller you know painkiller in english do you speak english painkiller and they do speak english invariably and they will give you a painkiller and option two you get your painkiller an option one you get your painkiller and you go through more trouble option one is harder but an option one you are training yourself to be more fluent at the exact moment where you can because when you're speaking with all the words you know and you're having no problem you are not becoming more fluent any time you have no problem talking you're not improving I mean you're maybe rehearsing some words you're bringing back old memories and stuff but you're not getting better at the skill of taboo you're not getting better the skill of using your vocabulary to articulate your thoughts even when there are holes in it you're not getting better circumnavigating the holes where every time you run into this problem and you choose option one you are so the goal with speech is how can you maximize the time you spend playing taboo how can you uh run into problems more often and then how can you rehearse this process of running into a problem and getting around it running into a problem getting around it oh the thing on my computer that makes the light come out it's broken can you fix the thing on my computer the light comes out I see the things but I can't see anything oh the monitor yes my monitor's broken every time you do this your language gets better how do you rehearse this you never use english when you're speaking your target language if you set this rule that I will never ever speak a word of my own native language and I will force myself to come up with the stupidest explanations of the words that I don't know oh I need some uh you know the things on the feet that the thing the feet things the leather feet things and they'll say you want shoes like yeah that every time you do this that's what you need to be doing you need to be sounding like an idiot and rehearsing this process of getting around the words you don't know er and so the only way to do that is by refusing absolutely refusing to speak in your native language and then you need to find people to do this with it becomes sort of just a logistical challenge which will go over now um you have a few options you have home options you have a broad options and you have something in between uh we'll talk about the home options first the first of these our language exchanges in the style of dating sites ah the one I've went over a few in the last few days trying to see you know what's what's changed over the last few days the one in your syllabus is I believe live mocha dot com and they've changed their interface a bit such that I'm now preferring inner palace dot net ah this is a new one and if you're going toe if you have the syllabus whatever with even if you don't have the syllabus write this one down because I actually really like this website um but there are many there's booster dot com there's my language exchange dot com there's language hyphen exchanges dot com which are all those are all in the syllabus or should be I think they are um and the idea is this you basically you log in this is interpol's um you signing with facebook whatever and what you'll find our a list of profiles like a dating website basically and so you go through and someone just says you know hey, I'm from you know shadow spartak hungary and whatever this is what I look like and it's what I'm interested in and the idea is not to date, although they do have some options down there, you know, on the bottom left think this will zoom it won't sue on the bottom left here you have, you know, what are you looking for? What languages air you going for? What age range do you want? You want male or female? This I mean it's all it's, a dating website basically dating website, and in fact they have dating options say, I'm looking for romance or flirting. I'm looking for a relationship, these are options, but I recommend using the language exchange thing I mean, if you want to go find a hungarian, you know, girlfriend or something that's fine, you will learn a language faster that way, but still you're looking for language exchange is generally you're putting in your language that you're interested in this case, I've put hungarian and then you search and you find that there's in this case more than five hundred hungarians who are interested in talking just to sort of get better in english. The way these exchanges work is generally you come in contact, you send them a message, you say, hey, you know, I'm interest in learning hungarian if you want to practice your english, then let's kind of chat and then you get together on skype skype is video the normal video chatting thing can go to skype dot com so you don't think actually that's in the syllabus so I will write it in uh where's my browser I have no brother if you go to skype dot com appear s k y e com if any of you are not familiar with skype now you are skype is above is a video chat service basically you can chat on your computer with someone else you can see their face uh it's really great service it's free and so you go get skype s k y p e dot com and you contact this person they will send you there skype contact information you will send them there is you'll set up a date and then you'll just chat we're gonna talk about the next segment about what you should chat about, but you'll chat and generally will chat for let's say a half hour in english and half hour in hungarian you'll set up unequal time thing uh and it's free and it's a nice way to practice your language and it's a nice way to meet people I just need you actually get to have friends developed friends who are hungarian speakers um just cool um I don't need to be in firefox I need to be in prison oops I don't need to do that you can find one pro per person's profile you could go into it, you'll find all sorts of information about them what they're interested in, what languages they speak this person has, you know, this nietzsche quote and she has actually, uh, speak some german she speaks some english and she's fluent in hungarian, and she'll talk all about herself and where she lives. She lived six thousand two hundred thirty one miles away from me, and we can chat and become friends and practice our languages together, it's a neat sort of resource. The other resource is the one that actually prefer, um, because I am selfish with my time and I in terms of language exchanges while they're free, and they're wonderful in their wonderful ways of meeting people. I find that the if I'm going to spend an hour with someone on video chat, I would rather spend that entire hour in hungarian because I get twice as much out of it. Speaking to a hungarian in english is a fun way to meet someone, but I like efficiency and that makes me a jerk then that makes me a jerk. I prefer to spend the entire hour meeting them in hungarian, so I like to use I talkie for that if I'm not going to do one of the later options of immersion um I talkie is extraordinarily cheap private later. Private language tutoring. It looks like this. Uh, and you all die if you r s v p you have a ten bucks gift certificate on anyway. Which gives you two hours of free instructions. So do that. Um, you guys talking about com er, this is their website. You click on whatever logging with facebook you sign up fry talking. Ah, you use your little voucher thing with the r s v p you get your ten bucks and you'll see this website on the top. You have a few options. I get shy, sir, sit next to my computer from a point of things. Um, up top, you have basically these two options are the most interesting that I would say they have instant tutoring. Uh, right now, I sort of focus on these two, um, you can choose basically professional lessons or informal tutoring, professional lessons or people who have teaching credentials who identify themselves as teachers. I don't know if people have to actually submit their teaching credentials, and so you may have people who just say they're teachers and that's fine, because if someone says they are teacher and teachers it than they are a teacher, as long as they're getting good reviews. Then the thing people are expecting to get from them they're getting from them I don't care if they have a teaching credential or they have informal tutoring where people are identifying as I just speak the language you want to talk with me, I'll talk with you they're not going to give you a lesson plan so these are your two options professional essence or informal tutoring er and so in this case I've clicked the provider professional teacher button you then get to search and say okay, what language is that they teach I want someone who can teach hungarian it wouldn't be bad if they spoke english although we're going to be playing taboo and there will be no english. So honestly, if you find a teacher who cannot speak a lick of english, that might be better but they will everyone speaks english the worst thing the worst thing for learning a language is knowing english I mean, if you find any sort of if you're my experience of being in austria any russian who moves to austria because no one in austria speaks russian will become fluent in german like that and then the americans come to austria have tons of everyone, speaks english and just flounder I mean they get there and it's not like if anyone's watching from vienna hi you guys are wonderful and your german is great but it's so much harder for you guys for us, then for the for any of the russian speakers, they just get it like that because no one speaks russian with them for the other russians. So anyway, you make the search and you? What you'll find is that you'll find a mix of community tutors, which are these informal, informal tutoring sort of things thes, non professional teachers and a mix of professional teachers who have teaching credentials or at least have experienced teaching and the rates will differ. They put all the rates in I c I talkie credits I talking credits are ten cents each. I don't. I mean, they've used basically, they it's you have these people who are nine, nine, fifty or ten bucks an hour, she's twelve bucks an hour, twelve to sixteen. This person six bucks to seventeen bucks depends on what they're teaching. Some people will teach english, pour like nothing was poorly. They'll teach a second language at a lower rate than they'll teach their native language. So this person is basically seventeen bucks an hour for hungarian. This person is six bucks an hour for hungarian. This is a community tutor, and this is generally what I would suggest we'll talk about what to talk about. But you should be doing your own lesson. Planning? Well, you have two options. I mean, if you're willing to pay for it, you could have someone else do your lesson. Planning. We'll talk about how to use teacher's butt. Mostly. You just need someone who's willing to talk to you and paying them six bucks so that you get twice as much time in that language I find really worth the money. So here's a profile. For instance, here's someone who's going for between four bucks and six bucks an hour. This person's willing to tutor you in german for four bucks an hour is not a german native speaker or is willing to tutor you in hungarian, their native language, her native language for six bucks an hour, and this is ridiculously cheap. Why is this so cheap? Because she gets to sit at home in her pajamas and tutor you in hungary. And all she has to do is kind of chat. I paid six bucks an hour to chat to some random person who's interested in her culture. She's having fun, you're having fun. Everything's. Great is a wonderful, wonderful arrangement. All you basically do is click the schedule a session button and you will see her schedule. You will say, hey, how about this time? And she will say yes or no and you don't even have to have one tutor. You can have six studios, you contrive a whole bunch of people out and see who you click with while you're looking for is someone to speak your language with and this is hungarian. This is not a very popular language. You'll find a don of people for spanish or french or italian. It also makes the market bigger, which makes things cheaper. Uh, what do you talk about? How do you deal with the teacher if you are actually hiring someone I talking. What do you do? Uh, we'll talk about what happens just generally. But if you have a real teacher or you have someone who's willing to step into the teaching role, how can you use that time really efficiently? Well, you can chat about whatever, and we'll talk about whatever to chat about soon. Um, but I really like focusing on frequency list. This is what I did when I was teaching english. Um, is I was teaching english in austria. And I had a big, big, big list of the top two thousand words of english. You're boring frequency list. I had know there were no example sense, and it was just the raw data, and I would slap this in front of my students, my private english students, I would say, show me the words you don't know on this page they'd skim through, it would be really fast. It's came through and they go. I don't know that one, that one, that one. That one that one like this is so far sounding like a really boring lesson. Like look at this list of data find me the things that are not very robotic and boring, and so they skim through, take them a minute or two, and they'd markoff like ten words, and then we would chat about each of one. Those words we would start discussing, they say, well, I sort of know the word bar, but pub is kind of new to me what's the difference. And then we get into a ten minute discussion about the differences between pubs, bars and beer garden, and it ends up being this really interesting cultural exchange of being like, well, how does this different from the thing? I'm familiar? You know, how is the devil's got different from the girl? Let's talk about these words let's really discuss how you would use them in a sentence let's discuss how they're different, what they look like, what they feel like, what they smell like what cultural associations we have with them, what idioms we use with them and you get all this great content and then the only prompted this entire conversation is this one word which turns out to be a really useful, frequent word? And so they learn this word cold mean, they really get the word down and they get all this other content and all the way through their writing down notes there saying, oh, that's, an interesting way of saying that oh, that's an interesting phrase I never heard that phrase really you can say that and then all the way through as they're talking, I'm correcting their grammar I'm letting them know when they're saying something that's not quite right. And so the output of these sessions about an hour of chatting back and forth about these ten words in a frequency list is that they have a definition that they've said themselves of the word that I've corrected the grammar of they have example sentences galore for this thing they have a ton of sentences that are related to this word they've learned a lot about english and american culture, and the difference is between that austrian culture and they could go home and they did. I had a student go home and take all of this and put it into our flash cards. Every single time we spent an hour together we'd end up with a guy like I think it was probably fifteen pages of notes from these discussions that she dump all into her flashcards. Study them come back the next week and we do it again. She began at level a one english will go through the european levels. Little later she began with rudimentary english. Ah, and we were supposed to meet one hour a week for six months, and at the end of six months she was supposed to reach the second half of a one english you're supposed to take anyone english again with me, which is to say rudimentary english like hello, I am austrian that was about his complex. You should have been able to speak, and at the end of that process she should have been able to say I come from austria like no progress effectively that was the test you're supposed to take it the end of this process my my bosses there said, alright, give her a placement test at the end of this well, we were meeting an hour a week and we were doing this and we were speaking through frequency lists and she was getting fifteen pages of content and dumping it into a flash cars every week and studying those instead of what of just sort of us going through english drills and by the end of those six months when she was supposed to be saying things like I come from austria you're having fine conversations about her work, her life, her aspirations everything her level of english was at a high intermediate low advanced level my bosses told me okay give replacement test I said which placement test to take which placement is should I give her they said give her the lay one test the early early early beginner beginner test of she blank a student conjugated the verb to be and I said no what she's an advanced english speaker what do you want from me? She should be taking an advanced tests and know where she is and they said all right we're going to give her the advanced test will see where she is she ended up being a b two high advanced high intermediate level and they said never do that again you just took money from us she progressed too quickly at that point I quit that company shortly after that uh but uh there's a sense like this thing this kind of discussion gives you a ton of content and it ended up being a really fun way of doing our lessons it's, like I don't have to go through boring grammar books and she didn't have to go through growing boring grammar books. We don't have to talk about grammar. We talked about grammar when we when we needed to, when she said something she's like I I is a student she's I'm like okay, well, here's, how you deal with this verbal? I am a student and we talk about it in a context of real life. But generally this was a really, really nice way to conduct lessons. Honestly, for all of you teachers out there, if any of you are teaching languages for one, this takes no effort from a teaching standpoint, and it delivers fantastic results. I mean, I was lesson planning, it's not like I've never planned a lesson like I was absolutely lesson planning. Uh, and I found that this was so much easier and so much more effective, so I really like the stuff. Um, you have some more options out there in terms of where you're talking to people, and those options are usually people think about travel as your main one way to do this and travel is wonderful. My experience in italian was in italy was in peru gia written center, and it was probably one of the most magical summers of my life I fell in love with the italian language it is my favorite language of all my languages and it is my worst language of all my languages at this point I think hungarians just about to beat beat italian and it's my worst language because I was in italy because we would go to class and we had a lot of class they were doing thirty hours of class a week for cheap there are a lot of institutes in each in most countries their institutes designed for foreigners basically if you if you move into that country and you need to function there there was going to be an institute there that brings you up to speed it's just I mean it's a it's it's a raw functional thing like you you have these people who can't speak the language of the country they need to speak the language of the country there is a school for them this is not for tourists this is for people who are living there it's usually how you save some money and so you go to these institutes and they give you a ton of instruction and so we went uh I went there with with my man's wife and we went there and took thirty hours of class a week it was wonderful the classes the teachers were good classes were fun food is great and so every forty five minutes we would take a break because it's italy and you need to take your cappuccino actually espresso and so our teacher would have an espresso every every forty every hour you know what the fort we take you teach for forty five minutes drinking espresso fifteen minutes teach for forty five minutes drink espresso for like some days nine hours in a row you just see these teachers just chucking espresso with amazing and in those fifteen minute breaks everyone would speak in english always in fact there was seek us out they be like americans get them like we could we could practice english with you people and so you speak english you try to avoid it you'd be like known on navarrete and they would just be like no no no no I don't care if you don't want to speak and so you do are you at least hear it and the people in class generally the teachers will also translate things into english even when you don't want them to like you're like I'm in italy all these people are non native english speakers and you're still using english in class like you um and so english becomes this huge danger there are ways of of mitigating that danger uh but there are no ways of completely eliminating it generally what you're looking for are people who hate to speak english you're looking for people who are terrified of english of being forced to say things where they feel uncomfortable because speaking a language that you don't speak is uncomfortable just is you get used to it, but it is. And so there will be people who are so terrified of english that they're just going to be so thankful that you're there that they don't have to speak in english with you. You're one of these tourists, but you don't speak, you speak their language, I'll just thank you so much that you spared me the english you find these people, uh, or you pretend you're someone, you're not. You just say, I know you say in the language, I only speak albanian like I'm albanian because no one speaks albanian like it's great, uh, that works sort of, but that's that's limiting. Generally, you're looking for people who hate speaking english, and, uh, you're immersing yourself in things that italians do. You go to the museum and you take the italian tour, you go to the the audio tour, you got the audio guide and get the audio guide in italian. I've done this and I did this insult spork, I wouldn't went the sox pork and I wasn't studying german already knew german, and so I got the audio guide in russian. For all the russian tourists and so you're walking round salzburg and you have the russian tour of everything and it was silly because everything is just fog in south boca's salzburg is the city of fog and people are saying look down to your right and you will see this in russian and will say anything but everyone listening to the same audio everyone's laughing at the same time to the non existent fog city uh but you're hearing this in russia and the whole time you can even do this in the u s honestly you can go and do touristy things in the us and listen to the audio guys and I love the audio guide thing um but generally you would you want to do is do things with italians for italians if you're in italy and you're trying to tell you you go to cooking classes for italians you go two tours of parmesan factories for italians it's like italians are also tourists in italy they go from the south to the north of the north of the south and so you take advantage of all of that but still english is a danger the thing that you get out of travel is culture um you fall in love with the culture, there is no way that, uh we'll talk about this at the end, but italian for me is is a language of experiences the language of food it's a language of all sorts of things that I did not get in any other circumstance when you're making flashcards you can't eat them I wish you could but you can't it's I know it's like one of those to the side the sad things about flash cars is you don't get to eat them uh and so when you're running around a country and you're eating all their food and you're talking to all these people you are so joyful and wonderful and the weather is wonderful and you're in this wonderful place and their children and they're speaking italian that gives the language of flavor that you can't get anywhere else and so travel is a magical thing I'm not saying don't travel I'm just saying that there are parts of it that air date and english is the most dangerous part of all if you're trying to spell play this game of taboo if you're trying to say my rule is I will not speak a word of english then when people start coming at us like zombie style and horrors being I use big english that becomes challenging and so that's a challenge you should be aware of ahead of time the other option the in between option is immersion ah and it is a strange strange strange thing and I love it there is only one institute that I'm aware of where taboo is the law of the land uh there may be others and if there are I would like to know about them there are a few that sort of approach it but don't make it explicit but at middlebury college in vermont they have ten language schools they offer the ten most frequently which is really korean japanese they just added a korean school uh japanese mandarin uh french, italian, german, portuguese, arabic yes hebrew uh russian I think I covered ready spanish um and these schools basically say that if you speak a word of not the language or learning you don't get to go to the french school in speak spanish or something it's cheating too uh you'll be kicked out with no refund. This is where I learned german and we talked about already um and what happens is you get to play taboo all the time every single minute of every single day and every occasionally on saturdays you'll run away you sneak sneaking phone called home and just be like I'm still alive when you click that's about it general, you are speaking your target language the entire time you're also getting a ton of ah of training every day you have about four hours of class during twenty hours of class a week which was less than my experience in italy in still you get a lot more you have around four hours of homework a day a lot were writing constantly ah and you're getting all those corrections back which is great for flashcards wonderful uh middle mary for me is heaven it is the most stressful heaven in the world but it is heaven it's so stressful you go crazy by the end of it you go crazy but it's it's heaven I mean it's a wonderful wonderful experience um there is no culture exactly they try to approximate culture they tried to say and now we're gonna have the cinema club now we're going to you know, eat friend we're going to go to the french restaurant in town and eat french stuff but it's not the same as being in france it's just not they try they have a giant soccer culture is awesome said all this language schools fight in spanish school always wins d'oh um it's certain school always loses the german schools all philosophy students which essentially every school has its own own culture and so the friends school is all women and the german school is I don't know why and german schools all philosophy students and the russian school are all diplomats and fbi people um but it is a wonderful place I highly recommend it there's an issue with it is that they're two issues with the one is the lack of culture you're missing that component so this becomes somewhat academic and to uh it's expensive um, it including room and board, you must have ruined board because you're not allowed to leave. You are basically in prison there with your language school people, you must eat with them. You cannot go off and eat with the spanish school if you're not in the spanish school, uh, you can go off into the town and eat delicious pizza. The american flatbread company, the one that's in my birthday party, they're they're, um uh but generally you are always paying for room and board that's always part of the whole. What did the experience that you have there on dh? So that ends up being for any of the seven week programs, which are any of the languages that don't change the alphabet. So for german, italian, french, spanish and portuguese, you are pings around seven thousand dollars for that summer without financial aid. If you're doing any of the eight week programs which were the ones that change the offense for a korean. For japanese. From andrew, for russian, for hebrew in for arabic, now they have eleven schools. Evelyn schools. I just created another school. I think they actually do have eleven schools. Now, um, for those of our eight week programs there, nine thousand dollars is a lot of money. But they have wonderful financial aid if you apply early enough I sort of uh regret saying this since so many people at once if you apply in october or november right when their financial aid opens ah they will dump money at you their financial aid is grand faced its need based and uh it is really wonderful they really tried to make it so that you could actually afford it and generally I found it's been affordable especially when you think about the fact that they're paying for every single meal you eat in the beginning they were giving you free ben and jerry's ice cream the whole time vermont great uh so this is an experience is really pretty amazing in terms of efficiency for language learning uh this has been my pick middlebury has been my pick um so I like this place for taboo and what I like to do in terms of a general language learning method is I like I like what I did with french and in russian I like building a language myself from scratch building the sounds building the words building the grammar learning the whole grammar we'll talk about the whole overview of of all this uh and then once I have the whole grammar down I have basically a good vocabulary have the top thousand words all that sort of stuff uh then I show up to middlebury because middlebury is a great place to polish you show up and at the point where you don't have to learn any more grammar, really, you don't have to learn much more vocabulary. You can just go there and talk all day long, and so the only thing I'm doing, really I mean, I'm learning lots of vocabulary. They're testing all the time, there's so much homework. I mean, it's, not like you're, you're not working on your flash what I usually do. I bump my flash cards up from thirty new ones, a day to, like, seventy a day when I'm a middlebury, just crank him out because I figure it's my full time job, you learn this language, why not learned as much as I can? But my main goal in middlebury is to talk all the time, and this is probably one of the best places to do it.