8th Annual ILI Symposium 2017: Stephen Krashen (2)
one more hypothesis I'll give you the updated version of it I think now this is conjecture but I'm suspicious I suspect that it's true that language acquisition requires that input be interesting that's obvious if it's not interesting no one's gonna pay attention you won't acquire but we now think it has to be more than that we think now it has to be very interesting the word I like is compelling so interesting that you forget you're listening to another language this is a concept borrowed from a psychologist named chin Cinque muhuali no I will not spell it for you i D fo our way oh no I won't spell it for you but it is from his book called flow FL o w was a wonderful book it's amazing he says when you're in a state of flow only the activity exists your sense of self exists dis diminished your sense of time is diminished there's only the activity he and his colleagues have done research all over the world on what our flow activities my favorite study was done in Japan and Tokyo where they looked at young men who liked to ride their motorcycles downtown Tokyo at midnight and why did they do it their hypothesis was that they did it to impress the girls turned out that was supported but they also said when I'm on the motorcycle that's all that exists I'm not thinking of Who I am time stands still this is what we're aiming for input that's so interesting you're in flow I'll give you a case history and there's that started me thinking about it this is was presented to me by my former student and now colleague Christie Lau who works in this San Francisco area and this is about her son we call him Paul in the paper we wrote about him Paul is now a teenager kind of entering college nice young man he grew up bilingual Cantonese English
Christy and her husband are both from the Hong Kong area and her parents lived with them and grandparents and they spoke Cantonese so Paul grew up comfortably bilingual Cantonese in English well when he was young Kristy and her husband were really working hard and they occasionally had to hire a babysitter the babysitter
would come over turn on the television - Mandarin cartoons now you know this most of the public doesn't know Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages they're not both dialects of Chinese they're really different there's some shared vocabulary they're related it's kind of like Romanian and Spanish you know you know one it will help you a little but it's not a guarantee so the Cantonese that he knew did help Paul a little bit in watching the cartoons I'm sorry I jumped ahead the babysitter would come over turn on the TV - Mandarin cartoons Paul could understand them for several reasons little bits is shared vocabulary the wonderful high quality of children's cartoons I think they're most of them are just sensational I sometimes watch them on the airplane even when my grandchildren aren't around I think they're so good so gradually you'd see the same cartoons over and over again and gradually grew to understand them my favorite two favorites spongebob oh you ever watch Spongebob every episode is good every single one I worry about mr. Krab though mr. Krab is a crab the restaurant he owns the krabby patty sells crab sandwiches this isn't right they need to look into this okay anyway you want another off the topic my favorite children's cartoon even better than spongebob have you ever watched Regular Show Wow okay I'll just leave that as a recommendation it is really amazing anyway eventually he could understand children's TV and Mandarin as he got older he started watching it in high school dad would bring home two movies every weekend in Mandarin and the family would watch them in the evening the family would get together grandma grandpa everybody and watched the news in Mandarin today as a young man Paul speaks Mandarin when company comes over and their Mandarin speakers he has no problem the family has visited Taiwan they've gone to Beijing Shanghai all these Mandarin places he's comfortable no problem at all I speaks Mandarin quite well Paul doesn't care about Mandarin he's neutral there's this movement among Chinese that Mandarin is our common language we should all do Mandarin to bond together honor the culture he isn't careful he's not for it he's not against it he doesn't care about Mandarin he is interested in the TV programs he liked the stories acquiring Mandarin was an accidental byproduct of getting compelling comprehensible input it's the compelling input that counts motivation doesn't matter I am pronouncing the death of the concept of motivation we've all had this experience in my language teacher friends tell me this like they teach Spanish in middle school and they tell the kids you know you really should pay attention in Spanish class some day Spanish is going to be very useful to you nine-year-old kids they don't care they want to go skateboarding or whatever okay tell them a good story and they will acquire the language whether they're interested in it or not and two days Mineko is going to talk about bedico Mason's gonna talk about how to do that so here's my conclusion so far what we want to do is fill our classes with compelling comprehensible input and we've got it made I will summarize this way language acquisition requires input that is comprehensible and interesting and we hope compelling we want both of those that's hard to do that's the job of language teaching people like me at the university have come up with this all the research that you just heard about but we did our job was easy it's easy to state the theory and get results doing this in class how do you make input comprehensible and compelling at low levels especially that's difficult and that's why dr. Mason is here it's easy to give students input that is comprehensible but not interesting that's called school it's also easy to give people input that's not comprehensible what's interesting we do this all the time I just talk talk talk and my colleagues at the University have dedicated years to providing us with input that is neither comprehensible nor interesting in my opinion anyway let's take a five-minute break no more would you mind trying to raise your hand and make this sign can you do this now you know what this is right it's actually several things and I want to give you some background and this is usually the only thing from my talks that people remember is from Star Trek right it's from Vulcan the planet Vulcan and it's the symbol for live long and prosper right well the teenagers on Vulcan don't do this the teenagers just do this and they say proper prosper man prosper anyway number two who introduced it into Star Trek Leonard Nimoy himself he brought it in where did he get it he got it from the synagogue now what you should also know this is very important is that Leonard Nimoy goes to the same synagogue that my dear uncle Boris went to which means we're connected the way this is done in Judaism on the most holy day Yom Kippur the Day of Atonement were you fast all day a member of the priestly caste a Cohen was called anyone whose last name is Cohn is probably a member of the cohan class priestly caste does this symbol in front of the Torah in front of the Old Testament front of the Bible okay so Leonard Nimoy is Jewish what you don't know is that Spock is Jewish I have the evidence now in Judaism religion goes through the mother it's matriarchal Spock's father is from Vulcan his mother from Earth from boss a nice Jewish family so Spock is Jewish got that Gerry ok Spock is Josh not only is Spock Jewish William Shatner is Jewish you know Captain Kirk my daughter who is also Jewish says that for her Star Trek is Jews in space ok that'll be the next series Jews in space another part of this you should know this is my hypothesis some of you can do this easily some of you have a little trouble my hypothesis is people who can do this easily generally are those who've played the piano got it I will write three journal papers based on this it'll be good for my career okay okay I want to add some more to what I said this in the first segment I want to add some more to the comprehension hypothesis I want to add some corollaries to the hypothesis corollary number one kind of surprising talking is not practicing talking is not practicing talking is the result of comprehensible input of language acquisition not the
cause we have many cases showing this is true you don't have to talk to acquire a language in fact it doesn't help or hurt it doesn't matter it's the result I want to give you one case history that makes this point we have a lot of you know complicated research showing this is true but I want to give you a case history and I like this case history it's something that happened to me but the same thing has happened to you so it's a universal experience my version of it took place in the 1970s when we were living in New York it was my first academic job I was director of ESL at Queens College as I told you we like everyone else in New York we lived in a big apartment building and the apartment across the way from us was owned by a Japanese family I'm sorry a Japanese company and every year there was a new family in the apartment and every year there were the children who couldn't speak English and there I was director of e s l with my PhD from UCLA very SMA arty I will teach English to these children and brag about it to my friends so let me tell you this was in the 70s I didn't know about this stuff then this stuff we all we got it kind of in the middle of late 70s I thought then I to PhD in linguistics I knew nothing I thought then the way you teach language is you get people to talk and you correct their mistakes turns out that's dead wrong but that's what we all thought so next door was a little girl the family you told me four years old gosh she's probably a great-grandmother by now anyway and I wanted to help her learn English so I tried to get her to talk I'd come up to her say he told me good morning no response he told me say hi hello no response obviously I've got to make it more concrete he told me say ball here's a ball no answer well clearly I've got to break it down into its component parts let's work on initial consonants he told me say Bob look at my lips no response well there's a theory going around them that's come back and the theory is children don't want to learn language you've got to force them into it in fact the theory today is that children don't want to learn anything and the theory today is that children are lazy and evil which is why we have to test them all and teachers are lazy and evil so we have to force them dork no no that's true of course so I used that I said I won't give you the ball until you say ball no matter what I said he told me didn't speak she didn't say anything the first week the second week the third week the first month five months until she started to speak actually that's not entirely true children during this time do say certain things things say it's not real language they pick it up from the other kids in the neighborhood things like leave me alone get out of here one child they knew the only thing he could say was I kick your ass wasn't quite sure what it meant right exactly after about five months he told me started to speak and several things were interesting about her language acquisition first it looked a lot like first language one word two words gradually getting more complicated the same process our children went through second it came quickly by the time he told me and her family went back to Japan at the end of the year she had made enormous progress in conversational English what was going on during those first five months she was listening she was peeking out comprehensible input big sentence coming up when she started to
speak it was not the beginning of her language acquisition it was the result of all the comprehensible input she had gotten over those few months she was going through a silent period you'd like to have a silent period wouldn't you how about you go to a class to do another they do decide you're gonna get some knowledge of Lakota to go to Lakota class and in this perfect class you don't have to say anything isn't that wonderful you could talk all you want but no one's gonna call on you and also if the input isn't comprehensible it's the teachers fault not yours that's how we're doing it today and the results were getting as you'll see are much better than the other methods okay so that's number one number two corollary number two this one goes back to the to the natural order hypothesis let's say we acquire language in a predictable order rule one rule 2 rule 3 all the way up to rule 6890 one I just made that up the question of language acquisition how do we go from rule 1 to rule 2 how do we move from the what we know now to the next one well the answer is you get input you understand that contains the next rule that you're ready for i confused everybody in the field in back in the 1970s which was a very good career move the way to get ahead in the language field probably any field I'll give you the secret make up new terminology make up new terminology people think it was all your idea you get the credit for it and make sure the terminology is not entirely clear make sure it's a little bit confusing and people think you're a lot smarter than they are I've done this accidentally and it's been great I made up this terminology in the 70s and when people meet me they say what was that okay gosh he must be very smart here's the terminology I said then that if the rule you know now is at I at the term from algebra my son's a mathematician it's really cool how do you go to the next one i plus one well the answer is not teach I plus one we don't teach along the natural order here is the fantastic hypothesis that I came up riding on the Pomona freeway and 1976 and it suddenly hit me I had to pull off the road and write it down and do deep breathing for a while because it was so exciting give people lots of comprehensible input that is compelling the next rule they're ready for I plus one is there don't worry nutrition when you have lunch you don't go to lunch and think well you know I really need some more calcium some vitamin b3 and selenium so I'll order this you don't do that you simply get what we call a balanced diet lots of good food etc etc and then lots of coffee and all the vitamins you need are there in the right order and they naturally are combined with the things they should be combined with and you get them again and again as you need them the same with language acquisition our
conclusion don't worry about grammar teaching give people the comprehensible input they need and language is acquired all the rules you get them naturally so that's the second major corollary another fact I'd like to present you which will help me talk about case histories language acquisition is gradual its gradual you get a little bit at a time the best example is vocabulary a guy named Waddell wrote a brilliant brilliant article years ago 1973 such a nice quote I put it on your handout acquisition of vocabulary is a little bit at a time we may know a very large number of words with various degrees of vagueness in a twilight zone between the
darkness of unfamiliarity and the brightness of complete familiarity this was confirmed about 15 years ago by brilliant researchers at the University of Illinois they did studies and they found that when you're reading or listening and there's a word that you don't know but the context is comprehensible you get a little bit of it each time you see the word or you hear the word you get about 5% maybe 10% that may not seem like very much but if you get enough input that's more than enough they looked at reading they calculated that if fifth-grade children read about a million words a year and they get 5 percent of a new word each time this accounts for vocabulary growth it's not all at once as soon as you finish the lesson you don't know that word you've simply made a little bit of progress making it more familiar on the road to acquisition so many of us I'll talk about later I'm studying Mandarin now it's so much fun oh and it's so slow it's amazing there are lots of words when I usually when I meet a Mandarin speaker and I plunge into Chinese they just stare at me okay I can't get those people to understand their own language what's wrong with it anyway and what's the frustrating thing is there all these words I think I know but I can't quite come out with them they're kind of there and I can't quite grab them keep reading and listening they'll be there that's that's the moral behind that it comes gradually not all at once what I'd like to do now is go to case histories to illustrate what I've just talked about the idea of comprehension silent period etc and I want to say a word about case histories it's one of many ways we do research I think it's a wonderful way the trick with case histories speaking to you as a research person you got to look at a lot of them you can't just look at one or two if you look at one or two you don't know what's significant like someone will tell me my cousin learned to speak French and all he did was memorize the dictionary that's not listen to you that's one key to Street you got to take a bigger look see what else he did and look at other case histories so we've looked at hundreds and I'm giving you a few examples the first one was a case I got to see up close I got a call from the Los Angeles Times is about 20 years ago and the reporter was doing a study of immigrants from Mexico to the Southern California area who acquired English but also acquired other languages at the same time and he and these are usually people who work in restaurants he wanted me to come out and meet a guy named Armando at a restaurant
in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles arrest an Israeli restaurant owned by moroccan jews who settled in israel and armando had acquired hebrew Audio like that as well as english he came to the United States in his late teens having had all fourth-grade education in Mexico started to work in the land Lilla restaurant had been there
about 10 years and his Hebrew was pretty good in fact the first thing I did is I tested him of course we had things called tape recorders then may have heard of those and we had a conversation I had a conversation with him his best buddy member of the family and I we talked about what did you do yesterday
which was the Sabbath and we have this nice conversation the Hebrew they did fine without me push them along a little bit I took the tape the next day and I took it to the Israeli embassy and the Israeli tourist office and I asked two people to listen to the conversation what did they think of our mundo how do you like this guy is
Hebrew one person said he's pretty good he's lived in Israel for maybe two three years and he's become very functional in Hebrew it's not the highest most sophisticated there's a lot of slang but he's quite impressive another person thought he was fluent and he was from Ethiopia on the other one thought he was very very good and Hebrew is a second language and he's obviously Moroccan well that's the fourth person thought he was a native speaker so you get from very good to native his guy had done it I talked him how did you do this first of all he didn't say anything for the first two three years he just listened he was not getting a lot of comprehensible input so this is like my neighbor Ito me next door listening to a lot of incomprehensible input graduated filters out did he get corrected he said yes but only on the vocabulary not ungrate grammar itself did you study Hebrew grammar never you know when you said
this we repeated a sentence he is 'm did you know that was the future tense is that no idea but it was perfect he got it right everything was fine never learned to read in Hebrew no interest in converting to Judaism no interest in living in Israel but very well integrated into the community you meet this guy I was very impressed with him you Sydenham was like meeting Jerry okay buddy this guy is okay talk to him he's interesting there's no barrier that's the way it was easy friendly person the family loved him he was in an automobile accident while he was in the hospital every day the family from the restaurant would send over breakfast lunch and dinner he knew the family he knew the customers he knew all the workers and chatted easily with them in Hebrew all the time he into me he integrated into the local community my bitterness about this though the reporter did not include my analysis in the newspaper article I could have had a career I could have had
a name for myself blew the hole but I published my own incomprehensible paper about him I got my revenge other areas that come out with similar ideas moving on to the next page we have been told by anthropologists one name Jane Hill especially that we shouldn't just look at you know the people we see in language classes people around us we shouldn't look at a lot of different situations and she relied on the work of an anthropologist named Sorenson who looked at Native American languages in the Falcons River area between Brazil and Colombia this was done in the 1960s now several papers about these people really interesting ten thousand people in a small area that speak twenty four different languages Wow I mean there are ten thousand people at a baseball game twenty four different languages they had a very interesting rule you may not marry someone who speaks your language they regard outsiders as incestuous we
marry people to speak our own language okay so as someone is growing up they pick up their mom's language their dad's language and the local common language of the inner community the larger language and as they grow up they're adding languages the whole time constantly it's about a year or two until they start to speak we see this constant all the time it takes a while they go through a silent period they don't study they don't speak until they feel ready the languages are not all related some of them are some of them are not and this doesn't hold them back also they're very modest about their claims as you see this is common to many Native American cultures they don't brag about how well they speak the language they're very modest they understate their accomplishments but it's obvious that they get pretty good it is considered impolite and uncomfortable to correct somebody correction we think does not have that big of an impact it's the comprehensible input so here is another case that fits right in let me give you the opposite Daniel Tom it Daniel Tom it is a case of Asperger a form of autism oh I can get rid of these scratches he wrote a book about it which I read which is a very good book called born on a blue Sunday on and he was featured in a special in the UK on television called brain man he has
acquired ten languages I would say acquired and learned but let me tell you what kind of a brain he has as a victim of what we call savant syndrome or Asperger's he has an incredible power of memorizing by the way I highly recommend his book it's a very insightful sensitive book about his life it's really quite something anyway to show you a kind of a memory as he did this stunt for charity did it on television he memorized pie to 20,000 places can you imagine he holds the British and European record for memorizing pine the world record is someone in China who has memorized it to 60,000 places it takes days to recite it he did it for
charities that's all in a good cause this is the kind of memory by the way if you want to work on your career a little bit you can get lots of Fame this way with pipe there's a website if you memorize pi2 20 places and have someone witness it they will list you on the website I can do it to 20 when people ask me what my code number is I tell them it's the last four digits of pi so is it worth the middle four you can do that too okay anyway he has done these languages and it's clear in his book when he talks about how he did it that he does both acquisition and learning I've got some quotes here Lithuanian I wrote words down as I learned them to help me remember them conscious learning and I read children's books in other words comprehensible input Icelandic heed for this TV show he learned Icelandic in ten days and on TV he had conversations with native speakers and was quite comfortable okay what did he do yeah he had a teacher check pronunciation conscious learning but the large amount of reading helped me develop an intuitive sense of the languages grammar that's acquisitions he did both he asthma says what would you do if you started a new language oh yeah I'd have a dictionary grammar books all these things but lots of texts I prefer to learn words within whole sentences to give me a feeling of how the language works again both of them he has a system that he's put on the Internet I haven't looked at it in a long time of teaching people languages it's clearly both acquisition and learning this is a grammatical focus and there's practice and there's reading an input so is the conclusion we should combine both and do a balanced program no this is Daniel Tammet who rep memorized PI to 20,000 places these are the people who can learn grammar not us I want to in the 9.6 minutes remaining to me I would like to talk about a couple more cases I was invited to a conference two and a half weeks ago I went to in Montreal it was a conference dedicated to hyperpolyglots people there knew lots of languages the guy who invited me I mentioned it before Steve Kaufman knows fifteen languages okay I was the least talented person there or the least accomplished and I'm not bad I'm pretty good at lots of languages these people ten twelve fifteen languages and they were so interesting if another person came who knew more languages than they did they said wow I want to be like you when I grow up it was like that I want to tell you about two cases of hyperpolyglots Lum Cocteau and Steve Kaufman and make the point that this supports the theory I met lone Coto in Hungary 25 years ago 22 years ago I was giving a short course at the University and page for two weeks and while I was there one my student said you should meet Lum cotton she is a national treasure she is the world's greatest polyglot 17 languages and if you want a meter you better hurry she's 86 so made an appointment my student called uh plumcot Oh professor crashing is here from California would like to meet you and mom Cocteau said so what and we had a meeting Wow I made three trips to Budapest just to see her and talk to her my student had read her book which was written in Hungarian she was the real thing she did all of her language acquisition in Hungary not she didn't grow up multilingual she grew up monolingual Hungarian she got interested in her 20s that's when she started she got interested in French she finished her PhD in chemistry at the University I was teaching out in page and then decided to start teaching French she understand French she kept one lesson ahead of her students did the same thing with English she became an interpreter and translator that's where she did it her main source of input reading she would find a book in another language and keep reading it until she got it kind of awkward I told her what we did that we have all these you'll find out when dr. Mason gives her talk graded readers and saidar she said oh if I had that it would have been so much easier she was a little nervous about her Spanish she said the only book she could find in Spanish was a translation from English Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she and her family moved she did Russian during the Nazi occupation of Budapest when it was forbidden by law to speak Russian and public that's when she did Russian she moved into an apartment that was abandoned by a Russian family they left all these romance novels in Russian she read them all by the way when Steve Kaufmann gave his talk he asked all these hyperpolyglots how many of you grew up with more than one Lane which about 1/3 2/3 of them did it the way Lovato did and the way Steve Kaufman did Steve Kaufman grow up monolingual
English in Montreal he had a little French in school but never paid attention he then had three years in France he then had a long stretch in Japan where he worked as a lumber salesman and eventually for the Canadian government but the other languages he did on his own with classes teachers creating materials and did it later in
life let me tell you what they said number one they agree find compelling input Kaufman said the best things in the Mandarin classes he took was when he and the teachers would sit around and just talk that was the most interesting I did Hebrew in a special intensive Hebrew program in Israel and what we
call an open work-study program and the first three hours each day was regular Ebru instruction contextualized grammar it wasn't that bad because the teacher was very entertaining but the last half-hour she told Bible stories no interest in grammar and she did it in simple Hebrew and we were captivated because she always had a new twist on what was going on in the stories that's what had happened we forgot we're listening to Hebrew ylim Cocteau says the books did it for her they were compelling she plunged into them a character's fate becomes the readers fate genuine readers sail with Robinson Crusoe throw themselves under the train with Anna Karenina died of tuberculosis with the Lady of the camellias afterward luckily they come back to life so compelling input ok grammar Steve says sometimes they look at grammar books but I forget the rules right away and it was only through exposure to language that I mastered the grammar I love this next
one I deliberately ignored explanations of the theory of Chinese grammar because they made no sense to me instead I just accepted the various structure patterns of sentences in Chinese as normal this is brilliant I regard Steve Kaufman as my therapist in languages all his experiences he knew about my theory
before he met me this is all on his own and he's all this good practical advice he knew he found it was easier to learn a structure from exposure to phrase patterns than understanding the grammatical explanations this one I should put on my wall do not spend your time in a vain attempt to master the language from grammar rules and lists you will not enjoy this tedious form of study and it will not work this these are the Masters these are the greatest polyglots in the world would lets you avoid mistakes is not grammar rules but seeing it hearing it etc I asked Lum Cotto about teaching grammar to adults she said it's okay make it up shown and only include the simplest of forms the world's greatest polyglot of her time when asked should we teach grammar to children she said the concept of teaching grammar to children is absurd is who you gonna believe Lum cata a genius or so-called professional textbook writers most of whom have never spent a day alone in a room with ten year old children error correction loam koto error correction can make you sick to your stomach Wow she was at a conference translating from English from another language into English and it was a conference on chemistry and she has her she had her PhD in chemistry she made a slip of the tongue instead of
saying inorganic she said uh nor Ganic she said my chief rival heartily corrected me I was lost for the rest of the day now if that happens to lone Cocteau who has lots of self-esteem and confidence I spent hours with her what about our 11 year old kids first exposure to the language correction can be
staining on the other hand I've got a safer full exposure undirected mistakes are very perilous you keep saying it wrong they take root in the mind I don't know if that's true I think if you keep getting more input our data says a lot of them gradually go away when you're reading should you know every word no this is liberating Coffman I heard him say this in public to expect to forget whatever you look up in a dictionary pretty quickly he says when he's reading if he looks up something in the dictionary he forgets what the word is if the time he's gone back to the text does that make you feel better this happens to me all the time she says alum cotton says don't get obsessed with words you don't know focus on passages and sections that you do understand and that's how you improve don't force it don't automatically reach for the dictionary this next one helped me Steve don't worry about perfection you'll often feel you're struggling when in fact you're communicating quite successfully do not think your grammar and pronunciation are being judged your listeners don't care they want to understand you this took me a long time not only was I embarrassed when I made a mistake feeling that people would be insulted but I wanted to applause whenever I got anything right if I made the past participle agree with you know and gender and number I wanted people to just stop and say oh isn't he terrific they don't care people are listening to what you say Lum Kato language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly Wow propagation of half-truths is not an advancement of science but a hindrance mr. Trump for the language learner however it would be a pity to fall silent if you don't know it certainty whether the four we'll hit home or not Kaufmann helped me two and a half weeks ago I told you about the problems I've been having problems they're not problems this process with mandarin where I get frustrated because I know I've seen the word I know I would recognize the meaning but I can't quite come up with it so I can't really use it and that gets frustrating he says this is normal don't worry about it keep reading keep listening when he said that in Montreal that night I went back to Mandarin I did reading and listening for 45 minutes and I felt a lot better okay I did it yesterday to trust the process don't worry about perfection the great British actor what's his name senior moment who's the most famous British actor Laurence Olivier thanks said don't worry about perfection when you get there nobody's gonna notice okay same thing with language language works even if only poorly I'm going to come down to glorious conclusions very simple on the bottom of the page the answer is comprehensible input interesting even compelling input and another word that bonito Basin and I've been talking about rich input input that is contains all the grammar you need just because there's so much of it an input that is fascinating that adds depth and interest to the topic you're talking about language acquisition is easy inevitable it is our birthright and all these polyglots agree with me there's no talent for languages we all have it when I was in Budapest in Hungary I kind of showed off and told people that I knew long cut though I have meetings with the Budapest grammarians with the linguistics professors you know they invited me to lunch to coffee etc I gave a talk and University in Budapest and in casual conversation I'd say you know I've been hanging out with LOM cotta I must be an important person right and they all said Oh heard none of them took her seriously they all said she has a different brain a different brain does she have three hemispheres let me what do you mean a different brain no mum cathode denies it Steve Kaufman denies it and it was a steady topic of conversation among the
hyperpolyglots by the way bonito I'm still in touch with the hyperpolyglots on Twitter we still exchange things all the time none of them know about research they're not they're not researchers they're not teachers but Wow do they have interesting ideas they all agree there's no special talent what it is is trusting the process being patient know that it's an uneven path toward improvement it'll seem uneven but hang with it anybody can do it I'm done please burst into wild applause thank you okay thank you very much you
