Learning Languages Through Stories with @Olly Richards (1)
Hi, this is Steve Kaufmann and I'm, again, and I'm really pleased to have with
me today as a guest, someone that I've known for a long time at various sort of
meetups of language keeners Olly Richards of storylearning.com and um hello Olly.
Hi, Steve.
Please allow me to say, first of all, hi, if people, uh, enjoy my
videos, please subscribe, click on the bell for notifications.
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Olly.
Steve
uh, you and I have been involved in this whole kind of internet based language
learning thing for quite a while.
And I want to go over some of the ways in which language learning has changed.
And of course, both of us started learning languages long before this
whole internet thing started...
how language learning has changed, how the technology has
changed, how we've had to change.
So that's what I would like to talk about with you if you agree.
I am at your service.
Okay.
So, uh, before we get going, tell me a little bit about storylearning.com.
Yeah.
So storylearning is, um, my website, my YouTube channel, and the whole
focus of what we do is that we teach languages through stories.
And this all came about, um, many moons ago.
Um, I mean, I've always used stories and reading as a way to learn languages.
Um, but I never really thought about how I could use it as a teaching vehicle.
Um, but then I had a long career teaching languages and then I began
to actually write books of short stories, which people really love.
And then, so I kind of developed this concept and thought, well,
how many different ways can we teach people through stories?
Much the same as the mini stories at LingQ, um, uh, but now inserting
pedagogical elements as well.
Um, and so nowadays that's, that's everything that we do.
So we make courses, we write books and everything is about stories.
Okay.
And before we go further into that, of course telling stories in a way, our
presence on YouTube is a form of story.
Uh, we talk about different things.
We tell stories.
And I just wanted to, I mentioned this to you before we started
up, you know, here we are.
Uh, I've been in this business of, I mean, I guess my first YouTube video
was, I don't know, 15 years ago.
I remember it well.
I was just thinking....
On the chair.
Yeah on the chair.
So, so then I was just thinking here I am, you know, getting set
up for my interview with you.
And I thought I would describe to people what I have to do.
So I have my iPad open because that's where I communicate with you.
And you might describe what you do at your end, but so I, I'm no longer looking
at you, even though you are there.
And I hear you through my Air Pods because in fact, I'm recording the
video on my iPhone, which is located about six feet away from me on a tripod.
Now the iPhone is connected into my computer because I have my computer
open beside my iPad and plugged into my computer is first of all, a microphone.
And second of all is a cable that takes me back to my iPhone.
And then I use Quick Time and I use a program on Quick Time to make sure
that I'm centered more or less centered because I tend to be a bit sloppy in
whatever I do, but I got, I can see on my computer screen, how I am centered,
what actually will show up in the video.
So I have to get that going, now the audio from my iPhone because it's
six feet away, wouldn't be very good.
So I have my microphone plugged into my computer and I use Audacity to record
the, uh, audio, and then we merged the audio and the video files in order
to get a good quality video on audio.
So we are not at all dependent on the connection that we have through Zoom,
because although Zoom and Skype have improved there can be interruptions
and frozen moments and, you know, different audio quality and so forth.
One other thing is for whatever strange reason, every time I open
Audacity I get an error message.
So I always have to go through the same step of quitting Audacity,
searching for it, with that...
Magnifying glass to get it up again.
And then the second time I get into Audacity, it works.
So just some background.
Oh.
And I have three different sets of lights here to improve the light.
So there's a whole set up process to do these, to tell my story.
How about at your end?
That's the interesting thing about that whole setup you've got there
is it didn't begin like that.
It's is something that's evolved over the, over the years.
And as I say, there's so many parallels between this and other
things in life where you just start off, you know, your very first video.
I believe it was a web cam on your computer with you just sitting on a chair.
And that was, that was that same for me.
Um, but then as we go, we add more things on.
So my setup is at the moment, so we are talking on Zoom.
That's how we're doing it.
And right now I'm looking at the call itself into the laptop, which
nobody can see, but I can't record the laptop because the camera is no good.
So what I do is I have my fancy DSLR camera, which I use for my YouTube videos,
um, set up above the screen up here.
So I'm looking at the camera right now because that's how we get a nice effect
for the audience who watches it later.
But I can't see your face.
Your face is down here and I'm looking at the camera up here
and then linked to my camera.
I have an overhead mic, which is up here, um, which is, which is capturing my voice.
Um, that's linked directly into the camera.
I can see over here what's coming up from the camera to make sure that
it's still recording and I'm centered.
And I also have two box lights up here, one backlight and then four or five
different lights in the background, um, to, to light it up and see if you won't
be able to see that right now, because you're just staring at your camera.
But when do you see the final results on YouTube, it will
hopefully look quite good.
I'm afraid that some of my viewers are going to say, why
don't you get a set up like Olly?
Cause his is much better than yours.
So we'll see.
We're...
it's...
in any case, we continue to evolve and, and, and language
learning continues to evolve.
Um, what do you think are some of the major sort of
changes that have taken place?
Say...
which Was the first sort of language that you, other than English, your first
foreign language, which was the first one?
And if you compare how, uh, you know, the world of language learning
today to when you first started, what have been some of the main changes?
So my first language was French and, um, I remember working in a
cafe in London when I first, when I first heard French around me and
thought, well, that sounds fantastic.
Let's go and learn it.
And so on my way home, I would stop by the European bookshop, which was then in...
now it's in Gloucester road at the time it was in Soho and I would go
back and the only way that I knew to learn French was with textbooks
because that's what we did at school.
And so I would go down into the European bookshop, um, in Soho and I would go
down and browse the French grammar books.
You had The Complete Merde, which was the perennial French book,
which was there already at the time.
And then there were the Collins books, the Teach Yourself books.
I don't, I don't remember what they were and I would simply flick through
the grammar books until I found one that seemed more what I might enjoy.
And then I would work through it page by page.
Um, and, uh, and that was pretty much it.
Now, um, fast forward 20 years or so...
but subsequently you learn Spanish, you learned Arabic, you learned
a whole bunch of languages.
Yeah.
And all of that was in the kind of analog methods as well.
So I think because I was, I was trained in that way.
I've always found personally that digitizing languages robs me of attention,
which is for me as the most valuable asset when it comes to the, any, anything.
So I've always got...
been, I've always been quite uh, I've always preferred, you know,
pencil and paper to anything else.
The big things that have changed.
I mean, the major ways that I use technology now would be for, uh, for
example, reading, reading Japanese, I would read digitally always because
it's just so much faster to look up either the, you know, the read,
the reading of a, of, of a Kanji or the, or the meaning of a Kanji.
Um, and then obviously I use the internet to take language lessons, to
connect with tutors and um, and just for general, for general, I know, you
know, watch movies, all the regular stuff really, but that's about it.
I'm not a big one for apps.
I'm a big fan of LingQ.
I use LingQ on a regular basis.
Um, but I, but I, I very much, I very much use the internet to
connect today to speakers, to read content, and then sometimes with a
little bit of help when it gets hard.
Right.
Uh, interesting.
I think it's true, and I agree with you that reading on paper, uh, is
better than reading on a computer.
Uh, but there are a few conditions there.
It's better because you, there are fewer distractions and you are
basically dealing with the words and they're not shining at you.
And it's, it's less distracting.
However, I find that in my own case I have to be at a certain level in
order to be able to read on paper.
Uh, so if I take an extreme example now, of course, when I learned Chinese,
there were no computers and there was no digital texts so it was all paper, but
nowadays learning Persian and Arabic, I'm just not strong enough in Arabic.
I have your book by the way, Arabic Short Stories, and I can
read them, but it's tough because the pronunciation is not obvious.
Uh, the words that I don't know, I don't know.
So if I can read it digitally, I can hear the text to speech.
I can look the word up.
Um, I can see...
in some languages.
If I looked the word up, say on LingQ, I can see a conjugating dictionary.
I get a whole bunch of additional information, which I find useful, but
my goal is to get to a level where I can read comfortably uh, a conventional book.
And so even in terms of say Slavic languages, it's easier for me to read
Czech or Polish simply because the alphabet that we're more used to is it's
just that much easier for us to read.
And even something like the Cyrillic alphabet, which is really not that
difficult, it's still just that little bit more of a chore than reading in the
alphabet that you're most familiar with.
Uh, the other thing is, uh, if I go back in history, the reason we started LingQ