MBA1363 Guest Teacher: Steve Kaufmann – How To Learn A New Language

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Ready to Save on New Tech it's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show More than just a Business podcast. Business coaching, insights and lessons every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, the Complete Business Training and community Online and Today's episode is a Guest Teacher Episode. On our Guest Teacher episodes we invite an expert to teach their area of expertise and today's guest teacher is Steve Kaufman and he'll be teaching you how to learn a new language. Today's episode is a bit different. You might be asking, why do I need to learn a new language? As an entrepreneur, why did Omar have Steve teach this lesson today? Well, it's very simple. I believe the number one skill for every entrepreneur is clear communication skills. If you can communicate your ideas, your thoughts, your message, whether it's to your team, to your customers, to your partners, to your affiliates, whatever they are, you have that competitive advantage over your competition. Now imagine you can do that at scale with different languages. Are you kidding me? Most people can do it with their own language. Learning a new language can tremendously help you understand not only how to communicate in that language, but also to understand the culture culture and the people of that language so you can serve them better. I want you to just trust me. I've been with you for over 1300 episodes. This is going to help you give today's lesson a try and you will not regret it. Today's guest teacher, Steve Kaufman is the founder of LingQ.com that's L I N G Q.com he's been a diplomat and entrepreneur for years, but now he's dedicated his life to helping people learn languages quickly. This is going to be really, really fun and interesting. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's guest teacher, Steve Kaufman, believes that anyone can learn a new language. In fact, Steve is 74 years old and has learned 10 languages just in the past few years. He's going to show you how you can expand your communication skills by picking up a new language without frustration in a new and novel way. I'm going to pass on to Steve, but I'll be back to wrap up the episode. But for now, take it away, Steve.

Hi, my name is Steve Kaufman, and I'm going to talk to you today about how you can change your life. I changed my life when I became a speaker, a fluent speaker in a second language, French, and then went on to learn 21 languages. Learning languages has helped me in my career as a diplomat, as a senior executive in the forest industry, and then in the last 32 years in running my own successful business in international trade. You may think that learning another language depends on some special talent, or that you have to be born into a family where people speak many languages, but this is absolutely not so. Learning another language depends on your attitude and how you use your learning time. Traditional language instruction focuses on grammar, and that's the way they did it in school. And it makes language learning difficult. In fact, it discourages people from learning languages. It teaches languages backwards. There is a much more efficient way to learn languages, and that's the way I learn languages. In fact, in the last 12 years, I have learned 11 languages, and I'm 74 years old. But I do it by using my time efficiently. And because I understand how the brain learns languages, you have to let the brain get used to the sounds and the structures and the words of a new language before you worry about explanations about how the language works. We can't understand these explanations. We can't do the grammar drills that we had to do in school because we don't have enough experience with the language now. Today, with modern technology, MP3 technology, the Internet, YouTube, Netflix, there are so many opportunities to connect with interesting things in another language and to allow the language to come into your brain so that eventually you're going to be able to speak the language. Now, people always say, I don't have time to learn another language, but that's because they don't know that in order to find the time to learn another language, you have to focus on listening. You have to focus on listening to things that are meaningful to you. I start my day by listening to the latest language that I'm learning. While I'm making breakfast, I listen in the car. I. I listen while working out. And then when I listen, of course, there are things that I didn't understand. So then I go and read. And nowadays, with online dictionaries and a whole host of modern functionality, I'm able to mine what I was listening to and what I'm now trying to read. I can mine it for the words and the phrases that I'm going to use in. In order to be able to speak in the language. So initially, you have to focus on understanding the language, getting the language into you, building up your familiarity with the language, building up your vocabulary. Then when you start to speak, you will be less frustrated. You'll be less frustrated because you aren't trying to nail down grammar rules. You aren't trying to do tests, you aren't trying to remember things. You're just naturally, instinctively using the words and phrases that have been ingrained in your mind through an efficient process of learning. Now, all of this does depend on your attitude. You have to believe you can do it. You have to establish regular habits, like my habit of listening every day. You have to stay with the task. And that's why the most important thing in language learning is not worrying about how well you're doing or what you can say or what mistakes you made. The important thing is to stay active. And that's why in the app that I use for language learning, we measure the activity level. How many hours did I listen? How many words did I read? How many words did I learn? And as long as I can see that I'm staying active, then I know that I will eventually improve in the language. So you have to create these habits. You take the initiative. Your. Your cue is that you want to learn another language, and you try to visualize yourself speaking that language. And you have to give yourself credit that you will eventually learn to speak that language. So now you have this motivation, and you're developing good habits, and you will see the results. And if you stay on task, you will achieve what I achieved. And that is developing a whole range of friends and friendships in different countries amongst people of different linguistic groups. And of course, a successful career, as I said at the beginning, a successful career as a diplomat, and then as a senior forest industry executive on four continents. And then all of that enabled me to establish my own successful business. If you speak more languages, more opportunities will come your way. However, it's up to you as an individual to take that initiative to say, I want to learn another language and I believe I can learn another language. It's not difficult to learn another language. I just have to establish certain habits, habits of listening and reading. And then eventually, as these words and phrases build up in my brain and as I sense this desire to want to use the language, then I go out and I speak. But when I speak, I don't worry about the mistakes I make. Because if you are worried about the mistakes, if you are worried about trying to remember fine points of grammar, this will inhibit you. On the other hand, if you just take it as it comes speak, say what you think is the right thing to say, you will involve yourself with the language more and the result is that eventually you will speak better. So that a lot of people in learning languages, they're too concerned about being correct or speaking well at an early stage and this inhibits them. The correct approach is to involve yourself with the language, listening, reading, speaking, enjoying it without worrying about how accurate your usage is because you are confident that if you put in the time, you will eventually achieve the results that you want. And, and I can assure you that once you have transformed yourself into a comfortable and fluent speaker of one new language, or maybe two or three new languages, your life will be changed. If you develop good language learning habits, listen every day and follow up with reading the way I've described here, you will make significant improvement even in just a few months. But language learning is a long distance event, it's not a sprint. You have to stay with it in order to become fluent. So I would like to offer to all of the hundred dollar MBA listeners a one year subscription to LingQ, where you get an additional 5% off on the annual premium, which is actually 35% off the monthly price. So to take advantage of this offer, go to LingQ.com LingQ.com MBA for more details. And now back to Omar at Capella University.

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Great lesson by Steve Kaufman. Love his angle on learning languages. Being familiar with the sounds, the nuances, the tones of the language. Now, many people don't know that I speak obviously English, but I also speak Arabic. My parents are Egyptian and we grew up speaking Arabic at home. And I definitely can see what he's saying. It's a lot easier to understand or pick up a language when you're familiar with the sounds. I know this firsthand even today because Nicole and her family are Italian. And when they speak Italian in front of me, I've picked up so many words and I can understand about 50% of the conversation now just by being around the Italian language, hearing it and being immersed in it. Picking up a new language can be your business's superpower and at the very least, it's going to give you a challenge to overcome and build resilience and grit. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Don't forget to check out linked.commba that's L I N G q.commba so you can grab Steve's gift to us to get started with our language learning. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you're the leader of the company, your personal development makes a huge impact on your business. Development who you are and how you act and how you use what you learn to greatly impacts your team, your product, and how you serve your customers. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Lifelock. How can I help?

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