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Steve Kaufmann, 75, speaks 20 languages and reaches thousands and thousands by way of his voice-guided social media channels.
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West Vancouverite Steve Kaufmann speaks 20 languages. Photograph by Francis Georgian /PNG
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Anybody with sufficient motivation and time can study a brand new language, says Steve Kaufmann, and age does not matter.
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He ought to know: The West Vancouverite speaks 20 languages with various ranges of information, has 400,000 subscribers on his YouTube coaching channel and greater than 25 million views. And co-founder of LingQ, a language studying app utilized by greater than one million folks.
Studying a language is just not troublesome and ought to be enjoyable, is his motto.
It is a bit like an extended stroll, he says, the place you aren’t getting to your vacation spot, however you positively arrive: should you can benefit from the panorama, it is good the place you get to.
“My message about language studying by way of social media is that we will study all languages,” stated Kaufmann on the cellphone from his house in Eagle Harbor, “and that conventional language educating, with its concentrate on grammar and proper talking, is counterproductive. ”
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Kaufmann was born in Sweden to Czechoslovak Jews shortly after the top of World Warfare II, however the household moved to Montreal when he was 5 in 1950.
At 17, he give up a job within the building trade and appeared within the port of Montreal for a ship that will take him to Europe in change for on-board work. After a couple of rejections, he was profitable with the Gerda Schell, a German trampoline. Ten days later the boat was within the docks in London, England, and from there Kaufmann traveled to Dover, took a ferry to Ostend, Belgium, after which went to Grenoble, France, the place he lived for a yr on the foot of the Alps.
He had French classes when he grew up in Montreal, however now he threw himself headlong and studied French on the Paris Institute for Political Research, a grande école attended by luminaries like Pierre Trudeau and a number of other French presidents. From there, Kaufmann flipped by way of Europe and purchased a primary data of Spanish, Italian and German.
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Impressed by his newfound linguistics passion, he utilized and was employed as a commerce commissioner for the Canadian authorities. It took him a yr of full-time examine to change into fluent in Mandarin in 1967 as Canada was getting ready for recognition by the Individuals’s Republic of China.
Relocated to Japan within the early Seventies, he now needed to study the language there. After leaving the Canadian Overseas Ministry, Kaufmann stayed in Japan for an additional 9 years, working within the timber trade. He’s nonetheless the chairman of West Van-based KP Wooden Ltd.
However it wasn’t till later in life that he started to study different languages - he began Russian, his ninth language, when he was 60 – and is now learning Arabic and Farsi.
(The complete listing of languages he speaks consists of English, French, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, some Greek and a few Turkish, and the 2 languages he’s presently learning by listening to Arabic and Iranian tv sequence, watching the information on Al Jazeera, and studying books on Arabic and Persian historical past.)
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Kaufmann’s studying mannequin has been praised by the likes of Stephen Krashen, professor emeritus of linguistics and schooling on the College of Southern California, who has stated no less than a couple of occasions that he admires Kaufmann’s strategies.
The West Vancouverite is animated and optimistic in his YouTube tutorials, with a small a part of his library-like ebook and CD assortment behind him in his ethereal picket home.
“You need to be motivated, it’s a must to just like the language,” stated Kaufmann. “It is the entire mindset factor, it’s a must to suppose you’ll be able to, you need to study the language, you suppose the time you spend studying the language is nicely invested.
“You possibly can’t enable your self this time, it’s a must to make investments a number of time. You possibly can’t converse fluently in three days, three weeks or three months. “
The trick is to not get slowed down within the guidelines of the brand new language, stated Kaufmann, or to be pissed off as a result of you do not know a brand new language. That is the place conventional language educating discourages folks, he stated.
“Everybody can study and you’ll get higher at it; Not solely do you regularly study extra of the language, your mind turns into extra versatile, getting used to totally different sounds, other ways of claiming issues. “
gordmcintyre@postmedia.com
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