Interview with Steve Kaufmann

Published: July 13, 2009, 9:41 p.m.

With 11 languages under his belt, Steve Kaufmann is an extremely accomplished language learner. His extensive language learning wisdom in shared in his book titled The Way of the Linguist: A Language Learning Odyssey and his online language learning system called LingQ. On top of all this, Steve maintains an informative blog called The Linguist on Language where he shares his views on language learning and other topics of interest. Many of the articles stir up quite a debate and it is enjoyable to go through the comments to see the vast array of viewpoints. With fluency in so many languages, most would immediately claim that Steve is simply a "natural" at language learning, and that they have no hope of learning 11 foreign tongues, let alone one. But having learned 5 of those languages after the age of 55, Steve lays waste to the "talent" myth, as well as six others common myths in his popular Pick the Brain article: 7 Common Misconceptions about Language Learning. In the interview, we dive into each of these 7 misconceptions about language learning, as well as how to learn languages effectively and the role of a good teacher.


For show notes, visit LanguageMastery.com/blog/Steve-Kaufmann.



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