Olly Richards

Olly has a wonderful blog and podcast to help people learn languages in effective ways. Our interview was a follow-up on a series of talks about language learning that we had a few weeks ago, only this time, I was interviewing him. Olly explains why he is not a fan of apps, how his choice of resources always depends on what is available for that language, how input has become the number one thing for him at the very beginning, and we also touch upon the issue of motivation. I guess you’ll get a lot of great tips from this interview. Also, check out Olly’s great resources for individual languages!

Jan van der Aa 

Jan from the Netherlands was told by several teachers that he should never look for a job where he’d need foreign languages because he sucked at English at school. Yet he speaks 8 languages today and even has a Youtube channel to inspire others to learn languages! In this interview, Jan will tell you how he uses flashcards and especially frequency lists to start learning a language, and how the basis of his method is about speaking and using whatever little you have learned in practice. Jan is an example of a polyglot who spends a lot less time with a language (20 minutes) so if you’re very busy, you’ll like his recommendations.  His website is www.languageboost.biz.

Elisa Polese

Elisa has learned 24 languages on various levels and believe it or not, teaches 13 of them! In this interview, she tells us how she picks a book which will suit her, how much time a student should speak in a conversation lesson with a tutor, how she learns vocabulary simply by writing it down or highlighting it in the book (but always making sure it is relevant vocabulary that she will most probably use in practice!), and a couple of other tips. Why I picked Elisa for this interview is that we differ in our opinion of learning two or more languages at the same time, and I want to offer alternatives to my teaching 🙂 Find out more about Elisa (or even book a lesson with her if you like) at www.speakfromdayonewithelisa.com.  

Andrzej Olszak

Andrzej is an interesting polyglot. He only started learning languages well in his 50s, and he definitely doesn’t spend 2 years per language because in the last 6 years, he’s learned more than 20 languages on various levels. His learning methods are so different to mine, and yet he succeeds in his language learning goals. Watch this interview to learn how one can base their methods almost purely on apps, speaking, and writing notes.

Roman Zubov

Roman will tell you about a nice system of learning languages using many of the methods and principles from Language Key: he starts with Assimil, reviews older chapters by reading and by back-translations, uses visualization to help his memory, spends about 2 hours with a language a day, starts speaking as soon as 2 weeks from the start with some self-talk, learns vocabulary by writing example sentences changing individual words, listens to recordings repeatedly (even 5 times). He also says talent is not required to learn a language, and we end our interview with reasons why he likes learning languages in the first place.