[00:00:02] Speaker A: Today I speak to Jonathan Levy. Among his many projects and talents, he is a speed reader and super learner, which means that he can learn things very quickly and within a very short time frame. For that, he's using memory techniques about which we will talk today. And he's the host of Become a Superhuman podcast where he interviews superhumans that achieved great things, that learned many things. He's an author and wrote several books on this topic, and he's an online course creator. And he created the Become a Super Learner course where he teaches students to learn and read faster. Welcome, Jonathan. I'm so glad to have you on.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Thanks for having me, Gabriel. I'm really, really happy to be here.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: So I'd like to connect this topic and my first question to language learning. Now, you have learned languages and how do you use your techniques to learn a language quicker?
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Yeah, well, the truth is, the majority of the languages I speak, I unfortunately learned the hard way.
So years and years and years of classes and or speaking with family members. It wasn't until I started studying Russian that I actually had this toolkit of memory techniques and accelerated learning.
And with the Russian language, I started to apply and admittedly as we go along with these memory techniques and the more years I teach them, the more ways I discover that they can be used. So I'm still discovering ways. Only in the last year have I actually kind of discovered a methodology for converting grammatical cases, which you have in German and also in Russian. Very rare in languages to have these declension cases.
I've discovered a way to kind of innovate and memorize those in a faster way. So I'm still discovering ways. The obvious one being learning vocabulary is very easy with memory techniques and using spaced repetition techniques, which we can go into a little bit further, further accelerates the memorization of raw vocabulary. But it's only recently that I've been able to kind of engineer ways to kind of upload grammatical rules and behavior into memory techniques. But that's essentially it. I mean, the language is comprised, of course, of vocabulary and grammar. And so if you can hack those two different things and then on top of that, just having unique and innovative ways to approach practice and review and repetition and reinforcement and stuff like that obviously helps. So those are kind of the three ways that I go about attacking it. And it's all based, at the end of the day, fundamentally on memory techniques and memorization and kind of a more innovative, more creative way to memorize new information.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: So I talked a lot about learning words quicker with spaced repetition and with other memory techniques. So I'd like to go into the grammar part because that's really interesting. Sure, I haven't heard about techniques on how to apply those memory techniques to learn grammar quicker, so I'd be interested. How does that work? With the cases because the Slavic language have the cases. The German has those cases, right?
[00:03:13] Speaker B: So what I've done one way that I've attacked it and it took me years to kind know. They say in Hebrew we have a saying which translates to the shoemaker goes barefoot. And I find that to always be true. Anthony and I always joke about that, that will struggle with some kind of learning task and then be like, oh, right, memory know, it's like sometimes we're the last people. Just like the doctor somehow ironically always smokes cigarettes. You're like, oh, right.
So it took me years to realize like, wait a minute, I can just convert this into a memory palace and put it in. And what I've done is I've actually engineered a system where each room so I study the Russian language, which has six cases, or padaji, and I've converted each room in the house into a case. And then what I've done is I've filled it with markers or losi, indicating all the different possible scenarios, and I've done. I'm sure Anthony talked about the use of kind of emotionality violence, things that are offensive. So I have all kinds of sexual images. So if you could tell me actually really quickly the four cases in German, I know there's only four, but if you happen to know what the words are in English and we can compare and then maybe I can kind of for your audience, relate it back.
For example, in Russian you have prepositional, which I don't think you have in.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: German, I'm not sure the exact so in German it's the genitive, the date of I'm not even sure how they translate into English. Genitive, number going, tiv.
[00:04:42] Speaker B: Perfect.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: And accusative.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Accusative. Okay, so those are four German cases. Just going to cut two rooms out of my memory palace. So let's go into, for example, dateive, right? Date of Latin kind of origin is to give. And in Russian I imagine same as German, it's about giving. So we'll use kind of an offensive can I swear on the podcast?
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:05:03] Speaker B: A little bit of light swearing and we can bleep it out. So the date of case is the memory palace that I use. I specifically found an apartment which had the bathroom split into two. You have the toilet and the shower. Because in Russian we have instrumental case, which I guess you guys don't have. So shower is where you use the instruments, but the native is to give a shit. So anything that involves giving goes in that toilet. The genitive case is the female's bedroom of this particular apartment. So gender fairer, gender genitive. And then what I've done is I've associated the meaning of that case. Because one of the hardest things for a new language learner to do is like sure, it's hard to know you have thousand different pronouns that are all different depending on the case. And you have declensions of verbs and all kinds of crazy stuff, declension of nouns, rather. But the hardest thing to do for me was, when do I use this case?
And it doesn't always make sense, at least not in Russian. So, for example, why is behind in this case and not in that case? Because in English, I think that behind is the same as on top of. And in Russian it's not the same, it's a different case. Or why would this be instrumental case? So what I've done is I've created these logical rules, which are offensive and stereotypical and politically incorrect, to say, okay, so genitive case, if you use the word without. So she's without a boyfriend. She doesn't have a boyfriend. I don't know why that's genitive case, because to me, that sounds like a prepositional case. I'm telling a story, but in Russian it happens to be without. Now, the way that I've connected that logic is I've put it in the female's bedroom, and the marker is this woman standing there complaining on the phone about how she hasn't had a boyfriend in so long or how she doesn't have that pair of shoes she wants. So I know that anything that includes the word without bias is in that case. And then I just go on. I don't know how it works in German, to be honest with you, but in Russian you have questions. So if I were to ask, for example, chivo, which means of what or of whom? That is a case or a question for which the answer will always be in the genitive case. And then what I've done is I've put a Chevy in the certain part of the room. So I have of whom, of what in a certain part of the room. Windows always follow tell me if I'm losing you, by the way. But windows are always the questions. You always stand, and you ask these questions while contemplating out the window. And then what I've done is I've connected it. So this woman wants to know, there's a nice Chevy outside chival of who is that? Of what make or of what company? And it's okay if the audience kind of isn't following. The point that I'm trying to get to is what I've done is I've created falsified logic that then maps on top of my knowledge of this specific apartment building. And I've reengineered logic to say, okay, if I'm using the word without, then I'm in genitive case, if I'm talking about, for example, of what publisher is that book? Then I know I have to go back in, and I say, okay, of what? Chivo. And then I would say chavoi. And then on top of that, I would map out the declensions, right? So in a different area in the room, I would map out and say, okay, if it's chival and it's female, then it would be Oi. And I have stories about that. The woman stands in front of the mirror and says Oi or E. And it's essentially what I'm getting to, even if people don't take away the actual way that I'm doing it. Because this stuff does take quite a bit of time to explain and understand and we have hours and hours of courses that explains how it all works. But I think the takeaway point for the audience is to understand that you're creating just superfluous logic that makes sense to you. So if it makes sense to you that accusative, for example, is the kitchen because someone comes in and accuses you of eating their leftovers and on and on and on and on. Nominative case is the male bedroom because boys take their father's name and on and on and on. And you just create falsified logic that works for you and you know, nominative, if it's the boy. The boy is very simple. He doesn't have complex thinking or ideas. So there's no declension in nominative case, at least not in Russian. I imagine it's the same probably in German. And that's how I do it. And it sounds like it's a very kind of like complex solution. But if you think about the fact that a lot of these declensions to a non native speaker just don't make sense at all, like why is without in a genitive case? It doesn't make sense. And it might be different in another language, by the way. So you're just creating logic that does make sense to you. And in a sense you're kind of hijacking these existing neural networks that say, well, yeah, women like to gossip on the phone. That's something that I've known since I was 13 years old and I already know that in this apartment that I used to live in, this was the female bedroom.
And I'm just inserting new knowledge into it. Does that make sense or candidate? I go on a huge tangent.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: I think I'll have to break it down just because a few things I didn't understand myself. So first, the really simple thing.
You link the name of the case, the question that you ask and an example into one memory room, into one.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Room of the memory. What I've done is I've created a template which says name of the room is the case. There is an explanation why that should be the case. For example, dot if give a shit, nominative always take their father's name, genitive, gender. And this only makes sense to me, probably, but someone else could come in and do a different example. For example, Jen jenna. Jennifer is a female name. So, okay, it's going to be in the female bedroom. Accusative in the kitchen doesn't have to be, by the way. Accusative could be in the know. If you had a huge argument with your girlfriend and every time you argue it's in the bedroom, then maybe the bedroom will be Accusative case.
So that's the first thing. Then I've created stations that follow the same template. So left of the window is always the who question that goes with that case, and the what question is always to the right. And so I kind of already know that if I go to, for example, the left side of the window, it's going to be kavo, which is of whom or who.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: In that specific room.
[00:11:37] Speaker B: In that specific room, it turns out kavo is used in you have ocho russians. Super complicated. But the point is that's true. I know that chivo must involve of what, because it's on the right window and I happen to have encoded that. And then on top of all that, I think where I lost you is you have declension sounds, right? So, for example, let's say I'm in I won't use instrumental case because that doesn't exist in Russian, but let's say I want pasta. Well, in the Accusative case, so how would I say the word pasta in German? And then how would I say I want pasta? We'll try and break it down.
[00:12:16] Speaker A: Pasta. You could say the same thing in German. Pasta or noodle, and I want is ichmeshte.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: Does the word noodles change for the Accusative case?
[00:12:31] Speaker A: No, in German there's four cases, but the only thing that changes is the article itself. So there's like huge tables where there's a million.
Yeah, I don't think German learners agree, but yeah, definitely russian is more complicated.
I get confused. And it's my second native language, so it's pretty difficult. But yeah, so in German it's only the articles that change. The word self doesn't change. Yeah, say that to German learners. Say that to German learners.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: I guess that's true. I should learn German. I actually have a German passport. I just don't speak the language at all. But in Russian you would change everything. Pretty much the only thing you wouldn't change is I. So I want, I need, I use, but so I would go and I encode examples, essentially. But what I do is I encode the example with the sound. So for example, ETA pasta, that is pasta yahachu pastu, meaning I want pasta. And the way that I've done that is I've created what's a visual symbol that I can think of that involves the word OOH. Well, I'm in the kitchen, so I imagine that someone is looking into the oven and they're seeing a beautiful cake and they're going OOH. And that's the female. So that's only if the word is a feminine word. If it's a male word, it doesn't change. It turns out in that specific case, accusative. So I have a different thing where the man comes in to the kitchen and doesn't even pay attention to what's happening because he's a man. Like, what does he care?
And so there's all kinds of different symbols and just every sound that I need to make. So, for example, one of the hardest cases is instrumental, where you add ohm to everything so, like, I work with instead of karandash. Karandash. Ohm, I work with the pencil. And so we happen to be in the shower room, the side of the bathroom with the shower. And I think about the man's electric razor, which makes the sound.
And that's how I remember that that's the sound. Because you can get there are it's not even six, because it will be different if it's feminine, masculine or neuter. It's not quite 18 because some of them are the same, but you can get very confused, like, okay, I am sitting on the table. Well, what case is that? Okay, now that I know the case, is that masculine or feminine? Okay, and wait, was that oi e om OOH.
So it can be basically every vowel that you can make and a few that we can't because Russians also have this e sound. And so I've just created a way to kind of remember that sound using a story or a visual symbol. I hope I haven't completely lost the audience here. I promise you guys, it makes sense when you've kind of dug into it and studied it.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: So the most important thing to remember is, just as a recap, is that you encode the different information about a certain case in one room and in one action, let's say. So the ending, the name of the case and the question. So for German, there wouldn't be the sound, but for people who learn German, it wouldn't be the sound, it would be the article. You encode the article in this specific room with some kind of mnemonic like you do?
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess if we were to kind of take the 30,000 foot view, the end sum game is to create a visual symbol that's memorable and detailed and has emotionality for everything that you want to remember, whether that's rules, whether that's people's names, and then put that in a physical location. Because our brains are so very much wired to remember locations and remember images, most of us will never forget our first house that we grew up in. And you probably still know where all the furniture is, you probably know what was on the nightstand, and you probably remember exactly where that childhood picture was. And so you're just essentially I like to use the word hijacking. You're hijacking that existing neural network and placing visual symbols in there. And that really is the essence of the actually, one of the things I've learned from Anthony is I don't really care how my students do it. I give recommendations. You can use this different methodology to break down the rooms. But I've had students I love to interview students and put out success stories to motivate other students. And I had a guy come to me and he was actually learning German, German, Italian and Russian at the same time. Don't ask me why. And he said to me, he's like, you recommend putting by the first character. So K would be all words that start with kitchen would be all words that start with K, and O would be office, and so on and so forth. And he goes, that's a really bad way to do it. Why wouldn't you do it as parts of speech? So kitchen is always adjectives, noun is always this. And then he says, in order to form a sentence, I just teleport between, and then I know, and then you can break it even down further. So my office at work is nouns that involve this. And I was like, that's brilliant. You know what? If that works for you, David, that's the way to go. So I don't really care so much about the actual way that people do it, as long as they use the underlying infrastructure, the underlying systems, because there's so much power and different things work for different I'm although I don't speak the German language, I grew up with a very German mother, and everything is very organized and very neat. So I like everything alphabetical. But it turns out that many people that doesn't serve them as well, they want to have proper nouns in one memory palace and they want to have informal nouns in another, and they want to have pronouns in yet another.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think that's very important.
There is no perfect method to learn a language. There's just the one that suits you the best. So whatever method you think is interesting, you got to adapt it to yourself so that it fits. Because if you force something for the audience, if you force something that works for somebody else, it won't really work for yourself unless you tie to your own experiences and everything.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: Absolutely. You had mentioned via email that you're going to interview Gabriel Weiner after me, and I love Gabriel stuff. I think it's some of the best language learning stuff out there, personally. But there's one thing that I think is missing, anthony and I both agree is missing from his method. So he talks about a way to build memory cards, and I'm sure he'll get into it in his podcast, but he advocates putting the images on the flashcards. And what I've done to adapt my own vocabulary learning is I create a memory palace and I don't put it on the flashcards, so I put just the words on the flashcards, mainly to save time, to be honest. But then I'll create a visual symbol and I'll put that in a memory palace. And as I review, I'm not only reviewing the word and the pronunciation and everything, I'm going into my memory palace, not on the device. And that does a couple of different things. One, it saves me the time of having to Google image search every single word that I want to learn. That was what I that takes a ton of time. Yeah, it takes so much time. I can see you've read his book it takes time. And if you download someone else's deck, those are images that make sense to someone else. And the second thing is, it allows me to review anywhere, anytime. So I can just go through my memory palace and just one by one by one by one, memorize the words. And then when I do hit my anki deck, I'm pretty caught up.
[00:19:57] Speaker A: All right, so, this is the first step, this memory palace. It's the first step, which it works really well for certain information that you want to learn, and it all makes a lot of sense. But now, for your language learning, there's a second dimension. You don't have 5 seconds, 10 seconds, 30 seconds to recall that information. If you're speaking to someone, you have to recall it right away. So, how do you go from the first step of having all that information stored somewhere in your head to being able to recall the right information within less than a second?
[00:20:34] Speaker B: Yeah, so, a couple of things. First, I have no shame. I will actually stand and talk to people. I learn a lot of new words in hebrew. Most of my life is in hebrew at this point. And so the words that I'm learning now are very kind of like esoteric words, like essence and a specific type of military operation. And I learn all kinds of crazy words in my day to day life. And I will actually stand there and be like, hang on.
And they're like, what did you do there? I'm like, I just had to go back and remember it. But that's in the initial phase. And you're right. You don't want to have to do that for every single word. This is actually an area that I really want to research a little bit more. If anyone out there wants to fund research is over time, I have always allowed the memory palaces to decay as things kind of and the brain does move things into different areas as they become used more often. So over time, you'll see kind of like a hard drive that becomes fragmented, and then you perform the little d frag operation, and it moves everything back into place. Our brain does that when we sleep, and it moves things closer and closer to the center of the brain. And so hence the reason I would really love to do a funded study where we scan someone's brain as we ask them 100 new vocab words, and then six months later, after they use them every day, I'd love to see which parts of the brain light up when they use the same vocab words. My belief is that over time, your brain says, okay, you know what? This makes sense. Let's just insert this into a different neural network and actually moves memories physically in the brain to a different part. And that comes only with use. So, words that I never use in russian, I still need to get with the memory palace and kind of go back and I remember Gabriel markers that I set two years ago. Right? So there's a couple different words for children in Russian, as I'm sure there are in many languages. Children, kids, little ones. And most Russians don't use the official word, at least not the ones that I've spoken to. They say Malinki. Right? Little ones.
But I happen to know the proper word for children, and I still remember two years ago. But in order to get there, I have to go back to a picture of a Jet Ski on the couch in my house in California, and it's diet Ski. So for words that you don't use, this technique will always be helpful. But then over time, for the words that I do use, I may not even remember how I learned them. It's just kind of allowing the brain to do what it does best. Our brain is one of the most incredible filters ever, and it's able to kind of mush information and create this mosaic. And a lot of times, there's actually an interesting psychological phenomenon where over time, we not only forget where we learn things, but we also start to think that ideas are our own. So oftentimes, one of the things I teach in my course is, yeah, one of the things that I teach in my course is going back and reviewing books. You read a book, go back and review your highlights. After two months? After six months. After a year.
And a lot of times I'll review a book that I read years ago, and I'll come upon an idea, and I'll be like, I've been presenting that idea as something really fresh and really innovative and stuff like that. Did I maybe pick that up in this book six years ago? And we don't know.
And it may be that I brushed over it and ignored that idea and then kind of came to it on my own because I was reading all this surrounding information. But our brains are really, really good at doing this.
And I think that's one of the beauties of memory techniques is I can tell you exactly where I learned different things because now I've put them into a structure that says, this came from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, for example. But then on top of that, I'll also say, as kind of the third point on how do we not have to delay when we speak is our brains are really, really quick at doing can. If I were to describe something to you, you could jump into that place in the memory palace very quickly, and I often do for words that are really kind of confusing or old or stuff like that. So you'd be actually quite surprised. I do tell people, if you're reading a book and you're speed reading, it doesn't make sense to insert things on the fly into a memory palace. Memory palace is really for when you're sitting down quietly and saying, okay, let's memorize this. But then again, as a counterexample at the World Championships, when people are putting they're memorizing a deck of cards as fast as possible. They're putting it into a memory palace. They're condensing it. So three to six cards in one station and a station that has either 15 or 26 or 52 or whatever stations. But the world record for doing that encoding, not recalling encoding it in, is now somewhere around 24 seconds. So you can do this very, very quickly. And if you can encode it, you can probably recall it even faster, so you'd be quite surprised. But then again, we all want to get to a point where we just speak naturally, and obviously we want to get to a point where we think in the language that we're learning yeah.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: It'S all about practice. It doesn't matter whether you're using memory palace or not. At the beginning, you speak really slow and you need time to recall words, and then the more times you do it, the better it gets. I want to get back to the grammar part because I'm pretty good at memorizing words. Sometimes I do use mnemonics. I haven't used memory palace before, but sometimes I do use mnemonics. And even if I do, I remember the word fairly quickly, within less than a few seconds. But now, with grammar, there's even another dimension that comes on top of that. You don't recall a certain word, which I see how this shouldn't take too much time, but you're recalling something that goes on top of a word or something that changes something within a sentence, right. Naturally, that makes the recall even slower, and you have to build something out of several pieces. So how do you think I assume it works the same way. You just have to practice it more. But maybe you have some thoughts on that.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Yeah, well, how about this? Let's think about it as building a concrete structure, right? So you're building a building and you know, they always slap those scaffolds on the side of the building because, A, the workers need to climb on them and they need to maintain the building and they need to do all this stuff, but they also need to pour the concrete. And when you pour concrete, you don't just pour it, you pour it into a template and then over time, it hardens. And at the end of the day, you also have the rebar inside the concrete, which is holding it and reinforcing it even more.
And maybe we could think about using these techniques as kind of a similar thing. So you're creating this rigid structure around which or in which you are pouring in all this new information, and then over time, as that new information hardens, you pull away the structure. Now, that is to say that you completely remove the structure because you always have that rebar. In there and you can get back to and try and remember how you learned that information. If you're ever in doubt or you ever have one of those moments where you're like so you'll always have some semblance of structure, but over time, I think you can peel away. And I think that's very similar to the way that we learn in that we create these structures and then over time, we kind of just forget. And I'm sure at some point someone taught me all the lessons of the English language. In a rigid structure, you need the trailing comma and you need to put in an apostrophe. But over time, when I speak to Israelis and they ask me like, well, why can't I say it this way?
I don't know. I have no idea. I just know that it's right. And I think that's the same thing because that structure has been pulled away. All I'm left with is this hard, concrete foundation that says, you can't say it that way. And I think that's the case, and I think that's exactly to your point about practice, why we need to practice so much. And it's gotten to a point that the early things that I learned in Russian, the first cases, I could probably explain to you why the accusative case always uses you for the female gender. But for me, it's just natural.
I know that if I say yahachu I want yeah, I know that anytime I say I want, if it's a word that ends with an ah. And that would most times indicate that it's feminine. It's just second nature. It's kind of like riding a bike without training wheels. You just become acclimated to it.
[00:29:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very interesting. There's a lot of grammar, especially in Russian, and to encode it all in a structure that you know very well and that you can recall anytime, that's very important because if you practice speaking, you can't recall all the grammar rules that you learned. And it's a patchwork. But with a proper memory palace, sure, you have this whole thing in the back of your mind, and sometimes you need to think for half a minute, but at least every time you do that, you get better at it and you don't have to look it up or ask.
[00:29:44] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think anything that you use will eventually be migrated into kind of normal memory, if you will. Old school memory. That's how children learn, right?
[00:29:54] Speaker A: Definitely, yes. So memory palace is a good thing for grammar and words. Any other techniques, memo techniques that you use?
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I was just talking about this a few minutes ago with someone where I think one of the biggest benefits or one of the biggest tricks that I've developed over the years for learning languages is not actually a memory hack, it's a mentality hack, which is I have zero shame. I don't care how many mistakes I make. I don't care how many people laugh at me. I've completely let go of that. And sometimes it's frustrating. We have all kinds of weird stuff in Hebrew where it's like the word is masculine, but you pluralize. It feminine. There's a lot of weird exceptions. And I'm now getting into the point of the language where I speak well enough that people kind of tilt their head when I make a mistake. It's like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. My accent betrays me. There's no doubt about that. But it's getting to the point where the errors in the language are kind of at a very high level. Like, you didn't know that. That's an exception. That windows. When you pluralize, it actually becomes masculine. Or when a body is a body, it's a body, and that's masculine. When it's corpses, then it's feminine. Strange, weird stuff, esoteric. Kind of like far out. There stuff that native speakers already know. And I have no shame. I don't care how many people correct me. I always look people in the eye and say, thank you, genuinely, and I never brush. I think a lot of people have a tendency to either beat themselves up and that forces people not to correct them or to be like, yeah, it doesn't matter. Whatever. You understood what I'm saying. How many times have you heard someone be like, you know what I'm saying? Which basically is a communication to someone who's willing to teach you. Don't correct me again. Just let me speak. And I don't want that. Because I encounter in any given day 1000 different people who tutor me in Hebrew and who see that I appreciate it.
So I do that. I always force even if someone speaks English better than I speak Hebrew, I almost always force them to speak to me in Hebrew unless it's someone that, you know, I'm willing to help. But for the majority of people, if we're in Israel, I insist that we speak Hebrew, unless they ask me, hey, can you help me with English? Then I'll immediately switch over. But it's like, I have an opportunity here, and we're talking right now about construction. My vocabulary in the construction field rebar. How do you say rebar in Hebrew? So I take every opportunity, and I refuse to be embarrassed or have any shame. And there have been situations where the entire conversation turns to, like, laughing about how I said something. I'm like, yeah, it's really funny. Just join in on the laughter, because the benefits far outweigh the cost. And people who are embarrassed and people who are shy and people who are only willing to speak with their language partner or only willing to speak with their girlfriend because they're embarrassed. I run laps around these people with language learning, and I see Israel is a country with many, many immigrants, and I see people who really want to learn the language, but they only practice in their language learning class. Because they're too embarrassed at work that everyone will laugh at them. And these are the same people who come to me and are like, hey, can you help me translate?
You have to have that mindset that you're learning a language, and you're going to be clumsy. And people understand that.
And in most cultures, fortunately, people are very grateful that you're learning their language and very impressed. In Russian, people will make fun of you just have to have a thick skin about it.
[00:33:28] Speaker A: No, I totally agree 100%. I always say the same thing.
You have to have no shame. You have to speak and make absolutely mistakes, as many as possible, because in the end, the more mistakes you make, the less you make. Because every mistake is an opportunity to improve and to make less mistakes in the future.
[00:33:46] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: That's a really important mindset to grab every opportunity you have to practice the language and to grab every opportunity you have to improve. So that's a very good absolutely.
Sometimes it can break down the flow too much. Like, if you have a person constantly correcting you, you don't feel like speaking anymore because totally, the flow has to stay because otherwise it's not a conversation anymore. It's language class, and you don't want to have that.
[00:34:15] Speaker B: Yeah. There is a balance, especially in the beginning, there is a balance where I know that in Russian, I can't talk to you about politics in Russian. I'm not at that level. So the beginnings of conversations with my Russian friends will always be in Russian, like, what's new? How have you been? How's your boyfriend? How's things at work? And then when it switches into like, oh, my gosh, did you see what happened in the French election? That switches to Hebrew.
So you have to know the balance, and you have to know when you're in over your head. But I think I'm a big believer in one of the things we teach in our courses is progressive overload. It's a methodology that I lifted from weightlifting, actually, where if you only work at your comfort zone, you never get better. So you need to progressively overload, progressively put yourself into situations of struggle. And so I do that, and I'll edge closer and closer to that conversation about the French elections in Russia. I won't just completely dive in because you see people who are like, for example, you go to a foreign country, and you've only been learning the language for a few weeks, and you try and argue with the hotel manager about the charge on your bill. You're completely in over your head. So it's about kind of doing it in a progressive fashion and getting kind of close to the limit. Going over the limit, but not too far.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. There's one question I have in mind, because many of my listeners are seniors, and they are learning a language to immigrate to another country, which is warmer than Germany and spend their retire in a warmer country. And so many of them have problems, even bigger problems, retaining words.
Now, obviously, you don't have the experience yourself yet, but maybe you touched upon that, or you have any idea.
Do your techniques apply to any age or does it change? Do you have different tips for people that are a little bit older? What are your thoughts on that?
[00:36:21] Speaker B: What I think is really interesting is these memory techniques tend to work for just about anybody, except if you have a kind of rare psychological learning disability where you can't visualize as long as you can visualize, these techniques work for anybody. And what I think is so powerful about this way of learning, there's a misconception that people say, well, if I learn Spanish, then I'll forget French. And the only reason that that's true is because the more Spanish you speak, the less French you're speaking. But in reality, the more that I learn, the more that I'm able to learn. Because our methodology is built upon connecting all knowledge to existing knowledge, whether that's a memory palace connecting to a template structure or it's when I learn someone's name, I connect it to someone else with that name.
So the more people I meet, the more names I can remember and the more languages I learned. So when I learned Russian, when I learned Spanish in general, I didn't have these techniques, but when I learned Russian, I had so many different sounds to connect to. Right now, sure, a lot of these seniors may not speak other languages, but just think about they have so many more memories than you and I, potentially two or three times more memories because they have a longer lifetime, they've met more people, they've had more experiences. And so in a way, although our memory function and our brain function does have a tendency to decline with age, actually research is starting to show that that's not from physical aging. That's from misuse or disuse. Meaning we spend 30 years in our career. How much do you really learn if you stay in the same career? Maybe you elevate it to a manager position, but now you're just managing people, doing things that you already knew how to do. Whereas if you're changing careers as our generation tends to do so it really comes down to if you stop using that muscle, you lose it. Now research is starting to show that the elderly can learn as effectively as we do. They actually did a study, I believe it was with nuns and realized that if they are challenged to learn something new, for example, a new language, they can actually deliver, particularly if they use all this extra mass of memories to their advantage instead of against them, they can actually learn and remember all this stuff. So that's what I would say, is if you come to me and you say, I have memories from 70 years of my life, I'll say let's use that. You probably have met way more people than I have. You've probably traveled the world more than I have and we can use that to our advantage. And I also want to add one of the best things you can do for your brain to stave off Alzheimer's, dementia, all that kind of stuff, is to learn a new language, learn anything really. An instrument is great, but language learning is really up there as one of the biggest challenges of learning that we as humans can undertake besides maybe quantum physics.
So it's one of the healthiest things you can do for your brain. I'm so glad my father is studying two languages right now and he's sharpest attack.
[00:39:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's very important. That everything is a skill. Basically learning is a skill. Learning a language is a skill. Building a memory palace is a skill. If you need 5 hours today for your first memory palace, tomorrow it's going to be 4 hours and so on. And that's a point that I talked to with Tim Keeley about who is a hyper polyglot who's 60 plus and speaks like a dozen of languages. And he says that every language he learns, he learns faster. It doesn't matter his age, it just gets better because he has so much practice and he stays mentally fit. And that's the problem. The older you get, the less mentally fit you stay. But not because of your age, but like you said, because you're doing the same things, you don't learn anything new.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: You have more stuff to latch onto. So for example, if you were to give me, give me a tough word in German, just out of curiosity.
[00:40:18] Speaker A: Scheimvicher.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: Shaim Vishar.
[00:40:22] Speaker A: Shaibin visha.
[00:40:24] Speaker B: Shaiben Vishar, okay, so what does it mean, by the way?
[00:40:28] Speaker A: That's funny, now that I said it, I don't even know what it means in English. It's the thing that on the car if it rains in the front that gets away the water.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: Oh, that's perfect.
Shibin.
[00:40:41] Speaker A: What's? It in English.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Wiper. Windshield wiper.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: Windshield wiper. Of course, I forgot.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Okay, so someone else might hear that, say that I only spoke one language and they'd need to connect those three sounds, three syllables to one language. So I need to find three different things and there's nothing in English that sounds like vish. So now I have to really creatively and maybe connect it to wish. And then maybe the next time I say it, I'll say Shibin wisher. But because I speak multiple languages, I'll connect shy to being shy in English. Then I could connect to a person or it also happens to mean son in Hebrew. And then visher is what we call that exact same thing in Hebrew, right? So you could say, oh, well, you speak Hebrew, that means that you don't have enough space in your brain to learn German. It's quite the contrary. And that's a perfect example, the fact that I speak Hebrew gives me a huge leg. You know, there's probably I don't know any word that sounds like shy or ben in Russian, but maybe in Spanish. And I could connect these different sounds and I can mix them. And at the end of the day, people may say, well, then, don't you confuse the different languages. It's not at all the case. Ideally, the situation that we want to get to is not where we have silo in our brain called Russian and silo in our brain called Spanish and silo called German. We want to get to a point where I look at a spoon, and if you meet a truly multilingual child, someone who their father's this is one of my nieces. Her father's Portuguese, her mother's Israeli, and between them, they speak English. So this little girl grows up in a household where she picks up a spoon and there isn't Spanish spoon, Russian or Portuguese spoon, English spoon. It's just there happen to be three words for this thing. And she knows that if I'm speaking down this route, I'll use this word. And so it all comes down to just as, like I said, in many languages, we have different words for children. So I know that if I see a group of children that can be children, kids, Malinki, dietsky, yeladim, tanim, banimve, Banot, there is like a ton of different words, and it's just a matter kind of you want it to be more like a thesaurus than three or four separate yeah, see what saying? Yeah, at least that's my opinion. That's my belief.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: Funny thing about the multilingual child, just as a reference for the viewers, I recently interviewed Julia Divatkina, who raises her daughter with eight languages. She's five years now and speaks eight languages, so maybe if you're interested she doesn't confuse them. No, she doesn't confuse them. And she picks up languages like that. It's incredible.
[00:43:25] Speaker B: I think that's one of the greatest gifts that a parent can give to their child is languages. One time when I was living in Singapore, singapore being a country that has many different languages as the official language, I remember I was in the subway and I saw this father carrying his little kid, and then he goes, what are we going to go do now? And the kid goes, we're going to go get ice cream. You promised. And he goes, okay, but only if you tell me that in Mandarin. And then the kid goes and he goes, and how would you say that in Malay or in Bahasa? And he goes he goes, all right, now we can go. That's amazing.
That's the way to do it. It takes patience, but such a gift.
[00:44:06] Speaker A: Yeah, richard Simcott does that. He says, oh, I have a gift for you. And then if his daughter doesn't speak in the right language, he says, I can only tell you about it if you answer it to me in German or something. So it's pretty cool. You make it to the advantage of the kid to speak that language.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: Incredible. Yeah, exactly.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: I'd like to end on something you do on your podcast, which is to ask for one tip that people can use right away, right after listening to this. What would be your best tip for that technique?
[00:44:42] Speaker B: Let's do a technique. Sure. The next time you learn something, and I want you to take a very broad approach to learning. See, I look at the world that everything is learning, right? And I'll give you an extreme example. I just moved in with my partner, and many people would see that as, like, a personal thing or whatever. I see it as learning. I am learning how to cooperate and how to compromise and how to do sweet things, and everything's a learning challenge to me. So I want you to take a very broad approach to learning. Learning can mean what is the waitress's name? Learning can mean, you know, how many I love this habit that we all have. We all look at a menu in the restaurant, we decide what we want, then we close the menu. And then the waiter comes and we have to open the menu again. Because for some reason, it's like, I know that I want the parmesan crusted chicken, but I don't commit it to memory, which is silly. So it can be anything small or big. Maybe you want to learn the next word. And I would encourage you to take that learning challenge and immediately convert it to a visualization, whether it's someone's name, whether it's parmesan encrusted chicken, convert it to memory and use your memory. And don't just do what we all do, which is repeat it ten times. Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel, Gabriel. I connected you weeks ago to someone named Gabriel that I already know. Then when I saw you, I matched your face to his face. I found some similarities, and I use my memory, and I use my visualization skills, and it'll be rusty at first and until you have developed and refined the skill set. And that's why we teach courses that are weeks and weeks and weeks on every little facet of this thing. But you can immediately start realizing benefits from day one. And you don't have to take a course to start down this journey and learn how to harness your visual memory. So that would be the technique and the little piece of homework that I would give people.
[00:46:34] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much, Jonathan. Where can people find out more? Where can people find your course and everything?
[00:46:41] Speaker B: Absolutely. So our courses can be
[email protected], and our podcast, which is free, we encourage everyone to listen to it, is becomingsuperhuman.com. But you can just go to Superhuman blog.
[00:46:55] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing that. And thanks so much for coming on. It was a pleasure to talk to you.
[00:47:01] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. Mutual. All right, everyone. Take care.
[00:47:05] Speaker A: See you then. Bye.
