Language Creators are just acting...

[00:00:00]Hey, what is up guys? In today's video, I want to watch Nicks video called the inverse relationship between fluency and impressiveness. I think this will open up a good conversation, especially because language learning on YouTube is really just a balance of this. Like people trying to impress others, trying to say like, oh, you can learn a language in like 3 months. So, let's go ahead and get into the video.

[00:00:15]>> Every niche on YouTube eventually develops the same problem. The people who are best at doing something and the people who look like they're the best at doing something are not necessarily the same people. Language learning YouTube is no exception. It's creators face a perverse incentive. Spending hundreds of hours quietly listening to Spanish doesn't give you much to show on camera.

[00:00:35]But memorizing and rehearsing short interactions in a language until they're audition ready can make for an incredible I got fluent fast video. One >> Some of the biggest people in the niche have said that they learned like 10 languages and they go on the street and and talk to natives and shock them and stuff. And I think the best people who are actually really good at the language are not even the people that are showing off on YouTube. They're the ones who have stepped away from YouTube and from social media completely. And they're actually worried about learning their language versus trying to show it off on YouTube.

[00:01:01]>> develops actual fluency, the other looks impressive. When language learning videos show someone delivering fast French in the streets after only 30 days or switching effortlessly between 10 languages after 1 year, we begin to mistake polished performances for broad language ability. Fluency becomes the ability to rattle off sentences fast. It becomes something you can memorize your way into in a month if you're smart. It becomes a game of how quickly you can learn some vocab and some grammar math to be able to construct and decode sentences really fast on the fly.

[00:01:30]>> Pretty much having just decent pronunciation and just repeating sentences in the correct way in your language is really what people are trying to market. Which I get, there's a group of people that just want to get to the point where they can actually just say stuff in the language, which is totally fine in itself. But there's other people that actually want to have fluency and have really good comprehension in the language. Which so far, I haven't seen anyone really get that kind of comprehension by using flashcards or just studying grammar. All the people that I've seen that have this unique comprehension in the target language that they're learning is people who have actually spent a lot of time consuming content in their language.

[00:01:58]>> Nobody's saying that the ability to do that in a month isn't impressive. It is, and it's entertaining to watch. It's just a completely different skill than being able to effortlessly recognize and produce a language in a native-like way, where you don't have to decode or construct anything. You just listen and speak. In my experience, fluency and impressiveness just pull you in opposite directions. If you focus on looking impressive, you won't get fluent. And if you focus on getting fluent, you won't look very impressive.

[00:02:23]Imagine I told you that your goal was to convince an audience that you were a great guitarist in 1 year. Well, there's two very different ways of going about accomplishing that. You could spend the year becoming a genuinely great guitarist, or you could spend the year crafting a handful of performances that are explicitly meant to convince people that you're a great guitarist.

[00:02:41]>> And people could argue that doing the latter accomplishes what you actually are seeking out to do. So, it's the most efficient way to get to your goal.

[00:02:46]>> If you focused on actually becoming great, you'd spend that year building your broad ability. You'd be working toward building a deep intuition of the instrument. But if you focused on performance, you'd spend that same year polishing a few songs until every note, transition, and flourish looked absolutely effortless. And if I asked both guitarists to play a song, well, the guitarist who optimized for performance would probably look more impressive. Everyone on YouTube would say they're the much better guitarist.

[00:03:11]But that doesn't mean they actually are, it just means that they optimized for a very narrow goal. When you optimize for performance, you spend your time trying to achieve perfect delivery in narrow areas. But when you optimize for broad ability, you're no longer trying to perfect isolated pieces. You're trying to become comfortable across the skill as a whole. In language learning, this is the fundamental distinction between performance and communication.

[00:03:34]>> And I would say this is also the difference between a native speaker and someone who's just performing for some specific event, like either talking to natives while they're going to travel, being able to have a conversation on YouTube with somebody that's a native speaker.

[00:03:45]>> The goal of performance is to impress.

[00:03:48]The goal of communication is to understand and be understood.

[00:03:51]Performance rewards perfect grammar.

[00:03:54]Communication rewards clarity.

[00:03:56]Performance rewards rehearsed delivery.

[00:03:58]Communication rewards spontaneity.

[00:04:00]Performance rewards polish.

[00:04:02]Communication rewards adaptability.

[00:04:04]Performance rewards looking like you know the language. Communication rewards actually using it. They're different things and traditional language learners almost always seem to be training performance while input-based learners almost always seem to be training communication.

[00:04:17]>> And that's the thing, having all these performance-based metrics is actually more beneficial if you want to actually showcase your language skills, especially on YouTube, versus someone who actually wants to get really fluent in the language. Because you can't really showcase all of these communication skills like clarity, spontaneity, adaptability. This all comes in the moment when you're actually speaking to a native and it takes a long time to actually master them. So, really, why would you spend so many years trying to improve your communication where you can just perform better in the moment that you really need to and achieve that goal faster.

[00:04:43]>> training communication. And that distinction gives us a much better way to think about fluency. Fluency shouldn't be thought of as the best you can make yourself sound. It should be thought of as how you communicate by default when you're not trying to prove to other people how well you speak. The mental state of performance is completely different from the mental state of communication. When you're performing, your attention is turned inward. You're monitoring your grammar, your accent, your speed. You're monitoring how you sound to everybody watching. But when you're communicating, your attention turns outward. You're thinking about what the other person means, what you want them to understand, and where the conversation is going. In performance, the language itself is the object of your attention. In communication, the language is just the medium. It did >> People want the benefits of communication, but also want to be able to perform perfectly when the time comes. And since these are being marketed completely differently, especially on YouTube, I think there's a big shock when people are use input-based systems to achieve performance skills when they're actually just gaining communication skills overall.

[00:05:38]>> This appears behind what you're actually trying to say. Stuff that language learners obsess over like perfect grammar and lightning-fast recall speed.

[00:05:46]These simply aren't high on the list of importance in everyday conversation. And unless you're planning to go to the UN to give a speech in your target language, most of you watching this video simply don't need to learn to perform. All you need to learn to do is communicate. And that should change how we think about practicing speaking. If your goal, like mine was, is effortless, comfortable communication, then practicing speaking like you're auditioning for a play is counterproductive. A conversation is just not a performance. You may become better at producing polished sentences and using very impressive vocabulary and hiding your mistakes. But not only do native speakers not require that of you, it's also just not how human beings interact with each other.

[00:06:27]>> Try to do this at every single conversation is super tiring. Like you're trying to be perfect at every single step and you're going to slip up at some point. Like no matter what, even if you're perfect for, let's say, 10 minutes, 15 minutes at a time, you're going to slip up and then the native speaker is going to realize what your actual level is in the language.

[00:06:41]Whereas, let's say, other language learners that are watching your video of you performing your language won't really notice that.

[00:06:46]>> Best way to get fluent speaking isn't to stare at a wall and practice structures and phrases until you memorize them so well that you can recite them like Shakespeare. That's about 50 steps removed from real human communication.

[00:06:57]It might look impressive on YouTube, but it's pretty much useless on a Tinder date in Colombia or Argentina. If you want to improve your speaking a language, you can just speak. You don't need any super secret regiment. You don't need a drill sergeant standing by to correct you, to whip you when you make mistakes. You can just practice communicating like you have in your native language.

[00:07:15]>> And the funny thing is this niche of language learning has gotten so crazy.

[00:07:18]Like people are trying to dig around to find the person who has the best accent and try to copy the results. But what I've seen personally is the people that have the most impressive language skills are the ones that have actually dedicated the time into developing that communication skill versus just performing and showcasing their fluency.

[00:07:32]>> Don't make it into rocket science.

[00:07:33]People consume hundreds of hours of a language and feel discouraged because their speaking doesn't sound impressive.

[00:07:39]But that's totally natural. You've been building understanding, not rehearsing a performance. Your ability to understand will develop long before your ability to perfectly express that understanding.

[00:07:50]You're like that first guitarist. You're building an intuition for the instrument instead of perfecting a single solo.

[00:07:55]Building your understanding and struggling through your ability to express it is part of that natural process. Unfortunately, that process doesn't allow you to shock the natives all that quickly. And I know people are going to misunderstand me here and think I'm saying absolutely no grammar.

[00:08:10]>> I'm saying look up the grammar, look up some words, get some explanations, but don't require perfection of yourself before you're ready. Get at least 150 hours of input, find a speaking partner that makes you feel comfortable, and just start speaking. Most language learning videos I see on YouTube are just so fixated on speaking. It's always how to speak a language fast in 3 months. It's never how to understand a language fast in 3 months. That's because those kinds of videos simply aren't targeting people who want to make a long-term investment into a deep, durable fluency.

[00:08:40]>> This happens in most fields. Like people don't want to spend so much time practicing a martial art, learning an instrument. They just want to get to the results as fast as possible. And really that takes away from the whole experience because then it's not even worth doing. That's why when you actually see someone that can speak so well and eloquently in their foreign language, it's so impressive because it's not something that everyone can do or that you see everyone just achieve like in a month or two.

[00:08:59]>> Those videos are for people who want to look impressive at Thanksgiving. What good is speaking a language if you can't understand that language spoken back to you?

[00:09:06]>> I'll be honest some of the videos that really got me into learning Spanish and that really impressed me were those types of videos that people were putting on like performances. So there is some benefit to actually seeing those types of videos, but you have to really realize that those videos are not the reality of things. Like you have to actually put the time and dedication to actually learning the language and obtaining really good language skills.

[00:09:23]If you want to be able to speak really well or listen really well. Let me know in the comment section below what you guys think about this performance versus comprehension debate and I'll see you guys in the next one.