How Polyglot @LindieBotes Learned 12+ Languages By Herself
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🤯 How did Lindie Botes from South Africa learn to speak over 12 languages, including Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Hungarian? In this video, you will find out exactly how SHE did it, and how YOU can, too!
📖 LEARN A LANGUAGE THROUGH THE POWER OF STORY
Whether you want to learn TWELVE languages, or just ONE, stories are the best way I have found to get fluent. Forget the boring textbooks and time-wasting apps and learn a language the natural, effective way with one of my story-based courses
👉🏼
📺 LINDIE'S CHANNEL:
📚 RESOURCES:
StoryLearning Blog Article:
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👉🏼 WATCH NEXT:
How this guy learned fluent Chinese by age 21:
🕵️♂️ OTHER METHOD BREAKDOWNS I'VE DONE:
How This Guy Learned Fluent Japanese by Age 21 | Method Breakdown @Matt vs. Japan:
How Moses McCormick learned 50+ languages! RIP @laoshu505000
How English With Lucy Learned Fluent Spanish By Age 18 | @English with Lucy:
🎥 SOURCES:
I changed my mind about language methods – how I learn vocab, grammar and speaking now:
How learning 8+ languages changed my life (Lindie's polyglot story):
Holistic language learning through cultural immersion and culture shock:
Language learning tips for beginner & intermediate learners
⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:30 – Lindie speaks Hungarian
2:05 – What language do you think in?
3:15 – Growing up shy; lacking confidence
5:40 – The more languages we speak, the more identities we can flow in and out of
6:27 – How did Lindie get here, and how did she maintain her languages?
8:32 – Shift from traditional methods to immersion-based approach
10:04 – Paraphrasing: The skill of talking around words you don't know
11:46 – How to immerse yourself without moving abroad
14:04 – Habit stacking
15:08 – Door closed, phone off!
15:45 – Language stacking: Learning one language via another
17:24 – Journaling in a foreign language
19:02 – Fun, varied & creative + discipline & hard work
That is really interesting, I was very shy and insecure too! 😮 I think when you start learning new languages, you realise you can “start over” and it makes your life fuller and you can “live several lives” ❤️
Yeah, to me learning by context is also a lot better, I “hate” learning vocabulary lists, I prefer watching films, listening to music, talking to people… 😄
It’s definitely a more fulfilling way of learning languages!
hey! i agree with you as well. I’m not a polyglot or anywhere close to it, but i love learning languages and that gives me confidence for sure! thank you so much for this comment and all the best in your language journey!
Watching shows and listening to music even helps in gaining accents too. Once I started to learn languages and slowly I saw I can practice and not only retain vast amount of information but also break them and form new sentences as I like, I practically felt we can do anything with our brains.
And I think that shyness or introvert nature compells us to create more versions of us and hence newer languages lol😂
Couldn’t agree more
How do you overcome the fear of talking to other people that are native speakers?
This is really helpful! I’m bilingual in Korean and English, and always wanted to explore other languages as well – knowing that language is a door to the different culture and soul. Can’t imagine the depth and flavor of experience from the polyglot perspective. Very inspiring and challenging. Thank you!!
Lindie is great to take inspiration from!
English is the most important in the western world
And Arabic is the most important in the Islamic world, so I highly recommend learning it.. For information, it is the most beautiful language in the world
@عبدالله I speak Arabic as my first language (: it is different for sure😍 حلو العربي
I am a great admirer first and foremost of Lindie’s positive attitude and humility. Her language accomplishments are quite considerable as well.
Indeed they are!
That’s funny as true that when you speak other languages, you change your personality. My family says that my voice even changes when I speak Spanish. When I speak Thai, I am totally different. When I speak Polish (my native tongue), different sense of humour and different body language. I need more personalities and I can’t wait to try your method using stories only
Luca Lampariello has a way of describing it. As a prism and the light that hits the prism(the languages) and the different light produced form different angles as the different “personalities”. Essentially you’re still the same person but just have different side to you through these languages
Same. I am definitey way more charming in english compared to german. It’s easier for me too to express my thoughts and emotions in english.
Noticed during the summer too (live on an island so lots of tourists and foreign service workers) that i am way more forward and physical when i am on dates speaking english compared to german 😅
My native language is Thai and I’m learning Polish. Glad that you’ve put in effort to learn it, it really is a beautiful language
Well she answered the question right at the beginning of the video: “Over the past few years I have dedicated a significant portion of my time to learning a lot of languages…” I guess the biggest problem I see is that most fellas think they can learn without effort and devotion to what they are trying to achieve.
@Elliot Maze Yeeeh….
Yes, I have been learning French now 3 hours everyday for 5 months. It seems everyone does the same as me or more
Concordo Evandro!
@Deborah Meek I do Thai for about 2 hours most days – for abou 11 months now
To be honest, I don’t want to speak 12 languages. I am not that ambicious. I want to speak 4-5 languages fluently. I am in the middle of that journey. I admire people who can speak more than 2 languages fluently. It requires a lot of work. I started with just 1 language, my native language and I am moving slowly from there.
Same!! You can do it, how have you come along since then? (:
how long did it take to learn 4 languages
And what is your native language?
🐯Younes🐯 1st language or the language spoken by ur ethnicity.
🐯Younes🐯 what are you doing on this app if ur 4 years old 😭
Sometimes I forget that english is not my mother tongue. I grew up learning it in school, I now watch movies and series in english, of course listen to english music, speak english in uni and at work, read english literature.. but as this is quite common for people of my generation in Germany, I don’t see this as something very special. English seems so easy and natural to me, I wished I had this with other languages as well.
Not quite there yet, and hopefully never – I really don’t want to lose my mothertongue 😀 – but I, too, wish I had the relation with other foreign languages I have with English 😀
English is a Germanic language, so it makes sense that it would come easy for you.
I’m Italian, I speak mostly English throughout my days, and it’s crazy how I even think in English now, and it’s easier to express myself in English sometimes. I also lived in Germany for 3 years, German did NOT come as natural at all, it’s such a difficult language. My daughter had a teacher from Spain who couldn’t speak English, so we would communicate by mixing Italian, Spanish (both are so similar it was easy enough) and a bit of German 🙂
Should be “wish”, not “wished”. 🙂
@josiadam98 that’s actually amazing. My relationship with English is very similar. I think and speak both in my native language (Hindi) and English. So I feel like a true bilingual. All because of the exposure method of learning English instead of a very organised method.
I personally think the best way to learn a language is how you learnt your own when you were a child. And you’ve described pretty well how that is achieved.
What she DIDN’T do is watch Youtube videos about language learning all day, so go and study your target language now.👊
yes!! 😅
But videos of the polyglots from the different countries help me with my English listening skills. It’s another)
I feel attacked…
Merci “egle lt” pour ton bon conseil. I’m french and I watching it without subtitle so I’m currently doing very hard my homework😅✌️.
Para quienes aprendemos inglés es una gran fuente de recursos y mejora a través de la inmersión.
I learned several languages as a child because of my father’s job. We moved every three to four years to a different country. The longest I have spent in a country other than the USA has been seven years in Italy (really six because one of those years I spent in boarding school in Switzerland). My point is that by the time I was 9 I spoke five languages. I learned them like every child learns to speak. When you think of how a baby learns to speak they get spoken to and then they try to imitate the sounds that they hear. Of course, once you already know how to make sounds it is easier to repeat those sounds. A child is not worried about grammar they are just interested in getting their point across. A five year old will say in English “I live in a green house”. If you were to ask that child why is it that the correct way of saying that is a ” green house” instead of a “house green” they will say it just is. They are not going to say because in English the adjective precedes the noun. Of course in my experience the longest it took me to lean a language as a child was the first one after that it only took me about six months to a year to be fluent in the other languages. Now once you stop speaking them you loose them. I have lost the ability to speak Portuguese a language that I stopped speaking at age six. Now I can understand it. At work we get visitors from Brazil I will say hello to them in Portuguese and when they ask me a question in Portuguese I answer them in Spanish and explain that I have forgotten most of my Portuguese but that I can understand what they are saying. I can still hold a conversation in Italian and French. By the way it has been 55 years since I left Brazil and we had lived there for about three years. I know that I can be fluent in Portuguese again maybe one day I’ll see how long it takes me to speak it fluently again.
What does your father work in? Moving to a different county every 3-4 years sounds cool to me
Being from South Africa, a country with 11 official languages, with so many different cultures and tribes… its kind of sad not seeing any native south african languages on her list 💔.
That would have made it even more beautiful taking the time to learn the languages of the different people around you everyday
But nonetheless it’s still beautiful ♥️… im inspired
Seems the other SA languages doesn’t fit her profile. Not popular enough I guess.
When I study the Korean and Turkish language, I thinks it’s important to study the basic grammar rules. It sort of help you to understand basic sentence structure and suffixes. Once you got that it’s pretty easy road ahead plus memorizing of course the vocabulary
Anadilin ne ?
@dunyahali İngilizce
Writing a new journal in a different language everyday is amazing! I absolutely love that! I also think I may try the language stacking with Spanish and Italian 🤔
yes – That was an aha for me too. I already keep a diary, why not do it in Portuguese?
Wow this a good idea , to write diary , I should work it out too, thanks
This feeling of searching for one’s identity certainly hits home for me. When I started learning French in Middle School, and later visited France, I felt like I was “Me” for maybe the first time, and finally had found a place of belonging! Paris, especially, seemed like my place in the world. Now I don’t speak French much and don’t travel, but sometimes I do dream in French and if I start to speak it comes flooding back to some degree.
I never really had an identity crisis, and I wasn’t ever bullied or sidelined. Still, I feel that learning a new language is a very unique activity, like learning how to play a musical instrument or doing a sport, or playing videogames, just like you said. Having some personal activities isn’t an identity crisis, but a sign of a healthy personality. I also think that, depending on your character, you can choose a different language to learn that suits you best, and that’s what’s great about learning new languages. Of course, I’m not even close to the level of Lindie, but that’s my opinion on the subject.
This entire video absolutely blew my mind! I always thought the best way to learn a new language is through studying words, phrases, moving to a country, or by using Duolingo loool. But the idea of learning a language by living like a native speaker (changing the language in you phone settings, listening to podcast and other things they use on a day to day life totally blew my mind! This is such a simple way of learning, I feel silly for not considering this for myself! So glad to chose to watch this video!
As a Hungarian native speaker, i have to say her Hungarian is fluent which is really impressive, not many foreigners get to this level. Hungarian is a difficult language for english speakers. Yes she makes some grammar mistakes and she does have an accent but she is good enough to make herself understood, so great respect. I am very curious how many hours went into her Hungarian language project.
she is not an english speaker lol)
@Asbest She just studied all her life in English (the official language of South Africa). Were you misled by the fact that Afrikaans is her mother tongue?
@Xenon Nexus where was you mislead? Watch the video, don’t say things that are your own theories and don’t be shameful.
OK, so according to you, she is not an English speaker. And if I am pointing out your mistakes, I am shameful. Sorry, in the universe I am living, she speaks English, and from early age she is bilingual. We both know who has a comprehension problem here, don´t we?
@Asbest even so it’s very impressive
My brother studied languages at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in California. The pace of study was intense. Students had to master the language course in 36-64 weeks. Psychologically it was very difficult, but fortunately he was helped by Yuriy Ivantsiv’s book “Polyglot Notes. Practical tips for learning foreign languages”. The book ” Polyglot Notes” became a desk book for my brother, because it has answers to all the problems that any student of a foreign language has to face. Thanks to the author of the channel for this interesting video! Good luck to everyone who studies a foreign language and wants to realize their full potential!
learning languages is the only thing that makes me feel like I can achieve something and I’m not a total loser.
when i learn a new word, it’s like I’ve known another new friend and it makes me so happy. also, it helps me get in touch with the outside world because you can know more about different countries’ cultures while studying languages. ❤️
I felt what you said about learning new words. Sometiems on the good and postivie days, when I encounter a new word to memorize I go “Oooh, hi there little one, and what are you?”
That’s so weird that so many polyglots struggled with bullying and not having many friends as a kid – I was the same! I was bullied in school and ended up immersing myself in learning languages (using books from the library because 2000s) as an escape/way to occupy myself. I was never this dedicated but taught myself the basics in quite a few languages and learned the Russian, Greek and Hebrew alphabets around the ages of 12-15. I only speak two languages now and intermediate Spanish but this definitely was my escape as a kid!
It’s great Lindie has learned so many languages and to hear some of her methods. I can’t help but be slightly sad that in such a language rich country as South Africa that she has taken so much effort to learn languages from far away places rather than utilise the amazing language variety within South Africa and surrounding countries.