The CEO of Air Canada, based in Montreal spent 300 hours studying French with a teacher and another 250 hours studying on his own. And at the end of it, all over a period of six years, he couldn't speak French. This became a scandal. He had to resign. Now the question is, why does that happen? It's not unusual. It wasn't for lack of effort. He put a lot of effort into it. At some level, he must have been motivated. But it happens to lots of people: they study hard, they think they're learning, and in the end they can't use the language.

Based on my own experience as a learner and also what I have recently learned about how the brain learns, I'm gonna tell you why that happens, what you can do about it. So what happens when you study a language the traditional way? You learn some words, you learn some rules. You hope that those lodge themselves somewhere in your brain. You may even be able to produce those bits of information, words, sentences, structures, in a test. But in the end, over the long haul, you can't speak, you don't understand the language that you're trying to learn. And the reason is, as I now understand, the reason is that the language doesn't reside in your brain as groups of words or grammar rules.

Rather, it's part of a network, a web of networks that is constantly regenerating itself. Every time you're exposed to the language, every time you hear a different voice in a different context, or you read, or you listen or you watch a movie, every exposure to the language is creating another connection within this constantly growing web of connections, and that is how you eventually understand the language and are able to speak it every time you use it or try to use it or try to understand it, you are regenerating that massive web of connections. So we often talk about retrieval, but when you go to retrieve something, you don't go in and retrieve the word that you think you're trying to retrieve.

You are regenerating the whole network, enriching your connection to the language, and that's what eventually enables you to remember things and to produce the language or to understand language. Classes feel productive. You're doing something, you're maybe being quizzed, uh, you are reviewing, uh, tables. None of that is enriching the networks that you need, that you need to be growing within your brain to enable you to naturally use and understand the language. Stephen Krashen draws a distinction between deliberately learning and natural acquisition, and what he intuitively understood, or from his

research of learners is something that I recently discovered. In, uh, listening to, uh, an interview with Jeffrey Hinton, the father of AI, I understood that this corresponds to how the brain learns, which is based, as I said, more on this sort of constantly, uh, deepening and enriching web of connections weighted in different ways, depending on the different emotional and otherwise, you know, exposures that we've had to the language. That's what Krashen understood, and that's what Hinton explained. So the classroom is actually a very poor place to learn a language. If we need lots of exposure, then how do we create an environment where we can build on those connections that we need?

Unfortunately, it's very simple. We need to listen and read a lot. Very simply, we speak when we have the opportunity, but by and large, we need to give ourselves as many different kinds of exposures to the language through listening and reading. Now, if you're located in an area where you are surrounded by the language, that's easy to do. However, if we are not in a place where the language is spoken around us, we need to do a lot of deliberate reading and listening. Now in the past, trying to read in a paper, uh, you know, on a, in a traditional book, you very quickly you run into words that you don't know.

You have to look them up. Uh, and those words are essentially gone. What has changed now is the technology that is available to us, the ability to bring books, YouTube, videos, podcasts, whatever we want into a system like LingQ, where you can look up words immediately and then forget about them and look up the word when you next see it and forget about it. But this whole learning environment approximates how we learn through this exposure, compelling input, and so forth. At first, of course, the input is not so easy for us. And I have said before that I listen more than once to easy content at the beginning, but eventually we move on to, uh, content that's genuinely compelling to us.

And we now have the option with AI to actually create content, cater to our needs, to the accent. We want to, the level of difficulty we want. All of these can be imported into LingQ, for example, where the words can be looked up and forgotten, looked up again and forgotten. And we're constantly feeding our brain this rich context that's going to enable us to learn the language. So an application like LingQ takes the friction out of acquiring this kind of compelling input that will take us to a level of fluency in the language. So if you've been unsuccessful at learning a language such as the CEO of Air Canada.

It's not because you didn't try, it's not because you're not intelligent. It's because you were given a hammer to go and paint a wall. In other words, the tool, the method of instruction was wrong. That's not how the brain learns. Don't study, don't drill, don't do quizzes. Expose yourself to the language, enrich your web of connections, and you'll be on your way to achieving your language learning goals. If the CEO of Air Canada had decided to spend 550 hours with LingQ, he might still have his job. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.