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So about two years ago,
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I was featured in a New York Times article called,
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"Adventures of a teenage polyglot,"
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which featured my passion for learning foreign languages,
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this peculiar hobby that I had.
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And at first I thought it was great.
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I loved the fact that language learning was getting more attention
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and that it wouldn't always
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seem like an isolating hobby
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that was suddenly putting me into contact with people all around the world.
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And as I spent more time in the media spotlight,
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the focus of my story began to shift.
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So whereas I've always been interested in talking about the why and the how,
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why I was learning foreign languages, how I did it,
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instead, it turned into a bit of a circus,
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in which media shows wanted to sensationalize my story.
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So it would go a little something like this,
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"Hello, I'm here today with 17-year-old Timothy Doner
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who's fluent in 20 languages.
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Oh, I'm sorry.
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He actually can insult you in 25 languages
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and he's fluent in another ten.
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Tim, how about you tell our audience 'Good morning'
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and 'Thank you for watching', in Muslim?"
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(Laughter)
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"Er... Arabic."
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(Arabic)
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"Great Tim. Now can we get you
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to introduce yourself and say,
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'I'm fluent in 23 languages' in German."
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"It's not really true. But..."
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"No, no, just tell the audience."
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(German)
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"Perfect. Now how about
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a tongue twister in Chinese?
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(Laughter)
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"Well, we could talk about Chinese,
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you know, a lot more Americans are learning Chinese these days,
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and I think there's a lot of value in that."
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"No, no, no. Just give us a tongue twister."
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(Laughter)
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(Chinese)
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"This guy! Tim, how about
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another tongue twister in Chinese?"
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"I will prefer not to, but you know
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we could talk about China.
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There's a lot you can gain by learning a language.
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"Oh Tim, I'm sorry, That's all the time we have."
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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"Now why don't you to tell our audience
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'Goodbye' in Turkish
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and we will be over here?"
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"You know we haven't talk about anything substantive."
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"But Turkish please."
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(Turkish)
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"How about that kid, right,
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wonder if he gets any girls...
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(Laughter)
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Now stay with us because up next,
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a skateboarding bulldog in a bathing suit."
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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So, as funny as that was,
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it highlighted two pretty major problems
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in the way my story was covered.
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On a personal level,
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I felt that language learning was now becoming like a bit of a task, almost.
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It felt like something that was suddenly had to be rigidly organized.
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Something that had to be compartmentalized, rationalized,
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expressed in a concrete number.
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I speak X languages.
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I know Y languages.
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As opposed to what I'd always done,
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which was just learning languages for the fun of it.
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Learning to communicate with people,
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learning about foreign cultures.
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And on a bigger level, it's cheapened what it meant to speak a language,
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or to know a language.
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Now if I can impart you with anything today at TEDxTeen,
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it's that knowing a language
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is a lot more than knowing a couple of words out of a dictionary.
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It's a lot more that being able
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to ask someone where the bathroom is,
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or telling them the time of day.
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But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
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So for those of you who aren't familiar with my story,
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maybe a lot of you here don't know what the word polyglot is,
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and it's a pretty weird one.
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I started here.
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So this little tot is me, circa 2001,
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and this is the beginning of my language learning journey.
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I actually was a child actor
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before I'd learned any languages.
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And I always had a little bit of a gift for accent.
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So I'm going to auditions for radio commercials,
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or for TV commercials,
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and I'd do an Austin Powers impression.
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I'm not going to do one now.
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(Laughter)
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Or maybe I would do
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Apu from the Simpsons.
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In fact there was actually one time an audition
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which I was asked to leave,
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because they told me to speak like a little kid with a lisp,
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and I wanted to do Darth Vader in a French accent.
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(Laughter)
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But, that taught me the basics of
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of how to breakdown sound.
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How to pick up a foreign accent,
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or foreign speech patterns,
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and really live with it.
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Now fast forward a little bit,
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I'm now in about third grade,
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and I've just started French for the first time.
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But six months into a year,
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into even two years later,
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I can't converse with anybody.
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French is just another subject in school,
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and even though I can tell you words
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for elbow, knee bone, shoelace.
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I couldn't really have a fluent conversation with anybody.
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Fast forward a little bit more.
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In seventh grade, I started Latin.
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So Latin of course is a dead language,
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and in learning Latin, you really learn
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how to breakdown language,
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to see language as a system
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with rules, and as a bit of a puzzle.
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So that was great,
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but I still didn't feel like language was for me.
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So, forward a little bit more.
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About 13,
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and I've been interested in learning more
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about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
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I started studying Hebrew.
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Now, I had no way of doing it.
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I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing,
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so I listen to a lot of Rap music.
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I memorize lyrics, I'd spit them back out,
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and I would just try to chat with native speakers,
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once a week, once a month,
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and I've got that incrementally,
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I started to understand a lot more.
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Now I didn't sound like a native speaker,
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I couldn't speak very articulately and
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I certainly didn't know the grammar.
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but I had done what I'd never managed to do in school,
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which was to pick up the basics of a language
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all on my own.
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Forward a little bit more.
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I started taking Arabic when I was 14
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in a summer program going into 9th grade.
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This is summer of 2010.
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After a month I found that I could read and write
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without a problem.
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I'd learned the basics of the formal language
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and one of its major dialects.
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And it turned me onto the fact that I could really pursue languages as a hobby.
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So, it finally came to March 24th 2011.
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So I've pretty vicious insomnia,
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and as I was studying more languages
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using grammar books or watching TV shows,
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and let's say Arabic or Hebrew, became one way of focusing my time.
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So on that night, while I was awake till some ungodly hour,
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I recorded myself speaking Arabic into my computer screen,
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subtitled it,
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and I uploaded it to YouTube
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under the title, "Tim speaks Arabic."
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(Arabic)
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Next day I did the same thing,
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(In Hebrew)
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Tim speaks Hebrew.
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And the comments, when I trickled in, were fantastic.
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I got things like,
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"Wow, I've never seen an American speak Arabic before."
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(Laughter)
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You blame them?
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In addition to that I got things like,
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"Wow, maybe you should fix your vowels here."
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Or "maybe this word is pronounced this way."
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So suddenly language learning had gone
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from the solitary pages of a book,
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or my computer screen,
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into the wide world.
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After that I was hooked.
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I had a community of speakers to interact with,
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and essentially had a teacher or conversation partners
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for any language that I wanted to do.
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So I'll show you a quick montage of that.
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Video: (Arabic) I started studying Arabic roughly, 6 months ago.
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(Indonesian) This started... one, two, three, four...
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maybe four days ago.
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(Hebrew) I actually feel
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that reading and writing are easier in Arabic
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(Ojibwe) I certainly find Ojibwe difficult!
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(Swahili) But I came home the day before yesterday.
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(Pashto) How is my pronunciation? Thanks so much!
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Have a great day. Goodbye!
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(Applause)
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Tim Doner: That became my way
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of reaching out to the world.
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But as I was learning all these languages,
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I faced a number of obstacles.
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So number one, I had no idea how to teach myself.
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In fact, I'm sure many of you if you were told
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you have to learn Pashto by next month,
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you wouldn't know what to do.
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So I experimented.
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Here's one thing.
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So in my Latin class, I read about something that Cicero described,
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called, "Method of Loci."
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technically Locurum.
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But it's a technique in which you take mnemonics.
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So let's say you want to learn
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10 vocabulary words on a list.
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You take each of those words and
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instead of memorizing them in blocks.
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you integrate them into your spatial memory.
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So here's what I mean.
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This is Union Square.
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It's a place I go every day.
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If I close my eyes
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I can imagine it very, very vividly
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So I imagine myself walking down Union Square,
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and in each spot in my mind that has resonance,
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I associate it with a vocab word.
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I'll show you right now.
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I'm walking down Park Avenue,
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and in Japanese "to walk" is "iku"
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I go a little bit further, turn right,
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sit on the stairs where I can "Suwaru".
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Directly north of there is a statue George Washington
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which I used to think was a fountain,
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so that's "nomu", "to drink".
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Right next, there's a tree that you can "Kiru", "cut".
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If you want to go north for Barnes & Noble,
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you can "Yomu", "to read".
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Or if I'm hungry and I want to go to my favorite Falafel place,
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I can go one block west of there, so I can "Taberu", "to eat".
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I missed one.
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Alright. So 8 out of 10! Not bad!
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So I found that most of the time
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by experimenting with methods like these,
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it made language learning a much more interactive experience.
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It made it something that I can remember much better.
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and I had a lot of fun with.
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Maybe that's not for you.
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Here's another one.
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So a lot of people often ask me,
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if you're studying so many languages at the same time,
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how do you not confuse them?
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Or how do you learn so many vocabulary words?
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In Spanish I learn a word for table