https://youtu.be/B3Fxur1gDG0
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hello and welcome to kangaroo english
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my name is christian and today is sunday
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the best day of the week
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um today i'm going to be answering the
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question
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how can you learn
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english like a baby how can you get
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fluent
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like children do in in english
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and and actually this is one of the
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great big important questions in
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linguistics
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why is it that children are just
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so good at learning languages i mean
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think about it as as an adult you have
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an incredible cognitive advantage
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right you're better at problem solving
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you have more general knowledge
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you um have more cognitive power
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uh you you're just smarter
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in every single way than a baby in every
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single way so
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why can't you use this power to learn a
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language
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well actually the reason
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and this is probably the surprising
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reason the reason is that
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you know too much
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especially you know too much about
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language
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right especially your own language so
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first let's imagine language from the
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perspective
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of a baby
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you say mama mama
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mom baby you're making the movements
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just say mama
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mama mama
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mama
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[Music]
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so babies don't know
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anything about language they don't know
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the difference between
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nouns and verbs and adjectives and
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prepositions they don't understand about
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future tense and past tense
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all they hear is sound
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continuous sound this big
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long noise
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right and think about it maybe it's a
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question you've never really thought
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about
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how do babies and children how do they
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know
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what you're talking about right how do
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they know
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how to take a noun a word for a thing
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how do they know how to take that out of
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a sentence
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how do they learn verbs when it's all
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just joined together
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right the answer is that they don't
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so i i want to
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talk about another language which is
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very
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alien not just to people who speak
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english or another european language
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but it's alien to almost
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everybody on the planet okay because
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there's there's a group of languages
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that is the way they work is very very
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very rare
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okay they're called polysynthetic
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languages and
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one of those languages is cherokee which
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is a language spoken by
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some native american people in in
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in the united states in north america
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and
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i want to give you an example of a word
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from that language okay the word is
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diti yohihi i love saying that word it
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sounds great
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okay now ditty yohihi
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is a word that means lawyer
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it's a word for lawyer you go to court
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you know
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there's the judge you're in the
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courtroom and standing next to you is
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your diti yohihi right the person who
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represents you but what is the actual
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translation of that word into english
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like the literal
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translation well it means
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a person who argues repeatedly
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and deliberately and for a reason think
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about it
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all of that information right and that's
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a lot of information all of that
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information is contained
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in that one single word
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five syllables
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the ten letters how
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because the way the language works is
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very different
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they don't have words okay
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the way that it works is you have um
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you know this this kind of base which
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you manipulate
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with suffixes and prefixes and
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and and you manipulate the the phonemes
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and and
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and you create this one continuous word
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with all of this information inside it's
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incredible
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okay so to
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to a baby hearing that language
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that they will never learn about words
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because words don't exist not in the
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same way that we know them right
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they're never going to learn about verbs
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the way that we understand them because
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it doesn't exist
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they're never going to learn about
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tenses past and future because it
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doesn't exist
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in the same way in in the cherokee
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language right
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so really
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and this is this is the kind of you know
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controversial
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or strange way of looking at language
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you know
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the way that we have decided
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to divide language the way that we have
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decided to categorize
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language really is is kind of arbitrary
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you know it's a decision we made
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to say well these are nouns these are
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verbs and and we do this and that you
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know it's
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it's not necessary to do that
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to learn a language and
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if you were trying to learn cherokee
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you would have to radically change the
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way
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that you think about language
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and a cherokee baby trying to learn
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english would have to radically
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change the way that they think about
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language
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so what's the solution um what does this
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tell us
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about the question is how can you learn
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a language like
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um like a child like a baby well um
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i want to talk about this great piece of
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research okay
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from the journal of memory and language
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uh the paper is called the advantage of
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starting big
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learning from unsegmented input
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facilitates mastery of grammatical
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gender in an artificial language
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by noam siegelman and in balan and
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this is just an example of lots of
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similar work okay this is not isolated
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there's lots of work about this subject
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okay so what they did was
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they had different groups of people and
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they wanted to teach them an artificial
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language
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they wanted to teach them a language
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that they invented
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and this language has grammatical gender
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like spanish which is
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a language that i speak and as a native
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english speaker
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learning spanish i have a problem with
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grammatical gender
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right it's like the masculine feminine
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of the
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noun and i always get it wrong you know
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and and
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also for me it's difficult to accept
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that it's necessary
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you know it's not necessary to know if
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this is masculine or feminine it doesn't
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need
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right so you know i have to adapt
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to to the way that that that spanish
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works
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and the way that most people
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approach language learning the way that
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it's taught in
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a lot of classrooms the way that it's
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taught in grammar books
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okay the way that they study your
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success at language learning in exams
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the whole system is designed for you to
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break language into basically words
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into chunks right so we're like okay
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we're gonna
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test you on articles do you know the
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difference between ah
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and the we're gonna test you on um
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your tenses do you know which verb
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to put in this whole is it present
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perfect or past perfect or
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you're right right so
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most students are accustomed to viewing
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language
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in little chunks little pieces right but
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what they did in this experiment is
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they didn't they taught adults
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um chunks whole chunks instead of
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teaching them that
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you know mano is the word for hand in
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spanish
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and that it's a feminine word so when
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you think about manner you have to say
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la no
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they taught them that this is la mano
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all together
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in one chunk and guess what you ready
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we show that learning from unsegmented
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input
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leads to more article noun units
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and to better learning the findings
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provide
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novel evidence for the advantage of
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learning grammar
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from multi-word units
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that's how children learn language
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because children don't know what words
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are they learn that later right
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children learn chunks big long chunks
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and so your your advantage
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of knowing more stuff your advantage of
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understanding the categories of nouns
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and verbs
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is actually your huge disadvantage
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because
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you focus on the little pieces of
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language
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but what you should be doing is pulling
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back
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and looking at language
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in in in chunks right or as they as the
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name of the paper says
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starting big um and i'll give you a
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simple example in english right so
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in english we have this structure to
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make
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equal comparisons okay and the structure
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is
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the something
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the something for example the bigger the
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better
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the faster the more dangerous
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the hungrier the more
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angry right okay so it's about equal
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comparison
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when the first thing goes up the other
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thing also goes up
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when the first thing goes down the other
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thing always goes down
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where does the meaning come from okay
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does the meaning come from
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the article the no
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does the meaning come from the
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comparative
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adjective that you use in that position
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no the meaning comes from
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the whole construction put together
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analyzing the parts of the construction
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don't help you to really understand
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understanding is the key here
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not superficial memorization but
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real true understanding
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and understanding that
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the structure the construction
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is what gives language the meaning not
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the individual pieces okay
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so if if you want to
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if you want to to get fluent if you want
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to
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try to to regain
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some of that advantage that you have as
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a smart adult
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then please stop looking at language as
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little pieces okay because it's not
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that's something that you learned to do
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at school
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something you learned to do from the way
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the language learning
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industry works but it's not it's not the
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best way
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okay not the most efficient uh
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and it won't lead it won't lead to
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success
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and just just one final thing okay which
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is
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maybe the biggest advantage that
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children have
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over adults apart from this is that
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children have curiosity they're always
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asking why
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you know anyone who's had a
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five-year-old
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in the house is is very quickly annoyed
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by why
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but why why is it like that why why why
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why
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that that's how you need to approach
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your language learning why why
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it's not enough to know you have to know
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why
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and the why questions
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the the more you ask why the deeper you
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go
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is actually where you find the most
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interesting things
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you know the most important
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fundamental parts of the way that
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language works
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so please be curious
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and start big not small
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i'm christian this is kangaroo english
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and i'll see you in class
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[Music]
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you
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