Watched Breaking the language barrier | Tim Doner | TEDxTeen 2014 from YouTube

Tim Doner is a senior at the Dalton School in New York City who has studied over 20 languages. His interest started at the age of 13, after several years of French and Latin, when he began learning Hebrew and soon moved on to more obscure tongues such as Pashto, Ojibwe and Swahili. As he describes it, his goal is not to achieve fluency in each, but rather to learn about foreign history and culture through the medium of language. He spends much of his time perfecting his linguistic skills in different neighborhoods around the city, and to date his Youtube channel has received over 3 million hits. Tim has been interviewed (in English, Mandarin, Arabic and Farsi, among others) for media outlets such as The New York Times, BBC, The Today Show, Reuters and The Economist. He is starting his freshman year at Harvard next year and plans to study linguistics.

A nice hook to pull one into some of the reasons why one would want to pick up languages as well as how to do so.

8:44 method of loci (locorum)

10:02 Learning words in groups based on related sounds.

11:22 Why learn languages? Some useful motivation here.

Language represents a world cultural view. This is particularly poignant because a language (and its methods of thinking, viewing the world, and usually lots of associated culture) disappears from the world every two weeks.