Steven Kaufmann

Steven Kaufmann (aka Steve Kaufmann) is a Canadian ex diplomatic officer, Hyperpolyglot/polyglot, linguist and language teaching theorist. Kaufmann has learned a number of languages, based initially on professional travel and living overseas, and then on teaching himself using his own methodologies and his language application. He can speak 16 languages fluently.

Background

Kaufmann initially learnt Swedish, growing up in Sweden as a child, before moving to Canada. He studied some French while living in Montreal, though he largely spoke English, before moving to Europe in the early 1960s, and learning French and Spanish there. After securing work with the Canadian Government, he moved to Hong Kong to study Chinese in the late 1960s, before moving and living in Japan in 1970, learning Japanese while he was there. Over these times, he picked up a number of techniques for learning languages. He was featured along with a number of other Polyglots in Canada's Global TV programme on hyperpolyglots: "Word Play", where polyglots describe their experiences speaking multiple languages.

Languages

Kaufmann speaks 16 languages fluently, including English, French, Mandarin, Japanese, German, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Czech, Romanian, Cantonese, Swedish, Italian, Korean, Ukrainian, and most recently Polish. In some of these, Kaufmann has extensive vocabularies, for instance, up to 40,000 words for Ukrainian. He is currently learning Greek and Hebrew.

Learning Theories

Kaufmann has a number of theories that he attests to assist learning of languages. He says successful language involves learning significant vocab, around 1000 words, before you begin any serious tuition and to delay speaking to that point . He also states that you need to learn, forget and re learn grammar. Kaufmann also advocates initial and constant reading and listening.He also notes that the language learning must be fun for the user, one of the great threats to learning a language being that students simply drop their studies, but if the student finds an element of enjoyment in it, they will keep studying. He proposes that age is not a barrier to learning a language, holding himself as an example of SomeOne who at the age of 70, is still actively learning languages.

Published Works

• Kaufmann, Steven "The Way of the Linguist: A Language Learning Odyssey" Authorhouse 2005
• Kaufmann, Steven "The Linguist: A Personal Guide To Language Learning" Authorhouse 2003