Steve Kaufmann: languages, method and verdict

How the method became an app

Steve Kaufmann's approach is simple to state: listen a lot, read a lot, look up the words you do not know, and let grammar sink in through exposure before you study it. He often points to Stephen Krashen's ideas on input as the theory behind it. The practical side is laid out in the guide to comprehensible input.

He studied Mandarin full-time in Hong Kong in the late 1960s as a young Canadian trade official, long before pop-up dictionaries. Anyone who learned Chinese on paper knows the bottleneck: every unknown character means minutes of searching, and nothing records which words you have already looked up.

LingQ, which he co-founded with his son Mark in 2007, is the software answer to that problem. It turns any text into a lesson, shows a meaning at a tap, and remembers the status of every word you have met. In effect, it automates the tedious half of his method and leaves you the reading and listening.

So the app is not a side business attached to a famous learner. It is the method itself, in the form a learner of the 1960s could only have wished for. Whether the software lives up to the idea is a separate question, and Kungfucius answers it in the LingQ review.

On stage

Kaufmann is also a familiar face at language events. He has spoken at the Polyglot Conference in the past, and the larger gatherings of that scene are listed in the events calendar.