Tim Doner - Polyglot

Write a post about Tim Donor & his language abilities. What did you find most interesting about him? Do you plan to emulate any of his language learning strategies?



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The Three Minute Thesis Competition

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On Tuesday morning, we had learnt outside class at University of Otago. We attended to listen The Three Minute Thesis competition program. It had six Master’s degree and PhD. students participated to speech. It was an enjoyable, interesting and unforgettable experience.  The candidates were the best presenters. It seems that they had prepared highly informative. It was challenging to do a clearly presentation in a period of time. In particularly it was just only three minutes speech. But they all did a great job. “Heat-Humanities” was the thesis topic for a competition in this time. Is was not easy to opt for. There were so much information and hardly to find out an appropriate problematic subject. Surprisingly, they were able to determine a interesting issue. For instance once of the topic is  “How is the concept of silence used in peace and conflict studies journals?” It was presented by Kalika Kastein, PhD.National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Division of Huma...
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Tom Doner – Polyglot

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Why he was learning foreign languages, how he did it? Tom Doner is an American who can speak many languages. He has been teaching himself languages since he was 13-year-old. Now, he has achieved his goal in nearly 23 languages.  He used to be a child actor. It brought him to find out of a gift for accent while he was going to auditions for radio commercials. Consequently, he interested to start learning French at the beginning, and then Latin, Hebrew, Pashto, Ojibwe, and another. There is a saying from Nelson Mandela that Tom Doner was talking at Tedx Talks in 2014 said: “ If you talk to a man in a language he understands  that goes to his head.  If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart ”.  That was the main reason why he has learnt languages. The technique that he used to memorise vocabulary called “ Method of loci ” which help him to take mnemonics. For example: If he has 10 vocabulary words in the list that he wants to learn. He takes each of th...
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Tim Doner

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Tim Doner is certainly an extraordinary talent, isn't he?  I like the point he makes about language being a vehicle for culture . He makes this point in his discussion of some everyday Persian expressions in his TED Talk where he discusses the expression of thanks "Ghorbanet beram" which literally means "May I sacrifice my life for you" or "I'll die for you." The strength of these words shows that good deeds for another are valued particularly highly in Iranian culture. An insight I will miss out on if I don't learn Persian. As Doner concludes "You can translate words easily, but you can't quite translate meaning."  Regarding ways to learn languages, I think Doner is on target in suggesting watching movies is a good way to achieve this goal. In the clip uploaded by THNKR, he says movies are useful for language learning because they expose you to the normal rate of speech and examples of colloquial words and phrases, and it is fun...
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