This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers. and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're gonna find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way?
Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. This is music from German composer George Philip Telemann. Telemann is the most prolific Baroque composer. He wrote more than 3,000 compositions. And in the 1700s, he was incredibly popular. But eventually, Baroque music went out of style. And many of Telemann's scores sat collecting dust in Germany. Forgotten. Including this concerto. And this was a piece that had just simply...
existed really only one manuscript and no one had really seen before. This is Gregory Hayworth. He's a professor at the University of Rochester and calls himself a textual scientist. We'll explain what he means in a minute. But for the last two decades, Gregory has been hunting down and translating lost manuscripts all over the world.
including at a library in Dresden where many of Telemann's works were archived alongside a treasure trove of other manuscripts, all of them badly damaged in World War II. Yes. At the end of the war, both the British and the Americans had bombed Dresden, as we all know. The manuscripts, which had been in the King's Library at the time, had been... stored in an underground room near the river, the Elbe. And with one of the bombings, the side of the river broke and it flooded this underground room.
And many of the manuscripts lay in water for about two weeks. And of course there was chaos. And then conservatives from Berlin came and they dried the manuscripts out. So these manuscripts went through a lot. And when the war ended, things didn't get that much better. Dresden became part of the Eastern Bloc, and the kind of restoration that was available to them was limited.
And so they remained, wasting away and illegible, until 2009. That's when Gregory went to Dresden to try out a new scanning technology. He spent the next few years rescuing all kinds of documents there, including that Telemann concerto. It was one of those badly damaged items that the music curator knew about and said, hey, have a look at this.
The score was stained by mold, the notes nearly impossible to read, and for two years, Gregory and his team worked on it. And we managed to recover most of what was gone. This is a 2017 recording of the concerto, the first time it was performed in hundreds of years. Yes. Do you remember listening to the concerto? I mean, it's like you resuscitated something that was truly dead and buried, and then you could hear it come alive. Well, what's fascinating about this particular piece...
is that many of the objects that we image are esoteric. They're in languages that people don't speak anymore, and the public has a hard time relating to them. But by far the most compelling is music. Because it communicates to the general public on an emotional level. And so that's really exciting, to be able to take an object from total invisibility to sharing with the public. And so the moment of... actually hearing and recovering an object is really intimate a musical masterpiece revealed
Those notes on the page would have remained illegible smudges, but the right person and the right technology came along to interpret them. Which brings us to our show today, Found in Translation. Ideas about making sense of data, biology, and language that can change the way we understand entire economies, diseases, and human interaction. So back to Gregory Hayworth. His evolution from medieval scholar to so-called textual scientist began 20 years ago when he was just a reader of texts.
What an unsatisfying word reader is. Here's Gregory Hayworth on the TED stage. For me, it conjures up images of passivity, of someone sitting idly in an armchair, waiting for knowledge to come to him in a neat little parcel. How much better to be a participant in the past? an adventure in an undiscovered country searching for the hidden text.
I read and taught the same classics that people had been reading and teaching for hundreds of years. And with every scholarly article that I published, I added to human knowledge an ever-diminishing slivers of insight. What I wanted to be was... An archaeologist of the past, a discoverer of literature, an Indiana Jones without the whip, or actually with the whip. And so I changed the direction of my career.
Gregory changed the direction of his career all because of one manuscript. In the early 2000s, he was working in that same Dresden library, studying a medieval manuscript that was in bad shape to begin with, worse by the Cold War. And it was called Les issues d'amour, the chess of love. And it is perhaps the last major...
long poem of the European Middle Ages that has never been, well, it's never been transcribed and it's never been edited. When you first saw the manuscript, the poem, what did it look like? Well, because it'd been in water. It looked like a series of huge ink blots. And what the Soviets had done was they had decided to clean up the extra ink. And they did it using a technique that was...
popular among the Soviets at that time, they used urea, which is basically made from urine. Pee? Yes. And it's acidic, and it actually is quite effective. But in so doing, it had two effects. First of all... It removed ink, but it also removed ink from the text. So much of it was so faded that you couldn't see it.
although all the ink blots were now largely gone. The second thing it did is it caused in many places the parchment, which of course is animal skin, to turn translucent, a kind of gray translucent quality. which is typical of Uria. And that really damaged and destroyed some last of it. But I managed to transcribe, oh, maybe a few thousand lines. using the standard tools of the trade at the time, which was like a black light and a lot of effort. And then I ended up...
not being able to go any further. And so I went online to try to figure out what technological means I could use to improve the reading. And there I learned about how multispectral imaging... had been used to recover two lost treatises of the famed Greek mathematician Archimedes. I decided to write to the lead imaging scientist, Professor Roger Easton, and to my surprise, he actually wrote back.
With his help, I was able to build a transportable multispectral imaging lab. And with this lab, I transformed what was a charred and faded mess into a new medieval classic. The idea behind multispectral imaging is something that anyone who's familiar with infrared night vision goggles will immediately appreciate. That what we can see in the visible spectrum of light is only a tiny fraction of what's actually there.
The same is true with invisible writing. Our system uses 12 wavelengths of light between the ultraviolet and the infrared. And these are shown down onto the manuscript from above from banks of LEDs. And another multispectral light source which comes up through the individual leaves of the manuscript. So multispectral imaging means shining different wavelengths of light onto a manuscript and taking numerous photographs with a very special lens. And by taking separate photographs...
of the same object in multiple wavelengths, we can reveal or are able to see things that the naked eye can't see. Computers then help refine the photos. you know, statistical algorithms which help enhance the images. And starting with that, we work with scholars to try to decipher and transcribe the manuscript so that we can understand them better.
Gregory and his team have used this technology to restore everything from biblical gospels to maps from the 1400s. And what they discover often helps historians understand what the writers were thinking at the time. So, spectral imaging can recover lost texts. More subtly, though, it can recover a second story behind every object. The story of how, when...
and by whom a text was created, and sometimes what the author was thinking at the time he wrote. Take, for example, a draft of the Declaration of Independence, written in Thomas Jefferson's own hand. which some colleagues of mine imaged a few years ago at the Library of Congress. Curators had noticed that one word throughout had been scratched out and overwritten. The word overwritten was citizens. Perhaps you can...
guess what the word underneath was? Subjects. There, ladies and gentlemen, is American democracy evolving under the hand of Thomas Jefferson. Through this lens, we witness the mistakes, the changes of mind. the naivetes, the uncensored thoughts, the imperfections of the human imagination that allow these hallowed objects and their authors to become more real, that make history closer to us.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit, Gregory, that the images that are coming to mind for me are Sherlock Holmes and Invisible Ink and Nick. Cage in that movie National Treasure trying to hunt down precious manuscripts. I mean, it is kind of as exciting as that, though, right? Yeah, this is a kind of, you know, recovery of the past, which has... i don't know maybe exaggerated or lurid elements of recovery
But it's something that I hope will become much more common as students begin to learn textual science. It's something that we need to be able to do because otherwise we're going to lose forever parts of our past in the next 50 years. Several years ago I conducted a survey of European research libraries and discovered that at the barest minimum there are 60,000 manuscripts pre-1500. that are illegible because of water damage, fading, mold, and chemical reagents. Imagine worldwide.
how a trove of hundreds of thousands of previously unknown texts could radically transform our knowledge of the past. Imagine what unknown classics we would discover which would rewrite the canons of literature, history, philosophy, music. Or, more provocatively, that could rewrite our cultural identities, building new bridges between people and culture. In a minute...
How this technology can be used to scan documents written now, too. Today on the show, found in translation. I'm Manoush Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, found in translation. We were just talking to textual scientist Gregory Hayworth. He helped develop technology that uses multispectral imaging to recover manuscripts that would otherwise be illegible.
And he's working on more recent documents too, including some written by prisoners of war in Syria. They're scraps of cloth with inscribed names in Arabic. and they came from an escapee of the prisons of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. These prisoners had found themselves in these horrific conditions, and they...
wanted to record at the very least a story of who had been there. And they agreed that if anyone got out, they would make multiple lists of this and they would be able to contact people and tell them their mother, their father. had been there. In order to make these manuscripts, they ripped pieces of linen cloth from their shirts and they used chicken bones as a stylus and ink.
made from a mixture of the blood from their gums with the rust from the bars. Oh my gosh. And they inscribed names, and then they rolled them up and they sewed them into their hems. And one man escaped, and he delivered these precious lists to the Holocaust Museum.
So did they actually take the list then? Yes. So we imaged the list and made it more legible so that we could read some of these names and have a real record of them. And the images now exist at the Holocaust Museum as a testament to who... had been disappeared. So you are looking at things that have been written incredibly recently and can help us make sense of what is going on in the world.
right now. Yes. In fact, many cultural heritage objects from the last century and a half, for example, are in much worse shape than objects from a thousand years ago. One of the things that we're particularly interested in are modern objects that have been censored by governments, beginning with Nazi-censored documents, many of them like postcards and letters from the camps. And that should...
I hope, fill in gaps which otherwise we would never be able to know. So we're calling this episode Found in Translation. And it occurs to me that we could use the word translation. to describe your work on numerous levels. I mean, there's the literal translation from an ancient language to languages we speak now. There's the translating from...
what looks like absolutely nothing on a page to making sense of it with the help of this technology. There's the translating it from the page to our ears with the Telemann concerto. I wonder how you think about it. Well, this particular Telemann piece, it was written in the hand of Giovanni Vivaldi, who was Antonio Vivaldi's father. And Antonio Vivaldi had wanted to hear this particular concerto. And so he sent his father to copy it. So what we're hearing is...
Giovanni Vivaldi's interpretation of some of the lines as well. So manuscripts are objects that evolve. We're used to books in which the same text is printed in all the copies of that same book. But a manuscript evolves and changes because it's copied by hand. One of the things that multispecial imaging has taught us is that our present is changing our past in ways that will really reshape our understanding of culture and the transmission of that culture.
and at its best, I hope, bring people together and eliminate or reduce misunderstandings from the past. That's textual scientist Gregory Hayworth, professor at the University of Rochester and founder of The Lazarus Project. You can find his full talk at TED.com. And that 2017 performance of Telemann's Concerto was played by students from the Eastman School of Music. Today on the show, found in translation.
I'm sitting at the edge and suddenly this magnificent creature surfaces. And I'm thinking, that's a blue whale. Ralph Shami was on a boat in Mexico's Gulf of California when he saw his first whale up close. And she's massive, massive. And she comes up to breathe, and that breath is like a train. She dies and she comes up and she blows all that air out. I mean, I had tears in my eyes. I'm seeing this incredible mystery unfolding in front of me, thinking...
Where have I been all this time? And life has never been the same. Ralph is an economist who recently left the International Monetary Fund after 25 years there. And within the IMF, I worked on all kinds of issues. I'm an expert on fragile states and conflict-affected countries. It was a very stressful job. What happened was, after you work on fragile states and you lead missions, these are dangerous missions, really. And you become fragile yourself. So in 2017, he was on a rare break.
An old friend who knew how much he loved the ocean got him a spot on an expedition studying whales. The researchers told Ralph he had one job. If you really want to help Ralph, clock when the whale breaches, when it dives. At night, the whole team would go ashore to unwind. We'd all cook together, and some of us would cook, some of us would clean. One night, Ralph joined a dinner table discussion that stuck with him.
And so we're sitting around the table and having conversations about the whales. And I'm on my third glass of wine, trying to get into a conversation. And I overhear a conversation about whale carbon. Whale carbon, the amount of carbon dioxide that a whale houses in its body, away from the atmosphere. They said, well, they have tremendous amount of carbon.
Because whales eat massive amounts of krill, which themselves feed on phytoplankton, single-cell plants. Now, why is phyto important? Because phytoplankton is really where the biological... Life of the ocean starts. They capture about 33 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year. That's equivalent to the work of four Amazon forests. So the whales eat krill, the krill eats phyto.
And then what does the phyto need to survive? Well, they need phosphorus, nitrogen, and iron. And all three factors are in the poop of the wild. So it's a virtuous cycle. Whale feeds on krill, krill feeds on phyto, phyto needs the poop of the whale. So this whale is not only grabbing carbon on its body, it's fertilizing the phyto. So the whale is a great ally in the fight against climate change.
You see? It was the greatest story never told. That's what I kept saying to myself. So you have this wonderful cycle. Here's Ralph Shammy on the TED stage. The whale feeds on the krill, the krill feeds on the phyto, and the phyto needs the poop of the whale to get more active. And when the phyto gets more active, it grabs more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Now, that's good news, right? Yeah. Except that whales are dying. They're dying from ship strikes. They're dying from pollution. They're dying from entanglements. In fact, they're dying because our current economic system puts zero value on a living whale. But chop a whale, sell it for its meat, it acquires a value. The value of a living whale is zero. Zero dollars. Zero in any currency. I'm a financial economist. And I'm listening to these scientists.
bemoaning what's happening to the world, and I wanted to help. I didn't know how to help. And I thought, wait a minute. Maybe I can bring your message to the audiences around the world. Maybe I can translate all of that value. those services they do for us in a language that we can all understand. It's the language of dollars and cents.
What was going through your mind? I mean, it sounds like your brain was kind of set on fire in some ways. Yes. Right away, my mind went to value. Value of the carbon captured by a wave. Because, you know, I'm an economist. I work on wages and people's earnings. And I said, so whale carbon, how much would I be paying the whale for fighting climate change? What if I could?
value the services of the whale. I was Googling and I found nothing on this at all. I'm a financial economist, so I'm looking at it from a market valuation. And I knew that a dead whale was worth a lot of money in countries where they still eat whale meat. So a dead whale had a value, $40,000 to $80,000 depending on.
the size of the whale, but a living whale had no value. So I started thinking, well, how would I go about doing it? After all, the whale is a living system. The whale captures carbon on her body. And she gives birth to baby whales who also grow up to capture carbon on their body, and they give birth to whales and so forth, and indirectly through the fertilization of phytos. So how would you do something like this?
Well, I looked at it and I said, wait a minute. This looks like a share of stock that pays dividends. Except those dividends are live dividends. They give birth to more dividends. So if I were to track... the whale over her lifetime and keep track of all these dividends into the future and then multiply that by the price of carbon and discount that all the way to the present.
I can figure out what is the present value of the lifetime earnings of a single whale. Would you like to know how much? Would you like to know how much? At least $3 million. At least. $3 million per whale. Now, that's just an estimate, because for now, there's no standardized way for countries and companies to price carbon. But Ralph says that needs to happen ASAP.
Because companies and governments have made a lot of promises to go carbon neutral. And pretty soon, they'll need to deliver on those promises. So voluntary carbon markets, that's what we have right now. But in Europe, the regulation is coming. Even the Biden administration is coming around the idea of interest around the protection of nature and its biodiversity and dealing with climate change.
And it's no longer the privy of just the governments. The consumers are asking companies, what is your footprint? investors, I mean, billionaires, I know some of them, that are saying now, I don't want my money to be invested in extractive services. I don't want to be linked to companies that have a huge carbon footprint. For the last six years, Ralph has been working to envision a new kind of marketplace, one that doesn't extract from nature, but puts a value on it.
He calls his solution science-based finance. And he's not just applying it to whales, but to elephants, wildebeest, seagrass. Right now, he's working with the Bahamas on one pilot project. So they mapped the seafloor of the Bahamas and discovered that the Bahamas is sitting on 30% of the total mass of seagrass in the world. In the world? Yeah.
According to my calculations and my colleagues, that is worth about $150 billion. So I am sitting on seagrass and you, Microsoft, you need to offset your carbon footprint. You made a commitment to go carbon negative. So here's what we do. How much carbon do you need? And Microsoft says, well, for this year, I need 100 tons. For next year, 150. I say, okay.
I'll sell you these from my seagrass. You pay me that money. Because remember, in order for the seagrass to do its work, it has to stay alive and well. Which means you also have to look after the sea turtles. and the apex predator, the tiger sharks. When the tiger sharks die, the sea turtles would completely destroy the seagrass. So when you're investing in seagrass, you're impacting food security. When you're investing in seagrass, you're looking after fauna.
When you're investing in Seagrass, you're looking after the people, the communities. You're alleviating poverty. You're creating employment. You're bringing new businesses. So suddenly, for Microsoft, they can put on their website, look. We are purchasing the carbon of the seagrass. We're ensuring that seagrass lives forever. We're investing in nature in perpetuity. By creating resilience in nature, we create resilience in the people.
Not to be cynical though, Ralph, but who is going to keep track of all this? Who's going to make sure that... The people who say they're going to grow more seagrass actually grow it. Who's going to make sure that the companies actually spend the money to buy the carbon offsets from the seagrass growers?
How do we keep track of all this? Exactly. Who verifies the verifier? Who certifies the certifier? Who's watching the watch person? That's what you're asking. Well, I've worked on financial development for 30 years. Every nascent market is subject to gold rush behavior, double counting, triple counting, cheating. And for Pete's sake, even mature markets, how many times do we hear about all kinds of insider trading on Wall Street?
So especially nascent markets are subject to these things. But if the market is to take off, we need to solve these issues. Some of them the market themselves would solve. Some of it would need a policy. Because I'm now telling people conservation is not a cost proposition. Conservation, now we've turned it upside down, is a profit-making proposition. Just think about it.
What this paradigm does, it turns it upside down, says, no, you are conserving what is now an asset. And that asset has value. It's producing cash flows for you. So of course you need to protect it. Part of me feels... Very sad that we humans don't know how to value nature in and of itself. That we need to translate it into monetary value. Is money the only language we really speak?
You know, with this calling, I've met so many people. I remember being at the International Labour Organization. And right before I spoke, a woman, she said to me, I'm appalled that you're putting a price on nature. And I said, do you work for free? And she said, no. I said, why should the elephant work for free? Why do I allow for myself what I would not allow for nature? I find that the epitome of arrogance.
that humans prefer to sing songs about nature and write poetry as they watch it die, taking its last breath in front of us. You see, if we were not in the 11th hour, If all people appreciated nature for its intrinsic value, you wouldn't be interviewing me. But we are at a point in time where despite our best efforts, nature is dying as we speak. And we're dying because the language that we have chosen for ourselves is the language of dollars and cents. Leave the tree where it is and make money.
leave the whale for itself and make money. So I'm really not about nature. I'm really about changing people's behavior. You're like the Lorax. You speak for the trees. I would love to. I would be honored if I'm thought that way. But I'm trying my best to take what the scientists are saying and translate it into the language that we have chosen.
If we choose a different language, it's a translation. Now, all translations suffer, right? But let's not wait till we get it perfect. Because if we want to make it perfect, there'll be nothing left. That's economist Ralph Shamme. He recently retired from the International Monetary Fund after 25 years. You can find him at bluegreenfuture.org. To see his full talk, go to TED.com.
On the show today, found in translation. I'm Anoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, found in translation. One thing we've all gotten used to over the past couple years is testing ourselves at home for the COVID virus, translating an infection into a thin pink line that tells us to stay home or go about our day.
But let's say you test negative and still have a fever that just won't go away. One day, you might be able to take another test at home. So you could know immediately if you have a bacterial infection and need antibiotics, stat. Oh, it would be amazing. It would be amazing just to know that at least... As a patient, you don't need to go somewhere and deliver your sample in a place where you could get an even worse infection. It's a long road to making research in the lab so user-friendly.
And one of the people leading the way is this woman. My name is Fatima Al-Zahra Al-Atrakji. I'm a researcher within the intersection of molecular biology, micro and nanotechnology and medicine. I'm also a founder of a company called PreDiagnose, where we create the sensors for the detection of bacteria. In the future, you may have a version of Fatima's invention in your own home.
For nearly a decade, she's been using her expertise in highly complex nanotechnology to watch and listen as bacteria cells communicate. Yes, bacteria talk to each other. in their own microbial language. Yeah, bacteria speak to each other. They can communicate, they send out signals to each other and they respond to these signals and they are able to coordinate their activities based on their communication.
But instead of words, the tiniest organisms on our planet communicate with signaling molecules. They're all ways around. Whispering. making secret plans, building armies with millions of soldiers. And when they decide to attack, they all attack at the same time. Here's Fatima on the TED stage. To coordinate all the functions bacteria have, they have to be able to organize. And they do that just like us humans, by communicating.
But instead of using words, they use signaling molecules to communicate with each other. When bacteria are few, the signaling molecules just flow away, like the screams of a man alone in the desert. But when there are many bacteria, the signaling molecules accumulate, and the bacteria start sensing that they're not alone. They listen to each other. In this way, they keep track of how many they are.
and when they are many enough to initiate a new action. And when the signaling molecules have reached a certain threshold, all the bacteria sense at once that they need to act with the same action. So bacteria use different messages to rally each other, to say band together or build a colony or start a mutiny. They are really smart.
But we are trying to decode what their conversations mean. So, OK, let's say that they do decide to attack, that they've been hanging out, they've been multiplying, and now they're thinking, you know what? We're bad, we're mean, we're nasty bacteria, and we're going to show off a little bit. How would that work?
Then they would all at once start producing something that will be harmful for the host or for other bacteria that they would like to get rid of. Because they would also, sometimes they are really dominating. They would really like to. dominate the space they are in and that would be secreting something that would kill the other bacteria. And this is where Fatima's sensor comes in.
She uses it to interpret these molecular conversations between bacterial cells and possibly predict what they're up to. In one trial, she listened in on the signals they were starting to send each other. and use those early whispers to diagnose infections before they spread. I followed 62 patients in an experiment where I tested the patient samples for one particular infection without knowing the results of the traditional diagnostic test.
Now, in bacterial diagnostics, a sample is smeared out on a plate, and if the bacteria grow within five days, the patient is diagnosed as infected. When I finished the study and I compared the tool results to the traditional diagnostic test and the validation test, I was shocked. It was far more astonishing than I had ever anticipated. My device caught bacterial conversations in more than half of the patient samples that were diagnosed as negative by traditional methods.
In other words, more than half of these patients went home thinking they were free from infection, although they actually carried dangerous bacteria. Inside these wrongly diagnosed patients, bacteria were coordinating a synchronized attack. They were whispering to each other. What I call whispering bacteria are bacteria that traditional methods cannot diagnose. So far, it's only the translation tool that can catch those whispers.
I believe that the time frame in which bacteria are still whispering is a window of opportunity for targeted treatment. Together with doctors, I'm already working on implementing this tool in clinics to diagnose early infections. Fatima, I just read that in 2019, 7.7 million people died of bacterial pathogens. I mean, that is over 13% of all global deaths that year.
And then you found that using normal diagnosing methods, half of the patients in the study went home thinking that they were fine, but actually carrying dangerous bacteria. If we can diagnose people early, would that change the way that we treat them? Yes. So one of the big questions was if we are able to detect that early, what does it mean for the patients?
Do we then treat with antibiotics when we are in all other fashion not able to see the bacteria? So when we're not able to detect the bacteria with our routine techniques, what do we do then? Do we treat them? Is it okay to treat patients that early? What would happen to the patients if we do that? Would we develop resistance? All sort of questions started popping up just by the scenario of being able to detect early.
if we understand their communication, maybe we're also able to diagnose better, diagnose earlier, and sit in with alternative treatments that enables us to use way less. antibiotics than we're doing today. I wonder if you could just describe to me what your vision is for this technology, maybe 5, 10, 20 years from now.
Our vision is that in the short term, the tools that we create can be used at clinics. So they can be operated by the healthcare professionals. For example, when the patients come in during an issue. screenings then they can use these tools to quickly get an overview of how the patient is doing. On the long term we hope that it's possible for the patients to administrate this themselves.
We really hope that if we can identify a group of really problematic infections and then work on a tool that only can detect them. then we're able to say, okay, if you have a surgery, if you're susceptible, then stay at home, measure at home, and then the results will go to your doctor. And then your doctor can take action from there. But at least you don't need to get in somewhere and be exposed to having an infection from the hospital or from another site where a lot of sick people come in.
And it all starts with decoding the language of bacteria. Exactly. If we are able to understand them. then maybe we're better treating them, better diagnosing them. That's the whole concept. That's why we do this basic research. That was inventor, microbiologist, and nanotechnologist Fatima Alzara-Allatrakti. You can see her full talk at TED.com. As we come to the close of our show, found in translation.
We want to acknowledge that people usually say lost in translation to refer to all the nuances that get missed when you try to express yourself in a language not your own. Because learning a new language can be daunting. And even though you can just download an app these days to translate things for you, Lydia Makova says there are good reasons to keep learning new languages.
And it's actually not that hard if you discover the method that works best for you. Lydia herself speaks nine languages. Here she is on the TED stage in 2019. I love learning foreign languages. In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years. When people find it out about me, they always ask me, how do you do that? What's your secret?
And to be honest, for many years, my answer would be, I don't know, I simply love learning languages. But people were never happy with that answer. They wanted to know why they are spending years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency. And here I come, learning one language after another. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages. And that made me wonder too.
How do actually other polyglots do it? What do we have in common? And what is it that enables us to learn languages so much faster than other people? I decided to meet other people like me and find it out. The best place to meet a lot of polyglots... is an event where hundreds of language lovers meet in one place to practice their languages. There are several of such polyglot events organized all around the world, and so I decided to go there and ask polyglots about the methods that they use.
And so I met Benny from Ireland, who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one. He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them right away.
He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day because that's how he learns, based on the feedback. And the best thing is he doesn't even need to travel a lot today because you can easily have conversations with native speakers from the comfort of your living room using websites. I also met polyglots who always start by imitating sounds of the language, and others who always learn the 500 most frequent words of the language, and yet others who always start by reading about the grammar.
If I asked a hundred different polyglots, I heard a hundred different approaches to learning languages. Everybody seems to have a unique way how they learn a language. And yet, we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently. And as I was listening to these polyglots telling me about their methods, it suddenly dawned on me. The one thing we all have in common is that we simply found ways how to enjoy the language learning process.
All of these polyglots were talking about language learning as if it was great fun. You should have seen their faces when they were showing me their colorful grammar charts and their carefully handmade flashcards and their statistics about learning vocabulary using apps or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language.
All of them use different methods, but they always make sure it's something that they personally enjoy. I realized that this is actually how I learned languages myself. When I was learning Spanish, I was bored with the text in the textbook. I wanted to read Harry Potter instead. So I got the Spanish translation of Harry Potter and started reading. And sure enough, I didn't understand almost anything at the beginning. But I kept on reading because I loved the book. And by the end of the book...
I was able to follow it almost without any problems. And the same thing happened when I was learning German. I decided to watch Friends, my favorite sitcom in German. At the beginning, it was all just gibberish. I didn't know where one word finished and another one started. But I kept on watching every day because it's friends. I can watch it in any language. I love it so much. And after the second or third season, seriously, the dialogue started to make sense.
We are no geniuses, and we have no shortcut to learning languages. We simply found ways how to enjoy the process, how to turn language learning from a boring school subject into a pleasant activity which you don't mind doing every day. So meeting other polyglots helped me realize that it is really crucial to find enjoyment in the process of learning languages, but also that joy in itself is not enough. If you want to achieve fluency in a foreign language,
you'll also need to apply three more principles. First of all, you'll need effective methods. If you try to memorize a list of words for a test tomorrow, the words will be stored in your short-term memory, and you'll forget them after a few days. If you, however, want to keep words long-term, you need to revise them in the course of a few days repeatedly using the so-called spaced repetition. We're all very busy and no one really has time to learn a language today.
But we can create that time if we just plan a bit ahead. There are so many things we can do without even planning that extra time, such as listening to podcasts on our way to work or doing our household chores. The important thing is to create a plan in the learning. I will listen to a YouTube video while having breakfast. If you create a system in your learning, you don't need to find that extra time because it will become a part of your everyday life.
If you want to learn a language fluently, you need also a bit of patience. It's not possible to learn a language within two months. But it's definitely possible to make a visible improvement in two months if you learn in small chunks every day in a way which you enjoy. And there is nothing that motivates us more than our own success. I vividly remember the moment. when I understood the first joke in German when watching Friends.
I was so happy and motivated that I just kept on watching that day two more episodes. And as I kept watching, I had more and more of those moments of understanding these little victories. And step by step, I got to a level. where I could use the language freely and fluently to express anything. I can't get enough of that feeling, and that's why I learn a language every two years. Now, some of you may be thinking, that's all very nice to enjoy language learning, but...
Isn't the real secret that you polyglots are just super talented and most of us aren't? Well, there's one thing I haven't told you about Benny. Benny had 11 years of Irish, Gaelic and five years of German at school. Couldn't speak them at all when graduating. Up to the age of 21, he thought he didn't have the language gene and he could not speak another language. Then he started to look for his way of learning languages. And today...
Benny can easily have a conversation in 10 languages. Does that sound like a miracle? Well, I see such miracles every single day. So if you've also tried to learn a language and you gave up thinking it's too difficult or you don't have the language talent, give it another try. Maybe you're also just one enjoyable method away from learning that language fluently. Maybe you're just one method away from becoming a polyglot.
That was translator and polyglot Lydia Makova. You can watch her full talk, The Secrets of Learning a New Language, at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week. found in translation. This episode was produced by Harsha Nahata, Andrea Gutierrez, Lane Kaplan-Levinson, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes...
James Delahousie, Rachel Faulkner-White, Matthew Cloutier, and Katie Monteleone. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray, Josh Newell. Hannah Glovna, and Trey Watson. Our theme music was written by Ramteen Arablui. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.