Tag: YouTube

Kurzgesagt – in short, not just for Germanists!

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A content shout-out ostensibly just for Germanists this week – the fabulously entertaining and informative Kurzgesagt (‘in short’), otherwise known as Dinge Erklärt (‘things explained’), the online animated explainer channel that is well into its second decade.

It’s one of the social media accounts that’s been in my feed for a while now, drip-feeding short, quirky content into my algorithm and making me feel like I’m wasting a bit less time with the socials scrolling. It’s a bit what if, a bit how things work, and a very decent bit silly, too – perfect if you like your German practice served on the fun setting.

Not a Germanist? Not a problem!

It must have occurred to the Kurzgesagt team pretty early on that they were on to a winner, as multiple language ports started to pop up. The first port of call is through their English-language channel, with the same name plus the tag ‘in a nutshell’ to drive the point home. Really? I’m all for importing new foreign-language terms into English without the gloss support! But that’s another blog post…

Anyway, Kurzgesagt has gone properly polyglot over the years. Sibling channels have popped up in a whole stack of languages. That means the same Duo-like cute birds and backdrop of cosmic existential dread, just in different words:

Pro tip: lots of videos appear on several of these channels. Watch one in English first, then again in your target language, and you’ve basically got a free, officially translated parallel text.

In the Kurzgesagt mould

If you’d rather go home-grown than in-translation, there are alternative native explainer and science populariser channels which match Kurzgesagt’s curious, slightly daft spirit:

  • French: DirtyBiology. It starts from pop culture or odd-sounding questions and somehow lands on proper science. If you want something meatier, try Science Étonnante, which goes deeper (think sixth form and up).
  • Spanish: QuantumFracture. Physicist José Luis Crespo’s animated physics channel is one of the big beasts of Spanish-language science YouTube. CdeCiencia is good for seconds.
  • Italian: Geopop. Geologist Andrea Moccia explains earthquakes, engineering and everyday science with slick 3D animation. Try Barbascura X if you like your marine biology with a side of satire.

Scandi bonus round

The Nordics do their science explaining mostly through their public broadcasters, so these are shows rather than channels, but they’re very bingeable:

  • Icelandic: Ævar vísindamaður (“Ævar the Scientist”). Ævar Þór Benediktsson’s science show for kids on RÚV is all experiments, famous scientists and big questions, like whether you could drill right through the Earth’s crust. For bite-sized bits, look for the short clips in Vísindahorn Ævars.
  • Norwegian: Newton, from NRK. It’s a kids’ science show that has been going since 2007 and now comes in snappy 12–15 minute episodes on NRK Super. Its motto is roughly “doing cool things scientifically and making scientific things cool”, and one episode had them redoing old YouTube challenges with dynamite. Very much the fun setting.
  • Swedish: Vetenskapens värld, from SVT. It’s the grown-up option: hour-long episodes, and one of SVT’s oldest programmes, running since 1971. If you’d rather keep it silly, look up Beppe Singer, a much-loved kids’ science presenter from SVT’s Hjärnkontoret.

Learner’s tip: kids’ science shows are brilliant for intermediate learners. They speak clearly, explain everything, and the vocabulary is genuinely useful.

In a nutshell…

So there you have it: a whole world of animated birds, exploding experiments and existential wonder, in pretty much whichever language you’re working on. The beauty of channels like these is that they sneak into your feed and do the heavy lifting for you. Subscribe to one or two in your target language, and before long the algorithm starts serving you useful scrolling. Guilt-free socials time? Now that’s a what-if worth exploring.

And if you’ve got a favourite explainer channel in another language, especially one for the Danes (I couldn’t find one!), do share it in the comments. Kurz gesagt: happy watching!

A classroom ready for teaching

Teaching to learn: boost your studies by helping others

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The idea of learning through teaching is nothing new. We find the idea in an old Latin proverb, docendo discimus (by teaching, we learn), possibly handed down to us from Seneca the Younger. The premise is simple: being able to explain what we know turns that knowledge from passive into active smarts.

We might also argue that the skill of teaching is facilitating learning, rather than bound to the actual content of that learning. It’s not necessarily about what you know, but how well you can explain (and re-explain) material – even new material. In this light, a natural next question is: can we teach without being experts in that content already? And are there learning benefits for us in doing so?

Primary Languages

The Primary Languages model rolled out in many UK schools is a great example of learn-while-teaching. Many teachers are not language specialists, but rather using teaching materials that allow them to stay one step ahead of the students.

The very best materials, like Linguascope‘s elementary resources, are packaged like ready-made lesson plans, which can be reviewed before class and form a roadmap for the teacher. Great teaching in this context is the skill of presenting, explaining and reviewing content, even if you’re just a few steps ahead of your class.

Peer teaching

In the classroom setting, learning through teaching can be just as powerful between peers. Students may be tasked with learning material in order to teach it to other students, either contemporaries or those in lower year groups. The resulting ‘altered expectations‘ – the knowledge that you’ll have to teach the material you’re learning to others – transform motivations and sharpen focus on really understanding. Also dubbed the ‘protégé effect‘, educational scientists have noted how preparation to teach results in students spending longer on material. One study provides empirical evidence for this ‘teaching expectancy‘ effect.

The idea has achieved some institutional acceptance already; educationalist Jean-Pol Martin has helped to instill the Learning by Teaching (Lernen durch Lehren) model as a popular method in German schools. The modern ‘flipped classroom‘ also has elements of student-turned-self-teacher, too, reversing traditional roles.

Build teaching into your own learning

So, teaching as learning has a long pedigree, and already has some good traction in the real world. But what lessons can we take from this for our own language learning?

Bug friends and family

Share with friends and family what you’re learning. They don’t ‘do’ languages? Then break it down as simply as possible. Tell them about a quirk of your target language that you find unusual. Think you’ll bore them to tears? Then find some way to make it interesting to them. The more challenging, the harder you’ll have to think – and the more that material will stick.

To get the interest of family and friends, I’ve actively looked for things that will make them laugh in the past. Never underestimate the power of humour in learning! Funny-sounding words (Fahrt in German is always a good one), weird idioms (tomar el pelo – literally ‘pulling the hair’ for ‘pulling someone’s leg’ in Spanish) and other oddities speak to the imaginations of the most reluctant listeners. “You’ll never guess what the word for ‘swimming pool’ is in French…”

Find a learn-and-teach partner

You can go beyond sharing humorous factoids and foibles. Find a fully-fledged language partner – someone who is as motivated as you to learn the language – and devise a schedule where you take turns in teaching vocabulary or grammar points each week. You’ll be activating those ‘teaching expectancy’ effects that worked so well in the classroom studies above.

Create resources for other learners

A revision technique I learnt as a student was to condense important points into simple explanations for others. If you can explain something complicated in a new, simpler way, then it’s a good sign that you really understand it.

Something I’ve been doing recently is to revisit my Castilian by creating Spanish revision videos for beginners. It’s been a form of revision for me, activating old knowledge bases that were starting to fade through lack of use. And because of the interconnected nature of knowledge (the neural networks of our brains), switching on a few buried memories triggers and refreshed many more connected informational blobs.

It’s easy to find a platform to share your homemade revision resources these days. Starting a YouTube channel or a Facebook group could be the perfect platform for your own learning through teaching.

Teaching is connecting

At the heart of it, learning through teaching embodies what languages are all about: making connections, building bridges. Try working some of these ideas into your own learning, and enjoy the social splashback!