I'm Elise Hugh with TED Talks Daily.

Today, learning foreign languages seems like one of those things that some people can do really

well, and for the rest of us, is a hopeless pursuit.

I tried learning Korean when I lived in Seoul, and after three years, I can still barely

order at a restaurant.

In this Ted Salon Talk from 2018, Polyglot and language mentor Lydia Machova, who speaks eight foreign languages, shares her secrets and those of other folks who can learn new languages super fast.

You'll come away from it thinking it's not as tough as you might think, even if you're missing that language learning,

Jean, like me.

I love learning foreign languages. In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years, currently working on my eighth one. 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

...