User:Vincent Pace/sandbox/Steve Kaufmann

Steve Kaufmann (b. 1945) is a Canadian polyglot linguist, author, award-winning blogger and the founder of the language-learning website LingQ. He currently speaks twelve languages to varying degrees of fluency: Cantonese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.

Life
Kaufmann was born of Jewish parents in Czechoslovakia. In 1945, his parents fled with him to Sweden and they emigrated to Canada when Kaufmann was five years old, and he grew up speaking only English.

He studied French at McGill University and later in Paris.

Kaufmann joined the Canadian Foreign Trade Service in 1962. He spent the period from 1968-1971 as trade commissioner in Hong Kong, and from 1971-1974 he was assigned to the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. He learned Mandarin and Japanese on these two assignments overseas.

From 1974-1977, Kaufmann worked in a major Canadian lumber exporting company's Tokyo office. He was later hired by a rival Canadian lumber company, which led to another two-year stint in Japan, and continues to work in the lumber industry today.

He began learning Russian at age 60 and Portuguese at age 62.

Language-Learning Method
In 2005, Kaufmann published a book detailing his language learning technique. The previous year, he had founded The Linguist Institute to apply his language-learning technique, and the main method by which that has been done is the language-learning site LingQ. Since 2008, Kaufmann has also maintained a blog that further explains his language-learning techniques. In 2009, the blog was named the number-one language-learning blog and the number-two overall language blog.

Kaufmann's language-learning method consists of exposing learners to a great deal of target language input through audio and subsequently texts of the same audio, and later through conversation with native speakers and writing corrected by native speakers. The method largely eschews the grammar instruction, although does not do away with it completely, and delays language production until a learner has had a great deal of exposure.

Criticism
Kaufmann's technique has not been without criticism. The reliance on massive input to teach grammar has been criticized as not being reliable, and clearly failing in cases such as where certain native speakers never learn proper grammar. It has been criticized for being insufficient for academic reading. On the other end of the spectrum, it has been criticized for not being ideal for those with limited literacy in their first language.