Steve Kaufmann

Kaufmann was born in Sweden in 1945 to parents from the town of Prostějov in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the Czech Republic. His parents were bilingual in both Czech and German. At the age of five, in 1951, the family moved to Montreal, Canada, where he grew up.[2][3][4] In June 1962, Kaufmann quit his construction job and looked to find a ship in the docks he could work on in exchange for taking him to Europe. On his third attempt at asking, he was given a job aboard the German tramp steamer, the Gerda Schell, which had lost a sailor in Quebec City. He arrived in London ten days later. After a week there he caught a ferry at Dover and landed in Ostend, Belgium, before heading to France.[4] After a year living in Grenoble, he continued studying politics at the L'Institut d'Études Politiques (Institute of Political Studies) and learning French in Paris.[4][5][6][7]

Kaufmann hitchhiked through Europe after his studies, picking up basic language skills in Spain, Italy and Germany.[4] He went on to join the Canadian diplomatic service, where he began learning Mandarin in Hong Kong in 1969, and became fluent in it within a year of full-time studying.[4] When re-posted to the Canadian embassy in Japan in the early 1970s, he had to learn Japanese.[8] Moving from his role as a trade commissioner, he then used his language ability in commercial trade,[9] living in Japan for 9 years.[10] Eventually, mainly later in life, he started learning more languages.[8]

Kaufmann appears at conferences to speak on his language learning techniques and abilities. He also runs a number of social media channels discussing his experiences of language learning and suggested techniques, [12] [13][14] both of which focus on language learning techniques and assisting people who are learning language.[11][15] He was one of the founding organisers of the North American Polyglot symposium.[11] Kaufmann travels to learn languages, and has given numerous interviews in native languages on various television channels around the world, in languages such as Chinese, Russian and Ukrainian.[16] He has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.[17]

Kaufmann has been studying languages for over 50 years.[18] He advocates total immersion in the learning process.[19][20] He places great emphasis on absorbing the language by reading text and not worrying too much about unfamiliar words, believing that they will gradually be acquired through repeated reading. Though he advocates using techniques such as flashcards to memorize difficult words, most of his learning time goes into listening to native speakers and reading texts. He is particularly fond of reading books on the history of the country or region of the language he is learning in the native language.[3] He is an advocate for older people learning, and states that age is not necessarily an impediment to learning a language.[21] He also recognizes mistakes as a natural part of the learning process, and believes that people can still be considered fluent even with some mistakes.[3]

Kaufmann started to learn Russian, his 9th language, when he was 60.[8] As of 2020 he has an understanding of 20 languages, though his ability to speak and write in them to a highly proficient level varies considerably. He has stated that he rarely writes in the languages, and that revisiting acquired languages he is out of practice in can be challenging initially when interacting with a native speaker.[3] The languages he speaks aside from English are: French, Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), Japanese, Korean, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Persian.[22] As of 2020 he stated that after studying Turkish he is now focusing on learning Arabic and Persian, and spends time listening to Arabic TV series and Al Jazeera news, and reading books on Arabic and Persian history.[3]