Steve Kaufmann (born October 8, 1945) is a Canadian internet personality known for his language-learning content on YouTube, and the LingQ online language-learning platform which he co-founded.
Kaufmann was born in Sweden in 1945 to Jewish parents from Prostějov in Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.
His parents spoke Czech and German.
1951
He grew up in Montreal, Canada after he and his family moved there in 1951 when he was five.
1962
In June 1962, Kaufmann quit his construction job and worked aboard a German tramp steamer in exchange for passage to Europe.
After a week in London, he visited Belgium, then spent a year in Grenoble, France.
He studied politics at the L'Institut d'Études Politiques (Institute of Political Studies, commonly known as Sciences Po) and studied French in Paris.
He hitchhiked through Europe, picking up basic language skills in Spain, Italy and Germany.
1969
He went on to join the Canadian diplomatic service, where he began learning Mandarin in Hong Kong full-time in 1969, and allegedly became fluent within a year.
1970
When he was re-posted to the Embassy of Canada, Tokyo in the early 1970s, he learned Japanese.
After his role as a trade commissioner, he used his language abilities in commercial trade, living in Japan for nine years.
He eventually learned more languages, mostly later in life.
2007
Along with his son, Mark, Steve co-founded the language learning platform LingQ in 2007.
Kaufmann appears at conferences to speak on his language learning techniques and abilities.
He also has social media channels where he discusses language learning, primarily to assist learners.
He was a founding organizer of the North American Polyglot Symposium.
He travels to learn languages, and has given interviews in native languages on television and on YouTube, including in Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), Russian and Ukrainian.
He has been a regular contributor to the Huffington Post.
Kaufmann has spent over 50 years studying languages.
He advocates total immersion in the learning process.
He places great emphasis on absorbing the language by reading texts and by not worrying about unfamiliar words, believing that they are gradually acquired through repeated reading.
Though he supports using techniques such as flashcards for memorizing difficult words, he spends most of his learning time listening to native speakers and reading.
He is particularly fond of reading books on the history of the country or region of the language he is learning, written in that language.
He prefers not to have a fixed study schedule and enjoys listening to content in his target languages while performing other tasks.
He believes that age does not impede learning a new language and that older people can learn languages as well as younger people.
He believes mistakes are a natural part of the learning process, and that people can be considered fluent despite making mistakes.
Kaufmann started learning Russian, his ninth language, when he was 60.
As of 2024, 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 said that he rarely writes in the languages, and that speaking languages he has not used for a while can be initially challenging.
As of May 2023, Kaufmann speaks these languages to varying degrees:
