One problem with seeing the end-result of any feat, is not understanding the processes that went on to get to that point. As my friend Khatzumoto said to me once;

Olympic coverage really ticks me off… you can’t just go up to a person on game day and say how talented they are. So I came up with this rule, that in order to earn the right to watch the Olympics you should have to watch all of their training too!

This issue of ignoring the work that person had to go through to get to the point you see him is a huge problem in language learning. It’s easy to see someone speak a foreign language and dismiss that person as a “genius”, or say that it just comes naturally to them. As if it was their destiny, or a universe-conspired explosion of luck. This is discouraging as each of us thinks about how much we have to struggle, and study and fail because we don’t have natural talent.

While I will always strive to learn as quickly as I can, the fact of the matter is that I can’t, and no other learner can, skip the frustration involved and required to reach a useful level in a foreign language. One reason the title of this blog tends to annoy a lot of people is because of this presumption that I perhaps claim to go to the country, hang out with pretty girls and party all the time in glamorous James-Bond style and magically speak the language at the end; it’s just not fair, so it can’t be true. Learning a language takes hard work, and since spending “only” 3 months on it isn’t hard work, I must be lying.

But here’s the thing. Three months is a really long time. It’s not about counting the months, but counting the hours and the quality of those hours that makes the difference. A lot of my time, especially initially, is spent quite a bit outside of my comfort zone, and actually being tremendously frustrated, and this is something that very few learners do much, even if they spend “lots of time” studying.

The only way to get anywhere meaningful is through hard work

And I’ll let you in on a little secret that those who think I party my way to fluency don’t know: I’m pouring blood, sweat, tears and a crapload of sacrifices into this mission. More than the vast majority of those who have been “learning the language for years” can ever imagine. It’s about priorities and insane devotion to the task, not simply “working hard”. This is something that anyone else can do, but sadly most don’t.

One reason it will indeed take you years to learn a language is if you make sure you are comfortable the entire time. Stay indoors with software that mostly requires that you just click a few buttons, sit down with a book or go for a pleasant jog with a podcast on, go to a class and let the teacher do all the talking, or do exercises only at the level prescribed to you. Even if you are pouring everything into studying hard, is that really trying as hard as you can? Working hard is not the same as living hard.

In my mind, this isn’t good enough and it’s too academic. The real world presents you with problems and learning opportunities before you are ready. The more you are exposed to them, the faster you’ll be forced to learn.

To illustrate this, let me give you a comparison of what I am doing and what a typical expat learning the language might do:

My own long road through the shortcut: a typical day

Most expats: Get up, work, study some vocab in the break, after work get the weekly one hour private lesson, and speak in English the entire time, go home and study for an hour, then go out with your English speaking mates for the rest of the night, complaining about how hard Chinese is… in English. Satisfied that 2 or 3 entire hours of “hard” work mean he’s done his part on the “long road” to speak the language some day.

Me: Wake up to a radio in Mandarin telling me the news and desperately force myself to pick out as many words as I can, and wish I knew what was going on in the world after I understand only fragmented basic words. Start off grumpy.

Go somewhere completely different for breakfast today to force myself to get out of the lazy routine I was getting into, since my favourite place already knows what I want and I just confirm it with 2 or 3 of the same words. It’s possible I’ll order the wrong thing because of this. Order in broken Mandarin, with no more pointing and just saying “that” and consider it a success if I get what I wanted. Starting the day off with the wrong breakfast is damn annoying, but you can bet I won’t make the mistake again next time.

I really could have done with that filling hot egg and spinach muffin they have at the Starbucks across the road… but deal with the fact that a breakfast is a breakfast. At least I ordered it in a way that forced me to practice beyond repeating the same words I already know.

Study for several hours, then after doing work for several hours after that (yes, I have to work too! Luckily it’s part time for the moment) get out of the books and out of the house to do the important spoken project of that day (e.g. explain my way into having my cellphone repaired, go get a quick tea somewhere and force myself to ask a non-tea related question of the waitress, ask directions to something that I know the answer of to help me get used to expected vocab, record a video in Mandarin for Youtube commenters to take dumps on me etc. – anything that forces me to speak the language) Every experience is like pulling teeth as I am way out of my comfort zone, but each time I learn something important and remember the minor victories.

Then it’s time for the gym! But treadmills and dumbbells are boring. Instead I go to dance lessons included in my membership. An entire hour of instructions being shouted at me and others… in Mandarin of course. Trying to divide my attention between mimicking the instructor’s body movements precisely (luckily I have some experience dancing, so I keep up fine), and trying to figure out if I can contextually figure out what he’s saying and learn some new words. End the hour exhausted physically and mentally.

Go to a crowded cafe with lots of people speaking and try to study there until they close. Studying is the easy part. Sitting in a comfy chair with nice music and nobody pressuring me or waiting for me to say what I want to say… I could do this all day! Which is exactly why I shouldn’t…

An expat walks in with his local girlfriend, speaking in English, and is soon joined by several expat friends. I sigh about the fact that I still don’t know anyone in the city yet (I’m certainly not too shy to make new friends, just not able to do it effectively in the local language yet and not interested in the slippery slope of hanging out “just a little” with English speaking expats), and put my earphones on with the radio (some easy listening station, since love songs have much easier to distinguish slower lyrics) as I continue to study. My time to shine and really get into the meat of the part of language learning I love most will come in a few short weeks. All this studying is based on the issues I actually have with speaking, not on blindly going through courses.

Come home, and try to communicate with my terribly broken Chinese in an online chatroom. Succeed in convincing someone to meet up with me next week! Then realize how incredibly unprepared I am to sit down with someone and talk for more than 5 seconds in Mandarin. Anyway, I’ll figure that out when the time comes…

Then finally it’s time to “reward” myself with two hours of non-work-related English to end my day, but I keep it entirely online to make sure I actually speak as little as possible or no English at all in that day.

I naively think that they Internet is going to be a warm friendly and encouraging place, and then see forums, blog posts, comments, youtube videos reminding me (as if I haven’t heard it enough already) that I’m going to fail miserably and am not “taking this seriously”. After a pretty rough day of taking it seriously I get angry with Internet trolls and waste my wind-down time feeding them. Ironically these comments are helping me because I’m getting great negative reinforcement about exposing myself to English. When I speak in Mandarin everyone is friendly, and smiling and encouraging… and I feel energised after each time I’ve tried to say something new to someone, despite how awkward it is. But when I discuss speaking Mandarin in English then it’s doom and gloom.

The solution to this problem is obvious. More Mandarin, less English.

I shrug off the discouragement, and filter it out for some useful comments and feedback and take that to heart. As well as this many people are indeed giving me useful encouragement, which is crucial, and something I really need after the day I’ve had. There is an important process of dealing with the immense amount of negativity I’ve been getting for this project, and your own doubts that slow you down, and a process that has been the core of helping me to learn faster that I’ll discuss in the next post.

Then I remember that there is a big X at the top right of the window and I can turn them off… and I go to bed to start the process all over again the next day.

Are you under pressure to improve all the time?

It’s not fun to be stuck in this stage, and the whole point of it is that if you want to stick to your guns and be 100% devoted, you can’t start sharing your frustrations with anyone in person yet, because you don’t even know the word for “frustration”. But I know from experience how much all this hard work can pay off in terms of friendships and exposure to sides of a culture many passers-through never get to see.

Despite the fact that I’m not enjoying myself much in this stage of the language learning process, I am enjoying the language. It’s the most logical, consistent and straightforward language I’ve ever come across!

Studying the grammar, vocab, tones, word order and characters are the easy part. The hard part is to force myself to actually use them instead of just sitting down with a book all day, which is so tempting as that is well within my comfort zone. The hard part is to go up to someone when I speak so desperately slowly still, and doing it anyway.

All of my frustrations are based on the interactions I force myself into, as it’s quite lonely to have to go through this rough stage of not being able to express myself at a useful level yet. Many expats don’t really have this frustration, because after a few brief attempts at trying, they will go back to their friends and vent in English. I know that if I can stay with this frustration a little longer, then the level of frustration will very quickly start to evaporate.

Since I didn’t make it clear before, I’ll specify it now: I’m learning Chinese so that I can speak it for the rest of my life. This is not like some other missions I had in the last year or two where I was just checking out a language and learning what I needed for that single experience. So all my work is focused on long term benefits for short term sacrifices. I am not hanging out with the many fun and interesting Taiwanese who speak English because this is only the first time I’ll be in the country, and I want to make sure I can see the many sides English speakers are prevented from seeing, in my last month here on this visit, as well as helping me fully appreciate mainland China when I get to visit it after these 3 months are up.

If this means I have to have a rough one or two months of really frustrating entire days and way less socialising than I like (but still plenty of speaking) before I can use the language confidently and start to make deep friendships, then it will have totally been worth it.

Everyone struggles, but some struggle more efficiently

Those of you who will have seen my first video attempt at Mandarin, will see in my face how much I’m trying to think to force basic words out of me (or in this case… ba…sic….syll…a…bles), and may appreciate that maybe there is no quantum leap of merrily skipping through frustration for anyone. This is why I shared that video with you, and will likely make another one again in two weeks – just one video at the end could not possibly tell the whole story.

Everyone struggles, and I hope you can see that I’m going through the same problems any language learner has to go through, and actually many other issues that most language learners don’t have to go through because of my intensity and avoiding of English speakers, leading to all of my interactions throughout the day being superficial.

There is a huge difference in how I’m approaching this. Instead of skipping frustration, I do what few others will – I charge into it and fill my entire day with it. It’s like tearing off a band-aid; most people do the “hard stuff” of feeling like an idiot in early stages of language learning in very small doses. I’m doing lots of study of course, but what really defines my day is what I do away from the books and audio and comfy chairs.

While I got the usual Internet “warmth” of people laughing at me, or reminding me… again… that what I’m aiming for is impossible (seriously people, look impossible up in a dictionary or figure out what it really means will you!) after uploading that video, I also got some useful feedback of what to focus on next, and having produced the video forced me to learn things I hadn’t before, that no book could EVER teach me.

The video isn’t so impressive and that’s the point. I’m not pulling any rabbits out of any hats in this mission and I’m not merrily skipping my way up to higher spoken levels overnight. I’m struggling, but doing so more efficiently and more consistently than most learners would. When learners tell me that it takes “at least 5 years” to speak Mandarin, I have to ask them frankly – what the hell were you doing for those five years? I’m not smarter than you, I’m just more willing to take more punishment and feel like a complete idiot most of the day.

I feel like the myth that you are “smart” if you learn languages, makes too many people unwilling to accept that they will not be able to argue politics and deeply share their feelings if they dared to speak in their first weeks, before they are “ready”. Any idiot can learn a language, and knowing this means that I can accept that perhaps I have to be that idiot.

You feel really stupid when you try to use a language in situations that are outside of your comfort zone, and that’s precisely why you need MORE of these situations, not less of them.

If you charge into the frustration, embrace it, and fill up all your free time with it, then you WILL get to the other side much quicker. Too many learners only do these annoying practice things, once in a while, and it’s what slows them down tremendously. Doing it the hard and intensive way is damn stressful, and I can confirm that. I’m not interested in the easiest way to learn a language, I want the most efficient way.

Enough of this easing yourself in gently nonsense. That’s precisely why it’s taking you so much time.

Hopefully my next video will be much more interesting (unlike the first one, something I’d be very happy to show to a native) and it will be because I’ve been through hell to get to it But I’ve been to hell and back several times by now and know the path intimately.

Totally worth it every time.

Your thoughts on this welcome in comments below as always!
Similar Posts:

• How to think in a foreign language (it does NOT “just happen”)
• Learning enough of the language to get by on the flight over
• Benny’s TEDx talk: Speak from Day One
• Travel phrasebooks: a serious language learner’s best first book to study
• How to make time if you are too busy

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The only way to get far quickly is to get out of your comfort zone (my typical day learning Mandarin) is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yhnWnR1g7M

If you’re a new reader here and would like the most concise version of my best advice to speak from day one, then this video is for you

If you’re a long-term reader and have wondered who/what precisely inspired me to start on this road to become a polyglot some day, then you will see me finally share that story in this video.

Although this was only the second time (hopefully of many) in my entire life that I’ve spoken publicly in front of a decent sized audience (the first being at TBEX), a combination of several camera men, a decent microphone and a cool audience made me look like I didn’t hurriedly prepare the speech the night before, and I think I actually managed to convey the speak from day one message pretty well!

Speaking at a TED associated event has been something I never even dreamt possible, but I was hoping to some day. You may remember that I asked for some help from my site readers (as a birthday present) to vote for me to speak at SxSW (an event in Austin in March)? In the end, they weren’t interested despite the many votes (probably for the best as that would have made it impossible to have 3 uninterrupted months to devote to Mandarin), but the real reason I wanted to speak there was to build up my speaking resume to maybe be considered by a TEDx event some day.

Luckily for me, those at San Antonio wanted me to share my simple message in true TED style. It turns out San Antonio has America’s largest Hispanic population that does not speak Spanish, so they were especially motivated to hear my story. Since I’m so grateful for the opportunity, I’ll forgive them for misspelling my name

Since this was only my second time ever on stage like this, if you have any feedback make sure to let me know in the comments! This way I’ll improve the message in any future speaking engagements. If, however, you think this is the kind of quality you expect in a TED talk, please contact the TEDx team and let them know that so that they may consider putting it on the big TED! Being hosted as a TEDx video means that most of the people who view it will likely come from my website, but if big TED took it on, I could get this message in people’s iTunes stream, and on TEDs official Youtube account and main webpage.

Of course there are no sales pitches and not a single mention of my website on the video, since I wanted to focus only on the simple, but life-changing message that speaking a language is what makes a world of difference, not studying it.

To suggest this video for TED, just write a quick message to tedxtalks AT ted DOT com mentioning my name as the TEDxSanAntonio speaker, with the title “Rapid Language Hacking”, as perhaps a candidate for TED and hopefully they’ll consider it! To be honest, I really feel the TED stream needs something like this after their discouraging message about language learning somehow got shared. The stream needs some balance!

After sending the email, leave your thoughts in the comments below; really appreciate it!
Similar Posts:

• Language Hacking tips for English speaking travellers (My TBEX talk)
• Redifining your motivation
• Combining learning languages with your hobbies: My first video in Czech!
• 7 reasons why you should sing to learn languages
• How to prepare, record & upload a video entirely in a foreign language just after starting to learn it

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Benny’s TEDx talk: Speak from Day One is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

One understandable misconception from people when they first arrive on this site is that I would think it takes exactly three months to learn a language.

To me the question and answer “How long does it take to learn a language?” “X months/years/lifetimes” is ludicrous, as it leaves far too much undefined and only caters to lazy one-size-fits-all mentalities, which is something I personally detest about many major expensive language learning courses.

Why 3 months then?

The reason I chose three months has nothing to do with any linguistic research about the time it takes to learn the “right” amount of words, or how long it takes for your mind to adjust to a local language, or anything of the sort.

It’s because that’s typically the tourist visa limit for visiting a country, or the time I personally like to spend in a country.

Yes, that’s where my three months comes from! It’s lifestyle related, not language related.

In three months, I can get into a comfortable routine, maybe have a girlfriend, get to know a city well, take a few weekends to visit the surroundings, and most importantly make good local friends. And yet, it’s short enough that I know another trip is on the way soon so I am still definitely a “nomad” and traveller. I consider it the “Goldilock’s zone” of not too little and not too much.

The question should never be “how long does it take one to learn a language” but How long do you have? or How intensively are you willing to invest your time?

Four year MIT course in one year?

To show you a parallel example that emphasises intensive use of time, my good friend Scott Young has decided to do the entire four year Computer Science course offered at MIT in just one year (and is blogging about his “mission” in the same way I blog about mine).

At the two month point he recently confirmed that he’s done approximately the equivalent of the entire first year course already, so it looks like he’s on track! What he is doing isn’t being recognised by MIT, but he is sitting the tests and correcting them himself and at the end of his year he will very likely know as much as any MIT Computer Science graduate.

This mission really emphasises how it makes little sense to say that it takes a very specific amount of time (e.g. four years) to learn anything. It depends on the person. Most people at college are not structuring their time as well as Scott is, so they’ll attempt to fit into their university’s randomly assigned four year box.

If you don’t learn independently, the fastest you’ll ever learn is as slowly as the course progresses. There is something to be said about independent learning.

Why you can learn a language quicker

The thing is, I fully intend to learn a language to fluency (without arguing too much about semantics, I’d simply say it’s along the lines of the level of comfort I have when I spontaneously speak French or Spanish or my other languages with natives) in three months starting in January, for a language totally unrelated to anything I’ve ever learned before.

The reason Scott and I can do such things is because we set ourselves tight deadlines and plan in a way that allows us to make them realistic. For me, the “secret sauce” is constant exposure to natives in real social environments and speaking from day one.

I don’t spend my three months studying the language, I spend them living the language. As well as this, I’m never learning a language full-time. I spend time alone on my computer, doing work (writing these blog posts take time, but as you’ll have seen this year I’ve also been adding lots of features to the site. This month I’m preparing a video course about speaking from day one that I’ll release just after the New Year). So even with less than half-time work investment, I still force myself to use the language as much as I possibly can.

I see anything else as an insult to the language itself, as you are ignoring the human aspect. Travelling to the country isn’t a necessary part of this; I learned most of my Portuguese while living in France, finding ways to meet up as regularly as possible with Brazilians.

When you learn independently you start to cut out things that are quite irrelevant. I use my engineering philosophy to decide that making mistakes is OK, and actually necessary – something many language courses tend to punish severely for, which is as idiotic a way to encourage learning to speak a language as I can imagine.

As well as this, I don’t focus much on literature or being able to write professionally in a short time, because that’s not directly related to my goal of speaking fluently. Such goals are important, but would work better as separate missions in my mind, if you wanted them. I don’t. I write text messages and read newspapers or magazines in my day to day life, so that‘s the level I need. When I feel my level is good enough and I am indeed ready, I have gone ahead with such things and consider several of my languages to be quite professional (having studied for and passed official European diplomas for these languages, which require such studies).

If you have short-term very well defined goals (make a phone call in the language within two weeks, learn all kitchen related vocab within an hour, have a 30 second chat in the language by the end of the first week etc.) rather than long-term goals that mean nothing (like “learn Spanish” – a New Year’s Resolution bound to failure) you can do so much more. It can feel intimidating to imagine doing everything that is involved in learning a language, but if you take it one step at a time, but make it so those steps push you to your limit, you CAN do a lot, much quicker.

It’s not the years you put in, but the hours you put in.

Enough with perfectionism; stop saying that you want to know every part of a language by some poorly defined end-goal (usually infinity), and be specific and do it quicker. When I say “fluency” I allow myself to make the odd mistake, and still have an imperfect accent. Fluency is not the same as being bilingual, and the fact that I’m not aiming for perfection is great because it means that a mere mortal like myself can do it in a finite time.

How much time does it take “the average person” to learn a language? Who bloody cares! I’m not a statistic, and I hope you don’t consider yourself one either. So “average” means nothing here, because you are unique in your advantages. Pick a tight deadline and a realistic solid end-goal and work with it. Even if you only get to 90% of your end-goal you have achieved so much more than most people.

Thoughts? Share them in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• How to achieve a New year’s resolution to learn a language: turn it into a mission
• Mini-goals are the path to achieving fluency
• Hitting a brick wall in your language progress
• Redifining your motivation
• Learning grammar… do I have to?

----------------------------
How much time does it take to learn a language? is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Last week I shared some FAQs for a long-term traveller, and taking a bunch of questions that readers have been sending me on Facebook, Google plus, twitter and the LHL email list, now I’ll discuss some language learning issues that people have been wondering about.

Note that I discuss FAQs about the website and my missions separately here.

As you can see, half of these are requests for advice and the others are curiosities about my personal experience as a language learner. Feel free to ask more questions in the comments (after searching the site to see whether I’ve answered it already or not), and you can get an interesting more in-depth discussion about what is causing you problems if you ask the Fi3M community in the forums.

How do you stay motivated to keep learning through the long intermediate stage?

This one is never a problem I have because my work in a language is not study focused. [Or when it is study-focused I have a short term looming deadline I can't escape, like when I sat the C2 German exam.]

Studying over the long term can get boring quickly, but I aim to practically use my language as often as I can. If I have a looming coffee date in the language that I’ve set up even if I’m not in the country, then my motivation to study is very strong and I’ll do some SRS flashcards, maybe read some text to have hard words highlighted, or even study grammar to fine tune my mistakes.

This way I am doing more than simply speaking, but speaking is always the core. The fact that I know I’m going to use the language for real means that I’m motivated to improve it ever so slightly just before the meeting. Each one of these “last minute” study sessions adds up.

When you are learning and using it, and serious about improving, the motivation will always be there.

Have you ever used a foreign language you know well to learn another one?

Yes – one of my favourite books to help me get the basics of a language is the Assimil de poche series, written in French. I learned a lot of my Hungarian, Turkish and many other languages with this book. Interestingly enough, I find their Irish one (L’irlandais de poche) to be among the best introductions to the language that I’ve come across; way better than so many English attempts.

And there have been countless times where someone helps me to learn a language, explaining it in another language to me, which is not English. Many of my Italian friends are those I met in Spain, on the Erasmus exchange program. So when I visited them in their home town, they helped me advance in Italian, constantly explaining things I didn’t understand in Spanish, since they wouldn’t speak English themselves.

How can you join in on a conversation when you don’t understand every word?

This question screams perfectionism to me, which is a terrible mentality to have for language learning.

You don’t need to understand “every word” to join in on a conversation!

When I’m learning a language, there will be many times that I barely understand half of the words I’m hearing. This is obviously to be expected. Accept it.

What you can do instead is learn to extrapolate, based on the mountains of context and non-verbal cues, and fill in the gaps thanks to the one or two words you do understand. I gave a detailed example of how I did this in the initial stages of re-learning German here.

And for your part of the conversation, don’t forget to use connectors to ease the flow.

What about keeping up with a group of natives?

This is an intimidating situation, but you can’t just skip over the frustrating bit, study passively until you are “ready” and then feel comfortable “some” day. You have to dive in and force yourself to get used to it. When you are focused and trying to engage, or at least keep up, with time your skills will improve.

To ease along this process, just try your best to keep up and fake it a little. Nod politely and guess what they are saying. Encourage them to do all the talking, to ease some pressure off yourself.

When not with them in person, expose yourself to as much natural content of natives as you can! Download podcasts (NOT language learning ones, real ones), listen to online radio or watch a movie without subtitles. The level you should have here is more or less the same for keeping up with a conversation two natives are having in front of you. These speakers will not slow down for your benefit.

If you’ve downloaded audio, then use a tool like Audacity to slow it down, so you can hear things a little easier if they are speaking too quickly for you, and send tricky segments of the text to Rhinospike to have a native help you out with a transcription.

Then turn on the subtitles on the movie, but only have subtitles in the language itself to help you associate the sounds with the written word. Translated subtitles are next to useless for learning a language, because most people will just read them and not need to listen at all, perhaps only picking up random new vocabulary, but not training themselves in focusing on understanding the native language on its own merit.

As with everything, try, try, try again and with time your skills WILL improve in keeping up with natives. Accept that it will be frustrating, and that this is totally natural, but will pass.

Do you feel like a different person when speaking different languages?

Yes. Part of the way I separate languages in my head and not mix them up, is to create a ‘personality’ that I associate with the languages.

So everything changes for me when I switch to that language; my body language, the topics I would be likely to discuss, if I’m chilled out, or more outgoing, etc. based on what’s more appropriate in that language and culture.

There are so many benefits to attempting this. It convinces that person not to speak English with you, when you lose major typical English-speaker traits, and thus makes them more comfortable around you and feel less that you are a “foreigner”, and open up to you more.

I curse way more in some languages than others, and act like a clown or more cultured, based on what I know works with people my age in that place. Ignoring such cultural aspects is a huge mistake when learning a language.

What language do you dream in?

I’m no expert on dreaming, but it seems to me that language is not an aspect of dreaming in any real sense. Language is a means of communication between two people and at best you can consciously force yourself to self-dialogue during the day in the language as I suggest below. But if you’ve spent all day with some noise on in the background and you think you were dreaming in that language because of it, it’s really just that. You THINK you were.

I could think that I speak Japanese in a dream, without ever studying it or knowing a single word of it. The same way I can think that I’m flying, or that a supermodel is tearing my clothes off. It’s a figment of my imagination.

So in my dreams I will think that I’m speaking some language with someone depending on where the dream takes place, and I’ll generally do this for any language that I’m actively working on or using.

But the fact that I think I’m “speaking” the language in my dream is meaningless as far as I’m concerned, since apart from distinguishing actual words on occasion, a dream flows in a way that makes actual “conversations” or even full sentences to simply not take place nearly all the time. It’s an illusion of speaking that you will remember in a blurry way in retrospect that we tend to with dreams. It didn’t really happen!

Shorter, less cynical answer: Probably half in English, a quarter in the current active language, and another quarter in a language I have learned before, even if I’ve forgotten it.

How do you stop thinking via English?

Thinking in English and translating it is a terribly slow way to communicate. Through constant real-life exposure, you will be forced to think quicker and the words will come out without you having to go via English.

One way of helping this is to learn vocabulary by images instead of dictionaries, and to force yourself not to say the word in English in your head.

I don’t think in English when speaking any language; the weird phrasing and direct translations and wrong word order make this an important point to work on.

Another thing that has helped me immensely is to force my inner dialogue to be in that language. So if I go to the fridge and it’s empty, I won’t think “Shite! I forgot to buy X!” but “¡Joder! Se me olvidó comprar X!”  if I wanted to encourage a Spanish mindset. This will be grammatically wrong and lack words in initial learning stages, but I’ll still do it as much as I can and it’s very effective in keeping up momentum and not switching back to English, even when alone.

Making sure the interfaces for all of your devices is in the target language also helps for virtual immersion when you aren’t with people, and doing as much as you can (reading, watching movies etc.) in that language without “relaxing” in English can squeeze that nasty English right out of you! Abandoning English altogether was the reason I could learn to think in Spanish so quickly in the first place.

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These are just some of the questions that I get asked a lot. I try to cover anything else I get asked on the blog, but in general I explained the vast majority of my learning process in the Language Hacking Guide. You’ll also get the general gist of most steps I take in learning a language by reading through as many blog posts as you can.

But if you think there is a question I still haven’t ever answered, feel free to ask it below. If it’s a really interesting question I may devote a whole blog post to it! Otherwise I’ll try to answer here or in a second FAQ post some time later

Once again, don’t forget to ask complex questions to the very active Fi3M forum, and don’t forget to subscribe to the email list to find out what my next language is by Monday!
Similar Posts:

• Learning enough of the language to get by on the flight over
• Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes
• How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months
• How to start learning Italian (video)
• The silent period – a comfortable way to waste time

----------------------------
Frequently asked questions for an experienced language learner is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Nearly everywhere in the world, and with nearly every culture in the world, when you try to speak their language with them they are so pleased. They will encourage you and compliment you, and be happy to hear more.

Your fears are unfounded and you should just make as many mistakes as you can – they really don’t mind!

If you feel you are boring them with your basic level, don’t worry about that. Just ask lots of questions, and use conversational connector fillers and the chats will start to flow. By conversing regularly you will get years worth of advancement in a very short amount of time.

First: The reluctant ones are easy to convince

If you are answered immediately in English when you speak their language to them, don’t fret! They just need a wee bit of convincing and they’ll instantly ditch the English.

I have written in great detail before about How to convince natives to speak to you in their language.

Some people just need a little nudge, and if you read that post you can see how I suggest you should simply just ask, give your language learning story some context so they are on your side, start and continue in that language, and maybe even compromise and do an even exchange.

Honestly, in 99% of cases with most cultures you’ll convince them immediately and a post like this really isn’t necessary. But the reason I’m coming back to this point is for that very rare case where they still insist on speaking English to you, and in some cultures this is much more common than others. You’ve given your case, and spoken to them in their language and they still reply in English.

A few more gentle nudges

Before I charge into battle, I try to be nice and helpful to their English-speaking cause:

I tell them everything I know about where they can find free resources, and people, to practice their language, such as hosting a Couchsurfer. I give lots of my best general language hacking tips to learn a language quickly (as you can imagine after half a million words of blogging, and writing a book about it, I have a lot), but I do it in their language.

This way I am indeed helping them, while helping myself at the same time.

The way I see it, if they really need to practice and this conflicts with my own goals, I can take the approach of “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime” and if you advise the person well, that will help them way more than a few minutes of English conversation with someone who doesn’t want it.

One last thing to keep in mind is that that person may not actually be stubborn, but it’s just a cultural expectation. If you are dealing with a northern European there are obvious things many people forget (such as improving your R pronunciation) when trying to speak English to them.

And in some other places, like in my case Paris, I have found that looking at it from their perspective can change things incredibly and they will be happy to hear you speak their language if you make some tough cultural adjustments.

Are you passionate enough to do what it takes?

If they still insist on English, then I like to show that person how serious I am about speaking their language. Only by sticking to your guns can you win this “battle”.

And yes; I view it as a battle. They are hitting me with English, when I’ve made it clear I don’t want it and that it’s absolutely useless to me when I have a tight target in a short time in their language.

Frankly, it’s wasting my time.

This kind of thing happens to me rarely in my travels, since usually simply asking nicely does the trick pretty much every single time.

But when it comes down to a battle of wits of them consistently hitting me back with English, I am prepared and victorious every time. Some of what I suggest here is definitely not going to give the impression that you are a very nice person, but you have to ask yourself what’s more important? If you are passionate about speaking that language, then what are you willing to do?

You may be meeting this person on a regular basis, so even if they think you are a bit weird at least they will not be forcing English on you and disrupting your momentum.

If I’ve asked nicely and they keep at it, then I slap some sense into them and wake them up to the real world. Yes, these may seem much more aggressive, especially when you have just met someone, but you have to put your foot down from the start if you want to maintain that important decision to avoid English.

This is one of the main reasons I will learn a language so quickly – because I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty. No more Mr. nice guy.

It’s time to bring out the big guns

• I say that I’ll gladly speak all the English they want, but my rate for private English lessons starts at €50/hour and I require payment in advance. I ask them if they’d like an estimate in the local currency

Yes, I will say this with a straight face even when in an obviously casual social situation. I was an English teacher for many years, and it’s work that I charge money for. English lessons are a huge multi-million dollar industry worldwide and in too many cases they may actually just be using you for free English practice.

English is something to add to your resume, and I’ve seen many many cases of expats who are very “popular” simply because they are being used and not realising it.

If they give me the obvious retort that I should pay them, I sober them up:

• I remind them that I am the one who has travelled across the planet, moved my life, left my friends and family and my comfortable routines for this strange culture, and I need to speak the language if I’m to integrate into the country and have any chance of making a life and friends for myself. What have they done? They’ve stepped outside their door and demanded the first English speaker they see for free lessons. It’s selfish AND lazy.
• Next I tell them that there are plenty of interesting tourists or lazy expats who would love to speak English with them! They can practice with them, but not with me. I’ll gladly tell them how and where to find them.
• If we are in an English speaking country that they are a foreigner in, I remind them that it’s idiotic to say that they need me of all people to practice with. They can practice English with millions of others around them, but I’m one of the few who wants to learn their language.

One trick many will try is to talk you out of it by simply continuing their side of the conversation in English. If you’ve agreed to do this as part of a language exchange, then that’s great – otherwise it’s terribly annoying. So I keep at it, and then I call attention to it to catch them off guard.

I ask them why they are speaking English with me? It’s distracting and I don’t like it. They’ll never win this English to-and-fro with me. I tell them straight that they really don’t want to go up against me on this. They have no idea what they are getting themselves into.

Of course you realize, this means war!

When things are getting really ahead with them not budging, then I start to distract them with irrelevant information that will make them feel terribly guilty.

I tell them how historically, the beautiful Irish language was being suppressed by the British to the extent that it was illegal to speak it, and punishments for not speaking English were severe. This was a time the Irish were forced to use a language they didn’t want to, and that language was English.

Now I won’t do this in a “I hate the English” kind of way (half of my family is English, and I love hanging out with the English, so I’m the last Irishman you’ll ever see that untrue stereotype from), but I will be highly suggestive in how I present some historical information to compare the person I’m talking to, to an evil empire squashing my dreams.

What? I told you, this is war!

Next I really poor on the guilt – I tell them how I had to go to speech therapy when I was growing up, and how I simply don’t like English because I genuinely associate it with a language that I’ve struggled to communicate in over decades. Their language on the other hand, as much as I’m struggling in it, is more enjoyable because I don’t have those memories.

If you aren’t Irish or didn’t go to speech therapy, then you can of course use your imagination to give other reasons why you would tell them that speaking English makes you grimace.

And yes, I’ll actually grimace even at the very mention of the word “English”, and turn my nose up at it as if something stenches terribly. This is very powerful in emphasising the point.

I’ll also list some random things like how inefficient English is, how ugly it is etc., which is not particularly relevant because there is no such thing as a “better” language, but when pressed I can make you feel depressed to speak English by arguing my case  against it!

Again this isn’t necessarily fully true, as I obviously enjoy reading and writing in English and speak loads in English when I’m somewhere like America, but at the crucial moment I will turn my back on the language.

And then of course I’ll remind them that despite my poor grammar skills and weak vocabulary in their language, they are understanding me fine. It’s a little slower to speak to me in their language than it is in English, but it’s also slower to deal with my stubbornness to refuse to speak English, and honestly that is wasting way more time than me hesitating as I search for a word here or there.

No matter what their retort is, I have my own counter-attack, no matter how silly or illogical it might be. The point isn’t about arguing at a level of logic that would convince a university debate team; it’s about convincing that one person.

After the battle, everyone becomes friends

I am definitely among the hardest native English speakers in the world to actually convince to speak English, when I am eager to learn another language. And this is a huge part of the reason I will learn quicker.

In the process, I’ll maybe have somewhat messed up my chance to make a pleasant first impression on someone, but you know what? I’ll meet them later and they’ll get the picture and speak to me in their language. Any friends that are with them will do the same, and my decision to not speak English is maintained so that I will learn their language quickly.

It’s essential that people don’t associate you in their mind as an English-speaker. Making the switch later is much much harder, even if your level in the language has improved.

As aggressive as all of this seems, you will earn respect from the other person for standing your ground, and after their initial frustration that they can’t get English practice out of you, the subject will be changed and they’ll see how interesting you are in other ways.

Even when I’ve said really mean things like “I’d rather have my eyeballs boiled in acid than speak English with you” (which is easier than you think to get across in another language: you really just need the words “eye”, “boil” & “acid” – any poor grammatical construction will still make it obvious), I’ve become good friends with that person, and if one of their friends try to speak English to me later, they will actually be the ones dissuading them

As I said, meeting someone almost as stubborn as me is quite rare, but when I do, I show them I mean business. Any time you spend speaking English with a native of your target language is time wasted that you could be practising and progressing. Make the tough choice early on and stand up for yourself!

Any thoughts on these aggressive ways to not speak English? Let me know in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• How to convince natives to speak to you in their language
• Language Hacking tips for English speaking travellers (My TBEX talk)
• How I have spoken no English with locals for my entire first week
• How to speak multiple languages without mixing them up
• How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months

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Battle of wits: Nice and nasty ways to win when they want English practice is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

One of the biggest questions I get when I encourage people to just speak, no matter how bad your grammar is and how few words you know, is “What will I talk about?? They’ll just get bored and angry with me!”

This attitude is quite strange because it presumes a level of rudeness of foreign cultures that is (almost) never true. You’ll find pretty much everyone is so eager to hear you speak their language, if you would just give it a try!

But ignoring the reactions, and just focusing on what you would talk about, once again I find it to be a weird question. What do you talk about in your mother tongue? Surely that will do! With a bit of imagination, you can work around lack of words and share something you are passionate about.

And if anything, that vocabulary should be prioritised in your studies over what many courses may consider “essentials”. Talking about travel and language learning has always been more essential vocab for me to focus on than learning colours has.

While there are many answers to this (it really depends on what you like to talk about), the simplest advice by far which solves many problems is this:

To be interesting you have to be interested!

Learn how to ask questions.

Let the other person do the talking.

This way you are not under as much pressure. You don’t have to have a bubbly personality to keep them interested, you don’t have to give long speeches, and you don’t have to talk endlessly about yourself;

Ask them what they like – how is work going? What are they doing this weekend? Did they see the game yesterday? Do they like cats or dogs, and why? Who is their lifelong hero?

Think about questions that require answers much longer than a word or sentence. Something that opens up several minutes (at least) of interesting conversation.

When you ask good questions then they’ll do all the talking for you. You can keep up the flow with clever use of conversational connectors, which helps the other person feel that they aren’t waffling on uninterrupted.

I personally feel that the most valuable reason to learn any language is to learn about other cultures more directly, not to go around the world telling everyone how great I am. For this, you need to be a good listener, and that’s way easier than being a good talker.

As well as being easier and putting you under less pressure, it gives the other person the spotlight.

Everyone likes a good listener! Several studies have shown that the most “interesting” people you tend to meet in social gatherings are actually simply those who do very little talking, but show genuine interest in finding more about who they are talking to, by asking the right questions.

So try it – don’t know what to talk about? Ask the other person what they‘d like to talk about. The best way to be interesting is to be interested.
Similar Posts:

• How to convince natives to speak to you in their language
• Language Hacking tips for English speaking travellers (My TBEX talk)
• How to start learning Italian (video)
• How I have spoken no English with locals for my entire first week
• Looking for signs: understanding foreign body language

----------------------------
What will I talk about when my language level is so basic? is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnGG-_urLKk

The video gives my overview of this incredibly useful and totally free tool – check it out! As I say, today you are in for a treat

A new feature has been added to fluentin3months.com for everybody to use – a foreign language reading interface, which can be an incredibly useful tool to help you advance quicker in being able to read and absorb vocabulary in your target language no matter what that language may be.

All you have to do is go to fi3m.com/lwt and you’ll find it to be pretty straightforward to navigate, especially after looking at the video above and the links below to get an idea how to use it fully. If you don’t have a log-in for the Fluent in 3 months forum yet, get that here as your log-in will keep your languages, texts and stored words/phrases private just to you. You cannot access the online system without logging in.

Since this system is stored online, you will be able to read those texts on your computer, iPad (or other tablet) or your mobile device – all you need is an Internet connection!

Background

Last year I reviewed a website called LingQ, and while I can’t say I appreciated many of the features (or staff) of that commercial site I did actually really like specifically the reading interface. It was an encouraging and practical way to read texts in foreign languages (German in my case) and improve your vocabulary while you are at it.

The problem is that it’s not something I can globally recommend to people because too many important features are for subscription paid customers only (which can get expensive since it’s starts at $120/year for the basic account), and it has an extremely limited list of languages (i.e. not a single one of the six languages I’ve learned in the last year is offered on that site). And new features are added very slowly.

But I was very pleased to see that an open source foreign language learning system has been developed by J. Pierre, which has been inspired by LingQ, but gone way beyond it in adding many features, and no limitation on which languages you can study, and that it is totally free.

The only catch I saw was that it had a somewhat intimidating installation process. It’s not that it’s complicated, but the steps require many people to do some things in environments they are not at all familiar with. If you are not interested in using the online version on my site, then you can install it yourself locally on your computer. The problem is that you can only use it on that computer, and you can’t really use it offline anyway because that removes the dictionary feature.

So I worked with Eddie, who is a reader of the blog, to tweak the code such that people could skip that installation procedure and use it online instantly, and after some testing it is ready for you all to try out!

Instructions

There are many features of this reading system, and I wouldn’t hope to write an extensive explanation of them all here. Instead I highly recommend you check out the site of origin of the open-source system here:

lwt.sourceforge.net

This page explains everything you could hope to know about Learning With Texts, including detailed instructions on how to install it on your own computer (which you can skip if you prefer to use it on this site immediately). Videocasts of other people explaining its use are included, as well as an explanation of all features.

If you are unsure of using it after playing around a little, I’d recommend you start reading the instructions from here, but here are my brief instructions on how to go about reading your first text in the system. First make sure you know what text you’d like to read – go to a blog, or news website for your target language, or find other text like song lyrics you may want to learn. Then:

1. Sign up, log in and then just go to fi3m.com/lwt (or fluentin3months.com/lwt) whenever you wish in future.
2. Click “My Languages”. If your language is already included, great! If not, just click New Language and follow these instructions to fill in the information.
3. Back on the main page, select that language from the drop-down list, and then click My Texts and then New Text
4. Paste the body of the text you wish to read (not too long – up to 1,000 words or so should be fine) into the box, and add the appropriate title. If you have audio associated with the text (news reading or music with lyrics) then upload that audio to a free dropbox account in the public folder (or other online host), and paste the dropbox URL into the audio field so you have stop/play controls within the interface.
5. Click Save and Open and you will see the reading interface I showed in the video. Read through, and click words or phrases you don’t understand and the dictionary should open automatically in the bottom-right. In some languages an individual concept may be across multiple words (such as “get on with”, “like shooting fish in a barrel” etc.), so click that number (the appropriate word ending is indicated) to look that full term up instead. When you are sure of the translation, use the top-right panel to add that word to your personal study database, indicating its difficulty level.
6. Continue like this until you understand the full text!

After that you can test yourself using the built-in flashcard feature, or you can export the terms so that you can access them using a Spaced Repetition System. Further instructions to do that for LWT are given on this blog. This way you will be fully confident about the tricky words and know what they mean when they come up in future.

[One of the final bugs we're ironing out on the online version is that this export feature is not working in some browsers but is in others - that will be fixed as soon as possible, but switch browsers just for the export until then if it doesn't work for you.]

And of course by using the system more, you will improve your reading abilities more and be able to track how well you are doing. The number of words is not particularly meaningful (for example dog and dogs would count as two, not one word learned), but it’s motivating to see that number rise and see less and less words highlighted as you put more texts into it!

It’s also very useful to have your tricky words plucked directly out of texts for you to study so systematically.

Give it a try and let me know how useful you think it is in the comments below!

Since this is open source, you are welcome to code some new features yourself. If you’d like to contribute, or if you have suggestions for new features, please contact the author in the LWT forum here. He cannot help with bug reports unique to this site.

If you are having trouble using any features specifically on this site (that may work in the standard version), or need any tips on how to set-up Learning With Texts then head on over to the Fi3M forum LWT section and let us know!

Thanks and happy reading!
Similar Posts:

• Free video/audio chat, language group chat and games with other language hackers and native speakers!
• How to make your computer multilingual
• Honest & detailed review of the LingQ web-based learning system
• How to download free native-spoken podcasts & MP3s in almost any language
• How to convert PDFs/daily news/anything to ePUB/mobi for your eReader/Kindle

----------------------------
Introducing LWT: The free, open-source computer, iPad & mobile foreign language reading tool is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

In the last eight years, I’ve invested serious time into learning 16 languages (so far; I’ll be giving clues to the 17th one in the e-mail list throughout August, to be started in September. You can sign up to that on the top-right of the site if you think you’ll be able to figure it out!), maintaining and improving about half of them actively at a fluent level and forgetting some of the others.

One thing has become clear and will be no surprise to most people; (with everything else being equal) it gets easier to learn the next language, the more you learn.

Perhaps there are neurological pathways being formed, but I have a completely different theory for what gives me and others the “polyglot edge“.

Apart from my normal advice for speaking a language, I think the following are the real reasons that I and other polyglots will learn faster than a monolingual would with his/her second language. As you can see, most of these are actually things that you can easily start applying yourself, without having to learn a bunch of other languages first.

1. Confidence

When I first tried to speak Spanish and failed, there was a voice in my head telling me You’re an idiot with not enough vocabulary – who could possibly want to listen to you talk?? People will laugh at your mistakes! and of course this prevented me from trying at all. “Maybe if I go back and study some more then I’ll have enough to speak?” Repeat ad nausium.

Now when I try a language in my early weeks, I have done this so many times that I know the secret to super high confidence: think about nothing. Whatever I can say, I say it. Whatever I don’t know, I accept it as the way things are for now. Despite these I still walk up to the person and say something.

Even though I’m learning slower than normal in this mission, last night I still went up to a group of seven Turks and held their attention for several minutes with my Turkish, and they were all very pleased with what I was saying (and impressed that I was saying it in such a short time). There are many things I could have told myself to lead to me not even bother trying, but I ignored all that and just went for it.

Confidence is a huge boost that experienced polyglots have. They have failed hundreds of times before and “somehow” survived!

Summary: To get this edge, fail fast and fail often. Speak with people regularly. When you see it’s not that big a deal you’ll start to gain the confidence to let you try it more regularly.

I’ll do it great now because of I’ve got eight years of “proof” that the world definitely won’t come to an end if I walk up to those strangers and hit them with what I’ve got, no matter how little it is. Do you really need several years to figure that out and realise it for yourself?

2. Common words

If switching between closely related languages, of course you’ve got a boost from knowing the words they share. When I saw ordinateur for the first time in French, I knew what it meant because I had learned ordenador in (Peninsular) Spanish.

That’s great, but did you know that you can already do this to a very useful extent without having to learn an entire other language first?

If you are studying a Latin language for example (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese etc.) then realise that you have tens of thousands of words already before you even begin! In other languages you have words related to technology and brands.

Also, being well read in your own language helps a lot! I’m not actually well read (sorry! Only started reading actively recently when I finally ditched 15th century technology), however when I was applying to do a Masters in the states (long story) I had to sit the GRE exam. I failed the English mock exam, so I had to study a fat book of obscure/pompous English words, and then passed it. Learning these complex words I didn’t know before actually helped me in my Latin languages, since their cognates came up frequently!

No language is closed off. For example, it turns out Turkish has borrowed over 4,000 words from French! This has been a great boost for me, and many of these are also recognisable to English speakers who haven’t learned French. And when I learned Hungarian, I also managed to compile a list of many cognates I came across (linked to in my Why Hungarian is easy post). These cognates are there even though these languages are not even slightly related to English.

Summary: Among the first things I always do when I start a new language is to try hard to find a list of cognates (full or partial) that I can study. Depending on your language, try and Google to see if you can find a list and you may be surprised that you already have loads without needing to know a closely related language! Learn that list first for a huge boost!

3. Established techniques

A lot of the last eight years has been trial and error for me to test systems (reviewing Rosetta Stone, the Pimsleur Approach, and various websites and strategies to test them out). In some cases I have wasted my time and could eliminate the bad ones, while continuing with what I know does work.

As I eliminate more and more that is wasteful and take on more and more that works, I start to perfect a method that works incredibly well for me.

One way you don’t have to test out so much and waste so much time and money is to scrutinise other people’s experience and find what works best for you. If you read a few of my blog posts you’ll see if following my advice may be good for you. Then again maybe it isn’t. Have a look at other blogs and if you like what they say follow what they have. Here’s a list of some of the Internet’s most popular language lovers.

Some people, like me, devote a lot of time to testing out theories or interesting looking programs and techniques and sharing the results with you, so you don’t have to. But don’t take anything I or anyone else says as Gospel. Experiment for yourself, and realise that sometimes it’s not actually the method but the passion behind it, and that perhaps any method that isn’t harming you is helping you if you apply it right.

This may all sound a bit conflicting so let me summarise it as follows:

Summary: Research other people’s experiments (so you don’t have to do them), check to make sure you can trust them and if you have a similar learning style/personality, and try to follow their advice. If you find any conflicting advice that looks interesting, experiment and see if it produces better results. If it does produce better results, ditch the first approach immediately, even if it was recommended by an incredibly charming (and humble) Irish lad. Experiment fast, and establish your learning strategy quickly.

4. Once you speak one already it gets easier

There is a certain satisfaction with just knowing that you can do it. You have taken on the challenge of learning to communicate in a foreign tongue and have actually used it naturally with human beings. Once you get this Eureka moment, then everything does get way easier! You get the confidence discussed in point one immediately for any future languages.

The second, third, fourth times are going to happen because you know you can do it. You’ve already proven it to yourself!

To this day, when people ask me what the hardest language in the world is, my answer (after referring to that linked post) is that for me it was Spanish, because it was my first. I hadn’t gotten over the “I can’t do this!” barrier yet. Hungarian and Turkish are a walk in the park compared to what I had to deal with in Spanish.

Aha! I hear you say – you can’t get around this as a monolingual then, can you Benny?

Well actually, you can.

All natural languages have a lot of complexities to them that are going to slow you down when you learn them, so one strategy that I highly recommend is to make your target language your third (not your second) language.

The way to do this is to learn Esperanto, which was designed to be easy, for just a few weeks. Not years, but weeks. That’s a sacrifice definitely worth making.

Summary: By learning such an easy language with lots of people online willing to help, and lots of material to practice with (the Esperanto wikipedia has more entries than the Arabic one), you’ll reach the stage of being able to say I speak a foreign language quicker than ever before. This overlooked advantage will make a huge difference for when you get back to the language you are focused on.

5. Super amazing memory abilities!

Supposedly, the more words you learn, the better you get at learning them. This may be somewhat true, but the way I learn vocabulary has been something I picked up in recent years and are techniques that anyone can learn and apply themselves quickly.

I use image association to learn new vocabulary, look for cognates (as discussed in #2), and apply spaced repetition to important words so I don’t forget them. When you apply efficient techniques for learning new vocabulary, you will learn it quicker. Having done it with other languages before is irrelevant if you have used the technique enough to get used to doing it quickly.

6. Grammar-ese

For the first stages of learning a language, I specifically avoid grammar explanations as they will slow me down. However, once I’ve got the flow I actually get a book that has purely grammatical explanations and go through it in detail.

Now when I do this, the thing is that I have an advantage of the “17th” language I’ve learned already: grammar-ese. As an electronic engineer, eight years ago I didn’t have the foggiest idea what a definite article, conjugation, past participle, accusative and all those other thingies were. Now (somewhat reluctantly) after lots and lots of language learning books I know aaaaall about them!

In my own learning approach, diving into grammar explanations at the right time has helped me immensely to get beyond the speaking a bit stage into able to express myself very well. We ask ourselves a lot do I have to learn grammar? and for the first stages of learning a language I have to say definitely not. But… it certainly makes it easier to perfect it when you do speak grammar-ese, and at that time I do side a bit with the academics (for once) and get my head in the books.

And I do this a lot better because I stopped fighting grammar. Getting your head around grammar explanations aren’t hard, and grammar can be lots of fun (I genuinely enjoy it! And I hate studying). The problem is that grammar gets this really bad rep because of how it was presented to us in school.

When my teacher was telling us about DER/DIE/DAS/Accusative/Genetive/Dative in German class, I was daydreaming about anything else. So I get it! I know how you can be frustrated with grammar!

But the thing is, many polyglots speak and like grammar-ese. When it’s presented to you about a means of communication that you already have some comfort in, then it’s a far cry from the dull stuff your teacher wrote on the blackboard. So my words to monolinguals out there who dislike grammar are:

Summary: Leave grammar aside and focus on getting some flow in speaking your language and getting your point across, but then dive into it enthusiastically when you are ready to tidy up the edges. It can be very enjoyable and fascinating to discover the technical reasons why your target language work the way it does!

7. Momentum

All of the above points mean that I know what’s going on and start learning a new language with great momentum, and will learn it quickly. If you are focused enough and make sure you maintain your enthusiasm, and share your language mission with others for some accountability and to have friends to encourage you, then you can keep up this same rate!

Maybe you won’t be able to do it at exactly the same speed as a polyglot, but you can certainly give us a run and keep us on our toes! In many cases, readers of my blog have surpassed me quicker than I could have expected on their first foreign language, so I know it’s possible

So go give it a whirl! Not being a polyglot already is as bad an excuse as not having time, being too old, not being destined for it, and all the other non-reasons that people give.

Let me know what you think about this in the comments and then go be a polyglot
Similar Posts:

• How the Norman Conquest can teach you thousands of foreign words instantly
• Just 2 weeks learning Esperanto can get you months ahead in your target language
• How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months
• Starting to learn a language with the right attitude
• Steps to take to ensure you speak quickly AND learn grammar well

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How to learn to speak your 2nd language as if it were your 16th: The polyglot edge is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

I wrote in great detail before about why adults are much better language learners than kids, but now linguists are starting to chime in!

There is a stupid rumour going around that you can’t learn a language after a certain age (was it 6, or 12, or 14? I forget where the drunk blind man threw the dart that we have been basing this on) and considering I myself started properly at age 21, and how many people have been sharing their own success stories with me (if you have one, make sure to share it with all of us in the Fi3M forum’s success stories section – the best ones will get showcased on the blog!) I hope to have the ammunition to destroy this pointless demotivator.

The most discouraging TED talk ever

I’ve had some frustration with some linguists in the past when they make remarks that they can’t back up with relevant research, which serve no purpose but to discourage learners. But when they get taken seriously by the public, then I have to take a stand against it.

Among the worst examples include an otherwise interesting TED talk about The Linguistic genius of babies – in it she shows us a bullshit graph about the “critical period” for learning a language where all hope is lost from age 17. She drives it home with the comment “no scientists dispute this curve”. Really now?

She also claims that age ONE is where we can can no longer distinguish foreign sounds any more; “You and I can’t do that… we can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages”. This is just ridiculous. After some focused training, and sometimes even just a few seconds of paying attention, and you’ll hear it. In some cases, it’s harder and takes a wee bit more time, but it’s definitely not impossible.

She doesn’t have a clue what she’s talking about because she actually researches babies.

This stuff really pisses me off as the “research” tests in a context and environment that children are bound to win on anyway (such as traditional classroom learning) and doesn’t test in areas that adults would be better at. As far as I’m concerned this is totally irrelevant research, as well as being unhelpful. I can’t imagine how many people were on the fence, but saw a video like this or read some paper where kids came out on top… in classroom learning, and decided from that to give up, even though they have many many advantages the kids don’t.

Seriously TED, you need to get me to speak up on one of your stages so I can undo the damage of this previous talker, as well as destroy people’s own misconceptions. Millions of adults around the world learn languages to excellent levels fine all the time. Any sloppy research that comes up on this is arguing against an army of people that disprove it.

Linguists who are working for the greater good

Fortunately this is not the case for all linguists, and now popular research is backing up what I’ve been saying all along!

I was just on Google plus, and my friend Joop shared this link with me so I thought I had to get it on the blog:

Age no excuse for failing to learn a new language – New Scientist

Researchers realised that there are crucial differences in how adults vs children learn and tried to demonstrate it in this research. When they did, surprise surprise, adults come out on top. Once again, for more specifics about how I think this works on a broader scale – read my post about how you are not too old to learn a language.

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments!
Similar Posts:

• Why ESL teachers are the best teachers and the best learners
• Achieving New Year’s Resolutions, my multilingual summer in Barcelona and welcome new readers!
• Language Hacking tips for English speaking travellers (My TBEX talk)
• Free book: The polyglot project, how to learn languages
• How I’m teaching my 3 year old a second language

----------------------------
The linguistic genius of adults: Research confirms we’re better learners than kids! is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

This post was originally part of my introduction e-mails for the Language Hacking League (which you can sign up for on the right to get similar tips or links twice a month in your inbox after an introduction series).

Considering how I use Turkish as an example (but you can apply this tip to all languages), it seems appropriate to mention it on the blog now that I’m learning that language

Basically, one of the blog’s readers, Steve, had asked me how to get around having trouble translating to Turkish in his head because of it’s “strange” way of phrasing things. He told me that “I have a car” is actually expressed by saying “Arabam var” which is literally “a-car-my exists” or “My car exists”.

This issue of rephrasing and trying to translate directly from English exists in learning many languages, so this was my response to him over a year ago, with no knowledge of Turkish and now advice that I’m applying for real myself:

Put the foreign language on a pedestal, with your native language being wrong

There are turns of phrase that don’t work at all in other languages when translated from English. Even Irish for example would actually phrase “I have a car” as “There is a car to me” (word for word) from the example he gave me.

I find that trying to phrase the sentence in your mind in English and then translating that will always make it sound weird. You have to see things entirely from within your foreign language and get used to flowing through that language without word-for-word translations from English.

“My car exists” may sound strange at first, but when you think about it, it isn’t logical in English either!

How can the same verb be used to have a car, a cold, lunch, to have to do, to have the house painted and to have seen. It’s silly when you think about it! So in that case, a car existing as mine is way more practical than “having” it. I prefer to put the other language on a pedestal and see it as the better way to phrase the sentence

Why do they have to have a masculine and feminine in French and other languages?

Forget the linguistic / historical reason that languages have noun genders. This is not so helpful to many learners. I have a different answer to the question:

It helps by adding in handy redundancy information; for example, if you are in a noisy bar or speaking on the phone and hear “la X verte” you are genuinely helped in narrowing down what that X is that you didn’t hear clearly, when you combine it with context. It’s more likely to be a car (la voiture) than a bus (le bus / l’autobus [m]) if the conversation is about modes of transport.

Anyone who studies digital communication or electronic engineering knows that data transmission uses redundancy in a similar way to combat noise and losses in systems – it’s just more efficient in non-ideal transmission environments. Most places I use languages are noisy and distracting so this trick has genuinely helped me on many occasions.

In English if you don’t hear the one word, the sound of other words around it (apart from a vs an) may not help indicate what it is. So having gender can be reframed as being “better”.

Why do adjectives have to come after nouns in Latin languages, and not before them like in English?

Well, surely the noun is the most important thing in the whole sentence! It should come first! If you say in English “I want to buy a big shiny new cheap….” while hearing all these words you still have no idea what the person is talking about, but in Spanish it’s “Quiero comprar un [noun] barato nuevo…” No unnecessary waiting!

These aren’t actually the linguistic reasons why the languages differ, but they are purely inventions I came up with to justify why the other language is better and exist just in my mind. They are not actual arguments to have with people (since you can retort them with why English or some other language is “better”). I’ll argue with people about why a language is easy because it can be a great motivator to realise this. Replying that it’s the hardest language in the world is wasteful and totally unproductive.

Whining about how different it is will get you nowhere. Rejoice the differences! Stop comparing it to English (or your native language) in an unhelpful way, and start trying to think in that language.

Reframe the language as being the most logical clever and beautiful way of phrasing things and with that positive mindset, you will find it a lot easier to get through it than when you had your filter set to pessimist.

Any thoughts on this? Share them with us in the comments!
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• How to prepare, record & upload a video entirely in a foreign language just after starting to learn it
• 6 easy ways to roll your R
• Getting rid of your English accent when speaking a foreign language
• Why Czech isn’t as hard to learn as you think
• What will I talk about when my language level is so basic?

----------------------------
Why does the language have to be so weird? is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Making a video in a foreign language is incredibly easy, even if you have just started to learn it.

I made a minute long segment of my video entirely in Turkish this week just a few days after starting to learn it and have been getting great feedback and encouragement from people once they had seen it. After a slow start, simply preparing for and making that video has forced me to improve my level extremely quickly.

The reasons you might want to make such a video in your early stages include:

• Forcing yourself to output something and getting used to pronouncing the words
• Burning the words of your video into your memory forever, since you’ll know them really well thanks to the preparation, especially as I describe it below
• Giving yourself a project to work towards with a deadline, forcing you to improve by that time (along the lines of Parkinson’s Law). I recommend “the day after tomorrow” as your video upload deadline, not several months from now!
• Sharing your language project with the world, so you can get support and so you can be held accountable publicly to continue improving
• Using the video itself; a love-note for your girl/boyfriend, an introduction to yourself for natives on some social networking site, a more personal reply to someone on a forum by linking to it, or a way to measure your progress with time.
• It’s also excellent practice to get you used to using your language to help you become more comfortable for when you do it live with a native.

I make a lot of videos – before I started this blog I had a whole website to separate the 100 or so videos I’ve got on Youtube into different languages. One of those videos (about Burning Man) was picked up by National Geographic and shown on TV on Natgeo adventure in Italy, because I made it in Italian too.

Most of those videos are in documentary style with a voice-over, but these days I’m making more and more videos were I’m speaking directly to the camera.

People think it’s super hard to make such a video and that you should wait until you’re “ready” and speak the languages fluently. I say start as you mean to go on. Use the language now in as many ways as you can and you’ll improve on your skills much quicker.

If you wait until you’re “ready”, you will never be ready as you will keep up this routine of looking for excuses to prevent you from ever trying. I decide to be ready from day one so as soon as I’ve gone through the preparation steps outlined here I can make a video in that language immediately. That’s all there is to it.

First week learning a language? Of course you can make a video entirely in that language!

Most videos I like to make are when I’m already comfortable in the language, which is pretty obvious when I’m talking live and unrehearsed with another person in Spanish and French (fluently), or Hungarian and Dutch (basic conversationally) etc. The majority of my videos are recorded because I am comfortable enough in the language to use it spontaneously without preparation specifically for the video.

However, on occasion I’ve made a video just after starting to learn to speak. I did this my first weekend really trying to speak in Thai, my first day learning ASL, and most recently, this week in Turkish. Each time I was honest about the preparation that went into making the video (saying that it wasn’t spontaneous, nor could it be considering how I had just started speaking in each case!)

But the results of making these videos have been incredible! Each time it has skyrocketed me to start to make dramatic progress thereafter (except with Thai since I waited until my last weekend in the project to make that video; a far-too-late mistake I’m trying to prevent any of you from making Since then I try to make my videos much sooner) and the script of the videos have been burned into me forever so I can produce them at a moment’s notice, which can be very useful when key vocabulary or phrases are included.

As well as this, I get incredible encouragement from people! It’s so important to get this emotional boost to set you in the right direction. People who watch the video will congratulate you (as long as you are clear about what you did in the video, and are not bragging), and offer helpful hints so your next one will be better.

So please do try to make a video. It will cost you nothing but a little time. These are the completely free steps I recommend taking to do it:

Setting up for recording

1. Get your equipment ready. Your computer may have a webcam included in it, and that’s fine, but sometimes it’s better to use your still camera‘s video record mode (pretty much all modern digital cameras have this option; the fact that it isn’t HD or whatever doesn’t matter so much), since you will be much more flexible in where you can record it. Some mobile phones also do this, but the quality may be quite bad and almost unwatchable. And of course if you have an actual video camera that can help too, although it’s not really necessary to have all its features in this case. Before recording, check your video settings to make sure they are ideal for uploading and saved in a recognisable file format.
2. Choose a fun and interesting location. Using your webcam in the same place you always use your computer means we will always see just you face-on and the boring wall in your room behind you. This is only slightly better than simply creating audio and labelling it as a podcast. Take your camera (or webcam with laptop) outside of your house, and change scenery while recording if possible. Even having some nature in the background can be a huge improvement. Or walk through somewhere interesting while talking and holding your camera. They’re small and portable for a reason
3. Alternatively, if you must be in one location, think of another way to make it more fun. For example, in the only non-English sit-down soliloquy video I’ve made, I introduced fun props to make the video way more entertaining. A video that’s fun to watch will get shared more and have more engagement and feedback because of that. (My language hacking guide video has received 50,000 views and 150 comments on Youtube in just over a year, as well as lots of tweets, @s and Facebook shares about it). For more random ideas to make a video that little bit crazier, see the photo I’ve included with this post Making it more interesting isn’t so necessary, but it will make it more likely that people will stick through your whole video.
4. When you’re ready (see below), press record! Press stop when you’re done and you’ll have a file ready to upload (also explained below). In most cases you don’t need to edit the file at all.

Preparing the language part

This is presumably the hardest part since you “don’t speak” the language yet.

Well, I don’t call myself a language hacker for nothing! Hackers are famous for finding ingenious ways of solving a problem (typically with computers, and sometimes with all aspects of life) that otherwise would take much more time (and money) to achieve. The best way to do it is to…

CHEAT.

Yes, you read that right. Cheat. Find a way to do it even though you aren’t “ready”. As long as you are honest about this (as I am in my specifically first-week videos listed above; in the rest of my videos I’m not cheating, but do like to joke about it ) there is nothing sinister about it.

It’s only cheating in the sense that you are breaking the “rules” that you should wait until that non-existent ready-day before doing anything ambitious.

So this is what I recommend doing to be able to produce a video similar to the ones I’ve made in my first week:

1. Prepare your script in advance in your mother tongue so you know precisely everything you want to say. (Talking about your language learning mission, giving us a tour of your town, whatever it may be. Have a purpose or theme to the video if possible, rather than random ramblings). There will be plenty of time to be spontaneous in the foreign language later. Right now you simply want to be confident about what you are saying. Too many people lack this confidence, so making a video where you know precisely what you are going to say will inject this confidence into you when you need it most! This will definitely help you for actual spontaneous conversations later.
2. Keep in mind that the longer your script is, the more memory and other work you have later. If it’s your first time, aim for a one minute long video. Keep in mind that it will take you more time to get through foreign text than the equivalent in your native language.
3. Try to translate it so that it is correct. If you already have a lower intermediate level of the language or higher already, try to do your best to create a text in the target language that is as good as possible. Translating like this is an excellent way to learn. If you really are in your first week, still try to produce it yourself as best as you can. Try to avoid using Google Translate (or other automatic translation tools). When I say “cheat” I don’t mean to skip important parts, and understanding precisely why you say things a particular way is part of the learning process. If you don’t understand (almost) every word of what you are saying, then you will just be reciting noise.
4. If you get really stuck then ask a native to help you (there are many sites that you can get in touch with one through), but ask them about particular sentences and give them your best attempt first, so they are helping you learn the process rather than simply acting as free translators.
5. Finally when you have a full text that you have mostly prepared yourself (with some help perhaps), send it to Lang 8. Users on this website will correct your text for free in foreign languages. Now you have a native-approved text that you can learn!
6. Next you need to hear how that text is pronounced by a native. Send the resulting text to Rhinospike. To make sure that your text (i.e. your account) is prioritised, read some other requested text in your mother tongue aloud into a microphone and upload for other users. This user contribution is how both this site and Lang-8 remain free for everyone.

Practising speaking it yourself

1. So now you have the text and know what it should sound like thanks to the native! It’s time to practise! Listen to each native-spoken sentence while reading the corresponding text and pay attention very carefully to what each letter and syllable sounds like. Then repeat it, aloud. Say it with confidence, not under your breath.
2. Do this for the entire text of several sentences. If there are tricky sounds that come up, then look into trying to mimic them as best as you can such as short-cuts to roll your R. Mimic every aspect of the native speaker; the loudness, precisely where the stress on words are, the musicality, the speed etc.
3. If you have time, record yourself reading the language (pure audio) and send it to a native to get some feedback on the most important things to change, or which part is not understandable.
4. It won’t be perfect, but let’s say you can repeat the text as well as you can now! It’s time to commit it to memory!

Memorising the text

1. Simply reading on camera is not effective, you need to be able to say it from memory, or much more naturally. It looks more professional and it also allows you to develop your skills at saying these phrases at a moment’s notice without having to scramble for your notes.
2. I use a combination of several famous anchoring memory techniques, combined with my favourite music-phrase-learning technique (explained in one of the free chapters of the Language Hacking Guide you get if you sign up to the e-mail list on the top right of the site). So take the first word(s) of each sentence and assign an image to them of whatever comes to mind (the more illogical, loud and crazier the better). Here are some suggestions for how I use image association with foreign words. Make a story with these first words in the right order so you won’t miss out on a sentence. This way you know where to start each time, based on what you have just said.
3. Now take each phrase and sing it out to the tune of some music you like, as described in the free chapter I mentioned. I do this to learn phrases in general, but it’s very effective for learning components of a speech too. Sing it out several times, remembering the word and sound for each beat. After a few repetitions it should be applied to memory.
4. You should have the components ready to say the entire part of the video without any help from the paper. Start with the first word, think of how the phrase is sung out, and then simply say it. The singing is only for recall purposes, you don’t have to actually sing on camera. (But that could be fun too!) Now you’ll remember from the story you imagined what the second word is, and will recall the song also from that second sentence. Speak that out, and continue in the same way until you finish.
5. Do this a few times and you should have the whole text memorised. Now say it with feeling. Seriously – remember what you are actually saying - the content should come easier now and you can focus on the meaning so it comes across as much more natural. This last stage is crucial so the language becomes more natural to you rather than just memorising some noise.

Uploading the file

1. So once you’ve got it all memorised, speak in the video and then press stop and you will have a file ready to upload!
2. Any kind of editing is not so necessary for this type of video, and you can upload the file directly. I’ll usually only edit the file in video software if I have several scenes to put together, or if I want to use my own nice-looking subtitles (but you can apply standard subtitles right after uploading as explained below).
3. Upload it to Youtube or to dotsub. (I like dotsub’s easy and direct way of adding subtitles, but since most people prefer Youtube you might want to stick with it). See how I used dotsub for example on my Spanish or French LHG pages.
4. When it’s uploaded go into the Captions and Subtitles (Youtube) part of the video settings and download the machine transcription. The actual text will be totally useless… however the timing for when you speak will be useful and you can replace the text based on the pre-made time-stamps. You will want to add the subtitles in English (or your mother tongue) so your friends back home can understand it, and upload the text file. If you upload it to dotsub, here are instructions on adding the subtitles.
5. Make sure to fill out all the other information on Youtube such as the tags and the location, as this will help people find your video easier.

And you’re done! Embed it on your blog (making sure to enable subtitles) and share it with the world

The amount of steps I’ve included here are only for the sake of being as detailed as possible for people with all levels of familiarity. Let me know if I missed anything! Many of these steps are very simple and you can go through the whole process in an afternoon (plus time waiting for feedback from native speakers).

So give it a try! When you are done, I want to see your videos! Post links to them in the comments below to share them with the world And if you have any other thoughts on this process, then share them with us!

Ready? Lights…. camera… action!
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• How to speak a language pretty well, starting from scratch, in just two months

----------------------------
How to prepare, record & upload a video entirely in a foreign language just after starting to learn it is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmQFtjzGWBw

Here it is! My first time ever speaking in front of such a large audience!

The video is 30 minutes long and covers some tips and encouragement that I’ve mentioned on the blog at various times and which are covered in much more detail in the Language Hacking Guide of course. Since the audience was mostly travellers, I focused on short-term abilities to speak while in the country.

I was worried about how it would go or if I’d get through everything, and in the end I only covered a third of my notes before I went to questions! 30 minutes flew by!

As well as giving this talk I was also on two panels (for two full hours on the same day), talking about branding and working within a niche to help people interested in growing their website. It’s been a hectic weekend for me! But once I was done contributing, I was very glad to spend time with some amazing people, and good friends of mine. There are far too many to list!!

Many thanks to TBEX (Travel Blog EXchange) for putting on such a great weekend, and for giving me this fantastic opportunity to attempt to get through to so many influential people (other bloggers, many of which have wide audiences), and convince them to stop making excuses and just speak the language of the country they are visiting! I’m already hearing some success stories from those at the event who have been trying out my tips and I look forward to sharing their stories with you.

I’ve had a great two weeks in North America, here in Vancouver for this event and also in Portland for the “World Domination Summit”. I’ve met some incredible people, and it’s great to mingle and party with similarly minded people and other bloggers. We talk about many different topics, but in our own way we are trying to use the Internet as our own little platform to improve the world.

After these two weeks of speaking English, it’s time for me to get back to some language hacking, and start the next mission (on Thursday)

Hopefully this is the first of many such talks I’ll give – I can already see a few ways I can improve on it for next time. If you have any thoughts on the talk, let me know in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• Benny’s TEDx talk: Speak from Day One
• Achieving New Year’s Resolutions, my multilingual summer in Barcelona and welcome new readers!
• What will I talk about when my language level is so basic?
• The linguistic genius of adults: Research confirms we’re better learners than kids!
• Any language anywhere hack 3: Helping tourists for free language practice

----------------------------
Language Hacking tips for English speaking travellers (My TBEX talk) is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Today I want to share two great video interviews in Spanish (subtitled) with you about an excellent means of learning a language for young ladies: working as an au pair.

While living in Amsterdam, I actually met quite a lot of au-pairs when I wasn’t hanging out with the Dutch. It turns out that city has a history of being more open to it, and since the Dutch generally speak English very well, quite a lot of those I met were actually in the Netherlands to dramatically improve their English, or even other languages.

I decided to interview two of these girls (aged 20 and 21) both in their native Spanish, to share their stories with you all!

Elizabeth from Gran Canaria (Canary Islands)

The first of these interviews was with Elizabeth from Gran Canaria.

I had lived in the Canary Islands myself, and these days it’s the accent in Spanish I tend to aim for when I speak it, as it is a nice balance between Peninsular and Latin American. (You’ll hear that it definitely sounds like European Spanish compared to the second interview, but there are no “th” sounds for ‘c’s and they use ustedes instead of vosotros among other things).

Frustrated with the lack of opportunities in Spain, she came to Amsterdam to try to intensively improve her English as an au-pair as a means to transition into other work once she has improved her English enough.

She tells us that the family actually pay for everything for her (flight, food, clothes etc.)! She also gives some useful encouragement for other young girls who may have the opportunity to travel, and confirms that she is applying the communicative approach to learning her language and speaking and using it despite initial lack of vocabulary.

I met her just after she had arrived, and I noticed that her English had improved dramatically in just five weeks!

To make the video even more interesting, I recorded it from a pedal boat while going through Amsterdam’s canals! (I found an elastic tripod that I could wrap through a hole to keep my new interview camera fixed) The first few minutes have some construction work and noisy boats around us and then it gets much nicer!

I was quite distracted in trying to avoid ducks and tourists in other boats, so I hope my questions were OK! Great as the idea was, I think in future I won’t be controlling some sort of vehicle while I do one of these interviews!

Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4WSvd5Ftws

Melisa from Colombia

Melisa is from Medellín, where I lived last year. She was actually there at the same time as me, but we only met in Europe for the first time.

She also has some interesting things to say about how easy and safe it was to travel as a young girl. Her au pair family actually paid for half of her flight from Colombia and helped her a lot with visa applications.

She also mentions that while here she has been actually learning Italian by doing a tandem exchange! Here is her video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6HtsLacuAo

You can see that I tried to adjust my Spanish a little to hers, and used “vos” and the corresponding conjugations when I could remember it, since this is how she herself speaks.

More au pair info

These girls show that it’s certainly possible to live abroad, even if you have never travelled before in your life, are young, can’t afford to pay for flights, accommodation, etc. and don’t speak the language of the country (precisely the situation both of them were in on arrival).

You can also see that both of them are strong independent women who are really enjoying their first stay abroad – nothing bad is happening to them.

This article about au pairing on the Matador network has some more practical information for those interested.

If you have had a similar experience in the past, or have any advice for other ladies considering au pair work, or thoughts on these particular interviews, let us know in the comments!
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