It’s time for a new 3 month language mission!

Since I started the blog about a year ago, I’ve learned pretty good Czech in 2 months, convinced some Brazilians that I was a Carioca, got by in Thai, and just recently passed 4/5 of one the hardest formal examinations in German.

So now it’s time to take on one of the toughest challenges yet: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months!

Hungarian: a non-Indo-European language

Before the Chinese/Japanese etc. learners jump on me for lazily taking on another “European” language, there’s something you should be aware of…

Hungary may be situated in Europe, but its language has almost nothing in common with any of the many European languages surrounding it (apart from a distant relationship to Finnish/Estonian)!

Many even think of Hungarian as being among the hardest languages in the world. One way a speaker of other European languages could perhaps come to that conclusion is that it is not an Indo-European language.

This basically means that English/French etc. have more in common with Romanian, Polish, Swedish, Lithuanian, Sanskrit and Persian than they have in common with Hungarian. Not just the very occasional vocabulary outside of direct family branches, but also the sentence structure can be somewhat familiar in these languages. It doesn’t make your job a huge amount easier, but at least it gives you some sense of familiarity, and I found this when learning Czech.

Apart from rare loan words, Hungarian seems to show nothing in common with its neighbours! Luckily it uses the Latin script (but so do Swahili, Turkish and Vietnamese…), but unluckily it seems to pack enough grammar into its sentences to make your head spin. Forget German’s four grammatical cases, or Russian’s six – Hungarian nouns can have up to eighteen cases!

I’m certainly going to miss prepositions - in, at, to etc. since these seem to get merged into the word as a “postposition” as one of many ways that Hungarian can produce extremely long words such as “megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért“.

It’s a phonetic language, but it still has some things that will take some getting used to! ‘s’ is the ‘sh’ sound and ‘sz’ is the ‘s’ sound (the opposite of Polish), and the ‘g’ in the name of the language itself, magyar, is pronounced like a d!

Sound intimidating enough yet?

3-month mission: conversational Hungarian

I got all of the above information just from the Wikipedia article on Hungarian this afternoon for the sake of providing a summary. I am starting to learn the language from scratch as of today.

The only word in Hungarian I’ve learned so far is “Szia” (“hi”, pronounced see-ya apparently). So yes, this is absolutely from scratch with no similar or even distantly related language to act as my crutch.

My target is to reach conversational level in the language by mid-October. My mission is to take the intimidating message of the above paragraphs and to turn it around completely to find out what’s easy about Hungarian, to the point where I can effectively communicate in social situations with natives in the language, and of course, share my discoveries with you all!

I don’t want to sit any tests, spend hours watching TV shows or listening to the radio or reading, and I definitely don’t want to have my head in books studying grammar and vocabulary the entire time. I want to talk with Hungarians and attempt to have a social life almost exclusively through the Hungarian language.

I have no doubts that my usual tricks will come in very useful and that I will be able to communicate in some way quite quickly. However, I should specify exactly what I’m aiming for so there is no confusion! It won’t be fluency this time, but I do want to be able to converse.

Before I hop my flight out of Budapest on October 14th (just in time to fly south for the winter!) I want to be able to meet Hungarian natives I have never met before and have a casual conversation about a wide range of typical things people talk about at social events, with no preparation. I am allowing myself to make mistakes, as long as what I’m saying is totally understandable, and my focus will be on conversations I am involved in.

I’ll also aim to make a video or two in Hungarian before I leave so you can all hear what I sound like!

Trying out this “preparation” thing you all love so much

This target will be similar to the “pretty good” level I reached in Czech. The reason I’m aiming for about the same level (rather than fluency) is because I will actually have slightly over two months of proper immersion rather than three.

Rather than diving straight in, studying on the flight over, and speaking consistently from day one of the mission (which I know from experience works really well), I am going to give myself just over 2 weeks to prepare (while still in Berlin) and study some material (both from books and online). These two weeks may ultimately hurt my potential progress (especially since it won’t be full time – I’m still in recovery mode from the exam!), but now that I’ve had a chance to improve my study technique, I want to see if there is any benefit at all to this “preparation” thing you all seem to be raving so much about!

Two weeks not speaking the target language is already longer than I would usually go for, but it’s worth a try to see if it does indeed help to focus on absorbing as much as possible first.

This easing in period will be further extended, as I’ll spend my first week in Hungary in a town called Pécs just south of Budapest with some Esperanto speakers (at an event filled with fun young party-goers, called IJS). There will be some cultural adjustments to make in Hungary (etc. figuring out how to eat well in a country that doesn’t show much promise for vegetarians) and I’d rather be with friends and have some chances to communicate fully with the many Hungarians at the event (I’ve been told that Hungarians generally don’t speak much English or other languages), before I start full immersion a week into August.

That first week will also give me a chance to get to know some Hungarians who normally live in Budapest so that I can expand my social circle – of course they’ll all be convinced to speak just Hungarian with me after that first week!

Living in Budapest

The reason I choose particular destinations for my language missions, is less due to marking my territory among pompous linguists, and way more due to the actual destination and the people where I travel to. I consider myself much more of a nomad than a language learner and the social rewards of spending time almost exclusively with locals is mostly the reason why I am always so keen to make sure I can converse with them.

Budapest has long been on my list of places to visit, and there’s no way I could give a city with its reputation any less than a few months! I can’t wait to get to know it and discover what experiences await me – especially by discovering it through the people from the city itself. My “road less travelled” is not going to undiscovered villages, but simply being a “3-month tourist” without being a typical English-speaking one.

More than discovering Hungarian verb conjugations, I would like to discover Hungarian culture – and speaking to its locals is the best way to do this. That’s what the mission will ultimately be about!

So join me and see if I can reach a pretty-good conversational level of Hungarian in just three months!

If you have any advice or thoughts about this mission, feel free to share them in the comments below!
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• Mission complete! Partial success – What will Benny’s next mission be?
• C2 exam results and analysis
• First month in Berlin & 8 language 6 dialect tour of my flat
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• Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes

After slightly more than two weeks since sitting my third CEFRL exam (German this time), I have just gotten the results of it today! I have to say, I am very pleased with the results and happy to share them with you all!

One unique thing about my language learning projects is complete transparency of the good and the bad aspects of how these missions pan out, so I will continue that in this post and share full details of my results, what I did right and what I did wrong. I know several readers are considering sitting a similar exam, so hopefully my recommendations will come in useful.

Overall result

There were five different aspects to the exam. Based on four of these aspects I “passed” the exam and have a C2 level in German in these parts, doing better in certain sections than I originally thought I would!

However, I did not pass one aspect: Listening comprehension. Because you must pass all of the five sections, the overall result is not a pass and I will not be awarded the C2 diploma.

If I needed this diploma for professional reasons or to study then this would be a huge disappointment, but my purpose for sitting this test was always to do my best and to aim ‘impossibly‘ high in the very tight deadline of three months. When you see the results I got in individual parts, you will understand why I am very proud of how I did. I have also learned a lot about improving my study approach and this will be crucial in future missions (when combined with the priority of social-based learning).

I’ll give the results of each section and elaborate more on it below. There are 5 different possible grades: sehr gut (very good), gut (good), befriedigend (satisfactory), ausgleichbar durch mindestens “gut”…. (pass pending gut or higher mark in certain other sections) and nicht bestanden (not passed). I will also mention what I remember as a comparison in my Spanish DELE from several years ago.

One difference with the Spanish C2, for example, is that the overall pass is way less complex than in German. There are also 5 sections, but (when I did it) you need 80% or more in each section to pass. There are no levels – just a pass or fail. I did pass that and can mention why I did better than the equivalent in German in certain cases.

The results are presented in marks per section (marks achieved / (slash) total possible marks), followed by a representing percentage and the actual grade.

Oral exam

Result: 60/80 (75%: ‘good’ grade)

Believe it or not, this was the one I was most nervous about.

I have been way less social in Berlin than usual, so I have not had the chance to focus on constantly improving my conversational level as I normally would. Despite this, even with way less conversational time, I have plenty of language hacks to improve spoken level under tight conditions. So not only did I pass, but I got the good grade!

This was even more of a challenge when I saw the theme I had to discuss (for 5 minutes before the theme I had prepared in advance): deforestation! I can’t even discuss this in English, so I’m glad I have lots of tricks up my sleeve (yes, the language hacks I wrote about work great in oral exams) that eventually got me into a nice flowing conversation and ultimately gave me a grade to be proud of.

Having said that, the grade I got in my Spanish oral was a much more impressive 96%. You may think that this was due to simply having put more time into immersion in Spanish (about a year before exam compared to three months in German), but I am sure that it is actually because I focused on speaking Spanish first and then worked on more academic study methods that make up the rest of the exam. I didn’t really focus on the DELE exam until the weeks before it, when I was already speaking Spanish confidently.

I still remember that Spanish oral exam and how I immediately abandoned the “usted” form, used lots of casual language, and even flirted with the madrileña examiner a little. While German requires you to use Sie in such a situation (Spanish from Spain is way more restrictive), I still “worked the room” to keep the atmosphere informal in the exam and I am sure this worked to my advantage.

I never say people shouldn’t study to speak a language well (for example, I always have grammar and vocabulary books to help me in each mission), but as you can tell by the theme in certain posts recently, study must be put in its place and the focus must be on what a language exists for: communication. I am absolutely convinced that I would have gotten a similar result to my Spanish exam (95% or more) in the German oral if I studied less during those three months and focused entirely on speaking, using the techniques that I know work well but full time instead of just occasionally.

From a purely oral perspective I will always recommend people make studying a minor focus of their time to improve their level, and spend more time conversing. The only reason I did indeed study so much in Berlin was because I was sitting an examination, with other aspects as outlined below. Study works for examinations, but it’s a mistake making it the priority for real life. This also applies to oral exams, which are as close to the real life use of languages as you can get.

In future I will (of course) not be studying so much, but I will also only aim for sitting another C2 (or similar) exam when I already speak the language fluently. I will not likely be doing this again any time soon though.

Written exercise

Result: 52/70 (74%: ‘good’ grade)

This nice result was a bit of a surprise as writing is usually not something I focus much on. However, I had some tricks up my sleeve (read: not cheating, it was just me, a pen and no “bathroom breaks”) that I will discuss at a later time.

Apart from my usual hacks for spoken production that can be somewhat transferred to written production, I’d simply recommend that people write as much as possible for similar themes as in the target exam and have a very critical native correct them.

I don’t remember exactly what I got in the Spanish DELE for this, but it would have been 80-90%. If you can speak confidently and correctly, then you simply transfer it to written format. This is easy in phonetic languages like Spanish and German. To me its logical that my oral and written results were pretty much the same. The only difference is that I removed casual empty-softeners (like, you know, isn’t it?) and conversational connectors, which would make speech sound more natural, but not work in written form.

The only aspect of this that was hard for me was the actual writing - I had a cramp in my wrist as I haven’t used a pen to do more than fill out forms, sign my name, or write a quick postcard since… well since the Spanish DELE exam in 2006! This to me is a dark-ages aspect of CEFRL exams and I wish they would just let me use a computer (obviously with spell-check and Internet etc. disabled), or at least give me a feather to dip in ink so I can do this backward “writing” thing with some style.

Grammar

Result: 43/70 (61%: ‘satisfactory’ grade)

I just barely got within the safe pass grade both in German and in Spanish. I still remember the Spanish result was precisely 80%. One tiny slip up and I would have failed the entire exam!

I don’t like to focus so much on grammar and the rules of a language: speaking ‘perfectly’ is definitely way less important than speaking confidently. People who focus on this perfection will never actually reach it since they still aren’t confident enough to speak. When you do speak, improvements come naturally: as I said I got 96% in the Spanish oral by simply applying what works for improving spoken level.

So, it’s no surprise that I didn’t ace this section. I don’t like this part as it presents the questions sometimes in a way I feel is quite artificial for how you would need to apply the rules in real life. However, they do indeed test your understanding of the technical aspects of the language. It’s not my place to tell the Goethe Institut or Instituto de Cervantes how to run their exams, but I would personally do it differently.

Another frustrating thing is that you have to study for the exam layout. The way I passed this was to simply look at pass papers, see what they asked and study as many possible iterations of the answers that could come up as my main non-vocabulary SRS based study. I definitely improved my actual grammar in doing this, but I still think it’s restrictive.

I actually initially thought that I may have failed the exam because of this section. Rather than language abilities, I think just recognising patterns and studying those patterns gave me a pass in this part and it doesn’t (in my opinion) particularly reflect much on my actual language skills.

Reading

Result: 25/50 (50%: would just be ‘pass’ grade due to ‘good’ in written)

This part was the only surprise for me, as I thought I had passed it safely, but I actually did quite poorly.

After a text with questions (that I believe I answered satisfactorily, but not perfectly), there was a part to check your level of vocabulary by giving synonyms to words in the text. Precise synonyms are required (there are only one or two right answers), so I think mine were too general and I may have gotten no points at all in this part because of that. There is no half-points system – you are either right or wrong.

What I would have done differently: more focus on vocabulary study, to be more precise. My answers were likely ‘correct’, but not good enough. Also, I would recommend answering more questions on texts and running answers through a native. It’s likely that I wasn’t phrasing the answers in a satisfactory way, or presumed I gave enough information but didn’t.

What I wouldn’t have done differently: Despite the title, reading a lot does not necessarily help. I read enough for the purposes of this exam and I wouldn’t have increased my focus on reading if I were to resit it. Even ‘passive’ exam sections like reading and listening (see below) are actually active in these exams in that they require you to prove your deep understanding. This is not required of people who normally listen to podcasts/radio or read a lot. See more on this below in the same tune, but for listening.

If you enjoy reading in a foreign language, then go for it. But this section in a C2 exam requires you to rephrase answers, extrapolate slightly, search through text for certain information and be able to produce vocabulary – not just recognise it. This is not the same as generally summarising a chapter of a book for example. You need to answer questions on texts for sample exams, not just read a lot.

Despite this, I did (just about) pass the reading section due to the higher marks elsewhere bringing me up. In the Spanish exam I got 80-90% in this, and that was likely simply due to more exposure to the language.

Listening comprehension

Result: 15/40 (37%: not a pass)

The listening part is what determined the overall result. This result wasn’t a surprise and I had said that this section may determine if I pass or fail. It’s actually comforting that I failed by several points, as I would have hated being a point away from the entire exam counting as a pass. Although I’m frustrated with this result, unlike in the grammar part, I think this was very fairly tested. I would not change this part of the exam if I was designing it myself and I deserved the result I was given.

There’s no use (other than for ego) being a cry baby and blaming the questions I was asked or saying this particular audio was too hard etc. I was tested fairly and I am not currently at the level required to pass this part of the test at C2 level.

My biggest mistake here was (as mentioned above), presuming that to prepare for the listening exam, I simply had to listen to a lot of German. Ever since I arrived, I have had the radio on almost constantly, mostly on news and discussion stations. I somewhat paid attention and definitely got the general gist most of the time, and all of the time in the last month.

This did not actually help me for my listening exam.

Other learners swear by passive listening all day long as a means of learning a language. I was already sceptical about it, but now I’m convinced that it’s not a practical use of time (at least for me). If you like listening to the foreign language, then listen away, but don’t think that you are actually learning much. Listening while washing the dishes or driving a car will give you important exposure, and this is important to get a ‘feel’ for the language to make it sound less strange. But it is not necessarily improving your actual level of the language; definitely not your ability to produce, and not even so much for your ability to understand.

Unless you are actively involved in the audio, you can only improve your level if you give it all of your attention, or if you have the ability to efficiently split your attention so that it is getting crucial focus. I cannot do this myself.

What I would do differently if I were to sit this again: be 100% focused on listening when preparing (not doing anything else at the same time) and try my best to get as many details as possible out of the audio, rather than just feeling good about myself that I got the ‘gist’ of it.

I definitely understood the text read to me, and could summarise it satisfactorily if requested, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to give very specific information that you only pick up if you are focused and making notes. I realised just a few days before the exam that I was very much unprepared for the aural part after doing an example exercise. My main mistake was presuming that this part of the exam would be easy because listening is easy.

It’s a pity because my ability to understand German is good, but in conversations (which is always my ultimate end-goal) you do not have to remember very specific details. For example, talking to a friend and knowing that they went to Spain for the summer is easy, but remembering exactly how many days they spent in each town and listing what they had for dinner each evening requires a level of focus I usually don’t give (even in English). In these exams you can listen to the audio twice, but efficient and fast note taking is crucial and something I would have to work on if I did a similar exam in future.

Despite this I got 85-90% in my Spanish exam – this was likely simply due to greater exposure. With greater exposure you would naturally improve your abilities to pass all parts of these exams, but the point of my experiment was to see which ones I could hack in three months.

Conclusion

With a different approach, and taking what I said here into consideration, I still think it’s possible in three months from my starting point (vague familiarity). However it has been a stressful and anti-social three months for me so I won’t be doing it this way in future and I’d recommend people give themselves more time because of that

The point of this experiment was never the end goal of definitely passing the exam. It was always to try my best, force myself to improve the academic side of my German in a short time and investigate and improve my study/learning approach. In all of these aspects the mission has been a success for me!

As well as this, I fully passed 3/5 of the exam (and could theoretically pass 1/5 from the balance points), 2 of these parts by a very safe margin. This is not something people would usually achieve in three months, so I will be very happy to refer back to this in future as another success.

What about the accent part of the mission? Well, since I was focused so much on the exam, my spoken German suffered and, despite speaking very well, I still definitely have an accent. I could actually eliminate the main foreign aspects of my accent in my last two weeks with some intensive work, but I have worked very hard recently and need a break – so I will not be pursuing the accent reduction part of the mission. In future I will aim for just one crazy 3-month objective at a time!

Either passing the C2 exam or passing off as a German is definitely possible, but trying both at the same time requires focusing on unrelated parts of the language and I’m glad that I focused mostly on just one in the end.

Having said that, my German level is now fluent, and I will officially add it to my list of fluent languages spoken! I have not added a language to my permanent list for a while (I just reached pretty good level of Czech, dabbled in Thai and otherwise have just been improving my other languages for a few years) so this is a great achievement and I will continue to improve my German over time.

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Although I will officially begin the next mission later this week, I will still be in Berlin for a few weeks, so I will continue to improve my German here and will be making an interesting video or two entirely in German too.

I hope you’ve enjoyed joining me in another exciting mission! Many more on the way of course

Let me know what you think of the final results of these exams in the comments below!
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• Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months

NOTE: The Language Hacking Guide is now available to be read in its entirety in six languages (seven next week), translated by natives.

The stone of Rosetta

You might think that this post has something to do with expensive yellow boxes that you can buy at airports with language learning software. Nope.

The Rosetta stone is, in my opinion, one of the coolest contributions to languages of modern times, and I’ll refer to it as the stone of Rosetta so that there is no confusion. The people who wrote the software program are very clever for using that title, but I find it frustrating that the name is associated with them now for many people more than with the original “language hack”.

Before the Rosetta Stone was discovered and then deciphered, there had been no understanding of the ancient Egyptian language, which appears in pyramids and in other incredible sites, since shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire. For 14 centuries, even the Egyptians themselves were incapable of reading hieroglyphics.

The stone was discovered in 1799 and immediately seen as the key to understanding all the ancient writings of the Egyptians: it’s a tri-lingual translation of a decree for King Ptolemy V, created around 200 BCE, in hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic script (closer to the spoken language at the time) and ancient Greek. Since scholars knew ancient Greek, it was a simple (well actually it took about 20 years and a lot of ingenuity) case of comparing the Greek to the hieroglyphics.

This one stone, and one translation opened up the doors to a world of Egyptian history and culture, turning their writings from mere random scribbles of images into a readable language. As a language buff, I was in awe of getting to see it in person at the London Museum, as this one translation did indeed change the world as we know it.

The “stone of Rosetta” method: reading equivalent translations

I am sure some clever linguists will educate me on the official terminology, but I like to think of the stone of Rosetta method as one of the oldest, and still quite an effective way to learn a foreign language.

You read a text in your mother tongue and then with the full idea of it in your head, you read the target language equivalent translation (obviously only a good quality translation). Rather than using a dictionary (which sometimes can give you translations in the wrong context, or generally be frustrating to use to look up words) you can refer back to the full translation in your own language to compare what you don’t understand.

Since you have already read the text and understood it entirely, your focus changes to allow you to get into the flow of the language much more and this can help your progress a lot.

For centuries many people got their first exposure to foreign languages by reading translations of the bible in that language, knowing the original off by heart.

If it worked well to decipher Ancient Egyptian, then I’m sure it can help us a little to improve our French, Spanish etc.

You don’t even have to read to apply this method – I used to watch way too much TV when I was younger and could almost recite the entire script of some episodes of The Simpsons, so it actually helped my Spanish comprehension a lot to watch the dubbed Los Simpson when I moved to Spain. I didn’t need subtitles; I already knew what they were saying and associated the Spanish words much quicker than getting distracted by reading subtitles.

This greatly improves learning speed because you are focused more on the flow, rather than on the meaning of every single word, since you already understand what you are reading.

Multilingual Language Hacking Guide

With this in mind, I have taken my Language Hacking Guide, which explains precisely how you can speak languages from the first week and improve towards fluency very quickly thanks to lots of confident practise, and had it fully translated. All 33,000+ words of it have been translated by natives to the languages listed below.

Since the techniques I discuss are equally valid for all languages, I wanted to still give people an edge on the actual language they are interested in learning. My hope is that they will attempt to read the guide in that language. In doing so, they will be applying the tips of immediate immersion (albeit just in reading form in this case) discussed in the guide. They can refer to the copy in their mother tongue to help them understand. I’ll be using the guide myself in future to learn languages as I have them translated to these languages.

These translations also allow non-native English speakers to read it in their mother tongue. All translators worked hard to make sure that my ideas and voice were maintained, as well as re-wording things so that they sounded more natural in that language.

The languages included in this update are:

• French, translated by Christine Schmit, professional translator from Luxembourg. Title: Domptez les langues étrangères
• Portuguese, translated by Leticia Dáquer, professional translator from Rio – I worked in a translator traineeship in the same company as her in Italy. Wouldn’t have had anyone else translate it to Portuguese but her! Title: Guia para hackear línguas
• Spanish, translated by Alex Arroyo from Mexico. He has an engineering background like me, but is gaining a passion for languages. Ridiculously nice and clever guy! Title: El manual del superpolíglota
• Italian, translated by Andrea Piu from Sardinia, another translator with a varied work background like myself. Title: Il manuale del superpoliglotta
• German, translated by Bleicke Peterson from Germany. He was happy to help me promote my learning method over the academic approach. Title: Der Fremdsprachen-Hacker

Next weekend I’ll send an update with a Polish translation, and in 2 months I’ll send the Greek, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Esperanto, Hebrew, Dutch and Russian translations. The price will go up when I add the next group of translations, but they will all be sent for free to anyone who gets a copy in the mean time.

I’m hoping to include many more translations in the update in 2 months, so if you are a native of any language not listed and are interested in translating (payment is based on sales that the translators themselves make), please contact me if you have time this summer.

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I’ll be starting my next mission (already announced on Facebook) next week! But first, I’ll get my German exam results on Monday and let you know how it went! It won’t make the slightest difference, but any pagan luck rituals of knocking on wood, throwing salt behind you or crossing fingers, will be appreciated for the sentiment!

On Friday I’ll make a special birthday request so look out for that post! (Thursday in the e-mail list)

Note to “enthusiastic” commenters: While I welcome pretty much all comments, if you plan on complaining that quality unique content costs money, and that I also need to keep my lights on, please save your breath as I will delete all pointlessly negative and irrelevant comments. Over 95% of the content I write on the blog and in the e-mail list is completely free, and sales from the Language Hacking Guide will help me devote even more time to providing more free content to inspire others to take on the language learning challenge.

Looking forward to hearing from you all! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to watch a football match with tens of thousands of Germans!
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Now that I’ve sat three of these diploma examinations (French, Spanish and German), I feel like I can give a useful summary for those curious!

When I introduced my current mission, I only quickly mentioned some details about the exam and what it exists for. They do indeed serve much more of a purpose than just for crazy Irish guys to sit them for ambitious 3 month missions! In today’s post I’ll describe the A1-C2 certificate process in much more detail.

Why sit them?

These certificates can be very useful to have on your CV/résumé, and they generally have no expiry date.

Self-evaluation of your language level may not be taken seriously by employers who truly require language skills, such as in the tourism and translation industry. A lot of companies in Europe are familiar with the CEFRL grading system and may even require recognised certification in the languages you claim to speak well.

Certain levels of these certificates are also pre-requisites to study at universities full time in those countries. This is by far the most common reason for young people to sit these exams. Most of those I met at the French, Spanish and German exams needed the certificates to be able to start studying a Masters locally, or even to begin a 4 year degree programme if they are not nationals of the country in question.

One other reason however, which is why I have always sat them, is to have a target to aim for to force myself to improve my language skills quicker than if I was just vaguely aiming to “improve”.

This has advantages and disadvantages though. I generally don’t place much importance on my writing skills or ability to analyse and discuss printed text in a foreign language, and these are requirements for all exams. Nearly all advice I give on this blog is linked directly to my focus in learning languages: to speak fluently with natives. The oral aspect of the exam tests this quite well, but this can contribute only 20% to your chances of passing in many cases.

Having said that, for many people writing and reading are just as important as speaking so it’s good for them to have everything tested. I will personally not be sitting a test like this again for a while as I have little patience for studying for long periods of time due to how little that contributes to actual ability to converse.

I have some interesting ideas to make it easier to pass these tests (language exam hacking if you will, but definitely not cheating!) and I will find out in 2 weeks if the work I put in to this ridiculously tight 3 month challenge to C2 was enough to get an overall pass in German. Even if it wasn’t, the work I put in to improve all aspects of my German has worked for my purposes and I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made in the last months!

What organisations provide the certification?

The Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFRL) is a language level evaluation system, which is used as a standard in Europe. Some Universities may use it, but the exams that I discuss here are for examination members of the ALTE group (see bullet list below) and are implemented by several major European language institutions. When used by these institutions it is not just any old university with a lazy language course or “Micky Mouse” certification that you can buy online – in many cases it is administered by the organisations that govern official modern usage of the language itself and is the most recognised certification in the world for many languages.

Being the organisation that promotes the language worldwide also means that they take pride in the levels expected of speakers and passing the highest level is no easy task. However, since they are indeed promotional, they attempt to make the exam as human as possible, while keeping it academic and following a standard exam layout. If the Alliance Française say you speak French at the level you passed then few people can ever doubt it.

Certification of this kind exists for almost every official European language. The best part is that you can sit them in many countries (depending on the language), not just where the language is spoken. In many cases no travel is required - most major capital cities have branches of the first three institutes mentioned below, as well as many others. In some cases they may only allow you to sit the highest level exam in the country itself. I think this is a good idea, as you would very likely need full time exposure to realistically attempt to pass them. For lower levels, you can just sit them at home though!

To be more specific, here are some examples and links to more information about these certificates. Read these websites for information regarding fees, testing locations, test dates, requirements, example tests etc.

• German: the Goethe Institut
• French: the Alliance Française
• Spanish: Instituto de Cervantes (click ‘English‘ on the left)
• Irish: TEG
• Italian: CELI (page only in Italian)
• English: Cambridge exams
• For all other language exams (Portuguese, Greek, Czech etc.), check out the ALTE list of members

How does it work?

The layout of exams are somewhat different to one another and some have particular requirements that others do not. For example, in the German exam I had to read two (small) novels in advance that I could choose to answer questions on in the written part of the test, and in the French exam you have to choose a specialisation subject in the DALF level exams. Neither of these were a requirement in my Spanish DELE however.

What they do have in common is the European standard grading system of A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2, (A1 is the lowest, C2 is the highest) although what each of these actually means is debatable. Here (PDF link) is a vague self-assessment guideline of what these levels may mean. Some Universities may only require a B2 to attend their courses, which means that you can indeed communicate in the language, but still not very confidently. But a lot of universities do require a C1 or C2 to attend particular courses, which are very hard to pass.

The C2 level does not imply that you would be mistaken for a native – you can still make mistakes, have an accent, and stumble a little, but otherwise you must be able to confidently express yourself and understand in many normal situations, without the use of any dictionaries etc. I decided to aim for C2 in German and Spanish simply because it would force me to attempt to reach this level or very near it, as long as I take it seriously of course. My first attempt at a CEFRL test was the French B2 and I did not find it enough of a challenge to push me to improve my French quickly. Going for a more ‘realistic’ lower level may not be a problem for most people though, as the pressure of a looming C2 when you are far from ready can be quite stressful.

The basic components of the exams also tend to be quite similar: they usually have five sections: Oral (spoken), Aural (listening), Reading, Writing and Grammar. Grammar may be counted as within the “reading” section, but you will almost always find complex questions to test your technical understanding of the language.

If I needed these exams for the purposes of studying then I would have aimed for the minimum level required to be more sure of passing it. One other issue is that the higher levels are always more expensive. The price varies considerably – between €30 and almost €300 depending on the language and the level.

As suggested in the post title, one thing that sets these certificates apart from simply studying the language at university is that you do not need to attend classes. With this in mind, the couple of hundred Euro seems a lot cheaper than the thousands of Euro required for expensive courses or years at university. You still need to do a lot of preparation, and private lessons would not go astray if combined with studying past exams and books made specifically for that exam. The language institutes themselves will almost always provide courses tailor-made for the exams, but they tend to be quite expensive so I have never attended these.

Since you don’t need to attend any classes, you really can just sign up for the exam (a few weeks in advance), show up on the written test day and oral test day, and then get the certificate after the time it takes for correction. No messy bureaucracy involved!

My most recent C2 exam attempt

It turns out that the German ZOP (C2) exam requires just over two weeks for correction. So on July 12th I’ll get my results!

I had been learning Spanish for about a year (from scratch) when I sat and passed the DELE Superior (C2), so I might be pushing it too far this time to attempt to get a C2 in just 3 months. Of course, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t pass, but my main purpose for this exam was always to force myself to learn as much as possible in a short time, by seriously attempting to reach the minimum pass grade, and that aspect of the mission has been a great success!

I’m very pleased with the progress I made and the realistic attempt I gave in the exam, even if I miss the pass just by a few percent. Aiming so high and reaching what I did means that I am confident that I would definitely pass the C1 (one level below) if I were to sit it.

As far as the contents of the exam itself go, I am confident that I passed several parts (most likely written, reading and oral), but the aural part had some tricky questions that I may not have answered satisfactorily and the grammar part requires skills that I found frustrating (and frankly, unnatural) to have to work on (such as taking a pre-made sentence starting with a preposition + noun and reforming it to start with a conjunction + verb while keeping the meaning exactly the same – yes it is as much fun as it sounds…)

Despite certain questions, I did find the exam overall to be a very fair and challenging evaluation of level, just as other ones I have sat have been. Rather than be a big cry baby and blaming the exam, if I don’t pass it will simply be because I haven’t reached C2 level yet, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I still believe I may have a chance of passing (it’s quite hard to tell) so I will reserve any judgement until July 12th.

Sitting an exam that tests all aspects of a language has required me to stay indoors and study a lot, so I think I will focus just on my conversational fluency for the next while in German and other languages. Being forced to study so much has helped me refine and improve my study technique, and this will ultimately help me to help others learn languages, and give me an edge for short study bursts. However, I will definitely not be studying so intensively for quite a while, as that only takes away from time that I could be actually conversing in the language.

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I usually start speaking a new language from day one, but I’ll attempt to do some focused study for two weeks before I start speaking my next 3-month-mission language! Let’s see if these study techniques make a difference, or I if I stick to the belief that you should dive in immediately and stop waiting so much. For me 2 weeks is already a long time to be focused on a language and not be practising it!

But first, I need a break and a chance to appreciate Berlin! In the mornings I can get the Language Hacking Guide version 2.0 ready – next week the entire contents of the guide will be in seven languages in one download (free upgrade for all those that bought it already), translated laboriously by natives. Hopefully I’ll have the time to redesign a few things on the site too. But in the afternoons/evenings, I will be out and enjoying this amazing city!

I’ll announce the next 3-month mission on the blog just after I get the results of the German exam – otherwise I’ll continue attempting to improve my German for the rest of my stay here. If you missed the announcement in the Language Hacking League, then don’t forget to ‘like’ FI3M’s Facebook page to see it announced there this weekend!

Since I have done practically no work at all in reducing my accent (this was not a requirement of the oral exam other than for the purposes of being easy to understand), it will be hard to achieve that aspect of my initial goals in just a few weeks, but I will certainly try! Nothing is impossible if you keep trying! Although in future, I think I’ll just have one ridiculously ambitious goal per 3-month mission

Have any of you sat CEFRL tests? What have your experiences been? Share them with us below!
Similar Posts:

• C2 exam results and analysis
• Why studying will never help you speak a language
• FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam
• The German 3 month mission: Become a Berliner & sit C2 exam
• Non-verbal skills: essential but ignored aspects of foreign language communication

♬ Cumpleaños feliz ♫ Joyeux anniversaire ♪ Happy birthday dear fluentin3months ♬ Tanti auguri a te! ♪

On June 1st 2009 I wrote the first post on this blog, and my fluent in 3 months projects had begun! It has been an incredible first year! The blog has received (to date) almost 2,500 comments and 500,000 page views, and has just won 1st place in the Top Language Learning blogs and 2nd place out of all Top 100 Language blogs 2010!!

In the last year on this blog I have documented how I was able to speak pretty good Czech in just two months (video here), pass of as a Carioca, get by in Thai, and of course am working on the German mission right now. And of course, along the way I have constantly reminded all of you that you can easily do it too! It has been one of the best years of my life thanks to all the support from readers to make sure I kept up the missions! Thank you

And the effects have gone way beyond the Internet. I met some fantastic other bloggers in Thailand who gave me great advice, met up with a couple of readers in person and have even been recognised in the street dozens of times by people I’ve never met! It helps that every single post so far includes a photo of me in it I also seem to have a reputation ahead of me. I’ve lost count of the times someone in a party would talk to me for a few minutes and suddenly say “… hold on, are you that crazy 3-months guy?!?”

The blog has also made a big practical difference to my finances, all in the last two weeks. Unfortunately, everything I’ve earned for the last 15 months has gone directly to paying off my Visa card, which I had to use as an ATM card ever since my old laptop melted in 42ºC heat in India and left me workless for several weeks and needing to replace it with an equally powerful laptop. I had spent a lot on an iPhone just before this happened, which probably contributed to me disliking it so much…

However, since releasing the Language Hacking Guide, I may not have sold enough to retire yet, but I have (as of a couple of hours before writing this) cleared my debt! After paying rent, at the time of writing I now have €34 to my name and I’m damn happy about it Having a non-negative balance feels quite nice indeed! The best part is that I have received waves of positive feedback about the Language Hacking Guide – so people have genuinely been loving it and saying it was well worth what they paid for it! Sales have been slow after the first week, but hopefully as the site grows, more people will check it out.

To think, all it took to solve this problem and to be exposed to so many amazing people was a few mouse clicks and typing some words!

What’s in store for year two?

In one month, my 3-months will be up for the German mission – those of you in the Language Hacking League (sign up for free on the right of the site) will get e-mailed next Monday to hear where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing in July. I can say that for at least the next year I will continue the pattern of 2-3 month language missions that I have had since the site began. It’s fun!

People always ask me how I choose my next language – they suggest that the cases of this language or the tones of that language will be a great challenge for me. Well, as much as I love a challenge, grammar and other technical details of a language are not the reason I travel. I travel to get to know more people, enjoy a local culture, and feel comfortable in my day-to-day life. For me a cool city is way more important than a cool language. Although I definitely want to expand into some more interesting languages!

In fact, I’d love to get into Russian and Japanese, but there is one problem with both of these! No, it’s not Russian’s cases or Japanese’s kanji. That’s nothing – there’s something that scares me way more than that! It’s the fact that I love living in major active cities, so I would really much prefer to have those 3 missions in Moscow and Tokyo. Only problem is… they also happen to be the world’s top 2 most expensive capital cities! I’m not rich, and arrange my travels around that. Berlin for example is one of the cheapest capital cities in Europe, so coming here for 3 months was an easy choice, especially after hearing from so many people how great it is.

So, my side-mission for the rest of this year will be to try to earn more than I normally would as a translator. I don’t need to retire to a paradise island, feed a smoking/drinking habit, buy a car, or invest in lots of junk (since 40kg is already plenty to be travelling with). But if I want to be more flexible in my travels than sticking to cheap cities, I’ll have to start earning a bit more.

The good news for those of you who are just here to read & comment is that it means I am planning to be much more active! Once I have done the German exam, I’ll start working on aspects of this site like perhaps adding a forum to help connect language hackers, hopefully posting more regularly than once or twice a week, and I’ll definitely be writing guest posts on other blogs (about many things, not just languages!) and trying to get more interested readers to come here.

My priority will always be to continue to write interesting content to share my language learning adventures and my language hacks, both on the blog and the separate hacks in the e-mail list. I’ll keep all this advice nice and free! And hopefully 0.1% or so of people visiting will want a little bit more and will read the guide

Consultation

After the initial successful first week, sales of the guide continue to go well, but still not quite enough to live off. I’m going to take the risk and try to be a full time language hacker. I think I can contribute in other ways on my short time on this rock than locking myself up for weeks translating French train-door specifications to English…

Since I have been enjoying injecting some enthusiasm and language hacks into people I randomly meet in social events (one reason I was so slow to start a blog is because I am better at explaining myself verbally than in writing), I am going to go to the next level and try to help people on a one-on-one basis remotely. I was a language teacher for most of the last 7 years and you can see in the videos that I am certainly not shy to try to encourage people, so I am confident that I can really help people by Skype / telephone calls.

If you think you might be interested, or know someone who might, then check out my “Hire me” page for more details. Just as I am starting up, I’ll half the normal rate I am aiming for just until next Friday 10th. If you need to speak a language asap, but are not so confident and need formulate a plan of action, then let me know if you’d like private consultation and we’ll see if I can help

4 weeks until the dreaded C2 exam!

OK, now back to the current mission! I signed up for the C2 exam last week and am working really hard to make sure passing is a real possibility. Now that I am familiar with the exam layout I can tell you that it’s hard!! Much harder than I had expected! Despite that, and despite my slower progress due to being almost totally focused on writing the Guide for 6 weeks straight, I still have a chance!

The easy part will be the oral exam. I would have passed this anyway if it was spontaneous, as the Spanish and French ones I did were. Speaking confidently is my forte and the core of the Guide I wrote! But it gets even easier – you are actually allowed to prepare a speech in advance and then discuss the same topic. I will prepare a talk about “Unconventional language learning strategies” and my examiners will of course be German teachers in their day-jobs. They may have examined many people before, but they won’t know what hit them when I get there!

But there is one big problem I wasn’t aware of until signing up. They don’t let you sit the oral exam unless you pass the written one! This has been a big blow to my plans, as I mostly wanted to know my result in the spoken part, even if I didn’t overall pass the exam. Despite paying a tzar’s ransom to sign up for the exam I can’t even sit all parts of it unless I pass others. Bloody annoying!

So the pressure really is on to do as well as possible in the other parts. You don’t have to pass all of them. I need to get a result of at least 60% in the written essay to be allowed into the oral one. This is going to be very hard at the standards required, but I’m going to write as much as possible over the next weeks and get corrections. I won’t ace this, but I am going to try really hard to achieve that 60-65% window required.

After this I need 60% in at least two out of the following three parts to pass overall: listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and the “expressiveness” part. The listening part will be hard, but I think I have a good chance of at least getting the 60% in that, the reading part is harder than you would think because of the complicated questions they ask, even though the texts are actually very manageable, but I’m practising a lot so I also have a chance there. And the “expressiveness” part is a frustrating collection of very technical grammatical questions that the examiners can expect a bold lecture from me about how pointless it is if I make it into the Oral exam! I’ll try my best but it’s not likely I’ll pass that part.

Even so I can still theoretically get the overall diploma with a “satisfactory” grade! However, falling below that extremely difficult to reach 60% grade in any of the four aspects I’m aiming to pass will render the entire result as a fail. And not getting that minimum in the written will mean that I won’t even get to sit the only part (Oral) that I was actually looking forward to!

Sound daunting enough? I seem to be willingly putting myself through this ridiculous exam procedure despite the fact that it’s June and I should be in sunny parks chatting up blond Berliners. At least the very unexpected dull weather Europe is experiencing these weeks means it’s not that bad being stuck indoors studying. Sitting an exam like this is the only reason I’m studying so much, because otherwise it can’t help as much as being much more social would with a goal of speaking better.

My spoken level has been improving (as you can see by watching my two most recent videos), but way less than I would prefer. Attempting to reduce my accent is hard as I’m not speaking regularly enough, but I am still not giving up on that just yet!

So, we have one month left! You will of course get details of how the exam went… they give me the final results about 10 days after sitting the exam (but they will correct just the written part on the same day to tell me if I’m not invited to the Oral exam – how nice of them!)

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There you have it! So, what do you think about FI3M’s first year? How would you like to see the site develop over the next 12 months? Do you think having Skype calls is an interesting way for me to get to Tokyo? Based on my description – will you forgive me if I don’t pass the C2 exam, or do you think I have a good chance?

Share all your thoughts in the comments! Any off-topic negativity will be banished to the netherworld of Disqus’ deleted comments limbo!

Thanks again for all of your support over the last 12 months
Similar Posts:

• The German 3 month mission: Become a Berliner & sit C2 exam
• Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes
• C2 exam results and analysis
• The Language Hacking Guide is ready!
• First month in Berlin & 8 language 6 dialect tour of my flat

After seven years of working hard to improve my language learning strategy, almost a year of blogging about my learning approach, and six weeks of full-time writing and research for it… the Language Hacking Guide is ready for download!

Click here to see a funny 8-language video I made to talk about it, and to read all about what you can find inside the 40MB download!

If you’d like to browse through the first few pages of the e-book part (to see the table of contents and get a feel for it), join the Language Hacking League e-mail list on the right of my site and you’ll get it free in your first e-mail. (You can unsubscribe immediately if you don’t want any more e-mails with language hacking tips after that) If you are already in the list you should have received it this morning .

Only the first ones to download the guide will get a bonus for the next day or two! To see what that is, check out the description!

My hopes with this guide are to share the core of what has helped me to achieve the faster progress that I have in languages. The guide is separated into six parts: Mentality, Plan of Action, Communicating from Day One, Speaking with natives, Learning resources and Particular language issues. It is a mixture of positive attitude and particular techniques with examples and worksheets to help you try to do the same. There are also several interviews with some amazing language learners that some of you will certainly know!

This is only version 1.0 – there will be updates with full translations, and more sections added. I will even likely include updates in the next week, as people are already giving me their interesting suggestions (e.g. not just one PDF file for reading on a screen, but also a printable version and an ePub format version). These updates will be free.

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When I started this blog, I had no idea I would be heading in this direction! But I have literally gotten hundreds of e-mails from people asking me to go into more detail into my method and to present it in an easier to read format than a blog with random articles. So the Guide is my attempt to do so. In seeing the popularity of the site, if I can actually earn a little money from the traffic (up until today I received €80 in donations over the year – nice, but not enough to help me pay off debts ) then I would have more free time to be able to write much more articles here

Everyone won’t buy the guide and that’s OK – the small amount of people that do will be helping me out, so that I can keep writing these posts to help people who need free tips! Any of my “secrets” currently in the guide will be shared in the blog in one form or another, but over a very long time and in a somewhat random way. I have a huge amount of ideas for posts that I want to write!

Hopefully, the support from the Guide will give me more free time to be able to write here more regularly . I usually write only twice a week (recently only once), and I’d like to do it more

So check out the description and video and let me know what you think of it!
Similar Posts:

• FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam
• The stone of Rosetta & multilingual Language Hacking Guide 2.0
• Language hackers, e-mail list and the upcoming guide
• The German 3 month mission: Become a Berliner & sit C2 exam
• Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCylqlYNRTg

It’s been a month since I arrived in Berlin, so it’s about time for a mission update! To make it more interesting, I’ve decided to include this multilingual video tour of my flat.

I also made (just English) videos to show my home in Prague and Rio, since I host Couchsurfers most of the time and I’d like them to see where they’ll be sleeping before they come.

However, this is the first time I’ve tried to make a single video with multiple languages, i.e. the whole video is one unedited (other than adding graphics like flags & subtitles) take. I really prefer to use my languages to talk to people rather than my camera, since it feels very artificial. On top of that it’s hard to switch between languages so quickly, so I made a few mistakes, but otherwise you can hear me speak the languages I have good command over, one after the other, and I even included German so you can hear how I’m more-or-less speaking it after a month!

First month

The reason that video is relevant to my first month in Berlin is because that flat is basically where I’ve spent most of my time since I got here! I prefer to spend more time outside, but before the summer weather got here I wanted to make sure I did as much of my indoor stuff as possible, to get it out of the way.

After the first week, I was translating double-time again and this gave me very little time to do anything else. So I decided to block translation work for the rest of the month, and most of my day has been devoted to writing the language hacking guide so that I can describe in great detail the process involved that helps me learn languages quickly.

I’ve made great progress in writing a huge amount already, and interviewing some amazing people to include audio in the guide. I’m hoping to release it mid-May!! (For more info on that, join the language hacking league by entering your e-mail on the right).

Progress in German

The first week was the most crucial, since I had already gotten into the rhythm of not speaking English. I made enough progress to be able to even spend several hours a day speaking just in German, using my usual tricks! Since that week, my level has definitely improved, but a lot less in its spoken aspect than what I usually prefer, simply because I’m not being social enough.

This month I’ve been implementing the ‘input experiment’ -- a title I got to like less and less, since I find this concept of input vs output to be silly for language learning and totally ignores important inherent human aspects. I’m not a robot thank you very much!!

Anyway, this new approach has gone reasonably well as I discover which non-social systems work (at least for me) for learning languages. Certain ones are useful for reading and listening comprehension, and other ones (like SRS, which I’ll explain soon) have revolutionised how I previously learned vocabulary.

I’ll continue to share my thoughts on what I have found useful, and elaborate on them more over the coming weeks. These methods can help people with no access to other learners or natives in their town, although if you live in a major city and are learning a major language you have a lot less excuses for not being able to practise with people.

Chances of success?

I’m way off being able to reduce my accent to be non-foreign, but I’m told that without knowing it in advance, most people have not guessed that I’m a native-English speaker based on how I speak German. This is mostly because I worked hard in other languages to get rid of my English accent. This is less likely in in a video like the above one, because of the very artificial nature of switching from other languages so quickly and basically talking to myself. I speak better than that in conversations.

I still have an accent in all of my languages, but not having the English ‘r’ and other things have been hugely helpful in making sure conversations don’t slip into English. Even if my level is quite low, the lack of a very strong accent actually makes it seem like I’m speaking better than another foreigner who would actually have way more command over the language than I have, but with a very noticeable accent. This has been a big help to make sure that conversations don’t slip into English.

I still haven’t reached fluency (as I define it), but I’m confident that I’ll do this in May so my last weeks can be focused on reducing my accent and better emulating Germans. Remember, completely eliminating my accent isn’t quite what I’m aiming for -- I want people to think that I’m German for about 30 seconds into our first conversation. This means that I can make some minor mistakes, as long as they are subtle enough not to raise any alarm bells!

In most casual conversations, people wouldn’t notice minor mistakes. Some readers seem to be confused about what I was aiming for. I never aim for perfection and I think it would be ridiculous to ever try. But what I’m aiming for is still realistic (depending on how devoted I am) and should be thought about in a social context. To me, speaking a language isn’t about how much I know, but how well I can communicate. There is a big difference that I’ll go into in more detail another time.

With regards the C2 exam -- I decided to get a private lesson from a Goethe Institut instructor (very familiar with the exam) and asked her what she thought my chances are. She said that it is perhaps possible, despite my current level, if I keep up the rate of progress that I have so far. However, based on her evaluation of my writing I will have to work really hard for that important aspect of it to be passable. She reminded me how ridiculously hard the exam is to make sure I was aware of the very likely chance of me not passing.

The fact that she didn’t laugh / roll her eyes at my suggestion of doing the C2 exam is definitely encouraging! I now only have two months left before I plan to sit it!

Life in Berlin

Hopefully in the next update I can tell you more about life in Berlin itself. I have only been out to socialise a couple of times a week and I can say that so far I’ve found Berliners to be very friendly, and I quite like the city!

It’s one of the quietest major cities I’ve ever lived in. I have been in certain central areas that definitely don’t seem shady, and sometimes I don’t even see other people/cars for a few minutes. Usually capitals are chaotic and filled with traffic jams etc., but I find it quite peaceful here!

I think this will change soon because summer is upon us -- warm weather came quicker than I was expecting, so I imagine the city will explode into life soon! I look forward to getting out to enjoy it!!

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So I hope you enjoyed the video and this update! As always, I look forward to your comments
Similar Posts:

• The German 3 month mission: Become a Berliner & sit C2 exam
• Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes
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• FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam

OK, I’ve had several months of a break from full language immersion, but it’s time to get back to what I know and love!

In a few short hours I’ll be flying into Berlin where I’ll be spending the next 3 months! The next mission is of course German.

My mission will be to convince Germans that I’m a Berliner by the end of June, and to sit the Goethe-Zertifikat C2: Zentrale Oberstufenprüfung examination. The level required for this examination goes way beyond fluency; it is for Mastery of a language.

So, you would have to be crazy to attempt it without years of intensive study. Or, if you plan to do it in 3 months time, you would want to already be speaking at an excellent level right now. The only problem is… right now, I don’t speak German!!!

The familiar story of a wasted academic background

All the languages that I am currently fluent in have been picked up through immersion, avoiding English, and applying a positive attitude while remaining committed to make sure my level was constantly improving; using the language hacking techniques I discuss on this site and will elaborate on in the guide. I have never taken academic courses (or audio/software based courses) in any of them.

Despite that, you may be surprised to hear that I actually studied German for 5 years before going to University – it’s the language that I’ve put the most work into, and yet, right now I couldn’t even order breakfast in German if I wanted to. You’ll notice that it is not one of the flags I’ve included on the right of this site as a language that I speak.

I know all about the Accusative/Nominative/Dative cases and the various ways to say the (der, die, das, den, dem…), I know that the order that words appear in a sentence goes by Time then Manner then Place, and that the second verb goes at the end if there is an auxiliary verb. I can reproduce tables of rules and I can read some text and have a pretty good idea what it’s about.

But I still don’t actually speak German.

Since I was an English teacher for several years, I know that there are good ways to teach a language. However, sadly, most of the English speaking world does not teach foreign languages well and even after years of investment, lots of us are still left scratching our heads when we actually need to speak.

I did try though – I spent several weeks in Munich and a month in Freiburg (both in south Germany) a few years ago. I felt like I was starting over from scratch, but even so, I managed to start speaking a little. I even lived with two Germans in Spain for several months and got to practise even more. But it was never enough to actually feel like I was really speaking; this was very early in my travels and well before I had improved my language learning technique.

Despite any confidence in my abilities in other languages, the countless times that I have met Germans, Austrians and (German) Swiss over the years have pretty much always required the conversation to be in English (or another language that we both speak). It’s embarrassing considering all the time and homework that I have done for German, and to be honest I’ve had enough of this feeling!

So I want to see if I can turn those wasted academic years into something useful, and achieve fluency in a short period of time. I feel like lack of vocabulary and familiarity with speaking are the main things holding me back, since I genuinely do understand the grammar of the language. I am not starting over from scratch; I want to make something of that academic background!!

This means that I’ll be aiming to speak fluently in just a few weeks! If that goes according to plan, then I’ll be ready to take on my greatest challenge yet.

The C2 level exam: Think “very hard” & multiply that by a thousand

The Common European Framework of References for Languages level C2 is one of the hardest possible examinations you can do in any language. The system used in Europe for competency in languages splits levels into A1, A2, B1, B2, C1 and C2, starting from “breakthrough” at A1 where you may have a few basic phrases, and ending at C2 where you understand virtually everything and join in on conversations with ease.

I have the DELE Superior C2 diploma in Spanish from the Instituto de Cervantes, so I know exactly what this level means. It’s ridiculously hard! For those of you who think I should be realistic and do the B2 or C1 exam first… well, I did that in French and was annoyed that it wasn’t harder I love a nice challenge!

You do not need to attend any course to sit the exam; you just pay the fee and show up on the examination day, and that is what I intend to do at the end of June. I can’t promise that I’ll pass it, but you can bet that I’m going to be trying my best to do so!

The exam consists of a written section: text analysis, essay and listening comprehension. Plus an oral examination. A passing grade is broken up into ‘very good’, ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’. I would of course be quite satisfied with satisfactory, if there is a chance that I can get it!

When I am more familiar with the exam itself, I can see what chance I have of passing it and what to aim for. I want to at the very least get quite a good grade in the oral section, even if I don’t achieve an overall pass. That alone will require huge amounts of work, and I intend to do my best in the other sections too, of course.

The Goethe Institut recommends 1,200 hours of advanced tutorials, but this will be nothing more than a part-time fun project for me (as the Spanish DELE was). I’ll also be working full time, and even trying to write a language hacking guide which will include several books and audio interviews, as well as trying to have an active social life and going out with Germans . So, I may be aiming way too high this time! But, I tend to do that a lot – it’s good to aim for the stars even if you just land on the moon

I’ll do the same things I did with the DELE to give myself the best chance of passing this exam, and of course will share all the tips and progress (and result, no matter what it may be…) on this blog

Convincing Germans that I’m German

The more fun part of this mission will be something similar to what I achieved with my Portuguese in Rio; I want to meet a native for the first time and talk to them, and have them genuinely and honestly think that I’m also German for up to 30 seconds. 30 seconds may not sound impressive, but this is a very long time to be in an active conversation and not slip up, especially considering my time limit of 3 months to do so.

This mission will involve me speaking German fluently first, then reducing my accent to be as imperceptible as possible, while adapting to German body language and mannerisms as accurately as I can. I will consider this part of the mission a success if several different people that I’ve just been introduced to, who don’t know me, thought that I was German before noticing a mistake, 30 seconds or more after the conversation has begun.

I don’t want to convince any linguists; just random people that I meet naturally in social events.

I’ve been told that the Berlin accent is hard to pinpoint and that many Germans in Berlin aren’t even from the city. I’ll work toward standard German, but I’ll be focussing on the northern dialect that would be expected more in Berlin, to have a specific dialect to aim for.

Considering the fact that I don’t speak German right now, this should be interesting

The great input experiment

Since vocabulary is a big weakness for me in my German right now, I will be changing my social learning approach slightly and trying some input learning techniques that so many of the site’s readers have gotten a lot out of!

I will be reviewing many different input techniques from a language hacking perspective. I want to know what way I can learn words the quickest and the most efficiently, and of course which one is the most fun! I’ll be trying out SRS, Livemocha, podcasts and several other methods, each one just by itself for 1-2 weeks and reviewing them for how good they fit in with my idea of language hacking.

Some parts of my reviews will go on the blog, more details will be included in the weekly language hacking league tips e-mail (sign up on the right) and the most important parts of my analyses will be a part of the guide. I’m also hoping to conduct audio interviews with those most familiar with these techniques, to include with other interviews in the guide. Hopefully I will find something that works well with what I do already, and I’m sure that my reviews will come in handy for people as I give the advantages and disadvantages of the methods as I see them, so a reader could pick one that that suited them best. All methods that I will be investigating will be free or very inexpensive.

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So, join me over the next 3 months as I try to become a Berliner!

Do share your thoughts on this next mission! Do you think I’ll manage to convince Germans that I am German? Am I crazy to want to do the C2 examination? How do you think the input experiment will go? Let me know what you think in the comments!!
Similar Posts:

• First month in Berlin & 8 language 6 dialect tour of my flat
• C2 exam results and analysis
• Taking CEFRL tests for quality European language certificates with no classes
• The stone of Rosetta & multilingual Language Hacking Guide 2.0
• Language hackers, e-mail list and the upcoming guide

Every day I get several e-mails through the contact me form on my site from other language learners out there, sharing their struggles (that I can certainly relate to) and asking for advice.

Sometimes, I can give the advice in just a couple of sentences, other times I need to refer to a long post that I or another blogger has already written. Sometimes I feel like I need to write a response that would take hours to read to express the level of detail required. However, almost every day I get asked… what is your learning method??

While I definitely think I’ve been transparent about a lot of what I do with languages on this blog, I know that lots of people are curious to hear more. So today I’m announcing two major projects that I’ll be adding to the site, for the purposes of providing more information for those of you interested in trying similar approaches to be fluent in a language quickly. These will be separate to the blog itself, which will continue in the same way as before.

The first is the language hacking league, an e-mail list for those of you genuinely interested in getting more involved in the Fluent-in-3-months project and getting some extra tips:

Language Hacking league e-mail list

For the purposes of being more transparent to those of you curious about the steps taken as I learn a language myself, and while not overwhelming blog readers with too much information, I’ve set up a language hacking league e-mail list that you can join if you want.

The e-mail list will include very brief weekly updates on progress in my current mission and tips for what you should do in a similar situation, as well as answers to Frequently Asked Questions, and some extra language learning tips in compact form that will not published be on the site. It also includes some of the best links on the Internet for language learning.

Since only the most interested of you will be joining, I will also be using this list to ask for your help on occasion, because there are times when I feel like asking for help on something relevant to the project. I know that some readers would be interested in helping me out with, but it would disrupt the flow of the blog if I made a whole post just about a single thing; especially since I know that there are a lot of not-so-active readers out there that do genuinely just want to read some language tips and hear the story of the mission and nothing more. Sometimes I will simply ask for your opinion on something I’m working on; this is a way for me to keep more direct contact with those most interested.

Of course, I will not be using this e-mail list to spam people. You can try it out, and if you don’t like it, you can easily permanently remove your e-mail from the subscription list.

One major thing I’ll be doing in this list for the really curious among you is that it will be where I will first publicly announce my missions. So, in future if you want to find out where I am going next and what I’ll be doing there for 3 months, all you have to do is subscribe and you’ll find out before anyone else! I will send such e-mails a few weeks before I actually travel.

Name:

Email:

We respect your email privacy

I will, of course, write general mission updates every few weeks or so on the blog that will contain the most interesting parts written in the e-mail list. So as I say, only those genuinely interested in more details, links and extra language hacks should join the e-mail list The second project I’ll be working on over the next months for later release is the language hacking guide. Here’s some information about it:

The language hacking guide – how to become fluent in 3 months

[Update: The language hacking guide is ready!! You can get your copy and read more information about the actual contents here.]

It’s inspiring how many of those e-mails I receive every day have recently said that they’ve actually read through my entire archive of posts (only about 9 months to date, but still, I write a lot each time) in an attempt to get a good idea of my language learning method.

The problem is, my posts are all over the place – basic grammar tips in one post, advanced accent reduction in another, with sprinkles of the positive attitude that makes it all possible. You can definitely see how I think by reading all of my posts, but it’s hardly a good overall guide that you can read systematically.

So I’m going to create that guide. Rather than just write a series of posts on the subject, or even release a tiny e-book, I am planning to create the ultimate language hacking guide. I’m not shy to tell you that I think it’s going to be something that a lot of people will want to get their hands on and something that can genuinely help frustrated learners who still can’t speak.

From now on I won’t be referring to it as my method so much. This approach of trying to become fluent in a language quickly is LANGUAGE HACKING. I’m not the only person who does this, and I’ll be getting advice from other language hackers out there, and interviewing them as part of the guide. Other people’s advice will be as important as my own, since I want the scope of the guide to be as broad as possible.

To be honest, I feel that a guide about crucial aspects of speaking languages quickly is just not out there yet. There are plenty of language learning guides and websites already, but they almost always focus on the content of the language rather than the process involved in actually speaking it when the time comes.

This crucial human aspect is a gap that needs to be filled that I’ve been attempting to do on this blog. My current plan for the guide is to have it contain several separate e-books, some audio interviews and possibly some video [for download], as well as other extras that will be decided later on. This is the current vague outline:

PART 1 SPEAKING: The language hacking mentality

If you invest in a course like Rosetta Stone or use advanced input techniques of listening to CDs and such, these methods work (some well, some really badly) for improving your scope of vocabulary or ability to recognise. But a language is much more than pure content. I am amazed that even the most skilled linguists can’t see this. Even after studying for years (either in an inefficient academic programme or using good pure-input techniques) you would still be missing so much that is required to confidently speak the language.

What if you are generally a shy person and aren’t confident enough to express all that you’ve learned? Won’t the locals feel frustrated at your feeble attempts to speak their language? What about the huge amount that you still don’t know? Exactly when will you be ready to speak? A month? A year? 8 years? What will you do if they answer you back in English? What if you move suddenly to your spouse’s country or for work reasons and don’t have the time to invest months into input-based learning?……

There are so many questions that are never dealt with in most courses and I intend to answer them in detail. Those who read my blog already generally know my answers to some of these questions. You need to start speaking NOW if you want to reach a good level quickly.

If you are only interested in a language for its own sake, for literature, or to watch movies in the language, with no plans of actually going to the country that speaks it, then I actually recommend you embrace the pure-input method suggested in the many courses currently available, whether it is free or paid. However, if you want to speak with actual human beings (no iPods, computer programs, books or movies) then I have quite a few tips for you that even the most expensive courses simply don’t supply.

The first part will discuss the mentality and approach needed to talk to human beings in your target language and to gain the confidence to do so. I’ll be presuming that the reader is an introvert, but with an open mind. This part of the guide will also possibly include interviews with other language hackers with similar, as well as different, approaches to language hacking.

PART 2 LEARNING: Several different hacks to learn the language quickly

Of course, if you have no words, phrases, and at least some basic grasp on grammar, it is really hard to actually speak the language no matter how confident you are. I have mostly focused on discussing the human aspect on this blog, simply because it’s so universally ignored. But a lot of people have said that they’ve combined my advice with efficient input methods and the result works extremely well for them.

So in the second part, I’m going to be focusing on actually learning (rather than speaking) the language. On the blog I’ve already mentioned things like getting more time out of your day, image association techniques for memorizing etc., so I will return to those as well as go into the nitty gritty details of the process that I personally go through when trying to start and improve my level of any language until I’m fluent in it.

Using such techniques you can reach a very good level of the language quickly. The reason people can spend years studying a language and not achieving anything worthwhile is because the approach they use is simply flawed.

But saying what I have been doing is still not enough. My own personal language hacking method is definitely not perfect, and can always be improved. So over the next months, I will be testing out some input and computer-based methods that have been extremely popular among other learners, such as SRS, LiveMocha, new memory techniques, and any other suggestions you can give me that have definitely worked for other people, and I’ll be discussing as many good ones as possible in the guide.

However, I will be testing them in the context of how they improve my actual spoken level of the language of my next 3-month mission. I am not interested in theory – I want results.

If there is a technique that works over years (such as the traditional academic approach, or certain inefficient input based methods) then I am simply not interested in it, as that will not help me in the short-term and would thus not come under my understanding of language hacking.

In this part I will definitely be interviewing people who are experienced in using these other approaches, since their long-term experience and advice will be crucial in making any short-term summary I can give to be worthwhile. I’m hoping that the scope of introducing several different methods would mean that the reader could choose one that they feel would work best for them.

Release details

This is an immense undertaking and would take a ridiculously huge amount of time to create. However, being the ambitious lad I am, I’m going to try to have it ready by May, in time for summer and when lots of people will be travelling abroad. Obviously, achieving this target deadline depends on so many things, including how many hours I’m putting into my actual full-time job, the next language mission, and generally having a life! Time will tell if I make the deadline.

After it has been released, I’ll update it with further tips and FAQ based on previous versions. These updates will be free.

I also plan on working with other translators (natives of course) to have the entire guide translated to several languages, after releasing it first in English.

This is a package that you can bet that I’ll be selling rather than giving away for free. Most websites with the kind of traffic and level of subscribers I’m getting here would have countless affiliate links, advertisements on the page, paid promotions etc. Apart from the very rare Amazon link for books, and a silly unobtrusive donate via-Orange-juice button (which in the end is averaging less than 2 actual €3 donations a month!), I’ve done none of that and have focused purely on content from the start. I haven’t sold out my goal to genuinely help people learn and speak languages to make a quick buck, and the concept for creating this guide is just one I’ve had recently. But what I plan to release will be worth paying money for and I’ll be investing a lot of time into it.

I’m not going to be recommending any expensive courses to accompany the product; most resources that I use are completely free. So this will genuinely save people money, especially if they are considering buying some other pure input based course that usually ends up costing hundreds of dollars, or even thousands in the case of academic courses. It will otherwise give them an overview and review of several different free options before they invest their time in them.

The price tag I’ll be putting on it will be US$39 (before other language updates). For the amount of content I plan to include, I think that’s a fair deal. I have little interest in making a million dollars online, but frankly my current frustrating financial situation of oscillating in and out of debt and locking myself in my room to work non-stop for 3 weeks is getting super annoying and has even prematurely ended my first mission on this blog. After May I don’t want to be able to use that excuse for a reason that I didn’t achieve a 3-month mission and I think selling something worthwhile like this could get me out of that pattern.

If you are interested in getting involved and hearing more details about the progress of the guide, you’ll also get information about that in the weekly e-mail list! I’ll be asking people what they want to see in it as I’m writing it, through the e-mail list rather than through this blog. Once again, here’s that form if you are curious to find out more:

Name:

Email:

We respect your email privacy

This guide will only be for those genuinely interested in having a much more in-depth view of language hacking as I see it, and as those I’ll be interviewing see it. Most readers of the site can very simply ignore the book if they wish, and I consider all readers to be equally important. The site will continue as it has always been A lot of the advice in the guide will be freely available on the blog in one form or another, just a little harder to go through in a logical way. And of course, if you just have a single question to ask me, all you have to do is ask!

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I’m curious to hear your thoughts on these two projects in the comments! What would you like to see in a free e-mail list that I simply haven’t discussed on the site? What have I not mentioned in this overall plan that you would love to see in a guide? Is it something you’d like to read and listen to? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Similar Posts:

• The Language Hacking Guide is ready!
• The stone of Rosetta & multilingual Language Hacking Guide 2.0
• The German 3 month mission: Become a Berliner & sit C2 exam
• First month in Berlin & 8 language 6 dialect tour of my flat
• FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam

What an experience!!

This “dipping my toes” in my first Asian language has helped me see so many things I hadn’t realised before, despite the extremely little amount of time that I actually put into it, i.e. about 15 hours in the first month exclusively to be able to read the symbols and understand the tone rules, and the time around making the video just before leaving. What I really learned was in the many other hours I had of interactions with other learners and English speakers.

You’ll be surprised to see what I have taken away as the most important lessons; they have little to do with techniques for learning tones or dealing with Thai’s differences from European languages and more to do with general lessons relevant to other languages and those very interactions with other learners.

Confidence to speak is what holds pretty much EVERYONE back

It doesn’t matter what language you are learning; Asian or European, the reason you aren’t speaking it is because you aren’t confident enough. Learning all the grammar, tone rules, vocabulary and exceptions seems to be the way that a lot of people achieve this confidence. In my opinion, this is inefficient. The study and learning aspect is still very important, but only for improving on your spoken level, not for getting the confidence to be able to speak.

Learners focused on the details say that they will be ready to speak the language when they have enough. My 3-month missions are possible because I gain this confidence through speaking rather than through studying. You can speak in your first days of really trying (as I showed in the video), and gaining confidence this way takes way less time than through trying to know a language inside and out. That was a tough morning for me, but it was like tearing off a band-aid – doing it quickly was the best way. After that weekend I was confident in speaking Thai in so many situations in my final days, that I just wasn’t “ready” for before.

My lack of readiness was nothing more than a barrier that I had put up myself. The only real regret that I have in this mission is that I didn’t start with speaking and have that confidence from my first weekend rather than my last one. I would have effortlessly improved my speaking habits over the entire stay, even with very little work. In future I won’t wait to speak – reading aspects will come after that and not before it.

Flashback of other learners’ “encouragement”

Since my approach involves immersion, I simply don’t tend to associate so much with English speakers, or if I do, it would be through the language we are both learning. The benefits of this are obvious, but I had long forgotten one really important reason that also pushed me towards this learning strategy.

Other learners can be very discouraging!

In this Thai mission, this was just a minor annoyance because (as you can imagine) I’m already confident enough. You could call it arrogance, but the whole point is that I’m telling everyone else how they can do it too and that I’m not special. But I got a flashback to when I was learning Spanish and my enthusiasm was curbed by other English speakers at a time when I was way more vulnerable. When people hear you speak a language pretty well they can’t really do much to discourage you, but when you are still trying and not quite succeeding, they can be very unhelpful.

Frankly, English speakers have standards that are way too high on perfection in languages. I can think of very few times over the last seven years that a native has given me any unhelpful criticism (as opposed to helpful corrections and such) in the languages that I’ve learned, with the exception of the French (more specifically, Parisians, but I’ll be writing a post soon about a revelation I’ve made in my French/Paris experience thanks to a return visit there).

However, I have gotten an amazing amount of negativity from English speakers also learning the same language. This attitude is something I struggle to understand, but to be honest I find it easier to simply avoid it by avoiding English speakers altogether. It’s sad (especially when it also means I’m avoiding non-language-learner travellers, who have actually hugely enriched my Thailand experience), but fighting against anglophone negativity (unlike Latino and Asian friendliness) is energy I’d rather spend on speaking with natives.

Since I obviously have a “strange” way of going about learning language of focusing on the positive, I unintentionally got into a few arguments with people about the ideal approach. In always trying to see what’s easy in a language, other learners were constantly showing me what’s hard. I am way off speaking Thai well, but everything they told me looks like something that would take a finite amount of time to be able to absorb and I am very sure that they would be achieved quicker with an upbeat attitude.

Any list of exceptions and rules that they could give me, I could counter them with a similar list for any other language. Thai is clearly way more different to English than French is, but Thai doesn’t have noun genders, irregular plurals, definite/indefinite articles, complicated rules for use of prepositions, difficult conjugations and so much more. If I say this you can counter with more things Thai has that European languages don’t, but what’s the point? It just turns into a pissing competition for whose language is “harder”.

Having a view of several languages gives me a unique perspective, and I can say that an astounding amount people seem to believe that their task is the hardest one. Thai is harder, or Czech is the hardest language in the world etc. Sorry guys, but there is no hardest language in the world. I said it before and I’ll say it again; it’s all about attitude With a negative attitude anything you do can and will be hard.

You still need other learners

Despite what I said above, avoiding other learners is not a great solution. While I still think that Asian languages aren’t as different the monster that I thought they were, I couldn’t have gotten my head around the differences so quickly without help. Natives usually aren’t in the position to explain these differences… and this seems much more so in Asian languages, which means you need to turn to someone focused on the details! Uh oh…

Voicing my approach of learning languages got me into quite a few arguments with other learners – this was not a good idea. Obviously I’m very passionate to share my approach with others, but the lack of evidence I could provide this time (since I wasn’t actually speaking the language I was learning for once) meant that I wasn’t going to convince them by words of positivity alone. I should have accepted this from the start because some of the advice that they had given to me was actually really good and I should have tapped that resource for more! In future I’ll argue my point a lot less and just let the evidence speak for itself, since I will be working hard in nearly all future missions and not just casually curious like I was with Thai.

Others can help you so much in your language endeavours – even if you happen to be against the academic or other approach that they use, what they know is essential and important information. If they have been learning longer than you, they can definitely make things easier in your own journey when asked for advice.

Although I am a little annoyed at the cynical direction that the discussion went in the thaivisa forum, some of the advice given was fantastic! I was given a link to a pdf file to help me get my head around the font issue in Thai that I had mentioned, shown a great page on the Thai-language site for recognising tones, and given lots of other interesting facts about how Thai works. They were really very helpful (when not arguing how silly I was)! I definitely recommend other Thai learners to try out that forum, but maybe don’t show that you think that Thai might just not be that hard, and definitely don’t mention my name

My friend Aleksandra also believed that it was important that I knew the difficulties of Thai to get a more rounded view – once I stopped trying to argue this point and asked for specific advice, her knowledge was essential. The video I made would not have been possible without her coaching me and correcting me.

Everyone needs to be flexible

So I’m clearly torn! Avoid other learners or learn to get along with them? The first one is not a healthy solution; especially since I tend to live in cities and I am genuinely interested in helping others learn languages quicker, so I’m just going to be meeting more and more learners. So I’m going to swallow my pride and try to be flexible – at the end of the day, no matter how great I think my approach is, it isn’t perfect and is always open to improvements! Hopefully this flexibility will encourage the other party to be so as well, and see some benefits of what I might have to say

From this conclusion, my next mission will have this theme of improvements. I am going to be trying some new (to me) approaches that I never had before because I had dismissed them as incompatible with my view of language hacking. This blog has exposed me to so many other points of view and a lot of people say that they are combining my strategy with other ones, and happy with the combination.

Why should they have all the fun? I’ll be test-driving some other learning approaches, which may not be as social as what I usually do, but may indeed have some interesting merits for learning a language quickly.

End of Thai mission

In the end I achieved all of what I had initially aimed for – with the exception of not attempting to read unprepared text to a native. The real point of the mission was confidence in an Asian language, and I feel ready to aim for something much much higher next time I try So I consider this mission a success! I now award myself 4 out of 5 stars for the achievement:

The mission was mostly a break for me – when I reveal the next ones you’ll understand why I needed such a break!

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this story! The next one will be way more interesting and the target way higher than anything else I’ve aimed for before

But first, I’ll be sharing some details on how to learn the Irish language, my own tips on it, a video and several other posts. I’ll also be introducing another project I’ll be working on over the next months (other than the mission) very soon.

Let me know what your views are on experiences with other learners! Share your thoughts on anything mentioned here, in the comments
Similar Posts:

• Next mission: Read and speak Thai in 8 weeks
• Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months
• Summary of month 1 in the mission to become Brazilian
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• My next mission: Become Brazilian in 3 months!

It’s time for my next mission!! Sceptics beware; as always I’m going for an ambitious goal

In a few short hours, I’m going a complicated route (Krakow –> Prague, Prague –> Amsterdam, Amsterdam –> Bangkok; it was the cheapest option and gets me “miles” in my preferred programme) to Thailand.

With an extended tourist visa and a ticket back to Europe 8 weeks later, I plan to be able to read and speak Thai by the end of my stay.

I’ve never been in Thailand before (which is kind of unique in this day and age for someone who’s already been travelling for 7 years) and I don’t speak any other Asian languages. I’ve never dealt with a tonal language before, and I’ve never read a language that doesn’t use the Latin alphabet.

Despite all of that, I’m confident that I’ve got a good chance of reaching my goal! But first, I should very clearly define that goal!

The hard part

I plan on achieving something that I imagine very very few tourists do on short visits to Thailand. I want to be able to correctly speak the 5 tones of Thai and be able to read a given text of several sentences aloud to a local (who is not necessarily familiar with English and European accents), so that they can understand it.

This of course, involves me learning how to read Thai. There are 44 consonants, 21 initial sounds, 8 final sounds and 32 vowels. And of course, it’s written in symbols that are completely strange and foreign to me, with no spaces between words and an entirely new set of vocabulary to learn. Sounds like fun!!

I don’t plan on being able to read with a perfect Thai accent, but I want Thais to understand me when I speak. This is much harder than it sounds because even pronouncing a word correctly can still leave it as incomprehensible if you don’t apply the right tone to it.

For example, I see that the word mai can mean new, no, silk, turn a sentence into a question, or is used to form new words, depending on which of the five tones you apply to it.

So I believe this is indeed an ambitious goal! I will award myself 5 stars at the end of the 8 weeks if I can read a short text of several sentences (that I’ve never seen before) to several different Thais who don’t speak fluent English, and who definitely understand what I’ve said.

To make the mission even harder, I will be working full time (as always), so all work I put into learning and practising Thai will be less than part time, since I also plan on enjoying myself in my free time in ways other than speaking the language .

The easy part

The hard part of this mission is definitely the reading aspect and mastering the tones. The rest will be much easier. Thai grammar is much simpler than it is in European languages, and unlike a typical backpacker arriving freshly in Thailand on his round-the-world ticket for his gap year, I’ve got 7 years of developing my method of learning languages and actually applying them and achieving fluency several times over (anyone could apply the same method, but sadly, most don’t).

Apart from the tones and Thai script, I imagine (correct me if I’m wrong) that this will be more or less the same as learning a European language, just with more vocabulary to memorise, and a much simpler grammatical system.

Despite that, because I’ll have my work cut out for me in what I outlined above, I won’t be putting as much work into speaking “fluently” (that will come in the next visit to Thailand if I decide to). I’m not even going to aim to speak pretty well in 2 months. I’m told that tones and script are the hardest part of Asian languages, so I’m going straight to the core of the problem and focussing on it from the start.

The “speak” part in the title of this mission is also a mockery of those who aim to “speak” a language for something such as a New Year’s resolution, without clearly defining what this means.

If you say you “speak” a language, this can be anything from being confused for a native, to having just a few words or sentences. Hell, even a parrot can speak! It doesn’t actually mean anything in terms of language level or actual comprehension. So no matter how great or how miserably I do in this mission I will “speak” something at the end of it.

More specifically, I am aiming to speak basic to lower intermediate Thai in the 8 weeks I’m there; asking directions, ordering food, basic small talk and haggling etc. and getting the gist of typical responses, without relying on my phrasebook.

I would push this goal up higher, but as well as the difficulty of the tones and reading part, I’ve decided to go south to the islands, rather than north where I’d be immersed much more and not speak any English; by far the best way to learn a language quickly. I’m told that the south is much more touristy, and I am very honestly telling you that I am not going for an “authentic” experience in just 8 weeks, having never been there before and feeling in the mood to relax a little.

Most of the rest of 2010 will involve me being immersed in cultures and avoiding English speakers, and going for even harder goals than this one. So I’m going to take it easy in Thailand, live on a beach, get regular cheap massages (and, unfortunately, work full time), hang out with both Thais and other tourists and party .

At the end of my stay I’ll make a short video entirely in Thai, so any curious readers of the blog can hear how I’m speaking.

I’ll be in Bangkok for my first days and will investigate where to go to from there.

Can it be done?

Despite the fact that I am being upfront now about the fact that I will be a “tourist” in Thailand, I plan on putting a lot of work into the tones, and understanding the writing system and I’m fully aware of the fact that this will be hard work.

Since this is entirely new territory for me, I’ll be relying on advice from others to help me (as well as my own experience). For example, Matador recommends that I should get a tutor (I usually prefer to learn almost entirely through active natural application of a language, but I’ll make an exception this time), and sing it (music has already hugely helped me to learn other languages; I’ll explain how in a later post).

If anyone else has some useful advice, such as image association for the symbols etc. then please do let me know of them!! Otherwise I’ll just develop my own method

Although tones and writing systems are completely different across most Asian languages, I feel that if I can find out how to master them quickly, then I may indeed be able to become fluent in 3 months in other Asian languages.

So this mission is actually a long-term investment for me. I’ve asked around and those who have learned Asian languages have consistently told me that tones and writing systems are by far the hardest part of those languages to master. So, rather than slowly work my way through a language, I’m going straight to the core of the problem and focussing almost entirely on this “hardest” aspect. If I can indeed master them quickly, then I don’t see anything else holding me back, or even holding back anyone else who follows advice from what I’ve learned, to quickly learn how to speak an Asian language fluently.

If I don’t achieve my goal, I’ll analyse why and try again later, although as always, I will presume that I’ll be successful until proven otherwise

So, what do you think? Can it be done? Have I set the bar too high this time? Is 8 weeks way too short a time? Will I spend my entire stay with a confused look on my face as in the photo? Any advice to help me succeed?

Do share your thoughts in the comments and join me as I learn to read and speak Thai in 8 weeks!
Similar Posts:

• Getting along with other learners & conclusions of Thai mission
• FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam
• Mission complete! Partial success – What will Benny’s next mission be?
• My next mission: Become Brazilian in 3 months!
• Summary of first month of mission & top 100 language blogs nomination

<– This is my pre-Christmas spirit look. I’ll get visited by time-travelling ghosts tonight, don’t worry!

But seriously, I wanted to wish all my readers Happy Holidays! Whether you celebrate Christmas, or (like me) appreciate this time of year more as a great chance to be with family, I hope you are having the best time!

I always try to make it home at this time of year to be with my parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, nephews, cousins and old friends. It gives me great perspective on my travels to be back in the town I grew up in and be back with people I know and love!

I’ll be back on the road solo again, flying into new situations and making new friends, but I definitely appreciate family time whenever I can get it!

Quick favour! Do you have 3 minutes to spare to help make this site more interesting for you in 2010?

CLICK HERE TO ANSWER 10 QUICK QUESTIONS (Edit: I’ve already analysed the results and you can see my conclusions here)

For those of you feeling generous and in the holiday spirit, I would appreciate 3 minutes of your time to answer some questions about this site! I’d like to see what interests my readers and how I can better improve the site in 2010.

Keep in mind that I’m new to the blogging game (this site has only existed since June of this year), so all comments and clarifications will be greatly appreciated! With your help I can focus on my stronger points, and I am very happy to accept constructive criticism so that I can be a better blogger in 2010! Your clicks can help influence the kinds of articles I’ll be writing!

It will take you a maximum of 3 minutes if you just click the multiple choice questions and give the basic answers, or a few more minutes if you have the time to expand on these answers. Seriously, I would greatly appreciate hearing your thoughts

CLICK HERE TO ANSWER 10 QUICK QUESTIONS

After the weekend I’ll be writing again to wrap up the Brazilian mission before I introduce the next one!

If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, I hope the cold weather doesn’t slow down your trip home and that you enjoy time with your friends and family. I wish you all the best for the holiday period!

Hugs from snowy Ireland!
Similar Posts:

• C2 exam results and analysis
• Language hackers, e-mail list and the upcoming guide
• FI3M is one year old today! Future plans, consultation & weeks before exam
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• Mission complete! Partial success – What will Benny’s next mission be?

4 gold stars for partial success

My most recent “mission” has been to try to become Brazilian in 3 months, i.e. reach the stage that several Brazilians would think that I too was Brazilian. And I can say… mission complete!!!

I have decided to award myself 4 gold stars for my achievements. To achieve 5 stars I emphasised that I wanted to converse for about 2 minutes in several casual social situations with the result of the other person being surprised when I made a mistake or mentioned naturally where I was from. Sadly, I didn’t achieve exactly that – but I am still very pleased with the result.

What I did do was have a few (6 at last count) locals that I had just met, who genuinely thought I was from here, each in isolated events, for up to 20-30 seconds and when I was very focussed and intentionally trying. So I didn’t reach my more generous time limit and I couldn’t pull it off naturally and casually, and especially not if I was even the slightest bit tired or distracted. Even so, the overall end-goal has been reached!

As well as the “trick a local” goal, I have achieved so much more here; I’ve greatly improved my Portuguese and will label the main linguistic achievement of this time as getting past the plateau of speaking “well”. My accent has hugely improved (even when I’m not focussed) and I use more casual and less formal language and I can tell that Brazilians are more comfortable talking to me because of this. In upcoming posts I will describe the biggest changes I’ve made to my Portuguese, to make it more Carioca.

Apart from the technical linguistic aspect, I think that what I’ve achieved from the Brazilians’ perspective is more important. Nearly everyone I talked to assured me that my accent was inconsequential and that my attitude towards Brazilians was the key factor in deciding if I was Brazilian at heart; which is way more important to them. I definitely feel like I wasn’t just another gringo in Rio to them, and I’ve made lots of friends in the process. I am genuinely feeling sad to leave my favourite country and the cidade maravilhosa. There is a famous untranslatable Portuguese word: saudades . That is what I’m going to be feeling very soon…

I’ll also summarise the social aspect of what I learned in becoming a Carioca, in a separate post. So there will be a couple more posts about what I’ve learned in these 3 months, before I wrap up this mission entirely.

What will the next mission be?

I will be home for xmas for one week, and then I am going to Zakopane for one week in Poland for the JES event for New Year’s. The first week in January I am getting a flight out of Poland to my next destination, where I will be spending 2 months. I have big plans for 2010!! I plan to take on 3 languages by September.

So, I hear you ask, what is the next language??

I will tell you of course, but since I’m an evil bastard I’ll keep you in suspense a little longer! I want to finish some posts relevant to the Brazilian mission over the next 2 weeks before officially starting the next one on this blog just before the end of the year!

But for those of you who want to find out sooner, I will announce it first on fluentin3months’ facebook page and then on my twitter account, this weekend! And yes, this is a shameless plug to get more fans/followers

Otherwise, you can leave a comment below to say what you think the next language will be. I will e-mail anyone who gets it right to confirm. Each commenter only gets one guess! Some close friends and other contacts already know where I’m going, so don’t spoil the surprise please

Also, leave your comments to share your thoughts about this mission. Do I deserve 4 stars, or is that too generous? Is being Brazilian at heart more important than just speaking with no accent or having the right body language? Let me know you have been following this story and tell me if you’ve enjoyed it!
Similar Posts:

• My next mission: Become Brazilian in 3 months!
• Summary of month 2 in mission to become Brazilian
• Summary of month 1 in the mission to become Brazilian
• The German 3 month mission: Become a Berliner & sit C2 exam
• First month in Berlin & 8 language 6 dialect tour of my flat

Time flies when you’re having fun, and Brazil is about as much fun as you can have! In less than one month already, I’ll be flying back to Ireland for Christmas! My purpose in Brazil this time has been the ambitious goal of convincing Brazilians that I’m one of them before my (less than 3 month) time limit runs out. So, will I make it??

I was well aware of most of the difficult challenges that lay ahead of me when I started; I have conquered some of them and discovered new ones. Honestly, it could still go either way! But it’s looking harder and harder to reach the stage where talking to someone for 2+ minutes will have them genuinely surprised when I slip up or naturally say where I’m from. However, I won’t give up until the end of my stay here

The good news:

The good news is that I have definitely hugely improved my Portuguese; much more so than I would by just leaving it to improve “naturally” by simply living in the country. I’ve worked hard, spoken only in Portuguese nearly all the time and the results are evident.

Everybody who talked to me at the beginning of my time here, or before it, has noticed that I’m speaking so much better now. This was always the priority for me, so I’m very glad to say that my informal/streetwise vocabulary has improved, my body language and general communication with locals is much better and my accent is greatly reduced, especially with regards the music of sentences.

Rather than rely on compliments to judge this, I can see by a slight change in the interactions with my Brazilian friends, who no longer speak slowly with me or use as much formal vocabulary, which they wouldn’t do so often between one another, in order to help me. As I’ve learned about the Carioca dialect of Portuguese, I’ve also learned a little bit about Carioca culture and the act of sacaneando (taking the piss, or light-hearted mocking) is really popular among friends (more so than many other western cultures, but about as much as in Ireland, so it doesn’t take much getting used to) and they do this more now as they see that I am not likely to get offended due to misunderstandings.

Some of them were very glad to read why I love Brazilians so much, and have assured me that based on my attitude and my own understanding of Brazil, that no matter how well, or badly, I speak Portuguese, that I’ll always be “Brazilian at heart”. This acceptance is a huge achievement in itself and something I’ll always be proud of hearing.

The bad news:

Despite trying to act Brazilian, the (somewhat) bad news is that my accent is still convincing people of the same thing as was when I arrived; that I’m actually from Portugal!! In fact, it’s happening to me even more now than when I first arrived, as I make less grammatical mistakes that I needed to iron out. Despite making huge improvements in the music of the language, I’m still eating my unstressed vowels and not opening my mouth enough as I speak. This is a very easy thing to get over in theory, but when speaking at machine gun speed in an active conversation, this way of speaking is still not natural enough to me, and is therefore not so easy to control.

I just need to keep practising, and working on this problem will be one of my priorities in the next few weeks. Even after my time in Brazil I will have to work hard on this, because it will hold me back in trying to speak other languages with no accent. This doesn’t happen so often when I really focus on speaking clearly and using as many gírias from Rio as possible, that they’d never hear elsewhere. In that case they say that I sound much more Carioca, but it still requires me to force it a bit.

On the plus side, I can use this to my advantage for the point of view of the mission, and claim that I have at least achieved the stage of convincing people that I’m a native. This was not my initial goal and it only works with those who are just vaguely familiar with the Portuguese accent, but it’s something – and I’m always one to see how the glass can be half full

Social aspect

Despite the progress that I’ve made, as I said in the first month summary, I could have done much more. This time I can quantify the cause much more clearly, of simply not socialising enough.

I live in a really nice penthouse apartment (that I got for an amazing monthly rate using a combination of Indian haggling skills and Irish charm!) and this has actually been a bad idea since I feel more inclined to invite people here rather than go out to meet them, especially since I get so many visitors from nature anyway to add to the amazing views that I’d like to share with people.

This means that I’ve been lazy to leave the house as often as I should – I am officially striking “live in a penthouse apartment” off my bucket-list and getting somewhere simpler in future language-missions to encourage me to stay in the house less when I’m not working. Ideally, I’d live with other locals, but this has been difficult with my home-based job, where I need a quiet environment whenever I’m working. I’ve already lived with over 70 flatmates (not counting almost a thousand couchsurfers), so I’m enjoying having my own space for the moment

I go out to socialise about 3 times a week, but since I live alone and not within walking distance of any of my friends, this makes me a bit lazy on the other days and I end up only superficially interacting with people in shops etc. It is simply not immersed enough and I can go a day or two at a time without having a real conversation, especially when workload increases. Time is no excuse to not make progress in a language, and I have been guilty of using the non-valid excuse of not being “extrovert enough” despite telling others that they shouldn’t either.

So for the next few posts, I’m going to discuss how I’ve been eliminating this problem; especially since a lot of readers tell me they are too shy to try some of my more hands-on methods and get out of their audio courses to actually practise. I’ll be discussing some ways of how I make lots of friends as a lone traveller and adapt to the local culture, without embarrassing myself.

Do you think I was crazy to try to fool Brazilians into thinking I was one of them, or do I still have a chance at succeeding? Maybe the acceptance of being “Brazilian at heart” is enough and I should just leave my accent as it is? How would you deal with the social problem differently? Do share your thoughts in the comments!
Similar Posts:

• Summary of month 1 in the mission to become Brazilian
• Mission complete! Partial success – What will Benny’s next mission be?
• My next mission: Become Brazilian in 3 months!
• Summary of month 2: on the final dash to see if I make it to fluency!
• Summary of first month of mission & top 100 language blogs nomination

First I’ll get the bad news out of the way; I could have done a lot more this month. After my financial issues this summer requiring me to work double-time for 6 weeks, I’m trying to make sure that I don’t end up in the same situation again and have continued to work quite intensively to try to reach some sort of financial stability (not there yet). This has given me a lot less time to really appreciate Rio, and I still haven’t done much more than go out with Couchsurfers and other friends a few times a week.

Getting there!

Despite this, I’ve squeezed all the time I could out of my day to get some studies of the Carioca dialect of Portuguese, and chatted to lots of people and socialised only in Portuguese for the entire month; avoiding speaking English as always! Even though I could have achieved what I have this month in just a few days if it wasn’t for work, I can happily say that I have learned a lot, and I am still confident that I have a good chance of reaching my goal, especially since I’ll be giving more time to the mission for the next month!

What I have learned this month has been absolutely fascinating!! This will make a huge difference, not just to my Portuguese, but to all of my languages (especially the Romance ones), as I try to reduce my anglophone and general foreign accent. I’ve learned to a much deeper level that a foreign accent isn’t simply about pronouncing the letters right (which I’ve already had a pretty good command over), but so many other factors.

As I’ve already said, some non-Romance language speakers (like anglophones and those who speak other Germanic langauges as well as some Slavic ones for example) tend to focus too much on consonants, and this can leave certain vowels of words as not being said clearly. For example, the Portuguese word for “word” is palavra. In English, I don’t believe we usually say “ah” so often in non-stressed consonants (it depends on the dialect of course, this is the case in the Irish accent), so I tend to pronounce this as “puh-LAH-vreh” when speaking quickly. I would unfortunately also do the same in French, Spanish and Italian for example; this is a classic mistake that us English speakers make (as well as the other ones I mentioned in the above linked post, like our pronunciation of the letter R for example). With some help, I have been able to repeat certain phrases and can proudly say that under controlled conditions I can say a sentence so well that I’ve been told that it’s in a perfect Carioca accent!!

Unfortunately, “controlled conditions” means that I have to repeat that same phrase several times over and be very focussed and get corrected a lot until I say it right. I need to make this pronunciation come naturally, and this will be a big part of my challenge; deprogramming myself from 27 years of tossing unstressed vowels aside.

More discoveries

Other reasons I was told that I reached the perfect Carioca accent after lots of attempts at the same sentence include my work on rhythm. Sentence rhythm in Romance languages is extremely different to other European languages (depending on the particular language in question). I’ve been told that English and German speakers (the non-Latino gringos Brazilians would be most familiar with) have a very robotic way of speaking Portuguese, with a single sentence being segmented too much and not flowing like a wave. This is a crucial difference that I will come back to, to explain better – especially once I have learned to apply it better!

Finally, a language is not just the words you say, but how your body says them. Even saying that sentence perfectly would still seem unnatural if I had my hands on my lap as I said them. Speaking a language also involves adapting the body-language of native speakers; moving your hands and your head, and opening your mouth so you are saying things very clearly rather than mumbling them. My outward appearance and body language are just as crucial to speaking like a native as eliminating my accent is.

Less than two months left!

This isn’t actually a 3-month challenge since I’ll be going home for Christmas a week before the 3 months would be over. So the pressure is mounting! I need to get all the learning and theory and the bulk of practising done. The purpose of this next month will be exactly that; I want to learn all that I need to learn so that my final weeks are just for practising and ironing out the final issues until I (hopefully) reach my objective! I will continue to share my insights on this site along the way as always

The best part of doing this in Brazil first (before I try it with other languages), is that I am getting a huge amount of encouragement from Brazilians, as I had hoped. Not one has doubted that I will reach my objective! Even I have to admit that there is a good chance that this may be beyond my current capabilities, but I’m still presuming that I will succeed until proven wrong. No matter what, I will have learned so much in this time in Brazil about speaking like a native for any language, so it will be time well invested! And if I am even somewhat successful, I can take that confidence with me, that I will have entirely thanks to Brazilians being so nice with me, to a culture that will be much less encouraging and much more sceptical.

What about you? Do you think it can be done? Has anyone else reached a similar objective? Am I crazy to even try? Do share your thoughts in the comments and let us know you are out there
Similar Posts:

• Summary of month 2 in mission to become Brazilian
• Mission complete! Partial success – What will Benny’s next mission be?
• My next mission: Become Brazilian in 3 months!
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• Summary of month 2: on the final dash to see if I make it to fluency!

EDIT: This mission was a success! You can read how I spoke Portuguese with no foreign accent, and how I adapted to life in Rio. I also wrote about why I love Brazilians so much :=)

After learning 6 languages to fluency in 6 years of travels, and learning to speak Czech in just two months (and of course, telling you how I did it!), it’s time that to go on to the next level in language learning!

I think that I may finally be ready for the greatest challenge I’ve ever set myself. This time I am not only setting the bar higher, but I’m setting it the highest you possibly can! What’s the next step after fluency? “Very fluent”? Too vague. “Bilingual”? Quite good, but I can make it much more fun than that…

Destination: Rio

On Monday morning I’m hopping a flight to Rio de Janeiro, where I’ll be spending the next 3 months. Out of all the places I’ve travelled to, Brazil is by far my favourite. In 2006 I spent 3 months in the south, mostly on the island of Floripa, and in 2008 I travelled the northeast, and experienced the amazing Carnival in Olinda. Over both trips, and a total of about 5 months, I’ve mostly bussed all the way from Porto Alegre in the very south to Natal in the north-east tip (a distance of about 3,000 km…) and have friends everywhere and gotten to know many cities. Nevertheless, Brazil is big, so I’ve barely even scratched the surface!

Even so, I still at least know the country a bit. There are many, many reasons that I love Brazil and keep going back, but the main one is by far the fact that it has o povo mais legal do mundo - the coolest people in the world. Although Brazil may be famous for its amazing football players, samba dancers and very beautiful natives, there are so many more levels to them that those who don’t travel there, or just go for extremely brief holidays, just don’t get. I’ll gladly explain the many reasons I love the country and its people in a later post. For now, just know that I highly respect Brazilians, and even idolise them. Their way of living and enjoying life is something that Europeans and North Americans could learn a lot from.

So, my next mission is to become Brazilian in these 3-months. No, this doesn’t mean that I’ll be applying for citizenship. The end goal of this mission is very simple to explain, but it will be extremely complicated to achieve:

I want Brazilians to think that I am Brazilian

That’s the mission! By mid-December, I want several Brazilians to have believed that not only am I speaking Portuguese as good as a native, but that I actually am a native. This is way more than just a linguistic mission. This will involve examining and adapting everything that I do; how I walk, how I dress, how I shave, how I eat (e.g. in Brazil you shouldn’t eat a pizza with your hands, but you should smother it in tomato ketchup!), how I dance, how I socialise, how I react to certain situations and many other things that I haven’t even considered yet. I want to put on such a good show for them that they will be genuinely surprised when I reveal that I’m actually from a town in the middle of Ireland!

There are two main aspects that I’ll be working on in this mission:

Speaking like a native

Easier said than done! I’m making things really hard for myself this time because I’ve never gone beyond fluency, so this is entirely new territory, which I may not be ready for yet. Reaching a native level in 3-months (starting from fluency) in itself is already a tough nut to crack and I genuinely don’t know if I can do it. Especially in such a short time limit; I’ve met foreigners who have managed to speak a language with no accent, but it took them years to get there. If I manage this, it will have been from a total of only 8 months of exposure to Portuguese. I may be aiming way too high this time! This objective is daunting, and ridiculously ambitious… which is why I simply have to give it a try

Until I see how to adapt my current learning method to this new challenge, I will treat this like I have with any language. I am not aiming to speak “Portuguese” like a native, because nobody actually speaks that; in each language we usually have plenty of dialects and Portuguese is no exception. I will be focussing on trying to speak the sotaque carioca (Rio dialect of Portuguese) fluently first and then like a native, by adapting my current rather neutral and somewhat formal Portuguese to become more casual, and of course to reduce my accent and foreigner-isms, and include as many of the dialect’s nuances and expressions as I can. Then I’ll start getting into the nitty gritty final mistakes I’m still making with my pronunciation to see if I can reach the holy grail of language learners, and speak with no foreign accent! Do we really need years to achieve this? Or is it possible in such a short time-frame? That’s what I intend to find out!

Cultural and appearance

Even if I were to (somehow) speak the Rio dialect perfectly and with no accent, there is still no way that I would pass off as a Carioca in my current state. The last frustrating 6 weeks stuck indoors working double time to work off debts means that despite all the sunshine in Prague, I’m completely untanned, and even a little stressed out, so I won’t initially be as relaxed and up-beat as many Brazilians (but I’ll be chilled out soon enough over there!!) My body language screams gringo and also, my clothing, grooming, facial expressions, and many other things are simply the result of my upbringing and even some influence from countries I’ve recently lived in, and will all give me away as just another gringo in Rio.

Despite all that, becoming Brazilian is an important attempt for me to try to understand the culture a little better; from the inside. Also, imitation is the best form of flattery! There is no culture that I have grown so fond of as I have with the Brazilian one, so I want to learn as much as I can about how they think, and how they live their lives. I’ll try to adapt my outward appearance and general behaviour to the Brazilian style. Luckily, I’ve spent a lot of time in Latino countries in the last few years, so the general warmth between people is no longer an adjustment I have to make, and is something that I’m actually quite looking forward to returning to! I also fancy myself a bit of an amateur actor, so this will be my greatest role! I have fun trying to integrate myself into other cultures, as you can see when I tried to pretend to be Italian, and I will be examining every aspect of how Brazilians behave and attempt to emulate it.

Challenges and realistic limits

I am of course aware of the obvious first criticism to this being possible; I’m a white northern European! Believe it or not, even us Irish can tan pretty well. And Brazil has possibly the greatest ethnic diversity on the planet, with no “typical” Brazilian look possible, as there are African, Asian, European, native-American and many mixtures in-between there. So there are plenty of white Brazilians!! If I find that I still look too “alemão” to be a Carioca, then I have a plan B!! (And no, it’s not plastic surgery!!)

Apart from the obvious challenges (like this being a ridiculously difficult objective and the fact that you’d have to be crazy to try it), there are some that are more surprising. Brazilians are actually too nice, especially when it comes to gringos trying to speak their language. They will always compliment you and congratulate you, no matter what your level is, because you are trying to learn their language. This was excellent motivation to keep my momentum up in the early stages, but the lack of criticism is going to hold me back at this more advanced stage, so I need to make sure that I can find some Brazilians who don’t mind correcting me and reminding me of my mistakes, as I did to reach fluency in my first trips.

It is also important that I am clear about what I am aiming for and what I am not aiming for. I won’t actually reach “native” level, but I will hopefully reach a point where talking to me briefly seems like talking to a native. I don’t intend on impressing or “fooling” any linguists, or reaching a professional level of Portuguese. I just want normal people in normal social situations to talk to me for 2-5 minutes until I slip up on something, or just naturally mention where I’m from, and I want them to genuinely think that I was Brazilian. I’ll be meeting lots of new people, and unless a decent amount of them think I was Brazilian in December, then I won’t be giving myself 5 gold stars! I obviously don’t intend on lying to convince them; I want them to draw their own conclusions that I will correct.

I will say right now that I will be trying my hardest and devoting most of my free time to this project (although, I still have to work a normal work-week as a translator), but that I am totally accepting the likely possibility of not reaching this objective and will take it in my stride if I “fail”. Having said that, like in my previous project, I will presume that I will succeed and work on that assumption until proven wrong.

The best part of all of this is that even if I “fail” (as I said when I stopped my 3-month mission at 2 months, with the right attitude there’s no such thing as failure), I won’t actually fail since I will have achieved quite a lot in those 3 months! I’ll have (hopefully) greatly improved my Portuguese, and my understanding of Brazilians and how they think, and I’ll have learned what I need to do if I aim for a quasi-native-level again in another language in future (which I will). And you know… I’ll have spent 3 months in Rio, which can’t be that bad

As part of the cultural aspect of this mission, I’ll be trying to learn the basics of samba and will possibly make a short video documentary about it, like I did about learning tango in Buenos Aires.

How you can help!

As a novelty, I decided to blog my latest mission over the summer about learning Czech, and my general language learning tips, and the huge amount of encouragement that I got from comments, and seeing the subscriber numbers go up so quickly was definitely my main motivation to continue! Now, I’m no blogging expert or writer, but despite that the site has naturally grown somewhat popular! I’m not sure if it’s because of the mission and story itself, or because of sharing my language learning tips and ideas, or a combination of both, but seeing this growth is such amazing encouragement for me to continue!

This means that even if you don’t know any Portuguese, you can definitely help me achieve this next mission! My energy source to learn languages is pure positivity and motivation, but sometimes I do need a recharge So if you’d like to join me in this new adventure, I just ask that you leave the odd comment to share your thoughts, encouragement or advice, and especially that you share interesting posts with your friends through Facebook, twitter and stumbleupon so that more people can join me in this adventure! Also, I’m not making any money from this site (not at the moment anyway), so if you’d like to treat me to an Orange Juice (although, my drink of choice will mostly be Guaraná for the next 3 months!) it would always be welcome

So, do let me know your thoughts below and share this post with others and join me as I try to become Brazilian in 3 months!!
Similar Posts:

• Summary of month 1 in the mission to become Brazilian
• Mission complete! Partial success – What will Benny’s next mission be?
• Summary of month 2 in mission to become Brazilian
• Why I love Brazilians (& Br. Portuguese)
• Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months

However, sometimes a break is good! Being so focussed on such an intensive project, such as learning a language, can be tiring. After a break of a few weeks, when you get back into it, you can start afresh with the same initial dash that you had before. It depends on your own personality and learning style. Unfortunately, a long break when you have given yourself a very small time limit is not such a great idea!

My own brick wall

At my two-month point things were looking promising! My accent was pretty good, and I had several friends here in Prague with whom I only spoke in Czech. I’d go out for dinner and converse about everything from sharing my travel stories to even basic philosophical discussions, with the limitations I mentioned (the other person had to speak slowly, and I couldn’t follow a conversation between two people, for example). I honestly believed that I had a good chance of reaching my own definition of fluency within my 3-month deadline.

But even when I had written that 2-month progress report, I had already spent over a week speaking barely any Czech and my chances to practise and exposure to the language have gotten worse as August continued, and I haven’t been able to practise for weeks now. Unfortunately, external and internal factors have come together that will prevent me from reaching my fluent-in-3-months goal this time! I really am sorry because I know a lot of people wanted me to make it, to show the doubters that it can be done, to help motivate themselves to try it to and just out of pure curiosity to see if I could make it. Before those who were waiting to pounce on me with I-told-you-sos jump down my throat, note that I am by no means giving up!! I may have lost the battle, but I will win the war and prove that 3 months to fluency is possible. This was only the first of many experiments; all of which I’ll be documenting, as I continue to give general language learning (and other) tips .

Debugging the system

Thomas A. Edison was interviewed by a newspaper after 800 unsuccessful tries to make a working light bulb. “How does it feel to have failed 800 times?” the reporter asked. And Edison’s answer? “I haven’t failed 800 times. I haven’t failed once. What I have done, is I have succeeded in proving that those 800 ways won’t work. Once I eliminate all the ways that won’t work, I will find the one way that will.” Several years later, after thousands more “successful proofs” he managed to find a way that works, and thus illuminated the world.

I am not a linguist, so I don’t go about studying languages the way they would. I am an engineer and a scientist at heart. I believe that every problem or mission (learn a language, have a satisfactory career etc.) has a solution if you are imaginative enough, and one way to find a perfect means of reaching a target is debugging your current method; i.e. find what is preventing you from reaching the goal, eliminate the issue and try again, then repeat the process until you are successful. I used to do a lot of programming so I apply this metaphor to many problems, and learning a language is one of them. To me, it can be broken down into a series of steps that you take to reach the final target, and if you are analytical enough, many of life’s problems can be looked at like that. This was always an experiment to me, and I will analyse the process and repeat the experiment taking the appropriate corrections into account. When you eliminate whatever is causing the problem, then you will eventually reach your goal! Note that I plan to reach this goal very soon .

So to me, this summer was definitely not a failure. With your permission, I am going to claim that I learned how to speak pretty good Czech in just two months. This is something that I am quite proud of! I can tell you exactly why I was not able to get past that point and emphasise that I don’t intend on making the same mistakes for my next fluent-in-3-months project. These two reasons are what mainly held me back:

• A project like this requires time, and even though I have my ways of squeezing the most out of my time, something sucked way too much free time away from me in my last month; due to financial problems I ran into (as I mentioned in the post about my work), I have had to work 12-hours a day, 7 days a week for most of August. In the very little free time that I’ve had, I have been much less enthusiastic about a project that was seeming less and less likely of getting achieved.
• As much as I’d love to blame this entirely on my lack of free time due to work (which is technically an external factor, but is actually just due to my own stupidity with financial management), there is a much more important reason why I didn’t reach fluency, which was a mistake from the very beginning. I had no long-term goals with Czech. I was relying entirely on my mini-goals of short-term objectives (upcoming coffee date, learn all words related to a particular topic in an hour etc.) and my other motivation of using Czech as a stepping stone to Slavic languages; but I had no actual long-term plans with Czech itself. These short-term goals got me very far!! But I needed something bigger and more long-term to keep me motivated. My decision to learn Czech was extremely spontaneous (I moved to Prague about a week after I came up with this strange idea, never having been here before or even having any Czech friends), and my only medium-term goal was to reach fluency in “a” language in 3-months. Czech had no special meaning to me, and sadly even after a whole summer here, I still haven’t fallen in love with this language or its people, like I have with other languages and cultures.

There were other minor things (like my inefficient grammar study method, etc.) that I will take into consideration in future, but my set-backs have absolutely nothing to do with Czech’s inherent difficulties, and I still think the language itself is not as bad as people make it out to be.

I will eliminate each of the above set-backs and make sure they do not exist in the next attempt. My current intensive working period (not fun during the summer!!) has meant that I will luckily be out of debt soon, and I think I may have (finally) learned that bouncing between my credit card limit and €0 is not such a secure long-term option! I can easily be much more secure with my current job and I will attempt to manage my finances better in future so that I am never put in a situation like this again.

And as with the motivation; I will definitely think much longer about a 3-month investment in future! I have more personal and global reasons to learn other languages like Polish, Russian, Chinese etc. and starting the project with the goal to learn that particular language in 3 months, rather than learn “a” language in 3-months will be a major difference when I try this again. Every other language I’ve learned has been for a huge array of reasons, and it should not have been any different this summer. A language isn’t like a stamp that you can add to your collection; it has a history and culture and people associated with it, and particular reasons why it may be special to you. This is something that I ignored for the first time this summer, and I will not make the same mistake again!

What’s next?

I will continue to work intensively for the remainder of my time in Prague to really give myself some financial security, but I will finally have weekends off again from this Friday (can’t wait!!!) to try to focus on taking advantage of this beautiful city rather than just focussing on its language. I will continue to post my general language tips and other related observations on this site (I have a LOT of post ideas; this site was never to exist just for this summer!); I will summarise my best tips for learning Czech soon for example.

However, I already have another 3-month project lined up! It will already begin on September 21st!! Rather than being humbled by not reaching my goal of fluency this summer, I am actually setting the bar higher and aiming for something much harder!! The two main issues above won’t exist because I’ll have (at least temporarily) sorted out my finances thanks to all of this intensive work, and I am extremely passionate about my next mission and have been thinking about it for a long time! I will reveal that mission very soon .

In the mean time, I’m really sorry for those who I had promised to reach fluency in Czech!! As I said, I don’t consider this a failure, but I’m still disappointed because I had promised a lot of people that I would make it. Hopefully you can understand my reasons for needing to focus on sorting out my finances for the moment! Stick around, I’ll have a lot more interesting projects coming up soon .

Any thoughts? Encouragement? Angry messages saying that I’m a fraud? Share them in the comments
Similar Posts:

• Summary of first month of mission & top 100 language blogs nomination
• Redifining your motivation
• How to become fluent in a language in 3 months
• Summary of month 2: on the final dash to see if I make it to fluency!
• Defining fluency in order to achieve fluency!

Today’s post is just a summary to keep you updated on my progress in this summer’s experiment (No language learning tips today, sorry!!)

I have been in Prague for a total of 2 months now, in my experiment to see if it is possible to become fluent in a language starting from scratch in just three months. I chose Czech very randomly and it’s worked out nicely since I’ve been greatly enjoying my summer in Prague!

At the end of my first month, my level of Czech was “OK”, but still not so impressive since I was relying a lot on learned-off sentences from my phrasebook and general conversational connectors. I was basically as good as a trained parrot, definitely ready to speak whenever I could, but not so great for an actual conversation.

Since my translation work was greatly reduced in the last month, I decided to take advantage of the free time and finally did some studying. I really dislike studying and avoid it in my language learning projects whenever possible. But I didn’t want to have to worry about grammar in my finals weeks, in which I’ll be perfecting and improving what I already know, so I gave Czech grammar some time.

Still don’t appreciate studying grammar!

What a boring month!! After this, I have been further discouraged to focus on studying grammar so much in future experiments. After my first month I would speak immediately and get my point across. However, in recent weeks, while I was studying grammar I kept stopping myself to mentally calculate the case of a word and come up with its ending, or piece together the right verb formation for the particular situation. This slowed me down… I can complain all I like, but at the end of the day, it’s a necessary step to get through. I hope to find a way to get through it quicker or enjoy it more in future experiments (and if I do, I’ll let you know how!!), but for the moment I had to sit down with a grammar book and do written exercises (sigh). The good news is that I had enough time to get through my entire (detailed) grammar book and basically understand everything!

Sorry to all the purists out there, but Czech grammar is not hard if you have the right attitude towards it. Czech’s inherent “difficulty” will never be an excuse I use if I don’t reach fluency in the 3-month time limit I’ve set myself. I find it very logical to be honest and the theory is straightforward! I’ve had no problem writing emails in Czech when I have the time to analyse the sentence and think it out before I write it. When someone argues its difficulties to me I have several retorts about how Irish Gaelic and even Latin languages completely outdo it in complexity in many situations. No language is difficult in itself, it’s just more different to other ones you may learn. There’s an important difference and accepting that will help you approach it with the right attitude.

But it is trickier applying it quickly on the go. I had gotten used to romance languages’ grammar quirks quickly after the 2nd or 3rd time, so learning another one was not that much of a challenge, but I have to make an adjustment for Czech’s different grammar. This is precisely why I chose Czech, despite it being a less important language internationally. I’m hoping that the grammar and vocabulary similarities with other Slavic languages will help me learn them a little quicker later on. I’m seriously considering learning either Polish or Russian next near!

The good news: I can speak Czech!!

OK, so the good news is that after studying all that grammar and learning enough vocabulary I can actually make the “arrogant” claim, that after only two months I CAN SPEAK CZECH! My last month will be focusing on improving on my current level, since I definitely do not speak it fluently yet. You can hear that my accent is pretty good, and I can and have had natural conversations with natives about a wide range of topics without ever relying on English. I am extremely pleased at the level I have reached after just 2 months trying and even if I don’t reach fluency I will proudly remember not using English to have a social life with locals here in Prague.

But it isn’t fluent yet! Will I make it in just 4 weeks?

The bad news is that I have a long way to go!! I can only have a conversation with someone who is very patient as I stutter and pause mid-sentence to do some mental gymnastics to get the right word. Despite having enough vocabulary to say lots of things, I’m still relying on a small set of words that I am way too comfortable using, so I have to force myself to use more synonyms and express myself better. I can understand the other person quite well, but only if they speak slowly and clearly and if they are speaking directly to me. When following conversations between two natives I get lost and only rely on recognising words here and there. Sadly, I still can’t watch TV and understand it enough to enjoy it without (Czech) subtitles applied. So I’m under no illusions – my Czech conversational and understanding skills are still quite bad!

So I honestly don’t know if I will make it to fluency! My last month will be focussing on meeting up with natives regularly to practise and converse (although I have to confess that these “meetings” may be giving preference to one gender in particular… ), and the Czechs are definitely helping me and encouraging me! I will also continue to do some side studying to make sure I am clear about the grammar and try to get some more words in my head to use when I need to.

I am still aiming to reach fluency in time, but if I don’t, my excuses for not reaching it will be very simply not being focussed enough this summer. I have invested a surprisingly little amount of time in Czech this summer, since I love speaking other languages with my Couchsurfers and have tried to work as much as possible whenever I received any. Frankly, I’m also just generally lazy . I never wanted to see if I could become fluent in 3 months; I wanted to see if I could become fluent in 3 months with very little work and only part-time attention!

I am also quite distracted as I am hugely looking forward to my next 3-month language mission, which will be completely different! (Not just learn another “hard” language from scratch) I’ll introduce the actual crazy mission itself when the time is right, but those following me on twitter already know where I’m going.

Oh by the way, thank you so much for all of your votes in the Top 100 language blogs!! I was amazed to see that this very young blog has reached the honourable position of number SIX out of hundreds of entries from the best sites across the Internet!!! Being in the top ten is much better than I ever could have hoped!! It wouldn’t have been possible without all of your clicks I intend to try to keep the posts interesting and useful so I deserve to stay in that position I am also very glad that I’ve got over 350 subscribers! Welcome to everyone new!! I am a very new blogger, and not such a good writer yet and I still have a lot to learn (sorry that my posts are always so long!!) so please contact me if you have any tips and encouragement

So, do you think I’ll make it to fluency? Should I be pleased with my progress so far at least? Let me know what you think, and if you have any advice for me in my last month in Prague, write me a comment!!
Similar Posts:

• Summary of first month of mission & top 100 language blogs nomination
• Hitting a brick wall in your language progress
• How to become fluent in a language in 3 months
• Next mission: Read and speak Thai in 8 weeks
• Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months

Top 100 language blogs

For those of you interested in discovering some really good blogs about learning languages, I highly recommend looking through the list over at this year’s nominees for the Top 100 Language Blogs. Fluentin3months.com has the honour of being included in the nominees! The winner will be announced at the end of the month. I’m so pleased with the number of subscribers and comments that this blog has reached in just one month online! So if you think that this is a good site, and that maybe other people may be interested in reading some of these articles, then I’d really appreciate your votes Just click the button on the left any time and vote for “fluent in 3 months”.

Looking back

This week is very important for me! Firstly, it’s actually my birthday today . I’ve completed an impressive 27 laps around the entire solar system!! I’m not exhausted yet though But of course it’s also been about a month since I got to Prague and started learning Czech.

However, something even bigger for me is that it’s actually also been six years since I graduated university, and moved to Spain and my language learning adventure began. I have been travelling ever since (specifically living and working in each place normally for about 3 months) and have usually been very focussed on learning the language of the country that I am living in. I still have the same positive attitude and enthusiasm to learn now as I did then, but a lot has changed! Languages have become a big part of my life (and my translation work now pays for my travels) and ever since I discovered better ways to fluency, I have had some amazing friendships and incredible experiences that would never have been possible if I had just spoken English.

That is why I started this blog; I’d like to share these tips to help others and especially encourage English speakers to learn other languages and stop making excuses why it’s out of reach for them. I am not making any money from this site (at least, not right now, maybe never will), but I wanted to share what I’ve learned with others. Anyone can do what I did and what I am doing; all they need is the right attitude and to go in the right direction with their study methods But I still have lots to learn!! You have shown me that in your comments. So I am looking forward to hearing all that you have to say on the many posts that I have planned

First month learning Czech

So, how has this first month gone? Quite well!! When I arrived, I didn’t understand anything written in Czech and anyone talking was just incomprehensible noise to me. But I’ve been studying my phrase book, memorising words, focussing my efforts, and keeping the end-goal in sight and telling lots of people about this mission! I can gladly say that now I can actually understand pieces and words of others’ conversations or from TV programs (harder to understand because they speak fast) and when someone speaks slowly to me, I am actually able to have a conversation beyond the basics and the phrases that I’ve learned! I am able to come up with my own sentences on the fly to take the converation beyond basic questions and answers, and have even been telling short stories! I’ve been stopped in the street to be asked the time and immediately gave the answer without hesitation and I even managed to have a couple of semi-real conversations thanks to imaginative use of conversational connectors and being very expressive when I talk.

Of course, there are problems too – my grammar is abysmal and there are plenty of words left to learn!!! I’m still way off having meaningful conversations, and unless someone speaks quite slowly to me, I will almost certainly not understand what they are saying. I’ve made good progress, but I still have a really long way to go! Out of all the many challenges that I have to reach my fluent-in-3-month goal this summer, none of them are anything more than excuses. Czech grammar is not as bad as people make it out to be (and I only have Irish, Germanic and Latin languages to compare), but there is one thing that may hold me back from reaching this goal: time. Not the fact that I only have 3 months, but the actual hours in the day, since I work full time and have a lot of other things that keep me busy in having a fun and active life . I will write soon about how I am “creating time” to learn Czech despite these setbacks, but one of my non-Czech projects is actually relevant to the overall theme of this site…

The important side mission

I can also share my other main mission this summer with you now: perfect my already spoken languages. I’ve said before that I almost never speak English when abroad, but I also haven’t been speaking as much Czech as I ideally would here. This is because I have actually spent (so far) 5 days speaking only in Portuguese, 4 days speaking only in Spanish, 4 days speaking only in Italian and almost two weeks speaking only in French (eating out, going out to dance, chatting, socialising). Morning, day and night (when not working) and with native speakers. Yes, in Prague. There is no point in learning several languages if you are just going to forget them all over time! This side mission has been getting greater focus than my Czech mission in the first month, so hopefully I will find the right balance soon. In fact, the sum of everything I’ve learned in Czech up to now probably could have been done in one intensive day This is why, even if I only reach “pretty good” Czech after 3 months, I will still be convinced that anyone would easily reach fluency in 3 months or less if they applied the right methods and were more focussed.

I will share how I’ve managed to speak these languages, when not even in their country, in later posts.

My next monthly update won’t be until mid-August, since I am spending a whole week not speaking any Czech, but in a different city in the Czech Republic (Liberec) doing something quite interesting. More on that soon! I am also looking forward to sharing my next very short video with you very soon; “How to learn Italian” – a light hearted funny video that I hope you’ll all enjoy!

So what are your thoughts on my progess in Czech in one month? I plan to be having comfortable conversations (albeit still with lots of mistakes) and a greater command over the language by my next monthly update so that I can dash toward fluency in the last month. Am I crazy in thinking that this is possible with my daily time restrictions? How about my side-mission? Should I abandon it?? (That wouldn’t be so much fun, would it!) Do share your thoughts in the comments below
Similar Posts:

• Summary of month 2: on the final dash to see if I make it to fluency!
• Summary of month 1 in the mission to become Brazilian
• How to become fluent in a language in 3 months
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• Mission: Conversational Hungarian in 3 months

Welcome to my new blog “Fluent in 3 months“! I’ve already been making videos over at my main multilingual site Around the World in 80 Mays for some time, and I will include some language learning videos there soon. I have, however, decided to create this new site specifically for discussing my best language learning techniques After learning Irish Gaelic, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and Esperanto I have picked up quite a lot of short-cuts, memory techniques, and a pretty good mentality that has hugely helped me to learn these languages, and earn the title of “polyglot”, so it’s about time that I shared them!!

I insist that it’s something that anyone can do. I am not naturally linguistically talented (or at least, no more so than your average Joe); I had very poor grades for languages in school (and studied Electronic Engineering at university) and I only started speaking non-English languages at 21 (Age at time of posting: 26). Nevertheless, I have definitely learned that it is a lot easier than most people think and I have reached quite good proficiency in the languages listed above, as well as changing my career to freelance translator!

My posts will be aimed at learners of any language, but I will be using those that I know as an example, including the one I happen to be currently learning. I will also be talking about specific languages.Now that I can see how easy it is to learn languages, I am constantly travelling to new countries and staying there (for around 3 months usually) and immersing myself in the language, although it can just as easily be done in the comfort of your own home with the right tools and attitude.

This summer I will be spending 3 months in Prague and I currently speak no Czech. Nothing. Right now I don’t know how to say “Please” or “How are you?” or “Where is the train station?” or even “My name is”. I do not speak any language closely related to Czech (such as Polish) and Czech is very different to all other languages that I have learned up to now. Despite this I strongly believe that after 3 months I will be able to say that I speak “fluent” Czech; i.e. have comfortable conversations with locals about a wide range of topics, without a strong accent and with a good enough command of the language for expressing myself clearly in many social situations and understanding as much as possible. I don’t plan on having my head in books all summer, or paying huge fees for courses; and most importantly, I’ll be having a lot of fun along the way! After that, I’ll use the same methods to learn the next language!

If you’d like to see how it’s done, use the subscribe link on the left to see my upcoming tips and language-learning story and join me as I become fluent in a new language in 3 months!
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