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 general.. || Continue Reading →

One of the most important things I’ve learned in my first year of blogging about my 3 month language missions has probably been discovering that achieving the “impossible” is actually easy. It turns out that several people that I’ve come across or read about have achieved the impossible several times over each. Taking their lead, so have I! Today I’ll share how. What is “impossible”? Looking at this blog it’s easy to come across a few examples of impossible tasks. First, you see the title “Fluent in 3 months” R.. || Continue Reading →

Can you guess what I’m thinking from looking at my expression in the photo? When I run into some study-focused learners and the discussion turns to languages, sometimes I honestly feel like we are talking about completely different things. A lot of them like talking about subjunctives, past participles, cases and word roots, conjugations, tone rules and so on. If you are a grammarian or academic then these things can lead to fascinating discussions if you are into that. However, I find focusing entirely on such details to be unhelpful if you actually want to communic.. || Continue Reading →

Whenever I meet new people and try to help them with their language learning missions, when they hear that I have already learned to speak a few languages and ask me to list them, the one that always gets their attention the most is Esperanto. Most people have never even heard of it, but occasionally they say that they thought it was dead and that maybe I learned it as an alternative to Klingon or Na’vi just for the hell of it, since “nobody actually speaks it”. Well, today I am going to make a suggestion that I included as one of many other language hack.. || Continue Reading →

♬ 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.. || Continue Reading →

Check out this video that explains everything in this post, with airport footage from an actual trip I made with 40kg: Ah, no-frills airlines. How we both love and hate you at the same time! Since quite a lot of us are on a budget nowadays, we try to find ways to pay less as often as possible, and low cost carriers (like Ryanair, Easyjet etc. in Europe) are a great way to do this if you are travelling. They remove all unnecessary luxuries and simply get you to your destination. If you travel just with hand luggage and buy your ticket at the right time, they are by .. || Continue Reading →

“I made a new video – I look cool in it! Want to come up and check it out?” Sounds like an innocent enough thing to say, right? While talking to a German friend of mine (a girl, but seriously just a friend and one I’ve had for many years), I wanted to say this pretty simple phrase. Through very unwise use of the word “geil” (normally cool/awesome) and “kommen/bei mir” (normally come & my place), what I actually somehow said was that I was horny and I wanted her to come inside me. And that’s come with sexual intonati.. || Continue Reading →

This post has been a long time coming. Teachers and linguists are going to hate me for this, but it has to be said: You can never speak a language by just studying it, no matter how much you study Yes, you read that right. Studying is the wrong thing to do if you want to speak a language. I’m totally serious. Last night I ran into some English speakers and heard the same thing I’ve heard thousands of times about other languages: they have been studying German for years and don’t speak it yet, even though they now live in Berlin. Every day, I get dozens of.. || Continue Reading →