A Year Without Speaking English: What I Learned

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How much could you learn if you spent a year avoiding English and used each new language from the start?

My friend Vat and I tested that question through four language missions in Spain, Brazil, China and Taiwan, and Korea.

We gave each language about three months. We wanted to see how far we could get, not prove that everyone could reach the same level on the same schedule.

This is what happened during our year without English, what I thought we achieved and which parts of the method I would adapt rather than copy literally.

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away with a native speaker for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

One Year Without English: 4 Languages in 365 Days

Vat and I organised the year into four stages: Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Brazil, Mandarin in China and Taiwan, and Korean in Korea. We spent about three months on each language and followed one main rule: don’t speak English, apart from family calls and emergencies.

How well did we do?

Here’s a brief, unscripted video of us speaking all four languages, so you can judge the results for yourself.

A three-minute informal conversation is not a proficiency test, though. You can also watch longer footage from our missions in Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese and Korean.

Because we made each target language our default, we accumulated a lot of practice in all four. But did we become fluent?

The only formal exam I took was the then-current HSK Level 4 in Mandarin. I scored 74%, above its 180-out-of-300 passing mark. The test provider mapped that level to CEFR B2, but that alignment has been debated, and a written HSK result does not by itself establish overall conversational ability.

For the other languages, I’ll have to use more of an informal assessment.

My rough estimate at the end of the trip was that we had reached an upper-intermediate level in Spanish and an intermediate level in Portuguese. I put Vat’s Mandarin at lower-intermediate. For Korean, I put Vat at intermediate and myself at lower-intermediate. That difference matched our interests: Vat had been excited about Korean from the start, while I had become absorbed in Mandarin. These were informal self-assessments, not exam results.

By my working definition, our Spanish was functionally fluent: we still made grammatical mistakes and had accents, but we could hold long conversations on many topics without a dictionary. Our Portuguese was less developed but conversational. In Mandarin and Korean, we could handle many daily interactions, although our abilities were uneven.

Lessons I Learned From Speaking No English

The four languages of this trip weren’t my first time learning a foreign language. That was French. I had spent a year studying in France as part of my university course.

Like Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Korean, I had only minimal practice in French and wanted to become fluent during my stay. But unlike my recent languages, I didn’t throw myself into the language with no English. I worked hard and I studied hard, and I left with an intermediate level of French. But unfortunately it was often painfully difficult. Even six months after I started, holding a long conversation was exhausting.

In Spanish, Vat, who had no prior experience with Romance languages, and I both felt that our conversational progress after three months had surpassed what I achieved during my year in France. That was a striking personal comparison, not evidence that Spanish can always be learned four times as fast.

The useful question is which parts of our method created more practice and which depended on our circumstances. Here are the lessons I took from each stage.

Spain: Why Zero English Made Practice Easier for Us

Spain was the first country in our journey. We were nervous about the no-English rule. After all, what if it simply proved too difficult? What if our idea to limit English for a year was actually a vow of silence, if learning a language in three months was beyond our abilities?

Because of this pressure, Vat and I were extremely strict about not speaking English. We permitted some necessary calls to family back home, or English in emergencies, but otherwise we spoke only in Spanish to anyone we met, including each other.

Sometimes this had funny consequences. Benny happened to be living in Valencia while we were doing our Spanish project. Benny speaks fluent Spanish, but not everyone in the group did, so he sometimes translated our Spanish back into English when the four of us spent time together.

From the outside, this sounds painful. Even looking back, I’m surprised we applied the rule so consistently in Spain.

From the inside, it was a different story. The first two weeks were hard, especially for Vat, who had less prior practice. After that, Spanish started to feel like our normal way of communicating. By the middle of the second month, we rarely had to discuss the rule itself.

My lesson from Spain was that making one language the default removed a repeated decision and gave us more speaking practice. It felt less strenuous after the first few weeks, but this was our experience, not a controlled comparison with my year of French.

Brazil: Immersion and Study Did Different Jobs

Our experience learning Portuguese in Brazil was a lot bumpier than in Spain. For one, our practice was extremely limited. When we arrived, I had done four hours learning some very basic expressions and Vat hadn’t done any.

We also had problems on arrival. Our prebooked apartment was a nightmare, so after cancelling the rent, we were temporarily without accommodation. We could not find a landlord who spoke English or Spanish, and most places were booked for the holidays. Portuguese was no longer just a learning project; we needed it to solve an immediate problem.

We walked around the small village with a memorised phrase meaning “We’re looking for an apartment for two months.” After several days and dozens of rejections, we found someone willing to rent us a place that had been for sale. The rental process involved lawyers, contracts, fingerprints and detailed paperwork, which felt excessive for two months of prepaid rent.

Despite that rocky start, we made quick progress in Portuguese and were back to our normal routines within a month. Neither of us studied much; most of our practice came through surfing lessons, the local samba bar and daily errands. Vat also worked full-time on his architecture-school portfolio for much of the stay.

Study and immersion did different jobs for us. Study helped us notice patterns; real interactions forced us to retrieve words under pressure. You can create some of that pressure without moving abroad by setting target-language-only periods in one-to-one online lessons or at a language meetup.

“For us, study built the foundation and immersion turned it into practice.”

China and Taiwan: The Importance of Laying a Foundation

China was beautiful, fascinating and probably my favourite country. It was also the most challenging stage for me.

I know Benny doesn’t like to dwell on the assumed “difficulty” of languages. That’s an attitude that can trap you into thinking learning or immersion is impossible. I completely agree.

The extra challenge was useful because it exposed the limits of our method. Immersion with limited study had taken us a long way in Spain and Brazil; with Mandarin, we needed more deliberate groundwork.

For English speakers like us, early spoken communication required more groundwork. We had to hear and produce tones reliably, and there were fewer transparent cognates to help us guess unfamiliar words.

My solution was to spend more time on tone drills, common syllables and high-frequency words before expecting conversation alone to carry me. I also chose to learn characters because they helped me connect familiar components across compound words.

Mandarin required more work from me than Spanish or Portuguese, but that made the progress rewarding. Because it was less closely related to languages I already knew, each conversation gave me access to history and culture I had not encountered through my European languages.

New Mandarin words became easier for us to remember as our foundation grew. We could connect compounds to familiar parts: 熊猫 (xióngmāo), “panda”, is literally “bear-cat”; 南瓜 (nánguā), “pumpkin”, is “south-melon”; and 葡萄酒 (pútáojiǔ), “grape wine”, combines “grape” with 酒, “alcohol” or “wine”.

I had prepared more Mandarin than Vat, so I found it easier to shift into the no-English rule. The rule still gave me valuable practice, but the groundwork made that practice more productive.

Korea: Don’t Borrow Other Learners’ Expectations

During our travels, we met other foreigners who wanted to learn the local language but were not making the progress they wanted. We heard this especially often in Korea.

Several long-term residents we met could use only a handful of Korean sentences. That was a description of our social circle, not a measure of expatriates in Korea as a whole.

Some people we met had gone to Korea to teach English and had never made a concrete plan for learning Korean. English-speaking work and social circles made it possible to function without much Korean, while the language’s sound system and grammar were unfamiliar to us.

Those explanations sometimes hardened into an expectation that meaningful progress was nearly impossible. Hearing that repeatedly affected how we approached the final stage.

Vat and I, at this point on our trip, were pretty exhausted. Nearly a year of travel and having repeated the language-learning immersion process three times in a row, we were hardly in our best shape. We had broken the no-English rule a number of times, and we were feeling guilty about not holding to the principles of our project.

I still reached what I called a working level of Korean in three months, and Vat progressed faster than I did. Korea was difficult for us after a year of travel, but our experience did not match the impossibility we had heard described.

What I learned in Korea was that other learners’ expectations can shape your own. Spending time with people who treated regular Korean practice as normal made it easier to keep practising, even when progress felt slow.

What Happened Next?

Unlike Benny, Vat and I did not intend the trip to become a permanent lifestyle. We wanted a gap year before returning to our usual work. After the trip, Vat went back to study architecture and I returned to writing in Canada.

We did not want to abandon the progress, though. Three months was an experiment, not an endpoint.

Five months after we returned, I wrote that I was maintaining weekly conversation practice in each language. I had worked through the first 2,500 Chinese characters and planned to practise handwriting and read books and articles. I had also spent two weeks in Mexico practising Spanish.

For me, the main advantage of short-term immersion was getting past the early frustration of having almost no usable language. Once I could have basic conversations, practice became more enjoyable.

How to Adapt the No-English Idea

You do not need to spend a year abroad or ban your native language completely. Try a bounded version that fits your level, responsibilities and safety needs.

1. Set a target-language window with a willing partner or housemate. Much of our practice came from speaking with each other. Agree on a time, topic and fallback language so the exercise stays useful.
2. Plan a short immersion block. It could be part of a trip, a local event or an intensive week at home. A shorter block increases practice time, especially if you already have a foundation, but it does not guarantee rapid growth or fluency.
3. Book a one-to-one online tutoring session and agree on a target-language-only block. Beginners may still need a fallback language for explanations, but even a short conversation block creates retrieval practice.

“A short, well-planned immersion block can give you more chances to use what you know.”

Languages can open up different people, cultures and ways of thinking. You do not have to wait for years of study before you start using one.

Our project was unusually intense, but its most useful principle is modest: create regular situations where your target language is the easiest language to use.

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If you want to study the project-design methods Scott uses beyond language learning, see his current Rapid Learner course.