Transcription
Most people think learning a language takes years of studying, living abroad, and being born to bilingual parents. But experts at the US Foreign Service Institute say that you can actually reach intermediate fluency in just 6 months.
Now, I'm bilingual in Spanish, and I have a fancy certificate to prove it. But it took me way longer than it should have to get here. And if I knew then what I know now, I could have saved myself years. So, in this video, I'll show you what actually works for learning a language fast, the mistakes that will slow you down, and the sacrifices you'll have to make. And some of my tips might shock you because here's the truth: Fast language learning is an oxymoron. It takes time.
Let's just look at the world champions of language learning, babies. It takes them years to learn how to talk, right? But the good news is you're smarter than a baby, probably. Now, I won't promise fluency in a week like some YouTubers. I learned Spanish the traditional way. I studied in school and then I lived in Spain for 2 years as an English teacher. And now I live in Mexico with my Mexican wife. And I've realized that there's no shortcut to fluency. Learning a language is like navigating a maze. Sometimes you hit a dead end. But if your goal is just to speak and be understood, then you can make that maze much simpler. And the first step is to skip learning grammar.
Now, I know this is going to make a lot of sixth-grade language teachers very upset, and I apologize, but the truth is that you don't need to understand the grammar to speak a language. Okay, let's look at our favorite language learners again, babies. They don't understand the grammar when they start speaking. They just start making noises, which eventually form words, and then they eventually start making sentences, and they're not worried about being perfect right off the bat. They don't even know what grammar is, right? They're just trying new things and trying to communicate. That's the most important thing. They just copy what they hear and start practicing something. It doesn't sound good at first, but babies aren't embarrassed to make a mistake. So, you should focus on your ability to communicate, not necessarily being perfect and understanding every bit of grammar, right? We're looking to just be understood, to just speak and understand what we're listening to. For that, you don't need to be an A student. C's get degrees, right? You want to be a C student. You want to be average. You want to be intermedial. You want to be in the middle.
So, yeah, there's some grammar concepts that you do need to understand: pronouns, how to conjugate verbs, where to place adjectives. But the deeper you get into it, it just becomes a rabbit hole where you're learning things that I like. When I was learning Spanish, I was learning things that I don't even understand in English—past participles and gerunds and phonetics, the subjunctive, and all this stuff that just sort of like bogged down my brain with unnecessary information. And I sort of had to like think through all these things every time I wanted to talk. It just confused me and it slowed me down. Really, you don't need to know all that stuff. Obviously, if you want to go deeper into the language, you should go back and learn these things, but that's just up to you how far you want to go. A lot of the times, like a native speaker, they will first off, they'll understand you, and if they don't, they'll give you grace if you're at least trying to speak the language. And they'll show you more respect for trying than if you just expect them to understand your language.
So that's why you shouldn't focus on this next mistake either, which is focusing too much on pronunciation. When I was working as an English teacher in Spain, the biggest obstacle that held my students back was their fear of talking. They thought that they would make a mistake, they would embarrass themselves, or they just wouldn't be understood. And while it's true that sometimes you'll run into those types of people out in the world who are probably just miserable people anyways, and yeah, they'll give you a hard time for your accent or for the way you talk, but nine times out of 10, you'll run into nice people who will try to help you and make an effort to understand you. At least that's what I found. And so if you get too caught up on pronunciation, you won't start talking, which is the most important thing to get the needle to move when you want to learn a language because you have to get your newly forming foreign language brain connected to your mouth as soon as possible. And you can only do that by talking.
Now, if you are too caught up on your pronunciation and you want to improve it, then there is a way to do that. And I call it the Jim Carrey method. Now, this is something I just invented, and I don't know if academics would say it's the best method, but basically it involves pretending to be a native speaker, right? So, we all know who Jim Carrey is. He's a legendary actor who's played iconic roles in movies like The Mask, Dumb and Dumber, The Grinch. He is so good at embodying these larger-than-life characters that I mean, they are so exaggerated. They're cartoon characters, but he does that so well cuz he's just a master impersonator and character actor. So, what is the Jim Carrey method? That is when you try to impersonate a native speaker. You fake your accent when you're speaking in your target language. And it's going to feel weird at first. It's going to feel like offensive maybe or like you're going to make somebody angry, but it's just practicing the sounds you need to make in your target language. All righty then. And what you're doing when you do that is you're training your mouth to move in a way that makes the noises that you need to make, and you're training your vocal cords to make the tones that you need to make. Right? So, italiano. Now, these are exaggerated accents, and the hand gesture might not be necessary, but it helps. I don't know. I feel like some people are going to disagree with me on this one, but let me know in the comments. Would you rather speak Italian with an exaggerated Italian accent or with an indecipherable American accent? I ever dare you.
But to find an accent you want to copy and try out for yourself, you need to be digesting a lot of your target language. Now, the most repeated advice you'll hear on the internet about learning a language is to focus on input. The most important thing when it comes to learning a language is getting in there. And today, by the way, we're going to talk about comprehensible input. There's a good chance you're not getting enough comprehensible input. And that's because it works. Input is anything that you read or listen to, but input alone won't cut it. Anybody who watches anime with the subtitles or Kdramas or telenovelas, hey, I'm not here to judge. You'll know that just watching in a foreign language won't make you absorb and understand the language. If that were true, every 30-year-old who lives in their mother's basement and owns a body pillow would be speaking fluent Japanese. Okay, I'm just kidding. That was a joke. I watch anime and I don't have a body pillow.
So, you need to start thinking of your brain as a computer, right? And language out there in the world is data. Hear me out. When you type on a keyboard or you click a mouse, your computer's CPU processes the physical input of tapping the mouse or hitting a key and turns it into digital data. Then, the computer runs calculations to figure out what to do with that data. Your brain does the same thing. It interprets words and context and extracts meaning to form responses. But a computer knows what to do with the data it receives because of its programming. So you need to program your brain. Now the way you program your brain to understand a foreign language is by attaching meaning to that foreign language. And there's a lot of ways you can do this. So I'm going to walk you through them.
Now the worst way is just by picking up a random novel in a foreign language. These aren't meant for language learners. So there's very little information that you can process. The best-case scenario if you try reading a book in a foreign language without knowing the language is that you'll have to stop and translate every single word in a dictionary or Google Translate because all you see is text on a page. Like there's no pictures, and unless the book is made for language learners, there's no context to understand its meaning. So skip these entirely, even kids' books.
A step above foreign books is using a textbook that's designed for language learners. Now, I highly recommend you start here if you're starting from zero because these types of books are meant to help you and guide you along your journey. And they do that by working you through what's called the zone of proximal development. Now, this is an educational psychology term. And basically, what you need to know is that there's a sweet spot between what you already know and what you couldn't even know with help. So, for example, if you want to learn how to ride a bike, maybe right now you can ride a tricycle. And you can ride a bike if someone's there to hold the handlebars for you or you have training wheels. But even with help, you're not going to be able to ride a bike on a tightrope. It's just too far beyond your reach. So the sweet spot is where you're challenged enough that you need help, but not so challenged that you can't progress. This zone is where learning occurs and where you need to be to start programming your brain. So beginner language textbooks are great because they put you right in that zone. They give you context because they're based in English, but they also give you explanations and exercises that help you program your brain so you can turn input into intake. Now, the difference there is that input is just general data or information out there in the world, right? Like street signs that you don't understand, watching anime with English subtitles, just getting input. Intake is what you understand and you're storing in your RAM or wherever computers store their data.
Now, choosing a textbook is going to be up to you because there's no one-size-fits-all best textbook that I can recommend. It depends on your current skill set, your goals, and your target language. But some that I've heard recommended quite often are the Learn Yourself series and the Assimil series. And I'm going to share a hack with you guys: You can get these textbooks for free and a bunch of others on archive.org. All you have to do is make an account, and you can get free PDF or digital versions of these textbooks. And if you have a library card, you can actually access your library's audiobooks, textbooks, and movies without physically having to go there if you use apps like Libby or Canopy. You can also buy used textbooks online or just visit a local bookshop.
Now, I have this book here for learning French, Easy French Step-by-Step, and it's good. I like it. I don't have much time to study these days, unfortunately. It is good because it's working me through the language, and it's very similar. French is very similar to Spanish. So when I do have time to sit down and study, I feel like I learn pretty quickly. But the one bad part about textbooks is that there's no listening. So a lot of the words that I read, they sound completely different when I hear them in a series or a song or something like that. So I don't even recognize them. That's why the next way that you can program your brain is by watching movies, TV shows, or YouTube videos with subtitles in your target language.
Now, this is one of the best ways to passively practice a language because as you're watching and listening, you read the subtitles and you understand more. It's the same thing in English. Sometimes I don't understand movies that I'm watching in English because the sound effects are too loud or for whatever reason. So, I'll put English subtitles, and it helps me understand. It's so it's the same thing in a foreign language, and it feels weird at first, especially if you're not at a super high level in a second language. So, you're not going to understand most of what you see in here, but it flips a switch in your head where you turn on your second language brain because if you watch a show with English subtitles, you're not going to be intaking anything. You're just going to turn on your English brain, and it's just going to be entertainment at that point. But if you, you know, flip the switch and you have the second language subtitles, then you're using your second language brain.
And then the final and best form of input that you can receive is by speaking and practicing with native speakers or other learners. Now, the problem with this one is that it has the biggest barrier to entry because it's expensive to go travel and speak with native speakers, and classes can also be expensive and time-consuming. So, what I would actually recommend doing is using a platform like iTalki or Preply and speaking with a native speaker over a video call. You do have to pay, but it's so worth it because it's not that expensive, and even when you're living abroad in another country, you can feel like a burden asking native speakers to practice with you. So, this is good because it is transactional, but you know that you're getting a native speaker who's taking the time to really help you along your journey. You can also try HelloTalk, but I wouldn't recommend that.
Practicing speaking early and often is really important because it's probably the hardest or one of the hardest parts of learning a language. So, if you want to prioritize anything, it would be speaking, and you can actually just skip writing. So, this is one of those sacrifices I mentioned at the beginning of the video. Obviously, to be considered fluent in a language, you need to be able to speak, read, write, and listen, because those are the four pillars of language learning, and you need all four of them to build a strong base. But if you had to get rid of one of them, you can have a bar stool that has three legs, right? You only need three. If you need to write a message to somebody, like a text message, you can use ChatGPT or Google Translate. Same thing for emails. And unless it's like an academic setting, in the everyday world, we don't write that much. Especially again, if your goal is to speak and be understood as well as understand other people, then your focus should be on listening and speaking practice and reading as well to understand and learn more vocabulary. So again, let's go back to babies. Babies don't learn to read and write until they're older, right? So they first start by listening and then speaking, and then once they're a few years older they learn to read and write. So if I were starting a language that has nothing to do with my native language, like Chinese or Hindi, and the writing system is completely different, then I just would skip it if my goal was just to speak.
Now, this next thing that will slow you down as a language learner is something that slowed me down for years. And it took so long for it to finally click, but once it did, it made a huge difference. And that is to not translate. So, it sounds kind of counterintuitive. How can you learn a language if you're not translating? Now, when you're first starting out, that is the only way to learn because you need to have like a point of reference to learn the new language. But as you get further into your learning, you want to sort of like detach yourself from your native language or like detach yourself from your ego because you're so attached to your native language that you want to use it to interpret the new language. But sometimes there's just not word-for-word translations of words or phrases, and you need to sort of like sort of like understand the vibe more than really understand the exact translation and the grammar behind it and all that because that'll just bog you down. Whereas you can just get the gist of a phrase or a word and like know the meaning behind it without being so attached to the exact translation. And I'll give you an example. In Spanish, the word "feo" means ugly. But you can use it for so much more than just ugly. You can basically use it to say anything that's like bad, undesirable, or unpleasant. In Spanish, you can say "huele feo," which means something smells bad. But the direct translation would be "it smells ugly." And in English, "ugly" is usually used for like appearances, right? For what things look like. So you wouldn't say something smells ugly. That's like the little change I'm talking about. Like you don't translate directly, but you get the vibe of the word. You know what the word means and what it's trying to say. Another example is right now I'm trying to learn Japanese, and so I know the phrase "hajimemashite, yoroshiku onegaishimasu." I sort of know it, right? But that phrase means like "nice to meet you, I hope you take care of me," which is not something I would ever say in English, but it's just part of the culture and the language in Japan, and it's something nice to say. So, I'm learning that phrase, and I'm not thinking the direct translation of what each word and part of the word means. That's what you need to do. You need to you need to know the vibe of the word or the intended meaning of a word or phrase more so than the exact translation because that'll bog you down because you're still using your native brain, and you want to use your new foreign brain.
So, this is why I hate language learning apps so much because they just focus on translating, and they don't help you actually build out your foreign language brain. Now, I'm going to let you in on a little secret that the language learning industry doesn't want you to know. And that is that language learning apps are not made to teach you a language. They're made to make money. In fact, they often times purposely make it harder for you to learn the language so that you have to pay to upgrade your plan and get the better features. For example, you only have a certain amount of credits that you can use in a certain day before they regenerate. So, you only get so many lessons, or you have to watch an ad to continue your lesson. But, I feel like you can learn so much more by using a textbook or just watching a YouTube video than you can by learning with a language app. I got a 500-day streak on Duolingo. And the most I learned is "shot." When would I ever use that phrase ever, unless I'm like in a Freaky Friday movie with Puss in Boots? It just doesn't make any sense why they would be teaching me that before like "nice to meet you" or learning how to count to 100—things that I could actually use if I go to a French-speaking country. But anyways, if you want to learn more about how I became fluent in Spanish, then check out this video. Thank you for watching. Thank you to my Patreon supporters as always, and I hope to see you over there. Good luck on your language learning journey.