Transcription
In this video, I want to talk about the 45-minute language learning routine that actually took me from a false beginner in Spanish, but you know, you can apply this to any language, but I went from false beginner uh in Spanish to this. Now, this specific routine, I would say I did it for 30 minutes to 45 minutes a day. There are five main activities. I'm going to describe them to you very quickly.
The first activity, which was probably the most important, or at least the most impactful, I would say, and it's called the memorized speeches. Now, this is not an activity that I invented. I got this from Professor Paul Nation, who I interviewed on my channel. He is a respected uh scholar in this field of language learning, vocabulary, etc. And, you know, this activity is pretty simple. The goal is to write down speeches and learn them by heart, and that's it.
And before describing to you like the all the details, I just want to address probably, you know, a lot of people are going to criticize this type of activity of rote memorization. They say it doesn't work. Right now, it's very trendy to talk about immersion, and you need to get input, and Stephen Krashen, and all that. And in my experience, and according to the scientific evidence that I've seen, you know, speaking to, I don't know how many scientists, it's just not true. You know, memorization does have an important place in language learning.
And so, with the memorized speeches, what you want to do is, first, very important, and you should not skip th- this uh this step. You need to identify in which kinds of scenarios you're going to speak the language. Now, okay, in the long term, if you want to be, I don't know, native-level or close to native, very advanced in the language, you're going to need to be able to handle a bunch of scenarios, you know, all of them. But, in the meantime, which, you know, in the meantime could take years, you want to be able to, you know, identify the scenarios where you want to be fluent because realistically, it's not going to be possible for you to be fluent in all kinds of scenarios. So, you really want to have this hyper-targeted approach, which in the end, because you're going to be preparing for so many scenarios over time, it's going to build a base where you're going to be able to handle any scenario, really.
All right, so identify the topics that you want to talk about. And in my case, you know, learning Spanish, my goal at the end of the 3 months was to be able to talk with a native speaker about things like introducing myself, talking about my work, my YouTube channel, talking about language learning, talking about how I learned Spanish and why, that kind of stuff. Once you've identified these topics, then you want to write down uh speeches that or, you know, individual sentences that you're very likely to use.
Now, there are two ways of going about this. The first way would be you take an AI model. You can use Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT. It doesn't really matter. I mean, the three of them, they go back and forth, you know, in terms of like who's the best model, but overall, they're pretty equal. The you know, if you were to choose one, I would probably say Claude or ChatGPT. I personally use Claude now. During the challenge, I only used Gemini, and now I also use ChatGPT for, but mostly for programming. So, all of this is say, it doesn't really matter, but if you don't have any preferences, just go with Claude. You don't even need to get the paid plan. You can just stay on the free plan as long as you don't use it a ton.
So, you get the AI model, and you give it bullet points. You say, "Okay, I want a speech that talks about this, this, this, and that. Okay, so for example, if I want to introduce myself, I want to give it the bullet points of I'm going to say so you know, the prompt is going to be okay. So I want you to write a short speech in easy or intermediate Spanish that will allow me to introduce myself and here's what I want you to talk about. Number one, my name is Louis. Number two, I'm from Tahiti in French Polynesia. Number three, I have a YouTube channel about language learning. Number four, I'm a programmer and you know, I like programming. That kind of stuff." So bullet points. And then the AI is going to take care of you know, just redacting something that is grammatically correct and that sounds good. Obviously, it's not a a a one-shot thing. You're going to need to iterate over that, you know, multiple times saying okay, this part is too hard. Use another word here and so on.
But here I really don't want you to rush things because number one, you need to be hyper targeted. I I can't emphasize this enough but you know, doing this challenge of like the three months you know, to learn Spanish really it really drove it home for me that the fact that having a hyper targeted approach is really a super super big advantage in terms of becoming fluent. You don't want to learn things where it's going to be just in case. I mean, you want to cover broad range of scenarios but these scenarios have to be highly likely to happen. Don't learn things just in case. Learn things because you know, there's a high likelihood that they're going to happen in your use of the language.
The second method of developing these speeches with the AI would be to this is what I did as well, record myself saying something you know, in in English and then I would give the the video to the AI and I would tell it, "Okay, take this, uh transcribe it and translate it to Spanish, you know, in natural Spanish so that I can learn sort of the contents of this of this video." Now, obviously, this is going to be a little bit harder for a lot of people because there's a little bit more, you know, tech involved. So, I would recommend for most people going for the bullet point the the bullet point approach.
All right, so this was the first activity. Now, the second activity was, obviously, flashcards. Now, I think a lot of you guys have heard me talk about flashcards a lot on this channel and uh obviously, I use flashcards with Anki to learn the most common vocabulary. Now, this is this kind of falls into the just-in-case category, but to be honest, the deck that I used, which by the way, I'm going to put a link to the deck that I used in the description, but it contained the 2,000, you know, most common words in Spanish. This is a deck that I made and I got it corrected by a professional Spanish proofreader. It's got multiple audio versions, you know, Spanish from Spain, uh Spanish from Mexico, from Colombia. I personally used uh Colombian Spanish, but the point of using flashcards here is to learn the high frequency words because they're very very likely to happen in a conversation.
So, I did this and I don't know, there's not a lot to say about this. I just learned the 1,000 most uh frequent words, so the first 1,000 flashcards, approximately. The initial goal was to learn the first uh I mean, the the entire deck, right? The 2,000 most common words in Spanish, but because I was limiting myself to, you know, 30 minutes to 45 minutes a day, that's, you know, I only ended up doing uh 1,000 about 1,000 because I had, you know, all the other activities that I'm going to talk about.
All right, so the third activity would be um my AI tutor called Island Koala. Now, the initial plan for me was I was going to practice, you know, speaking Spanish with actual tutors from iTalki, but you know, there are a lot of issues. Well, first of all, you know, the times, I mean, in terms of scheduling the appointments. You You need to schedule the lessons and it's a little bit hard. It takes time. You need to present it to be present at a certain time. Also, you know, classes on iTalki, they're not expensive. You know, Spanish classes, you can have Spanish classes for $7 an hour, which is quite affordable. But, the thing is it's just 1 hour. If you you know, if you have to do this once every 2 days, you know, it ends up being kind of expensive over time. And to be honest, I think that the two of the biggest issues were number one, at the beginning of the challenge, I was a false beginner and so I did not have enough, you know, I couldn't speak enough to really benefit, in my opinion, from the lessons. And then lastly, you know, I live in Tahiti, so the internet speed is not great at times. Most of the time it's fine, but it's kind of stressful to think that, hey, sometimes it's not going to work and the lesson is just going to be wasted.
So, what I did is that I looked for an alternative and I actually I programmed my own my own alternative, which is the AI tutor that I built, called Island Koala. So, this AI tutor, which I built for myself, but then now it's available to the public. I'll put the link in the description. Has multiple features that I think are advantageous when you compare them to a human tutor. So, the first thing would be that, you know, with the AI tutor, you can go at your own rhythm. You know, if you talk with a tutor, of course, they're going to try to adapt your rhythm, but it's still going to be be back-and-forth. It's still going to be a conversation. And so, there is a bit of pressure from the student to, you know, output things and to, you know, maintain a reasonable rhythm. You can't just pause for 20 seconds and think about what you just said. With the AI tutor, it's different. You can really pause. Everything is written down. The AI tutor is going to correct every single one of your mistakes. It's always available. And also, importantly, well, obviously, in my case, I didn't pay anything cuz it's my creation. It's my app. But for, you know, other people who If you want to use it, what I did is that instead of having a subscription model where where you pay 20 10 to 20 dollars a month, it's a unique payment. You just pay once and that's it. You own the app. So, you know, multiple advantages here. Obviously, ideally, I would have combined this with human tutors as well. But, you know, it is what it is. It was a 3-month challenge. I couldn't just, you know, do a bunch of stuff cuz I limited myself to 30 to 45 minutes a day.
All right. And the fourth activity was simply a textbook. So, as I said, when I started learning Spanish, I was a false beginner. So, I needed a a global sort of vision, a global introduction to the language, learn the conjugation, the grammar, you know, some information on pronunciation, etc. And so, what I ended up using was Assimil Spanish. Um I don't have the book right here. But, you know, it's a physical book with 100 lessons. There's nothing fancy about it. I don't think it's particularly, you know, the best sort of introduction to Spanish. I actually hesitated a lot between this and, you know, using other tools that I recommended in in another video like, you know, SpanishPod101 is really great, Pimsleur, Rocket Languages. I really like all of these tools, but the reason why I ended up um using Assimil is because of the length of the program. It's a book that is fairly short. It's It's 100 lessons. And so, the whole point of this is that, you know, 100 lessons, you know, with a 3-month challenge, that's about one lesson a day, a little bit more on Sundays. But so it fit the length of the of the challenge pretty well. But overall, it's pretty good. I would recommend Assimil Spanish if you really want to get a you know, a good overall vision of the language in a short period of time.
And finally, the last tool that I used was Netflix. Now, I should add some information here because I did limit myself to 30 to 45 minutes of active study per day. That is to say for the previous four tools that I talked about. Now, for passive study, which is, you know, watching Netflix, watching stuff on in Spanish on Netflix, I limited this to 1 hour a day. So that's one more hour, but you know, it's not exhausting at all. It's basically just watching a a series in Spanish and enjoying yourself and you know, learning some Spanish. The whole purpose of this was, you know, my final goal was to have conversations, you know, video calls with native speakers. So I needed to have some sort of exposure to, you know, more natural Spanish because up until that point, you know, I was getting some some audio from, you know, the flashcards, from the AI tutor from Assimil, but it's all very sort of adapted for, you know, learners of Spanish. And so that's kind of the problem. You want something that has more of a natural rhythm, you know, some sentences are fast, there's accents, there's, you know, conversations in in a group, that kind of stuff. And so I I chose Netflix. I I mean, I chose a show called Narcos. This is the only thing that I watched during the duration of the challenge. It's about Pablo Escobar and the problem you know, cocaine in Colombia in the '80s and the '90s.
You want something that is at the right level for you. So typically for me it was just like way too hard, especially at the start. Even at the end, to be honest, there are parts where it's too hard. You want something that is just a little bit above your level, but you know, in my case it was so interesting that I thought, "Okay, it doesn't require any energy for it from from me to actually, you know, consume this. So, I'm going to do it anyway. It's not ideal, but hey, it's interesting." So, there you go. These are the five tools that uh I used for my Spanish challenge. You can use, you know, the same tools for, you know, learning any language. And I limited myself to 30 minutes to 45 minutes a day of active study and 1 hour of just watching Netflix.
Now, the precise sort of split of how many minutes I spent on each tool, that I do not know. I didn't, you know, have a timer or anything, but if I had to guess, the two activities I spent the most time on, you know, apart from Netflix, would be the uh flashcards. It just takes, you know, time to learn new words and do the reviews on Anki. I'm going to put a link to the to the deck and to all the tools in the description, by the way. And uh the memorized uh speeches, because you need to create the speeches, memorize them. It's pretty time-consuming. And then the AI tutor and the textbook, I would say I spent less time on them uh because they had more of, you know, it was like supporting activities.
But if you have if there's anything that you should take away from this video, is that the most important thing is going to be flashcards and the memorized speeches. I would say memorized speeches even more than flashcards, because this is going to be the final goal. In my, you know, in my situation, the goal was having conversations, speaking. So, you need to do that directly. And then the flashcards, you know, you need to cover your bases. You need to learn the high-frequency vocabulary. There's no doubt about this. So, there you go, and thank you so much for watching. I'll see you in the next one.