by Benny Lewis
The No-Nonsense Guide to Language Learning
Hacks and Tips to Learn a Language Faster
Benny Lewis
Copyright © 2017 by Benny Lewis.
All rights reserved.
www.Fluentin3Months.com
No part of this ebook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without explicit written permission from Benny Lewis.
Excerpts may be used for the purposes of review.
This ebook makes no guarantees of success or implied promises. The strategies detailed in these pages will work, but are dependent on the work ethic and diligence of the language learner.
Produced in the United States of America.
First Edition.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Is It Possible to Become Fluent in a Language in 3 Months?
Chapter 1: Why My Destiny Was to Never Speak Spanish (and How I Did it Anyway)
Chapter 2: The Smartest Decision I Ever Made
Chapter 3: How to Learn a New Language Fluently
Chapter 4: How Beginners Can Outsmart “Expert” Language Learners
Chapter 5: The CIA is Wrong: It Doesn’t Take 1,000+ Hours to Learn a Language
Chapter 6: The 7 Most Common Mistakes Language Learners Make (and How to Fix Them)
Chapter 7: How to Practise a Foreign Language Without Travelling Overseas
Chapter 8: Why Learning Languages Online can be Better than in Person
Chapter 9: How to Use Skype to Learn a Language
Chapter 10: The Only Way to Get Far Quickly is to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Want more? Try my free Speak in a Week course
Resources for Language Learners
Introduction: Is It Possible to Become Fluent in a Language in 3 Months?
I’m Benny Lewis, a fun-loving Irish guy, full-time globe trotter and international bestselling author.
Since 2003, I’ve become a fluent speaker of seven languages. And I’m able to have confident conversations in many others.
With my no-nonsense approach to language learning, I help people just like you to feel confident in speaking another language, even if they’ve only just started. My mission in life is giving people permission to make mistakes. The more mistakes you make, the faster you become a confident language learner.
Thousands of language learners have been successful with my approach, and I’d like to share it with you, too.
Over the years I have picked up quite a lot of short-cuts, memory techniques, and a pretty good mentality that has hugely helped me to learn seven languages, and earn the title of “polyglot”.
I insist that learning a language is 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. Nevertheless, I have definitely learned that it’s a lot easier than most people think.
Once I found out how easy it is to learn languages, I started travelling to new countries and staying there (for around 3 months usually) and immersing myself in the language. Three months isn’t a long time, so it forced me, through trial and error, to look for as many different ways to speed up my learning as possible. That’s how I discovered hacks for learning languages quickly.
The language hacks I discovered can just as easily be used in the comfort of your own home – no matter where you call home – with the right tools and attitude.
What’s my understanding of fluency? I call myself fluent when I’m able to have comfortable conversations with locals about a wide range of topics without a strong accent. I expect myself to have a good enough command of the language for expressing myself clearly in many social situations, while understanding as much as possible of what other people are saying. We’ll get into what fluency means at a deeper level soon enough though.
I reached this level of fluency without having my head in books for months, or paying huge fees for courses. Most importantly, I have a lot of fun along the way.
I know that my techniques work for any language, because I’ve used them so many times, and I get hundreds of emails, tweets, hashtagged YouTube videos and other messages every week from people who have applied my advice to their own language learning projects.
If you’d like to see how it’s done, read on. I’d like to start by sharing my language-learning story.
Before we begin, a couple of quick pointers to help you get the most from this book.
First, this book is a collection of some of my best articles on learning a language. I’ve updated them, improved them and rewritten them to flow naturally from one idea to the next, so you can gradually learn my approach. Sometimes you’ll find that I repeat a point I made previously. Hopefully this will embed the most important ideas into your memory and help the language hacker’s mindset become part of your life.
Second, throughout this book I mention different language learning resources, such as italki, my Speak in a Week course, Innovative Language podcasts, and the Add1Challenge. I’m certain you’ll find these helpful on your own language learning journey. You can find out more about these resources – including the links you need to access them – in the Resources section at the end of the book.
Let’s get started!
Chapter 1: Why My Destiny Was to Never Speak Spanish (and How I Did it Anyway)
It’s easy to look at someone who already speaks a second language and just think that it comes naturally to them.
If you’ve seen me speaking fluent Spanish with my friends, you might think that speaking Spanish was just my destiny. You might believe that I’m “naturally talented” with languages and the pieces of the puzzle just always fit together to make sure that my life would go in this direction.
Utter nonsense!
In fact my “destiny” was to never speak Spanish. The universe told me in very clear ways, many times, that it just was not my path. My stars were aligned, my luck was forged and the fates had decided that I’d be good at mathematics and computers, but not languages.
If you think I’m exaggerating, please read on. The destiny excuse comes in many forms: “it’s just not meant to be”, “it’s genetic”, “no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to do it”.
None of those excuses needs to be true for you.
How can I be sure of this?
I want to share with you some of the “signs” that the universe was giving me for many many years.
It’s important to share this because I know many of you have your own struggles and it can actually be demotivating to think that some people “have it easy”. Trust me, I did not have it easy.
Not the best start: Speech therapy
I don’t smoke, I eat healthily and I don’t drink. A big reason behind these decisions is that I spent the first years of my life very sick and was admitted to hospital for some time. Now that I’m in good health I don’t want to squander it.
One unfortunate consequence of my health problems was that I developed a difficulty speaking.
It was so bad that I needed speech therapy – I had particular problems with my R (not the rolling one, just the standard English one). My big brother still teases me that my favourite TV show was “Stah Twek”.
The consequences of this still linger somewhat – since I learned to speak a little slower and had to get private lessons to do it (which were obviously tailored towards speaking as correctly as possible), my English was not as natural as it was for others around me so I don’t have a very strong accent of where I’m from. People never guess that I’m from the part of Ir
eland I am from (Cavan), and foreigners tell me that I speak English in a way that’s easy for them to understand.
Having a delay in starting to speak English well was not a good prerequisite for speaking other languages!
When I’m speaking English, I still have to think a bit more than most people would. And speaking still doesn’t feel that natural. So no, I’m not talented with languages.
I gave up trying in my teens
Even though my interest in languages really took off in my early 20s, I was actually genuinely curious about speaking Spanish in my teens! A group of students from the Canary Islands came to spend July in my town several years in a row and I got really friendly with them. They loved me – my English was the easiest to understand in town without me even trying!
But, as many people do when abroad with those from their homeland, they spoke a lot of their mother tongue with one another. I tried to ask what something meant, and even printed out the “La Macarena” lyrics to speak it aloud to them. But they were having none of it! They had travelled a long way and their parents had paid quite a lot to have them immersed in English, so they’d at least do that with the locals all the time. My purpose among them socially was made clear and any attempt to learn a word or two of Spanish was met with “don’t be silly” retorts.
Obviously I gave up trying – what was the point in learning a language if my feeble attempts were just going to annoy them? I spent four or five summers with them, but never learned more than “hola” and wouldn’t even dare try saying that to them.
The academic conspiracy; if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail and fail again
In Ireland (at least while I was in school) you have to have studied a third language (the first two being English and Irish) to get into university. Making a choice was easy in my school – it’s not like they were offering the exotic characters of Chinese, or the musicality of Italian – it was French or German. Like it or lump it.
I actually went out of my way to ask if I could possibly take Spanish? Not a hope – we didn’t have a Spanish teacher in my school. German it was. I managed to get a C grade, but then the first time I went to Germany I wasn’t even able to ask directions (the one thing we HAD done repetitively over and over again in German classes!).
My abysmal results in German just reinforced the idea that this whole languages thing really wasn’t for me.
But I had another chance! We don’t have “majors” and “minors” in Irish universities, but mine offered free evening classes in languages, and Spanish was available!
Every year I went to the cultural talk that tried to encourage people to take on this optional Spanish class, and I was the first to hand in my application every time. I didn’t need convincing, but that was where you had to apply.
And every year, they didn’t accept me. The class filled up too quickly and there were no slots left. The first time I got turned down I was just annoyed and accepted it. By my third year I was determined and despite getting turned down again, I actually went to that first class and begged the teacher to let me in. I could see an empty seat!
But rules are rules and I wasn’t on the list. I presumed the random way they selected people just happened to not be in my favour at all, but when I went to the person who ran the cultural talk and asked them why I get turned down every time their answer was something that changed my view of “fair” forever: they simply took the first 15 (or whatever number it was) people in the stack of paper. Since I handed mine in first I was at the bottom of the stack.
My enthusiasm was actually the reason I wasn’t getting into the classes!
Lesson learned: stop being enthusiastic and give up. Universe 1, Benny 0.
Finally in Spain! But don’t think it’s going to be that easy!
I didn’t give up entirely though – I just waited until the end of my studies and applied for an internship for the summer after graduation. I had been working so hard to pass one of Ireland’s most demanding university courses (with an incredibly high failure rate) that I felt I deserved a nice fun summer, so going to sunny Spain for the first time seemed like the logical choice.
I spent a few days flicking through a Spanish course, convinced that this preparation would have me at least muttering the basics when I arrived. But I wasn’t expecting the expat bubble to be so strong!
An English-speaking Spaniard greeted me in the airport and brought me to an apartment with an English-speaking Brazilian and German. Our work exchange program had people from all over the world and they were my social group. English was the language spoken where I worked and when I went out.
I was starting to get the impression that nobody in the world ever speaks any language but English. All I could see and hear was English – sure the signs and products and TV were in Spanish, and strangers passing by spoke Spanish, but all my friends spoke English, that’s all that matters really!
This is a trap that so many expats fall into it makes me sad. But it’s actually bound to happen – why learn another language if it was just not meant to be? You were born language-stupid, just accept it! That’s what I was tempted to think.
I considered taking on Spanish a few times over the months though – I signed up for a pretty expensive course for a few classes – throwing money at the problem was bound to solve it!
But I was the worst in the class. I felt worse after each hour as the other students answered whatever noise the teacher was making. All I could offer were blank faces when asked ¿Blah blah blah blah blah? After several attempts I was getting nowhere, and everyone else laughing and enjoying the class was just making me jealous and frustrated. It was time to give up… again.
Six months living in Spain and I still couldn’t muster together a basic sentence in Spanish.
Destiny is all in your head
At 21 years old, with this background, how clear do you think “the message” was that it was just not meant to be? At this stage I could offer you many reasons why I would never speak Spanish. It was so tempting that I kept believing it for a time and my mind would be fixed on that idea.
But I had one trick up my sleeve that “bad genes”, speaking problems, unhelpful schools, discouraging natives, endless “signs” from the universe and frustrating irony could not knock:
I don’t believe in destiny.
I don’t buy that crap for one second. Destiny may sound pretty and romantic when talking about how couples were meant to be together, but its other forms (the modern one being a messed-up understanding of genetics) are excuses and unverified self-fulfilling prophecies.
If you believe strongly that you are bad at languages, then that will be true. It doesn’t matter which excuse you have randomly plucked out of the air – your commitment to it will make the claim true. Most of my work in trying to get through to people in my books, on my blog and in my videos doesn’t involve giving amazing language learning “tricks”, but to break that commitment.
I don’t care who you are – there is nothing stopping you from taking on the language learning challenge and succeeding. Yes, you may have to go through hard times, struggles and incredible resistance, as I did, but with persistence you will find a way that works for you.
Nothing I have said in this post “proves” that my destiny was to not speak Spanish. It just shows that the things I was doing at the time were not getting me there. So I tried something else. I didn’t want it enough at first, so I waited several years between attempts, but when I got serious about it, things changed dramatically.
Persistence wins over destiny
Experimentation will yield results, both positive and negative. You can give up after experiment #1 turns out negative, or you can come out on top after experiment #37.
All you really know from success stories is what the victor decides to tell you. People who achieve hard goals do it from being positive rather than whining constantly about their task. Because of that you get a filtered version of stories that leaves out the worst parts. Wh
y include those details? They weren’t relevant to success.
So stop complaining about how easy everyone else has it! I assure you, if you really ask people who seem to sail through life and stumble upon goals you’d kill for, you may just see that they have had setbacks much bigger than anything you could have dreamed up.
Sometimes success is actually due to being stubborn enough to ignore all the “signs” from the universe and to make your own destiny.
How did I make my own destiny and become fluent in Spanish? That’s what I’ll share in the next chapter.
Chapter 2: The Smartest Decision I Ever Made
OK, so now I’d like to share the most important decision I have ever made in learning languages.
This choice was the first step in my transformation from a hopeless “I’m not talented with languages” person into the polyglot that I am today. The change happened in one day: November 1st, 2003.
If it wasn’t for that one decision I would have given up with my first foreign language, and all later ones, and all of the wonderful experiences of the last decade and a half wouldn’t have been possible.
Let me explain…
Months of work and still not speaking
I had spent almost 6 months in Valencia, Spain. I loved the people, the fiestas, and life in general there. I wanted to stay longer, and I really wanted to speak Spanish.
I was trying so hard! I was studying every day, I even tried expensive courses for a short time, and I was speaking it every chance I got; in the supermarket, at parties with strangers I met, after giving an English class to a child I tried conversing with the parents, etc.
But I still couldn’t actually speak Spanish.
I was just struggling with repeating the same words and phrases over and over. I didn’t get it! I really wanted it; I was motivated! I was working hard. Surely after 6 months I should have been speaking much better than I already was?
I would go to my English-speaking friends, and my Spanish friends with good English, because I could properly express myself with them and let off some steam. I would say how maybe Spanish is just too hard for me. Other foreigners were also having the same problem, and yet a few others were inexplicably picking up the language with apparently little work.