by Benny Lewis
The Pomodoro Technique
Use this time-hacking method to increase your productive sprints. To use this technique, alternate 25 minute work sessions with five minute breaks. This allows your brain to get some breathing room.
Why does this work? If you don’t time-box your study sessions, the more you study in a single session, the worse you get at retaining the information and staying fresh as you get deeper into that session. Take breaks and you’ll be much more fresh!
Mnemonics and Spaced Repetition Systems
These memory-boosting techniques are the cornerstone of my language missions and allow me to quickly build up my store of useful words and phrases in record time. Read more about these in chapter 6.
Use italki to find low-cost online teachers
You don’t have to travel to a country to immerse yourself in a language. You can find teachers and language exchange partners online. That way, you can practise your language from the comfort of your own home. No need to buy a plane ticket! One of my favourite tools for this is italki, a marketplace for online language tutors and teachers.
Stop studying the language; live the language!
Incorporate your new language into every aspect of your life. Listen to music in your target language. Watch movies in the language. Play computer games or use your phone in the language. Listen to podcasts in your target language. Sing in the language. Heck, even think in the language. This constant exposure will make it easier to speak the language and recall vocabulary.
I’ll share some my favourite language podcast and other resources in the Resources section at the end of this book.
The truth about how many hours you need to become fluent
So, just how long does it really take to learn a language?
Based on my experience I would put the total hours necessary to reach a B2 level in most languages is around 400 to 600 hours. Now, before I say anything else, let me explain a few key points:
First, the number of languages you have learned before will affect this number. If it’s your first time learning a language (and the first time is almost always the most difficult) the number will be closer to 600 hours.
Second, I use the hacks I mentioned above, so my efficiency is higher than that of most people who are studying using “traditional” methods of rote memorization and listen-and-repeat tactics.
Finally, keep in mind the goal I mentioned before. The only test I’m trying to pass is real-life interactions. I don’t study the language, I live the language, and my focus is always on speaking from day one.
So, let’s break the hours down.
First, let’s look at an intensive learning project.
If you’re studying five hours a day, seven days a week (which is about what I do during my language learning missions) and use a combination of live one-on-one practice sessions with a native speaker and self-study, you will be accumulating 35 hours a week. Over the course of 12 weeks (three months) that works out to around 420 hours. That falls right in line with my prediction on how many hours it takes.
What if you can’t be that intense in your language learning?
I know that not everyone can put 5 hours a day into learning a language. But anyone (that includes you!) can absolutely find 1-2 hours a day, no matter how busy they are.
When you have less intensive study times, you do need to account for catching up, because you’ll have less momentum. Even with 33% extra study time to account for this, you still only need 560 hours.
How about I illustrate this with a few real-world examples:
Lauren’s Russian mission
Lauren, my partner, is a fairly new language learner. After one month of studying Russian for two hours a day (60 hours total), she reached around a high A1 or low A2 level.
Maneesh’s language learning experience
My friend Maneesh Sethi is able to learn a language in 90 days, and he suggests studying four to eight hours a day (we’ll average it at six), seven days a week. That works out to 42 hours a week which, over 12 weeks, is 504 hours. That’s right inside my 400 to 600 hour range.
Holly’s Portuguese mission
Holly is one of the team members at Fluent in 3 Months. After three months of studying Portuguese for an average of one or two hours a day (180 hours at a high estimate), she reached a high B1 or low B2 level, and was able to hold confident conversations on a range of topics with native Portuguese speakers.
If You Only Take Away One Thing, Remember This
There are two big lessons that come from all this analysis.
The first is that the traditional way of looking at language learning has some problems, because it is based on two huge myths:
Classrooms are the best place to learn to speak a language. (They aren’t!)
The goal of every language learner is to pass a test. (It isn’t!)
The number of hours that most “official” organisations say it takes to learn a language is built upon these (at least in my case) incorrect assumptions.
To become a fluent speaker of a language, with a focus on communication, then the best way to improve your skills is to speak the language.
When your goal is connecting with real people through a new language, then the number one priority should be to figure out the most effective and efficient ways to speak as much as possible. And that is what my approach is all about.
If you want to learn the language to use the language, then the road ahead just got a lot shorter!
Chapter 6: The 7 Most Common Mistakes Language Learners Make (and How to Fix Them)
Here’s a common scenario: you decide to learn a language and tell all your friends and family your plans.
Then they tell you about the “best” way to learn a second language (even though they don’t speak any other languages themselves).
“Take a class!” says one person.
“Get a degree in the language,” suggests another.
“Just watch a ton of movies,” chimes in a third.
Those all sound like great strategies, so you pick one and gleefully dive in.
Fast forward three weeks (or three years) and you’re barely able to form a sentence. Fed up, you give up learning the language.
That is, until you pick it up again with a new strategy.
With each new strategy you try, the same thing happens. In the end, you give up completely.
Here’s the thing: most common language-learning strategies don’t work because they ignore the most important rule of language learning: you can’t just study a language – you have to use it.
Let’s see why some of the most popular language-learning strategies don’t work, and how to adjust your approach to quickly level up your language skills.
Mistake 1: Take an Academic Style Language Class
Classrooms are not the best place to learn languages. Spending most of the time listening passively to someone talk at you about the language (often in your native tongue!) with very little speaking on your part is a poor use of your time.
The number of students graduating with 5+ years of classroom instruction in a language who still can’t hold a conversation shows that classroom learning is not the best way to spend your time or money.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Accountability
If you still have to take a class (such as for your college course), here are some ways to take the slow process of classroom learning and speed things up for rapid language learning.
Get accountability outside the classroom. The most common argument in favour of language classes is that it is too difficult to study effectively on your own. And while classes can be great for forcing you into a program of study and accountability, I would argue that you can get the same thing from your network of friends, or a program like the Add1Challenge.
Supplement your classroom time with an equal amount of time actually speaking the language. You can find tons of native speakers in dozens of languages over at italki, a marketplace for online langua
ge tutors and teachers. One hour of time spent with a native speaker talking in the language and reviewing what you learn in the classroom is always more effective than several hours of self-study at the school library.
Use SRS (Spaced Repetition Systems) to quickly memorize new vocabulary. SRS (Spaced Repetition Systems) can help you learn new words much faster. SRS works by prompting you to remember words and phrases when you are just on the verge of forgetting them. Research shows this is a really effective way of making sure those new words stick in your memory. My favourite tool for SRS is Anki, which is available for iOS, Android and desktop computers. I like Anki because it allows you to build your own virtual flashcard deck of words and phrases you want to memorize. Mosalingua and Memrise also use SRS.
For more information on all the above tools and resources, please check out the Resources section at the end of this book.
Mistake 2: Consider Studying Linguistics in School
Linguistics is all about picking apart languages and discovering how they work. If a language is a car, then linguistics is looking inside the engine.
Many language learners believe that knowing a language’s rules means you will be able to use them. It’s a strange belief since it often doesn’t apply in other areas. If you only knew the rules of kickboxing would you feel confident getting in the ring? I hope not!
The difference between linguists and polyglots boils down to knowledge vs. skill. Many linguists don’t actually speak more than one language so aren’t in a position to help you develop language skills. While linguistics is fascinating, it’s not actually related to helping you directly use a language.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Get Real World Practice
If you have dedicated yourself to the study of the structure of languages, I tip my hat to you. But it isn’t the same as being able to communicate in the language.
Understand that studying and speaking are different. The best way transition from a “language student” to a “language speaker” is to change your focus from book learning to “mouth using”.
To avoid mixing the two together, divide your focus and think of each one as a completely separate subject.
Imagine working during the day as a radio DJ, and also being passionate about playing the guitar. They’re both related to music, but from very different perspectives. Studying linguistics should never be a substitute for practising your target language.
Mistake 3: Watch Movies and TV Shows in Your New Language
Watching movies or television shows as a way to “passively” learn a language sounds like a language learner’s dream. That is, until you actually try it.
Passive language acquisition is one of those myths that preys on the lazy “couch potato” inside each of us that tries to get something without putting forth any effort. Learning a language takes work. You just can’t become fluent by passively listening to a language.
Movies and TV shows can help, but not if you plant yourself in front of a screen for eight hours a day. You’re no more likely to learn a language doing this than you are to become a pilot by watching aeroplanes. You need the right approach and mindset.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Get Involved in Your Movies
You can actually supplement your language learning by watching movies, if you go about it the right way. Here’s how to do that:
Don’t just watch the movie. Study it. Viewing a movie for entertainment means you aren’t focused on learning the language. Treat the movie like you would a textbook, and study the material. Activate the subtitles (in the target language, not your native one), and note the tricky words.
Break things up into consumable, repeatable segments. A two-hour movie is too much language to absorb at once. Break it up into segments of 10 minutes or less, and review them multiple times until you have really learned something of substance.
Engage with the material. A movie is an open book on body language, accents, inflection, pronunciation and many other areas of language learning. Don’t just sit on your hands! Get involved in the story, act out parts, repeat lines and body movements and make the language come alive!
Mistake 4: Listen to Songs in Your New Language
As with movies and television shows, listening to music is often seen as a magic path to learning a language. The problem is that songs are written poetically so they aren’t usually a good source for everyday grammar and vocabulary.
Listening to songs does have its place in language learning – as long as you have the right approach.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Sing Along
Instead of repeating myself, I’ll just recommend that you do the same as you would for movies or television shows: study the songs you listen to (don’t listen passively), repeat segments (to really understand the material) and engage with the song (don’t just listen – sing!).
One additional hack is to recognise that song lyrics often take creative license with a language, so while they are helpful to your studies, keep in mind that it is the equivalent to studying poetry.
Mistake 5: Use the Rosetta Stone / Pimsleur / Duolingo System
Popular language learning systems like Duolingo and Pimsleur do have some positive benefits. Duolingo gamifies language learning, which is good in principle. Pimsleur’s system helps with getting certain phrases down through audio training. Rosetta Stone is… sorry, I can’t think of any redeeming features… Yellow. Yes, it does yellow incredibly well!
But any system you buy or even get access to free of charge is going to have one major disadvantage that you can’t escape: they aren’t tailored to you and your life. Most of the words and expressions you’ll use won’t be useful in your own life, and this lowers the effectiveness of these programs.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Choose What Works For You
If you are going to use these systems (perhaps they were given to you as a birthday gift), there are three recommendations to help you make the most of each.
Read my reviews of each system. Be sure to check out reviews of the Rosetta Stone system, the Pimsleur approach to language learning, and the Duolingo language learning app to provide you with a big picture pros-and-cons view of each. You can find these reviews in the Resources section at the end of this book.
Supplement with personalised materials. As you go through each system, develop your own list of personalised vocabulary and phrases. If the topic of the lesson is “shopping”, then write out a list of 20 items that you shop for on a regular basis yourself and add those to your flashcard deck. This allows you to use the sentence structures and grammar you’re learning with relevant vocabulary.
Plug up the holes in their materials. Each system has deficiencies, so fill in the blank spaces with your own activities. For example, If the system doesn’t include a lot of speaking, then be sure to converse with native speakers. Or if the system doesn’t provide much listening practice, find listening materials online.
Mistake 6: Translate a Book Until You Learn the Language
Back when I started my first new language – Spanish – I sat down with a copy of El señor de los anillos (The Lord of the Rings) figuring that if I forced myself to read it with my dictionary in hand then for sure I would be fluent by the time I was done.
It took me an entire week to get to page 2!
This method might seem logical, but it’s completely impractical. It takes a huge amount of time. You’ll also be limited to the author’s specific writing style, which may make you sound strange to native speakers.
Can you learn a language from a book? Absolutely! But only with the right approach.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Young Adult Fiction
Books should be a supplement to a language study program, not the core of it. And just like movies, television and music, you have to change your mentality from entertainment to education.
I recommend selecting a book that you have access to in your native language so you can compare them side by side. Young adult novels (think Harry
Potter) work really well for this because the language used isn’t too stylised and the vocabulary won’t be too advanced.
Here are my suggestions on using a book to learn a language:
Tackle the book in segments, such as paragraph by paragraph.
Get the book in your native language so you can get the gist of each segment before reading on.
Preview the foreign language version to see how much you can understand without studying the text.
Select any words you don’t know which appear multiple times and add them to your SRS flashcard deck.
Read the passage to your italki tutor to work on your pronunciation and accent
Record a native speaker (perhaps your tutor or a language exchange partner) saying the passage in both regular speed and slowly. Alternatively, download the audiobook if it’s available.
Review the passage multiple times. First, make sure you understand what’s being said. Then practise pronouncing it.
If you spend sufficient time on each segment of the book you will find your comprehension and use of the language improve quickly.
Mistake 7: Only Interact with Other Language Learners
If you’re in a class, or have friends who are also learning a language, you might think getting together to practise the language will build your skills. After all, isn’t it important to speak as much as possible?
Meeting up with other learners to practise your speaking can be really helpful, especially in the early stages of learning a language. In fact, as a beginner, it can be the best approach. The problem is that other language learners are unlikely to stretch you once you’re at an intermediate level. To really accelerate your learning, you need a different approach.
The Language Hacker’s Fix: Practise With Native Speakers
Interacting with other people learning the same language as you can be really helpful. That said, the best person to speak to when learning a new language is a native speaker of that language. You are exposed to subtle nuances in how the language is used that you may not otherwise realise. It is truly invaluable.