What do these mean?

A warning, though, with regards to flashcards. The principle reason for which I oppose their use in language acquisition (important to mention, I am anti-flashcard in the context of language acquisition only) is that language is fluid. That is to say, unlike an anatomy test where there is precisely one correct answer to a given question, in language there are always multiple correct answers.

Let’s go through some examples to demonstrate the point. Let’s say you are planning to make flashcards. You go for high volume words, as you ought, and you wind up at the word get. What goes on the reverse side of that flashcard? Really think about it for a moment. Do you have your answer written down? Surely you said, “receive”, right?

I get it if you didn’t.

You have to get over your preconceived notions.

Getting ready to learn a new language necessitates that, at the very least.

But if you want to get a new job with this new language, you’ll have to get up, get yourself together, and get on the road.

After all, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And forget the words that get begets! It’s getting to the point where I don’t even get what I’m trying to do anymore.

Were you correct? When you decided what belonged on the reverse side of your “get” flashcard?

What about set? In your setup how would you set up the word set? Would you include the sunset? What about the TV set? A little unsettling, but don’t get upset! We have to prepare for the next set. It’s already preset in our program and we don’t have time to reset the plan. That said, there is always time to set the table. It’s never set in stone. That alone should set you free.

I could go on, but I hope I’ve made my point. If not, perhaps that is something with which you should challenge yourself as well. Find a few high volume words (they are high volume for a reason) and think of how many different ways you could use the same words to mean different things. I talk a lot about using different words to say the same things, but can you do the inverse?

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Multiple meanings

There are going to be times, especially if you spend time around people who speak foreign languages, when you are asked what certain expressions mean. It is therefore worth asking yourself whether or not you know if you are able to explain what the expressions you use in your every day life actually mean. Until I was forced to think about it, I never really knew how to explain them either.

Go through them in your head. Chances are there are some you use every single day, if not every week, and when you go to translate them into your target language they will make no sense. Here are a few, just for example:

• To run out

• To hang out

• To meet up

• To shoot the shit

• To give up

All of these things, and these are few of the many, hold direct meanings that can be translated, but if you try to translate the words themselves, it will not make sense to your interlocutor. In the same vein, it is worth your time to learn the expressions used in your target language. Chances are they have something that is near or identical to the ones you are using in your daily life anyway.

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The benefit of this is, of course, that you will be able to express yourself in a more natural way while simultaneously having a better understanding of the culture and people who speak your target language natively. Beyond that, though, it will force you to think more laterally, to reach for words that ~could~ work, even if it isn’t a guarantee.

Ironically, one of the steps towards fluency is beginning to guess at words. Not blindly, that comes at the beginning. Once you reach B1/B2 level, however, you should be guessing at words with ~70%+ accuracy. Especially if you are working on a Romance or Germanic language. This is why your vocabulary in your native language is so important. For more on that, read this:

Ultimately, all of this is to prevent you from boxing yourself into a certain way of thinking. Just because you always express a certain idea the same way does not mean others express that idea in the same way. In fact, through doing this you may discover an even better, more complete way of expressing yourself that you hadn’t thought about before now.

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Boxing yourself in

I try to make this clear to my students early on, but it is one of those things that doesn’t make sense until it makes sense. It’s one thing to cognize a fact, it is a wholly different thing to know and understand that fact. Sometimes I’ll get the comment, “Well, I never use that word in English anyway” as if that matters. It truly could not be less relevant.

You do not get to choose what other people say to you. Nor do you have any control over the history of your target language that led to certain word choices becoming more prevalent than others. How you would do things and how the people with whom you wish to communicate do things are rarely going to be the same thing; and they don’t have to change anything to communicate perfectly.

If you rely on static meanings or hold definitions as strict rules, you are going to be continuously disappointed throughout the language acquisition process. Language evolves despite our best efforts. That means archaic language will not always mean what it once did. We can see this clearly in written English, but the same process exists in every language.

I understand the desire to hold onto a definition as a rock in the storm, but for better or worse none of those definitions are indefinitely tied down. You will have moments where you realize that you said something horribly offensive (or just incorrect) and that is part of learning through the evolution of language. The more mentally agile you are, the less friction this process will cause.

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Conclusion

Probably once per week I tell my students that they shouldn’t be using flashcards. I understand that they work for some people. They may even work for you. However, flashcards are atrocious for actual language acquisition. It is one thing to memorize the definitions of words and their translations. Using the words and capturing their meaning is an entirely different beast.

That’s why I am always urging people to write. Nothing will make it so clear as to whether or not you know how to properly use a word as writing does. No where to run, no where to hide, just you and the things you know (or don’t) and the next session. It is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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HIIT

For those who don’t know HIIT stands for “High Intensity Interval Training” and it’s equivalent in language acquisition is transcription. The goal of HIIT training if to gain a large benefit in a short amount of time, to avoid diving too deep into the weeds. Transcription is precisely that tool in language acquisition and it is one of the main levers you can pull to increase your stress tolerance threshold.

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In fact, a good HIIT workout is between 20-30 minutes. That is the max amount of time I recommend doing transcription on a given day. As shocked as people often are by that, the truth is after 30 minutes (20 really) the frustration will build to such an extent where it become counterproductive. 30 seconds on 30 seconds off. 30 seconds listening, 30 seconds writing.

This remains, hands down, the greatest tool for learning to understand a language at native speed that I have ever found. While I have many recommendations on how to train the ear, this is the most potent. If you want to read more on why, you can do so here:

HIIT training, transcription, is something that you should do more days than you don’t. Assuming you would like to reach proficiency within the next 6 months. 4 days per week, taking every other day off. I tell me students this often, but the more you do it, the less time you have to spend doing it. Suffer a lot now to become proficient quickly or don’t suffer at all with a 2000 day streak on Duolingo.

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Weight training

Your weight training days of language acquisition are the days where you spend a lot of time reading and writing. Consumption is easy, but you will make the most gains through production. Using your recall is, to me, the equivalent of lifting weights. Your brain has to work pretty hard to move things from your memory to your working memory. The more you do it, the easier it becomes.

I also like this analogy because you can choose your “weight”. That is to say, you can choose how many sentences you write, what you write, how much help you allow yourself to use (ideally none), and what success is defined as. Your only competition becomes your logbook, your notebook, and you can focus entirely on progressively overloading yourself towards fluency.

Here’s a good example of what that looks like in practice:

1. Choose a topic you want to be able to discuss in your target language

   1. I implore you to go beyond “order food” or “buy x thing”.

2. Choose your success metrics

   1. How many words?

   2. How many sentences?

   3. What level of “perfection”?

      1. Are you okay with incorrect gender

      2. Are you okay with incorrect conjugations but of the right verb?

      3. Are you okay with typos? etc

3. Write about the topic.

   1. A good way to get new vocabulary into your routine is to find 50 words related to the topic of choice and write them down somewhere first, or at least have them visible. Then, write them directly into as many sentences as possible.

4. Wait 24 hours

5. Return to the topic and do it all again. This time, however, try to add 1-2% more. Three more sentences, five more vocabulary words, one less mistake.

6. Repeat until comfortable with the chosen topic

7. Choose a new topic

8. Repeat infinitely

It really is that simple. Note, though, that I choose the word simple and not easy because, while it is simple, mastering a new language is anything but easy. One thing that can make it a little easier, though, is a bit of mental speed training.

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Speed training

When I was a kid, our school had a summer program for athletes called “speed training”. It was a serious of drills that we would do with the end goal being the ability to reach higher speeds during our respective sports. Anecdotally, it was successful. Within the realm of language acquisition, we have the opportunity to do the same thing.

I really like the idea of drilling parts of the whole in order to improve the whole; and since we are talking drills it means we get to play with variety. Something that has always made studying easy for me. You should choose 5-8 drills and do them for 1 hour. Here are some ideas for “speed” or “agility” drills:

Say the same thing

Write out 5 sentences in your normal way of speaking. Do not change to try and use words that you know in your target language. That largely defeats the point of this exercise. Once you have your 5 sentences, write them all 2 different ways (so you have a total of 15, the 5 original + 10 new). The idea is to express the same idea in 3 different ways using as much different vocabulary as possible.

BONUS: Rewrite them all in your target language. Use reverso.com to help with any words you don’t know.

Paraphrase

Find an article in your target language that you could see yourself discussing with someone. This could be home decor, gardening, outdoors, fitness, anything. Read the whole thing, using any translation help you need along the way. Once you are done, write a summary that covers all of the major points and maintains the majority of the meaning. Try to limit yourself to 50-60% the original length.

Disclaimer: Even if you just do these drills in your native language, you will be doing yourself a service; and when you are doing it in your native language, you can mostly do it in your head. The writing is more important for your target language study sessions.

Synonyms

If you do nothing else, do this. I cannot think of a more valuable skill when learning another language than the ability to accurately define words and identify their synonyms. It comes up every single class. And I ask, because I want my students to develop this skill in both their target language and their native language. But you need to be asking yourself as well.

Here is a small example of two words that I go through this with for every Spanish student:

Inundar

Profundo

Just by looking at these words, you can probably surmise the correct direct translation, but do you know what they actually mean? Because if you said inundate, you are correct. That is what the translation is. But when las calles están inundadas por la lluvia the streets are flooded due to the rain.

Profundo does mean profound. But un lago profundo is a deep lake. These are the synonyms you need to be able to see without seeing them. If you can develop that skill, you will be unstoppable. The practice is easy.

If your target language is Latin or Germanic based, it is worth looking into the cognates between it and English. Using those cognates, try to find synonyms and you might otherwise use unintentionally. After all, I believe most of us would say deep instead of profound in our daily lives. That said, this is a demonstration of why English is such a beautiful language. Don’t believe me? Look up the German word for deep.

If your target language does not have those bases, then start in your native language. Think of a few (3-5) words and go through as many synonyms as you possibly can for those words. Write them down and translate them into your target language. You might be surprised by one or two being more similar than you would have thought.

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Conclusion

It is easy to forget that your brain is essentially a muscle and it needs to be trained as such. That also means it is going to be important to rest sufficiently in order to give your brain enough time to grow effectively. The variations in your training will reflect in your linguistic abilities, so make sure to work every one of these exercises into your language learning routine.

Not only will the mental agility become evident relatively quickly in your target language, you will notice reverberations in your native language that lead to you being a better, all around more effective communicator. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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During our discussion, I brought up a famous graph. The Dunning Kruger:

Something I didn’t say, that I probably should have said, is that there are people on this graph. That is to say, you are not alone on this graph. There are people permanently in the Valley of Despair and their are people along the Slope of Enlightenment. There are even people waiting at the Plateau of Sustainability. Who you listen to during your journey will have various effects.

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The receiver side of Dunning Kruger

Something I realized talking to another student the other day is that most of the time, anyone who knows more than you is going to be on your side. Very rarely will you come across someone who knows more than you and is against your progress. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for people who are in the Valley of Despair indefinitely.

The problem is that same one we all face: it’s incredibly difficult. Anywhere in life where you do difficult things, think about the people you’ve met through the process of getting to where you are now. I would all but guarantee you can map them onto this graph somewhere. When you are first starting out, everyone knows more than you, so you can just absorb.

While on The Slope, you will encounter three types of people. The first is a group of people just like you. A group that is working to progress out of The Slope and onto The Plateau. Those peers are able to help and hinder you, but none of them likely want to see you fail. However, there is a group in the Valley of Despair that will never leave.

It is too much work to get to the top and it is far easier to drag people down and keep them at your level. Ironically, the Valley of Despair can become a place of comfort. One need only despair if they plan to reach the next step on the path. In fact, the despair aspect doesn’t even come from the next step. It comes from the realization that there are drastically more steps than initially anticipated.

Do what you can to avoid these energy leeches. They have nothing to offer you along your path. Instead, try to seek out people in the third category. The WAGMIs or the We’re All Gonna Make Its. People who have accomplished your goal and would like nothing more than to see countless others accomplish the very same goal. Atop the plateau they await, but a few will help along the way.

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Listening to bad advice

Bad advice is where things truly go wrong. The problem is that most people are not aware that they are giving bad advice. In fact, a great many of them believe they are giving good advice without understanding the long term effects. We can take my favorite two examples in Spanish. This is what public schools teach in the US. In Spanish:

Hasta mañana = See you tomorrow

Hasta luego = See you later

Hasta pronto = See you soon

Me llamo = My name is

Now, for those of you who have been in class with me or have been reading these for a while, you will already see the problem. For those who don’t see the issue, this is also why flashcards are tough in language education. If you want to know why, read this:

So, hasta has come, for many, to mean “see you” and that is simply not what it means. Hasta means until. Learning it as “see you” causes a ton of problems later down the line since until has far more uses. The same goes for “llamar”. If you treat “llamar” as the verb for “my name is” then when someone tries to call you, there will be a lot of confusion. Llamar means to call.

Worst of all, if teachers just took the time to go through what these things actually translate to rather than what they mean (crawl before you walk before you run before you fly) then it is the perfect opportunity to address indirect object pronouns and reflexive conjugations. Me + llamo = I call (yo llamo) + myself (me). Far more useful in the short, mid, and long term.

Yes, the process of teaching the meaning over the translation is faster. But for every two steps you take forward using this method, you will take one step back and it will take longer to progress because now you have competing ideas fighting in your head. It takes 21 days to develop a good habit. Which means it takes 21 days to break a bad habit. You don’t deserve to lose out on that time.

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Incorrections

Unfortunately, much of this is a consequence of taking advice from people who are at the Peak of Mount Stupid. As incoherent as it is, people at The Peak are far more likely to give advice than people who have reached the Plateau. Logically it makes sense, too. At The Peak, you still haven’t realized how little you know. Every thing you learn feels like mastery.

Not until the Valley of Despair, are you truly able to recognize just how much more you have to accomplish in order to hit your goals. Listening to people at The Peak might seem like a good idea, but do not be fooled by their unearned confidence. The problem here is that anyone who is confidently giving advice is either a master or a novice. There really is no in between.

So, how are you supposed to tell the difference? It’s not easy. Therefore, rather than trying to sus out who is right, I recommend that you trust, but verify. Believe the advice, but look into it. Chances are whatever you were told is partially true. Your mission is to figure out where the truth stops and the inventions begin. Much easier said than done to be sure.

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But this verification process is simply another tool in your toolbox for the foreseeable future. Any time you are learning anything it will be something you need to break out to progress in the most effective and efficient way possible. Ultimately, you will be in charge of doing this for yourself, but luckily for you I have already written an article on how to do this well:

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Conclusion

Experience is an interesting concept because there are too many variables to count when calculating someone else’s. That is why it is helpful to categorize people who are offering help and the Dunning Kruger graph offers the perfect heuristic. Sometimes you may be surprised, particularly by the fact that the most experienced are often the most hesitant to share absolute advice.

Learning to accurately discern is a skill that extends far beyond language acquisition. Mastering it, however, can be done through language acquisition and later applied to other areas of life. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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The Toll

This could be any number of things and depends slightly on the person. Some people will see the toll as being discomfort. Others will see it as embarrassment. A few might even view it as shame. What the toll actually is, though, is silence. Now, that silence can feel uncomfortable and embarrassing and even shameful at times. But the true payment is merely silence.

When you are first learning a new language, especially at the six week mark, you are going to be translating in your head native language to target language. There is quite literally no way around this; and the more time you spend doing it the less time you will have to spend doing it. My students hear that exact phrase a lot. I say it almost every day because it is almost always true.

Personally, I would rather sprint up the side of the mountain than take 1000 switchbacks to the top. But I have written about that before, so if you would like an insight into my methodology, read this:

The translation that takes place in your head is not instantaneous. Especially not in the first or second or even third month. If it were, there would be no reason to worry about any of this. You need time in order to get your sentences out, particularly if you would like them to come out well. You will necessarily have to fill that time. Since you can’t fill it with language, silence is the only other option.

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The collection

Collection of the toll happens one of two ways from my observations. My personal preference is up front collection. I would much rather spend 5 or 10 or even 15 seconds in silence, thinking my sentence all the way through than stumble into the toll collector later in my formulation. This is where most people get stuck.

No one really wants to sit in silence. It is not an enjoyable way to practice or learn a new language. It is, however, necessary. If not up front than in the middle, or worse at the end. That said, it makes sense. After all, you probably spend little to no time in silence when speaking your native language. Why would you? Everything is automatic.

But it took you years to get to that point and that fact can be far too easy to forget in the middle of trying to memorize the same verb for the 12th time. I understand that. So what people tend to do is try to run before they can walk. By that I mean they start speaking without really having thought through their entire sentence. This might work in your native language, but not so much in a new language.

When you do that what inevitably ends up happening is that the person will jump into a response and begin translating word by word. Since language is contextual, this is already one step towards failure. An extra hurdle to get over that is being placed unnecessarily due to an attempt to avoid discomfort. Ironically leading to a more sustained period of discomfort.

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As you translate word by word your brain is now working on two problems simultaneously. Forming the rest of a coherent thought and simultaneously translating that thought before knowing what that thought fully is. Unsurprisingly this leads to both a botched translation and a loss of the idea that was meant to be expressed.

Once both are lost, the discomfort/shame/embarrassment is drastically worse than it otherwise would have been. That’s why I prefer to pay the toll up front; and why I tell everyone with whom I work to do the same. Spending 10 seconds up front to complete your thoughts before diving into the translation feels worse at first because you are uncomfortable before ever opening your mouth.

However, that initial discomfort is quickly alleviated by successful transmission of ideas. Each subsequent success will be further proof that you don’t have to fill every silent moment with broken speech. Sooner rather than later you will realize that it is just easier on you to give yourself time to think. A skill that you should probably bring into your native language as well.

The ROI

You do not have to pay without expecting something in return. Remember that when you are feeling down about your progress. Paying this toll, learning to be comfortable in silence, will have massive, positive repercussions throughout not only your language acquisition, but your life. Thinking through what you want to say is a skill very few people have.

By merely taking the time to let yourself think, you are separating yourself from the majority. It will make you a better thinker. You will become more compassionate because you will see why people are struggling, not just that they are struggling. Most importantly, you will have to spend far less time in silence than if you spend all of your brain power trying to fill every moment.

That is why this can be so difficult. It’s a lot like investing. At first, it feels like a loss because you are giving up something that you otherwise would have immediately accessible. But with each “deposit” you make, you bring yourself one step closer to never needing to stay silent again. Of course, once you master this skill, it might just be something you never stop doing.

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Conclusion

Most of the things I write about can be put into the “easier said than done” box. I understand that. But difficult to do is kind of the entire point. If you want easier done than said, Duolingo is available as an option to you. Since you are here, though, reading this, I believe you are willing to put in the effort to master this new skill.

Silence, after all, is a skill. Remarkably few people are comfortable in silence and even fewer people seek it out intentionally. Try to be one of the few. At least for a while until your brain catches up with your heart. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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While my schedule is maxed out, I have a lot of people who still would like to begin classes, but they want them given in a style that follows my framework. Whether or not that framework needs to come directly from me remains to be seen. So, I want to test the theory!

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Thank you for your attention to this brief notice, I hope that together we can bring language acquisition to even more people around the world. For those of you who are not interested, do not fear, there will be another regularly scheduled article coming this Thursday. Until then, aspiring polyglot!

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You brain is fighting you

One vivid memory I have is of learning how to do a backflip. The first time took me probably three hours because I was afraid of breaking my neck. Completely reasonable, in my opinion. Once I finally stopped thinking about it and actually sent it, suddenly the process made sense. Each subsequent attempt was not only better, but less intimidating.

Speaking a new language to native speakers is far less consequential than potentially landing upside down on your neck. Still, the mechanisms in your brain are the same as what I was experiencing in that moment. A feeling I am all but certain that you have experienced previously in your life. Your brain is fighting you, but only because it is trying to protect you.

Your job is to convince your brain that what you are doing is not dangerous. Easier said than done, certainly, but that does not change the reality of your mission. The simplest way to do this is by doing the thing. Nothing will prove to your brain that you are not in immediate danger quite like doing the thing without hurting yourself repeatedly.

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Simple, but not easy. Fight or flight is something many people reduce down to, well, fighting or fleeing. Unfortunately, this is not only a response to immediate physical danger. Rather, it is equally, if not more, powerful when it comes to emotional or psychological danger. Your brain does not want you to fail. Any time there is a chance you might fail, you will go into a version of fight or flight.

Getting your brain to fight for you

So, how do you fix it? As mentioned above, doing the thing is the number one way to convince your brain to fight on your side, rather than to try and preserve you is by doing the things. That said, there is a method to the madness. You don’t have to go out and do a backflip to start building your confidence. Instead, you should start with something far smaller.

Ultimately, this is all that truly matters: doing one thing every day that scares you. One thing that you can do, that you will do, and that you will survive failing. Start as small as necessary. Make a phone call, if that’s something that scares you. Talk to a stranger, if that is something that scares you. Join a club, if that is something that scares you. If you don’t feel apprehensive, you are not pushing yourself enough.

Being inside of your comfort zone precludes you from growing. As difficult as it is, the only way to improve is by forcing yourself into uncomfortable situations. Especially when it comes to things like speaking with other people. The advantage of doing these things is that you will feel the reverberations across a variety of domains, not just in your language acquisition.

Building the muscle

Learning a new language can and should result in your speaking and understanding your native language better. That is only one of the many areas where the skills you are developing throughout your language acquisition should bleed over into the rest of your life. If for nothing else, that is a phenomenal reason to take this muscle building seriously. Here’s how to do it:

1. Write out 5 things that scare you

   1. Negotiating

   2. Cold calling

   3. Speaking in public

   4. Running a 5k

   5. Swimming 1k

   6. Teach someone something

   7. Choose one thing that you can do, that you will do, and do it immediately

The sky is the limit here. I don’t know what scares you. Maybe you don’t even know. So rather than limiting yourself to scary things, you can include new things. Doing new things is often reason for apprehension, that is the feeling we are after. Feel apprehensive, then do it anyway.

2. DO NOT give yourself time to think.

This is the crux of it all. The one thing you have to figure out in order to never have to worry about training this muscle again. Act without thinking (within reason) and figure it out. Something I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that doing things before I’m ready has almost always proven useful. You will figure it out, you just have to convince your brain of that.

3. Reward yourself

That’s it. A simple 3 step positive feedback loop that you can use as propulsion toward your goals, beyond bilingualism. An amazing piece of language acquisition as a field of study is that the skills you develop while learning a new language are easily transferrable to other areas of life.

While you are training yourself to think before you act, you might not actually feel the improvements you are making. Not until you find yourself back in the previously terrifying circumstances that you were working to master, that is. For that reason, at the end of your list of things that scare you should always be “speak to a native speaker”.

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Conclusion

It is kind of wild that the very self preservation mechanisms we develop from birth begin to work more and more against us as we age. This is true of a lot of things. In a way, much of foreign language acquisition is targeted at staying young. Maintaining your neuroplasticity. Finding your childlike wonder. Making friends with new and interesting people using your new skills.

The older you get, the harder it will be. Right now, whatever age you are, you are never going to be younger than you are right now. There truly is no excuse to wait any longer to start doing the things that scare you. Every little win will compound and you will become unstoppable. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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I would go as far as to say that if you haven’t felt that way at some point, you are lying to yourself. Almost once per week (maybe month..) I have to learn something new and there is a part of me that would rather not. A part of me that would rather find a way around learning than take the time to learn. That is, until I had a child.

One million mistakes

Of course I still feel it sometimes, but the call of complacency is easily drowned out by the desire to be better. As cliché as it is, children are pretty inspirational. My daughter is currently learning how to walk. She crash boom bangs to the ground a lot. Then, she looks up at me, holds both her hands up, and says “dada” and we try again.

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Failure is part of my job. I try to ensure my students make over 1000 mistakes while working with me because the first 1000 mistakes are only the first 1000. There are going to be thousands, if not tens of thousands, more throughout their time speaking their target language. Getting used to failure, in a ~safe~ environment (though they call it bullying) is crucial for long term success.

I say this a lot to them, and probably too much to my friends and family, but adults are just large children. What works for children in language acquisition will work for adults, too. Failure, repetition, mimicry, perseverance, probing, full sending, all of these things I am blessed enough to watch my daughter do every day are things I now try to do every day.

At one point in your life, you were not capable of learning from the mistakes of others. Literally everything you did was a test. A probe into the unknown. What worked you either consciously or subconsciously tucked away that information and probed further. That is how you discovered the world. Now, with all that you know, you can learn things more effectively because every probe you send out has the context from your years of life and experience.

You, as an adult, can learn from the mistakes of others. I have discussed the advantages you have as an adult in another article, if you missed that be sure to read it and start making the most of those as soon as possible:

Getting back up again

Here is where children truly do have an advantage over adults. The thing about kids is, while they certainly do feel pain, they have a remarkably short memory for it. “Kids bounce” as my parents always used to say. Turns out, it’s true. Adults, on the other hand, can become incredibly pain averse as they age.

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Everyone has their own experiences, but it has been my observation that the people who are the most pain averse are the ones who spend the most time and energy avoiding pain. In a strange way, accepting the pain of failure or frustration or embarrassment or even physical pain when it comes to improving in fitness, helps in tolerating more in the future.

Perhaps that is why it is such a tough sell. “If you take this pain now, the pain you take on later will hurt less” isn’t exactly a winning message for most. However, I have no interest in lying to you. Almost all of my methodology is based on this exact quote/mantra/motto. It’s why I prefer the “sprint up the side of the mountain” approach to the “switch back” method.

It’s why my students start writing 10+ sentences right away. Why they read The Count of Monte Cristo or Game of Thrones or Harry Potter or Don Quixote or 100 Years of Solitude starting on day 1 when they learn the alphabet. It’s why we cover a minimum of 1 verb tense per week. More pain now, less pain later. It never gets easier, you just get better; and failing forward is the fastest path.

If you want painless, I recommend Duolingo! No pain, but a forever process. That said, if you spend a year on only Duolingo and try to talk to some native speakers, the pain may be just unbearable enough to call me to start some classes; and I promise I take your education more seriously than this:

One thing you, as an adult, do have that a child does not is an understanding of time. A child has no clue what it feels like to have a breakthrough or to master a new skill. At least not in the same way as an adult has. That means you can look back to the other times in your life where you felt like the grind would never end and realize that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Another cliché that is a propos here is that it is always darkest before the light. Almost invariably during your language acquisition, you are going to feel the most like a failure right before you have a tremendous breakthrough and leap forward. If you are feeling that, what you might need is a rest day. Here is how to do that right:

Short term memory loss

The final skill you need to remember (since you were once incredible at this) is how to forget. If you cling to every missed word, every incorrect verb tense, every improperly applied descriptor, is going to drive you crazy. In the moment, let it all go. Try to remember it after the fact (if you are anything like me, this won’t be a problem as the perfect response will come to you hours later) and make the appropriate corrections.

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If you have ever played music at a high level, you know the number 1 rule of playing live: do not stop. During practice, it is very common to stop and take it from the top, but you cannot do that during a live performance. Instead you keep playing as if the mistake never happened. This is the exact mindset you need whenever you are speaking your target language with a native speaker.

As much as it doesn’t seem like it (and it shouldn’t) your conversations are a performance. Only in so far as you are trying to pretend you actually speak a language fluently when you almost certainly do not. That is not a bad thing. Just treat it like the performance it is as a master of the field. Skate over your mistakes, ask for clarification when necessary, and continue the flow to the best of your ability.

You will play how you practice, so if your practice does not reflect your desired conversational outcomes, it may be time to re-evaluate. Once you get enough repetition in practice, move on to iteration. In fact, you might want to move onto that sooner rather than later. Read more on that here:

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Conclusion

I’m pretty sure my little girl is going to walk for the first time this week. That was the primary inspiration for this post. As I was writing it, though, I just kept thinking of how much my methodology overlaps with the way she attacks the world. Perhaps a genetic component to that, but I think it has a lot more to do with being hard heading and willing to fall than any genetic predisposition.

It may take a little buy in up front, but developing a thicker skin, a harder skull, and a better pain tolerance is worth it in the long run. You will see ripple effects across your life from fitness to nutrition to learning anything and everything. Children get a lot right. Especially learning through failure. In this case, it is worth following their lead. I am rooting for you.

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The good

I think we can all agree that conveniences are nice. It is nice to be able to hop in the car and drive 10 miles to a restaurant to have food made for you in exchange for some paper. Being able to pick up the phone and call your parents is much better than having to write letters. When it’s hot out, nothing hits like a good AC; and let’s not forget being able to extract ice from a machine inside your freezer.

There are plenty of positives to appreciate with regards to convenience. In fact, the vast majority of the time there are almost no down sides to the daily conveniences. My point here isn’t necessarily to get you to stop indulging in all of them. Rather I want you to think carefully about how often you are seeking a short cut or a way to save time day to day.

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Personally, I benefit immensely from the technology and systems that have made my life and the life of everyone in my generation easier than our great grandparents had it. We have more time now than humans have ever had before and that is one of the best parts about technology. However, sometimes more time is not actually a good thing.

The bad

Theoretically, if you had more time you would be able to accomplish all of the things you ever dreamed of accomplishing, right? Let’s say the world shut down for a couple of weeks, almost everyone was sequestered at home with near infinite time. Food delivery is at its peak and your only options are being inside your house or being outside in a park or in the woods.

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In that totally made up hypothetical situation, would you learn that new language? Would you work towards mastering that new skill? Would you finally start that business? Or would you watch TV, Tiger King was wild, and wait patiently for the world to open back up while all your newly discovered time passes you by?

For better or worse, more time doesn’t always equate to more life. In having a child, yes we lost some convenience, but it forced us to be better. To be more adaptable, to plan better, to execute more efficiently. It is tough to be busy all the time, but, after having experienced both, it is infinitely preferrable to being idle all day long.

Idleness is not the biggest issue, though. Yes, that is a problem and if you truly ask yourself whether you were “relaxing” or wasting time, I think you know the answer. It’s the same answer I came up when asking myself. The bigger problem, is the consequence of extended periods of inactivity spurred by modern day conveniences. In short: a skill issue.

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The ugly

Before we continue, I want to state clearly that being bored is not wasting time. Being bored is one of the greatest things you can do to inspire creativity and solve problems. For more on that, read this:

Now, the ugly of too much convenience. If we are being honest, it all started with smartphones. The ability to Google things made research much easier. It also made access to information next to free. In fact, Googling things became so common that looking things up became googling them. But how many of the things you have “googled” do you remember right now?

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Personally, I can think of a few, but that probably totals out to 0.1% of all the things I have looked up in the past 10 years. Now that problem is getting even worse with AI and I don’t think it gets better before it gets worse. That said, there are far more technological advancements that have taken people’s skills as payment for their use.

Spellcheck has left at least one generation without the ability to reliably spell words.

GPS has created at least one generation that cannot navigate by reading a map.

Digital clocks have caused a growing number of people to lose their ability to tell time with hands. Let alone with a sun dial if it were ever necessary.

Cellphones have made letters all but obsolete; and losing letters has had a horrific effect on the general population’s ability to write.

TVs have made reading a novel pass time.

In the US, cars have stopped people from walking even short distances.

Calculators have made mental math seem laborious.

Frankly, the examples are endless. Each one adds layers to the ugly that is compounding consequences for taking conveniences without filling the time that was saved through the convenience. But filling that time is difficult. Even with the best intentions, many people are stuck with too many rather than not enough options. Analysis paralysis is real and it, too, is a consequence of convenience.

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Conclusion

The ex CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, takes this concept to the extreme in his life and he credits his intentionally inconvenient life for helping him build companies. “Inconvenience necessitates problem solving” is as true today as it has always been. When everything is taken care of there is no need to innovate. It’s one of the reasons learning a new language feels like it takes forever now.

Looking up words is not a difficult task, taking notes no longer requires you to lift a finger, apps bring the learning to you anywhere, which means nowhere is your true learning space. I wouldn’t go as far as some people do to make everything inconvenient, but try to remove just 1 modern day convenience from your life for a month. I did it with my smartphone, that was pretty tough.

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Personally, I would prefer if you chose to leave behind your notes app, your digital dictionaries, and maybe even your language learning app. Just focus on the real world for one month. It is difficult, especially because it is being necessarily self imposed. But you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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A parent’s promise

People are notorious for putting their feet in their mouths. Misspeaking, saying the right thing at the wrong time, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and losing themselves in translation, even while speaking the same language. You, too, do all of these things. In fact, most of you probably spend too much time thinking about all of the times you have done those things.

I used to think about it all the time as well. However, once I learned of this promise, I had a goal to work towards. No matter how long it took, I was going to teach myself to always take the most generous interpretation of the things the people around me said to me. Let me just say, it takes a while. In fact, I still have work to do and I have been practicing for 15 years.

All of this is especially true in the world we currently live in where misinterpretation is seemingly a goal to many. But, be the change you wish to see, as they say. You might not even realize how much of a relief it is to the people you spend the most time around. I was certainly surprised.

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Living it in your own life

One of my students thanked me for always taking the things he said in stride, but that is just how I have been doing things for as long as I can remember. It makes no sense to hold someone to a standard that I myself could never live, so I explained this idea to him and he loved it. In fact, he loves it so much that he is trying to implement it into his own life.

That is part of the reason that I wanted to write about this today. Of course, there is a pretty direct connection between this type of interpretation generosity and learning a new language. After all, if you want someone to treat you a certain way, treating them well first goes a long way towards reaching that objective. When people know you won’t judge them for their mistakes, they will be far more forgiving of yours.

That said, you will be getting the most practice from people with whom you spend the most time. Generally, that means your friends and family. This is a good thing. It is pretty tough to master a new skill in a new language without first having the foundation in your native language. One of the reasons I am always insisting that you improve your abilities in your native language.

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However, this exercise is more difficult, not less, with the people you care for and love. When people you love say things, it can be all too easy to take those things personally. After all, these people know you better than anyone, so certainly the words they say are weighed carefully, right? Wrong.

Most people are going to assume they have a little more grace with you if they are close to you, you likely feel the same around people you love. It is natural to feel more comfortable around your loved ones and comfort breeds complacency. If you get too comfortable, it is almost impossible not to speak out of turn from time to time. That is when you need the grace. That is when you should give it.

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Falling, failing, improving

As I mentioned above, I have been on this road for upwards of 15 years. At least once per week, if not once per day, I find myself being hurt or bothered by something someone said without thinking. Of course, at this point I have the wherewithal to keep my thoughts inside, but that doesn’t mean I am complete control over my emotional reaction.

For that reason, you need to give yourself grace as you learn this new skill; and you should learn this as a skill. You have no idea how much weight you are carrying from all of the things people have to say to and about you. If you want a little glimpse/reminder, read this:

Ultimately, this isn’t for the benefit of anyone else. You deserve the peace of believing that everything anyone says to you was said with the best of intentions. Whether or not it is true is quite irrelevant. Your perception is what matters because your perception is what constructs your reality. There is a choice and you are the only one with the power to make that choice.

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Conclusion

Most people are perfectly content to spend their whole lives taking the least generous interpretation of the things that are said to or about them. It is easy to be offended. It is easy to be a victim. But easy choices don’t make for much of a memorable life. For better or worse, you are in control of how you react to everything. You have no idea how disarming it is to treat people like they want the best for you.

In a weird way, when you let go like this you are repaid in more ways than one. Certainly you benefit from carrying less weight from words you can’t control, but the people around you also carry less weight through having the freedom to speak openly and honestly without fear of hurting you. It is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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It’s natural

The vast majority of people I know are working with AI in some capacity to learn their target language. Even if they don’t know it. Duolingo is reliant on AI and I am all but certain every other available app is as well. This is not inherently a bad thing. Like any tool, AI can be used positively or negatively. The biggest problem is that most people don’t know enough to know what they don’t know.

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This is why it happens to people, too. When there is a missing piece of the puzzle or a lack of understanding somewhere, it shows up the most in repetition or recitation of the material. In fact, it happens so often that I often find it borderline comical. Especially given the fact that the hallucinations, at least on the human side, rarely are enough to cause major issues.

On the bright side, since everyone does it all you need to do is learn how to recognize it in yourself. Often this means taking your time. There is a desire among most people to speak quickly when they speak. Some only raise the tempo of their speech, others will also lower the volume. Occasionally it will deteriorate all the way to mere mumbling.

Taking a deep breath and remembering that you are not in a hurry during your study sessions or in class will solve 50% of the problem. As they say, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. However, that in and of itself is generally not enough. You next challenge is to review the material with a closer eye. You would not believe how often you are adding modifiers to your language.

Most of the time you do this is because it makes sense. Adding in a “very” or a “more” or a “most” is extremely common. Especially in a language like Spanish where those words are all very similar. My favorite thing to do in a time like that is stop my student and ask, “why did you say x”? That is more than enough for them to take stock of what happened and begin calibrating.

Trust but verify

Understanding a problem is the first step to fixing the problem. In your case you have a verification problem. So, how do you stop making a mistake that literally everyone makes? There are three ways:

• Write down everything and look for your mistakes

  • Do NOT use help when you do this

• Record yourself speaking

  • Do this once per week to make sure you are getting the most of the exercise and are consistently improving

• Hire a coach

  • No one is going to hear your mistakes better than someone else. If you have a friend or native speakers in general with whom you can practice, that is fantastic, but if not it is worth hiring someone to help you improve faster.

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If you are more focused on correcting and checking yourself, you are going to have to be simultaneously more confident and more harsh with yourself. This is a difficult balance to strike, but it can be done. One of the best indicators of a successful language learner is that they master the task of self correction. For more on that, read this:

Another area that you can improve is through testing and improving your native language skills so that you can recognize grammar mistakes as well as vocabulary mistakes. Mastery of your native language is the natural progression to mastery of your target language. When you don’t understand the grammar structures of your native language, you will end up messing them up in your target language through faulty syntax.

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Don’t just test yourself in your target language. Holding yourself to a higher standard in every language you speak will have ripple effects across all of the subsequent languages you learn and speak. A larger vocabulary, a better understanding of complex grammar structures, and an understanding of how to write will set you apart from other language learners in all the best ways.

Ask yourself why

The final course of action is to start asking yourself why. This is a pretty useful life hack if you are willing to run the experiment. Asking yourself why you do things is something the vast majority of people never do. Most people don’t even know why they think what they think or believe what they believe. Trying to get down to the real reason you are “hallucinating” words is difficult, but revealing.

There will also be times where the word in your native language resembles the word in your target language, even if it is a false friend that leads you to a false sense of security. The word “actual” in romance languages is notorious for this because it actually (lol) translates to “current” meaning “actually” in Spanish, French, Italian, etc, means “currently” not actually.

False friends are some of the most brutal tricksters in any foreign language. Especially as you begin to get more confident. In Spanish this happens with the past participle descriptions. For example, accelerado means accelerated, dividido means divided, so, naturally, embarazada means embarrassed, right? Wrong. It means pregnant. Beware of false friends.

Sometimes it is as simple as the fact that the words look similar in your target language and are used in similar ways (muy vs mucho in my classes is VERY common). Other times it has more to do with the fact that you are simply moving to fast and inserting vocabulary you would normally use in a given circumstance rather than what is actually being said.

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Conclusion

While the AI hallucination epidemic is likely going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever gets better, your hallucinations can be remedied. Part of the problem is that it requires judging yourself harshly without becoming demotivated. That is probably the main reason to hire someone to help you along the way. It doesn’t hurt as bad when deferring to an authority.

That said, I highly encourage you to take some time and work through the other options first. See how far you can take things on your own. Having a teacher/tutor/coach will always save you time, but you deserve to see what you can do before taking that leap. That data will help your teacher, too. It is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great so go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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Reality check

I try not to undersell the commitment, but it bears reinforcing. In order to truly get to a point where you can understand 80%+ of everything a native speaker says to you, you have to spend 1000 hours exposed and listening to the language. That was a major reason I bothered putting together the Passive Input Guide in the first place. Not all 1000 hours need to be active consumption.

The other day, someone sent me their language learning plan. One thing that was on there that I do not include in the language programs I build was “level appropriate content”. In fact, I would say that people sticking to level specific content is one of the biggest contributors to long term stagnation that exists. If you take away anything from this, it should be that you underestimate your level.

Most people don’t want to spend hours every week banging their head against a wall trying to make sense of new letters in new combinations. However, doing so will drastically accelerate your language acquisition. For whatever reason (human condition) people want to feel good when they are bad at things. Duolingo is incredibly popular for a reason. But that is a feeling. Not a tangible reality.

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Giving up “control” as it were, is a powerful step along your way to the bilingual summit. At the end of the day, you can spend 10000 hours with children’s books and songs and shows and you will, at the end of those 10000 hours, speak like a child. Alternatively, you can spend 1000 hours reading the classics, translating lyrics, and speaking broken language. That is how you speak like an adult.

A good rule of thumb is that you should never be able to understand more than 80% of what you are consuming. Anything less and you are only stroking your ego by avoiding all of the things you do not yet know. Yes, it is incredibly frustrating. So is learning any new skill, especially when you understand less than 80% of the skill. That is no reason to avoid doing difficult things.

Ultimately, you will never be able to control what other people say to you. Limiting yourself to studying only the things that you understand will all but guarantee a massive blow to the confidence the moment you are face to face with someone who doesn’t know, or care, about your self imposed limitations. It is a slog, but it doesn’t have to be miserable the entire time. It should be fun.

Make it fun

My favorite part of my job is building resource sheets. I am constantly amazed at how much high quality content there is available for free in just about every language you can think to learn. Of course, the more niche your language the more difficult it is to find resources, but the chances are, if you are into something, someone who speaks your target language is also into that thing.

But enjoyable material doesn’t mean much if you do not have a plan to deploy it. Building yourself a sustainable framework that operates as a plug and chug equation is by far the easiest way to fluency. Too many people spend too much time “planning” and not nearly enough time studying. Your planning should take no more than 1 hour per week. From there you should be able to sit down and rock and roll.

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You need an exposure focus, though. I am big on creation. No matter what, the tendency is to consume more than you produce. That is normal. In fact, in any conversation you should be consuming twice as much as you are producing. Using your ears and mouth proportionally, as it were. This is also the perfect ration for when you are on your own. Every 1 hour of consumption should equate to 30 minutes of creation.

Passive consumption is fantastic for running up the clock while doing other things. I’ve had students learn to understand Spanish fluently by watching dubbed cartoons while they do cardio. However, if you are only ever passively consuming your target language you are going to struggle with natural conversation. Unfortunately, it cannot always be fun.

Times when it is NOT fun

Failing is not fun. When you are training your ear, you are going to be failing a lot. In fact, failure is going to be what you spend the most time doing for at least 1 month. For that reason alone you should be keeping a running log of all that you accomplish. During moments when the light at the end of the tunnel begins to fade, those accomplishments are reinvigorating.

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This exercise is basically designed for the early stages of language acquisition. Early B1 should be seeing roughly 10%-40% comprehension, by B2 you should be seeing 40%-80% comprehension. It might sound crazy, but this is the best way to train your ear. Understanding too much of the content you are consuming can become a hinderance.

I learned this technique in Belgium when I was learning French, which is notoriously difficult on the ear, and I cannot adequately express how big of an impact it had. So here is what you need to do:

• Play an 8-10 minute audio all the way through. Do not try to write anything, this listen through is just to get used to the voice, speed, and content.

• Play it again, in increments of 10-15 seconds (less is okay if you need, but fight for that 10 seconds)

• Write down everything you hear. Try to keep adding with each subsequent playthrough. Stop after 3 and move on to a new audio.

• Compare against the transcript, write out your score, prepare for the next round.

• STOP after 30 minutes. Some people may stretch to 40, but this exercise is incredibly frustrating. There is no place to hide. You either get it or you don’t. After about 30 minutes, you hit a place of rapidly diminishing returns. For more on the power of transcription/dictation in language acquisition read this:

One thing that can and will help you when you are doing this exercise is listening for your high ROI words. What does that mean? Simple. You should be listening for 3 things initially. You need to know the subject (the person doing the verb), the verb (action taking place), and the objects (direct object being the thing and indirect being the person accepting the thing).

My brother gave me this beautiful book the other day.

In this sentence here is what matters to the pre B2 student: My brother (subject), gave (verb + timing), me (indirect object, the person receiving the thing), and book (direct object, the thing). Everything else is fluff. Yes, eventually you need to be able to understand everything, but if you get those 4 things correct, you understand 80% of every sentence.

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Conclusion

1000 hours seems like a lot because, well, it is a lot. However, you are going to spend at least 10x that time speaking your target language fluidly and confidently. No one like being bad at things. But being bad and staying bad are different. You have a choice to make every day on which one you want. Personally, I’ll take being bad over staying bad every day of the week.

It is going to take you 1000 hours whether you started last year or you are planning to start next year. The sooner you hit “go” on that clock, the less time you have to spend stressed out about the number itself. It is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So go out and do some difficult things today and become great. I am rooting for you.

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Voice

Most people probably think I push writing so hard because it is the best way to make the neural pathways you are developing more efficient. That may be true, but that is only part of the equation. The real reason I am always pushing people to write has almost nothing to do with language acquisition. Well, at least not foreign language acquisition.

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In reality, the best way to train yourself to think is by writing. Thinking, after all, is merely a conversation with oneself. Personally, I find it incredibly difficult to keep that entire conversation straight in my head; and I know I am not alone. At the end of the day, I want you to be the best thinker you possibly can be. That will make not only language acquisition easier permanently, it will have positive effects throughout various areas of your life.

By doing this work, you will also find your voice, if you have not already. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done. The vast majority of people do not think before they speak. Their voice is a reflex, not a deliberate decision. While the average day in the average life does not necessitate a strong personal voice, we are not chasing the average day in the average life.

With the mass adoption of AI, finding your voice is more important than ever because it is the one dead giveaway that you are human. Robots will always sound robotic (I know, genius, right?). This is one of the main reasons I warn against relying on AI for language acquisition. If you are curious about that, you can read more here:

Authenticity, humanity, are going to become ever more valuable as they grow ever more scarce. Writing, in any language, is a sure fired way to guarantee your voice remains authentic, despite the exploding synthetic nature of the world developing around you. It will also help you maintain your ability to spot slop when you see it, which is going to become an important skill in the coming years.

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Being able to spot slop (if you don’t know the term, it essentially means mass produced AI nonsense. “Made in China” stuff, but digital), is already becoming more difficult. Training your ability to detect it now is optimal. Help your parents, too. The fewer people out there consuming AI slop the better. Beyond the slop, though, learning to use your voice will help you recognize the voices of those around you.

Interpreting others

Your voice is more than just the words you say and the order in which you say them. It encompasses how you say things. That includes sarcasm, excitement, exhaustion, enthusiasm, jokes, and more. By learning how to use these things, you will begin to understand it when others are using it. That is yet another reason that production is so valuable in your day to day language study sessions.

But production without purpose is not going to be the best way to spend your time. Ultimately, you need to be storytelling as much as possible. The whole purpose of learning a new language is to share stories, your stories, with new people in a new place using a new language. If you are writing stories ahead of time, you gain the benefit of telling them for a second time when you meet a native speaker.

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Unfortunately, this means going back and editing your stories is going to be the best way to perfect them in so much as that is possible. I am guilty of this. In fact, it is probably my biggest area of opportunity. If you have been reading for a while, it is almost certain that you have seen a typo or two. This is because after I write these articles, I rarely go back and edit them.

So, in this case, I am preaching to me as much as I am preaching to you. Write your stories, but do not stop there. That is only the first step. Every time I ~do~ actually edit things I have previously written, I almost always find something that can be improved. This is even more true when it comes to writing things in a foreign language. For more on iteration read this:

Practice emoting, explaining things in great detail, fighting for every descriptive word to truly express things exactly how you want to express them. You have to start somewhere, sure, but you do not, and certainly should not, stay there. Iteration is going to be your bread and butter here. Take what you have and keep trying to make it better every chance you get.

Forging your own

Let’s say you don’t know where to start. Here are the things you need to do to start forging, or finding as it were, your voice. Here is a step by step of things to do next week:

1. Start writing down your own thoughts

Do this as often as possible. Of course you can’t always do it, but there is no more authentic you than your own thoughts. So you should take time to write them down, but you also should use this exercise to sharpen your thoughts. Test them, trial them, hone them. Learning to be a better thinker will make you a better learner.

2. Talk to yourself

The amount of time I spend throughout the day talking to myself under my breath is embarrassing to admit. However, it is also one of the things I enjoy about the day to day life. I like that I can find good conversation with myself, even if it makes me seem somewhat schizophrenic to my wife. And depending where you are, conversation with yourself might be the best available option.

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3. Narrate your life

Okay, so you don’t want to talk to yourself because you are not a weirdo like me. Fine. I get it. If that is the case, the next best thing you can do is narrate your day. Treat yourself like you are in a movie and talk about the things you are doing. Talk about the things you want to do. The things you did do. How it felt while you did those things. What you might change about the process. For step by step, read this:

While I don’t think this needs to be said, I will say it anyway: you should be doing all of these things in your target language. Sure, there will be some benefit to doing it in your native language. In fact, if you are struggling to do it in your target language, doing it first in your native language might bridge the gap. Either way, what matters most is that you start immediately.

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Conclusion

There it is. My true motive behind trying for so many years (and so many more to come) to indoctrinate you all into write more, creating more, thinking more, and being more. Learning a new language is amazing. Becoming fluent is one of the greatest feelings on Earth. But it is all secondary to the ultimate benefit of emotional and linguistic integration that is possible.

Of course it is difficult. As is often said, if it were easy, everyone would do it. Right now far more people are becoming parrots for ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever AI you prefer to insert here. Fade the masses. Find your authentic voice. Expand it across every language you know and every language you learn. That is how you guarantee yourself the best, or at least the most fulfilling, experience.

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Grammar

When it comes to grammar, I really am not a big fan. In all actuality I truly believe grammar is a good thing to go over, but not a good thing to master. At least mastering it should not be your goal. Bad grammar is not only common, but perfect grammar often sounds stranger. While I believe we should all strive to improve our language and the language of those around us, that is a long term goal, not something worth focusing on in the first year.

One piece of grammar that you cannot neglect, however, is conjugations. My favorite resources for conjugations are:

• Reverso - Reverso is an amazing all around tool if you aren’t already using it. I have every single student use it

• Linguno - Linguno gamifies conjugation. It is not as repetitive as Duolingo, but it is also something that is very limited because you are not the one controlling the sentences.

• Wordreference - Wordreference is similar to reverso, but a bit more academic and less user friendly. We used it a lot back in the translator days and if you are looking for precision towards the end of B2 beginning of C1, this is probably your best bet.

Grammar books are good and you can get them cheap from second hand bookstores, but grammar is something that is far easier to master through making mistakes than through attempting to be perfect. At the end of the day, the “perfect” grammar is the grammar that is used where you are. Memorizing the “vosotros” conjugations in Spanish for a move to Costa Rica is not worth your time.

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If you do know where you plan to start using the language, one of the more enjoyable ways to learn grammar is to learn what is different between that place and the place where the language originated. Sometimes it is easier to remember the things that are different than it is to remember novel things. And you never know when having these fun facts in your back pocket might pay off.

YouTube is also incredibly helpful when it comes to this, but precision is important here. Learning from a generalized video is maybe a good first run through, but you should ultimately be finding videos that address specific issues that you are having. The only way, or at least the best way, to figure out what specific issues you have to address is by writing everything down.

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Vocabulary

Vocabulary is a bit more enjoyable to build, in my opinion. Not because it’s easier, but because it is more relevant. Think about it in your own day to day life. If someone comes up to you and says, “I’m ran late today” you would likely get the idea. Is it a little awkward? Yes. But that’s just how it goes at the beginning. Vocabulary, on the other hand, can be a mess.

Imagine instead of using the incorrect conjugation, someone came up to you and said, “I crawl early today”. Quite a bit more decoding that has to be done in that case. This is how it goes in every language. The grammar is important, perfect grammar is a phenomenal goal, but correct vocabulary is far more important. That said, if you mess up a word, the person you are speaking to will let you know.

So, how do you build your vocabulary fast? Do these things today:

Read books above your language level

People fight me on writing the most, but this is probably the second biggest fight I have with people. My students do not read children’s books. I recommend children’s books, but only if you are working solo. If you have a teacher or a tutor or a friend or spouse who can help you, the comfort of children’s books will become a crutch that you may struggle to drop.

For more on how to get the most out of this exercise, read this article:

Thesaurus

I bring this up pretty often, but using a thesaurus when you are writing is the easiest way to grow your vocabulary. Not even necessarily because you lack certain vocabulary in your native language, but rather because you do have a certain default vocabulary. The last thing you want is to be stuck with a set, limited, amount of vocabulary with which to express yourself.

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You should be using a thesaurus to write irrespective of which language in which you are writing. The best thing you can do is move vocabulary from your passive to your active memory. It’s fantastic that you can recognize and understand the meanings of new words when you come across them, but even better is the ability to use them freely whenever you want.

For more on growing your vocabulary through targeted exercises, make sure you read this:

Media

The final place that you need to be looking for materials where you can learn new vocabulary is in media. Social media, news media, entertainment media, all media. Why? Because those are the words people are using today, right now, to describe the world around them. Even if those words differ from how you may have seen them in a dictionary. Take the word “tio” in Spain, for example.

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As aggravating as it can be, these places are where you have to come to find out what is happening in the present day. Language evolves, often far too quickly, meaning you are left at the mercy of the modern speaker, not the person who wrote the grammar book. If you only learn terms for their literary use, you will end up freezing in the midst of conversation when a word is used colloquially.

Translation

Translation is probably the most powerful tool you have available to you when it comes to improving both grammar and vocabulary. Alongside reverso and wordreference, you should be challenging yourself to need as little help as possible. Begin with short one sentence translations from your target language into your native language.

The major jump comes when you begin translating pre-planned sentences from your native language into your target language. You are already doing this in your head anyway, doing it on paper is a fantastic way to accelerate the process of linguistic integration. Once the language is fully integrated, translation is no longer necessary. That said, it will always be a valuable tool for improvement.

Doing all of this on paper, in pen, will multiply the benefits. It may seem silly, but once per week I have someone reach out to tell me they started writing after one or two or even three years and how much they wish they would have listened to me sooner. You can, and should, learn from their mistakes. Do not come to me in a year telling me you wish you could go back. For more on that, read this:

One bonus tool for those of you who are in the habit of juggling multiple languages at the same time. This is something that was introduced to me by a friend and fellow polyglot and after getting used to it a bit yesterday, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Even if you only use it for one language to increase listening time. Find it here.

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Conclusion

These are the tools that my students use day in and day out throughout the course of their education. We use them in class, of course, but these resources are things you should be using daily, with or without a class attached. The best part? All of them are free to use. After all this time, I thought it would be helpful to share the tools we use in class. I hope you are able to use these indefinitely to accomplish your goals.

The right tools and the right habits are all you truly need to accomplish any language related goal you have. In fact, those two things should be enough to help you accomplish any dream you have. It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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Technology

I have always prided myself on being someone who is capable of living in the moment. Admittedly that has become more difficult as a business owner, but I do try. Especially with friends and family. However, it has become so normal to be ~near~ one another while existing in completely different worlds.

It starts out innocent enough. Watching TV after dinner. After all, you are still together and spending time with one another, right? Soon one or both or all of you realize that you would rather be getting your algorithmically hand picked content instead of some TV show you are probably rewatching for the 3rd time chasing that nostalgia drug.

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A long time ago a teacher told me, “if it’s free, you are the product” and for an even longer time I didn’t really understand what that meant. Now I get it. You pay. We all pay. A LOT. But it isn’t money that we use. Instead we pay with the only thing we can never get back: our time.

Your time is valuable. The time you spend with your loved ones is also valuable. Do some math with me really quickly.

How many times do you see your parents every year? Once? Twice? 10 times?

How many years do you honestly think they have left? 10? 20? 30?

Let’s say we take the max of both. You will see them once per month for the next 30 years. The best case scenario is that you see them 360 more times. How many of those times can you afford to not be present? What if they only have 10 years left? You will see them 120 more times if you never miss a month. Life is so fragile. Do not spend it wrapped up in a world that barely exists inside your phone.

90s living

Lately, as a consequence of having a baby, we have been watching maybe a quarter of the TV that we used to watch. The result? We spend more time playing together, more time laughing together, and more time loving on each other. The change has been so delightful that we are discussing ways to run a “90s” household in the modern era.

• Steaming doesn’t exist, that show will be on next week at 5pm. We better not miss it!

• They only play cartoons on Saturday mornings!

• You have to read the book before you can see the movie.

• Get outside and don’t come back until the sun goes down!

• The wifi/cell service turns off at night, the company will turn it back on in the morning, don’t worry.

This is how I grew up (though wifi wasn’t around yet) and I look back incredibly fondly on my childhood. In fact, to this day I credit my parents for not caving and getting me a smartphone. That was one of the best parenting decisions they made, and they made a large number of very good decisions.

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When I was really young, my mom was in medical school so we had to get out of her hair and let her study. Anyone who has ever tried to accomplish tasks that require zero babies while there are more than zero babies around understands this. So we spent 23 weekends out in the woods camping, hiking, mountain biking, and roasting marshmallows.

I think one of the reasons that there is so much nostalgia for the 90s is because the vast majority of it all isn’t recorded. Memory is a funny thing. My wife and I are very into “type 2” fun. That is to say, things that seemingly, or actually, suck in the moment but are fun to look back on and laugh. In all likelihood, there is something like this on a larger scale going on with regards to that time period.

Perhaps the 90s weren’t that great, but the memories of a time before everything was digitally recorded are. Anyone who works with me knows that I am always pushing people to go analog. Digital is great, but the diminishing returns come quick and they are difficult to recognize before it is too late. Much like slowly gaining weight and ~suddenly~ struggling to go up the stairs.

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The “Yes” rule

Before going on exchange, my good friend, who happened to be the German exchange student we were hosting gave me some advice. This particular piece of advice changed my life on exchange and well after. That is, say yes to everything (within reason, obviously). Someone asks you to go do something? I don’t really care how bad you don’t want to go, you go.

Human behavior is hilarious. A child doesn’t want a bath, until they are in the bath. An adult doesn’t want to go to the gym, until they are in the gym. 80% of every battle is simply going to the place where the thing is happening. That is how low the barrier to entry is. All you have to do is show up. In your friendships, in your relationships, in your career, all you have to do is show up.

Here, again, is an area where I fail constantly. However, I used to be way worse 5 years ago and I was worse last year than I am now. Just like learning a new language, how you perform today is only relevant when compared to how you performed yesterday or the day before or the week or month before that. You will be shocked how often doing things you do not want to do will result in an amazing memory.

With all of that said, remember, relationships take two. If you are always showing up and you are always present and you are always saying yes, then you have done all that you can do. You cannot control what others do. In fact, you can hardly influence their decision making at all in most cases. You never know who will follow your example, but do not be discouraged if others do not reciprocate.

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Conclusion

Ultimately, my goal is to turn technology into an event. We are all going to sit down and watch a movie together. We are going outside until the sun goes down. We are settling in together for a night gaming together. We turn our phones off at night so that we can spend time together. I am far from perfect on this, but all progress is progress and I have come a long way just this year.

I highly encourage you to do the same things. It is difficult. In fact, this might be one of the most difficult challenges that I have ever discussed and it is only tangentially related to language learning. If you succeed, though, your education and your relationships and your career and your family will all improve simultaneously. So do the difficult thing. Join me in the present. I am rooting for you.

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Forming a habit

There is something called the 21/90 rule which states that it takes 21 days to form a habit and 90 days to make it permanent. While there are obviously other variables at play that can make things more complicated, let’s assume that the core idea is true. Three weeks to build a habit, three months to integrate it into your daily life permanently.

If you had a roadmap to build the habits that would take you to fluency in a matter of months or years, would you use it?

In the month of August, I will be running a Habit Building challenge with the goal of helping people develop the proper habits to not only master their current target language, but any foreign language they wish to learn thereafter. 30 days of targeted activities to maximize the study time of anyone who wishes to join. Designed specifically for working adults and parents.

Most people know why they want to learn a language, most people even know how to learn a language, at least in theory. So I want to provide the “what” as in what to do every day so that you can look back after one month and be proud of how much you have accomplished. Hopefully more than you ever have in your target language before.

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One of my students kept the very first sentences she ever wrote before class started. Then, I took her week 6 homework sentences that she wrote. Look at how far she has come in under two months!

One month will never be enough to get fluent. It will probably never be enough to reach a conversational level. However, it is more than enough time to put the habits into place that will result in fluency in any number of languages. Once you understand what to do and why you are doing it, everything becomes almost formulaic. Plug and chug, as my old calc teacher used to say.

Building things that last

Everyone wants something that works instantly. If you are here, especially if you have been reading for a while, you know that I won’t lie to you about how long things take. The amount of work it is necessary to put into developing any skill is consistently understated by people who are trying to sell false hope. If you want to ~master~ a new language, it is going to take you 10,000 hours.

Building things, especially things that last takes time. I also find that many of these salesmen have begun to freely interchange the words “easy” and “simple” which are anything but synonymous. Learning a new language is simple. In fact, language acquisition is completely solved. At this point, anything other than successful language education is a deliberate choice.

Nevertheless, it is one of the more difficult things that you can do, especially as a working adult, especially especially as a working parents. Sometimes all that is missing is a roadmap. Having a mentor is tremendously beneficial. In fact, I cannot overstate the benefit of having a high quality mentor. Not because they know how to do everything right, but because they have already made the mistakes.

Wherever possible, you should be learning from the mistakes of others. Learn what not to do, find out what is and what is not a waste of time, do not reinvent the wheel until you intimately understand how the wheel works and why. If you must make your own mistakes, track them at the very least. Otherwise you may find you are making the same mistake years into learning.

The last thing you need to do if you want to build something that lasts is keep going. It doesn’t really matter how many times you fail. It doesn’t really matter how many times you give up, as long as you come back later. Of course, if it is possible to avoid giving up then that is ideal, but I know many a polyglot who gave up on a language for years at a time before returning and mastering it.

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Just keep showing up and the progress will follow. It is impossible to avoid given a long enough timeline. That is one of the reasons I wanted to do this challenge in the first place. I will give you the metrics for what “showing up” means. Then I will give you the ways to integrate exercises into your daily routine so that showing up doesn’t feel like work. The goal is lifestyle change.

It worked too well

One quirk I have noticed among human beings is that when things are going well complacency doesn’t just stop progress, it ends up causing people to stop entirely. “It worked so well that I stopped doing it”, in short. Think back in your life, there is more than likely an instance of you doing this very thing whether it be with regards to exercise, nutrition, education, or something else, it is normal.

Just because something is normal, however, does not mean it is the ideal for which we should be striving. This is the reasoning behind a month long challenge. If 21 days is enough to form a habit, I want to go for 30 days to ensure that the “it worked too well” syndrome doesn’t have time to rear it’s ugly head. Beyond the 30 days I will also provide a 14 day momentum guide for after the challenge.

Ultimately the only thing you get out of such a challenge are the habits to learn any new skill, the concrete progress you make in your target language, and, hopefully, a greater appreciation for what you can do in 30 days provided the right guidance. If that is something you want to be part of, then make it happen.

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Conclusion

Whether or not you want to join the August challenge, developing the right habits is a gamechanger when it comes to progressing toward any goal you might have. You want to be more fit? Habit development. You want to become exceptional at a skill? Habit development. You want to become fluent in a new language? Habit development. That does not, however, mean you have to do it all alone.

I mentioned before the benefit of having a mentor, but what I did not explicitly mention is that the benefit is being held accountable. No one cares more about your success than you do. That is true. However, no one is quite as susceptible to your excuses as you are either. If you don’t want to join us this next month, find someone who will hold you accountable for your actions. I am rooting for you.

Not sure where to start? Start Here! This maps out the entire site based on where you are right now.

Want something you can use today? Grab the free vocabulary frameworks and practice exercises: Free PDFs

One of her pet peeves was, and likely still is, redundancy. To this day I still remember her specific examples.

“Don’t say this morning in the AM. If it’s the morning I already know it is the AM.”

“Deja vu all over again makes no sense. ‘Already seen all over again??’ Do not be redundant!”

Some of the ones that now irk me, since she so graciously imparted this pet peeve onto me, are: basic fundamentals, past history, and free gift. All of these are examples of ways in which many people mess up their own native language every single day. This is a conversation I have with all of my students. irrespective of your ideal timeline, mastering a new language is a lifelong endeavor.

Efficiency

A common theme amongst my students is a desire to use as many words as necessary to express themselves. That is standard. In fact, if you are learning a new language right now you are likely doing the same thing. Keep doing it. I only point it out because the natural next step is learning to express as much as possible using as few words as possible.

Effectiveness is important during the beginning phases of language acquisition. Effectively communicating matters far more than efficiently communicating when every word is a fight. In fact, this very same process is mirrored physiologically in the brain as the neural pathways you are developing at this stage are effective, but they are far from efficient.

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Working with an instructor is a good way to avoid a lot of this. After all, if you can learn from someone else’s mistakes then you should. Save yourself the time and trouble of making common mistakes by learning what common mistakes look like. You should do this in both your native and your target language since they often overlap.

With how many mistakes English speakers make in their native language every single day, it really is not surprising that foreign language education in the US is so painstaking. You are ultimately limited by how much you know and if you have to learn a new concept (that you already use in your native language anyway) you are spending valuable time trying to understand things you already know.

That is why I created the “English for Foreign Language Learners” guide. The purpose is to give you names for the highest ROI grammar concepts in English so that you know how they correlate with grammar structures in foreign languages. For the vast majority of you reading this, you probably already know 50% of what is in the guide. If you do not, however, I highly recommend you download it.

English For Language Learners Guide

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I am making this guide free because I think it would be a national disservice to do anything else. If you like it, be sure to check out the Guides page of the website for new guides released every month. Paid subscribers will receive every guide drop direct to their inbox so consider supporting if you aren’t already!

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Giveaways

Some of the common giveaways that someone might not completely understand their own native language involve forming perfectly good sentences that are widely employed, just incorrectly. For example, ending sentences with prepositions. That is, the word for or with or at or or or.

A mistake like this becomes a major issue when learning a new language because in a great number of languages it is impossible to form a proper sentence that ends with a preposition. If you don’t believe me, try and construct a sentence in your target language that ends with the word “with”. While it can certainly be done in English, that is technically grammatically incorrect.

Another telltale sign not understanding your native language is redundancy. In almost every system, redundancy is the first thing one attempts to reduce. The extra brain power necessary may seem inconsequential, but if you do it all the time then you are wasting brain power for no reason.

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“5 am in the morning” is redundant.

“A free gift” is redundant".

“To revert back” is redudant.

“An ATM machine” is redundant.

The more you know, the more you understand, the less you have to stress about wasting brain power on things that don’t matter. As a working adult, you have way too much going on to be wasting your energy inefficiently. Fortunately, by catching yourself making these mistakes you will improve in both your native language and your target language along with any subsequent language you learn.

Improving your ability

Vocabulary expansion can happen in a few different ways and in order to get the most out of your time you need to make sure you are doing the right things to reach your goal, whatever that goal might be. Vocabulary expansion is made up of two parts: recognition, or words that you can recognize when you see them, and retrieval, or words you are able to employ yourself.

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Both parts are necessary and you really can’t have the latter without having the former first. Compression is an exercise that will help you train your retrieval and your precision. So, what is compression?

1. Write out a story. It needs to be at least 10 sentences long, but the more the better.

2. Now, take that story and cut it by 20% WITHOUT losing any of the intended meaning

3. Iterate

This is a pretty advanced exercise, but you will still get something out of it if you are a novice. You can also achieve similar results by choosing someone else’s words and compressing them or paraphrasing them into your own words. Another way to do it is the same way in which Benjamin Franklin did it.

1. Read an article/essay/story

2. Take notes

3. Reconstruct the article based on memory and notes 48-72 hours later

4. Compare against the original

5. Grade yourself

   1. Where were you right?

   2. Where were you wrong?

   3. What could you improve?

   4. When will you try again?

Exercises by what they train:

Retrieval and precision:

1. Take any paragraph you wrote and cut it to half length with zero information loss. The word count is the score.

2. Banned words: rewrite a page without very, thing, good, bad, get, nice, interesting. Bans force retrieval of the specific word the lazy word was covering for.

3. No repeats: write 500 words in which no noun or verb appears twice. This will be brutal and immediately reveal of how small your active vocabulary is.

4. Taboo descriptions: define or describe something without using its five most obvious associated words.

Discrimination:

5. The distinction game: take near synonym pairs (envy and jealousy, vague and ambiguous, continual and continuous, uninterested and disinterested) and write the one sentence where swapping them changes the meaning. If no such sentence exists, you’ve learned they’re true synonyms, which is also knowledge.

6. Register laddering: one proposition, five registers, from the bar to a legal brief to King James. That is to say, write the same thing to 5 different recipients with varying degrees of formality to train your true understanding of cultural norms where your target language is spoken.

Acquisition:

7. The usage quota: writing words into a notebook is worthless without a usage rule. Three genuine uses within a week (conversation, email, anything real) or the word you are going to have to learn the word twice. Retrieval effort is what moves a word into the active set; rereading a list ultimately moves nothing.

8. Root harvesting: take one Latin or Greek root per week and generate the whole family before checking a dictionary. See my Latin roots material for help with this challenge in guide form; the challenge version is doing it from memory first.

Structural pressure:

9. Strict verse: sonnets and blank verse force vocabulary search the way nothing in normal writing does, because the right word must also fit into the structure. Writing to conform to standards is a powerful way to force yourself into using words and grammar mechanisms you might otherwise try to avoid.

10. Round trip translation: translate a paragraph into your target language and translate it back a day later, then compare with the original. The gaps between versions become a personalized vocabulary syllabus.

A quick warning with regards to compression and editing/translation in general. When something is truly written well, it will be nearly impossible to compress. When an author actually uses every word to the fullest, trying to compress the writing means diluting or altogether destroying the intended meaning. If you are getting frustrated, move on to the next sentence or the next excerpt.

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Conclusion

My classes have an incredibly condensed timeline. 3 months is not a long time, while it is also a pretty long time. Therefore, I cannot afford to waste my students time or brain power. Every single person I work with has a full time job, most of them have children, efficiency is absolutely paramount to their, and my, success. That is why we do most of these things and why I think you should, too.

Adding these exercises into your weekly routine will drastically improve your vocabulary which, if you were to ask me, is the most important part of learning any new language. After all, there are far more words than there are grammar structures. It is certainly difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great. So get out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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A1-B1

As mentioned above, most of the things I recommend people do are the same, they are just done at different levels of complexity. In fact, for the first three to six months (read A1 to B1) most of the content is beyond comprehension. That is intentional. If you understand everything, you are not learning anything. Besides, you won’t understand everything for years.

There is an interesting phenomenon where people who are learning a new language expect that they are going to understand everything at some point. While that might be true, the amount of time it takes to get to that point is more than most people expect. The reasons for this vary, but the biggest are dialect, accent, and cadence. You may understand everything regionally, but that isn’t everything.

At first, as much as it pains me to say this, the quantity is far more important than the quality. I was just telling a student this afternoon, “for everything that I can do, I cannot consume 1000 hours of content from native speakers for you.” The minimum to begin understanding anything approaching ~everything~ is 1000 hours of exposure. That is the true power of immersion, not just access to natives.

I created my Passive Input Guide explicitly for beginners because passive input is your easiest win as a novice in any new language. The point is never to understand everything immediately, that is wholly unreasonable. Rather, you should listen and give yourself a baseline. Write that baseline down. Then, spend the next three weeks pumping volume and see just how far you can get.

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B1-C1

For those who are beginning to feel the difference after a month or two, you should begin working on much more difficult exercises. Dictation, or transcription, is by far the best thing you can do at this stage. Especially during the B1/B2 stage. Listening to native speakers and writing down what you hear seems like a waste of time, perhaps, but do it for 3 weeks and watch the evolution.

Focused listening is the biggest difference between the As and the Bs when it comes down to it. This is almost entirely due to the fact that Bs are able to do focused listening while the As are still trying to master basic sentence structure, cadence of speech, and colloquialisms. Once you can understand 50% of a sentence, it is time to sit down and dedicate 30 minutes to listening daily.

Start small, something with annunciated speech discussing a topic that you know already. Ideally you are working with a video that has an unfamiliar orator as the more you listen to one person the easier it will be to understand that one person. Diversifying your input is incredibly important at this stage. During your A phase, differentiation is less important. Now, however, it is imperative.

The final step in this progression is listening to multiple people simultaneously. I’ve written about this before, so if you missed that, catch up here:

In short, once you can understand one person speaking to you, you have hit the first false peak. Unfortunately, this is a lesson everyone has to learn sooner or later, so better to break the illusion sooner, in my opinion. Having a target to aim at is incredibly important, but if that target is wholly unrealistic, it will have a deleterious effect rather quickly.

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Continued education

My program is called “3 months to conversational”. The reason behind this is because it is impossible to reach fluency within 3 months. However, once you can hold a conversation, the sky is the limit. In fact, once you can hold a conversation, the true battle begins. After all, it is all but guaranteed that you have quite a bit more you could learn about your native language, let alone your target language.

Building a content library is a terrific first step. Of course, if you have been following along with my methodology to this point, you should already have a solid repertoire, but now that you can hold conversations, it’s time to expand. For more on efficient expansion, read this:

If you are maxed out on content, it’s time to start moving towards integration. That is to say, rather than consuming content as part of your language learning process, start consuming it as if it is in your native language. Medical professionals should be studying medical vocabulary, lawyers should be reading legal texts, musicians should learn from those who speak their target language.

Specialized language is something I think everyone can benefit from and the deeper into your language acquisition you are, the more important it will become. For many, I often find that introducing it early on is beneficial, but you have to make that decision for yourself. If you are in the medical field learning Spanish or French, you can get my versions of specialized language to add in immediately.

Medical Spanish

Medical French

Conclusion

I know how frustrating it is to listen to something and understand absolutely nothing. I have done it 5 times already and I am currently doing it again right now. It will feel like you are wasting your time. There is nothing I can do about that. You don’t have to trust me, but if you read this far, try.

Give me 21 days of immense audio exposure. Should you see no changes, leave a comment and I will respond to see what went wrong. At first the breakthroughs will come in singular words. In a sea of noise, there will be a small signal. More expose, more signal.

Your brain is a descrambler that is more effective and efficient than anything any human could possibly create. It just needs time to work. Often more time than anyone really wants. It is difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great, so get out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

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If this post made you rethink your approach, the next step is replacing what isn’t working. My free downloadable PDFs give you exercises and frameworks that no app provides. Real output practice designed to get you speaking, not just tapping.

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How language works

Language learning is unique from other types of learning because much of it is dependent more on exposure than dedicated studying. Most other subjects demand sit down sessions of an hour or more to wrap your head around different concepts. Languages, on the other hand, are far more reliant on the amount of exposure than just about anything else.

At a minimum, you should expect 1000 hours of exposure before you are able to comfortably understand native speakers. This is exactly how you learned your native language, too. Not by understanding everything, not by optimizing your comprehensible input, not by balancing the perfect levels of understand and not understand. Just pure volume and lots of patience.

Ultimately, one dedicated sit down hour per day is enough to learn a new language on a pretty condensed timeline. Just about any language in just about a year, when done properly. However, I often recommend some exercises and, for those exercises, 20 minutes is more than enough. For more on those, read this:

Being busy is real. Everyone has things to do and most of us have bills to pay. Nevertheless, adding a new language to your repertoire doesn’t have to feel like adding even more to your list. If anything, adding a new language should make everything feel easier, even if that is not necessarily the reality. If you haven’t begun to already, now is the time to reframe.+

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Reframing

One of the major reframes almost all adults need to make is that of appropriate timelines. If you missed the article on realistic timelines for adult language learners, you can read about it here:

Your second hurdle is defining your milestones. In school, milestones are decided for you and, usually, graded with multiple choice tests. If you actually intend to learn anything, you have to step away from this system. Since you are now the person who is most invested in your education, if you weren’t before, that means the most important part of your new system is that it works for you.

Setting up these milestones is incredibly important because if you aim too small you will be basically running a Duolingo program. Learning nothing with 10 minutes of input per day over two years. On the other hand, if you aim too big you will grow frustrated quickly. Worst case you quit altogether because you didn’t give yourself a reasonable target.

Start small, but grow the difficulty over time. It is quite remarkable how much overlap there is between physical hypertrophy and the act of learning new things. Progressive overload is a concept worth understanding for your body and your brain. With the brain, though, you can benefit from far more snowballing momentum. That is to say, the plateau comes much later with languages.

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Stealing from Peter to pay Paul

As a busy adult, there is one final concept that you need to understand in order to avoid falling into common pitfalls. Think about it. How many adults do you know who are actively trying to learn new things and master new skills? Far fewer than one might hope. The simple fact that you are trying already puts you in the top 10%. Directing that energy in the most efficient way possible is only common sense.

Inefficiency in learning is like inefficiency in anything else: it burns unnecessary energy. And when we are dealing with a closed system, burning unnecessary energy is a mistake that we cannot afford to make. So, to avoid burnout, you need to learn to listen to your brain. Most people have a pretty good gauge of when their body is worn out, but brain strain is real and requires ample recovery.

Of all the things that people forget, the worst is probably the fact that sometimes you do just need to take a moment to catch your breath. Taking a break, especially as a busy adult, can feel like you are losing out on some of the valuable free time you actually have. In reality, the opposite is true.

You cannot take care of someone else from your deathbed. This is a phrase I use quite often with my friends and with my students. Point being, if you don’t take care of yourself first you will find it impossible to adequately provide for anyone else. To truly unlock your maximum potential, you must be getting enough rest. Otherwise studying anything is an exercise in futility.

My final secret for working adults is the same as it would be for any adult who was looking to add more into their schedule without losing out on time with their family. The concept is called (well, I call it), “stealing time”. In my life, that means waking up at 4am to get 2-3 hours alone to work on whatever it is I need to work on before being joined by my wife and baby for the day.

Stealing time looks different for everyone. Personally, my brain works best between 4am and 11am, so that is when I choose my time. You might find you get the best out of yourself from 9pm-midnight or maybe during lunch. It could be during your commute or while you fold laundry. Doing dishes and cleaning the floors. There is time available to you, all you need to do is find it and take it.

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Conclusion

Full brain syndrome is real. There is a max capacity. Fortunately for you and me and everyone, however, that capacity is not fixed. You can increase your capacity and you can lose capacity. I say this to my students often, but it bears repeating: the material is not getting any easier, you are getting better. That is your goal, especially when you are first getting started.

Passive input allows you to train yourself into a larger capacity without being overbearing like immersion can be. Learning a new language is unlike learning anything else and it can largely be built into a busy schedule. If you need help building your curriculum into your schedule, fill out this form and I will reach out to help you:

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It will be difficult, but you can do difficult things and be great, so go out and do some difficult things and become great. I am rooting for you.

Words you already know

One of the ways that someone might connect the dots for you is by showing you all of the words you already know, even if you don’t exactly realize that they are in a different language. For example, the German word paprika. Of course, you likely recognize the word paprika as a powdered red spice that you have always had in your cabinet. Did you know that it is just the German word for bell pepper?

So, paprika is just dried bell pepper. Turns out, a kindergarten is a garden of children. Gesundheit is interchangeable with bless you, right? Well, kind of, and much like “salud” it means health. Fondu? It’s just cheese, right? Well, yes, it is melted cheese. Fondu is the past participle (if you don’t remember what that is, you really need to read this article) of the French word “fondre” which means “ to melt”.

Have you ever chanted “encore” at a concert? You were yelling “again” at the performers, just in French. Your souvenir from the last vacation? Something to remember the trip because souvenir is the French word for remember. Everyone knows what salsa is, but not many know that salsa is just the Spanish word for sauce. That is the biggest difference between a good and a great instructor.

You already know all of these things. You just haven’t had the connection made for you. Out of all the classes I have, my favorite are always the ones where someone has an out loud “ah ha” moment. The added bonus of doing this is that you now have a word that you know well and use correctly in English to add to your repertoire in your target language.

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Asking questions

That said, I know not everyone is interested in having an instructor. So here are some ways that you can start to connect some dots on your own. First, be curious. You have to ask questions about everything in order to uncover any connection. Is this a necessary step to becoming fluent in a new language? Not at all. Will it accelerate the process and make all subsequent languages easier to learn? Yes.

Curiosity is a super power, much to the chagrin of our dear cat fellow. If you aren’t asking “why” multiple times per day, you have an opportunity to improve. For more on that, read this:

In short, never take things at face value. Is it possible that there are no connections to be found between words or concepts that seem related? It’s certainly likely. But that doesn’t diminish the utility of the times when it does work. Besides, the worst case scenario is that you now know a few more obscure facts that you otherwise would not know. Doesn’t seem a terrible trade off to me.

At the end of the day, this is the baseline analysis you should be putting into everything throughout your daily life. Maybe not all day every day, but when you pay close attention to the words you, and other people, use it can be rather illuminating. If nothing else, I would encourage you to expect more from yourself. Instead of learning one word, learn one root word and 5 variants, for example.

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The value of vocabulary

Aside from learning 5 new words for every new word you learn, improving your vocabulary in your native language comes with the added benefit of growing your vocabulary in other languages. Nothing comes from nothing. That is to say, every word you use comes from somewhere, has a history, and can be investigated to reveal more information.

Some words are higher ROI than others, but getting in the habit of pulling the string until everything unravels makes it easier to do each subsequent time. Curiosity, much like courage, is a muscle that must be worked and flexed over time in order to improve. Start small. Look up the etymology of 1 word this week. Choose a word that you know has related words across languages.

• Dormant

• Hope

• Believe

• Edifice (and in this, to build)

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These five words will give you not only a ton of other words to learn and work with, but an overall better understanding of English and, for native English speakers, it will show you some of the ways in which your mother tongue is rooted in so many other languages. Native English speakers have a massive advantage relative to other language learners.

But looking into the roots of words is not the only way to use your curiosity to your advantage. You can, and should, also be seeking out synonyms at every opportunity. Diversify your vocabulary and find ways to express yourself in ways you have not previously. For those of you who have been taking my advice to write more often, you can simply go back and make improvements to your writing.

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Conclusion

I recently wrote an article about learning languages as an adult that seemed to resonate. In that I mentioned how adults have a unique advantage over children when it comes to learning languages and that is the ability to infer. While this remains true, it is entirely irrelevant if you are not willing to take the time to build up the reference points you have available to you.

At first it might not feel like you are getting anything out of the exercise, but over the course of just a few weeks you can build in dozens of new hand holds to climb when the time is right. Unfortunately, much of this is more akin to farming than it is to hunting, but both yield results when done correctly. Not only that, but with languages you have the freedom to do both; and you should do both.

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