ATHLLC1163479673

00:00:00.000 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life,

00:00:05.640 | money and travel. If you're new here, I'm your host, Chris Hutchins. And hello, or maybe

00:00:10.200 | bonjour, Jean Boc, Konichiwa, Annyeonghaseyo, Hola, Laurana. How many do I have here? Maybe

00:00:17.120 | Marhaba, Shalom, Nihao. That's probably all I've got right now, but I am sure my guest

00:00:22.240 | today has many more covered. Benny Lewis is a language hacker and self-taught polyglot

00:00:28.120 | who can speak a dozen languages. He also runs the world's largest language learning blog

00:00:32.440 | called Fluent in Three Months and is a best-selling author of six language learning books. I am

00:00:37.760 | really excited for today's conversation. We're going to talk about his practical approach

00:00:42.000 | that would help anyone, regardless of age or whether they have that language learning

00:00:46.080 | gene, learn and speak new languages through better, faster and more efficient ways. We'll

00:00:51.160 | also talk about what makes languages easy or hard to learn, how technology has impacted

00:00:55.580 | language learning, how to think about learning a language before going abroad, and so much

00:01:00.840 | more. There's going to be so much content in this episode. I can't wait for you to hear

00:01:04.600 | it. So let's jump in right after this.

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00:02:36.760 | Benny, I'm so jealous you're joining from South Korea. Thank you for being here.

00:02:42.400 | Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

00:02:44.880 | To kick us off, I want to understand, coming from the States, I feel like there just aren't

00:02:49.800 | as many people interested in learning a language as I wish there were. And I'm curious what

00:02:54.200 | you think some of the common challenges or misconceptions there are that might be holding

00:02:58.020 | people back.

00:02:59.020 | Well, I myself had the misconception. I didn't grow up speaking other languages. I was only

00:03:05.540 | speaking English when I was 21. I actually studied electronic engineering. So I definitely

00:03:11.120 | understand coming from the background of I'm not good at languages. Especially if you go

00:03:17.120 | into a technical field, it's very tempting to get this whole left brain right brain concept

00:03:22.120 | in your mind, where you're either good at technical things, like I was good at mathematics

00:03:27.480 | and the sciences. And then I decided because of that, I'm bad at the arts and languages.

00:03:33.920 | And I created a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would see failure and say to myself

00:03:39.860 | and to others, that's proof that I am destined to never learn a language. And I could list

00:03:45.020 | a million examples of where I failed an exam in school or even moved to Spain after I graduated.

00:03:52.080 | And I lived there for six months and I did not learn Spanish for those six months.

00:03:57.280 | I totally understand coming from a monolingual English country that you just think to yourself,

00:04:04.600 | I don't have the language gene. Other people have it. I don't have it. Or I did not grow

00:04:10.640 | up speaking a language. So it's too late. I'm past whatever the cutoff age is for learning

00:04:16.600 | a language. And a lot of people say these things to themselves. And that truly is a

00:04:22.000 | self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you embrace these reasons that you're going to fail, the

00:04:26.960 | more you essentially make them true.

00:04:30.160 | And I always like to think what Henry Ford said once, whether you think you can or think

00:04:34.760 | you can't, you're right. And I think that's very true with language learning.

00:04:39.560 | And what changed for you?

00:04:41.360 | So after those first failed six months living in Spain, I was telling myself more and more,

00:04:48.040 | it was just giving me more fuel for this, you suck at languages fire. One of the things

00:04:53.280 | that challenged that was I was telling myself the technical thing, you're an engineer, engineers

00:04:57.920 | don't learn languages. But I was on this exchange program that had a lot of other engineers

00:05:02.960 | coming into Spain and they would arrive not speaking any Spanish. But after a few months,

00:05:08.000 | a lot of them would actually be speaking some level of Spanish. So this challenged this

00:05:12.780 | belief that I had. So I decided to experiment. I tried a few things and a lot of them were

00:05:17.900 | huge flops. That's another thing I know a lot of your listeners, perhaps in the past,

00:05:23.160 | have attempted to learn a language. It was a failure. And they say, that's proof that

00:05:27.440 | I'm just destined to never speak it. I had a lot of those failures beyond the failures

00:05:32.240 | in school. While I was living in Spain, I went to a group class and I was worse than

00:05:37.280 | the class. The teacher would turn to me, ask me a question and I would say, see, and hope

00:05:43.400 | maybe that's right. And it was never right. She was asking me how old you are or whatever.

00:05:47.560 | I had to keep experimenting and keep failing until I found an approach that works for me.

00:05:53.240 | I am absolutely convinced that there is nobody in the entire world that cannot learn a second

00:05:59.720 | language. But what is true is there are many approaches that are completely inefficient

00:06:06.000 | for a lot of people. In my case, the academic approach of learning like I did in school,

00:06:11.960 | sitting in a classroom with 30 other people and having a teacher talk at us, that just

00:06:16.560 | does not work for me. In that environment, I am a terrible language learner. So I think

00:06:21.640 | it's okay for people to say, using this particular approach, I am a bad language learner, but

00:06:27.520 | that does not mean you will never learn a language. Maybe you need to find that approach.

00:06:33.160 | After all these failed experiments of multiple attempts to learn language in ways that did

00:06:37.740 | not work for me, my last experiment was, I'm going to try and just speak Spanish all the

00:06:43.520 | time outside of my work because I was teaching English. So obviously I had to speak English.

00:06:48.620 | As soon as I walked outside the door of the school, I would only speak Spanish. And my

00:06:53.460 | Spanish was absolutely abysmal. This was caveman Spanish of like barely a few dozen words.

00:07:01.560 | And I decided to use it anyway. I pushed through this extremely frustrating stage and there's

00:07:07.920 | literally a moment that everything changed for me when I was still broke at the time

00:07:13.260 | and I just bought an electric toothbrush and it broke on me. And I was so mad about it.

00:07:18.080 | I wanted a refund. So I charged into the shop that I had bought it in, ready to demand my

00:07:23.580 | money back. And then I realized when I went up to the manager, I don't know how to say

00:07:28.120 | refund. I don't know how to say toothbrush. I don't know how to say broken.

00:07:32.360 | So I was like, máquina de dientes malo, tooth machine bad, dinero y de vuelta, money round

00:07:39.360 | trip. And it was absolutely wrong. If I was sitting an exam in an academic context, I

00:07:45.920 | would have failed this, try to ask for a refund for a toothbrush test. But you know what?

00:07:51.760 | I got my money back. And that just blew my mind that maybe I don't need to be perfect

00:07:58.480 | in Spanish or I don't need to have a high level in Spanish. I just need to communicate.

00:08:04.000 | And I think that's something that a lot of people could embrace. This idea of instead

00:08:08.320 | of thinking that every mistake you make is a big red X on an exam paper, bringing you

00:08:13.000 | closer to a fail. Every mistake is just you trying to communicate. And the gauge of success

00:08:19.680 | is are you understood? And do you get the gist of what they're saying back to you?

00:08:24.800 | This is a lot more nebulous and leaves a lot more room for you to have some form of success.

00:08:30.560 | And once I saw that, I started to lower the bar on what counts for success. And that gave

00:08:36.520 | me a lot of wins to push my Spanish forward. I think a lot of people have their head a

00:08:42.840 | bit too much on this very distant long term goal that you want to master the language.

00:08:49.320 | And I have reached that stage. I have a C2 diploma in the likes of Spanish. I worked

00:08:54.000 | as a professional translator. I have reached this high level stage. But when I'm in language

00:08:58.480 | learning mode, I decide to embrace the fact that I'm a beginner, try to have fun with

00:09:03.560 | it, try to accept my limitations and just decide my goal is to make a lot of mistakes.

00:09:09.520 | And that's how I'm going to make progress. That completely transformed my entire language

00:09:13.240 | learning life.

00:09:14.240 | It's funny. I haven't had to learn a language since learning a similar lesson in a different

00:09:19.000 | way. We've had three au pairs stay with us speaking Spanish and Italian. And I don't

00:09:24.760 | speak Spanish or Italian. They have more English knowledge than we did in other languages.

00:09:29.960 | As a person on the other side of this, when someone says something wrong, you don't think,

00:09:34.680 | "Oh my gosh, this person got it all wrong." You just communicate.

00:09:38.160 | And when someone says, "Take car school", you know what they're saying. It's grammatically

00:09:42.680 | incorrect, but it doesn't matter. I've watched three people, their English constantly improves

00:09:48.060 | without me teaching them lessons. They're just hearing my responses.

00:09:51.520 | I haven't tried to pick up a language since having them here, but it's made me a lot more

00:09:57.440 | confident than I think that perfectionism bug I had. And that probably comes from school,

00:10:03.760 | right? Failing tests because I didn't know specific words or gosh, the number of times

00:10:08.320 | learning French, messing up on the gender of a word. It felt like that was the only

00:10:13.400 | thing I was trying to learn was conjugation and gender, but I'm not even convinced you

00:10:17.080 | need them well to communicate at a basic level.

00:10:20.080 | No, you don't. Because like you said, people are flexible and you do learn those things.

00:10:25.640 | So it's not like I'm saying, "Make these mistakes." A lot of people would say, "What about fossilization?

00:10:30.220 | The mistake will stay with you forever." It doesn't. You'll practice and eventually you'll

00:10:34.840 | find tricks that work for remembering conjugation and remembering what the gender of certain

00:10:40.440 | nouns are. You start to internalize those things, but they're less important at the

00:10:45.280 | start. And it's like you said, people have this idea of the spotlight effect. Everyone

00:10:51.120 | is looking at me. Everyone is judging me. And whenever I try to speak the language,

00:10:55.740 | they're all laughing at how much of an idiot I am because I use the wrong conjugation.

00:11:00.800 | That's not how the real world works. Most people are patient. Most people want you to

00:11:04.800 | succeed. And if you say a broken sentence that gets the point across, but is grammatically

00:11:11.400 | incorrect, you're not talking to a computer that's going to spit out an error message.

00:11:15.680 | You're talking to a human being and they're going to understand you. They're going to

00:11:18.880 | interpret what you're saying and the conversation will move forward.

00:11:22.520 | This perfectionism does not work in the context of languages. It's unfortunate because languages

00:11:29.040 | are exposed to us in an academic situation at first. That's our context. It is an academic

00:11:35.280 | thing. Every mistake you make is a problem. But in the real world, I like to think language

00:11:41.320 | is can't be learned for real. Languages can only be lived. And this is the attitude I

00:11:47.560 | try to take to it. I try to think of it more like a sport that I'm practicing and getting

00:11:52.240 | better at. If you're doing any kind of sport, you're not going to get punished if you don't

00:11:57.040 | have a perfect game on day one.

00:11:59.320 | That's not how it works. You get better progressively with time. I think it's a lot better to think

00:12:04.360 | of languages in that context rather than academically, because perfectionism is the worst enemy

00:12:11.240 | of all in language learning. It will absolutely defeat any sense of progress you're going

00:12:17.280 | to make. It's going to destroy your ego. You have to let go of your ego a lot in language

00:12:21.760 | learning and decide. I sound like an idiot right now, and I'm OK with that.

00:12:26.880 | It's very humbling. I do it over and over again. I'm doing it right now with Korean

00:12:30.720 | and it's kicking my ass again. Even though I have a high level in other languages, I'm

00:12:35.320 | an idiot once again. And because I'm OK with being an idiot, that's why I can learn the

00:12:41.760 | languages.

00:12:42.760 | First off, I think there are probably some people listening right now that are like,

00:12:45.720 | "Wow, maybe I actually do know enough Spanish or French or German or whatever I picked up

00:12:49.760 | in school to actually use it." If you're that person, I'm excited for you. I hope you get

00:12:54.360 | a chance to forget a lot of these things.

00:12:56.560 | Definitely want to talk more about the practice of picking up a language for people who haven't

00:12:59.840 | even started. But I know there's a common belief that adults are not as good as language

00:13:05.400 | learners as children. Do you think there's any age limit to this?

00:13:09.200 | So this comes back to what I was saying before about approach. The approach dictates how

00:13:14.080 | successful you're going to be. When I was researching this a long time ago, I came across

00:13:19.320 | a study in the University of Haifa in Israel that found that under the right circumstances,

00:13:26.000 | adults are better language learners than children. That sounds very counterintuitive because

00:13:31.740 | all the evidence we see out there is children are clearly learning languages more than adults

00:13:36.360 | are. And it's because it's not under the right circumstances for those adults. The adults

00:13:42.200 | are taking dusty old grammar books. The adults are going to group classes where they're zipping

00:13:47.660 | it and letting a teacher talk at them. The adults are not truly living through the language.

00:13:53.680 | The adults don't have any friends in the language. They're not playing games in the language

00:13:57.320 | like a child does. And a child has a better language learning approach. It's not that

00:14:03.600 | they are better at language learning. You could argue both points. You could argue why

00:14:07.840 | children are better. They have more neuroplasticity. Their brains are open to more things. But

00:14:13.520 | ultimately there are a lot of advantages adults have. We have complete control for the most

00:14:19.360 | part over our days, our lives. We can decide where we're going, what we're doing with our

00:14:24.200 | free time, a lot more than a child can. A child may learn a language, but a child cannot

00:14:29.200 | decide I want to learn Chinese. That's not going to happen for that child unless the

00:14:33.800 | parents decide, okay, I'm going to help you do that. I'm going to put you in the right

00:14:37.360 | environment or whatever. So we have a lot more control over the situation, but I understand

00:14:42.840 | there's a lot of baggage that comes with things. As an adult, letting go of that baggage is

00:14:47.280 | very difficult. That will slow us down. So there is a certain mental hill that you have

00:14:53.080 | to climb that does make it harder for adults. I think a lot of us have fallen into this

00:14:58.340 | perfectionist trap and that makes it harder because children are not perfectionists. When

00:15:03.320 | you think of any child learning their native language, they make a million mistakes and

00:15:08.160 | they're fine with it. We can take inspiration from children, but absolutely there is no

00:15:14.160 | cutoff age. There is no age where you cannot learn a language. The only thing you'll find

00:15:19.560 | when you dig really deep into this is maybe there's an age where it becomes a lot more

00:15:25.880 | difficult to become bilingual. That is absolutely a problem you may want to solve or try to

00:15:31.680 | solve, but honestly, who cares? I am not bilingual in any of my languages. I am at a mastery

00:15:38.800 | level. Everything I can do in English I can do in Spanish, but I still have an accent.

00:15:43.520 | I still make the odd mistake and there might be like an obscure word here or there that

00:15:47.840 | I don't know. I'm not bilingual. You're not going to confuse me for a native speaker,

00:15:52.400 | but I'm close enough that I can function like a native speaker would, and that's fine. Maybe

00:15:57.160 | there's an age where if I'd started learning Spanish before that, I could change that gap,

00:16:02.040 | but who cares? It doesn't matter. I'm not trying to become a spy. I don't want people

00:16:07.280 | to think that I'm from Spain so I can fool them. I'm from Ireland. I'm proud of I'm from

00:16:11.680 | Ireland. If I've got a little bit of an accent, it has that sense of charm to it, so I'm okay

00:16:16.320 | with not being bilingual. Once you accept that, then this whole cutoff age becomes irrelevant.

00:16:23.440 | That's where the cutoff age is. It's for bilingual fluency in a language. I have come across

00:16:29.080 | exceptions. I have found adults who can become essentially the same as a native speaker even

00:16:35.120 | though they learned it later in life, but I wouldn't necessarily say that's something

00:16:38.600 | you could scale to a lot of other people easily. The goal should be fluency. If you can function

00:16:44.920 | the same in your target language like you would in English, then that's all you ever

00:16:49.960 | need. You're good with what you can do, and that is something every adult in the world

00:16:55.360 | can absolutely do. Given the caveat, there is a lot of work they have to do ahead of

00:17:01.360 | time in terms of mental changes and learning what the right approach is and so on.

00:17:06.240 | So, I want to come back to some of those mental changes. It just made me think of something.

00:17:09.520 | Right before I came to this interview, I told my daughter, who's about to turn three, "Oh,

00:17:14.040 | I'm going to go record a podcast, so I'm going to miss your bedtime tonight. It's going to

00:17:17.480 | be about languages." I was like, "How many languages do you speak?" She was like, "I

00:17:21.480 | speak Italian, I speak English, and I speak Spanish." She maybe knows 50 words of Spanish

00:17:27.320 | and Italian, but in her mind, she speaks it. It just crossed my mind that I could probably

00:17:31.120 | speak thousands of words of French. I could get along in the country by myself, no problem.

00:17:35.840 | Probably not fluent, but I'm comfortable enough to speak. And I don't actually consider myself

00:17:40.220 | someone who speaks French. I can speak French. So, that confidence to just feel like you're

00:17:45.360 | already there. You mentioned the sports example. My parents are not going to be on the World

00:17:50.040 | Cup field ever, but they could stand on the ground and kick a soccer ball. They can play

00:17:54.680 | soccer, just not at any level that would be fun to watch, or maybe fun to watch for a

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00:20:37.480 | It's one thing to say, so you'd have to get over that fear. Are there any hacks or tips

00:20:41.360 | you've developed or helped people with to get over those nerves and get over the need

00:20:45.480 | to be a perfectionist?

00:20:46.480 | Yeah, I mean, the biggest hack I can give to everybody is you have to speak your target

00:20:53.160 | language from day one. I think one big mental barrier people have is they decide I'm going

00:21:00.440 | to study the language for a certain amount of time. Maybe that's a few months, maybe

00:21:04.720 | it's a year, a New Year's resolution. I'm going to learn Spanish. So one year from now,

00:21:09.680 | I will have reached that magic moment when I can finally walk up to a native speaker

00:21:14.300 | and speak Spanish to them. And I think that is a fool's errand, because this creates a

00:21:20.720 | new situation in your head where you have to wait until you're ready, and then you can

00:21:26.440 | make all the excuses in the world that you're not ready yet, because you will never be at

00:21:31.520 | 100% perfectionism in Spanish. Even when you reach the very high levels I've talked about,

00:21:38.320 | there's still a couple of little things you need to polish. If you were enough of a perfectionist,

00:21:42.660 | you would never speak your target language. To throw that out the window, you have to

00:21:47.240 | decide I'm going to speak it right away. Even though I only know 10 words, I'm still going

00:21:53.040 | to try and use it. For instance, a couple of months ago, I started doing this with Korean.

00:21:57.320 | On day one, I decided I am going to get somebody on Zoom, a native Korean speaker, and I'm

00:22:02.400 | going to speak only in Korean to them. This may obviously have a lot of questions like

00:22:07.760 | how can you do that if you've literally just started to learn the language? I'll cheat

00:22:11.880 | a little bit. What I'll do is I'll have a Google Translate tab open, and I will, ahead

00:22:17.440 | of the lesson, I'll try to find a few phrases I know I'm likely to use. I'm from Ireland,

00:22:23.000 | my name is, and so on. Then I'll say this to the teacher. The teacher will reply, and

00:22:28.040 | I won't understand what they said. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of the phrases

00:22:31.880 | I prepared is, "I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you write that down, please?" I'll write

00:22:37.480 | that in the chat, and I can copy and paste that into Google Translate. It is a giant

00:22:42.600 | crutch. You could argue this doesn't really count as speaking the language, but the point

00:22:47.040 | is, you use these crutches like you use a stabilizer on a bike. It is giving you the

00:22:52.520 | ability to move forward, even though obviously you're not moving forward without the tool.

00:22:57.920 | With time, you'll need the crutch less and less. The stabilizers on your bike, you can

00:23:02.920 | take them off after you've learned how to get your balance and such. That is my biggest

00:23:08.400 | tip by far, is let go of the fact that you have to wait until you're ready, and speak

00:23:14.000 | right now. Decide, "I'm going to get in front of somebody." This is a lot more affordable

00:23:19.520 | than people think. People imagine, I've got to book a language class, and they look in

00:23:24.400 | their hometown, and they find the language class. It's expensive, $50 an hour, but they

00:23:28.560 | figure, "No, it's worth the investment." The thing is, if you go on a lot of websites,

00:23:35.040 | and you try to find a teacher with Spanish, who lives in literally any Latin American

00:23:39.120 | country, you can take advantage of a stronger currency exchange. You can get a really good

00:23:44.960 | teacher for $10 or $15 an hour, who's earning pretty decently in their country. With that,

00:23:51.320 | you have one person who is giving their undivided attention to you.

00:23:55.440 | Ahead of time, I decided with my Korean teachers, "I am paying this person for patience, because

00:24:02.040 | I am going to be extremely slow. I'm going to be incredibly awkward. I am paying this

00:24:08.320 | person to be patient with me, so I don't have to feel as bad that I'm wasting their time

00:24:13.960 | or whatever, because I'm paying for their time." That takes a lot of the stress off

00:24:19.000 | me, because obviously, I'm not going to walk up to a stranger on the street, and start

00:24:23.800 | blurting my low level of the language at them, and expect anything positive to happen.

00:24:29.260 | When I'm paying for somebody's time, that's different. I try to hire a teacher online.

00:24:33.880 | There's loads of good websites. One that probably has the most teachers is italki.com. Find

00:24:41.720 | a teacher there, book them, and you just start talking with them. It's going to suck. You're

00:24:45.760 | going to feel like an idiot. You have to remember, you have to suck a little less every day.

00:24:52.640 | The goal is not perfectionism. The goal is not to be a genius. The goal is not to debate

00:24:59.480 | Kantian epistemology in your target language. The goal is suck a little less every day.

00:25:06.440 | That is essentially my biggest tip of all. If you take anything from this interview,

00:25:11.920 | take that. Speak from the beginning. You're going to suck. Accept that. Embrace it, and

00:25:17.240 | just suck a tiny bit less every day, and that progressively leads to improvement.

00:25:23.400 | I love it. It's very simple. You have this whole program, Fluent in Three Months. I'm

00:25:28.420 | also curious about where the three months came from. Start with that, but it has to

00:25:31.920 | be more than just continually have these conversations. Are there steps along the way that someone

00:25:36.360 | should follow learning a language?

00:25:38.040 | Yeah, okay. So the three months, I know when people would see the title of Fluent in Three

00:25:42.120 | Months, they may imagine I'm talking about a particular program that will guarantee success

00:25:46.560 | in three months, but what it's more about is specificity. So I'm not prescribing to

00:25:52.220 | anybody that you must do this within a certain timeline. The problem I tend to see is a lot

00:25:58.160 | of people are extremely vague with their targets. So they will make a New Year's resolution,

00:26:03.520 | I want to learn Spanish, and that's it. That's all they come up with, and that has absolutely

00:26:08.560 | nothing attached to it. You need smart goals, specific, measurable, all that stuff. That's

00:26:15.320 | what I was thinking when I was getting started with all of this. I needed to have a specific

00:26:20.820 | target in a specific deadline. In my case, three months happens to work because I'm a

00:26:27.480 | nomad. I travel all the time, and when you travel, you will find a lot of countries tend

00:26:32.660 | to have a three month tourist visa limit. That's all the time I had, so that's the deadline

00:26:37.860 | I was going to give myself. Initially, I would travel to the country. Nowadays, I do it differently.

00:26:42.960 | I learn the language ahead of time, before going. Then I'll spend three months in the

00:26:46.820 | country without having to be in as intensive a learning mode. Ultimately, that's where

00:26:51.880 | it came from for me, is it's a tourist visa limit, and I find it's the Goldilocks zone.

00:26:56.520 | A year is just so much time that you can keep putting it off, decide, I'll do it once a

00:27:02.140 | week or whatever, and you might cram it at the end. Whereas a few weeks or a month is

00:27:08.340 | too little time to make any significant progress, so three months of very intensive language

00:27:14.460 | learning, if you're the kind of person who can work intensively for a particular time

00:27:19.600 | and take time off, which I know is not the case for a lot of people.

00:27:23.020 | For me, what I would do is I would work really hard for nine months out of the year, save

00:27:28.560 | up money, and then I don't have to work so much for three months, and I make it my full-time

00:27:33.240 | job. That is not something realistic for most people, so I don't guarantee fluency in three

00:27:38.660 | months, because if you want to make a really high level in a short amount of time, it needs

00:27:43.920 | to be a full-time job. For most people, try your best to decide three months or four months

00:27:49.660 | or six months, whatever it is, I can make a lot of sacrifices. I can decide I'm going

00:27:55.160 | to give up English-speaking shows on Netflix for three months, and the time I would put

00:28:01.580 | into watching those shows, I'm going to study the language, or at the very least, watch

00:28:05.900 | the shows in that language if I need to wind down or whatever. I go out with my friends

00:28:11.220 | maybe three times a week. I'm going to cut that down to once a week or once every two

00:28:15.420 | weeks, and the extra time I'm going to put into learning the language, I'm going to make

00:28:19.180 | a lot of sacrifices in my life, and those sacrifices are going to give me more time.

00:28:24.640 | Even if that's one hour a day, you utilize that one hour and decide I can't sustain this

00:28:29.940 | in the long term. Eventually, I need to relax. I need to be seeing my friends regularly,

00:28:34.700 | whatever it may be, but you decide for this short term of three months or four months

00:28:39.180 | or whatever specific number is realistic for you, the biggest priority in my life is learning

00:28:45.540 | this language. I'm going to eat and breathe this language. I'm going to be listening to

00:28:50.660 | podcasts about the language, reading books in the language, using apps or doing flashcards

00:28:55.760 | in the language, and of course, I'm going to be speaking the language with actual human

00:29:01.340 | beings via a Zoom call or whatever it may be. I'm going to do that intensively for a

00:29:07.100 | certain period of time. That's going to make a difference because a lot of people don't

00:29:11.580 | have any solid goals with their language. They don't have any sense of intensity, and

00:29:17.580 | try to do it in whatever free time they have.

00:29:20.460 | They're in a supermarket line, and they decide I'll do some Duolingo, and they've done something

00:29:25.620 | that day, and then they say, "Oh, I've done something in the language." That's not what

00:29:29.500 | I'm talking about. You need to let go of this, "I'm going to do anything for five minutes

00:29:34.460 | and feel like I'm doing something in the language." It needs to be a true project. That's what

00:29:40.580 | I do. I make it a project. The three months works for me because it is an amount of time

00:29:45.500 | that I can throw myself at a project. I start to run out of energy, and then go easy on

00:29:50.980 | myself the rest of the time. Generally, because I deal with multiple languages, I learn a

00:29:55.740 | new language for three months, but I'll be maintaining my languages for the rest of the

00:30:00.900 | year. I don't have to worry about learning a new language.

00:30:03.740 | It's an extremely intensive burst of progress. That's what I try to help people with. I run

00:30:09.940 | my own coaching program. It goes over three months. It doesn't necessarily mean you have

00:30:15.100 | to have the same target as me, but when people are on the coaching program, I at least guarantee

00:30:20.060 | by the end of it, you will be conversing in the language. Conversing is a lot more flexible

00:30:25.580 | than having to be fluent, because conversing, you can still talk to someone who's patient

00:30:30.500 | and you can talk slowly, and you can make a lot more mistakes.

00:30:34.180 | Some specific goal that works for you that might be realistic, but still pushing yourself

00:30:39.420 | as much as possible, that's what leads to a lot more success. That's what I see people

00:30:44.620 | not doing. People who don't succeed in learning a language, they don't have anything they're

00:30:49.140 | trying to reach in any timeline. So smart goals changes everything, and that's where

00:30:55.100 | the three months comes from.

00:30:56.380 | Okay. So we set specific goals. We set a timeframe. I like the idea of three months to get to

00:31:01.780 | fluency might be possible, but you've got to really be intensive. Is there an amount

00:31:06.260 | of time that you think is the minimum someone needs to put in to get to that conversational

00:31:10.940 | level?

00:31:11.940 | I think that's where you start to really see what is unique to the person. I found for

00:31:17.020 | me, I can't make progress in a language unless I'm putting at least an hour a day in. But

00:31:22.780 | I have come across a lot of people who actually can switch their brain into language learning

00:31:27.820 | very quickly. They can do something with 15 minute bursts. I've seen them progress over

00:31:33.500 | the longer period of time, obviously, but I have seen them progress. So this depends

00:31:37.840 | on the person. I'm not the kind of person that can do anything in 15 minutes. It takes

00:31:43.440 | my brain time to adapt, get used to it and get my momentum back. I personally need at

00:31:49.500 | least an hour. And generally I try to do a few hours because I'm doing it intensively,

00:31:54.500 | but I understand that's not as realistic for a lot of people in their life situations.

00:31:58.460 | So depends on the person. If you're the kind of person that feels like you can make genuine

00:32:03.380 | progress in a 30 minute window, that may be your minimum. But of course, this is why I

00:32:09.780 | was saying before, the first thing you do is look at your timetable and see what can

00:32:15.020 | I sacrifice for these next two months or four months or whatever the number is and find

00:32:21.100 | more time. There's no magic number. One hour is the number that's going to change your

00:32:25.780 | life. Just find how much time you have because the more time you do each day, the more you're

00:32:30.860 | going to learn.

00:32:31.860 | People always ask me how long will it take me to reach this level in the language? They

00:32:36.900 | would say, Benny, your three months are crazy because I spent six years learning Spanish

00:32:42.220 | in school and I would interrupt them and say, no, you didn't. You did not spend six years

00:32:47.220 | learning Spanish. Six years elapsed through which you maybe went to a one hour Spanish

00:32:53.860 | class with people and you were daydreaming about a girl you had a crush on or whatever

00:32:58.260 | it is.

00:32:59.260 | It's not quite the same as intensively living and breathing this language for a certain

00:33:04.620 | period. It's why I tell people the amount of time that elapses is not what's important

00:33:09.900 | for counting how successful. It's more about how many hours of dedicated time are you putting

00:33:15.460 | into that language where it's got 100% of your attention. Any less attention is going

00:33:20.660 | to give less important results. You can listen to a podcast while you're doing the dishes.

00:33:27.420 | You can do something at the same time and it is going to help you, but it's going to

00:33:31.860 | be less useful. So I would say an hour of listening to a podcast while you're doing

00:33:37.300 | other tasks is equivalent to maybe 10 minutes of actually giving it your undivided attention,

00:33:44.100 | replaying the audio, taking notes.

00:33:46.700 | It's why it's a very nebulous thing to decide how much time do I need because it depends

00:33:51.780 | so much on how you're using that time. This is why I tell people, don't worry if you've

00:33:57.600 | spent six years or whatever, I'm the same. In school, I had learned a German for six

00:34:02.920 | years and at the end of those six years, I couldn't do anything. I went to Germany and

00:34:08.380 | I couldn't order a train ticket. And that was literally one of the things in my lessons

00:34:13.140 | that kept coming up, how to order a train ticket. And I couldn't even do that. I say

00:34:16.600 | that I learned German for six years, but I didn't learn German for six years. German

00:34:21.780 | learning happened in my schedule where I was in that class, but it wasn't six years. Three

00:34:28.460 | intensive months. That is a whole different universe compared to what we think of for

00:34:34.260 | language learning in a very casual or passive way. You really need to take active control

00:34:40.420 | and it needs to be a priority in your life. And you could do a lot more in a shorter time

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00:37:25.620 | So you mentioned the example of it's really important to start speaking early on and there's

00:37:30.340 | ways that you could do it a lot more affordably. And it's really important how you spend the

00:37:33.780 | time. What are the things that are important to spend your time on aside from native speaking

00:37:39.740 | with another human? Is it vocabulary? Is it writing? Is it reading? What are the core

00:37:45.780 | elements in that three month period of what you need to be doing?

00:37:49.660 | I would definitely understand. This is one of the first questions people ask me is what

00:37:53.420 | is the best app for learning a language? What are the best books I can buy? What should

00:37:58.660 | I be doing with my time in terms of vocabulary and all that? I have to say, I don't want

00:38:03.260 | to sound like a broken record, but the biggest thing you should be thinking about is speaking

00:38:08.580 | with a human being. That should be the center of gravity. Everything else is building upon

00:38:14.180 | that. Every day I try to have a lesson with a teacher or if I'm less intensive, maybe

00:38:18.940 | a couple of times a week. And then everything else that I'm doing is to augment that experience

00:38:25.260 | with my teacher.

00:38:26.460 | Maybe after the class passes, I think to myself, man, I really suck at vocabulary. You have

00:38:32.260 | to do sort of a triage system. You imagine a hospital where all these sick people are

00:38:37.900 | coming in. There's a million problems to deal with, but the guy with the runny nose is not

00:38:42.420 | as important as the guy with the gunshot wound. You have to do this with your language learning.

00:38:47.300 | And yes, of course, you could think, oh, my accent sucks. Oh my God, I'm not conjugating

00:38:52.100 | my verbs, or I don't know the right gender of these nouns. But none of that makes a big

00:38:57.060 | difference with actual communication. I guarantee you when you're speaking languages and you

00:39:03.180 | mess up the gender, 99.99% of the time they will understand you regardless.

00:39:09.940 | People always cite, oh, but there's this one really specific example that if you switch

00:39:14.940 | the gender it means something different. That doesn't happen almost ever. For most cases,

00:39:20.940 | when you say in German "der" instead of "die" or you say "el" instead of "la" in Spanish,

00:39:27.220 | they understand what you mean. You have to start thinking of other things. Basic vocabulary.

00:39:32.300 | I'm going to do in my spare time, not because that's going to help me with some vague future

00:39:36.940 | of like generally improving my Spanish. I'm a lot more short term cited and I'm thinking,

00:39:43.300 | what can I do to make my next experience tomorrow or next week, if that's my next class, what

00:39:49.060 | am I going to do to make that slightly better in the language? So maybe then I will learn

00:39:54.740 | some vocabulary. And I'm a big fan of using flashcards because they integrate the spaced

00:40:00.260 | repetition system. They space it out to make sure you're remembering the vocabulary just

00:40:05.380 | before you would potentially forget it. For that, I use an app Anki, A-N-K-I, but I know

00:40:10.540 | for a lot of people it has a very simple interface, which works for me, but there's other apps

00:40:15.540 | that have notification sounds, a prettier interface that may be a bit more manageable

00:40:21.940 | for people. There's a bunch of apps that you can use. Which one you use isn't really as

00:40:26.900 | important as the fact that you are deciding how is this going to help my spoken sessions?

00:40:32.540 | I'm not the kind of person who says you must download this app. You must get this specific

00:40:37.140 | book because these are incidental. I will just literally find whatever book, I'll just

00:40:42.260 | walk into a bookshop wherever I happen to be and pick up that one. Obviously, except

00:40:46.780 | for my books, those are the books people should be buying first. But that being said, you

00:40:51.700 | just buy some language course and make sure you're doing stuff with your teacher and your

00:40:56.940 | teacher will help you decide a bit more directionally what you need to put your time into. I do

00:41:03.260 | understand people always want to know what is the app, what is the book? All of these

00:41:08.340 | will be 1% to 5% contributing to your success compared to are you finding a human being

00:41:15.260 | and speaking with them regularly? My focus is way more in that direction. In terms of

00:41:20.100 | what you're doing in the long term, you can't speak your way to fluency. You're not going

00:41:24.700 | to speak every day and then eventually end up at fluency. I have a bit more of a dynamic

00:41:29.180 | learning approach. At the beginning, it's all about speaking. That's priority. I just

00:41:34.460 | need to have these lessons and get over my lack of confidence in using the little language

00:41:40.700 | that I have. But with time, when I have the basic ability to communicate, then I find

00:41:46.900 | some of the more traditional learning resources are great. I will go through a language learning

00:41:51.580 | course book and do its exercises. I don't recommend that to people at the beginning,

00:41:56.980 | but in the later intermediate stages, that's when you need to start polishing up your skills.

00:42:02.540 | That's when it becomes a little bit more important in this triage system. You no longer have

00:42:07.820 | gunshot wounds, so maybe the runny nose of getting the genders right in the language

00:42:12.620 | is a little bit more important now because you've solved all the other big problems.

00:42:17.220 | I start to focus on grammar. I will study grammar. I'm not a fan of grammar in the beginning

00:42:23.380 | stages. I think it is one of the worst uses of your time to be studying grammar when you've

00:42:28.060 | just started to learn the language. But at the intermediate stage, that's when it is

00:42:32.460 | actually a bigger priority because that is literally your biggest problem. You're already

00:42:37.140 | communicating in the language, but your grammar is lacking, so that's what you try to fix.

00:42:42.380 | It's a very dynamic approach that you see what is my biggest problem right now and you

00:42:47.620 | try to solve that problem progressively with time. For people just starting off, your biggest

00:42:53.780 | problem is you can't say anything in the language and you don't know what they're saying back

00:42:58.180 | to you, so this is more a case of just pushing through the practice stage of giving yourself

00:43:04.860 | face time with a human being in whatever way that may be.

00:43:09.140 | For languages that don't use the kind of Latin alphabet, how important is reading and writing?

00:43:15.720 | Reading and writing is something I also tend to put later in the intermediate, regardless.

00:43:20.980 | Even for Latin based languages like Spanish or French, I wouldn't pick up a book and try

00:43:26.140 | to read it until I'm at the intermediate stages because it's just too much work with Spanish.

00:43:32.940 | When I first started, one of my failed experiments was I picked up El Senor de los Anillos, Lord

00:43:38.580 | of the Rings, and I thought if I read this, I'll be fluent by the end of it. It took me

00:43:42.660 | weeks to get to page two because I was literally looking up every single word. That was really

00:43:48.340 | not a good use of my time, whereas when I've reached the intermediate stage, then it becomes

00:43:53.300 | more manageable. Then I'm only looking up every 15th or 30th word. I can actually read

00:43:59.260 | significantly more and it becomes more pleasurable. Personally, I leave reading till later. I

00:44:05.340 | wouldn't necessarily say this is something I would prescribe to everybody because I've

00:44:09.940 | interviewed a lot of other language learners, a lot of episodes on my podcast where I talk

00:44:15.700 | to very interesting people. I can think of a bunch of them. There's Steve Kaufman, who

00:44:20.100 | runs the website LingQ. There's Professor Krashen, who's very famous for talking about

00:44:26.580 | comprehensible input, which is philosophy in language learning, where you try to get

00:44:31.820 | exposure to something that is within your language level, and that leans a lot more

00:44:36.620 | towards reading and people would actually read from the beginning. That may work more

00:44:41.740 | appropriately for a lot of people, but what I've found is it tends to work a little bit

00:44:46.260 | more for maybe either older generations or people who are really not as passionate to

00:44:53.260 | speak the language, and that's fine. They have a lot of goals in the language, but walking

00:44:57.700 | up to people and using it with them ultimately is maybe not their biggest priority. In my

00:45:02.220 | case, I'm a traveler. Speaking the language is by far the biggest priority. I need to

00:45:07.100 | make friends. I need to interact with people in complicated situations. Once I've done

00:45:13.380 | that, then I come back to reading and writing, regardless of whatever script it uses.

00:45:18.540 | In terms of how they're different, I don't really change how I learn a language when

00:45:22.720 | it's European versus when it's an Asian language. Maybe with something like Chinese as a character-based

00:45:28.940 | writing system, in that case, I would absolutely learn all my vocabulary through pinyin, which

00:45:36.300 | is the romanized version of Chinese characters. People say Chinese is one of the hardest languages

00:45:42.140 | in the world. Actually, Mandarin is not that hard. Grammatically, it's very straightforward,

00:45:49.660 | and the way the words are formed is very logical. I really don't think Mandarin is that bad

00:45:54.600 | of a language, but of course, Chinese characters are a huge barrier that you have to work through.

00:46:00.800 | I just decide, let's take this in two stages, like a native Chinese person would have done.

00:46:06.600 | Chinese children learn how to speak first, and then they learn how to read and write.

00:46:11.560 | That's what I was going to do. I learned how to speak Mandarin, and I would remember my

00:46:16.440 | vocabulary through pinyin, which is using our letters from the Latin alphabet to remember

00:46:21.840 | how to say the words. Then with time, I added Chinese characters so I could begin to read

00:46:27.200 | when that was in my triage system of a bigger priority.

00:46:31.800 | For a language like Korean that I'm currently doing, its writing system is very logical.

00:46:36.380 | You can learn it in a weekend if you put some intensive time into it. It's very straightforward.

00:46:41.040 | A lot of languages that have a phonetic system, like Cyrillic for Russian, or Arabic, or Greek,

00:46:47.480 | or in the case I'm doing now, Korean, you can still incorporate learning the writing

00:46:52.780 | system because that's going to help you a lot with vocabulary. You really want to be

00:46:57.040 | learning your vocabulary through its writing system when it's phonetic.

00:47:01.680 | People get intimidated. When I saw Korean before learning it, I was like, "Wow, all

00:47:06.000 | these circles and lines. This must take years to master." It is so easy. I cannot overstate

00:47:13.440 | how easy the Korean writing system is to pick up. It's extremely logical, and it's something

00:47:20.040 | I did in a weekend. You would be surprised for a lot of languages. It looks intimidating

00:47:24.640 | because all these squiggles and lines you've never seen before, but it's like anything.

00:47:28.900 | You put a little bit of time in, and it becomes manageable.

00:47:32.480 | Are there some languages that do skew on the harder or easier side to learn?

00:47:37.720 | I definitely have talked about this quite a lot. There's a podcast I've done with Paul

00:47:42.280 | Jorgensen, and he's a big YouTuber, millions of subscribers from the Lang Focus. In that,

00:47:48.320 | we talked about how to make difficult languages easy. People can find that in my podcast.

00:47:52.560 | Very fascinating when you dive into that one particular topic. But what I say in general

00:47:58.040 | whenever I'm thinking about this is, I like to get people in a different mindset. I'll

00:48:03.440 | give you an example. When I was in Spain learning Spanish, I met a Spaniard who was learning

00:48:09.760 | both Japanese and French. I said to him, "Obviously, French is going to be a lot easier for you,

00:48:15.000 | isn't it? Because it's in the same language family." He said, "Absolutely not. Japanese

00:48:19.280 | is so much easier." I didn't get it. I was like, "How? It's so different." He said, "Because

00:48:24.800 | I'm forced to learn French in school, whereas I really want to go to Japan. I like anime.

00:48:30.480 | I think Japanese girls are cute. I've always dreamed of living in the country."

00:48:34.640 | That completely transformed his experience and it made Japanese easier. When people come

00:48:40.200 | from this more academic way of looking at a language, they think, "How am I going to

00:48:44.960 | decide which language is harder? Well, I'm going to put one language on one side, another

00:48:49.560 | language on another side, and compare them side by side. If I see more common words between

00:48:55.760 | English and French, that makes it easier. If I see complicated grammar, like Japanese

00:49:01.680 | having a different word order in the sentence, that makes it hard."

00:49:05.740 | That for me is such an inhuman way of deciding which languages are harder and easy. It is

00:49:11.640 | easy to scale it. You can say, "Regardless of the person, this language is harder than

00:49:16.800 | that." But realistically, each person has their own situation when it comes to learning

00:49:22.860 | a language. They have their own passions, their own motivations.

00:49:27.000 | When I think of all the languages I've learned, compare my experiences, I would say something

00:49:32.520 | like Chinese was actually easier for me than Spanish. People always think, "That doesn't

00:49:39.240 | make any sense because Spanish is much closer to English," and all these other reasons.

00:49:43.600 | But ultimately, I had a bad language learning approach with Spanish for a long time. It

00:49:49.080 | took me a very long time to get to fluency with Spanish, to even get to a conversational

00:49:53.840 | level. I kept kicking myself. I kept telling myself, "Your Spanish is miserable. People

00:49:59.080 | are laughing at you. Who would want to speak Spanish with you?" All of these reasons are

00:50:04.040 | why it took me so long to learn Spanish.

00:50:07.840 | Whereas with Mandarin, at that stage, I had a good language learning approach, a good

00:50:11.720 | attitude. I embraced making mistakes. After three months, I reached a pretty good conversational

00:50:18.800 | stage. People can see YouTube videos of me where I'm interviewing people in Mandarin

00:50:24.280 | three months after I've started to learn the language. I could not do that with Spanish.

00:50:29.120 | This does not mean I'm going to say universally, "Therefore, Mandarin is easier than Spanish."

00:50:34.680 | Obviously not. It is the context. I was a more confident person. I didn't have great

00:50:40.600 | motivation at the start. I didn't really know why did I want to learn Spanish. I was putting

00:50:46.160 | the effort in a very inconsistent way.

00:50:48.880 | Whereas with Mandarin, I knew I want to travel China. I want to take a train 2,000 kilometers

00:50:54.600 | deep into the country. I want to make a video of me getting a kung fu lesson in a village

00:51:00.120 | with a kung fu master. All these dreams that I managed to make come true, I had these in

00:51:06.240 | mind and that made Mandarin easier. When I talk to people and I see they've decided they

00:51:12.400 | want to learn a particular language and it has real, genuine significance in their life,

00:51:18.320 | like their family background is there, or they have a love interest in the country they

00:51:23.040 | want to move in with, or whatever it may be, that is their passion and that is going to

00:51:27.840 | make that language significantly more approachable because they have huge motivation to learn

00:51:33.880 | it.

00:51:34.880 | Whether languages are easier or harder is insignificant because they aren't going to

00:51:40.440 | be easier if you don't care about them. Whatever language is the most important in your life,

00:51:47.080 | that is the easiest language because that's the one you're going to be able to get momentum

00:51:51.880 | to learn.

00:51:52.880 | I love that. I know a lot of the podcasts we talk about travel. I know a lot of our

00:51:57.160 | listeners love to travel. One of the times people are often most excited to learn a language

00:52:01.360 | is that maybe they planned a trip or they have this, like you said, in China, a vision

00:52:05.260 | for a trip they want to take. Not everyone who is planning a trip to a foreign country

00:52:09.240 | necessarily feels like they need to become fluent. Is there a stop along the way where

00:52:16.640 | you can have enough skills in a language to have a different experience traveling and

00:52:22.200 | unlock really interesting things that you can get to a lot quicker? Any advice for someone

00:52:27.960 | in that situation?

00:52:28.960 | Well, when it comes to language levels, there is a lot of specificity with this. This is

00:52:34.160 | something I take into account with my targets. I always work off the European Common Framework,

00:52:39.800 | which has a very specific way of categorizing language levels. It splits it into A, B, and

00:52:45.320 | C, and within each one, it further subsplits it into one and two. A is beginner, B is intermediate,

00:52:52.440 | C is advanced, one is lower, two is upper. A2 means you're an advanced beginner, and

00:52:59.280 | C1 means you're a lower level mastery speaker of the language. This scale of six different

00:53:05.400 | levels is where I pin everything. For me, fluency begins at the B2 level. This is upper

00:53:12.560 | intermediate. What that means is you can talk about most things you would talk about in

00:53:17.880 | casual social situations, but because you're not at the C levels, you don't have a mastery

00:53:24.040 | level. In my case, I studied engineering. The languages I have a C level at, I could

00:53:28.440 | work as an engineer in those languages, and I could have a philosophical conversation

00:53:32.520 | with you about very deep subjects, but for the most part, most conversations I'm going

00:53:37.560 | to have are at the high level B2 social conversations. That's what I'm aiming for, and it's important

00:53:43.720 | on this scale to remove perfectionism, because even the C2 is still not perfect. It means

00:53:50.080 | that you can work functionally through the language the same way you would in your mother

00:53:54.680 | tongue. Now, on this same scale, I think at the A2 level, upper beginner, this is where

00:54:01.760 | you can function very confidently as an independent tourist in the language. You can ask for directions,

00:54:09.400 | you can get the gist of their reply, you can deal with problems like you have an injury

00:54:14.080 | and you can get yourself to the hospital. All of these very basic functional things

00:54:19.100 | you can do with confidence, even though you can't necessarily have full-on conversations.

00:54:24.720 | I think that is fine for somebody who's going to the country briefly, and this is something

00:54:29.320 | you can genuinely get to in a lot shorter of a time than people realise. The very steep

00:54:34.500 | curve at the beginning, you can make a lot of progress very quickly. What tends to happen

00:54:39.920 | is we reach the intermediate plateau. This is where things start to get really rough,

00:54:45.460 | where you're putting as much effort in, but you get stuck at the middle level. This will

00:54:50.600 | happen to everybody, and that's okay as long as you can push through to very beginning

00:54:55.960 | stages. That B1, I feel, is something that is definitely achievable in a matter of a

00:55:01.320 | certain amount of months for people. Regardless of your background, if you're able to put

00:55:05.200 | the time in, a B1 level means you can have a lot of conversations with people, as long

00:55:11.080 | as they're a little patient with you. It does not count as fluency, but it counts as conversational.

00:55:17.320 | For me, this is where I love to be in my travels because I can start to make friends in the

00:55:22.880 | language. I can really hang out with people. If you're single, you can go on dates with

00:55:27.800 | people. You can do a lot with that B1 level. This, for me, is a minimum to feel like I'm

00:55:33.240 | truly experiencing the culture in a direct way. Anything less than that is more a case

00:55:40.400 | of how confident a tourist you are going to be, which in itself can be a wonderful thing.

00:55:45.680 | You can have a lot of great experiences, but ultimately you are going to be doing most

00:55:49.840 | of your things in English if you're only at an A2 level. It depends on your style of travel.

00:55:55.180 | My style of travel, obviously, is I avoid English. I want to make only local friends,

00:56:00.560 | so I have to get at least a B1 level. That's where, when you said at the beginning, Benny

00:56:06.480 | speaks 12 languages, number 12 comes from B1 and up. I personally only say I speak a

00:56:13.360 | language if I can have conversations in the language, not if I would function as a tourist.

00:56:19.800 | I actually have another dozen languages that I could function as a tourist quite confidently,

00:56:25.560 | but the thing is, that's not as impressive as it sounds because you can do that a lot

00:56:29.120 | quicker than people realize. You can be a very confident tourist. You can have a bunch

00:56:32.840 | of phrases ready to go in a very short time span, especially if you're having consistent

00:56:38.400 | conversations ahead of time. I did, for a while, travel to the country and think I'm

00:56:43.960 | going to get off the plane and immediately start speaking the language or start learning

00:56:47.980 | the language. That was an interesting period in my life, but nowadays I try to learn the

00:56:52.480 | language ahead of time. I don't leave it for when I'm in the country, especially for people

00:56:57.800 | who can only travel to a country for a very limited amount of time. I don't want to be

00:57:03.120 | in language learning mode if I'm only going to be in a country for a month or two. I want

00:57:07.760 | to really get to know the place. I do my work ahead of time and then I can explore and make

00:57:13.200 | friends once I get to the country.

00:57:14.760 | You said people can learn it way faster than they'd imagine. Could you put any kind of

00:57:18.980 | rough window on that? If someone's got a trip planned to Japan in a month, do you think

00:57:23.060 | they could pick up enough to get to the, not the B level, but in that A level, be able

00:57:27.140 | to have a conversation and ask some directions and have a few more local experiences?

00:57:31.140 | You do that in a weekend. People don't realize how quickly you could learn phrases. I think

00:57:36.860 | a lot of us just lack the confidence and we can't picture a universe where we walk up

00:57:42.380 | to somebody and ask for directions when we've never spoken a language before. We imagine

00:57:48.100 | this is only something geniuses do. I really want people to lower the bar on what they

00:57:53.780 | think counts as speaking a language as a tourist, because it's really not that impressive.

00:57:59.940 | You're learning a very finite number of sentences you can rattle off. You do not need to know

00:58:05.880 | the intricacies of the language. Whenever I'm starting off and I want to be a tourist

00:58:10.060 | in a language, I'll sing myself the phrase I want to learn. I'll sing that to myself

00:58:15.300 | a few times and that helps me remember it. I'll do that in 10 minutes. I'll learn how

00:58:19.660 | to say where is the library and I'll look it up online. I'll try to say it and that's

00:58:25.420 | it. It's really not that impressive. If you're going to Japan in a month, you can learn 20

00:58:31.460 | phrases this weekend. Instead, decide I'm going to take this month. I'm going to try

00:58:36.260 | and be able to maybe understand their replies to me. I'm going to try and push myself up

00:58:42.420 | to see if I can get to that A2 level and maybe be a little bit more confident to expand on

00:58:49.740 | my sentences, have a little bit of maneuverability where I'm not just rattling off memorized

00:58:55.380 | phrases. I can replace a word or two here or there. You could do that in a month, but

00:59:00.380 | if you're going to Japan, you're really passionate about it, maybe you should decide this next

00:59:04.580 | month I'm going to make those sacrifices and I'm really going to try and make Japanese

00:59:09.700 | my priority so that when I'm in Japan, I'm communicating a lot more than I would otherwise.

00:59:15.380 | But it sounds like to be able to ask questions and get a response, not necessarily be fluent

00:59:20.420 | at all a month, if you can really put in the time, is not an unreasonable goal.

00:59:25.540 | Absolutely. What I understand this tourist level of the language, then the A levels,

00:59:30.380 | this way more accessible than people imagine it to be. Once you've done it a couple of

00:59:34.420 | times, you realize you're just learning a few phrases and just trying to commit them

00:59:39.220 | to memory and then rattling them off and maybe learning a couple of the words that could

00:59:43.060 | come up in the replies. It's not that complex. The B levels do require a certain intimate

00:59:49.260 | understanding of how the language is truly piecing together its replies and having a

00:59:54.820 | broader vocabulary so you can expand on things. But the early levels, you could do that a

01:00:00.300 | lot easier than you imagine. Love it. Any final kind of tips or hacks when it comes

01:00:05.860 | to language learning? I know you've written so many language hacks books that people should

01:00:09.980 | put in their arsenal as they're going through this process.

01:00:13.340 | I've mentioned my biggest hack, but in general, my philosophy is I would really encourage

01:00:18.420 | people to make as many mistakes as possible. When I'm really getting into learning a language

01:00:24.480 | and doing it intensively, my goal is today I'm going to make 200 mistakes or more. That's

01:00:30.520 | my goal. And that gets you completely away from this academic mindset where every mistake

01:00:36.220 | brings you closer to a fail. Every mistake is you communicating more, suck a little less

01:00:42.020 | every day. That's my biggest takeaway other than speak from day one. I would encourage

01:00:47.020 | people to make mistakes, embrace your inner Spanish Tarzan or whatever you imagine this

01:00:54.860 | caveman functionality of the language. Try to just use that and that's how you move forward.

01:01:00.620 | That's how you push through those A levels to eventually then be communicating in the

01:01:04.980 | language. Embrace being a beginner. It's fine. I've had such wonderful experiences in many

01:01:11.260 | of my languages, even in those beginner A levels, I've had interactions that I remember

01:01:16.900 | for the rest of my life. That's great. You don't have to only be fluent in the language

01:01:21.900 | to have rich experiences in it. Once you are okay with being a beginner, it becomes a lot

01:01:27.820 | easier to have fun with it, to make progress, and then to go beyond that.

01:01:32.340 | I love it. Two things. One, I can imagine that people listening, we've talked multiple

01:01:36.900 | times about all these languages you've picked up and I'm sure there's people just curious.

01:01:41.460 | Would you mind sharing the languages you've hit that B and above level just so people

01:01:45.300 | can suffice their curiosity?

01:01:47.860 | Most of the romance languages I would have B2 and above. So genuine fluency, C in a lot

01:01:53.700 | of them. This would be Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and I have probably a B1 in Catalan

01:02:01.140 | as well. I have German, also a high level and probably a B1 again in Dutch. American

01:02:08.380 | sign language. That would be another B1. So most of my C levels are the romance languages.

01:02:13.820 | I also have Mandarin. I did reach a B1 level of that. So I think I'd need probably a couple

01:02:19.340 | of weeks to get back to the B1 level before I return to the likes of China. Currently

01:02:24.500 | learning Korean. And I'd say by the time this goes live, I'd say pretty confident that it's

01:02:29.420 | a B1 too. And then I've dabbled in a bunch of others that I would not put on that scale,

01:02:35.340 | but that's it in a nutshell. Oh yeah, Irish and Esperanto. Sorry, I forget sometimes when

01:02:39.620 | I'm listening to these languages. Yeah, go ahead.

01:02:42.500 | Great. Last thing. I know you've traveled quite a bit. Is there a place that someone

01:02:46.560 | looking for some travel inspiration can take from you? Maybe a favorite city or country

01:02:50.480 | or town that isn't the obvious place that's on everyone's list that you want to share

01:02:54.740 | and maybe why it's special?

01:02:56.860 | In a lot of countries, I'm a big fan of the second city. So rather than the capital city,

01:03:02.460 | I think the second city as a general rule, it's going to be more affordable. You're going

01:03:07.880 | to have less foreigners, so more of a chance to meet local people who maybe aren't overwhelmed

01:03:13.700 | with how many foreigners there are. Right now in Korea, I'm talking to you from Busan,

01:03:17.940 | which is the second city. And I can list a lot of advantages over going to Seoul because

01:03:23.220 | of how more of an authentic experience I'm having, but still having the comforts of being

01:03:28.580 | in a city.

01:03:29.580 | Obviously you're going to be even more authentic if you go to a village somewhere, but the

01:03:33.020 | city life I happen to enjoy the second city in a lot of countries. I'm a huge fan of basing

01:03:39.660 | myself there for a certain period of time to get to know the culture in a different

01:03:43.820 | way. And generally I tend to be one of the few foreigners who is in that city to be able

01:03:49.940 | to have a bit more of an authentic experience.

01:03:53.100 | I love that. Just a general rule of thumb is second city. Great. If you have any final

01:03:57.980 | parting wisdom for anyone, please share it. Otherwise, let people know where they can

01:04:01.780 | find everything you're working on.

01:04:03.660 | Yeah. So since you're in podcast mode right now, if you do a search for language hacking,

01:04:09.620 | that's my podcast. I've interviewed a lot of very interesting people with the full scale

01:04:14.100 | of people who are just starting out and having their initial success, the people who are

01:04:18.060 | professional linguists in the field and have been doing this for decades. I run my own

01:04:23.460 | coaching program where I help people to learn a language in three months to get to a conversational

01:04:29.520 | stage. People will find that on my website.

01:04:33.100 | Of course, I'm on all the social medias. I actually, as part of my way to practice languages,

01:04:38.700 | I make a new social media account in each of the languages, even threads that as we're

01:04:44.300 | recording this now, it's only existed for a week. I have 14 threads accounts just so

01:04:49.940 | I can follow in my target languages. I have 14 Tik Tok accounts, 14 Instagram accounts.

01:04:56.380 | And I use all of these to maybe post vertical videos to practice the language and of course,

01:05:01.780 | follow people. And my main one is Irish polyglot on most of the channels. People can find me

01:05:07.660 | there and get some more inspiration.

01:05:09.980 | That just made me think of one last thing before we go. Is that a tactic, maybe following

01:05:13.980 | accounts in other countries on social media, it never occurred to me as a potential way

01:05:18.020 | to practice or learn a language.

01:05:19.820 | A tactic that's a bit broader than that is think, what do you tend to do with your time

01:05:24.180 | and how can you do that in your target language? If you're the kind of person who winds your

01:05:28.060 | day down with Netflix, maybe create a new sub account. You know, you can have multiple

01:05:33.460 | sub accounts on the same main login and make that just your target language. You're only

01:05:38.620 | watching stuff in the language and the algorithm will recommend that to you. I personally happen

01:05:43.660 | to watch a lot of Tik Tok videos. That's how I wind down as I swipe up, watch Tik Tok rather

01:05:48.540 | than do that in English, which is not really that good of a use of my time.

01:05:52.220 | I created new accounts and I trained the algorithm to only show me content in those languages.

01:05:58.780 | I only followed people who made content in those languages. When I switched to it, I'm

01:06:03.420 | in that language mode, I'm using my computer. So I made sure that I could switch the language

01:06:08.540 | on my computer on my phone. I very quickly changed the interface on my phone. It's more

01:06:13.700 | of a broader thing of thinking, how are you living your life? What are the things you're

01:06:17.540 | doing and can you change any of those things to be in your target language?

01:06:22.000 | You like playing video games? Change the language that they're giving you the orders to shoot

01:06:27.020 | that guy to be in your target language. There's a lot of ways you can have this sense of virtual

01:06:33.500 | immersion without even having to leave your home country, that you can exist in the language.

01:06:38.820 | You like working out? I work out these days to Korean workout music. That's the same kind

01:06:45.460 | of bump, thump, thump music, but they're singing in Korean. Everything you do, try to do it

01:06:50.380 | in your target language. In my case, I use social media a lot, so I may as well use social

01:06:55.140 | media in my target language.

01:06:56.480 | I love that tip. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited

01:07:01.140 | to pick up a new language.

01:07:03.060 | Thank you, everybody. I hope to hear from all of you and best of luck on all of your

01:07:07.420 | own language journeys.

01:07:10.780 | Thank you so much for joining this week. I hope this episode has inspired you to either

01:07:14.440 | pick up a language that you haven't spoken in a while, maybe even try to learn a new

01:07:18.260 | one. I know for me, I'm already thinking about how to improve my French. If you have questions,

01:07:23.060 | thoughts, or feedback on this episode, or anything at all really, podcast@allthehacks.com

01:07:28.000 | is where you can reach me. Thank you so much for listening this week. See you next week.

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