Language Hacking: Become Fluent in 3 Months

00:00:00.000 | Whether you want to learn your first language or you're starting on your fifth,

00:00:03.640 | we've got all the hacks you need to be fluent in three months.

00:00:07.120 | And that's because I'm talking with none other than the world's best

00:00:10.240 | on the topic, Benny Lewis.

00:00:11.640 | By the end of this episode, you'll leave with a practical approach to learning

00:00:15.440 | a new language better, faster, and much more efficiently.

00:00:18.520 | So hit that thumbs up and subscribe to the channel.

00:00:21.080 | If you enjoy this video, let's jump in.

00:00:28.960 | Benny, I'm so jealous you're joining from South Korea.

00:00:31.960 | Thank you for being here.

00:00:33.480 | Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

00:00:35.240 | To kick us off, I want to understand, you know, coming from the States,

00:00:38.920 | I feel like there just aren't as many people interested

00:00:42.120 | in learning a language as I wish there were.

00:00:44.400 | And I'm curious what you think some of the common challenges

00:00:47.280 | or misconceptions there are that might be holding people back.

00:00:49.800 | Well, I myself had the misconception

00:00:54.280 | because I didn't grow up speaking other languages.

00:00:56.560 | I would. Oh, I was only speaking English when I was 21.

00:01:00.840 | I actually studied electronic engineering.

00:01:03.200 | So I definitely understand coming from the background of

00:01:06.840 | I'm not good at languages, especially if you go into a technical field.

00:01:11.760 | It's very tempting to get this whole left brain, right brain concept

00:01:15.720 | in your mind where you're either good at technical things,

00:01:19.720 | like I was good at mathematics and the sciences.

00:01:22.240 | And then I decided because of that, I'm bad at the arts and languages.

00:01:26.840 | And I created a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:01:30.360 | I would see failure and I would see I would say to myself and to others,

00:01:35.360 | that's proof that I am destined to never learn a language.

00:01:38.760 | And I could list a million examples of where I failed an exam in school

00:01:43.480 | or even moved to Spain after I graduated.

00:01:46.960 | And I lived there for six months and I did not learn Spanish

00:01:51.040 | for those six months.

00:01:52.480 | So I totally understand coming from a monolingual English

00:01:57.960 | country that you just think to yourself

00:02:01.240 | that I don't have the language gene.

00:02:04.320 | Other people have it.

00:02:05.520 | I don't have it or I did not grow up speaking a language.

00:02:08.920 | So it's too late.

00:02:10.200 | I'm past whatever the cutoff age is for learning a language.

00:02:14.560 | And a lot of people say these things to themselves.

00:02:17.400 | And that truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

00:02:20.480 | The more you embrace these reasons that you're going to fail,

00:02:23.840 | the more you essentially make them true.

00:02:26.720 | And I always like to think what Henry Ford said once,

00:02:30.560 | whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.

00:02:33.680 | And I think that's very true with language learning.

00:02:36.560 | And what changed for you after those first failed six months living in Spain?

00:02:41.320 | I was telling myself more and more.

00:02:44.520 | It was just giving me more fuel for this.

00:02:46.880 | You're you suck at languages fire.

00:02:49.360 | And one of the things that challenged that was I was telling myself

00:02:54.120 | the technical thing, you're an engineer.

00:02:56.240 | Engineers don't learn languages.

00:02:58.040 | But I was on this exchange program that had a lot of other engineers

00:03:01.800 | coming into Spain and they would arrive not speaking any Spanish.

00:03:05.680 | But after a few months, a lot of them would actually be speaking

00:03:09.160 | some level of Spanish.

00:03:10.600 | So this challenge, this belief that I had.

00:03:12.960 | And so I decided to experiment.

00:03:15.960 | And I tried a few things and a lot of them were huge flops.

00:03:19.640 | And that's another thing that I know a lot of your listeners,

00:03:22.560 | perhaps in the past, have attempted to learn a language.

00:03:25.960 | And it was a failure.

00:03:27.800 | And they just kind of say, that's proof that I'm just destined to never speak it.

00:03:31.560 | And so I had a lot of those failures beyond the failures in school.

00:03:35.840 | While I was living in Spain, I went to a group class and I was worse than the class.

00:03:40.760 | The teacher would turn to me, ask me a question, and I would say,

00:03:45.120 | I see no and hope maybe maybe that's right.

00:03:49.600 | And it was never right.

00:03:50.640 | She was asking me how old you are or whatever.

00:03:52.760 | And what I had to do was keep experimenting

00:03:57.880 | and keep failing until I found an approach that works for me.

00:04:01.320 | And I am absolutely convinced that there is nobody in the entire world

00:04:06.280 | that cannot learn a second language.

00:04:08.640 | But what is true is there are many approaches

00:04:12.200 | that are completely inefficient for a lot of people.

00:04:15.520 | And in my case, the academic approach of learning,

00:04:19.440 | like I did in school, sitting in a classroom with 30 other people

00:04:22.840 | and having a teacher talk at us, that just does not work for me.

00:04:26.520 | And in that environment, I am a terrible language learner.

00:04:29.840 | So I think it's OK for people to say using this particular approach,

00:04:34.640 | I am a bad language learner.

00:04:36.240 | But that does not mean you will never learn a language.

00:04:39.560 | Maybe you need to find that approach.

00:04:41.600 | And so what happened was after all these failed experiments

00:04:45.440 | of multiple attempts to learn language in ways that did not work for me,

00:04:48.960 | my last experiment was, OK, I'm going to try and just speak Spanish

00:04:55.120 | all the time outside of my work because I was teaching English.

00:04:58.720 | So obviously I had to speak English.

00:05:00.480 | But as soon as I walked outside the door of the school,

00:05:03.720 | I would only speak Spanish and my Spanish was absolutely abysmal.

00:05:08.840 | This was caveman Spanish of like barely a few dozen words.

00:05:13.840 | And I decided to use it anyway.

00:05:16.000 | And I pushed through this extremely frustrating stage.

00:05:19.840 | And there's literally a moment that everything changed for me

00:05:24.040 | was when I was still kind of broke at the time.

00:05:28.400 | And I just bought an electric toothbrush and it broke on me.

00:05:32.320 | And I was so mad about it.

00:05:33.880 | I wanted a refund.

00:05:34.880 | So I charged into the the shop that I had bought it in ready to demand

00:05:39.640 | my money back.

00:05:40.560 | And then I realized when I went up to the manager,

00:05:43.040 | I don't know how to say refund.

00:05:45.360 | I don't know how to say toothbrush.

00:05:47.000 | I don't know how to say broken.

00:05:48.680 | So I was like, uh, machina, the dentist is malo.

00:05:52.760 | Tooth machine bad.

00:05:55.840 | Dinero y de vuelta.

00:05:57.840 | Money round trip.

00:05:59.520 | And, you know, it was absolutely wrong to like

00:06:03.240 | if I was sitting an exam in an academic context,

00:06:06.320 | I would have failed this.

00:06:07.920 | Try to ask for a refund for a toothbrush test.

00:06:11.360 | But you know what?

00:06:12.880 | I got my money back and that just blew my mind

00:06:16.520 | that maybe I don't need to be perfect in Spanish

00:06:20.320 | or I don't need to have a high level in Spanish.

00:06:22.400 | I just need to communicate.

00:06:24.720 | And I think that's something that a lot of people could embrace

00:06:28.080 | is this idea of instead of thinking that every mistake you make

00:06:31.720 | is a big red X on an exam paper, bring you closer to a fail.

00:06:35.640 | Every mistake is just you trying to communicate.

00:06:39.160 | And the gauge of success is, are you understood?

00:06:43.440 | And do you get the gist of what they're saying back to you?

00:06:46.400 | And this is a lot more nebulous and leaves a lot more room

00:06:50.160 | for you to have some form of success.

00:06:52.520 | And once I saw that, I started to lower the bar

00:06:55.840 | on what counts as for success.

00:06:58.000 | And that gave me a lot of wins to push my Spanish forward.

00:07:02.440 | And I think a lot of people, they have their head a bit too much

00:07:07.520 | on this very distant long term goal that you want to master the language.

00:07:12.800 | And I have reached that stage.

00:07:14.560 | I have a C2 diploma in the likes of Spanish.

00:07:17.360 | I worked as a professional translator, so I have reached this high level stage.

00:07:21.200 | But when I'm in language learning mode,

00:07:23.320 | I decide to embrace the fact that I'm a beginner.

00:07:26.640 | Try to have fun with it.

00:07:28.120 | Try to accept my limitations and just decide my goal

00:07:31.680 | is to make a lot of mistakes.

00:07:33.560 | And that's how I'm going to make progress.

00:07:35.480 | And that completely transformed my entire language learning life.

00:07:38.360 | It's funny, I haven't had to learn a language since the learning

00:07:42.160 | a similar lesson in a different way.

00:07:44.640 | But we've had three au pairs stay with us

00:07:47.280 | speaking Spanish, Spanish and Italian.

00:07:50.360 | And I don't speak Spanish or Italian.

00:07:52.840 | And so they were kind of forced.

00:07:55.640 | They have more English knowledge than than we did in other languages.

00:07:59.080 | And as a person on the other side of this, when someone says something wrong,

00:08:04.920 | you don't think, oh, my gosh, this person got it all wrong.

00:08:07.600 | You just communicate.

00:08:09.400 | And when someone says, like, take car school, it's like, OK, well,

00:08:13.880 | you know what they're saying.

00:08:15.040 | It's completely grammatically maybe incorrect, but it doesn't matter.

00:08:18.800 | And I've watched three people just their English constantly improves

00:08:23.640 | without me teaching them, without me teaching them lessons.

00:08:26.360 | They're just hearing my responses.

00:08:27.880 | And so I haven't tried to pick up a language since having them here.

00:08:32.120 | But it's made me a lot more confident

00:08:36.000 | than I think that perfection is a bug I had.

00:08:39.720 | And that probably comes from school, right?

00:08:41.640 | Failing tests because I didn't know specific words or gosh,

00:08:45.320 | the number of times learning French messing up on the gender of a word.

00:08:49.880 | It felt like that was the only thing I was trying to learn was conjugation

00:08:53.440 | and gender, but I'm not even convinced you need them well

00:08:56.320 | to communicate at a basic level.

00:08:58.720 | No, you know, you don't, because like you said, people are flexible

00:09:02.640 | and you do learn those things.

00:09:03.920 | So it's not like I'm saying, make these mistakes.

00:09:06.160 | And a lot of people would say, what about fossilization?

00:09:08.880 | The mistake will stay with you forever.

00:09:10.520 | It doesn't.

00:09:11.480 | You'll practice and eventually you'll you'll find tricks

00:09:15.160 | that work for remembering conjugation and remembering

00:09:18.080 | what the gender of certain nouns are.

00:09:20.440 | You start to internalize those things, but they're less important at the start.

00:09:25.120 | And it's like you said, people have this idea of like the spotlight,

00:09:29.680 | the spotlight effect.

00:09:30.960 | Everyone is looking at me.

00:09:32.320 | Everyone is judging me.

00:09:33.760 | And whenever I try to speak the language, they're all laughing

00:09:37.000 | at how much of an idiot I am because I use the wrong conjugation.

00:09:40.600 | That's not how the real world works.

00:09:42.480 | Most people are patient.

00:09:43.680 | Most people want you to succeed.

00:09:45.880 | And if you say a broken sentence that gets the point across,

00:09:50.680 | but is grammatically incorrect, you're not talking to to a computer

00:09:54.400 | that's going to spit out an error message.

00:09:56.160 | You're talking to a human being and they're going to understand you

00:09:58.480 | and they're going to interpret what you're saying.

00:10:00.920 | And the conversation will move forward.

00:10:03.200 | And this perfectionism does not work in the language,

00:10:06.920 | in the context of languages.

00:10:08.360 | And it's unfortunate because languages are exposed to us

00:10:12.200 | in an academic situation at first.

00:10:14.600 | That's our context is it is an academic thing.

00:10:17.800 | Every mistake you make is a problem.

00:10:20.360 | But in the real world, I like to think languages can't be learned for real.

00:10:26.240 | Languages can only be lived.

00:10:28.680 | And this is the attitude I try to take to it.

00:10:31.600 | I try to think of it more like a sport that I'm practicing

00:10:35.120 | and getting better at, where, you know, if you're doing any kind of sport,

00:10:39.400 | you're not going to get punished if you don't have a perfect game on day one.

00:10:43.600 | That's not how it works.

00:10:44.800 | You get better progressively with time.

00:10:47.280 | And I think it's a lot better to think of languages in that context

00:10:51.280 | rather than academically, because perfectionism is the worst enemy

00:10:56.440 | of all in language learning.

00:10:58.320 | It will absolutely defeat any sense of progress you're going to make.

00:11:02.640 | It's going to destroy your ego.

00:11:04.640 | You have to let go of your ego a lot in language learning and decide.

00:11:08.160 | I sound like an idiot right now, and I'm OK with that.

00:11:11.320 | And I it's very humbling.

00:11:14.120 | And I do it over and over again.

00:11:15.920 | I'm doing it right now with Korean, and it's kicking my ass again.

00:11:19.280 | Even though I have a high level in other languages, I'm an idiot once again.

00:11:23.480 | And because I'm OK with being an idiot, that's why I can learn the languages.

00:11:28.760 | First off, I think there are probably some people listening right now

00:11:31.800 | that are like, wow,

00:11:32.920 | maybe I actually do know enough Spanish or French or German

00:11:35.920 | or whatever I picked up in school to actually use it.

00:11:38.240 | So if you're if you're that person, I'm excited for you.

00:11:41.400 | I hope you get a chance to forget a lot of these things.

00:11:44.120 | I definitely want to talk more about, you know, the practice

00:11:47.280 | of picking up a language for people who haven't even started.

00:11:49.560 | But I know there's a kind of common belief that adults

00:11:53.640 | are not as good as language learners as children.

00:11:55.960 | Do you think there's any kind of age limit to this or something like that?

00:12:00.000 | So this comes back to what I was saying before about approach.

00:12:04.600 | The approach dictates how successful you're going to be.

00:12:07.360 | And when I was researching this a long time ago,

00:12:10.760 | I came across a study in the University of Haifa in Israel

00:12:14.440 | that found that under the right circumstances,

00:12:17.560 | adults are better language learners than children.

00:12:20.760 | And that sounds very counterintuitive because all the evidence we see out there

00:12:25.880 | is what children are clearly learning languages more than adults are.

00:12:29.200 | And that is because it's not under the right circumstances for those adults.

00:12:34.480 | The adults are taking dusty old grammar books.

00:12:37.160 | The adults are going to group classes where they're kind of zipping it

00:12:41.120 | and letting a teacher talk at them.

00:12:43.040 | The adults are not truly living through the language.

00:12:46.560 | The adults don't have any friends in the language.

00:12:48.800 | They're not playing games in the language like a child does.

00:12:52.320 | And a child has a better language learning approach.

00:12:56.120 | It's not that they are better at language learning.

00:12:58.800 | And, you know, it's you could argue both points.

00:13:01.920 | You could argue why children are better.

00:13:03.720 | They have more neuroplasticity and their brains are open to more things.

00:13:08.880 | But ultimately, there are a lot of advantages adults have.

00:13:12.440 | We have complete control for the most part over our days, over our lives.

00:13:18.160 | We can decide where we're going, what are what we're doing with our free time.

00:13:21.920 | A lot more than a child can.

00:13:24.080 | So a child may learn a language, but a child cannot decide.

00:13:27.640 | I want to learn Chinese.

00:13:29.320 | That's not going to happen for that child unless the parents decide, OK,

00:13:32.920 | I'm going to help you do that.

00:13:34.680 | I'm going to put you in the right environment or whatever.

00:13:36.760 | So we have a lot more control over the situation.

00:13:39.560 | But I understand there are there's a lot of baggage that comes with things.

00:13:43.840 | And as an adult, letting go of that baggage is very difficult.

00:13:47.440 | That will slow us down.

00:13:49.320 | So there is a certain mental hill that you have to climb

00:13:52.840 | that does make it harder for adults.

00:13:55.040 | And I think a lot of us have fallen into this perfectionist trap.

00:13:58.840 | And that makes it harder because children are not perfectionists.

00:14:02.480 | When you think of any child learning their native language,

00:14:05.080 | they make a million mistakes and they're fine with it.

00:14:08.680 | And I think that's we can take inspiration from children.

00:14:12.400 | But absolutely, there is no cutoff age.

00:14:15.480 | There is no age where you cannot learn a language.

00:14:18.360 | The only thing you'll find when you dig really deep into this is maybe

00:14:23.160 | there's an age where it becomes a lot more difficult to become bilingual.

00:14:28.880 | And that's another problem.

00:14:30.240 | And that is absolutely a problem you may want to solve or try to solve.

00:14:34.040 | But honestly, who cares?

00:14:36.680 | I am not bilingual in any of my languages.

00:14:39.360 | I am at a mastery level.

00:14:41.400 | So I can do everything I can do in English.

00:14:44.840 | I can do in Spanish.

00:14:46.160 | But I still have an accent and I still make the odd mistake.

00:14:49.240 | And there might be like an obscure word here or there that I don't know.

00:14:52.520 | So I'm not bilingual.

00:14:54.360 | You're not going to confuse me for a native speaker.

00:14:56.480 | But I'm close enough that I can function like a native speaker would.

00:14:59.960 | And that's fine.

00:15:00.960 | And maybe there's a there's an age where if I started learning Spanish

00:15:04.320 | before that, I could change that gap.

00:15:06.680 | But who cares? It doesn't matter.

00:15:09.120 | Like, I'm not trying to become a spy.

00:15:11.360 | I don't want people to to think that I'm from Spain so I can fool them.

00:15:15.480 | I'm from Ireland. I'm proud of I'm from Ireland.

00:15:17.720 | If I've got a little bit of an accent, it's it has that sense of charm to it.

00:15:21.880 | So I'm OK with not being bilingual.

00:15:24.000 | And once you accept that,

00:15:26.800 | then this whole cutoff age becomes irrelevant.

00:15:29.920 | So that's where the cutoff age is.

00:15:31.600 | It's for bilingual fluency in a language.

00:15:35.560 | And I have come across exceptions.

00:15:37.760 | I have found adults who can become essentially the same as a native speaker,

00:15:42.800 | even though they learned it later in life.

00:15:45.200 | But I wouldn't necessarily say that's something you could scale

00:15:47.960 | to a lot of other people easily.

00:15:50.200 | But it doesn't matter.

00:15:51.800 | The goal should be fluency.

00:15:53.760 | If you can function the same in your target language like you would in English,

00:15:57.960 | then that's all you ever need.

00:16:00.360 | You're you're not going to try and be a spy.

00:16:04.480 | That's not who cares about that.

00:16:06.760 | Then you're you're good.

00:16:08.080 | You're good with what you can do.

00:16:09.400 | And that is something every adult in the world can absolutely do.

00:16:14.280 | Given the caveat that there's there is a lot of work

00:16:18.880 | they have to do ahead of time in terms of mental changes

00:16:21.800 | and learning what the right approach is and so on.

00:16:24.520 | So I want to come back to some of those mental changes.

00:16:26.640 | But it just made me think of something right before I came to this interview.

00:16:29.960 | I told my daughter, who's only about to turn three.

00:16:32.960 | I was like, oh, I'm going to go record a podcast.

00:16:34.880 | So I'm going to miss your bedtime tonight.

00:16:36.760 | And she goes, oh, it's like it's going to be about languages.

00:16:39.040 | I was like, how many languages do you speak?

00:16:41.480 | She was like, I speak Italian.

00:16:43.040 | I speak English and I speak Spanish.

00:16:45.160 | And I was like, she maybe knows 50 words of Spanish and Italian.

00:16:49.240 | But in her mind, she she speaks it.

00:16:51.200 | And it just crossed my mind that I could probably speak

00:16:54.160 | thousands of words of French.

00:16:55.480 | I could get along in the country by myself, no problem,

00:16:57.960 | but certainly not fluent, but I'm comfortable enough to to speak.

00:17:02.160 | And I don't actually consider myself someone who speaks.

00:17:04.840 | You know, it's like, oh, I wouldn't say I speak French like I can speak French.

00:17:08.480 | So that confidence

00:17:09.960 | to to just feel like you're already there.

00:17:13.360 | Are there any hacks or tips you've developed or helped people with

00:17:16.800 | to kind of get over those nerves and get over the need to be a perfectionist?

00:17:20.920 | Yeah, I mean, the probably the biggest hack, the biggest tip I can give

00:17:25.800 | of all to everybody is you have to speak your target language from day one.

00:17:32.000 | So I think one big mental barrier people have is they decide

00:17:37.400 | I'm going to study the language for a certain amount of time.

00:17:40.520 | Maybe that's a few months.

00:17:41.960 | Maybe it's a year.

00:17:43.320 | You know, I've made a New Year's resolution.

00:17:45.480 | I'm going to learn Spanish.

00:17:46.760 | So one year from now, I will have reached that magic moment

00:17:50.320 | when I can finally walk up to a native speaker and speak Spanish to them.

00:17:53.760 | And I think that is a fool's errand, because this creates a new situation

00:18:00.640 | in your head where you have to wait until you're ready

00:18:03.640 | and then you can make all the excuses in the world that you're not ready yet,

00:18:08.040 | because you will never be at 100 percent perfectionism in Spanish.

00:18:12.560 | Even when you reach the very high levels I've talked about,

00:18:16.400 | there's still a couple of little things you need to polish.

00:18:19.160 | So if you decide if you are enough of a perfectionist,

00:18:22.360 | you would never speak your target language.

00:18:24.560 | So to throw that out the window, you have to decide,

00:18:28.160 | I'm going to speak it right away, even though I only know 10 words.

00:18:32.600 | I'm still going to try and use it.

00:18:34.480 | So what I do.

00:18:35.760 | So what, for instance, a couple of months ago, I started doing this with Korean.

00:18:39.400 | On day one, I decided I am going to get somebody on Zoom,

00:18:43.360 | a native Korean speaker, and I'm going to speak only in Korean to them.

00:18:47.200 | And this may obviously have a lot of questions like, how can you do that

00:18:51.880 | if you've literally just started to learn the language?

00:18:54.320 | So, yeah, I'll cheat. I'll cheat a little bit.

00:18:56.680 | So what I'll do is I'll have a Google Translate tab open

00:18:59.960 | and I will ahead of the lesson, I'll try to find a few phrases

00:19:05.120 | I know I'm likely to use, like I'm from Ireland.

00:19:08.200 | My name is and so on.

00:19:10.400 | And then I'll say this to the teacher, the teacher will reply

00:19:13.520 | and I won't understand what they said.

00:19:14.960 | They'll say blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:19:16.960 | And one of the phrases I prepared is, I'm sorry, I don't understand.

00:19:20.800 | Could you write that down, please?

00:19:22.880 | And they'll write that in the chat.

00:19:24.360 | And then I can copy and paste that into Google Translate.

00:19:26.680 | So it is a giant crutch.

00:19:29.360 | And, you know, obviously you could argue this doesn't really count

00:19:32.800 | as speaking the language.

00:19:34.040 | But the point is that, you know, you use these crutches

00:19:37.720 | like you use a stabilizer on a bike.

00:19:39.640 | It is giving you the ability to move forward,

00:19:43.240 | even though obviously you're not moving forward without a tool.

00:19:46.280 | But with time, you'll need the crutch less and less.

00:19:50.000 | You'll need the stabilizers on your bike.

00:19:52.960 | You can take them off after you've learned how to get your balance and such.

00:19:57.440 | So that is my biggest tip by far, is let go of the fact

00:20:02.440 | that you have to wait until you're ready and speak right now.

00:20:06.560 | Decide I'm going to get in front of somebody.

00:20:09.240 | And if you're paying for a teacher, and this is a lot more affordable

00:20:12.800 | than people think, people imagine I got to book a language class

00:20:16.680 | and they look in their hometown and they find the language class and it's expensive.

00:20:20.560 | It's like 50 dollars an hour.

00:20:22.160 | But they figure, no, it's worth the investment.

00:20:24.200 | But the thing is, if you go on a lot of websites

00:20:28.880 | and you try to find a teacher who lives in the country,

00:20:32.880 | you know, with Spanish, who lives in literally any Latin American country,

00:20:36.480 | you can take advantage of a stronger currency exchange

00:20:40.640 | and you can get a really good teacher for 10 or 15 dollars an hour

00:20:44.440 | who's earning pretty decently in their country.

00:20:46.760 | And with that, you have one person

00:20:49.920 | who is giving their undivided attention to you.

00:20:52.560 | And I decide ahead of time, I decided with my Korean teachers,

00:20:57.320 | I am paying this person for patience

00:21:00.760 | because I am going to be extremely slow.

00:21:03.600 | I'm going to be incredibly awkward

00:21:06.320 | and I am paying this person to be patient with me.

00:21:09.800 | So I don't have to feel as bad that I'm wasting their time or whatever,

00:21:14.160 | because I'm paying for their time.

00:21:16.240 | And that takes a lot of the stress off me, because obviously

00:21:20.160 | I'm not going to walk up to a stranger on the street and start

00:21:23.760 | like blurting my low level of the language at them

00:21:27.000 | and expect anything positive to happen.

00:21:29.280 | But when I'm paying for somebody's time, that's different.

00:21:31.960 | So this is what I do is I try to hire a teacher online.

00:21:35.440 | There's loads of good websites.

00:21:38.080 | One that probably has the most teachers is italki, I-T-A-L-K-I dot com.

00:21:43.480 | And you find a teacher there, you book them and you just start talking with them.

00:21:47.720 | And it's going to suck.

00:21:48.960 | You're going to feel like an idiot.

00:21:50.680 | And the thing you have to remember

00:21:53.400 | is you have to suck a little less every day.

00:21:58.080 | The goal is not perfectionism.

00:21:59.880 | The goal is not to be a genius.

00:22:02.280 | The goal is not to debate

00:22:05.040 | Kantian epistemology in your target language.

00:22:08.240 | The goal is suck a little less every day.

00:22:11.720 | And that is essentially my biggest tip of all.

00:22:15.720 | If you take anything from this interview, take that speak from the beginning.

00:22:19.880 | You're going to suck.

00:22:21.400 | Accept that. Embrace it.

00:22:23.320 | And just suck a tiny bit less every day.

00:22:26.440 | And that progressively leads to improvement.

00:22:29.120 | I love it. I mean, it's very simple.

00:22:31.200 | You have this whole program, you know, fluent in three months.

00:22:34.720 | I'm also curious about where the three months came from.

00:22:37.800 | So maybe you start with that.

00:22:39.000 | But, you know, it has to be more than just continually have these conversations.

00:22:42.880 | Are there steps along the way that someone should

00:22:45.160 | should follow learning a language and and maybe why three months?

00:22:48.480 | Yeah. OK, so the three months, it's a good question.

00:22:51.360 | I know when people would see the title fluent in three months, they may imagine

00:22:55.720 | I'm talking about a particular program that will guarantee success in three months.

00:22:59.960 | But what it's more about is specificity.

00:23:03.360 | So I'm not prescribing to anybody that you must do this within a certain timeline.

00:23:08.560 | But the problem I tend to see is a lot of people are extremely vague

00:23:13.400 | with their targets, so they will make a New Year's resolution.

00:23:16.840 | I want to learn Spanish.

00:23:18.520 | And that's it. That's all they come up with.

00:23:20.440 | And that has absolutely nothing attached to it.

00:23:23.240 | You need smart goals, specific, measurable, all that stuff.

00:23:28.240 | So that's what I was thinking when I was getting started with all of this.

00:23:32.120 | I needed to have a specific target in a specific deadline.

00:23:37.400 | So in my case, three months happens to work because I'm a nomad.

00:23:42.240 | So I travel all the time.

00:23:43.840 | And when you travel, you will find a lot of countries

00:23:47.000 | tend to have a three month tourist visa limit.

00:23:49.920 | So that's all the time I had.

00:23:52.000 | So that's the deadline I was going to going to give myself.

00:23:54.720 | Now, initially, I would travel to the country.

00:23:57.600 | Nowadays, I do it differently.

00:23:59.080 | Nowadays, I will learn the language ahead of time before going.

00:24:02.440 | And then I'll go spend three months in the country

00:24:04.800 | without having to be in as intensive a learning mode.

00:24:08.400 | And but ultimately, that's where it came from for me is it's a tourist visa limit.

00:24:12.640 | And I find it's the Goldilocks zone where a year is just so much time

00:24:18.200 | that you can keep putting it off and you can decide I'll do it once a week

00:24:22.200 | or whatever, and you might kind of cram it at the end.

00:24:26.040 | Whereas a few weeks or a month is too little time to make

00:24:30.160 | any significant progress.

00:24:31.640 | So three months of very intensive language learning.

00:24:35.400 | If you're able to do that, if you're the kind of person who maybe can,

00:24:39.680 | you know, work intensively for a particular time and take time off,

00:24:43.880 | which I know is not the case for a lot of people.

00:24:46.160 | But for me, that's what I would do is I would work really hard

00:24:50.680 | for nine months out of the year, save up money, and then I don't have to work

00:24:54.440 | so much for three months and I make it my full time job.

00:24:57.880 | So that is not something I think is realistic for most people.

00:25:01.480 | So I don't guarantee fluency in three months, because if you want to make

00:25:06.280 | any level, any really high level in a short amount of time,

00:25:09.640 | it needs to be a full time job.

00:25:11.600 | But for most people, when you're doing it for you, try your best to decide,

00:25:16.360 | you know, for three months or for four months or six months, whatever it is.

00:25:20.600 | I can make a lot of sacrifices.

00:25:22.920 | I can decide I'm going to give up English speaking shows

00:25:27.480 | on Netflix for three months, going to take a break from those.

00:25:30.880 | And the time I would put into watching those shows,

00:25:34.040 | I'm going to study the language or the very least watch the shows

00:25:37.760 | in that language if I need to wind down or whatever.

00:25:41.080 | And you decide, you know, I go out with my friends maybe three times a week.

00:25:44.960 | I'm going to cut that down to once a week or once every two weeks.

00:25:48.440 | And the extra time I'm going to put into learning the language,

00:25:51.200 | I'm going to make a lot of sacrifices in my life.

00:25:53.640 | And those sacrifices are going to give me more time.

00:25:56.760 | Even if that's one hour a day, you utilize that one hour and decide,

00:26:01.440 | you know, I can't sustain this in the long term.

00:26:03.840 | Eventually, I need to relax.

00:26:05.560 | I need to be seeing my friends regularly, whatever it may be.

00:26:08.680 | But you decide for this short term of three months or four months

00:26:12.080 | or whatever specific number is realistic for you.

00:26:14.760 | The biggest priority in my life is learning this language.

00:26:20.240 | I'm going to eat and breathe this language.

00:26:22.640 | I'm going to be listening to podcasts about the language.

00:26:26.000 | I'm going to be reading books in the language, going to be using apps

00:26:29.400 | or doing flashcards in the language.

00:26:31.440 | And of course, I'm going to be speaking the language

00:26:34.840 | with actual human beings via a Zoom call or whatever it may be.

00:26:39.600 | And I'm going to do that intensively for a certain period of time.

00:26:43.640 | That's going to make a difference, because a lot of people,

00:26:46.240 | they don't have any solid goals with their language.

00:26:49.720 | They don't have any sense of intensity.

00:26:52.400 | And they just try to do it in whatever free time they have,

00:26:55.720 | like they're in a supermarket line and decide, I'll do some Duolingo.

00:27:00.120 | And they've done something that day.

00:27:02.200 | And then they say, oh, I've done something in the language.

00:27:04.760 | That's not what I'm talking about.

00:27:06.320 | You need to let go of this.

00:27:08.520 | I'm going to do literally anything for five minutes

00:27:11.400 | and feel like I'm doing something in the language.

00:27:14.080 | And it needs to be a true project.

00:27:16.920 | So that's what I do.

00:27:18.280 | I make it a project.

00:27:19.560 | The three months works for me because

00:27:22.680 | it is an amount of time that I can throw myself out of project.

00:27:26.400 | And like I start to run out of energy and then I'll go easy on myself

00:27:31.040 | the rest of the time.

00:27:32.240 | And generally, because I deal with multiple languages,

00:27:36.120 | I will learn a new language for three months.

00:27:38.760 | But then I'll be maintaining my languages for the rest of the year.

00:27:42.800 | And then I don't have to worry about learning a new language.

00:27:45.280 | So it's an extremely intensive burst of progress.

00:27:49.000 | And that's what I try to help people with.

00:27:51.640 | And I run my own coaching program.

00:27:53.680 | And of course, the coaching program goes over three months.

00:27:56.760 | And it doesn't necessarily mean you have to have the same target as me.

00:28:00.960 | But when people are on the coaching program, I at least guarantee

00:28:04.080 | by the end of it, you will be conversing in the language.

00:28:07.520 | And conversing is a lot more flexible than having to be fluent

00:28:11.520 | because conversing, you can still talk to someone who's patient

00:28:14.880 | and you can talk slowly and you can make a lot more mistakes.

00:28:18.040 | So something like that, some specific goal that works for you

00:28:22.360 | that might be realistic, but still pushing yourself as much as possible.

00:28:26.240 | That's what leads to a lot more success.

00:28:28.880 | And that's what I see people not doing people who don't succeed

00:28:32.520 | in learning a language.

00:28:33.560 | They don't have anything they're trying to reach in any timeline.

00:28:37.720 | So smart goals changes everything.

00:28:40.360 | And that's where the three months comes from.

00:28:42.440 | OK, so we set specific goals.

00:28:44.440 | We set a time frame.

00:28:45.760 | I like the idea of, you know, three months to get to fluency might be possible,

00:28:49.440 | but you've got to really be intensive.

00:28:51.640 | But it sounds like and maybe maybe there's an hour a day.

00:28:55.280 | Or is there an amount of time that you think is the minimum

00:28:58.280 | someone needs to to put in to kind of even get to that conversational level?

00:29:02.360 | I think that's where you start to really see what is unique to the person.

00:29:07.400 | I found for me, I can't make progress in a language

00:29:10.880 | unless I'm putting at least an hour a day in.

00:29:13.640 | But I have come across a lot of people who actually can get it.

00:29:17.720 | They can switch their brain into language learning very quickly

00:29:20.840 | and they can do something with 15 minute bursts.

00:29:23.920 | And I've seen them progress over.

00:29:26.160 | It's a longer period of time, obviously, but I have seen them progress.

00:29:29.760 | So this depends on the person.

00:29:31.680 | I'm not the kind of person that can do anything in 15 minutes.

00:29:35.960 | It takes my brain time to adapt and like get used to it

00:29:39.800 | and get my momentum back.

00:29:41.560 | So I personally need at least an hour.

00:29:44.120 | And generally, I try to do a few hours because I'm I'm doing it intensively.

00:29:48.360 | But I understand that's not as realistic for a lot of people

00:29:50.840 | in their life situations.

00:29:52.400 | So depends on the person.

00:29:54.400 | If you're the kind of person that feels like you can make genuine progress

00:29:58.160 | in a 30 minute window, that may be your minimum.

00:30:02.120 | But of course, this is why I was saying before, the first thing you do

00:30:06.080 | is look at your timetable and see what can I sacrifice

00:30:10.280 | for these next two months or four months or whatever the number is

00:30:14.080 | and find more time.

00:30:16.160 | So there's no magic number that like, you know, one hour

00:30:19.480 | is the number that's going to change your life.

00:30:21.640 | Just find how much time you have, because the more time you do each day,

00:30:25.680 | the more you're going to learn.

00:30:27.080 | People always ask me how long will it take me to reach this level in language?

00:30:31.920 | And like, you know, they would say, Benny, your three months are crazy

00:30:36.520 | because I spent six years learning Spanish in school

00:30:40.120 | and I would interrupt them and say, no, you didn't.

00:30:42.800 | You did not spend six years learning Spanish.

00:30:45.240 | Six years elapsed through which you maybe went to a one hour

00:30:50.760 | Spanish class with people and you were daydreaming about a girl

00:30:54.480 | you had a crush on or whatever it is.

00:30:56.160 | It's not quite the same as intensively like you are living

00:31:00.760 | and breathing this language for a certain period.

00:31:02.800 | So it's why I tell people the amount of time that elapses

00:31:06.400 | is not what's important for counting how successful.

00:31:09.560 | It's more about how many hours of dedicated time

00:31:13.080 | are you putting into that language where it's got 100% of your attention?

00:31:17.760 | Any less attention is going to give less important results.

00:31:22.720 | So, you know, you can listen to a podcast while you're doing the dishes.

00:31:28.320 | You can do something at the same time and it is going to help you,

00:31:32.720 | but it's going to be less useful.

00:31:34.760 | So I would say like an hour of listening to a podcast

00:31:38.520 | while you're doing other tasks is equivalent to maybe 10 minutes

00:31:43.320 | of actually giving it your undivided attention, replaying the audio,

00:31:47.440 | taking notes.

00:31:48.680 | So it's why it's a very nebulous thing to decide.

00:31:52.200 | How much time do I need?

00:31:53.800 | Because it depends so much on how you're using that time.

00:31:57.920 | So this is why I tell people, don't worry if you've spent six years or whatever.

00:32:02.680 | I'm the same I spent in school.

00:32:05.960 | I had learned a German for six years.

00:32:08.520 | And at the end of those six years, I couldn't do anything.

00:32:11.760 | I went to Germany and I couldn't order a train ticket.

00:32:16.200 | And I was literally one of the things in my lessons

00:32:18.440 | that kept coming up, how to order a train ticket.

00:32:20.640 | And I couldn't even do that.

00:32:22.040 | So I say I say that I learned German for six years,

00:32:26.480 | but I didn't learn German for six years.

00:32:29.040 | German learning happened in my schedule where I was in that class.

00:32:34.240 | But it was in six years compared to three intensive months.

00:32:38.640 | That is a whole different universe compared to what we think of

00:32:43.120 | for language learning in a very casual or passive way.

00:32:46.920 | So you really need to take active control and it needs to be a priority in your life.

00:32:51.360 | And then you could do a lot more in a shorter time period.

00:32:54.560 | I love it.

00:32:55.600 | So you mentioned the example of it's really important to start speaking early on,

00:33:00.320 | and there's ways that you could do it a lot more affordably.

00:33:02.520 | And you also said, you know, it's really important how you spend the time.

00:33:06.160 | What are the things that are important to spend your time on aside

00:33:10.160 | from native speaking with someone, you know, another human?

00:33:13.880 | Is it vocabulary?

00:33:15.680 | Is it writing? Is it reading?

00:33:18.080 | What are the core elements in that?

00:33:20.240 | You know, let's call it three month period of what you need to be doing.

00:33:23.320 | And I would definitely understand.

00:33:25.640 | This is one of the first questions people ask me is what is the best app

00:33:29.760 | for learning a language and what are the best books I can buy?

00:33:33.360 | And what should I be doing with my time in terms of vocabulary and all that?

00:33:37.240 | And I have to say, I don't want to sound like a broken record,

00:33:41.040 | but the biggest thing you should be thinking about is speaking with a human being.

00:33:46.080 | That should be the center of gravity for everything.

00:33:49.560 | Everything else is incidental to that or anything else is building upon that.

00:33:54.280 | So every day I try to have a lesson with a teacher or if I'm less intensive,

00:33:59.000 | maybe a couple of times a week, and then everything else that I'm doing

00:34:03.000 | is to augment that experience with my teacher.

00:34:06.680 | So maybe after the class passes, I think to myself, man,

00:34:10.240 | I really suck at vocabulary.

00:34:12.480 | Then you have to do sort of a triage system.

00:34:16.520 | You have to decide, like, you know, there's a million, you know,

00:34:19.760 | you imagine a hospital where all these sick people are coming in.

00:34:23.160 | There's a million problems to deal with.

00:34:25.200 | But the guy with the runny nose is not as important as the guy with the gunshot

00:34:29.240 | wound. So you have to do this with your language learning.

00:34:32.040 | And yes, of course, you could think, oh, my accent sucks.

00:34:35.240 | Oh, my God, I'm not conjugating my verbs or I don't know

00:34:38.440 | the right gender of these nouns.

00:34:40.360 | But none of that makes a big difference with actual communication.

00:34:44.440 | I guarantee you when you're speaking languages and you mess up the gender

00:34:49.400 | like ninety nine point nine nine percent of the time,

00:34:52.440 | they will understand you regardless.

00:34:54.640 | Like people always say, oh, but there's this one really specific example

00:34:59.760 | that if you switch the gender, it means something different.

00:35:02.360 | That that doesn't happen, like almost ever.

00:35:05.560 | For most cases, when you say in German instead of D or you say L

00:35:11.960 | instead of LA in Spanish, they understand what you mean.

00:35:15.680 | So you have to start thinking of other things.

00:35:17.760 | OK, basic vocabulary.

00:35:19.880 | That's what I'm going to do in my my spare time.

00:35:22.160 | Not because that's going to help me with some vague future

00:35:25.600 | of like generally improving my Spanish.

00:35:28.120 | I'm a lot more short term sided and I'm thinking,

00:35:31.360 | what can I do to make my next experience tomorrow or next week?

00:35:36.480 | If that's my next class,

00:35:37.800 | what am I going to do to make that slightly better in the language?

00:35:41.720 | So maybe then I will learn some vocabulary.

00:35:44.400 | And I'm a big fan of using flashcards because they integrate

00:35:48.400 | the spaced repetition system into them.

00:35:50.800 | So they space it out to make sure you're remembering the vocabulary

00:35:54.440 | just before you would potentially forget it.

00:35:57.360 | For that, I use an app, Anki, A-N-K-I.

00:35:59.880 | But I know for a lot of people,

00:36:03.480 | it has a very simple interface, which works for me.

00:36:06.600 | But there's other apps that have a bit more like,

00:36:10.200 | you know, notification sounds and a prettier interface

00:36:14.440 | that may be a bit more manageable for people.

00:36:17.960 | So there's there's a bunch of apps that you can use.

00:36:20.360 | Which one you use isn't really as important as the fact

00:36:23.960 | that you are deciding, how is this going to help my spoken sessions?

00:36:28.040 | So I'm not the kind of person who says you must download this app.

00:36:31.800 | You must get this specific book because these are incidental.

00:36:35.360 | I will just literally find whatever book.

00:36:37.920 | I'll just walk into a bookshop

00:36:39.960 | wherever I happen to be and be like, I'll pick up that one.

00:36:42.600 | You know, obviously, except for my books.

00:36:44.600 | Obviously, those are the books people should be buying first.

00:36:47.160 | But that being said, you just buy some language course

00:36:51.520 | and make sure you're doing stuff with your teacher and your teacher

00:36:55.040 | will help you decide a bit more directionally

00:36:58.480 | what you need to put your time into.

00:37:00.760 | So I do understand people always want to know what is the app?

00:37:04.560 | What is the book?

00:37:05.840 | But it's all of these will be one percent to five percent

00:37:10.760 | contributing to your success compared to are you finding a human being

00:37:14.800 | and speaking with them regularly?

00:37:16.600 | So my my focus is way more in that direction.

00:37:20.400 | And in terms of what you're doing in the long term,

00:37:22.800 | you can't speak your way to fluency.

00:37:25.120 | You're not going to speak every day and then eventually end up a fluency.

00:37:28.280 | I have a bit more of a dynamic learning approach at the beginning.

00:37:32.440 | It's all about speaking. That's priority.

00:37:35.120 | I just need to have these lessons and get over my lack of confidence

00:37:40.800 | in using the little language that I have.

00:37:42.960 | But with time, I when I have the basic ability to communicate,

00:37:48.360 | then I find some of the more traditional learning resources are great.

00:37:51.720 | And I will go through a language learning course book and do its exercises.

00:37:56.040 | I don't recommend that to people at the beginning,

00:37:58.960 | but in the later intermediate stages,

00:38:01.680 | that's when you need to start polishing up your skills.

00:38:04.480 | And that's when it becomes a little bit more important in this triage system.

00:38:09.120 | You know, you no longer have gunshot wounds.

00:38:11.440 | So maybe the runny nose of getting the genders right in the language

00:38:15.360 | is a little bit more important now because you've solved all the other big problems.

00:38:19.760 | So I start to focus on grammar.

00:38:23.560 | I will study grammar like I'm not a fan of grammar in the beginning stages.

00:38:28.200 | I think it is not.

00:38:29.520 | It is one of the worst uses of your time to be studying grammar

00:38:33.440 | when you've just started to learn the language.

00:38:35.360 | But at the intermediate stage, that's when it is actually a bigger priority,

00:38:39.680 | because that's that is literally your biggest problem.

00:38:42.680 | You're already communicating in the language, but your grammar is lacking.

00:38:46.520 | So that's what you try to fix.

00:38:48.320 | So it's a very dynamic approach that you see.

00:38:50.760 | What is my biggest problem right now?

00:38:53.240 | And you try to solve that problem progressively with time.

00:38:57.440 | But for people just starting off, your biggest problem

00:39:00.800 | is you can't say anything in the language and you don't know

00:39:03.880 | what they're saying back to you.

00:39:05.360 | So this is more a case of just pushing through the practice stage

00:39:10.360 | of giving yourself face time with a human being in whatever way that may be.

00:39:15.040 | And how important is for languages that don't use the kind of Latin alphabet?

00:39:21.600 | How important is reading and writing?

00:39:25.400 | Reading and writing is something I also tend to put later

00:39:29.120 | in the intermediate, regardless, even even for Latin based languages

00:39:32.440 | like Spanish or French, I wouldn't really pick up a book

00:39:37.080 | and try to read it until I'm at the intermediate stages,

00:39:40.200 | because it's just too much work.

00:39:42.840 | Like I literally with Spanish when I first started, one of my failed

00:39:46.760 | experiments was I picked up El Señor de los Anillos, Lord of the Rings.

00:39:51.320 | And I thought, if I read this, I'll be fluent by the end of it.

00:39:54.160 | And it took me weeks to get to page two because I was literally

00:39:57.560 | looking up every single word.

00:39:59.640 | So that was really not a good use of my time.

00:40:02.200 | Whereas when I've reached the intermediate stage,

00:40:04.800 | then it becomes more manageable.

00:40:06.640 | Then I'm only looking up every like 15th or 30th word

00:40:11.080 | so I can actually read significantly more and it becomes more pleasurable.

00:40:15.480 | So personally, I leave reading till later.

00:40:18.840 | I wouldn't necessarily say this is something I would prescribe to everybody

00:40:22.720 | because I've interviewed a lot of other language learners.

00:40:27.200 | It's people will see a lot of episodes on my podcast

00:40:30.240 | where I talk to a lot of very interesting people.

00:40:33.880 | And like I can think of a bunch of them.

00:40:36.280 | There's Steve Kaufman, who runs the website link.

00:40:39.480 | There's Professor Krashen, who's very famous for talking about

00:40:44.880 | comprehensible input, which is a philosophy in language learning

00:40:50.200 | where you try to get exposure to something that is within your language level.

00:40:55.080 | And that leans a lot more towards reading.

00:40:57.720 | And people would actually read from the beginning.

00:41:00.280 | So that may work more appropriately for a lot of people.

00:41:03.920 | But what I found is it tends to work a little bit more for maybe

00:41:07.680 | either older generations or people who are really not

00:41:11.960 | as passionate to speak the language.

00:41:15.360 | And that's fine.

00:41:16.280 | They have a lot of goals in the language.

00:41:18.240 | But walking up to people and using it with them

00:41:20.480 | ultimately is maybe not their biggest priority.

00:41:22.920 | In my case, I'm a traveler. I'm a nomad.

00:41:25.440 | So speaking the language is by far the biggest priority.

00:41:29.320 | I need to make friends.

00:41:30.800 | I need to interact with people in complicated situations.

00:41:34.800 | So speaking is my priority.

00:41:36.480 | Once I've done that, then I come back to reading and writing.

00:41:39.560 | And that's regardless of whatever script it uses.

00:41:42.720 | But in terms of how they're different, I don't really change

00:41:47.640 | how I learn a language when it's European versus when it's something

00:41:51.280 | like an Asian language.

00:41:52.680 | I mean, maybe with something like Chinese that has

00:41:56.680 | as a character based writing system.

00:41:59.000 | In that case, I would absolutely learn all my vocabulary

00:42:03.840 | through pinyin, which is the Romanized version of Chinese characters.

00:42:08.840 | So people would say, well, Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world.

00:42:12.400 | Actually, Mandarin is not that hard.

00:42:16.680 | Grammatically, it's very straightforward.

00:42:19.080 | And the way the words are formed is very logical.

00:42:21.880 | So I really don't think Mandarin is that bad of a language.

00:42:25.600 | But of course, Chinese characters are a huge barrier

00:42:30.160 | that you have to work through.

00:42:31.920 | So I just decide, let's take this in two stages.

00:42:35.400 | Like a native Chinese person would have done.

00:42:37.840 | Chinese children learn how to speak first,

00:42:41.200 | and then they learn how to read and write.

00:42:43.240 | So that's what I was going to do.

00:42:44.800 | I learned how to speak Mandarin, and I would remember my vocabulary

00:42:49.320 | through pinyin, which is using our letters from the Latin alphabet

00:42:54.040 | to remember how to say the words.

00:42:56.000 | And then with time, I added Chinese characters so I could begin to read

00:43:00.280 | when that was in my triage system of a bigger priority.

00:43:04.680 | So that's the case with that.

00:43:07.040 | But then for a language like Korean that I'm currently doing,

00:43:09.440 | it's writing system is actually very logical.

00:43:12.040 | You can learn it in a weekend if you put like some intensive time into it.

00:43:16.320 | It's very straightforward.

00:43:18.280 | So a lot of languages that have a phonetic system like Cyrillic

00:43:21.800 | for Russian or for Arabic or Greek, or in the case I'm doing now, Korean.

00:43:28.000 | You can still incorporate learning the the writing system

00:43:33.280 | because that's going to help you a lot with vocabulary.

00:43:35.280 | You really want to be learning your vocabulary through its writing system

00:43:39.400 | when it's phonetic and people get intimidated because they like

00:43:45.120 | when I saw Korean before learning it, I was like, wow, all these circles and lines.

00:43:49.960 | This must be it must take years to master.

00:43:52.400 | It is so easy.

00:43:54.720 | I cannot overstate how easy the Korean writing system is

00:43:59.960 | to to be able to pick up.

00:44:01.880 | It's extremely logical.

00:44:03.800 | And it's something I did in a weekend.

00:44:05.920 | So you would be surprised for a lot of languages.

00:44:08.360 | It looks intimidating because all these squiggles and lines

00:44:11.440 | you've never seen before, but it's just the it's like anything.

00:44:14.560 | You put a little bit of time in and it becomes manageable.

00:44:18.760 | Are there some languages that, you know, do do skew on the harder

00:44:22.880 | or English or sorry, on the harder or or easier side to learn?

00:44:27.240 | So I definitely I've talked about this quite a lot.

00:44:31.640 | There's a podcast I've done with Paul Jorgensen, and he's a big YouTuber,

00:44:37.360 | millions of subscribers from the Lang Focus.

00:44:40.680 | And in that we talked about how to make difficult languages easy.

00:44:43.960 | People can find that in my podcast, talked about it.

00:44:46.440 | Very fascinating when you dive in that one particular topic.

00:44:49.720 | But what I say in general, whenever I'm thinking about this

00:44:54.200 | is I like to get people in a different mindset.

00:44:57.400 | And I'll give you an example.

00:45:00.120 | When I was in Spain learning Spanish, I met a Spaniard

00:45:03.520 | who was learning both Japanese and French.

00:45:07.040 | And I said to him, well, obviously, French is going to be a lot easier

00:45:10.280 | for you, isn't it?

00:45:11.160 | Because it's in the same language family.

00:45:12.880 | And he said, absolutely not.

00:45:14.520 | Japanese is so much easier.

00:45:16.560 | And I didn't get it.

00:45:17.400 | I was like, how? It's so different.

00:45:19.680 | And he said, because I'm forced to learn French in school,

00:45:22.960 | whereas I really want to go to Japan, I like anime.

00:45:26.640 | I think Japanese girls are cute.

00:45:28.440 | I've always dreamed of living in the country.

00:45:30.600 | And that completely transformed his experience.

00:45:33.560 | And it made Japanese easier.

00:45:35.800 | And I think when people come from this more academic way

00:45:39.640 | of looking at a language, they think of how am I going to decide

00:45:42.960 | which language is harder?

00:45:44.120 | Well, I'm going to put one language on one side,

00:45:46.720 | not a language on another side and compare them side by side.

00:45:51.000 | And if I see more common words like between English and French,

00:45:55.000 | that makes it easier.

00:45:56.400 | And if I see complicated grammar like Japanese

00:46:00.000 | having a different word order in the sentence, that makes it hard.

00:46:03.400 | And that, for me, is such an inhuman way

00:46:07.200 | of deciding which languages are harder and easy.

00:46:09.880 | And it is easy to scale it.

00:46:12.160 | Like you can say, regardless of the person, this language is harder than that.

00:46:16.080 | But realistically, each person has their own situation

00:46:21.200 | when it comes to learning a language.

00:46:22.800 | They have their own passions.

00:46:24.440 | They have their own motivations.

00:46:26.400 | And when I think of all the languages I've learned

00:46:29.440 | and I compare my experiences, I would say something like Chinese

00:46:34.560 | was actually easier for me than Spanish.

00:46:37.640 | And people always think that doesn't make any sense

00:46:40.880 | because Spanish is much closer to English and and all these other reasons.

00:46:45.200 | You know, but ultimately, I had a bad language

00:46:48.760 | learning approach with Spanish for a long time.

00:46:51.240 | It took me a very long time to get to fluency with Spanish

00:46:54.640 | to even get to a conversational level.

00:46:57.080 | And I kept kicking myself.

00:46:59.120 | I kept telling myself, your Spanish is miserable.

00:47:01.720 | People are laughing at you.

00:47:03.440 | Who would want to speak Spanish with you?

00:47:05.480 | And all of these reasons are why it took me so long to learn Spanish.

00:47:10.720 | Whereas with Mandarin, at that stage, I had a good language learning approach.

00:47:15.280 | I had a good attitude.

00:47:16.800 | I embraced making mistakes.

00:47:18.600 | So after three months, I reached a pretty good conversational stage.

00:47:23.520 | And people can see YouTube videos of me where I'm interviewing people

00:47:27.720 | in Mandarin three months after I've started to learn the language.

00:47:31.480 | I could not do that with Spanish.

00:47:33.320 | Now, this does not mean I'm going to say universally.

00:47:36.160 | Therefore, Mandarin is easier than Spanish.

00:47:38.600 | Obviously not.

00:47:39.840 | It is the context of I was a more confident person.

00:47:44.320 | I had a lot better motivation with Spanish.

00:47:47.560 | I didn't have great motivation at the start.

00:47:49.600 | I didn't really know why did I want to learn Spanish?

00:47:52.400 | So I was putting the effort in a very inconsistent way.

00:47:57.400 | Whereas Mandarin, I knew I want to travel China.

00:48:00.640 | I want to take a train 2000 kilometers deep into the country.

00:48:05.040 | I want to make a video of me getting a kung fu lesson

00:48:08.280 | in a village with a kung fu master.

00:48:11.120 | All these dreams that I managed to make come true.

00:48:14.560 | I had these in mind, and that made Mandarin easier.

00:48:18.400 | So when I when I talk to people and I see they've decided

00:48:24.320 | they want to learn a particular language and it has real,

00:48:28.280 | genuine significance in their life, like their family background is there

00:48:32.240 | or they have a love interest in the country.

00:48:35.640 | They want to move in with or whatever it may be.

00:48:37.960 | That is their passion.

00:48:40.000 | And that is going to make that language

00:48:41.800 | significantly more approachable because they have huge motivation to learn it.

00:48:46.800 | So the fact that other languages are easier or harder is insignificant

00:48:52.160 | because they aren't going to be easier if you don't care about them.

00:48:56.280 | So whatever language is the most important in your life,

00:49:00.160 | that is the easiest language, because that's the one

00:49:03.120 | you're going to be able to get momentum to learn.

00:49:06.280 | I love that.

00:49:07.720 | I know a lot of the podcasts we talk about travel.

00:49:10.960 | I know a lot of our listeners love to travel.

00:49:12.560 | And so one of the times people are often most excited to learn a language

00:49:16.280 | is that, you know, maybe they planned a trip or they have this,

00:49:18.800 | like you said, in China, a vision for a trip they want to take.

00:49:21.520 | Not everyone who is planning a trip to a foreign country

00:49:25.320 | necessarily feels like they they need to become fluent.

00:49:29.360 | Is there a stop along the way where you can have enough

00:49:34.760 | kind of skills in a language to have a different experience traveling

00:49:39.120 | and unlock, you know, really interesting things

00:49:42.280 | that you can get to a lot quicker and any advice for someone in that situation?

00:49:47.040 | Well, when it comes to language levels, there is a lot of specificity with this,

00:49:52.800 | and this is something I take into account with my targets.

00:49:55.280 | So I always work off the European Common Framework,

00:49:58.840 | which has a very specific way of categorizing language levels.

00:50:02.800 | It splits it into A, B and C.

00:50:05.200 | And within each one, it further sub splits it into one and two.

00:50:09.280 | So A is beginner, B is intermediate, C is advanced.

00:50:13.400 | One is lower, two is upper.

00:50:15.800 | So A2 means you're an advanced beginner

00:50:19.920 | and C1 means you're a lower level mastery speaker of the language.

00:50:24.800 | So this scale of six different levels is where I pin everything.

00:50:29.600 | So for me, fluency begins at the B2 level.

00:50:33.760 | This is upper intermediate.

00:50:35.520 | So what that means is you can talk about most things

00:50:39.080 | you would talk about in casual social situations.

00:50:42.120 | But because you're not at the C levels, you don't have a mastery level.

00:50:46.640 | So in my case, I studied engineering.

00:50:48.760 | So the languages I have a C level at, I could work as an engineer

00:50:52.880 | in those language and languages, and I could have a philosophical

00:50:56.160 | conversation with you about very deep subjects.

00:50:59.240 | But for the most part, most conversations I'm going to have

00:51:02.520 | are the high level B2 social conversations.

00:51:06.160 | So that's what I'm aiming for.

00:51:08.200 | And it's important on the scale to remove perfectionism

00:51:11.720 | because even the C2 is still not perfect.

00:51:14.840 | It means that you can work functionally through the language

00:51:18.000 | the same way you would in your mother tongue.

00:51:20.240 | Now, on the same scale, I think that at the A2 level, upper beginner,

00:51:26.360 | this is where you can function very confidently as

00:51:30.200 | an independent tourist in the language.

00:51:33.680 | So you can ask for directions.

00:51:36.160 | You can get the gist of their reply.

00:51:38.800 | You can deal with problems like you have an injury

00:51:43.600 | and you can get yourself to the hospital.

00:51:45.600 | All of these very basic functional things you can do with confidence,

00:51:50.360 | even though you can't necessarily have full on conversations.

00:51:54.280 | And I think that is fine for somebody who's going to the country briefly.

00:51:58.160 | And this is something you could genuinely get to in a lot shorter

00:52:01.720 | of a time than people realize the very steep curve at the beginning.

00:52:05.720 | But you can make a lot of progress very quickly.

00:52:08.360 | What tends to happen is we reach the intermediate plateau.

00:52:12.920 | This is where things start to get really rough,

00:52:15.160 | where you're putting as much effort in, but you get stuck at the middle level.

00:52:19.600 | And this will happen to everybody.

00:52:21.760 | And that's OK as long as you can push through to very beginning stages.

00:52:26.480 | That B1, I feel, is something that is definitely achievable

00:52:30.400 | in the matter of a certain amount of months for people.

00:52:33.280 | Regardless of your background, if you're able to put the time in,

00:52:36.840 | a B1 level means you can have a lot of conversations with people.

00:52:41.760 | As long as they're a little patient with you.

00:52:43.640 | So it's not does not count as fluency, but it counts as conversational.

00:52:48.120 | And for me, this is where I love to be in my travels

00:52:52.200 | because I can start to make friends in the language.

00:52:55.200 | I can really hang out with people.

00:52:57.560 | If you're single, you can go on dates with with with people.

00:53:00.800 | You can do a lot with that B1 level.

00:53:03.560 | So this, for me, is a minimum to feel like I'm truly experiencing

00:53:08.080 | the culture in a lot, a lot more of a direct way.

00:53:11.680 | Anything less than that is more a case of how confident a tourist

00:53:15.840 | you are going to be, which in itself can be a wonderful thing.

00:53:19.720 | You can have a lot of great experiences, but ultimately you are going to be doing

00:53:23.760 | most of your things in English if you're only at an A2 level,

00:53:27.600 | which means your your interactions, your friends and so on.

00:53:31.400 | Whereas so it depends on your style of travel.

00:53:33.840 | My style of travel, obviously, is I avoid English.

00:53:37.360 | I want to make only local friends.

00:53:39.440 | So I have to get at least a B1 level.

00:53:42.760 | And that's where, you know, when you said at the beginning,

00:53:45.280 | Benny speaks 12 languages that that number 12 comes from B1 and up.

00:53:51.360 | So I only I only I personally only say I speak a language

00:53:55.560 | if I can have conversations in the language,

00:53:58.680 | not if I would function as a tourist.

00:54:01.400 | So I actually have another dozen languages that I could function

00:54:04.960 | as a tourist quite confidently.

00:54:07.040 | But the thing is, that's not as impressive as it sounds,

00:54:09.400 | because you could do that a lot quicker than people realize.

00:54:12.320 | You can be a very confident tourist.

00:54:14.080 | You can have a bunch of phrases ready to go in a very, very short time span.

00:54:18.480 | So you can be a confident tourist way faster than you imagine,

00:54:22.800 | especially if you're having consistent conversations ahead of time.

00:54:27.280 | I did for a while travel to the country and think I'm going to get off the plane

00:54:31.920 | and immediately start speaking the language or start learning the language.

00:54:35.160 | And that was an interesting period in my life.

00:54:38.160 | But nowadays I try to learn the language ahead of time

00:54:41.560 | so I don't leave it for when I'm in the country.

00:54:44.080 | I don't think especially for people who can only travel to a country

00:54:48.360 | for a very limited amount of time, I don't want to be in language

00:54:52.480 | learning mode if I'm only only going to be in a country for a month or two.

00:54:56.200 | I want to really get to know the place.

00:54:58.440 | So that's why I do my work ahead of time.

00:55:01.720 | And then I can explore and make friends once I get to the country.

00:55:04.640 | They said people can learn it way faster than they'd imagine.

00:55:07.920 | Could you put any kind of rough, rough window on that?

00:55:10.320 | If someone's got a trip planned to Japan in a month,

00:55:13.040 | do you think they could pick up enough to get to the not not the B B level,

00:55:17.080 | but in that a level, be able to have a conversation and ask some directions

00:55:20.360 | and and not just, you know, just have a few more local experiences?

00:55:24.440 | You do that in a weekend.

00:55:26.480 | But people don't realize how quickly you could learn phrases.

00:55:30.240 | I think a lot of us just lack the confidence.

00:55:32.680 | And we can't picture a universe where we walk up to somebody

00:55:37.240 | and ask for directions when we've never spoken a language before.

00:55:41.440 | And we imagine this is only something geniuses do.

00:55:44.760 | But like, I really want people to lower the bar on what they think

00:55:49.960 | counts as speaking a language as a tourist,

00:55:53.320 | because like it's really not that impressive.

00:55:56.520 | You're you're learning a very finite number of sentences you can rattle off.

00:56:01.680 | You do not need to know the intricacies of the language

00:56:05.040 | to know how every single part of that works.

00:56:08.040 | And, you know, whenever I'm starting off and I want to be a tourist

00:56:11.080 | and language, I'll sing myself like the phrase I want to learn.

00:56:16.360 | I'll sing that to myself a few times.

00:56:18.600 | And that helps me remember it.

00:56:20.280 | And I'll do that in like 10 minutes.

00:56:22.480 | I'll learn how to say, where is the library?

00:56:25.000 | And I'll look it up online and I'll try to say it.

00:56:28.040 | And that's it. It's really not that impressive.

00:56:30.800 | If you're going to Japan in a month, you can learn 20 phrases this weekend.

00:56:36.120 | So instead, decide how about I'm going to take this month.

00:56:39.800 | I'm going to try and be able to maybe understand their replies to me.

00:56:44.640 | I'm going to try and push myself up to see if I can get to that A2 level

00:56:49.440 | and maybe be a little bit more confident

00:56:52.760 | to expand on my sentences, have a little bit of maneuverability

00:56:58.040 | where I'm not just rattling off memorized phrases.

00:57:00.720 | I can replace a word or two here, here or there.

00:57:03.560 | So you could do that in a month.

00:57:05.840 | But if you're going to Japan, you're really passionate about it.

00:57:08.760 | Maybe you should decide this this next month.

00:57:11.360 | I'm going to make those sacrifices and I'm really going to try

00:57:15.360 | and make Japanese my priority so that when I'm in Japan,

00:57:19.240 | I'm communicating a lot more than I would otherwise.

00:57:21.960 | But it sounds like to be able to ask questions and get a response,

00:57:26.680 | not necessarily be fluent at all a month, if you can really put in the time,

00:57:31.040 | is not an unreasonable goal.

00:57:33.200 | Absolutely.

00:57:33.880 | And like this, what I understand, this tourist level of the language

00:57:38.040 | than the A levels, this is way more accessible than people imagine it to be.

00:57:42.640 | It's really not that impressive.

00:57:44.600 | Once you put once you've done it a couple of times, you realize

00:57:48.040 | you're just learning a few phrases and just trying to commit them to memory

00:57:52.280 | and then rattling them off

00:57:53.640 | and maybe learning a couple of the words that could come up in the replies.

00:57:56.800 | So it's not that complex.

00:57:59.120 | The B levels do require a certain intimate understanding

00:58:02.960 | of how the language is truly piecing together its replies

00:58:07.160 | and having a broader vocabulary so you can expand on things.

00:58:10.840 | But the early levels, you could do that a lot easier than you imagine.

00:58:15.440 | Love it.

00:58:15.880 | Any any final kind of tips or hacks when it comes to language learning?

00:58:19.800 | I know you've written so many language hacks books

00:58:22.200 | that people should be kind of put in their arsenal

00:58:25.280 | as they're going through this process.

00:58:27.160 | I mean, I mentioned my biggest hack, but in general, my philosophy is

00:58:31.200 | I would really encourage people to make as many mistakes as possible.

00:58:36.360 | When I'm really getting into learning a language and doing it intensively.

00:58:40.240 | My goal is today I'm going to make 200 mistakes or more.

00:58:45.600 | That's my goal.

00:58:47.000 | And that gets you completely away from this academic mindset

00:58:50.440 | where every mistake brings you closer to a fail.

00:58:53.080 | Every mistake is you communicating more.

00:58:56.120 | And like I said earlier, you suck a little less every day.

00:58:59.960 | So that's my biggest takeaway other than speak from day one.

00:59:03.440 | So I would encourage people to make mistakes.

00:59:07.360 | Embrace your inner Spanish Tarzan or whatever.

00:59:11.680 | You imagine this caveman functionality of the language.

00:59:16.240 | Try to just use that.

00:59:18.200 | And that's how you move forward.

00:59:19.720 | That's how you push through those A levels to eventually

00:59:22.960 | then be communicating in the language.

00:59:24.880 | Embrace being a beginner. It's fine.

00:59:27.400 | I've had such wonderful experiences in many of my languages.

00:59:31.440 | Even in those beginner A levels, I've had interactions

00:59:35.400 | that I remember for the rest of my life.

00:59:37.400 | And that's great.

00:59:38.960 | You don't have to only be fluent in the language

00:59:41.560 | to have rich experiences in it.

00:59:43.880 | So once you are OK with being a beginner,

00:59:47.280 | it becomes a lot easier to have fun with it, to make progress

00:59:50.720 | and then to go beyond that.

00:59:53.360 | Two things.

00:59:53.960 | One, I can imagine that people listening.

00:59:55.960 | We've talked multiple times about all these languages you've picked up,

00:59:59.160 | and I'm sure there's people just curious.

01:00:01.320 | Would you mind sharing the languages you've kind of hit that,

01:00:04.040 | you know, be an above level just so people can kind of just

01:00:08.320 | suffice their curiosity?

01:00:10.840 | So most of the Romance languages, I would have B2 and above.

01:00:15.840 | So genuine fluency.

01:00:18.120 | C in a lot of them.

01:00:19.360 | This would be Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese.

01:00:23.920 | And then I have probably a B1 in Catalan as well.

01:00:29.080 | Then I have German, also high level,

01:00:33.040 | and then probably a B1 again in Dutch.

01:00:36.560 | And then American Sign Language.

01:00:39.320 | That would be another B1.

01:00:41.760 | So most of my C levels are the Romance languages.

01:00:45.040 | I also have Mandarin.

01:00:47.800 | I did reach a B1 level of that, so I think I'd need

01:00:51.080 | probably a couple of weeks to get back to the B1 level

01:00:53.920 | before I return to the likes of China.

01:00:56.400 | Currently learning Korean, and I'd say by the time this goes live,

01:01:00.560 | I'd say pretty decently confident that it's B1 too.

01:01:05.760 | And then I've dabbled in a bunch of others

01:01:08.200 | that I would not put on that scale.

01:01:10.840 | But yeah, so that's that's it in a nutshell.

01:01:13.560 | I know you've traveled quite a bit.

01:01:15.560 | Is there a place that someone looking for some travel inspiration

01:01:19.160 | can take from you?

01:01:19.920 | Maybe a favorite city or country or town that isn't the obvious place

01:01:23.880 | that's on everyone's list that you want to share and maybe why it's special.

01:01:27.320 | In a lot of countries, I'm a big fan of the second city.

01:01:31.840 | So rather than the capital city,

01:01:34.080 | I think the second city, like as a general rule,

01:01:38.080 | it's going to be more affordable.

01:01:40.160 | You're going to have less less foreigners.

01:01:42.360 | So more of a chance to meet local people

01:01:44.920 | who maybe aren't overwhelmed with how many foreigners there are.

01:01:48.320 | So like right now in Korea, I'm talking to you from Busan,

01:01:51.720 | which is the second city, and I can list a lot of advantages

01:01:55.120 | over going to Seoul because of how more of an authentic experience

01:01:59.840 | I'm having, but still having the comforts of being in a city.

01:02:03.000 | Obviously, you're going to be even more authentic if you go to a village

01:02:05.960 | somewhere, but the city life I happen to enjoy.

01:02:09.160 | So the second city in a lot of countries.

01:02:12.080 | I'm a huge fan of basing myself there for a certain period of time

01:02:16.080 | to to get to know the culture in a different way.

01:02:20.560 | And generally, I tend to be one of the few foreigners

01:02:23.960 | who is in that city to be able to have a bit more of an authentic experience.

01:02:29.720 | I love that just a general rule of thumb is second city. Great.

01:02:33.800 | If you have any final parting wisdom for anyone, please share it.

01:02:38.200 | Otherwise, let people know where they can find everything you're working on.

01:02:41.480 | Yeah. So since you're in podcast mode right now,

01:02:46.400 | if you do a search for language hacking, that's my podcast.

01:02:50.000 | I've interviewed a lot of very interesting people with the full scale

01:02:54.240 | of people who are just starting out and having their initial success.

01:02:57.440 | The people who are professional linguists in the field

01:03:00.080 | and have been doing this for decades.

01:03:03.200 | I run my own coaching program

01:03:05.480 | where I help people to learn a language in three months

01:03:09.120 | to get to a conversational stage.

01:03:11.320 | So people will find that on my website.

01:03:14.240 | Of course, I'm on all the social medias.

01:03:17.200 | I actually, as part of my way to practice languages,

01:03:20.800 | I make a new social media account in each of the languages.

01:03:25.200 | So even threads that as we're recording this now, it's only existed for a week.

01:03:29.160 | I have 14 threads accounts just so I can follow in my target languages.

01:03:35.080 | I have 14 TikTok accounts, 14 Instagram accounts.

01:03:38.640 | And I use all of these to maybe post

01:03:41.400 | vertical videos to practice the language and, of course, follow people.

01:03:45.400 | And that's my main one is Irish polyglot on most of the channels.

01:03:51.520 | People can find me there and get some more inspiration.

01:03:54.760 | Yeah, I mean, that just made me think of one last thing before we go.

01:03:57.200 | Is is that a tactic?

01:03:58.600 | Maybe following accounts in other countries on social media?

01:04:02.120 | It never occurred to me as a potential way to practice or learn a language.

01:04:06.320 | Well, a tactic that's a bit broader than that is think,

01:04:09.520 | what do you tend to do with your time and how can you do that in your target language?

01:04:14.080 | So if you're the kind of person who winds your day down with Netflix,

01:04:17.200 | maybe within Netflix, create a new sub account because, you know,

01:04:21.800 | you can have multiple sub accounts on the same main login

01:04:25.360 | and make that just your target language.

01:04:27.480 | So you're only watching stuff in the language

01:04:30.040 | and the algorithm will recommend that to you.

01:04:32.240 | I personally happen to watch a lot of TikTok videos.

01:04:35.080 | That's how I wind down as I swipe up, up, up, up, watch TikTok.

01:04:38.360 | So rather than do that in English, which is not really that good of a use of my time,

01:04:42.920 | I created new accounts and I trained the algorithm

01:04:46.440 | to only show me content in those languages.

01:04:49.680 | I only followed people who made content in those languages.

01:04:53.080 | So when I switched to it, I'm in that language mode.

01:04:55.560 | I'm using my computer.

01:04:57.000 | So I made sure that I could switch the language on my computer on my phone.

01:05:01.960 | I very quickly changed the interface on my phone.

01:05:04.920 | So it's more of a broader thing of thinking, how are you living your life?

01:05:08.800 | What are the things you're doing?

01:05:10.120 | And can you change any of those things to be in your target language?

01:05:13.760 | You like playing video games?

01:05:15.440 | Change the language that they're giving you the orders

01:05:18.640 | to shoot that guy to be in your target language.

01:05:21.800 | And there's a lot of ways you can have this sense of virtual immersion

01:05:26.440 | without even having to to leave your home country,

01:05:29.360 | that you can exist in the language you like working out.

01:05:32.840 | Look for I work out these days to Korean workout music.

01:05:37.840 | And that's like the same kind of bump,

01:05:40.240 | thump, thump music, but they're singing in Korean.

01:05:42.960 | So everything you do, try to do it in your target language.

01:05:46.080 | And in my case, I use social media a lot.

01:05:48.920 | So I may as well use social media in my target language.

01:05:51.800 | I love that tip.

01:05:53.200 | This has been fantastic.

01:05:54.440 | Thank you so much for joining us.

01:05:56.000 | I am I'm excited to to pick up a new language.

01:05:59.280 | Thank you, everybody.

01:06:00.640 | And I hope to hear from all of you.

01:06:02.760 | And best of luck on all of your own language journeys.

Language Hacking: Become Fluent in 3 Months

Chapters