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That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Hello radicals, bienvenidos a Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Ruchites. I am your host and today I'm going to share with you a story and some lessons. The story is how I have taught my children to be fluent in Spanish in less than one year without being part of a Spanish speaking community, without enrolling them in a Spanish speaking school entirely at home as part of our overall homeschool curriculum.

And I'm going to share the story with you and share some of the lessons because I think these are lessons that are very applicable and helpful to your life. This show will not contain any technical financial planning. This is one of those living a rich life. I think that languages enrich your life.

I think there's a very good reason to teach yourself multiple foreign languages and to teach your children multiple foreign languages. It opens up new cultures to you, new countries to you, new regions of the world, new employment opportunities that may relate to your financial life in a very strong way.

It may help your children in a very strong way. But I'm not going to be talking about financial planning. I'm talking about language learning. But I'm pretty excited with some of the results that I've achieved in the last year. Including some methods that I made up and have since found out that other people are applying successfully as well.

And I'll share those with you because I think the results have been pretty astonishingly spectacular. And I want to share them with you now for one very specific reason. I'm close enough to remember what I have done and what I am doing, but far enough along to have results.

I like very much to wait until I've either done something and really proven the results out for myself before I talk about it or to really exhaustively research something. If I talk about something here on Radical Personal Finance, it's generally either something I have done and I know or it's something that I have researched extensively and I'm very confident in my opinions.

You will usually hear me, you'll frequently hear me, if there's an area where I get into where I'm not quite sure, I will quickly acknowledge that publicly and I'll state, "Hey, this is an area where I'm a little shaky." And I think that's important to do just from simple personal honesty.

But I don't want to wait until I have all of my results accomplished to share some of what I have been doing with you because what can happen is you forget. I always tease my mother about this because you ask my mom, if I go and ask my mother, whose youngest child is in his mid-30s, she doesn't remember anything about the day-to-day of raising little children.

It's just blocked from her mind. And so she'll see one of my children do something, she's like, "Wow, children do that?" And she's very sweet about it, but it's just funny because all of the day-to-day difficulties have been blocked from her mind now. And her mind only remembers the positive things, not specifically the day-to-day, moment-by-moment stuff.

And it's not that she doesn't have a tremendous wealth of wisdom to share, she does. But sometimes I wonder if she remembers things as accurately as she should. And so that's why I want to do this now while I'm still in the process. So I want to begin with my results, then I'm going to tell you what I have done, then I'm going to talk about the academic research behind what I have done, which I didn't know about when I started doing it, but have since found, and then how I plan to continue to exercise my results.

So for context, I have four children. The eldest is seven, recently turned seven, and the youngest is one, one and a half. So at this stage, I have four very young children. And when my eldest children were younger, my wife and I talked about the idea of teaching our children a foreign language, specifically Spanish.

Both she and I learned Spanish in high school, and both she and I were, I would say, advanced intermediate Spanish speakers. Neither of us is truly expert. I'm in both now advanced levels because we've been working on it, but earlier in our children's lives, we were advanced intermediate speakers.

And we talked about, should we try to teach our children a foreign language? But it seemed daunting. The task seemed insurmountable. I wasn't comfortable speaking Spanish to my children enough to actually do it. It was difficult. It was tiring. It was hard work for me to do it. I didn't know a lot of the daily vocabulary that you need with children, the common expressions.

I could understand basic communication and participate in basic conversations, and even advanced intellectual conversations, but the day-to-day phraseology of how do you say, get in the bathtub. There were words in every language that I didn't know because I didn't grow up speaking Spanish. I learned Spanish. I had two years of high school Spanish.

That's it. And so all of my other studies have been independent studies. And so we talked about it. We thought about it. And we just decided, you know what, we're not cut out for it. We're not going to do it. And so we decided not to try to teach our children Spanish.

Well, that was fine for a while. But over the last couple of years, we have done quite a bit of traveling as a family, including some significant travel in a number of different Spanish-speaking countries. And we thought, you know what, if we're going to be traveling in Spanish-speaking countries, wouldn't it be nice to actually teach our children some Spanish?

So we talked about it, but we didn't know how to do it. What could we do? Maybe we could enroll them in a school. And we thought about it. We talked about that. Should we go somewhere to a Spanish-speaking country and enroll them in a Spanish-speaking school? Maybe that would be good.

Maybe it wouldn't. But for us, for me especially, the opportunity cost of doing that would be too high. I think that largely standardized schooling is so time inefficient, it's such a waste of time, that the cost, even though you might get some benefits like language immersion, the cost of doing that is just so high compared to what can be done in a really productive homeschool environment at home.

So we decided not to do that. We thought about hiring a tutor, but what are we going to do? How are you going to teach children Spanish and put them in classes? None of my children had any interest in speaking Spanish. None of them wanted to do it. So finally I said, you know what, we're going to do this.

And a little under a year ago, I decided to commit. And I said, I'm going to teach my children Spanish. So the first thing I did was buy a bunch of books in Spanish. And I started buying any book I could possibly find, any book I could get my hands on in Spanish.

And I started with lots of storybooks. And I began reading the books to my children and translating them. I found a number of different bilingual books, so I used those. I quickly found out that I didn't like the bilingual translations, so I just focused on buying Spanish language storybooks and reading them to my children.

And I would read to them in Spanish, and then I would translate. And I started with reading short phrases, three, four words at a time, and then translating into English. And then I later moved on to reading longer sentences and then translating those into English. And we just started reading for a significant amount of time.

Now here I want to insert a small sidebar. Reading is a standard part of our family and what we do as a family. I consider reading and the ability to read and the habit of extensive reading to be a basic meta skill that's part of a basic meta ability of learning how to learn.

And so it's a very significant focus for us in our family to not only teach our children to read, but also to help them to love to read and for reading to be a significant part of their life. I consider reading to be the most effective way to acquire knowledge.

I consider reading to be the most effective way to acquire a broad, I'm going to use the word life experience, although I recognize its shortcomings in this case, I'll explain. I consider reading to be one of the most effective ways of acquiring a broad life experience because you can, by consuming the opinions and experiences of others through reading, you can be exposed to many aspects of life.

It's not a genuine lived experience, but it's a vicarious experience that expands the brain and expands the mindset massively. I consider reading to be a major part of language development. When I was younger, because of extensive reading, I've always had a good vocabulary, I've always had excellent grammar, et cetera.

And so I consider it to be a major part of language development. And I think that through reading, you have the chance to develop ideas, philosophies, et cetera, in a very powerful way. And it's more powerful than almost any other input methodology. There are some people who believe that you don't need to read to be successful, and I agree with them.

However, any person who is successful without reading, when I look at that person, I see how if they did read, they could be more successful or they could be more successful faster. I've never found a situation or an argument in which I believe that reading was a disadvantage to somebody with the temperament and personality and other basic life skills where they were destined for success.

The only disadvantage of reading would be if someone stays stuck reading and doesn't proceed to action. That would be the big danger point of reading. But I think that even through reading, you can become aware of that and then discipline yourself to make sure that you're implementing the knowledge that you acquire.

So for those reasons, reading is an important part of our family educational strategy. And we have a strategy about how to help our children to be readers. The basic component of that is from a very early age, we read to them a lot. We read to them everything from a very, very early age.

We fill our house with books, which is an important component. So we have lots of little baby books. We have lots of story books. We focus on buying the highest quality books that we can find. We try to focus on living books. That's a term that comes from the Charlotte Mason philosophy.

And as Charlotte Mason would teach, we try to put a delectable buffet in front of our children. And so there are books all throughout the house of all different kinds of books. And we actually physically put this in front of them in a funny way every night. When the children go to bed, my wife goes around the house.

Of course, if the books, if their books still out, which with little children, of course, we have lots of books to pick up. We pick them up and then she will salt the house with books or seed the house with books. So she'll go and choose five or six or eight books and we'll lay them out on the coffee table and they're different every day with all kinds of different things.

And so the child comes, you know, gambling along and they see the book there and they can't help it. They reach down and they pick it up and all of a sudden they're exposed to a new different book. And so these are part of our strategy. I guess another important component is in our house we don't have any screens or any devices other than books for entertainment or education.

So we don't have a TV. The children don't have digital devices. We don't let them use computers. Everything is just simply with books. And so if they're going to entertain themselves, it's either go play in the yard or play with toys or read books. And if they're wandering around with nothing to do, then often we'll say, go read a book.

If we need them to sit down, sit down and read a book. And so reading is just a basic component of their life. Now we only have one reader at the moment. My seven year old is our only reader. And he broke through in English reading to a very high level very quickly.

He wasn't a kind of superstar of doing it early. We worked on the early reading stuff and failed miserably. And so we just quit for quite a while. But then we came back to it at an age where he was more ready. We worked through it again, taught him the sounds of the words.

And he broke through fairly quickly and then became a voracious reader in English. My next child, who is currently five, has not yet learned how to read. We're working on it, but it's not really taking. And so now with our experience with the first one, we've learned not to sweat it.

Just take some time. But we've been teaching our children to read in English first. So less than a year ago, I had one reader who was reading in English, but we decided to go ahead and start reading to him and them in Spanish. And so I read significantly and I just took a lot of our reading time and put it into Spanish and my wife did some as well.

For context, we probably read, what would I say? I would guess the average is we read an hour and a half to two hours a day to the children. I read at the breakfast table, usually 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes. Read all different books. I read them books. Usually I choose books that teach character qualities, teaching virtue, generally story books, but story books with a lesson, with a parable.

So I switched those books to Spanish and I translated them at the breakfast table. I usually read to them for 30, 45 minutes before dinner. My wife will read to them during the day, the younger ones in the morning, during school time and in the afternoon. So probably another 30 to 45 minutes from her, I'll read 30 minutes before dinner.

And then at bedtime, I read to them for anywhere from 30 to 60 minutes. So I started to move that reading from English into Spanish, again, with simply translation. In addition to that, I made a point of trying to speak to the children more in Spanish. I didn't do any kind of perfect 100% in Spanish, but I tried to speak to them more.

So give them a command in Spanish, translate to English. Give them a command in Spanish, translate to English. And I tried to figure out a way to bring Spanish into the house. Now this was kind of a failure, but I think it did make a difference for my eldest, who is the one who is truly fluent.

The others are not truly fluent yet. I'll describe their levels in a moment. But this did make a difference to the eldest. I couldn't figure out because we're not part of a Spanish speaking community. Their children weren't exposed to Spanish, didn't have any Spanish speaking friends. And so it was basically just me, but I thought, how can I do it?

So I decided to hire basically a babysitter, a nanny, to come into the house a couple days a week and spend the morning with the children. And I found a Spanish speaking nanny who would come in and this was helpful just in terms of handling the homeschool duties, right?

To play with the younger children when the olders were doing school and my wife was engaged with them. But I made sure that the nanny came to play. And the person who this made the biggest difference with was my eldest, my eldest son, who again was six at the time.

And I encouraged them to hang out. They would draw pictures, they would play, they would play games, they would play outside. I encouraged them to cook together. And again, I continued to buy just every book I could find in Spanish. I bought Spanish cookbooks. I bought Spanish all kinds of storybooks, et cetera, and I'd put them out.

One day, my eldest started picking up some of the Spanish books and reading them himself. And I never taught him to read in Spanish. We did teach him to read in English, but never taught him to read in Spanish. But reading in Spanish is one of the easiest things about the Spanish language because the vowel sounds, the consonant sounds all map, almost all map to English.

And the vowel sounds are very simple. There are five very simple vowel sounds and they're very consistent. So it's relatively easy to learn to read in Spanish. And so he started picking it up. And so I kept on plying him with as many books as I could possibly find.

His levels started to get more and more and he started to just naturally start to speak with the Spanish speaking nanny when she would come. And then it was like he broke through and he started to get to higher and higher levels. So what I did was I stopped translating and I started reading more books to him without translation, reading more books without translation.

And I worked really hard to get as many Spanish books that would engage him as I possibly could and then to move away from just picture books to more textbooks, meaning books with just text, not the kind of textbooks you get in class, but books with text and four or five pictures in it.

And what I was looking for is I spent a long time looking for, I've looked for lists of literature. For some reason, these lists are not common in Spanish. If you're a parent and you're looking for books of lists of quality literature for your children, there are so many books written on this.

There's Honey for the Child's Heart and all kinds of lists everywhere of the classic books in the English language. But I've looked everywhere and I can't find those lists in Spanish. But what I did find, I was looking for something that would engage his attention and capture his imagination.

When I was a boy, what really made a big difference for me was when I discovered the Hardy Boys series, the classic Hardy Boys series, the 50 original Hardy Boys books written, I think, 1940s probably, 1930s or 40s. And those books just engaged me and I would get them from the library and read them and read them and I loved them.

And I read so much because I found those. Well, I went looking. I couldn't find Hardy Boys in Spanish, although they were translated, many of them, into Spanish, but I couldn't find them anywhere. And finally, I went to a bookstore and I found a series in a Spanish bookstore.

I found a series by the English author Enid Blyton. She wrote a series of books for adventure books for children called, they're written in English, called The Famous Five and then translated into Spanish called Los Cinco. And so I grabbed that series and I grabbed the first one to check it out, figured, okay, venture stories about books.

They're of course wildly unrealistic. They're not particularly, everything is not awesome. You've got these 11 year old, a 12 year old, a 13 year old whose parents are either, they're just totally uninvolved, whether they're neglectful or just encouraging free range children, who knows? But the parents are totally wildly uninvolved.

Children do all these dangerous, crazy adventures. But that author knows how to write for a child's imagination. And then I started reading to him the first Los Cinco book. I read him the first couple of chapters and then I just left the book and told him he had permission to pick it up and read it.

And when he finally picked it up, he did, he went ahead, he picked it up and he read it and he read it voraciously. And then I went ahead and supplied him with the second one and he read it voraciously. And then I supplied him with the third one and he just, he soaked it up to the point where he was finishing this 250 page book.

And one time he finished one of them in one day. So basically about, it was a long day of reading, but one to two days of reading. And that was like the capstone where I looked at my wife and I gave the yes sign and I said, all right, we've done it.

We have succeeded. That he is reading effectively in Spanish. When a child can pick up one of these books, which has tons of words that I don't know, even though at this point I'm an advanced speaker, when a child can pick up this book and devour it like this, that will work.

And so I've continued to supply him with those books as well as other books. I found a number of older, kind of similar genre of books for him. And I've continued to supply him with those books. So at this point in time, I consider him to be functionally fluent, fully fluent in Spanish.

And he can understand what is being spoken and spoken Spanish. He can pick up all kinds of, he can read in Spanish and he doesn't show a preference between reading in Spanish and English. I'll describe some of the other books. I worked hard to find books that I thought would capture a young boy.

So I found these really great Dorling Kindersley, DK books, these awesome about science and astronomy and space and the human body and history, just incredible, really vivid illustrations, all translated into Spanish, all written in Spanish. And so I supplied him with tons of those. Let me recount actually one story though.

So the thing that's hard about this approach is you don't know what book is going to capture your child's attention. The Fulcrum in my eldest in his Spanish journey, The Fulcrum was a book that I just randomly picked up. I was at the store and I picked up this book that was for sale.

It was called El Mesías and it was the Messiah. And it was published by Zondervan, which is a Christian publisher. And it was a manga book about the life of Jesus. And I just picked it up and I grabbed it. I don't like manga. Most manga, I know it's a big thing to some people if you're into manga, go for it.

But a lot of manga just strikes me as ugly. It's not attractive. It's not to me. And so I don't really want to supply my child with tons of manga, but I figured, "Meh, it was on sale. I'll pick this thing up." And I grabbed it and I gave it to him.

That book captured his attention like nothing I had ever seen. He read nothing other than that book for about two weeks. And just for context, that means probably read it for two and a half to three hours a day. With my eldest, he has reading time during while the other children nap.

And so basically free afternoon, free reading time, and he would just devour it, read it for two and a half, three hours a day. And he loved it. He loved it. And that was the book that was the fulcrum where everything kind of, the dam burst out open. I never would have predicted that that was the book.

It was just a random, "I'll pick this up and try this one out." But that was the book that made all the difference in the world for him. And then from then on, he was reading. And so at this point, he's functionally fluent. He's reading novels, just picture Hardy Boyd's novels, kind of a similar thing, a 200 to 220, 250 page child's novel written in Spanish.

And it's excellent Spanish, really high quality translations. And he shows no preference between English and Spanish with his reading. So when we salt the table and seat it with all these different books, he'll pick up the Spanish books and the English books without any preference. Obviously, the books still need to be age appropriate.

I've put a few books and tried a few different books that just didn't, he wasn't ready for yet, which is common with all readers, right? You don't give Pride and Prejudice to a seven-year-old because they can't appreciate, even though if they can decode the words, they can't appreciate the subtlety of the human interaction.

But of books that are to his level, he doesn't show any preference between Spanish and English. And the reading has made all the difference in the world. So what's fascinating to me is I did this without much understanding of the academic research. I have since come to find that there is a whole school of language learning that is exclusively focused on this, on what's called extensive reading as a language acquisition methodology.

And it makes all the sense in the world to me, and it maps to the good results that I've achieved. And what's fascinating to me is to watch a seven-year-old who is not in a Spanish-speaking school, doesn't have any Spanish-speaking friends, you know, I try to get some people to speak Spanish to speak to him, but it's very little other than my wife and me, but to watch that reading unlock the language, and then to see how effective it's been.

So a year ago, spoke no Spanish, today, fully fluent, consuming 200 or 250-page novels voraciously, and loving them. And what's amazing to me is to assess the level of his Spanish ability, where he speaks completely unconsciously with an advanced grammar. You know, the other day he was telling me about something in the book, and he's using this, if you know anything about language and grammar, there's a form that we have in most languages, we have it in English, but most people are not aware of it, but it's very important in Spanish and French, called the subjunctive.

And here he is telling me this example with the perfect conditional subjunctive conjugation of the verb, and it's the kind of thing that generally a third or fourth year Spanish student doesn't get right in the traditional Spanish education system. And yet, here he is, just unconsciously using the proper verb form in a really good way.

He's not perfect. He messes up his noun selection sometimes, messes up his "la" and "el" just like I do, just like we all do. Sometimes he messes up his conjugations, but he's totally unaware of them. He's totally unaware of the errors, and it just flows very naturally from him.

My wife says, "Man, I wish I could just speak as naturally as he does." And I feel the same way. Now, let me just go through the process again. I guess the other thing I need to say, what else did we do? We did a little bit of focused study.

I was able to find a book. I think it was also a DK book. It was written in English, but it was like your first Spanish book. I found it at Barnes & Noble in Colorado. I picked it up, and I gave that to him. And what we had him do as part of his homeschool was each day he would learn a page of vocabulary from that.

So, it had probably 20 to 30 words of vocabulary, and since he could read, his job was to learn the vocabulary, and we'd quiz him. Beyond that, he's done no formal grammar books, no drills, no anything. I guess my wife sat with him and taught him and went over and explained to him how yo estoy, tu estas, el/ella, usted está, nosotros estamos, vosotros estáis, ustedes están.

And did the same thing for ser, which means I am. Sorry, those are the two I am verbs, to be verbs in Spanish. And so, she went over that with him, but didn't go over future tense, past tense, anything, but we just read to him. And really, really phenomenal results.

That's the seven-year-old who's reading. The five-year-old who is reading has very much resisted this process. Sorry, the five-year-old who is not reading, not yet reading in English, nor in Spanish, but has very much resisted learning Spanish. Didn't have any interest in it, didn't want to do it, didn't want to speak Spanish, didn't want to listen to anybody speak Spanish.

But I have held strong and continued to read. And she's been on a similar timeline, but of course she was younger. And so, I've continued to read. I continue to do the reading now. At this point in time, she's not reading advanced, she's not listening to advanced texts, but I'm still reading storybooks.

One of the series that I found was Franklin the Turtle. I was able to find Franklin the Turtle books translated into Spanish. It's a Canadian children's book series that the original just had beautiful artwork, really lovely, short stories. And so, I bought tons of them in Spanish. And I can read to her a Franklin the Tortuga book in Spanish without translating, and she'll understand it.

And I'm reading to her significant texts, and she's understanding significant amounts. Now, she still asks and picks out, "Hey, what does such and such mean?" And I translate any word. What I've stopped doing at this point with her is I've stopped translating the full book. For a time, I used to translate all the book, but now I'll translate any particular word she wants to know, but I have stopped translating the full book.

Similar for my three-year-old, but neither my three-year-old nor my five-year-old are yet speaking. Neither of them has been interested in speaking in Spanish, and I've just let it go. I continue to read to them, and I know that in time it will come. So that's my experience. That's what I have learned.

Now, what's exciting to me is there's a lot of academic research, independently done, actually researched, that would say that what I did kind of by accident, just making up in my head thinking, "How can I do this?" What I did is actually a really compelling learning methodology for anybody who wants to learn a foreign language.

And these theories have, for me, made a big difference in my own personal language acquisition. And I've seen the effectiveness in Spanish such to the point where my plan is I'm going to repeat this process probably next year. We'll see. I don't want to go prematurely. I could start another language now with my eldest, but I don't want to just single him out.

But I'm going to repeat this process with a third language now, probably starting in 2021, or at least when I think the children are ready. Now, I should acknowledge, I'm going to tell you about some of these theories and explain them. First of all, that Spanish is a fairly easy language for English speakers to learn.

It's a tier one language. By tier one, I'm referring to the research done by the US American Foreign Service Institute on different tiers of languages. The US Foreign Service Institute was tasked, obviously many decades ago, with teaching Americans foreign languages so that they could be useful when they went abroad for diplomatic service.

They were in the US American diplomatic corps. After many years of teaching, they came through with an analysis of how long it takes to learn a language. This is specifically for a native English speaker. They have five tiers of different languages. Tier one languages, which are languages that are closely related to English, they estimate that it takes about somewhere between 575 to 600 hours to teach a tier one language to an English speaker.

Tier one languages include Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Swedish. The reason these are fairly easy for English speakers to learn is there are a lot of cognates. There's a lot of similarity. There are a lot of words that sound very similar between English and Spanish.

If you understand English and you speak English, then you can pick up a lot of the words that are cognates, that sound similar. If you think about it, let's say their research is that it takes 600 hours. Let me now map that to what I have done with my children.

If it takes 600 hours to teach a language to somebody, then if you divide 600 by 52 weeks, so 600, calculator failed, 600 divided by 52 equals 11.5 hours a week. If you divide that, let's divide the 600 by 365 to get a daily number, that's 1.64 hours a day.

Now reflect back on what I told you that we do, that we did, that I do with the children, that I told you that we read to the children probably something like an hour and a half a day to two hours, depending on the day. Again, I read 20 to 30 minutes a day at the breakfast table.

My wife will read to the children sometimes all together, and this ranges depending on what we're doing, but sometimes it's a couple of hours a day. Sometimes it's an hour a day, but certainly not less than an hour a day during the normal day. I read to the children usually when I get off work at five o'clock, five to six o'clock, so usually 30 to 45 minutes of reading there.

Then I read to the children before bed for 30 to 45 minutes. In that context, the idea that a child can learn a language in a year or so just with reading is a very realistic context for one of these easier languages for an English speaker, such as Spanish or any of those languages I said.

And then if you add to that what I described about my son just starting to read to himself, if you picture the fact that, let's say that he reads, I would estimate three hours a day, something maybe that's too little. So he does school, which of course is largely reading, but school is in English.

So let's just say he reads to himself two to three hours a day, then you can understand that he's very quickly learning the language, a language like Spanish. Now category two for the Foreign Service Institute, they estimate German is a category two or tier two language requiring about 750 hours.

So if you divide 750 by 365, that would come out to be about two hours a day. A category three language requires 900 hours where there are significant differences between, sorry, there are differences between English and these languages, Indonesian, Malaysian, and Swahili. Category four, they estimate takes 1,100 hours.

These are languages with significant linguistic and cultural differences from English. I'll read you the list. It's Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Croatian, Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Khmer, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Xhosa, and Zulu.

And then category five languages require, from their estimate, these are languages that are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers, require about 2,200 hours of input. So that would be Arabic, Cantonese, Chinese, Mandarin, Chinese, and Japanese, and Korean. So if we were to estimate 2,200 hours and divide that by two hours a day, that would now be 1,100 days of study, which would come out to be about three years versus one year.

So I don't think that we would have achieved these same results in one year if we had been doing this in Arabic. But what we did get was dramatic results with Spanish, which is awesome. And I want to talk now about this particular methodology, because there are a couple of things that are very much that I see working really effectively with as I watch the children learn Spanish.

And I'm going to talk about some of these language theories, because they're really helpful to me, and they've changed how I have started studying languages. I've recently, my goal for this year was I was really, really studying Spanish, partly so I could do a better job with teaching my children.

But I decided, you know what, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to try to see if I can get a C2 certificate in Spanish, which is advanced, near native speaker. And so I was working and working on that. But I didn't really have a plan for how to do it.

I hired a tutor that I worked with, but the tutor could talk with me, but I didn't really have a plan. And I just didn't like a lot of the stuff that I did. And I said, and then I came across some of these theories, and it totally changed my learning.

Because what I stopped doing was doing anything that I didn't like. I stopped doing anything I didn't like. I stopped doing grammar exercises. I stopped doing drills. I stopped studying vocabulary. And what I started doing was reading. And I just started reading extensively. And I've since learned that not only is this incredibly powerful, but it's proven that simply doing extensive reading will help you to learn a language very, very dramatically.

Now the leader in this space is a linguist named Stephen Krashen. And years ago, he started studying the process and he came up with five different hypotheses that he identified that make all the difference in the world. Now his first hypothesis was called the input hypothesis. The input hypothesis states that learners progress in their knowledge of the language when they comprehend language input that is slightly more advanced than their current level.

Krashen called this level of input I plus one, where I is the learner's interlanguage and plus one is the next stage of language acquisition. So from my experience now over the last year teaching my children this language, I see that this is something I did really effectively. I started with very simple children's books.

And there's a whole world of what's called TPRS, where people will encourage us to tell stories and never to translate. I don't know if that's the best theory or not. All I know is that for me, I translated. But there's a whole world of theory where people say you shouldn't even translate.

You should just start with books and point to the pictures and tell the children stories and repeat it with very, very simple stories. I just started with children's books and I did the translation. But the language was fairly simple. Children's books are not a great way of learning language because the vocabulary doesn't repeat enough, I think.

But still, they listen enough that they started to get the basics. And that was really useful to them. Now there are three corollaries that Krashen teaches. And by the way, I'm pulling this outline directly from the Wikipedia page, which you can review, called the Input Hypothesis for Language Learning.

And there are three corollaries. Number one, that talking or output is not practicing. So Krashen stresses that speaking in the target language does not result in language acquisition. Although speaking can indirectly assist in language acquisition, the ability to speak is not the cause of language learning or acquisition. Instead, comprehensible output is the effect of language acquisition.

So this is something that I did accidentally. Well, I didn't want to bother my younger ones were so resistant. I didn't try to make them talk. I didn't try to make them talk at all. I just read to them. And it turns out that this has been very, very effective, that they're starting to speak.

Again, my very resistant five-year-old is starting to speak a little bit naturally. Just a couple of sentences, you know, "Yo quiero esto," and insert a noun here. But it actually turned out that really effective, that just me talking to them was a good, was a very effective form of learning.

Now number two, the corollary of the Input Hypothesis. When enough comprehensible input is provided, I plus one is present. If language models and teachers provide enough comprehensible input, then the structures that acquirers are ready to learn will be present in that input. And according to Krashen, this is a better method of developing grammatical accuracy than direct grammar teaching.

And I've seen this happen. I see that I can, that my eldest child now understands and speaks using subjunctive and conditional and all of these more advanced forms, but that happened naturally at a natural pace. And then number three, the teaching order is not based on the natural order.

Instead, students will acquire the language in a natural order by receiving comprehensible input. And so what we did wound up being really effective, just providing lots and lots of comprehensible input. Now, number two hypothesis is called the Acquisition Learning Hypothesis. The Acquisition Learning Hypothesis claims that there is a strict separation between acquisition and learning.

Krashen saw acquisition as a purely subconscious process and learning as a conscious process and claimed that improvement in language ability was only dependent upon acquisition and never on learning. And so this particular feature is something that I have seen, that having, I've not taught my children anything related to the language.

I've simply had them listen to it and then hear what it meant by translating. I read in Spanish, then I translate. I read a phrase, then I translate. I read a phrase, then I translate. And simply through repetition, they have absorbed the words. And what's funny to me is hearing my five-year-old, so give you a picture, a typical scene.

I'm holding in my hands the Franklin book that I read to my children last night at bedtime called Franklin Quiere una Mascota, Franklin Wants a Pet. And so here's a typical scene of how this works. I'm reading to the children, to all the children. The seven-year-old is listening and enjoys the story and enjoys the pictures because it's simple and fun and beautiful pictures.

But he understands everything perfectly. The five-year-old on occasion asks a question, but the three-year-old has a much more limited vocabulary because a lot of the books that I've read to him, or read to all of them, he just is uninterested in. But I'll read a sentence like this. Si yo tuviera una mascota, quisiera que fuera un pájaro, dijo Oso.

So this is a, grammatically speaking, the translation is, if I had a pet, I would like that pet to be a bird, said bear, Oso. So, but this is a fairly complex or advanced grammatical form. Si yo tuviera una mascota, quisiera que fuera un pájaro, dijo Oso. It's a conditional and subjunctive form of grammar, which none of the children have any clue what that means, but the three-year-old will hone in on the word, you know, mascota, right?

He knows what pájaro is because we can point to, you know, birds outside of the window, but he'll hone in on mascota and he'll ask, what's a mascota? And the five-year-old has never been taught what mascota is, but she'll respond, oh, it's pet. And now she's doing the translating for him after having acquired or absorbed the words.

And watching this process is fascinating to me because it really does work. Let's go on. Number three, the monitor hypothesis. The monitor hypothesis states that consciously learned language can only be used to monitor language output. It can never be the source of spontaneous speech. And so the idea here with the monitor hypothesis is that as adults, when we study a language, then we are trying to analyze if we're saying something right.

So if I were going to say a Spanish sentence like this, si yo tuviera una mascota, quisiera que, and I have to stop and ask, you know, what do I say? Quisiera que ser? No. Quisiera que fuera or fuese? Quisiera que, I have to monitor that. But when you're doing that, that slows you down.

And so the monitor system where you're actually analyzing, okay, I'm using a conditional form. Si yo tuviera, if I had una mascota, quisiera, I would like. If I had, I would like. That's something that basically, it gives adults more progress in the beginning, but it actually slows everybody down.

Because when Krashen talks about it, in order for you to actually analyze your speech, the acquirer or learner must know the rule, which is difficult condition to meet because it means that the speaker must have had explicit instruction on the language form. You have to understand in English that if you were going to say, if I had, I would like, so you have to know the rule.

You have to be focused on thinking about the rules and speaking it, and you have to have the time to use it, which requires you to slow down and think about it. But if you can just simply get rid of the monitor and not use it when you're speaking, which is hard for adults, right?

You can do that when you're writing, you can stop and think, if I had, I would like. But you can't do that very well when you're speaking, then you can learn more effectively. And so watching my son, he doesn't have a monitor. He has no fear of speaking the language.

He's never known that you're supposed to be embarrassed about speaking a language, which we'll come to in the fifth hypothesis. He just simply speaks the language. And so he'll naturally use the proper forms unconsciously in many situations. And so it's fascinating to see that. Number four and five, the natural order hypothesis states that the language is acquired in a particular order and that this order does not change between learners and is not affected by explicit instruction.

This basically means that all languages have an order that children learn them in. And this is unique to the language, but your child is going to use certain forms, certain conjugations, certain tenses, certain conditionals later after they use the present thing. Your child doesn't learn to say, "If I had, then I would like," at beginning.

Your child first learns, "I want." That's how the English language works. Now, that's that natural order hypothesis. I have observed it in watching my children develop their language, but that's not particularly interesting to me. The most important is actually number five, the active filter hypothesis. This states that learners' ability to acquire language is constrained if they are experiencing negative emotions such as fear or embarrassment.

At such times, the effective filter is said to be up. And this is a very big deal for me. This is very hard for me, especially if when learning a language, we focus on speaking because I want to speak properly. I want to speak with proper pronunciation. I want to speak with excellent grammar because my pride is involved.

My self-image is related to how I speak a language. I take a great deal of pride in how I speak and wield the English language. I take pride in my vocabulary, in the way that I express words with interesting pictures associated with more interesting phraseology and construction. It's important to me.

And so that naturally goes over to foreign languages, but I'm not good at that. And so it's difficult for me to do that. And so here what I have seen is that in the home environment where I have never, we don't give our children tests of any kind. I think tests are basically worthless for learning.

They're worthwhile for placement. You know, a test, you know, the SAT, although this is of course a subject of much debate, a test like the SAT may be very useful for a college to place students and to assess them, but for learning, you don't learn anything from tests. So we don't give our children any tests of any kind as part of their schooling.

And I don't intend to start anytime soon. When they reach a point where they need to start doing that, we'll practice some test-taking skills, but tests are not particularly useful for learning. And so because my children, especially my eldest, who again is the one, is the only one who is actually fully fluent at this point in time, because of just an exclusively positive environment, he's never gotten anything wrong.

No one has ever told him that he said anything incorrect in Spanish. No one's ever said, "Oh, you did this wrong. You said this wrong." He has no filter. He has no problem speaking and trying things out because he doesn't have any fear or any embarrassment. And watching how powerful that is to me has been a real light bulb, a real revelation, an epiphany as I've seen, "Wow, look at how powerful this is." When you have an environment of unconditional positivity and you have an environment where there's no fear of mistake, then the brain doesn't shut down and start to control output and make a person feel bad because they can't say something perfectly.

It's fascinating to me to have seen it really effectively over the last year to just a really, really high level. I want to talk for a moment about extensive reading, because what I have now researched and come to understand is that what I have done has, for the reasons stated, good anchoring in the academic literature, which I didn't know when I started, but I now do.

And more importantly, what I have done with my eldest, who's a reader, has tremendously strong anchoring in the academic literature. That extensive reading as a language acquisition process is very, very powerful, because what it does, if you get the material right at the right level, and so again, it needs to be comprehensible input, the reader needs to be able to understand the majority of what's on the page, which means that it needs to be simple, but just a few extra things.

When you get that level right, though, the reader will automatically acquire the vocabulary. I'll mention the Los Cinco books. The Los Cinco books are fascinating to my son because of the stories, because of the adventures. They have a significant number of words that he doesn't know, but he knows enough to be able to capture the gist of the story.

And because he's reading them and then rereading them and then reading them and then rereading them, he picks up the words naturally, as I did with the English language, to the point where now his vocabulary in Spanish is probably not as extensive as mine, because he hasn't done, he hasn't done reading in as many areas as I have, so I would imagine that my vocabulary is clearly more extensive than his, but he knows lots of words that I have never taught him.

Now, when he speaks to me in Spanish, he'll break out some word that I simply don't know, and I can understand what he's saying by the context of his speech, but it's a word that I'm sure he's never heard, I'm sure that he doesn't know, and that it's something that he picked up exclusively from his reading.

And to me, that's exciting, because it means that if I can simply continue throughout his lifetime of plying him with enough books that are of interest to him on diverse subjects of all kinds of things, and I mean that, I do it with a very wide variety. The storybooks I love, because there's nothing more than a good story that captures your imagination to get you to read hundreds and hundreds of pages, but it can't just be storybooks.

I've got books on all kinds of stuff, so there's a very diverse level of vocabulary, and he'll in time pick up a diverse vocabulary from the diversity of these books, but extensive reading as an, even as an exclusive strategy, it works. The last point I want to make on Spanish and this process is to briefly discuss accent.

The place where my eldest, my seven-year-old, is still novice, not novice, the place where he's not advanced at this point in time is in his verbal accent, in his spoken accent. He doesn't speak with a horrible American accent, but he doesn't sound like a native Spanish speaker, and I think this is natural due to his limited exposure to Spanish speakers.

I have not succeeded in exposing him to a lot of spoken Spanish. I could, right? I could go and find a Spanish school with native Spanish speakers and enroll him in that, but again, I think the cost of that is too high. But that's where he hasn't had enough exposure to the spoken language in order to really develop a native-like accent, although he may have a native-like level of vocabulary, which he does for his age, an age appropriate.

He's beyond his age. He's reading books that are targeted to readers past his age in the Spanish language, when we need to look at degraded readers, degraded for children. And although he may have extensive vocabulary and good grammar instruction, what he doesn't have is a native-like accent. And I'm sure it'll come in time, but it's just going to be a matter of more listening.

The only thing I've been able to find that for good audio consumption is I found the Boxcar Children series in Spanish on Audible, and so I got all of those and he loved those. And so that gives him exposure to a narrator. But I haven't been able to get enough audio books in Spanish for him because of number one, the subject matter of it's been hard to find high-quality audio books designed for children.

And then number two, I have significant resistance still with my other children to listening to Spanish audio books. I force it, but not for too long. And so that'll be the big thing where he still needs to step up his game and listen to more spoken Spanish so that his accent will naturally correct and he'll acquire more of a native-like accent.

But on all the other levels, I'm very, very pleased with the progress and I'm very pleased with the methodology. So what does this mean and where do we go from here? Well, where do we go from here? The first thing is that I'm very confident now that we've cracked the code for reading, I'm very confident that for as long as my son is in my home, I can keep his language ability up by simply buying him more books.

I now consider this to be the most important benchmark in language learning is simply acquiring the ability to read in the foreign language that you're learning to the point where you can enjoy it and read whatever kind of books that you enjoy. In hindsight, I now realize that this was the biggest weakness for me in my own language journey.

I practiced speaking when I was younger, but I had two years of high school Spanish, I practiced speaking, I learned, I spent time when I was in college in Costa Rica in a Spanish-speaking country living with a Spanish family, speaking in Spanish, that helped some. But then when I went back to the United States, I spoke virtually no Spanish for years and years and years and my Spanish language abilities atrophied because I didn't reach the point at which I was reading for pleasure in Spanish.

I would pick up a book and it would just simply be too hard. I had to look up too many words and I was too much of a perfectionist to just let the words wash over me like a child does. And so I never read in Spanish and I couldn't listen to audio books that I enjoyed in Spanish because they had too much vocabulary that I didn't know and that I couldn't enjoy.

And so for me, what I have done over the last year in my own Spanish journey is I've cracked this level for myself, is I got to the point, as I previously discussed, using the application that Steve Kaufman developed called LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q, which is phenomenal. I got to the point by reading in LingQ that I could just enjoy reading novels in Spanish.

And so I picked the kind of books that I like to read. For me, I enjoy thrillers and I started reading them in Spanish. So I would buy a copy of a Tom Clancy book that was translated into Spanish. Then I would download it, I would strip the DRM from that, load it up into my app, into my LingQ app, and then read it in LingQ to the point where I could get enough vocabulary to where now I can read that same book without the crutch of LingQ and I can enjoy it.

I've also worked hard enough on amplifying, now the Spanish is affecting my English, on broadening my English vocabulary. Sorry, I've been successful enough at broadening my Spanish vocabulary to also to the point where I can listen to audio books. And so the last year I've listened to what, eight, probably eight or 10 novels in Spanish.

So I found the Michael Connelly crime novels, those translated into Spanish and a number of other ones as well. And so I can get those on Audible, I can download those and I can enjoy those stories. And so I'm at the point now where going forward, now that I'm reading, I'll be able to maintain Spanish.

So as long as I read a couple books a year, a couple of novels a year in Spanish, listen to perhaps a couple of audio books per year in Spanish, I'll be able to maintain my Spanish ability in a way that I couldn't before. And I think this is a big concern with children is if we can get them reading comfortably in Spanish, then they'll be able to maintain that language for life.

Whereas if we don't, then it's very easy for them to lose a language. You can lose, you can learn a language to a very high level at seven years old and at 45 years old, not be able to speak the language a bit. And so I now see that with any language that we learn, I think the most practical goal should be get to the point where you can sit down with an adult level book of whatever genre you're interested in.

Could be self-help, I read self-help books in Spanish. Now it could be a novel, whatever, could be anything you're interested in, but an adult level book, the kind of book that you would read in your native language, get to the point where you can sit down, you can buy one of those off the shelf or order off the internet and enjoy that book in the foreign language.

You may not know every word, that's fine. But if you can do that, then all you need to do to maintain your language ability is simply read the book, read a couple of books a year in that language and or listen to a couple of audio books a year in that language.

And that's not hard, that's not hard work. If you can get to the point where it's enjoyable for you to read the book in the foreign language and find something that you genuinely enjoy. So for language maintenance, I now believe this is the level. I've gotten my son to that, which is exciting to me because now we can possibly go on to another language.

Let's talk about learning another language. I have now decided for myself that this is going to be my primary language learning methodology going forward. Because over the years I've tried to learn other languages. You know, for years I've tried to learn French. I've really tried. The problem is that I thought that because I was, this is how I learned a language in high school, I thought that if I was going to learn French, I needed to find either a French class or a French teacher or a French grammar, you know, exercise book.

And I thought I needed to do exercises. I thought, well, if I learned in Spanish, "Oh, ah, ah, almost, on," I need to figure out what that is in French and repeat the same thing. And so over the years I would buy a French language instruction book and I would usually do about 30 pages and I would get bored.

I would buy a French audio book course and I would listen to about the first third of it, then I would get bored. And I would just do this again and again and again. And I would buy something and then get bored. And I never made any progress with the language because I was bored.

But once I realized and basically gave myself permission, one of the things I've done as an adult, I've stopped doing things I don't like, is I gave myself permission. I was like, "I'm not going to do that anymore." And once I realized that just simply reading and listening in a foreign language is a perfectly valid methodology of learning a language, then to me everything has become fun.

And so what I've done is I've just started over the last week, I decided, because I can't take a Spanish exam because everything, all the test centers are shut down, I decided I was going to switch to French. And so now my strategy is I'm just reading. I'm reading and listening in French.

And I'm finding it to be very, very effective. Last week I finished my first ever book that I've read fully in French. I read Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. And I read it in French. It's an open source book. So I was able to find it.

I read it in LingQ, which helped me with the vocabulary. And then I listened to the audio recording of it that came with it. And so I could listen to a native speaker read it to me, which helped me with my pronunciation. One of the things with French is, unlike Spanish, I've never been able to understand the French pronunciation rules.

And I've always felt like I need a teacher to teach me these rules. Well, just by reading the book and listening to the audio book at the same time, it's made all the difference in the world. And so now I'm studying French, but I'm studying it in a way that's really interesting to me of I'm exclusively reading.

I'm reading and I'm listening. I've got several audio books. I'm listening to Tim Ferriss's Four-Hour Workweek in French. I'm listening to a Michael Connolly novel in French. And I'm reading several books in French as well. And I'm reading the original Robert Ludlum, Jason Bourne book translated into French, the one that was published back in the 1970s.

I'm reading a couple of another Jules Verne novel in French and just reading things. And the stories are good enough that they keep me interested, even if I don't know the language. And I'm seeing really, really awesome progress in my abilities. I'm not at all trying to create any output at this point in time.

I'm not trying to speak in French. I'm not trying to write in French. I'm just listening. And the reason for that is I always thought you needed to speak a language to learn a language. Certainly, at some point you need to speak. But Steve Kaufman has convinced me that you can speak much later and that your speaking will be better if you can understand broadly.

I don't gain much pleasure out of sitting down and having a forced conversation with somebody and practicing a dialogue of how to check into a hotel. If I'm going to talk to somebody, I want to talk about something interesting. And that's one of the theories that has been effective for him as a polyglot is simply getting yourself to a very high degree of understanding before you try to speak.

So certainly you do need to speak, but I've come to be convinced that you can wait to speak until later and that if you can understand broadly, you can do it. I've also become... I'm persuaded, haven't proved it for myself yet, I'm persuaded to some degree on the activation hypothesis.

There are some language learners and teachers who believe that if you focus exclusively on input where you read and you listen and you develop a broad degree of understanding, what happens is the language is basically there in your head. And then once you go to a place where you need the language, one person's estimate is three days that if...

What's his name? This is what Victor Huliganov says. I forget his English name. Huliganov is a persona that he plays, but he's an accomplished polyglot and he's established something called... Developed something he calls the Gold List Method, which is a method for vocabulary acquisition. And in his writings, he believes that once you learn the language, you need three days where you're in...

Whether you're in country or in a context where your brain says, "Oh, this guy needs this information." And then you'll... If you spend... So if you learn French and you go to France and spend three days in a French speaking environment, then after three days, everything that you know will be able to come out of your mouth in a very fluent way.

Now, I don't know that that's true yet or not, but for me, it solves a big problem that I have with language learning, which is that I don't really want to make artificial appointments for language study. I've done this a little bit, but I don't really want to sit down and say, "Okay, I got to do two hours a week to talk to some random person on italki where I don't know if we actually have anything in common or if we actually want to be friends." I don't like talking to people in that context.

It's artificial. It's not fun. It feels like work. And so to have the permission basically to say, "I can just listen. I can just listen and read." And then in time when there's a chance, then talking will be appropriate and it'll work. That's a pretty cool thing. I'm testing that right now with French because I have no intention of trying to talk or write right now.

I'm just simply reading and listening and we'll see what happens. I'm going to try. My intention is if I can get my five-year-old to the point where she'll actually start speaking Spanish, then I'm going to see if I can repeat this process in 2021 with a new language because it's been so relatively easy for me to do it with Spanish that I want to see if I can repeat it with French because it hasn't been all that hard.

All it required me to do was to buy a huge number of books and read to my children. And so if I can do that in one language, then why not in a second? And so that's one of the reasons why I've decided I need to get my French to the point where I actually can read to them effectively so I can do this again until I can get them to be independent learners.

And so that may be kind of one of my family projects for 2021. I just got to get my hands on the literature and then figure out. So by the way, if any of you live in France, if any of you want to rent me a house next summer, if you have a house or if you have a guest house or something like that, reach out to me.

Send me an email, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. But I'd probably like to come and spend next summer in France, come for about three months. Because if we can, that would be a fun experiment to see if I can, if I can, if I start in January with reading to them, then what kind of progress would we make if I went ahead and brought them to an immersive environment, either in France or maybe Quebec or some other French speaking countries is also adequate.

And what would be the experience of that in terms of their language acquisition, I think it'd be an interesting scenario. And if I came in the summer, I could find some summer camps and do some interesting things and then test putting them into an immersive environment. So reach out to me if you've got a place that I can rent for a few months rather than just doing something on Airbnb.

What I am convinced of, and here's where I want to close the show, is that if you have children who are learning languages in school, you know, I have nieces and nephews that are learning Latin as part of their language study. And I've been sending my sister all these resources and saying, "Listen, look, if your children are going to learn Latin, at least make sure they actually learn Latin and not just learn how to do a couple of declensions artificially." And so I'm convinced that for any language, the secret is get the content, get the input, the comprehensible input.

And so this is, there's a whole movement called the Living Latin Movement where people are translating modern books into Latin so that there's material to read in Latin. And there's people where they're speaking in Latin and recording things in Latin. But if your children are going to learn Latin, don't just make it a classroom thing where they're going to study it for three years, hate it, and then go on.

Give them books and get them reading it. And do this with whatever they're interested in. So if your children are studying German, get them bunches of books and see if you can do this process. That's all I have to say right now. I've tried to give you a clear idea of the levels where my children are, and I wanted to do that, but to have an idea so that you would have an idea of what's possible.

But from here, you just take it and apply it, and I'll keep you in the loop as I continue this experiment and see if I can bring my younger children up to fluent as well. And then we'll see if we can repeat this experiment in the years to come, and I'll report back on that with you as well.

Now I'm going to do a little experiment. I just paused for a moment and I went downstairs and I got my son and I told him to come up here. Son, I've been saying and sharing with my audience a little bit about the progress that you're making in Spanish.

I told them that you've been learning a lot of Spanish. Is that true? Yes. And I was talking with them about some of your favorite books. What do you like about this series of the five? What do you like the most? I can't decide, but this is the book that only has something under the ground, and all the others have something under the ground.

This one doesn't, but it does have a cave. That's number three, that's your favorite, right? Yes. But that doesn't mean that I don't like the others. I understand. I'm not saying that you don't like the others. I'm just saying that that's your favorite. It's called "The Five Escape." How many times have you read this?

I don't remember, but I read almost all of them, but there are like two or three chapters that I don't prefer to read because it's enough with us. And in this book, it's called "The Five Escape." What do they escape from? I haven't read this. They're called the Sticks.

The Sticks? What is a Stick? Is that a name? It's the Stick family. They're evil, they say. I understand. And look, here's Julian trying to stop Jorge from going with Tim to the island alone, in his boat. Does this story take place on Kirin Island? Yes. So they went back to Kirin Island?

Now, Julian said, while they were walking to where the boat was, we'll put all of these things inside the boat. We'll go home and make noise so the Sticks find out that we're there. Then we'll go to the platform so they think we're going to take the train. And then they went to the island.

They all got in the boat. Tim didn't jump and he sat on the platform, which was his seat. He was talking with his tongue out, very excited. He knew very well that something was happening and that he was also participating. It was no wonder that he was shaking his tail frantically.

We're leaving now. Wait, if you were comparing the Five and the Hollister series, which one would you prefer? The Five. Why? Because there are many more things happening in the Five than in the Hollister. There's a little more adventure? Yes, but what is this? That's my microphone. I'm recording this conversation to share it with my audience.

Okay. Because I was sharing with them the story of your Spanish learning. I wanted them to listen to your life. Where is the little red one of these? I don't know. There was a red one. What is this toy? An airplane. An airplane? Yes. And where did you get it?

You already know. Yes, but I'm trying to provoke you to talk about something. I got it at the dentist, right? And I took off the machine that made the wheels spin on their own. I just want them to do it under my hand. Like this. You took off the spring.

We're looking for that word in Spanish. And I took off these too. Okay. Well, do you like Spanish? Do you like to speak Spanish? Yes. Especially with books, right? Yes. Okay, well, thank you for coming and thank you for... They were running away from the horrible sticks. But it's true that the sticks are horrible.

Oh, how strong. Okay, thank you, son. So, there you go. For any of you Spanish speakers, you can make your own assessment. But one year ago, he didn't speak Spanish. And you can assess his own level of Spanish at the moment. The hardest part with children is getting them to talk.

We try to do narration in our household, which means tell things about it. But he doesn't do narration very effectively in any language. So, figuring out how to provoke -- he's very talkative. But figuring out how to provoke a spontaneous conversation is not easy. But there you go. Thank you so much for listening.

As we go, I would remind you that I sell a course called "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis." And that course was prepared last year in anticipation of the kind of crisis that we're living through right now. It's still just as valid now as it was then.

And I would say it's borne the test of time very, very effectively. So, if you would like a plan for how to survive and thrive the coming economic crisis, it's coming, I would encourage you to go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Check out that course, radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. I think that you'll be pleased.

And the basic concept that I teach is how to be prepared at home, wherever that is, but also how to be prepared if you choose to relocate, especially the value of relocating to a foreign country. And right now, you can see what a big difference the country that you're in makes in terms of your experience of something even like a pandemic.

You are having a very different experience of your life of your pandemic, whether you are in the United States or in Canada or in Germany or in Mexico or in Brazil or in the Bahamas. Every single one of these countries has different characteristics. Now, you feel free to insert what you think is good or bad about that.

But what you'll see is that your country of residence during a crisis makes a dramatic difference in your experience of that crisis. But in order for you to be able to go elsewhere, you need to have done some prior planning and preparation. There are many people right now as we look forward to another presidential election, there are many people right now who are looking at Canada and they're saying, "You know what?

If so and so wins, the person I don't like wins the election, I'm going to Canada." Well, the answer is no, you're not, unless you've done the hard work of actually sitting down and figuring out legally how to do it. If you're just an American passport holder and you want to be a tourist, you're not going to Canada.

They're not going to accept you right now. You're not going to Spain. They're not going to accept you right now. And so you've got to do the advance work to have the necessary paperwork for you to be able to go to that country. I brought a couple of months ago Brandon Miller on from Canadian Immigration, Maple Immigration, and we did an extensive show on how to move to Canada, how to get a second passport in Canada.

And I heard from Brandon, by the way, that a bunch of you reached out to him, which I think is awesome. You reached out to him, got a free copy of his book called "The Second Passport." Some of you have engaged his services, which I think is great. Brandon is a great guy.

And so you've got to do that stuff in advance. So start with the course at radicalpersonalfinance.com/store called "How to Survive and Thrive During the Coming Economic Crisis." And if you have some ability in language learning, you'll be a whole lot more confident looking around the world. The great thing is that English speakers can live well in most countries of the world, but still if you only speak English, you're kind of stuck to the English-- native English countries, which may or may not be what you're looking for.

But if you're confident that in a year you can learn fluent Spanish, that opens up dozens of countries. If you're confident that in a year you can learn fluent French, that opens up dozens of countries. And we go on down the list. So thank you for listening to today's show.

I hope you've enjoyed it, and I'll be back with you very soon. So go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/store. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs. Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value.

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