Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading your life, money and travel. If you're new here, I'm your host, Chris Hutchins. And hello, or maybe bonjour, Jean Boc, Konichiwa, Annyeonghaseyo, Hola, Laurana. How many do I have here? Maybe Marhaba, Shalom, Nihao. That's probably all I've got right now, but I am sure my guest today has many more covered.

Benny Lewis is a language hacker and self-taught polyglot who can speak a dozen languages. He also runs the world's largest language learning blog called Fluent in Three Months and is a best-selling author of six language learning books. I am really excited for today's conversation. We're going to talk about his practical approach that would help anyone, regardless of age or whether they have that language learning gene, learn and speak new languages through better, faster and more efficient ways.

We'll also talk about what makes languages easy or hard to learn, how technology has impacted language learning, how to think about learning a language before going abroad, and so much more. There's going to be so much content in this episode. I can't wait for you to hear it. So let's jump in right after this.

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Yeah, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me. To kick us off, I want to understand, coming from the States, I feel like there just aren't as many people interested in learning a language as I wish there were. And I'm curious what you think some of the common challenges or misconceptions there are that might be holding people back.

Well, I myself had the misconception. I didn't grow up speaking other languages. I was only speaking English when I was 21. I actually studied electronic engineering. So I definitely understand coming from the background of I'm not good at languages. Especially if you go into a technical field, it's very tempting to get this whole left brain right brain concept in your mind, where you're either good at technical things, like I was good at mathematics and the sciences.

And then I decided because of that, I'm bad at the arts and languages. And I created a kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I would see failure and say to myself and to others, that's proof that I am destined to never learn a language. And I could list a million examples of where I failed an exam in school or even moved to Spain after I graduated.

And I lived there for six months and I did not learn Spanish for those six months. I totally understand coming from a monolingual English country that you just think to yourself, I don't have the language gene. Other people have it. I don't have it. Or I did not grow up speaking a language.

So it's too late. I'm past whatever the cutoff age is for learning a language. And a lot of people say these things to themselves. And that truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you embrace these reasons that you're going to fail, the more you essentially make them true. And I always like to think what Henry Ford said once, whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right.

And I think that's very true with language learning. And what changed for you? So after those first failed six months living in Spain, I was telling myself more and more, it was just giving me more fuel for this, you suck at languages fire. One of the things that challenged that was I was telling myself the technical thing, you're an engineer, engineers don't learn languages.

But I was on this exchange program that had a lot of other engineers coming into Spain and they would arrive not speaking any Spanish. But after a few months, a lot of them would actually be speaking some level of Spanish. So this challenged this belief that I had. So I decided to experiment.

I tried a few things and a lot of them were huge flops. That's another thing I know a lot of your listeners, perhaps in the past, have attempted to learn a language. It was a failure. And they say, that's proof that I'm just destined to never speak it. I had a lot of those failures beyond the failures in school.

While I was living in Spain, I went to a group class and I was worse than the class. The teacher would turn to me, ask me a question and I would say, see, and hope maybe that's right. And it was never right. She was asking me how old you are or whatever.

I had to keep experimenting and keep failing until I found an approach that works for me. I am absolutely convinced that there is nobody in the entire world that cannot learn a second language. But what is true is there are many approaches that are completely inefficient for a lot of people.

In my case, the academic approach of learning like I did in school, sitting in a classroom with 30 other people and having a teacher talk at us, that just does not work for me. In that environment, I am a terrible language learner. So I think it's okay for people to say, using this particular approach, I am a bad language learner, but that does not mean you will never learn a language.

Maybe you need to find that approach. After all these failed experiments of multiple attempts to learn language in ways that did not work for me, my last experiment was, I'm going to try and just speak Spanish all the time outside of my work because I was teaching English. So obviously I had to speak English.

As soon as I walked outside the door of the school, I would only speak Spanish. And my Spanish was absolutely abysmal. This was caveman Spanish of like barely a few dozen words. And I decided to use it anyway. I pushed through this extremely frustrating stage and there's literally a moment that everything changed for me when I was still broke at the time and I just bought an electric toothbrush and it broke on me.

And I was so mad about it. I wanted a refund. So I charged into the shop that I had bought it in, ready to demand my money back. And then I realized when I went up to the manager, I don't know how to say refund. I don't know how to say toothbrush.

I don't know how to say broken. So I was like, máquina de dientes malo, tooth machine bad, dinero y de vuelta, money round trip. And it was absolutely wrong. If I was sitting an exam in an academic context, I would have failed this, try to ask for a refund for a toothbrush test.

But you know what? I got my money back. And that just blew my mind that maybe I don't need to be perfect in Spanish or I don't need to have a high level in Spanish. I just need to communicate. And I think that's something that a lot of people could embrace.

This idea of instead of thinking that every mistake you make is a big red X on an exam paper, bringing you closer to a fail. Every mistake is just you trying to communicate. And the gauge of success is are you understood? And do you get the gist of what they're saying back to you?

This is a lot more nebulous and leaves a lot more room for you to have some form of success. And once I saw that, I started to lower the bar on what counts for success. And that gave me a lot of wins to push my Spanish forward. I think a lot of people have their head a bit too much on this very distant long term goal that you want to master the language.

And I have reached that stage. I have a C2 diploma in the likes of Spanish. I worked as a professional translator. I have reached this high level stage. But when I'm in language learning mode, I decide to embrace the fact that I'm a beginner, try to have fun with it, try to accept my limitations and just decide my goal is to make a lot of mistakes.

And that's how I'm going to make progress. That completely transformed my entire language learning life. It's funny. I haven't had to learn a language since learning a similar lesson in a different way. We've had three au pairs stay with us speaking Spanish and Italian. And I don't speak Spanish or Italian.

They have more English knowledge than we did in other languages. As a person on the other side of this, when someone says something wrong, you don't think, "Oh my gosh, this person got it all wrong." You just communicate. And when someone says, "Take car school", you know what they're saying.

It's grammatically incorrect, but it doesn't matter. I've watched three people, their English constantly improves without me teaching them lessons. They're just hearing my responses. I haven't tried to pick up a language since having them here, but it's made me a lot more confident than I think that perfectionism bug I had.

And that probably comes from school, right? Failing tests because I didn't know specific words or gosh, the number of times learning French, messing up on the gender of a word. It felt like that was the only thing I was trying to learn was conjugation and gender, but I'm not even convinced you need them well to communicate at a basic level.

No, you don't. Because like you said, people are flexible and you do learn those things. So it's not like I'm saying, "Make these mistakes." A lot of people would say, "What about fossilization? The mistake will stay with you forever." It doesn't. You'll practice and eventually you'll find tricks that work for remembering conjugation and remembering what the gender of certain nouns are.

You start to internalize those things, but they're less important at the start. And it's like you said, people have this idea of the spotlight effect. Everyone is looking at me. Everyone is judging me. And whenever I try to speak the language, they're all laughing at how much of an idiot I am because I use the wrong conjugation.

That's not how the real world works. Most people are patient. Most people want you to succeed. And if you say a broken sentence that gets the point across, but is grammatically incorrect, you're not talking to a computer that's going to spit out an error message. You're talking to a human being and they're going to understand you.

They're going to interpret what you're saying and the conversation will move forward. This perfectionism does not work in the context of languages. It's unfortunate because languages are exposed to us in an academic situation at first. That's our context. It is an academic thing. Every mistake you make is a problem.

But in the real world, I like to think language is can't be learned for real. Languages can only be lived. And this is the attitude I try to take to it. I try to think of it more like a sport that I'm practicing and getting better at. If you're doing any kind of sport, you're not going to get punished if you don't have a perfect game on day one.

That's not how it works. You get better progressively with time. I think it's a lot better to think of languages in that context rather than academically, because perfectionism is the worst enemy of all in language learning. It will absolutely defeat any sense of progress you're going to make. It's going to destroy your ego.

You have to let go of your ego a lot in language learning and decide. I sound like an idiot right now, and I'm OK with that. It's very humbling. I do it over and over again. I'm doing it right now with Korean and it's kicking my ass again. Even though I have a high level in other languages, I'm an idiot once again.

And because I'm OK with being an idiot, that's why I can learn the languages. First off, I think there are probably some people listening right now that are like, "Wow, maybe I actually do know enough Spanish or French or German or whatever I picked up in school to actually use it." If you're that person, I'm excited for you.

I hope you get a chance to forget a lot of these things. Definitely want to talk more about the practice of picking up a language for people who haven't even started. But I know there's a common belief that adults are not as good as language learners as children. Do you think there's any age limit to this?

So this comes back to what I was saying before about approach. The approach dictates how successful you're going to be. When I was researching this a long time ago, I came across a study in the University of Haifa in Israel that found that under the right circumstances, adults are better language learners than children.

That sounds very counterintuitive because all the evidence we see out there is children are clearly learning languages more than adults are. And it's because it's not under the right circumstances for those adults. The adults are taking dusty old grammar books. The adults are going to group classes where they're zipping it and letting a teacher talk at them.

The adults are not truly living through the language. The adults don't have any friends in the language. They're not playing games in the language like a child does. And a child has a better language learning approach. It's not that they are better at language learning. You could argue both points.

You could argue why children are better. They have more neuroplasticity. Their brains are open to more things. But ultimately there are a lot of advantages adults have. We have complete control for the most part over our days, our lives. We can decide where we're going, what we're doing with our free time, a lot more than a child can.

A child may learn a language, but a child cannot decide I want to learn Chinese. That's not going to happen for that child unless the parents decide, okay, I'm going to help you do that. I'm going to put you in the right environment or whatever. So we have a lot more control over the situation, but I understand there's a lot of baggage that comes with things.

As an adult, letting go of that baggage is very difficult. That will slow us down. So there is a certain mental hill that you have to climb that does make it harder for adults. I think a lot of us have fallen into this perfectionist trap and that makes it harder because children are not perfectionists.

When you think of any child learning their native language, they make a million mistakes and they're fine with it. We can take inspiration from children, but absolutely there is no cutoff age. There is no age where you cannot learn a language. The only thing you'll find when you dig really deep into this is maybe there's an age where it becomes a lot more difficult to become bilingual.

That is absolutely a problem you may want to solve or try to solve, but honestly, who cares? I am not bilingual in any of my languages. I am at a mastery level. Everything I can do in English I can do in Spanish, but I still have an accent. I still make the odd mistake and there might be like an obscure word here or there that I don't know.

I'm not bilingual. You're not going to confuse me for a native speaker, but I'm close enough that I can function like a native speaker would, and that's fine. Maybe there's an age where if I'd started learning Spanish before that, I could change that gap, but who cares? It doesn't matter.

I'm not trying to become a spy. I don't want people to think that I'm from Spain so I can fool them. I'm from Ireland. I'm proud of I'm from Ireland. If I've got a little bit of an accent, it has that sense of charm to it, so I'm okay with not being bilingual.

Once you accept that, then this whole cutoff age becomes irrelevant. That's where the cutoff age is. It's for bilingual fluency in a language. I have come across exceptions. I have found adults who can become essentially the same as a native speaker even though they learned it later in life, but I wouldn't necessarily say that's something you could scale to a lot of other people easily.

The goal should be fluency. If you can function the same in your target language like you would in English, then that's all you ever need. You're good with what you can do, and that is something every adult in the world can absolutely do. Given the caveat, there is a lot of work they have to do ahead of time in terms of mental changes and learning what the right approach is and so on.

So, I want to come back to some of those mental changes. It just made me think of something. Right before I came to this interview, I told my daughter, who's about to turn three, "Oh, I'm going to go record a podcast, so I'm going to miss your bedtime tonight.

It's going to be about languages." I was like, "How many languages do you speak?" She was like, "I speak Italian, I speak English, and I speak Spanish." She maybe knows 50 words of Spanish and Italian, but in her mind, she speaks it. It just crossed my mind that I could probably speak thousands of words of French.

I could get along in the country by myself, no problem. Probably not fluent, but I'm comfortable enough to speak. And I don't actually consider myself someone who speaks French. I can speak French. So, that confidence to just feel like you're already there. You mentioned the sports example. My parents are not going to be on the World Cup field ever, but they could stand on the ground and kick a soccer ball.

They can play soccer, just not at any level that would be fun to watch, or maybe fun to watch for a different reason. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy. And even if you've already filed, being proactive about this year to lower your future liability is so important.

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Yeah, I mean, the biggest hack I can give to everybody is you have to speak your target language from day one. I think one big mental barrier people have is they decide I'm going to study the language for a certain amount of time. Maybe that's a few months, maybe it's a year, a New Year's resolution.

I'm going to learn Spanish. So one year from now, I will have reached that magic moment when I can finally walk up to a native speaker and speak Spanish to them. And I think that is a fool's errand, because this creates a new situation in your head where you have to wait until you're ready, and then you can make all the excuses in the world that you're not ready yet, because you will never be at 100% perfectionism in Spanish.

Even when you reach the very high levels I've talked about, there's still a couple of little things you need to polish. If you were enough of a perfectionist, you would never speak your target language. To throw that out the window, you have to decide I'm going to speak it right away.

Even though I only know 10 words, I'm still going to try and use it. For instance, a couple of months ago, I started doing this with Korean. On day one, I decided I am going to get somebody on Zoom, a native Korean speaker, and I'm going to speak only in Korean to them.

This may obviously have a lot of questions like how can you do that if you've literally just started to learn the language? I'll cheat a little bit. What I'll do is I'll have a Google Translate tab open, and I will, ahead of the lesson, I'll try to find a few phrases I know I'm likely to use.

I'm from Ireland, my name is, and so on. Then I'll say this to the teacher. The teacher will reply, and I won't understand what they said. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of the phrases I prepared is, "I'm sorry, I don't understand. Could you write that down, please?" I'll write that in the chat, and I can copy and paste that into Google Translate.

It is a giant crutch. You could argue this doesn't really count as speaking the language, but the point is, you use these crutches like you use a stabilizer on a bike. It is giving you the ability to move forward, even though obviously you're not moving forward without the tool.

With time, you'll need the crutch less and less. The stabilizers on your bike, you can take them off after you've learned how to get your balance and such. That is my biggest tip by far, is let go of the fact that you have to wait until you're ready, and speak right now.

Decide, "I'm going to get in front of somebody." This is a lot more affordable than people think. People imagine, I've got to book a language class, and they look in their hometown, and they find the language class. It's expensive, $50 an hour, but they figure, "No, it's worth the investment." The thing is, if you go on a lot of websites, and you try to find a teacher with Spanish, who lives in literally any Latin American country, you can take advantage of a stronger currency exchange.

You can get a really good teacher for $10 or $15 an hour, who's earning pretty decently in their country. With that, you have one person who is giving their undivided attention to you. Ahead of time, I decided with my Korean teachers, "I am paying this person for patience, because I am going to be extremely slow.

I'm going to be incredibly awkward. I am paying this person to be patient with me, so I don't have to feel as bad that I'm wasting their time or whatever, because I'm paying for their time." That takes a lot of the stress off me, because obviously, I'm not going to walk up to a stranger on the street, and start blurting my low level of the language at them, and expect anything positive to happen.

When I'm paying for somebody's time, that's different. I try to hire a teacher online. There's loads of good websites. One that probably has the most teachers is italki.com. Find a teacher there, book them, and you just start talking with them. It's going to suck. You're going to feel like an idiot.

You have to remember, you have to suck a little less every day. The goal is not perfectionism. The goal is not to be a genius. The goal is not to debate Kantian epistemology in your target language. The goal is suck a little less every day. That is essentially my biggest tip of all.

If you take anything from this interview, take that. Speak from the beginning. You're going to suck. Accept that. Embrace it, and just suck a tiny bit less every day, and that progressively leads to improvement. I love it. It's very simple. You have this whole program, Fluent in Three Months.

I'm also curious about where the three months came from. Start with that, but it has to be more than just continually have these conversations. Are there steps along the way that someone should follow learning a language? Yeah, okay. So the three months, I know when people would see the title of Fluent in Three Months, they may imagine I'm talking about a particular program that will guarantee success in three months, but what it's more about is specificity.

So I'm not prescribing to anybody that you must do this within a certain timeline. The problem I tend to see is a lot of people are extremely vague with their targets. So they will make a New Year's resolution, I want to learn Spanish, and that's it. That's all they come up with, and that has absolutely nothing attached to it.

You need smart goals, specific, measurable, all that stuff. That's what I was thinking when I was getting started with all of this. I needed to have a specific target in a specific deadline. In my case, three months happens to work because I'm a nomad. I travel all the time, and when you travel, you will find a lot of countries tend to have a three month tourist visa limit.

That's all the time I had, so that's the deadline I was going to give myself. Initially, I would travel to the country. Nowadays, I do it differently. I learn the language ahead of time, before going. Then I'll spend three months in the country without having to be in as intensive a learning mode.

Ultimately, that's where it came from for me, is it's a tourist visa limit, and I find it's the Goldilocks zone. A year is just so much time that you can keep putting it off, decide, I'll do it once a week or whatever, and you might cram it at the end.

Whereas a few weeks or a month is too little time to make any significant progress, so three months of very intensive language learning, if you're the kind of person who can work intensively for a particular time and take time off, which I know is not the case for a lot of people.

For me, what I would do is I would work really hard for nine months out of the year, save up money, and then I don't have to work so much for three months, and I make it my full-time job. That is not something realistic for most people, so I don't guarantee fluency in three months, because if you want to make a really high level in a short amount of time, it needs to be a full-time job.

For most people, try your best to decide three months or four months or six months, whatever it is, I can make a lot of sacrifices. I can decide I'm going to give up English-speaking shows on Netflix for three months, and the time I would put into watching those shows, I'm going to study the language, or at the very least, watch the shows in that language if I need to wind down or whatever.

I go out with my friends maybe three times a week. I'm going to cut that down to once a week or once every two weeks, and the extra time I'm going to put into learning the language, I'm going to make a lot of sacrifices in my life, and those sacrifices are going to give me more time.

Even if that's one hour a day, you utilize that one hour and decide I can't sustain this in the long term. Eventually, I need to relax. I need to be seeing my friends regularly, whatever it may be, but you decide for this short term of three months or four months or whatever specific number is realistic for you, the biggest priority in my life is learning this language.

I'm going to eat and breathe this language. I'm going to be listening to podcasts about the language, reading books in the language, using apps or doing flashcards in the language, and of course, I'm going to be speaking the language with actual human beings via a Zoom call or whatever it may be.

I'm going to do that intensively for a certain period of time. That's going to make a difference because a lot of people don't have any solid goals with their language. They don't have any sense of intensity, and try to do it in whatever free time they have. They're in a supermarket line, and they decide I'll do some Duolingo, and they've done something that day, and then they say, "Oh, I've done something in the language." That's not what I'm talking about.

You need to let go of this, "I'm going to do anything for five minutes and feel like I'm doing something in the language." It needs to be a true project. That's what I do. I make it a project. The three months works for me because it is an amount of time that I can throw myself at a project.

I start to run out of energy, and then go easy on myself the rest of the time. Generally, because I deal with multiple languages, I learn a new language for three months, but I'll be maintaining my languages for the rest of the year. I don't have to worry about learning a new language.

It's an extremely intensive burst of progress. That's what I try to help people with. I run my own coaching program. It goes over three months. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to have the same target as me, but when people are on the coaching program, I at least guarantee by the end of it, you will be conversing in the language.

Conversing is a lot more flexible than having to be fluent, because conversing, you can still talk to someone who's patient and you can talk slowly, and you can make a lot more mistakes. Some specific goal that works for you that might be realistic, but still pushing yourself as much as possible, that's what leads to a lot more success.

That's what I see people not doing. People who don't succeed in learning a language, they don't have anything they're trying to reach in any timeline. So smart goals changes everything, and that's where the three months comes from. Okay. So we set specific goals. We set a timeframe. I like the idea of three months to get to fluency might be possible, but you've got to really be intensive.

Is there an amount of time that you think is the minimum someone needs to put in to get to that conversational level? I think that's where you start to really see what is unique to the person. I found for me, I can't make progress in a language unless I'm putting at least an hour a day in.

But I have come across a lot of people who actually can switch their brain into language learning very quickly. They can do something with 15 minute bursts. I've seen them progress over the longer period of time, obviously, but I have seen them progress. So this depends on the person.

I'm not the kind of person that can do anything in 15 minutes. It takes my brain time to adapt, get used to it and get my momentum back. I personally need at least an hour. And generally I try to do a few hours because I'm doing it intensively, but I understand that's not as realistic for a lot of people in their life situations.

So depends on the person. If you're the kind of person that feels like you can make genuine progress in a 30 minute window, that may be your minimum. But of course, this is why I was saying before, the first thing you do is look at your timetable and see what can I sacrifice for these next two months or four months or whatever the number is and find more time.

There's no magic number. One hour is the number that's going to change your life. Just find how much time you have because the more time you do each day, the more you're going to learn. People always ask me how long will it take me to reach this level in the language?

They would say, Benny, your three months are crazy because I spent six years learning Spanish in school and I would interrupt them and say, no, you didn't. You did not spend six years learning Spanish. Six years elapsed through which you maybe went to a one hour Spanish class with people and you were daydreaming about a girl you had a crush on or whatever it is.

It's not quite the same as intensively living and breathing this language for a certain period. It's why I tell people the amount of time that elapses is not what's important for counting how successful. It's more about how many hours of dedicated time are you putting into that language where it's got 100% of your attention.

Any less attention is going to give less important results. You can listen to a podcast while you're doing the dishes. You can do something at the same time and it is going to help you, but it's going to be less useful. So I would say an hour of listening to a podcast while you're doing other tasks is equivalent to maybe 10 minutes of actually giving it your undivided attention, replaying the audio, taking notes.

It's why it's a very nebulous thing to decide how much time do I need because it depends so much on how you're using that time. This is why I tell people, don't worry if you've spent six years or whatever, I'm the same. In school, I had learned a German for six years and at the end of those six years, I couldn't do anything.

I went to Germany and I couldn't order a train ticket. And that was literally one of the things in my lessons that kept coming up, how to order a train ticket. And I couldn't even do that. I say that I learned German for six years, but I didn't learn German for six years.

German learning happened in my schedule where I was in that class, but it wasn't six years. Three intensive months. That is a whole different universe compared to what we think of for language learning in a very casual or passive way. You really need to take active control and it needs to be a priority in your life.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. So you mentioned the example of it's really important to start speaking early on and there's ways that you could do it a lot more affordably.

And it's really important how you spend the time. What are the things that are important to spend your time on aside from native speaking with another human? Is it vocabulary? Is it writing? Is it reading? What are the core elements in that three month period of what you need to be doing?

I would definitely understand. This is one of the first questions people ask me is what is the best app for learning a language? What are the best books I can buy? What should I be doing with my time in terms of vocabulary and all that? I have to say, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but the biggest thing you should be thinking about is speaking with a human being.

That should be the center of gravity. Everything else is building upon that. Every day I try to have a lesson with a teacher or if I'm less intensive, maybe a couple of times a week. And then everything else that I'm doing is to augment that experience with my teacher.

Maybe after the class passes, I think to myself, man, I really suck at vocabulary. You have to do sort of a triage system. You imagine a hospital where all these sick people are coming in. There's a million problems to deal with, but the guy with the runny nose is not as important as the guy with the gunshot wound.

You have to do this with your language learning. And yes, of course, you could think, oh, my accent sucks. Oh my God, I'm not conjugating my verbs, or I don't know the right gender of these nouns. But none of that makes a big difference with actual communication. I guarantee you when you're speaking languages and you mess up the gender, 99.99% of the time they will understand you regardless.

People always cite, oh, but there's this one really specific example that if you switch the gender it means something different. That doesn't happen almost ever. For most cases, when you say in German "der" instead of "die" or you say "el" instead of "la" in Spanish, they understand what you mean.

You have to start thinking of other things. Basic vocabulary. I'm going to do in my spare time, not because that's going to help me with some vague future of like generally improving my Spanish. I'm a lot more short term cited and I'm thinking, what can I do to make my next experience tomorrow or next week, if that's my next class, what am I going to do to make that slightly better in the language?

So maybe then I will learn some vocabulary. And I'm a big fan of using flashcards because they integrate the spaced repetition system. They space it out to make sure you're remembering the vocabulary just before you would potentially forget it. For that, I use an app Anki, A-N-K-I, but I know for a lot of people it has a very simple interface, which works for me, but there's other apps that have notification sounds, a prettier interface that may be a bit more manageable for people.

There's a bunch of apps that you can use. Which one you use isn't really as important as the fact that you are deciding how is this going to help my spoken sessions? I'm not the kind of person who says you must download this app. You must get this specific book because these are incidental.

I will just literally find whatever book, I'll just walk into a bookshop wherever I happen to be and pick up that one. Obviously, except for my books, those are the books people should be buying first. But that being said, you just buy some language course and make sure you're doing stuff with your teacher and your teacher will help you decide a bit more directionally what you need to put your time into.

I do understand people always want to know what is the app, what is the book? All of these will be 1% to 5% contributing to your success compared to are you finding a human being and speaking with them regularly? My focus is way more in that direction. In terms of what you're doing in the long term, you can't speak your way to fluency.

You're not going to speak every day and then eventually end up at fluency. I have a bit more of a dynamic learning approach. At the beginning, it's all about speaking. That's priority. I just need to have these lessons and get over my lack of confidence in using the little language that I have.

But with time, when I have the basic ability to communicate, then I find some of the more traditional learning resources are great. I will go through a language learning course book and do its exercises. I don't recommend that to people at the beginning, but in the later intermediate stages, that's when you need to start polishing up your skills.

That's when it becomes a little bit more important in this triage system. You no longer have gunshot wounds, so maybe the runny nose of getting the genders right in the language is a little bit more important now because you've solved all the other big problems. I start to focus on grammar.

I will study grammar. I'm not a fan of grammar in the beginning stages. I think it is one of the worst uses of your time to be studying grammar when you've just started to learn the language. But at the intermediate stage, that's when it is actually a bigger priority because that is literally your biggest problem.

You're already communicating in the language, but your grammar is lacking, so that's what you try to fix. It's a very dynamic approach that you see what is my biggest problem right now and you try to solve that problem progressively with time. For people just starting off, your biggest problem is you can't say anything in the language and you don't know what they're saying back to you, so this is more a case of just pushing through the practice stage of giving yourself face time with a human being in whatever way that may be.

For languages that don't use the kind of Latin alphabet, how important is reading and writing? Reading and writing is something I also tend to put later in the intermediate, regardless. Even for Latin based languages like Spanish or French, I wouldn't pick up a book and try to read it until I'm at the intermediate stages because it's just too much work with Spanish.

When I first started, one of my failed experiments was I picked up El Senor de los Anillos, Lord of the Rings, and I thought if I read this, I'll be fluent by the end of it. It took me weeks to get to page two because I was literally looking up every single word.

That was really not a good use of my time, whereas when I've reached the intermediate stage, then it becomes more manageable. Then I'm only looking up every 15th or 30th word. I can actually read significantly more and it becomes more pleasurable. Personally, I leave reading till later. I wouldn't necessarily say this is something I would prescribe to everybody because I've interviewed a lot of other language learners, a lot of episodes on my podcast where I talk to very interesting people.

I can think of a bunch of them. There's Steve Kaufman, who runs the website LingQ. There's Professor Krashen, who's very famous for talking about comprehensible input, which is philosophy in language learning, where you try to get exposure to something that is within your language level, and that leans a lot more towards reading and people would actually read from the beginning.

That may work more appropriately for a lot of people, but what I've found is it tends to work a little bit more for maybe either older generations or people who are really not as passionate to speak the language, and that's fine. They have a lot of goals in the language, but walking up to people and using it with them ultimately is maybe not their biggest priority.

In my case, I'm a traveler. Speaking the language is by far the biggest priority. I need to make friends. I need to interact with people in complicated situations. Once I've done that, then I come back to reading and writing, regardless of whatever script it uses. In terms of how they're different, I don't really change how I learn a language when it's European versus when it's an Asian language.

Maybe with something like Chinese as a character-based writing system, in that case, I would absolutely learn all my vocabulary through pinyin, which is the romanized version of Chinese characters. People say Chinese is one of the hardest languages in the world. Actually, Mandarin is not that hard. Grammatically, it's very straightforward, and the way the words are formed is very logical.

I really don't think Mandarin is that bad of a language, but of course, Chinese characters are a huge barrier that you have to work through. I just decide, let's take this in two stages, like a native Chinese person would have done. Chinese children learn how to speak first, and then they learn how to read and write.

That's what I was going to do. I learned how to speak Mandarin, and I would remember my vocabulary through pinyin, which is using our letters from the Latin alphabet to remember how to say the words. Then with time, I added Chinese characters so I could begin to read when that was in my triage system of a bigger priority.

For a language like Korean that I'm currently doing, its writing system is very logical. You can learn it in a weekend if you put some intensive time into it. It's very straightforward. A lot of languages that have a phonetic system, like Cyrillic for Russian, or Arabic, or Greek, or in the case I'm doing now, Korean, you can still incorporate learning the writing system because that's going to help you a lot with vocabulary.

You really want to be learning your vocabulary through its writing system when it's phonetic. People get intimidated. When I saw Korean before learning it, I was like, "Wow, all these circles and lines. This must take years to master." It is so easy. I cannot overstate how easy the Korean writing system is to pick up.

It's extremely logical, and it's something I did in a weekend. You would be surprised for a lot of languages. It looks intimidating because all these squiggles and lines you've never seen before, but it's like anything. You put a little bit of time in, and it becomes manageable. Are there some languages that do skew on the harder or easier side to learn?

I definitely have talked about this quite a lot. There's a podcast I've done with Paul Jorgensen, and he's a big YouTuber, millions of subscribers from the Lang Focus. In that, we talked about how to make difficult languages easy. People can find that in my podcast. Very fascinating when you dive into that one particular topic.

But what I say in general whenever I'm thinking about this is, I like to get people in a different mindset. I'll give you an example. When I was in Spain learning Spanish, I met a Spaniard who was learning both Japanese and French. I said to him, "Obviously, French is going to be a lot easier for you, isn't it?

Because it's in the same language family." He said, "Absolutely not. Japanese is so much easier." I didn't get it. I was like, "How? It's so different." He said, "Because I'm forced to learn French in school, whereas I really want to go to Japan. I like anime. I think Japanese girls are cute.

I've always dreamed of living in the country." That completely transformed his experience and it made Japanese easier. When people come from this more academic way of looking at a language, they think, "How am I going to decide which language is harder? Well, I'm going to put one language on one side, another language on another side, and compare them side by side.

If I see more common words between English and French, that makes it easier. If I see complicated grammar, like Japanese having a different word order in the sentence, that makes it hard." That for me is such an inhuman way of deciding which languages are harder and easy. It is easy to scale it.

You can say, "Regardless of the person, this language is harder than that." But realistically, each person has their own situation when it comes to learning a language. They have their own passions, their own motivations. When I think of all the languages I've learned, compare my experiences, I would say something like Chinese was actually easier for me than Spanish.

People always think, "That doesn't make any sense because Spanish is much closer to English," and all these other reasons. But ultimately, I had a bad language learning approach with Spanish for a long time. It took me a very long time to get to fluency with Spanish, to even get to a conversational level.

I kept kicking myself. I kept telling myself, "Your Spanish is miserable. People are laughing at you. Who would want to speak Spanish with you?" All of these reasons are why it took me so long to learn Spanish. Whereas with Mandarin, at that stage, I had a good language learning approach, a good attitude.

I embraced making mistakes. After three months, I reached a pretty good conversational stage. People can see YouTube videos of me where I'm interviewing people in Mandarin three months after I've started to learn the language. I could not do that with Spanish. This does not mean I'm going to say universally, "Therefore, Mandarin is easier than Spanish." Obviously not.

It is the context. I was a more confident person. I didn't have great motivation at the start. I didn't really know why did I want to learn Spanish. I was putting the effort in a very inconsistent way. Whereas with Mandarin, I knew I want to travel China. I want to take a train 2,000 kilometers deep into the country.

I want to make a video of me getting a kung fu lesson in a village with a kung fu master. All these dreams that I managed to make come true, I had these in mind and that made Mandarin easier. When I talk to people and I see they've decided they want to learn a particular language and it has real, genuine significance in their life, like their family background is there, or they have a love interest in the country they want to move in with, or whatever it may be, that is their passion and that is going to make that language significantly more approachable because they have huge motivation to learn it.

Whether languages are easier or harder is insignificant because they aren't going to be easier if you don't care about them. Whatever language is the most important in your life, that is the easiest language because that's the one you're going to be able to get momentum to learn. I love that.

I know a lot of the podcasts we talk about travel. I know a lot of our listeners love to travel. One of the times people are often most excited to learn a language is that maybe they planned a trip or they have this, like you said, in China, a vision for a trip they want to take.

Not everyone who is planning a trip to a foreign country necessarily feels like they need to become fluent. Is there a stop along the way where you can have enough skills in a language to have a different experience traveling and unlock really interesting things that you can get to a lot quicker?

Any advice for someone in that situation? Well, when it comes to language levels, there is a lot of specificity with this. This is something I take into account with my targets. I always work off the European Common Framework, which has a very specific way of categorizing language levels. It splits it into A, B, and C, and within each one, it further subsplits it into one and two.

A is beginner, B is intermediate, C is advanced, one is lower, two is upper. A2 means you're an advanced beginner, and C1 means you're a lower level mastery speaker of the language. This scale of six different levels is where I pin everything. For me, fluency begins at the B2 level.

This is upper intermediate. What that means is you can talk about most things you would talk about in casual social situations, but because you're not at the C levels, you don't have a mastery level. In my case, I studied engineering. The languages I have a C level at, I could work as an engineer in those languages, and I could have a philosophical conversation with you about very deep subjects, but for the most part, most conversations I'm going to have are at the high level B2 social conversations.

That's what I'm aiming for, and it's important on this scale to remove perfectionism, because even the C2 is still not perfect. It means that you can work functionally through the language the same way you would in your mother tongue. Now, on this same scale, I think at the A2 level, upper beginner, this is where you can function very confidently as an independent tourist in the language.

You can ask for directions, you can get the gist of their reply, you can deal with problems like you have an injury and you can get yourself to the hospital. All of these very basic functional things you can do with confidence, even though you can't necessarily have full-on conversations.

I think that is fine for somebody who's going to the country briefly, and this is something you can genuinely get to in a lot shorter of a time than people realise. The very steep curve at the beginning, you can make a lot of progress very quickly. What tends to happen is we reach the intermediate plateau.

This is where things start to get really rough, where you're putting as much effort in, but you get stuck at the middle level. This will happen to everybody, and that's okay as long as you can push through to very beginning stages. That B1, I feel, is something that is definitely achievable in a matter of a certain amount of months for people.

Regardless of your background, if you're able to put the time in, a B1 level means you can have a lot of conversations with people, as long as they're a little patient with you. It does not count as fluency, but it counts as conversational. For me, this is where I love to be in my travels because I can start to make friends in the language.

I can really hang out with people. If you're single, you can go on dates with people. You can do a lot with that B1 level. This, for me, is a minimum to feel like I'm truly experiencing the culture in a direct way. Anything less than that is more a case of how confident a tourist you are going to be, which in itself can be a wonderful thing.

You can have a lot of great experiences, but ultimately you are going to be doing most of your things in English if you're only at an A2 level. It depends on your style of travel. My style of travel, obviously, is I avoid English. I want to make only local friends, so I have to get at least a B1 level.

That's where, when you said at the beginning, Benny speaks 12 languages, number 12 comes from B1 and up. I personally only say I speak a language if I can have conversations in the language, not if I would function as a tourist. I actually have another dozen languages that I could function as a tourist quite confidently, but the thing is, that's not as impressive as it sounds because you can do that a lot quicker than people realize.

You can be a very confident tourist. You can have a bunch of phrases ready to go in a very short time span, especially if you're having consistent conversations ahead of time. I did, for a while, travel to the country and think I'm going to get off the plane and immediately start speaking the language or start learning the language.

That was an interesting period in my life, but nowadays I try to learn the language ahead of time. I don't leave it for when I'm in the country, especially for people who can only travel to a country for a very limited amount of time. I don't want to be in language learning mode if I'm only going to be in a country for a month or two.

I want to really get to know the place. I do my work ahead of time and then I can explore and make friends once I get to the country. You said people can learn it way faster than they'd imagine. Could you put any kind of rough window on that?

If someone's got a trip planned to Japan in a month, do you think they could pick up enough to get to the, not the B level, but in that A level, be able to have a conversation and ask some directions and have a few more local experiences? You do that in a weekend.

People don't realize how quickly you could learn phrases. I think a lot of us just lack the confidence and we can't picture a universe where we walk up to somebody and ask for directions when we've never spoken a language before. We imagine this is only something geniuses do. I really want people to lower the bar on what they think counts as speaking a language as a tourist, because it's really not that impressive.

You're learning a very finite number of sentences you can rattle off. You do not need to know the intricacies of the language. Whenever I'm starting off and I want to be a tourist in a language, I'll sing myself the phrase I want to learn. I'll sing that to myself a few times and that helps me remember it.

I'll do that in 10 minutes. I'll learn how to say where is the library and I'll look it up online. I'll try to say it and that's it. It's really not that impressive. If you're going to Japan in a month, you can learn 20 phrases this weekend. Instead, decide I'm going to take this month.

I'm going to try and be able to maybe understand their replies to me. I'm going to try and push myself up to see if I can get to that A2 level and maybe be a little bit more confident to expand on my sentences, have a little bit of maneuverability where I'm not just rattling off memorized phrases.

I can replace a word or two here or there. You could do that in a month, but if you're going to Japan, you're really passionate about it, maybe you should decide this next month I'm going to make those sacrifices and I'm really going to try and make Japanese my priority so that when I'm in Japan, I'm communicating a lot more than I would otherwise.

But it sounds like to be able to ask questions and get a response, not necessarily be fluent at all a month, if you can really put in the time, is not an unreasonable goal. Absolutely. What I understand this tourist level of the language, then the A levels, this way more accessible than people imagine it to be.

Once you've done it a couple of times, you realize you're just learning a few phrases and just trying to commit them to memory and then rattling them off and maybe learning a couple of the words that could come up in the replies. It's not that complex. The B levels do require a certain intimate understanding of how the language is truly piecing together its replies and having a broader vocabulary so you can expand on things.

But the early levels, you could do that a lot easier than you imagine. Love it. Any final kind of tips or hacks when it comes to language learning? I know you've written so many language hacks books that people should put in their arsenal as they're going through this process.

I've mentioned my biggest hack, but in general, my philosophy is I would really encourage people to make as many mistakes as possible. When I'm really getting into learning a language and doing it intensively, my goal is today I'm going to make 200 mistakes or more. That's my goal. And that gets you completely away from this academic mindset where every mistake brings you closer to a fail.

Every mistake is you communicating more, suck a little less every day. That's my biggest takeaway other than speak from day one. I would encourage people to make mistakes, embrace your inner Spanish Tarzan or whatever you imagine this caveman functionality of the language. Try to just use that and that's how you move forward.

That's how you push through those A levels to eventually then be communicating in the language. Embrace being a beginner. It's fine. I've had such wonderful experiences in many of my languages, even in those beginner A levels, I've had interactions that I remember for the rest of my life. That's great.

You don't have to only be fluent in the language to have rich experiences in it. Once you are okay with being a beginner, it becomes a lot easier to have fun with it, to make progress, and then to go beyond that. I love it. Two things. One, I can imagine that people listening, we've talked multiple times about all these languages you've picked up and I'm sure there's people just curious.

Would you mind sharing the languages you've hit that B and above level just so people can suffice their curiosity? Most of the romance languages I would have B2 and above. So genuine fluency, C in a lot of them. This would be Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and I have probably a B1 in Catalan as well.

I have German, also a high level and probably a B1 again in Dutch. American sign language. That would be another B1. So most of my C levels are the romance languages. I also have Mandarin. I did reach a B1 level of that. So I think I'd need probably a couple of weeks to get back to the B1 level before I return to the likes of China.

Currently learning Korean. And I'd say by the time this goes live, I'd say pretty confident that it's a B1 too. And then I've dabbled in a bunch of others that I would not put on that scale, but that's it in a nutshell. Oh yeah, Irish and Esperanto. Sorry, I forget sometimes when I'm listening to these languages.

Yeah, go ahead. Great. Last thing. I know you've traveled quite a bit. Is there a place that someone looking for some travel inspiration can take from you? Maybe a favorite city or country or town that isn't the obvious place that's on everyone's list that you want to share and maybe why it's special?

In a lot of countries, I'm a big fan of the second city. So rather than the capital city, I think the second city as a general rule, it's going to be more affordable. You're going to have less foreigners, so more of a chance to meet local people who maybe aren't overwhelmed with how many foreigners there are.

Right now in Korea, I'm talking to you from Busan, which is the second city. And I can list a lot of advantages over going to Seoul because of how more of an authentic experience I'm having, but still having the comforts of being in a city. Obviously you're going to be even more authentic if you go to a village somewhere, but the city life I happen to enjoy the second city in a lot of countries.

I'm a huge fan of basing myself there for a certain period of time to get to know the culture in a different way. And generally I tend to be one of the few foreigners who is in that city to be able to have a bit more of an authentic experience.

I love that. Just a general rule of thumb is second city. Great. If you have any final parting wisdom for anyone, please share it. Otherwise, let people know where they can find everything you're working on. Yeah. So since you're in podcast mode right now, if you do a search for language hacking, that's my podcast.

I've interviewed a lot of very interesting people with the full scale of people who are just starting out and having their initial success, the people who are professional linguists in the field and have been doing this for decades. I run my own coaching program where I help people to learn a language in three months to get to a conversational stage.

People will find that on my website. Of course, I'm on all the social medias. I actually, as part of my way to practice languages, I make a new social media account in each of the languages, even threads that as we're recording this now, it's only existed for a week.

I have 14 threads accounts just so I can follow in my target languages. I have 14 Tik Tok accounts, 14 Instagram accounts. And I use all of these to maybe post vertical videos to practice the language and of course, follow people. And my main one is Irish polyglot on most of the channels.

People can find me there and get some more inspiration. That just made me think of one last thing before we go. Is that a tactic, maybe following accounts in other countries on social media, it never occurred to me as a potential way to practice or learn a language. A tactic that's a bit broader than that is think, what do you tend to do with your time and how can you do that in your target language?

If you're the kind of person who winds your day down with Netflix, maybe create a new sub account. You know, you can have multiple sub accounts on the same main login and make that just your target language. You're only watching stuff in the language and the algorithm will recommend that to you.

I personally happen to watch a lot of Tik Tok videos. That's how I wind down as I swipe up, watch Tik Tok rather than do that in English, which is not really that good of a use of my time. I created new accounts and I trained the algorithm to only show me content in those languages.

I only followed people who made content in those languages. When I switched to it, I'm in that language mode, I'm using my computer. So I made sure that I could switch the language on my computer on my phone. I very quickly changed the interface on my phone. It's more of a broader thing of thinking, how are you living your life?

What are the things you're doing and can you change any of those things to be in your target language? You like playing video games? Change the language that they're giving you the orders to shoot that guy to be in your target language. There's a lot of ways you can have this sense of virtual immersion without even having to leave your home country, that you can exist in the language.

You like working out? I work out these days to Korean workout music. That's the same kind of bump, thump, thump music, but they're singing in Korean. Everything you do, try to do it in your target language. In my case, I use social media a lot, so I may as well use social media in my target language.

I love that tip. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm excited to pick up a new language. Thank you, everybody. I hope to hear from all of you and best of luck on all of your own language journeys. Thank you so much for joining this week.

I hope this episode has inspired you to either pick up a language that you haven't spoken in a while, maybe even try to learn a new one. I know for me, I'm already thinking about how to improve my French. If you have questions, thoughts, or feedback on this episode, or anything at all really, podcast@allthehacks.com is where you can reach me.

Thank you so much for listening this week. See you next week.