Welcome to 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 Joshua, I am your host, and today we're going to talk about learning a language.

I'm going to first give you a few reasons as to why you should seek to learn additional languages to what you already speak, and then give you some helpful tools, things that have been useful to me as I have tried to enhance my own language ability. To begin, why?

Why should you learn an additional language to the languages that you speak right now? Many reasons why you should do it. Let's start with the financial ones to be most relevant to Radical Personal Finance. When you think about your life and your earning ability, in order for you to earn more money, you need to systematically develop additional levels of skill.

And every additional skill that you can develop will enhance your opportunities to earn money, if it's properly marketed and properly positioned. So I want you to imagine that you are jobless right now, and you are a high school dropout who spends no time, who has not done anything productive, has developed no economically valuable skills.

You're a high school dropout whose primary skill is drinking beer and getting high. All right, that's it. Now, you want to go get a job. What do you do? Well, you've got basically nothing. You've got basically nothing to offer except possibly your physical strength and ability. So you might qualify for a job moving furniture, or you might qualify for a job driving a lawnmower.

I've done those jobs. I've made money at those jobs. It's tough money, but that's all you're qualified for. That's about all you're going to do, and you're never going to make very much money in those situations. So if you want to increase your earning ability, you have to develop your human capital.

You have to develop your skills. So that comes in a number of different ways. It might come with academic credentialization. Getting a high school degree, finishing your GED could possibly be a solution. It might come with getting a college degree. You're going to have an easier time getting a job if you have a college degree than if you don't have a college degree.

Might come with having an advanced degree. It's probably going to be easier in many cases for you to get a job if you have an advanced master's degree than if you only have a bachelor's degree or if you only have a high school diploma. It's going to be easier for you if you have additional industry-level credentials.

So maybe you want to become a welder, and so you pursue some kinds of welding credentials. Or possibly you're a financial planner, and so you have a certified financial planner designation, etc. So you're a graphic designer, and you get some certificate from a known graphic design firm. These forms of credentialization are useful, and they move you dramatically up the earning chart.

You're likely able to demand more money. You're likely able to get paid more money, and they'll reduce your time spent on unemployment and make life generally easier for you. But the real magic comes when you don't just stop with the mainstream stuff. When you additionally develop other skills and abilities.

I like how Scott Adams uses the term "the talent stack." You develop a thick talent stack. And so maybe you have some experience with marketing. Well that makes you more marketable. Maybe you have some experience with a certain expertise in a certain software program. Makes you more marketable. But one of the things that you can often do is bring in additional language ability.

Makes you more marketable. Say, for example, you have a college degree in marketing, and you have some real experience in the world of advanced marketing. But now you want to go and get a job, but in addition to that you have a foreign language ability. Maybe you're skilled and bilingual in Spanish and English, or Chinese and English, or it can be anything.

Serbo-Croatian and English. Or some value. Now you can reach a more interesting market, and you're more valuable. If you come into a bilingual social media marketing management role, just the fact of your bilingualism will probably mean that you can negotiate a $10,000 or $15,000 or $20,000 or $50,000 increased salary.

Even in fairly simple jobs, you'll find that being bilingual is very useful. Number of years ago when I was just out of high school, I spent some time managing a tree nursery. And one of the things that was useful that helped me get the job was I spoke both Spanish and English.

And so I was a white, native American English speaker. But because I was Spanish, I was able to easily integrate and interface with all Spanish speaking all of our employees, were all Mexican and Guatemalan migrant workers in the tree nursery. The other foreman was a Mexican, but he spoke excellent English.

And one of the big reasons that he was a foreman was simply his bilingual ability. And so you can just see how obvious it is that a white owners, American owners who didn't speak a lot of Spanish, they needed go-betweens. And so in his case, his name was Fernando, he was a good manager, but it was primarily his bilingualism that allowed him to be an effective interface and allowed him to make a lot more than the other guys were making, which put him in a much better financial situation.

So if you're a welder and you're working with a lot of Spanish speaking guys, it makes a big difference. If you're a landscaper, one of the simplest things, I used to work with a lot of Spanish immigrants in the United States. And I always say, guys, take your English seriously.

If you're working and you're hired as an entry level Guatemalan immigrant, and you only speak Spanish, you're going to cap out your wages at 15 bucks an hour. But if you can just simply learn English, you'll very quickly end up things like having a driver's license, having a good driver's license is in good standing and knowing how to back a trailer, you quickly move into a foreman role, into a management role, three basic skills.

And I used to teach the guys, and I tell it to you, so it helped other people. The three basic things to make it to double your income, if you're starting as a low wage kind of entry level worker, is going to be having, I guess I should add more than three, the four.

Number one, being a legal resident, that makes a huge difference in your earning ability of being a legal resident versus not being a legal resident. So number one, legal resident. Number two, having a clean driver's license, having a no accident history. I had a friend of mine who had a job, he was a foreman of a crew, had an accident, he got laid off from his job because the owner of the company couldn't afford the insurance anymore because of the accident that he had.

It was his fault accident. And so the insurance rates spiked and he got laid off because he didn't have a clean driver's record. It was a stupid thing to allow to happen. Of course, things happen, but having a clean driver's record. The thing I used to say in landscaping was know how to back a trailer, know how to drive a trailer without backing the thing into the ditch.

If you talk to any owner of a landscaping company, one of the hardest things is finding somebody who can actually just drive the trailer properly and safely and not put the trailer into a ditch with thousands of dollars of equipment. And then number four, speaking English, being able to actually speak English.

It dramatically improves the marketability of somebody's ability to interface with customers, the ability to be a go-between, to manage crews, et cetera. And so I've seen in those kinds of jobs, bilingualism is incredibly valuable. Now, if you're listening to the show, you're of course either speak English or are learning English and certainly without a doubt, English is the single most important language that you can learn on a global basis.

English is the number one most widely spoken language in the world. It is the lingua franca, the common third language in any kind of professional context, about 1.2 billion English speakers around the world. And without a doubt, it is probably the single best thing that any person anywhere in the world can do is learn English to enhance their marketability and enhance their job opportunities.

You and I probably as native English speakers probably have an advantage, a real privilege that it comes easily to us because we're probably native speakers. But things go the other way as well. Learning additional languages as a native English speaker will additionally enhance your marketability, especially if you are a culturally native English speaker.

Somebody who can go back and forth from the United States to China and speak fluent Chinese and fluent English and who can understand the cultural interface is going to be very, very marketable. So over the years, I've become convinced that one of the best things that you can do for your earning ability is develop additional language ability.

It really hinders people who don't develop additional language ability if they're involved in that kind of context. Now, that's the financial context, but there are many other reasons to study languages, even just to keep yourself smart. One of the most important forms of exercise that you can do for your high quality of life is to exercise your brain.

You want to get a little bit smarter every day, and the way that you get smarter is to make your brain work hard. If you don't keep your brain working hard, it seems to decay. It seems to atrophy, just like your muscles, your physical muscles. The brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised.

There's good evidence, although it's not overwhelming, I've read good evidence from the medical people that say that anything that you can do to keep your brain exercised is going to enhance the longevity of your brain and your quality of living throughout your lifetime. There's evidence of just simply people being engaged in the social environments.

One of the reasons why I think retirement can be very dangerous for people in their mental health has to be navigated very carefully if you're going to retire from your job. Retirement can be very dangerous, but you can also keep your brain engaged with additional studies. You can study hard things to learn new things.

It doesn't have to be in a foreign language. You can be engaged with subjects that are keeping you stretching out and keeping you learning. But one effective way to keep your brain working is to always be learning an additional language. There's good evidence that multilingual people seem to experience delayed onset of mental diseases like Alzheimer's.

Very, very useful. So learning languages can be useful from a physical perspective. Other benefits as well is the ability to integrate culturally with other people. It's really fun. It's much more fun to go to a country and visit and travel when you speak the language or at least a little bit of it than when if you're a total outsider.

It can be really interesting and help with your empathy. I really appreciate one of the things that I've learned a lot over the years is I've been able to develop a lot more empathy from multilingualism by being able to travel and being able to get to know people genuinely and have them open up to you.

You know, I talked about my experience with immigrants to the United States, with Spanish-speaking immigrants. It's always been much easier for me to interact with Spanish-speaking immigrants to the United States than many of my friends because I can speak Spanish. I can interact with them and I can find out what it's like to live in their shoes and ask the questions that you're always curious about but that you wouldn't be able to get answers to if you couldn't cross that language barrier.

Many many reasons including financial reasons to learn a second language, learn an additional language. And I want to focus most of today's talk on just some practical tools that I have found useful. But I do want to address kind of how and why, just the reasons why you should want to in addition to these basic reasons and how you can actually do it.

Because we do genuinely live right now in a golden age for almost everything. We live in a golden age for almost everything, we really do. Including language learning. We live in a golden age of language learning. I think that things will get better in the future for language learning but I don't know how.

I think they will but I don't know how. Certainly people would say, "Well, it'll get better for not needing to do language learning, simultaneous machine translation." We're already living in that. It's being tested, it's effective. Right now you can take your cell phone with you and you can pull out Google Translate, you can hit the button, you can speak it and it'll spit out the language translation on the other side.

That is true and that's going to increasingly be a force for connectedness around the world as we increasingly have real-time machine translation of languages. But I'm talking about actual language learning. We live in a golden age. Some of these tools that I'm going to describe to you are wonderful and make things incredibly easier than they were a decade ago.

I want you to take advantage of that. But in this golden age, at the end of the day, you've got to decide why you're going to do something. I've become convinced that the single – maybe that's too strong – a major distinction between people who will be successful in the coming decades and people who are not is just going to come down to motivation, desire, simple desire.

And the master skill that you can develop in yourself is the ability to focus your desire, to increase your desire so that you experience motivation in ways that other people don't. My wife and I have an ongoing thing. I give her business idea after business idea and one of the common themes I tell her, "Oh look, this would be an interesting business idea right here in this particular area and here's how I would learn it." For example, I think about it with restaurants.

We travel a lot and sometimes you miss certain kinds of cuisine. And I've become convinced that I could move almost anywhere in the world and set up a foreign cuisine restaurant that was superb even if I didn't know how to cook the food. Because you can learn the intricacies of any cuisine in the world right now on YouTube.

I'm not Italian. I don't particularly love cooking Italian food. I'm not great at cooking Italian food. But I could become a world-class Italian chef with a few months of practice and the information that's easily available on YouTube. And I could move to downtown Beijing and open the world's best Italian restaurant.

I would adopt an Italian accent so that everyone thought I was actually Italian, which I can also learn on YouTube for free to speak my English with an Italian accent and a few chosen Italian phrases and I could be an Italian immigrant to Beijing with the best Italian restaurant in town.

Now, I'm of course grandstanding a little bit, but I genuinely do mean it. You can learn because the information is now widely available. And in the information age, it's not access to information that distinguishes those who succeed. It's largely motivation and those who are actually willing to learn the skills and make the information that's out there truly theirs.

This can be done in almost any industry. I just use cooking because it's easy and it's a fairly universal language. We all like to eat, I think. And it's fun. It's fun. But that's the point, is that you need the motivation. And so with language learning, it's exactly the same thing.

The thing that keeps people from not effectively learning languages is not skill. It's not ability. It's motivation. It's the actual motivation. If you have motivation, you figure out a way that works for you. My ways might not work for you, but if you have motivation, you'll figure out how to speak the language.

You'll figure it out. There are so many of us who come from immigrant families, the families that moved to the United States and had motivation and learned English. There's so many immigrants who go abroad and have motivation and learn the local language. And you've got to figure out how to motivate yourself.

And that's going to be the key distinction between your effectiveness with language learning. It's not going to be a matter of skill. It's going to be a matter of motivation. It's why you kind of see that a guy moves to Spain and falls in love with a beautiful Spanish woman who only speaks Spanish.

And all of a sudden, three months later, the dude's fluent in Spanish. Meanwhile, you've got some guy who sits in class in three years of high school Spanish and three years out the other end, he can only say, "Buenos dias, como estas?" And that's about it. It all comes down to motivation, motivation to learn a language.

So I don't know how to help you with motivation. You kind of got to know yourself and understand what is going to motivate you and then put in place structures of reward for yourself that go based upon your own motivation. One of again, those mega skills that you can develop is the skill of self-knowledge, self-awareness to understand your own psychology and figure out what's going to work for you and what's not going to work for you.

And if you can harness the power of understanding what works for you, you can put in place plans in anything that will help you to achieve the things that you want to achieve. I want to bust a myth though, and then I'll give you some tools. In addition to the positive side of motivation, there are some negative things that you'll have to overcome.

Perhaps you're an English speaker and you're 55 years old, you've never learned a second language. The chances are you may need to overcome some limiting beliefs, some lies that you may have believed that have kept you down. And two of the most common ones is I'm just not good at languages and it's easier for young people.

So the first one, I'm not good at languages. This is a total myth, a complete and total myth. Everybody in the world is good at languages. My evidence for that is everywhere in the world, little babies come into the world with no ability to speak or understand languages other than a little bit of nonverbal communication and they learn local language.

No matter how hard it is, no matter how complex, human beings are language machines. We're made in the image of God and God is a God who speaks. It's one of the key distinctions about God is God is a God who speaks and thus we're language learning machines. There's almost no limit to the language capacity of a human being.

There's no limit to the number of languages that you could speak. There are people out there who can speak dozens and dozens of languages with very high levels of fluency. Really the only limitation is the amount of time to learn, the amount of time to learn and to practice and we're all limited by our need to sleep and the 24 hours that we have in a day.

But beyond that there's almost no limit to the human capacity for languages. Now some people are more effective than others. Sometimes that's because of some form of natural ability. I noticed this with my wife. My wife seems far more capable than I am with regard to language ability. It annoys me sometimes because she'll hear a word one time and she'll remember that word basically forever.

I need to drill the word dozens of times to beat it into my head. I look at her and I just I sometimes tell her, "You waste this ability that you have because you don't work on it very much." I speak better than she does a lot of times because I work a lot harder but I think she's more naturally skilled than I am.

So some people do have some natural skills but all of us can develop some skill. All of us can do it. The key thing I think usually that separates people who are skilled at learning languages is the process of learning how to learn it, learning what works. Which is why oftentimes if you speak to somebody who speaks multiple languages, a polyglot, a lot of times it's easier for someone to learn their third or fourth language than it was for them to learn their second.

This is the same with almost anything. It's probably easier for many people to earn a PhD than it was for them to earn their high school degree, depending on the context of course. Because when you're learning something new, you have to develop some new skills of learning how to learn.

With languages, it's no different. So if you're just, you speak one language, you're an English speaker and you want to sit down and learn a second language, it's going to take time for you to figure out what routine is effective for me. What helps me to develop this language ability?

But once you've learned that with your second language, then you could add a third one and a fourth one and every one will get easier. Same thing with money, right? The first million is the hardest. Why? Well, there are some practical reasons that starting without any capital is harder than starting with capital.

But there's also a whole set of skills, a whole set of mindsets, a whole set of ways of thinking that you've got to develop. If you start from zero, to go from zero to a million dollars, to become a millionaire requires a complete transformation of who you are. But once you're a millionaire, to get another million dollars saved up just requires you to do a little bit more of what you've already done, to become a little bit more of who you already are.

And so things get easier with time. Now the second, so the first myth is, "Oh, I'm just not good at languages." Everybody can learn languages if you have the motivation. Now the second thing is you'll say, "Oh, it's just easy. It's harder when you get older." I'm thankful that this is a myth that the language research has pretty well debunked, pretty well exploded over the last years.

It's one of the most widely held myths that it's easier for children to learn foreign languages. I am teaching my children foreign languages and I'm convinced it's completely false. It's harder to teach children foreign languages than it is an adult. Because children basically only have, small children basically only have one way of learning and that's passive absorption instead of dedicated study.

What children do have at a young age is lots of time and they basically don't have to do anything else with their time. Our children when they're born into the world, they come into the world and we do everything for them. We change their diapers, we feed them. They have no responsibilities other than to sit around and learn.

And basically all they need to do is learn how to talk and learn how to walk. And so they have all the time in the world and they absorb, absorb, absorb, and absorb, but their actual learning process is extraordinarily slow. The time it takes for your child to start spitting out intelligible sentences is a very long time.

Starting from zero, what, they start about 18 months to start making intelligible sentences, two years old. Whereas you and I in 18 minutes we can make intelligible sentences in a foreign language. So adults can learn far faster than children can. Adults just usually don't have as much time as children do have.

If I brought you into my house and I fed you and I watered you and I met to all of your physical needs and I said your only job for 24 hours a day, your only job is to learn this other language, give yourself a few months, you could be fluently speaking another language.

Far faster than a child. So it's a matter of the amount of time that an adult has to invest. An adult has the ability to learn much more effectively than a child because an adult can take part of different material, an adult can study, an adult can review, an adult has all kinds of learning systems at their fingertips that make an adult's progress much better and much faster than a child.

So now on the foundation of my busting those two myths, I want to encourage you, you can learn another language. No matter how many languages you've learned, you can learn another language if you want to, if you have the motivation and you can learn it quickly if you have the right tools and the right facilities, the right materials.

So I don't want to give you a lecture on all of how to learn a language. It's beyond my skill set and the internet is your friend. There are many qualified language teachers out there that will give you their experience and I'm not the world's greatest polyglot, although my ambition is to be a decent polyglot, but it's just an ambition, it's not a reality and I've had the same struggles that you've had.

There have been times when I've learned a lot and there have been times when I've gone years without learning anything, but we really do live in a golden age of language acquisition and I want to give you some tools that I think will help you if you are studying another language.

These are tools that I think are completely game changing. The first thing that you need to do is you need to develop a strategy for language learning. What I think makes a lot of sense as a strategy for learning languages is learning words. If you can learn words and learn what words mean and if you learn enough words, you'll learn a language.

Now the natural acquisition of words is going to start with listening and then for adults, a huge benefit that we have is of reading. You need to listen to words and you need to read words. If you are someone who is bilingual or more, you'll know that the most common thing that someone says to you when they find out you speak another language is, "Oh yeah, you know, I am interested or I speak a little bit of this other language, but I can understand better than I can speak." It's always what someone says because it's always true.

You can always understand better than you can speak. That's a natural part of language. And so language learning often starts with learning to understand and then learning to speak does come on down the road. You have to learn to understand words and that means learning new words. And so you need some methodology to start to study and to learn new words.

Now that methodology doesn't have to be complex, but you do need something. And the key thing that you want is you want what the language people call comprehensible input. You want to have something that you can understand. If I put on a movie in Chinese and I just put the movie on and it's all Chinese, you won't, unless you, assuming you haven't studied Chinese, you won't understand, right?

Because it's just too much. It's too much language. But if you go into the local Chinese food restaurant that you really love to get takeout and every time you walk in to that restaurant to get your Chinese takeout and you say, you know, hi or howdy or good afternoon or however you greet people in English.

And if the Chinese person behind the counter said, "Ni hao" and responded with, with "Ni hao" every time, pretty soon you would figure out that "Ni hao" is a greeting, right? It's a greeting. You understand that because they always say exactly the same thing. And you've got two little words, two little tones that are pretty easy for you to listen to and you can understand.

And then if somebody tells you, you know, "Xie xie" that you should say, thank you. And they say, and you say, how do I say thank you? And they say "Xie xie" and every time you get something you say thank you in Chinese, then pretty soon you're going to learn that.

You've got comprehensible input. And this is how children learn as well. When we deal with our children and we're teaching them language, we speak to them in the context of something that they can understand. So if I'm telling my child, you know, put this over there, I'm going to use my fingers, I'm going to gesture, put this over there.

And they're understanding by the tone of voice, by the situation that we're in, put this over there. They understand that put this over there means I need to take this thing over there. And they can tell that by the way that I'm communicating. Or if I bake a loaf of bread and I butter a piece of bread and I get it out of the oven and it's hot and it's butter and I hold it out in my hand and I say, would you like a piece of bread?

Or would you like a cookie? They're understanding, okay, this is bread and this is cookie. And daddy's saying, would you like this? It's comprehensible. And so what you've got to do is you've got to find something that's going to be comprehensible to you. And most of the time, this starts with simple words, simple phrases, learning buenos dias, buenas tardes, you know, these basic things and learning them in their context.

And so you've got to find some kind of material that's going to help you to gain some basic comprehensibility. Now the world of this kind of material is wide open to you. You can pick up a phrase book if it's a language that you can read. For example, a language like Spanish, which is easy to learn to read, you can pick up a simple phrase book and start memorizing some phrases.

You probably know some simple Spanish phrases. You know that buenos dias means good morning and buenas tardes means good afternoon and como estas, you know, you know these things because you've heard them and they're very, very simple. Well, you can start there. I think it's very effective to start with some audio courses.

Years ago when I was driving a lot, I would go to the library and I would get from the library all the Pimsleur courses and all the Pimsleur courses in all the different languages start off the same way. They start with these basic phrases, just greetings. I remember one time I had gone through the Pimsleur Chinese course and I had learned, you know, eight phrases and I was in China.

And I'm sitting there in China and I was like, "Okay, I'm going to try out my Chinese phrases." And it was the most fun thing in the world. Ni hao, wo hui shuai yi jie putonghua. You know, like starting off with the basic stuff. And I got to the end of my six phrases and the Chinese person is sitting there just coming back at me at rapid fire and I'm just sitting there dumbfounded because I've completely lost all, I exhausted my six phrases in Chinese.

But it's a good place to start because it gets you the ability to start. And so you can pick almost anything, almost any introductory course and start it. And I recommend that you just pick something. You can pick something online, you can pick some podcast, you know, Coffee Break Spanish or Coffee Break French or, you know, pick up a Pimsleur course or a living language course or go to the library and try it.

Almost anything can start you. And once you start to get a couple of phrases, you realize that you can learn a couple of phrases. And if you can learn a couple of phrases and a couple of words, you can learn thousands of phrases and thousands of words. The good thing about most languages is you don't need that many words to be able to carry on a basic conversation.

The English language has the largest lexicon in the world. I think it's something like 250,000 words right now and growing. So English is without a doubt the hardest language in the world to learn massively because the lexicon, the number of words that are present is the biggest in the world.

My English vocabulary, I did took a vocab test, my English vocabulary is probably something like 30 to 35,000 words was an estimate I took recently. I don't even know a tenth, I mean I guess I know maybe 15% of the entire English lexicon. But the lexis of other languages is much, much, much, much smaller.

See what I did there? I just mixed it up on you and used two different words for the same thing. Lexicon and lexis, same word. The lexicon of other languages is much, much smaller. So I think I've heard estimates that French has a lexis of maybe 50,000 words and Spanish something like 30 to 50,000 words.

But you don't need even a fraction of those to carry on a basic conversation. A basic conversation can be easily had with some estimates a thousand words, some estimates a few thousand words. If you develop a few thousand words in a foreign language, you'll be able to pick up a newspaper and read and understand 85% of the words that are written in that language.

And so a few thousand words is a very doable target if you can figure out a way to learn words. And so that's your goal is to learn words. Now here's some of the tools that have been effective for me over the years. Number one, I do like audio-based courses.

I listen well and I can often hear things and so I like audio-based courses that turn drive time into learning time. I've done this with a bunch of languages. Some of it sticks, some of it doesn't, but it's really fun to be able to say hello in a dozen or two languages.

And you can learn that with just going through a few Pimsleur CDs that you can get from your local library. And so I like to do some of the audio-based languages. Where I find the audio-based languages for me stop working is once we get past the first introductions. But if you want to pick up a Portuguese CD or a Chinese CD and play it in your car where you're going back and forth from work, you can get your few basic introductions.

And that gets you started on learning a language. Really really valuable. What I find to be incredibly valuable is the use of flashcards. For me flashcards are a key thing. But over the years I've learned what flashcards work and what flashcards don't work. I speak relatively fluent Spanish. One of my goals this year is I'm working and studying hard for an advanced level Spanish diploma.

And I've got a lot of work to do to get there, but I'm working really hard towards that. But I've never had... I've had almost no formal instruction in Spanish. In fact my formal instruction in Spanish is limited to two years of high school Spanish and then about a month and a half of instruction when I was in Costa Rica in college.

That's it. But when I arrived in Costa Rica in college after two years of high school Spanish, I was able to carry on fluent conversations in ordinary circumstances in Spanish. And the secret was twofold. Number one, I spoke with people. And number two, I used flashcards. Start with number one, speaking to people.

What I observed and have observed over the years is that if you want to genuinely learn a language, you've got to actually use it. And the thing that keeps people back from learning a language is fear of looking and sounding stupid. And every advanced language learner that I've ever listened to and learned from has just simply overcome that fear.

Has been willing to just simply look and sound stupid. We all experience that fear. A moment ago when I'm trying to say, "I can speak a little Mandarin." That's Mandarin Chinese. It means I speak a little bit of Chinese. A little bit of Mandarin Chinese. But I have no idea if I do that well or not.

It's scary for me to record myself when I know I have fluent Chinese speakers and I haven't yet learned Chinese. And so I don't know if I speak it well or not. But that fear is just as present in me as it is in everyone else. I've just learned over the years that there's no point in succumbing to that fear.

You just have to act in spite of it. And I only ever had two years of high school Spanish, but what I always did was I always practiced speaking to people. And whenever I had the chance to practice with Spanish speakers, I would do it. And if you just do that, you'll get better.

Same thing when immigrants come to an English speaking country. If they will be willing to try, they make progress. But if they sit back and are scared to look stupid or sound stupid, they don't make progress. For me, the other thing was flashcards. The one thing I did was I went to Barnes and Noble and I bought a box of a thousand flashcards, thousand Spanish word flashcards.

They still sell it, the blue box. And I learned those thousand flashcards. And on one side was an English word, on the other side was a Spanish word. I memorized them. And those thousand words gave me the ability to speak Spanish by memorizing the thousand words. Now, that was what totally changed me because I arrived when I was in college, I arrived to a study abroad program and I found out that I could speak and yet tons of other people couldn't speak because they didn't have enough vocabulary.

And so flashcards work for me. Over the years, I've developed better techniques though with flashcards because although physical flashcards can work, they're not as good as some other systems. Another resource I'd recommend for you, Gabriel, I think his name is Weiner, wrote a book called Fluent Forever. He published it a few years ago, but it's a great book.

Fluent Forever. He has a website fluent-forever.com. But basically the book is an introduction to language learning, but it's 50% or more here's how you make great flashcards. And there are a few components that you can use for great flashcards. The first thing, I prefer digital flashcards over paper flashcards.

Paper flashcards can be useful, but digital flashcards are better because they can go into a digital flashcard system that utilizes spaced repetition learning. One of the things that I try to teach to high school students and to other students is how to harness the value of spaced repetition learning, a little bit of learning theory.

You can remember almost anything in the world forever if you're reminded of it often enough. You're never going to forget your name because you're reminded of it all the time. You've used it all the time, but you might forget what an unusual word like supercilious means if you don't use it all the time.

Think about all of the things that you studied in school. You learned what protozoa meant, but now although you might recognize the word, you probably don't really know what a protozoa actually is or what a dendrite actually is. You probably don't remember. You probably don't remember what the periodic table for ...

You probably memorized when you were in school. You probably memorized the periodic table, but it would be unusual if you remembered what K meant or it would be unusual if you remembered what ... I can't even come up with the examples off the top of my head anymore. The more unusual rare earth metals were.

They're chemical symbol. But if you used this stuff or if you were reminded on this stuff, you would remember. Example, when I was in high school, I memorized all of the capitals of the states and all the capitals of every country in the world, but I remember some of them, the ones that I used, but the other ones of them, I don't remember very much.

But what you can do is if I put together a flashcard system and had you memorize all of the capitals of the world and you memorized them and then you reviewed them, say every three months or every six months or once a year, you would still know them. That information would still be in your head.

That's basically what a spaced repetition system means. You can do this with a box. You can do it with a physical box. It's called a Liebner box or Leitner box, something like that. I can't remember the name because I don't care enough to put it in my flashcard system.

But the better solution these days is to use an electronic system. And there are a number of different applications that use this basic system. The idea is you create a flashcard that has a piece of knowledge on it that you want to maintain and then you review that flashcard until you learn it.

And then once you learn it, you allow a computer algorithm to feed that flashcard back to you right when you're about to forget it. So let's say that you're trying to memorize that the capital of France is Paris. We make a flashcard, Paris, France, and then you memorize that and then you review it every day for the next three days.

Well, now you know that the capital of France is Paris. Then the flashcard system gives it to you in a week and you show it a week that you still remember it. Then the flashcard system gives it to you in a month and you show, yep, I still know this piece of information.

Then in three months it gives it to you. Yep, I still know this. And yep, I still know this. And eventually that knowledge becomes part of your permanent memory. And at some point in time you'll never forget that the capital of France is Paris because you've been drilled on that enough times to where you'll never forget that little bit of data.

Well, you can do that with France, but you can also do that with the capital of Serbia. You can also do it with the capital of Senegal. There doesn't have to be any reason why Paris, France is any more part of your permanent memory than another if you were reviewing those other things enough.

And so the solution that I use for this is a computer program called Anki. And Anki, it's totally free if you use it. There is a paid version if you want to do mobile syncing with your mobile devices, but there's a totally free version that you install on your computer.

And so for any kind of piece of data that you want to commit to memory, I think that you should put it into an Anki flashcard system that you review regularly. And you can do this with really anything, any piece of data. So school, studying in school, this should be the basis of how students study for tests.

As you're going through and studying for an exam, you read a chapter and then you take all the bits of it and you take all the information, you make flashcards with it and you drill it until you memorize the key bits of information. And what I love about Anki especially is because it's all computer based, you can put anything into it.

You can put video clips, literally. You can put audio. You can put pictures. You can make flashcards in any possible way. And so what I'll do is I do this sometimes with books that I'm seeking to master. And I'll take a book that I want to master and I'll say, and I'll turn it into flashcards.

And so if you've got something that's really valuable, then you take it and you turn it into flashcards. And that's really, really useful. And you can drill something into your brain. It's one of the ways that I memorize outlines from books. You know, here are the three things, here are the five things.

Take it, put it into a flashcard, drill it into your head until it becomes a part of you. And you can put screenshots. And so this is one of the reasons why I love digital books, where I'll take my books, read them digitally. I'll create a flashcard, ask the question and the answer.

But then underneath the answer, I'll put a screenshot of that part of the book with it marked up, highlighted in all my marginalia, so I can imprint on my head where that information came from. And it's incredibly useful to you as a learning technique. Now with languages, what I have learned to do is follow the instructions laid out by Gabriel in Fluent Forever, where he talks about the specific bits of data that you want to be on a language flashcard.

And over the years, I've struggled and struggled and struggled to master a vocabulary if it's just translation. If it's just, you know, on one side you have a card that says "house" and on the other side you have a word that says "casa". I just struggle to memorize that.

And it's fine when it's "casa" and "house" because these are fairly common words. But what about when you get to words that are uncommon like "atisbo" and "estropearse" and like these more advanced vocabulary. I've drilled cards dozens and dozens and dozens of times and the words just don't seem to penetrate into my head.

But when I read Fluent Forever and I started applying those techniques, it really improved my skills. And so here are some recommendations that the author of Fluent Forever makes for how to make flashcards. What you do is you make multiple flashcards for the same word. And he has a whole system that you can get in the book and you can download his templates for free.

I highly recommend it to you. But now I make multiple flashcards for the same word. And what I do is I take a word, let's say it's a word that I'm trying to learn. I'll give you some words from my current Spanish studies. A word like "artasco". Artasco basically means satiety.

But it's a very unusual word. It's not the kind of word that is used much. But if you're like "comer hasta el artasco", like to eat until you're satiated, it's an unusual word. And that's the kind of word that I really struggle to keep in my head because it's not something that I would use on a daily basis.

It's not something that I have much of a connection to. And it's not a cognate. There's not a natural cognate between satiety and artasco. That's very different than a word like "feroz" and "ferocious" where there's an easy cognate and it's easy to remember. And so what I do is I create a series of cards.

I follow the Fluent Forever model where I create several different cards. But I put on one side is the word "artasco". But then on the other side I use an image. And I find a picture of the word for "artasco". And I find something. I use Google Images and I drag the image from...

Did I just say I use Google Images? I confess that sometimes I do use Google Images. I try to use DuckDuckGo Images but I confess I'm not a Google... I'm not perfectly free of Google for the non-Google folks in the audience. I don't use Google for searches but I do use it for image searches.

So I'll use that and I'll get an idea of it. And part of the process is you have to make your own flashcards. Because when I'm actually trying to figure out what does a word like "artasco" mean, I go do a search. I go to images.google.es. I use for Spain.

And I do a search for "artasco" and I try to understand. And I take a look at the articles that come up and I look at the images and I look at the words until I get a sense of what this word means emotionally. I try to feel it.

I don't want to translate it. I don't want to just translate it directly because it doesn't just mean satiety. I want to get a feel for what does this weird word mean. And then create a flashcard with it. So I'll grab some images. And you can have one image.

You can have five images. And I'll put those images on my flashcard. In addition, I'll go ahead and grab an audio recording of this. Now this is easy in Spanish. You don't really need this because Spanish is so easy to learn how to pronounce. But I struggle still with things like French pronunciation.

So with my French flashcards, sometimes it's not intuitive to me how a word should be pronounced or Portuguese. It's just not, it's much more complex in terms of the pronunciation rules than Spanish has. And so I'll grab a recording from a website called Forvo, forvo.com, where you can grab a recording of millions of words that native speakers have recorded.

And I'll put that audio recording there on the flashcard. Then I'll put some example sentences. So again, here the internet is superior. I'll grab some example sentences from various dictionaries or various real life sentences. And I'll put those on my flashcard. And then if I have some kind of personal connection to it, then I'll try to put a personal connection.

And all of these things are memory techniques that enhance the connection that you have with something. And so when I say the word "artazco," I can very clearly see in my head my flashcard that has a picture of a child, sorry, of a dude stretched out across a desk, staring at a plate of food, you know, completely overwhelmed as far as how much food that he's eaten.

And this really helps me because now the word is not just a translation which doesn't stick in my head. Now it's an emotional experience. And I do this with all kinds of words. Well, I do this with all words actually. And I always find some way to make it visual.

And that's helped me so much to be able to picture my words and to make them mine. It's just been incredibly valuable to put them into a picture because the pictures imprint themselves on my head. And what it also does is I used to do translation. And every now and then I will put a little bit of English.

But I don't put translations anymore on cards. I always keep everything exclusively in that language. So if I need a, what's another word, you know, a word like "berrinche," right, which means temper tantrum. So I don't need, it's an obvious thing. All I need is a picture of a child having an obvious temper tantrum.

And I'll know intuitively this is a berrinche, this is a temper tantrum, not this is a, I don't need the word, I need the image. And that helps to learn to really think in another language much faster as well. And so I'll always find an image. And if I can't find, if it's an esoteric concept, then I won't, if it's not directly that, then I just put a number of different pictures.

A number of different pictures that communicate the meaning of it and communicate it to me. And so you can find out more information on that flashcard system. I would strongly recommend to you the book Fluent Forever and strongly recommend to you that flashcard system. Because so then you start studying and so you learn, you take 20 or 30 new cards a day and what you do is you start with the new ones until you learn them and then they're fed back to you.

And Anki has a really easy system where you say when you want it, do I know this, do I want this in one minute to review it, do I need it in 10 minutes, do I need it in 10 days, do I need it in 10 months. And so you just naturally build out this card database.

And you review the cards little by little right when you're right at about the point of forgetting and then you review the cards until it really becomes part of you. So I use that for learning vocabulary and mastering words is the key. Anki. Now another system and the next thing you should do when you're learning vocabulary is you should use, you should learn the most commonly used words.

So you can begin with a frequency dictionary. If you're just starting and making cards yourself, start with a frequency dictionary. Start with a simple phrase book and learn the phrases so that you have some of the useful phrases of where's the bathroom and good morning and how do I get to the train station, all that standard tourist stuff.

But then you can start to use a dictionary of usage. And because it doesn't make any sense for you if you're a new language learner, it doesn't make any sense for you to learn unusual words like desempañarse and hartasco and berrinche. It doesn't make sense for that. You need to learn words like casa and carro and comida are much more useful for you because they're going to be used a lot more.

So you start with a frequency dictionary and you learn the first couple thousand words in their order of frequency of use. Now the other tool that I love is a tool called link. And I used link years ago but it wasn't very good and I forgot about it for a long time.

Link is a website, link.com, link.com, but it's a website and it's an app, etc. And link could in and of itself be your only language learning system. Link was developed by a polyglot named Steve Kaufman. And what he developed is a system that allows you to consume content, spoken content, written content, etc.

and to consume it in a way that you can mark the words that you don't know and mark the words that you do know. It's a little hard for me to relate verbally, much easier if you just check out the device, check it out. But what I do is I use link for learning words with written material that's more at an intermediate and advanced level.

Now link works for some people to start at a beginner level and I think that's great. I've not used it for that. I use it for intermediate and advanced level. Back to the point of comprehensible input. One of the challenges of giving yourself comprehensible input is giving yourself something that is interesting and that has words you don't know but that's not too hard.

So if you sit down to a newspaper and you don't usually read newspapers in English but all of a sudden I hand you a French newspaper and I say here read this, you have to sit down and you have to figure out how to look up every single word.

It's too hard, it's too time consuming, it's mind-numbingly boring and it saps your motivation to continue. And the process of looking up words is a time-consuming process. Let's say I'm going to sit down, I'm going to read a novel in Spanish or read a book in Spanish. I like to do that but I got to look up still a lot of words and it's time-consuming.

I got to circle the word, look it up, write it there, then reread it, then I got to go make a flashcard, etc. What I use is I use link to read. And so I take a book or you can use any content anywhere. You can upload newspaper articles, any webpage you're reading, you can load anything into link.

I like to use it for books and I find it helpful at the intermediate level for me. So I take my books and what I do is I get the book, either I buy the e-book, I buy an e-book, buy a Kindle book, take it, strip the DRM, put it into my library and then I export that into Anki or you can do this with PDFs, any PDF that you have you can export it into Anki.

And then what Anki will do is Anki will study that and as I'm reading I read in Anki and it gives me the ability to do a couple of things. Number one, if I don't understand a word I can just tap the word and it will immediately show me the definition for it.

I choose the proper definition for the word and it'll immediately add it to a list. But as I'm reading in Anki over time you develop a system and it'll ignore all the words that you don't know and it'll just show you the words that you do know. And then what it allows me to do is to grab the word that I don't know, let's say I'm reading and I find a word.

Right now I'm reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson in Spanish and so one of my words from today is the word "asana" which means the feet. But I can just mark that, I'm reading it in Anki and I can just mark that word, tap my finger on the word and say "ah, the word asana means feet" like F-E-A-T, not your physical feet, like a feet of accomplishment or a feet of engineering.

And I can mark this word and now it'll automatically create for me a note that includes the context in which I read it. So the context in which I read it was from the Jobs biography. Así que construyó una compañía en la cual los saltos imaginativos se combinaban con impresionantes hazañas de ingeniería.

And so I have now the context that comes from the actual book that I was reading and that goes right on my card. And I can either study all that vocabulary in Anki and I can do flashcards and reviews and tests, etc. Or I can do it in LingQ or I can export automatically flashcards to go over to my Anki decks and I can study there in my preferred flashcard program.

And so this is the single best way because what it allows you to do is to constantly consume content that challenges you and to make it so easy for you to look up content that you can find challenging content. For years my language ability stagnated because I didn't enjoy the process of reading content that was hard.

I would get a Spanish novel, for example, and I want to read in Spanish but it's hard. It's hard when you have to look up 10 or 15 or 20 words on a page. But yet to advance that's the level you need to be at. You need to be at the point where you're reading something that you understand the vast majority of but yet there's still stuff that you don't know.

It's annoying to sit there and in one page of a novel have to look up 10 words and it turns one page into this time-consuming thing. But with LingQ I can read and consume advanced level stuff and it's so easy just to find the definition that I can quickly build those words into my vocabulary.

Now I still use the flashcards because especially I'm trying to move words from my passive vocabulary to my active vocabulary. In Spanish right now that's my major focus is in order for me to advance in Spanish I have to add several thousand words into my active vocabulary and that means not just words that I would understand in context.

I understand "hacernas de ingeniería" I understand that's feats of engineering in context. I could probably figure that out but that word's not part of my active vocabulary. I wouldn't use a word "hacernas" in my daily speech but I want to and so I need the flashcards still. But if you're not trying to do that this allows you to just consume much larger levels of material.

And what happens if you can do that easily it allows you to consume material which makes most of the grammar in your happen naturally in your head. So my experience in the English language probably yours as well. I can't I can think of one or two things that I've ever gained from a single English grammar class ever in my life.

About the my one example is I know that if you're going to use a gerund then you make a possessive pronoun before the gerund. So the technical rule in English if you're going to say you know I appreciate your coming over the proper way to say it is I appreciate your coming over.

Coming is a gerund a verb that ends in an ing and so that should be possessive. I appreciate your coming over to say I appreciate you coming over is incorrect. That's about the only English grammar rule that I can ever I can come up with off the top of my head.

But I generally have impeccable English grammar because I have read hundreds of thousands of pages in English. And I enjoyed most of that reading. And so for me LingQ solves that issue of making it possible for me to enjoy reading in a foreign language which allows me to ignore most of the for me very boring grammar exercises of sitting down and manually going through these again boring exercises in favor of just letting my brain work it out.

The human brain is a grammar learning machine. Children in any language when they speak the language they're exposed to the language they connect to the language. Children in any language can naturally learn the grammar of the language without having to learn the rules. And so it's one of those kind of secret cheat codes that I don't think I ever studied for an English test in my life specifically because things just feel right and things feel wrong.

Now you do need parents that speak properly. That was an advantage that I had that many people don't have is I had literate parents with proper grammar. And so we didn't grow up speaking poorly. We didn't grow up speaking slang. My parents would be extraordinarily embarrassed if I said me and Tom are going to the lake.

And I do that with my own children. You just naturally correct those grammar mistakes that your children make and you give them a huge leg up in life a major advantage. But you can do the same thing in foreign languages. You get to the point where you can't explain why something is wrong but you just know that it feels wrong.

So those are my most useful tools. Anki for learning vocabulary especially for building vocabulary as part of my active memory and then LingQ for consuming large amounts of vocabulary. What else is involved with language? Well expression. The ability to express. Missed a point before I go on to expression.

Back to golden age of language learning. The most important thing in language learning is to find interesting content that you actually care about in your target language. If I were to go back 20 years for me to get target content back when I was in high school and college and I was interested in languages I couldn't get much of it.

Couldn't get much of it because let's say I want to learn French. Well I can get the Pimsleur French CDs and I can get a French book but I always struggled with the French books because I never learned my pronunciation rules. But how do I get good French content?

Well there started to be some improvements with DVDs dubbed in French but the breakthrough was the ability to access things like French podcasts and I used to drive around and listen to the BBC in French and I could just stream it right to my phone while I drove around.

That was game changing and now with YouTube where you can take anything that you're interested in no matter how obscure and enjoy that content in your target language it's far more interesting. And so I can take something totally esoteric. I don't know I enjoy prepper channels on YouTube but I don't really watch them in English I watch the prepper channels in Portuguese or in French or in Spanish and so it gives me the natural way to enjoy something that I think is fun and interesting to me but to do it in a target language and that's the kind of content no one in their right mind twenty years ago would ever have created some language DVDs of some random dude doing a tour of his bug out bag.

Makes no sense because there's no market for it but in YouTube I can go and find some guy who's got 300,000 subscribers to his channel and I can use that as my language study. And then of course I can import that into Anki if I want to and add it to my vocabulary.

Anki is a tremendous tool for that. So this is where we live in a golden age because I can have access to interesting content all over the world. So if I'm going to read the newspaper there's no point in reading it in English. I don't need to read the New York Times or the Washington Post.

I can scan those headlines but if I'm going to read a newspaper article why not read it from Argentina or why not read it from France. Why not get a different perspective and get it in an international context. And so with LingQ and with the modern connectivity I can just grab an article from you know Mexican newspaper pop that into LingQ read it in Spanish while at the same time adding my vocabulary words that I'm going to learn for that article.

It's just it's incredible how much easier and how much more fun all these modern tools make the acquisition of language. Now let's go to expression. All of us are going to be better at listening and understanding than we are at speaking. And the other big benefits of listening and understanding for example one of the things that I'm doing right now to level up my Spanish ability is focusing on other accents.

So I have I can understand 100% of Mexicans. I struggle to understand Cubans and so I'm watching Cuban YouTube channels to try to train my ear to understand Cuban Spanish because it's just it's difficult for me and if in my Spanish exam I'm presented with a "Cubano, frecuent, I'm going to be dumb." I can't do it I can't do a Cuban accent in Spanish, sorry in English but you know it's Cuban Spanish is really tough for me.

I've many times I've been in Miami and I sit and talk with a Cuban and they'll respond to me and I look at them and I think I thought I spoke Spanish but now I speak to you and I don't have a clue what you said. Well I can easily access that kind of material so the connectivity makes things better.

What about speaking? First thing I would say is if you're going to improve your ability in a language you've got to speak it. And here again we live in a golden age of communication partners. You might be interested in learning a language but you might not know anybody who speaks that language.

I, you know, when I have an interest in French, I'm studying French right now, Spanish, French and Portuguese and so I don't know any French speakers. There's no one that I have to talk to speak in French with and so there's no natural, I'm not a part of a natural community of French speakers, I don't, I just don't have it.

But with the internet I have the easy ability to speak to French speakers and there are tons of websites out there. You can do language exchanges free if you want to help someone improve their, you know, you speak English, you want to do a language swap. There's a wonderful website called italki.com which connects language teachers and so you can, with students, and so you can easily book conversation partners and at, you know, six bucks an hour, seven bucks an hour, book yourself a chance to speak with a native French speaker, a French tutor and you don't have to go to France, you don't have to go to Quebec, you don't have to go there, you can practice in the comfort of your own home.

It's an incredible opportunity to actually speak. So you have to speak in order to improve a language. You're always going to be better at listening but you have to speak. The secret technique that I've done over the years that has made me very skilled in speaking more fluently than most other students has just been simply learning to translate and one of the things that I have done for years is if I'm working in a language I force myself to translate the language in real time.

I would, I started this when I was in high school learning Spanish. I would be sitting in a church meeting listening to somebody preach and I would try to simultaneously translate it and of course in the beginning stages, I did it a lot of times because I was bored when I was in high school and I wasn't really into the content, I just practiced it for language ability but I would listen and I would try to translate and if you just do that because you're forced to find workarounds, you can start to be fairly articulate quickly because your brain gets used to finding the words that you do know of how to express the concept and what frustrates people is when they don't have the, when they don't have the skills to, they don't have the advanced vocabulary to express themselves in a language perfectly, they often get frustrated if they can't find a workaround.

And so if there's an advanced word that would be the perfect word for the context, it's nice to know that but you don't need to know that, you can just rephrase it, you can change and adjust how you're saying and so you can learn this very easily in some languages, a language like Spanish which has multiple tenses.

So if you wanted to learn to say I will eat, you could of course say comeré, right, I will eat but it's easier just to learn voy a comer, I'm going to eat, expresses the same thought and you can get there easier. And so what I've done over the years is just whenever I'm listening to something that is not really engaging me, I practice translating it.

So you could do this at work, you're sitting in a meeting at work, kind of boring, try to figure out how would you translate this into your target language and that skill of just translating in your head and doing it real time will make you very fast to be able to express yourself even if you don't have the perfect vocabulary, even if your grammar is not perfect, you'll still be able to, you won't be fumbling for words like many other people are.

So that's another technique that I've used over the years. There are many other things that you could say, just a simple modern technological system like Google Translate is game changing. What I do is I keep Google Translate on my phone, losing all my privacy credentials here, I keep Google Translate on my phone and if there's a word that I'm searching for then I just, I quickly look it up.

So for example, the other day I was trying to tell my children I'm going to tuck you in, right? Tuck you in bed is an important, I was speaking up in Spanish and tuck you in bed is an important thing to convey but I didn't know how to say it.

And so I quickly grabbed it, it's "arroparse", I quickly grabbed it, I grabbed the word and then what I do is I look it up in Google Translate and then I star it and Google creates a thing where anything that you star it'll create a list for you and then later I go ahead and I just pull out my phone and here's all the words that I've looked up throughout the day, they're all starred, these are words that I need to know because I wanted to know how do I express to tuck you in and so I learned the word is "arroparse" and so then I grab it, I pull it over to my flashcard system, I create my flashcard and now I know that word, I'll never forget it because in my flashcard system I've learned it and now I always know the word for "arroparse" or the word to tuck you in.

And so these little techniques are so much easier than the way I used to do it with an index card and a paper dictionary and blah blah blah blah. So those are some of my most valuable tools. I have not expressed to you any kind of comprehensive language learning system.

There are many other tips and tricks that you can put into place. What I want to close in by close with is simply expressing to you this. If you are interested in a language and if you're motivated to learn a language, the tools are at your fingertips. Grab yourself some books, grab a link account, you know set up some flashcards, try some of the things that you need to learn.

Some languages are more complex than others, right? It's much more difficult for a native English speaker to learn Chinese than it is to learn Spanish. But if you just simply because the number of cognates and the amount of familiarity. But it's actually, I haven't learned Chinese yet, but from my interest in reading about the language, I think that it's harder for an English speaker to learn excellent Spanish than it is to learn Chinese.

My understanding, again not being a Chinese speaker, so if I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong, but a language like Spanish is very easy for an English speaker to learn basic Spanish. But Spanish is complex because it's a language filled with tenses and all the tenses have to agree. All the verbs have to agree with the nouns and the adjectives and everything's changing in masculine and feminine and singular and plural.

And so to speak it properly with really high level grammar is very difficult. There are something like a hundred and fourteen ways that you can conjugate any, there's over a hundred ways you can conjugate any Spanish verb. And so advanced level Spanish is very challenging. Whereas Chinese is very hard for an English speaker to learn in the beginning because you're dealing with a tonal language, you're dealing with a language where there aren't any, probably any cognates that go back and forth, no words that you would naturally understand.

You know, a cognate again, a word like possible in Spanish, posible, in French, possible, in English, possible. So you can look at that and say, "Oh, that's probably possible." Whereas Chinese, I have no idea what the Chinese word for possible is, but it's not possible. But Chinese doesn't have the same complex grammar that Spanish and French have where all of your genders and your numbers have to match up.

So there are languages that are going to be objectively more difficult to learn, but every language has its thing that makes it a little easier. Once you get past the tones in Chinese, you're going to have a simpler grammar than you are with a language like Spanish or French.

But these modern tools make it a lot easier. So if you have the motivation, if you have the interest, if you have the desire, these modern tools can make it so that you can learn a language very, very quickly. I'm not a polyglot. I aspire to be a polyglot, but I'm not a polyglot.

I am a busy father, a busy businessman. I have limited amounts of time. My motivation ebbs and flows. Sometimes I care, sometimes I don't. I'll go months and months without studying something. Sometimes I'll get motivated and really pour on the studies. But I am convinced of this. I can take any language in the world, and since I've learned other languages, I know how I learn to some degree.

I can take any language in the world, and in a few months of study, I can carry on basic conversations in that language. And what that makes me feel is it makes me feel incredibly empowered. Because I know that I could go from... There's some languages that would be harder, right?

With Chinese, I'd need a few years. I'll learn Chinese, but it's not yet. Not yet. But I'll need a few years of study. It's going to be challenging. But I can take almost any language, and especially if it's an easier language, like a romance language. Give me a year, and I can be very fluent in it.

And that's a really empowering feeling, because it makes me feel like I can live anywhere in the world. I can move anywhere in the world, and I can connect. I don't have to always be an outsider. I can very quickly make progress. And the learning of it opens up my skills, opens up relationships.

I can't tell you how useful it's been. I went through all those Pimsleur programs and learned how to say, "Io parlo un poco d'italiano." You can ingratiate somebody very quickly and open up a conversation when you can speak their language. Even if you only have a few memorized phrases, it makes all the difference in the world.

So I encourage you, if you have an interest in learning a language, clarify your motivation. Think through a system that you think would work for you. Start using some of these modern tools. My tool belt is Anki flashcards and LingQ. I do use other things as well. There are other forms of content.

There are other classes that can be useful from time to time. Those will vary with the language. There are many books that you need. There's a real value in having some phrase books and grammar books, etc. You want to invest into your materials. But you don't have to. The Foreign Service Institute in the United States has foreign language materials for all kinds of things, all kinds of languages out there.

And if you want to improve your talent stack, one really good way you could do that is by learning a language. In order of most spoken to least spoken, the five or six most commonly spoken languages in the world, number one English, number two Mandarin Chinese, number three is Hindi, number four is Spanish, number five is French.

So you should learn the language that you're interested in, but those are some very highly spoken languages. And if your career is feeling a little bit stale, you'd like to open up a new market, this is one of the ways that you can specialize. You can be the Creole speaking accountant.

And if you are a white American accountant who also speaks fluent Creole, or who also speaks fluent Spanish, or who also speaks fluent Hindi, or who also speaks Somali, you can open up a whole new market for yourself and you'll be highly referable. Now obviously if you're living in Columbus, Ohio and there's a huge Somali population around you, your knowledge of Somali is not going to make you a better accountant.

But your knowledge of Somali will open up a huge potential base for your accounting services. And you don't actually even have to, it's not that the person can't speak English. You know one of the things I learned over the years by speaking Spanish, and I use French with Creoles, I don't speak Creole yet, but I've often used it with Haitians, is by being able to speak a little bit of French.

You know I'm a white American, but I've worked with so many ethnically, with Spanish speakers, Latinos and Spanish people, and Haitians, that even though they spoke great English and we would do our work in English, the ability to kind of solve that cultural compatibility where I could demonstrate, you know I'm a financial advisor, but you know I went to Haiti on my honeymoon and I can speak a little bit of French and I can understand Creole, that opens up a community connection in a way that other things don't.

And it opens up a similarity. And you've got to do that. If you want good relationships, you've got to learn how to be a little bit culturally sensitive. Every culture has their things that make people culturally sensitive, and a little bit of cultural intelligence, a little bit of cultural wisdom goes a long, long way.

And languages are one way that you can express that cultural intelligence. Hope you've enjoyed the show. Hope some of these resources are useful for you. Again, the book Fluent Forever, the application Anki, A-N-K-I, and LingQ, L-I-N-G-Q, those are the primary resources that I mentioned. And bon chance. Great job, mijo.

Nice, mijo. Good game. Yeah, congrats. Thanks. I'm hungry. How about tacos in Boyle Heights tonight? They're the best tacos in LA. No, the best tacos are in Southgate. The tacos al vapor there are so good. If you really want the best tacos, the secret ones are actually at this little place downtown.

Excuse me, I thought my tacos were the best tacos. I was about to say that. No one can beat your seasoning, honey. Yeah, mom's tacos are good, but the ones in Boyle Heights are- The ones in Southgate are still better. We have food at home. Tonight, I'm making the tacos.

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