Search this site. Against Apion PDF. Agenda Lama PDF. Agrarrecht in Europa. Droit Agraire En Europe. American Artisans PDF. Avocado Baby! Please type in your email address in order to receive an email with instructions on how to reset your password. Meet the man who makes the mission of learning any language possible!
The all-you-need guide to learning a language. Language hacker Benny Lewis shows how anyone anywhere can learn any language without leaving their home, using a simple toolkit and by harnessing the power of the Internet. After graduating in electronic engineering in his native Ireland he spent six months in Spain struggling to learn Spanish. This frustrating experience fuelled his determination to take a different approach to learning foreign languages.
A bit more confidence and persistence will ensure that the conversation stays in the right language. Having a little accent can be quite charming. Even if you may always have an accent, this is no reason not to pour everything into this project so that you can be a genuinely fluent speaker. Speaking perfectly is impossible, because even native speakers make mistakes. And native speakers have interesting and varied accents too! Some of my Spanish friends, it turns out, had been using me to get free English practice.
Many of us will go through this difficulty. Our friends or family may not offer any support— language-related or moral—to help us with this huge challenge. There is no simple one-size-fits-all solution to this problem. But the first thing you should do is to tell your friends and family that you are passionate about learning a new language and you genuinely need their support.
They might not appreciate how seriously dedicated you are to learning the language. They might have thought it was just a silly hobby. Showing them how serious you are might convince them to give you the support you need.
Expensive restaurants provide an English translation of their menus, overpriced tour guides herd you along the same route many millions of other foreigners have traveled, while talking excellent English, and when you board your flight home, at least one of the airline attendants will speak wonderful English to you, no matter where you are flying from. This is incredibly limiting, though.
An expression of concern always appeared on their faces as I, a white foreigner, approached them—until, of course, I started speaking Mandarin. Learning the local language opens up so many doors, from finding cheap local rates to hanging out with people who have never had the chance to speak to foreigners. It allows you to see the true culture of a local place, rather than a cookie-cutter packaged version.
All communication problems will be solved. You have to deal with the language directly. This is incredibly hard to emulate with a computer. Every successful language learner has had many challenges, failures, and frustrations along the road to fluency and beyond. We all face our own challenges. Successful language learners continue on despite the challenges. You may be surprised to find out that this person faced a very similar, if not the same, challenge at some point in the past.
The much more logical conclusion is that you were learning the language in a way that was wrong for you. There is no one true or perfect approach to language learning that is universally applicable to everyone.
The traditional academic approach, which so many of us have passed through, simply does not work for many learners. Then again, there are those who have successfully learned with that approach. The trick is to experiment and see what works for you.
Try a few of the suggestions in this book and see if they work for you. From this, you can come up with your own ways to learn. The trick is to keep trying until you find a way that produces real results for you. Should you learn an Arabic dialect or MSA? Where can you find good resources for learning the Irish language? Why does this language have to have masculine and feminine or neuter and common, etc. These kinds of specific language questions are challenges that may slow you down, but there are always answers.
I cover a few points about individual languages in chapter 6, though I barely scratch the surface, but if you run into an issue with your language, just ask someone about it. Not all answers are covered in books; sometimes another person with experience in the language can give you a whole new perspective on that issue. For instance, you can ask a question about pretty much any issue in the very active Fluent in 3 Months online forum fi3m.
Otherwise, find a helpful native speaker and ask that person directly. Most questions do have an answer. One of my blog readers, Anna Fodor, shared her inspirational story with us. Born and raised in England, she grew up with a Czech mother and a Slovak father. So she should have grown up trilingual, right? She spoke Czech up until the age of four and then stopped speaking it when she entered school. Finally, when Anna went to university, she decided to reboot her efforts with Czech.
She had assumed the Czech part of her brain had been somehow locked away in her mind. After graduation, she moved to Prague with the aim of learning to speak Czech. This was a pretty vague aim for her, but soon after arriving in Prague, she found my blog and my constant nudges for people to just speak the language, despite any mistakes.
She had been looking for a magic solution to her problems for years, but now she needed to put in the work. So one day she decided to stop overanalyzing things and just started speaking Czech with her mother.
It was hard, and she was so scared that her mother would criticize her mistakes. This was really amazing. It was like having a huge weight of childhood trauma lifted. Disabilities Make It Impossible to Learn a New Language This is a rough one, because it can be frustrating when we have unfairly been dealt a real, medically confirmed disadvantage as language learners.
Julie is severely deaf and partially blind. Despite this, incredibly, she has still managed to learn five languages as well as the basics of several others. Her parents realized that she had a hearing problem when she was two years old.
She had to go to speech therapy and had difficulty producing consonants like s, h, and f. Over the years, she has learned to get around her hearing difficulties by lipreading and extrapolating from what she does hear.
When her older brother—who has the same condition she does—started high school, she became aware of foreign languages and was really excited to get started on them herself. She turned up to her first French class with glee, but she finished it in a flood of tears. Since then, though, Julie has learned to always ask for new words to be written down for her.
Despite this bad start, Julie went on to study French for four years in high school plus one year in university. She also took three years of Spanish. She would shine at the written word in both languages, but listening was her sticking point. Since her brother had gone down the same path, ahead of her, she found out that she could request both her French and Spanish listening examinations be done with a real person reading the script to her, which allowed her to lip-read as well as listen.
Her teachers in school were otherwise very encouraging and supportive, and she ended up winning prizes for being the best French and Spanish student in her fourth year. During university, she had the chance to study for a year in Sweden. She made sure that her teacher knew about her hearing problems from the start, and she was now much more confident about asking for things to be repeated or written down.
She also grew more confident about using Swedish in front of others without much embarrassment. By the end of university, she had learned three languages. Since then, she has studied basic Gaelic and even recently started learning Japanese. In just a few months, despite how difficult her condition makes it for her, she learned the meaning of hundreds of kanji Japanese characters and even started speaking Japanese. Julie is a true testament to the idea that there are no limits to what a motivated person can achieve.
She has haggled for French books in a street market in France. Her passion for language learning has also meant that she has reserved restaurant tables in Italian, bought coffee in Greek, and spent over half an hour discussing, in Spanish, the state of the world with a little old lady in Barcelona.
This is not due to any reason we give but our devotion to that reason. I hope you see from the previous stories that no matter what challenges you face, someone else has gone through the same or much worse. If Julie has the courage to take on so many languages, then how can you fall back on such weak excuses as being too busy or not having a language gene?
The truth is that passion will get you through every problem if you are serious about learning a language. There is no excuse good enough to justify not being able to learn a language.
And if you are still in doubt about a particular setback that prevents you from learning a language, check out fi3m. No matter what problem you may be facing, someone before you has had the same problem yet has learned the target language regardless. Momentum is essential to both beginning and maintaining good progress in language learning, which is why I wanted to start by clearing these major hurdles.
This is precisely why I recommend you pick a specific target with a specific deadline for your language learning project. The word mission even has a sense of urgency and requires a plan of action beyond what simply promising yourself ever could. Having watched probably too many action movies and TV shows while growing up, I like to add a little drama to otherwise mundane tasks, and the concept of a mission to be completed against a ticking clock makes it seem much more exciting.
This brings us to the title of this book: Fluent in 3 Months. Successful language learners are those who are as specific as possible with their goals. I want to provide a much more precise understanding of fluency once and for all. First, some definitions can be way too loose. The problem here, though, is that if you have such high criteria for fluency, then I have to confess I am not fluent even in English, my native language! I am not the kind of person to use pompous vocabulary in everyday conversations, or even in formal ones.
Speaking a language accurately and with facility is precisely what I have in mind when I aim for fluency. However, this is not something you will ever get a consensus on. This is a problem if we want something distinct to aim for, though. The CEFRL System With such conflicting ideas about what constitutes fluency, the system I rely on is a much more scientific and well-established language threshold criterion used by the major bodies that examine language levels in Europe.
This system uses standard terminology, accepted across Europe and used by many institutions for Asian languages, even if not adopted by those countries formally , for specific language levels. In the terminology, basically A means beginner, B means intermediate, and C means advanced.
Each level is then split into lower 1 and upper 2. So upper beginner level is A2, and lower advanced level would be C1. On this scale, an A level is what I would generally call a functional tourist: good enough to get by for basic necessities, or a beginner in various stages. C level implies mastery: you can work in the language exactly as you would in your native tongue and are effectively as good as a native in all ways, though you may still have an accent.
In my mind, fluency starts at level B2 and includes all levels above it C1 and C2. More specifically, a person who reaches the B2 level on the CEFRL scale, relevant to the conversational aspect, is defined as someone who can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
This means that, for a solid fluency goal, you should aim to participate in regular conversations without strain for either you or the people you are speaking with. For me, B2 fluency—at least in a conversational, social context—implies that I can live my life in this language exactly as I would in English. I can go to any social event that I would typically go to in English and chat with natives without having them slow down for my benefit. I can discuss anything I would in English at a casual event, and natives can generally talk to me as they would with another native speaker.
Hesitations are okay, and accents are fine. Also fine at the B2 level is the inability to discuss some very complex topics. There is never an end point at which you can say your work in learning the language is done. Learning a language can be a lifelong adventure, but the point is that you can reach certain stages within finite times when you have those stages well defined.
Now, as you read previously, you can have a particular milestone in mind to aim for—advanced beginner A2 , conversational B1 , fluent B2 , mastery C2 , or others—but here comes the big question: How long does it take to get there?
You have to live up to your side of the bargain—you have to put in the time and stick to the plan. Also, the process requires a lot of strategic mental and emotional adjustments. If you succeed in learning one language to fluency over a longer period, then your approach may be ready for you to use in a shorter —say, three-month—period of time on your next language.
An intensive language learning project demands your absolute focus. Ultimately, languages are learned in hours, not months or years. Whether or not your process adds up to a huge number of hours, the only thing worth counting is the time when you are percent focused on learning, living, and using the language.
To realistically expect to make good progress in a language in a short amount of time, you have to put at least two hours a day into it, and ideally more. But you have to set aside much more than scattered study sessions if you want to advance quickly. Do what it takes to create this time, avoid other side projects, and fill your language learning slot every day. If you put just a few hours a week into it, fluency in three months is indeed impossible.
You simply have to put in as much work as you can, as intensively as you can, with as much emphasis on solving immediate language problems as you possibly can in order to progress. If you do, you will quickly see how much time is necessary for you to advance to a higher level. So why am I so crazy about three months? When I would go to a new country to learn the language, the visa limit for tourists was about three months. So I had only three months to reach my deadline.
Even though I no longer go to a country to learn a language, and I now prefer to learn in advance of traveling abroad, I have found that three months is as good a time line as any. When you give yourself a short deadline, rather than thinking you have plenty of time, you tend to work as efficiently as possible.
Deadlines of one, three, or six months are excellent for this reason. If three months feels right to you, focus on one project and have an adventurous end goal.
Various Grades of Success Remember that language is a means to communicate. And the only way you can fail in your language learning mission is if you are at exactly the same point at the end of your first mission as you were at the start. Was my Mandarin, and the entire project, therefore a waste of time? As long as a person spoke slowly to me or rephrased what he or she had said, I could socialize. And I was really proud of this.
Thanks to that intensive project, I can continue to speak Mandarin for the rest of my life, and I have a fantastic new place to start from as I strive toward fluency and beyond. With language learning there is no true failure if you can communicate with other human beings. However, you should always strive for the highest grade of possible success. Be sure to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Mini-Missions Mini-missions, as I like to call them, take on the absolute biggest specific problem you may have at a particular moment with a language and help you focus on solving that problem as quickly as possible.
My tones were way off. Because of this, my mini-mission—my absolute priority—was to focus on getting my tones right.
I focused only on tones, not on vocabulary or reading Chinese script or any number of other things—just tones. Once my tones were in good enough shape, I was ready to tackle basic vocabulary. By week two, my biggest problem was that I relied too much on my phrase book. I needed to work on saying things spontaneously, from memory. So I tackled this issue as a mini-mission, and soon enough I was able to speak several phrases from memory, and I continued with this pattern of setting mini-missions for myself throughout the project.
These mini-missions give you a very real—and earned—feeling of accomplishment and progress. They are specific plans of action that fit your particular language needs precisely and help you deal right away with your most immediate challenges.
This helps you focus on each challenge until you conquer it, while also helping you make huge strides toward the bigger goal a few months down the road. As an example, rather than assigning myself a vague weeklong mission to learn Mandarin vocabulary, I made sure I processed sixty flash cards a day with the specific intention of learning how to order food while traveling freely around a new country.
At the end of my first month learning Mandarin, I felt I had reached something of a plateau. I could have basic touristy exchanges from memory and with passable tones, but these exchanges lasted only ten to fifteen seconds. So I gave myself a brain-melting mini-mission. During the week following that first month, I scheduled time to sit down with native speakers for hour-long conversations.
What a week! But at the end of it, I had practiced so much that I could hold a conversation for several minutes. Plus, since I had only one goal and one mini-mission, it was a lot easier to tailor my work specifically to make this happen. I remember when I was beginning to learn a little Hungarian, and I received my first phone call in that language. I had to think fast and attempt to get information out of the caller. After that very short one- to two-minute call, I felt exhausted.
I could almost feel my brain being pushed into overdrive. Through brain-melting mini-missions like these, you can push on to a new language level. You have to move out of your comfort zone. And the mini-missions are designed to do just that. Focus on your biggest issue and tackle it. If your entire project is made up of brain-melting moments, you can burn out incredibly quickly. At first, I thought three full months of focused learning would be the ideal amount of time to reach my target, without any breaks at all to speak English.
What I eventually figured out, though, was that I could only keep up this kind of active, intense learning for about three weeks. I reached a saturation point. If you have greater endurance than little old me, then perhaps you can keep on going, but I think most people realistically reach a burnout point. Absolute full-time immersion and pushing yourself as much as I suggest require you also take breaks. Since discovering this, I have found that working full-time all week on a language, then giving myself one evening off each week to socialize in another language, helps me recharge my batteries and, ultimately, work the most effectively.
Once a month I would also take an entire weekend off the language project and hang out with other foreigners like myself, go for a swim, dance for a few hours—anything not related to the language I was learning.
I got great mileage out of this while doing my Arabic learning project in Brazil, as well as my most recent one, to learn Japanese in Spain. Breaks like this are also an effective psychological tool. Breaks are essential during a full-time immersion project. Use them to recharge your batteries and as motivation to work harder to reach a specific milestone. Frustrating moments are inevitable. To keep them to a minimum, try to have fun with your language every day. Assign yourself language tasks that you actually look forward to.
Plan of Action Discipline is choosing between what you want now and what you want most. Before you get started on your project, be sure to keep these points in mind: Decide precisely what you are aiming for. Pay careful attention to both what is required and what is not required at that level. Set aside a specific period, whether it is one, three, or six months, and make sure your language learning project is your highest priority during this time.
During your intensive learning project, make sure to focus on the biggest issue you have and try to solve it, or greatly reduce it, with mini-missions rather than going through a generic course, which may not be well suited to the precise point you are aiming for.
Announce your mission to the world, which establishes a chain of accountability since your friends and family will then be aware of your goals and can follow along with your progress. You can do this with Facebook status updates, a blog, or your own log on the Fluent in 3 Months forum at fi3m. The first one is the memory to absorb all that new vocabulary!
For more thoughts on language missions and other topics relevant to this chapter, check out fi3m. One of the most intimidating aspects of learning a language is the huge amount of vocabulary that lies ahead of you. Depending on how you count them, a language could have as many as a half a million words. In ancient Greece, the idea of memorizing through associative techniques like mnemonics was actually quite normal, but this was replaced in modern times with.
Ancient Greeks had fantastic memories, because there were no textbooks or notepads to take home with them. Lectures were oral, and people came up with clever ways of remembering poems, stories, and any long spoken passages. Later, the widespread availability of books meant that anyone could look up something in print whenever he or she needed to, so memorizing became less common and less relevant.
We have an even more pronounced version of this nowadays: many people end up not learning, or even memorizing, any facts, since they can always Google them in an instant. We no longer seem able to efficiently hold information in our memories but instead refer to a printed or online source.
But the next day, or a few days later, it would be gone. I find that rote memorization is somewhat useful for recognizing words. So after a few dozen—or a few hundred—repetitions, I might for a short period remember what der Tisch is, if I were to read it. What really keeps it there?
We make memories by association. Sights, smells, strange and powerful images, stories, and the like are what make the most memorable events in our lives stand out.
The Keyword Method for Learning Words Quickly A much more effective, and much more fun, method of learning vocabulary is through associating very visual images with something that sounds like the word you want to remember, also known as the keyword method. You need to create an amusing, animated, and unforgettable image, or even a short story, whenever you come across a new word or phrase you want to remember in order to stick it to something in your mind.
These images or keywords are much easier to recall, both when attempting to recognize a word and when producing a word yourself. When I saw this word for the first time, I tried to think of a word similar to it in English.
To be more visual with the English translation, rather than think of a generic train station very easy to forget! So I picked that train station, visualizing it clearly in my mind. Now combine the two in the most ridiculous way possible. He runs up to the timetable, sweating like crazy while he looks for the train to Bologna—the city he is going to for the world lasagna-eating championship. He gasps when he sees that his train is about to leave.
He dashes to the right platform, only to catch sight of the train pulling out already. This ridiculous story is one that is much harder to forget. The recall process takes less than a second and barely slows down a nicely flowing conversation. So how do you learn this while incorporating the tone? Like anything else, it just requires a bit of imagination.
She stumbles to find her footing, and I see my opportunity. This is no ordinary bow and arrow, though. My arrow is made entirely of bees. Inside The No-Nonsense Guide to Language Learning, you'll discover: Why Benny's destiny was to never speak Spanish - and how he did it anyway The smartest decision you can ever make for your language learning How to learn a new language Crack the Code and Get Fluent Faster!
But constant travel, along with a buoyant attitude, has unmasked the polyglot within. Through the language hacker online learner community, you can share your personalized speaking 'missions' with other learners - getting and giving feedback and extending your learning beyond the pages of the book. See our Privacy Policy and User Agreement for details. Published on Jul 27,. Learning german doesn't have to be hard. Learn to speak german in three short months with hugo's world-renowned book and cd pack, hugo in 3 months cd language course: german, and you will soon be answering with a resounding "ja!
Posts that do not concern the german language or learning german will be removed. Learn to speak german fast with this practical and entertaining course for beginners. Book fluent in 3 months pdf free download, by benny lewis isbn : , , benny lewis, who speaks over ten languages—all self-taught—runs the largest language-learning blog in the world, fluent in 3 months.
When the autumn and winter months arrive, we pack up our bathing suits, short shorts and sundresses in favor of snow pants and winter coats.
The same holds true for the many stages of learning Italian. The complete collection is worth investing in at the intermediate and advanced stages as well. With Spanish, I followed the very principles of language learning that this book is suggesting. These principles are:.
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