Benny Lewis's Blog, page 97

Sprint! Take goal setting in language learning to the next level

Next week, when I’m back in Ireland, I’ll have some fun announcements for language learners, and can get back into actively making videos myself now that I’ve got the hang of this slightly different style of travel.

But continuing with some cool guest posts, today Olly from I will teach you a language is telling us about sprinting in your language learning project and the benefits from highly specific short-term goals. Enjoy!

What comes to mind when I say the words “goal setting”?

Is it:

a) Yes! I’m there!

b) I never bother

c) I know it’s important, but…

I’ve known people who fall into all three camps. Some people seem to have a natural ability to set goals and stick to them. Others just get started and don’t bother with goals.

But when it comes to language learning in particular, I suspect there’s a fairly large number of people who fall into the last category.

I’m a classic example of this. I’m great at setting goals – I can set goals and decide how I’ll achieve them all day. Sometimes I actually do But, inevitably, after a certain period of time, I fall off the log. I can’t, or don’t, follow through.

Happens every time.

I have massive respect for people who are strong at goal setting and have the stick-to-it-iveness to follow through. But what happens if you just don’t work that way?

Benny has talked about his solution to this problem with what he calls mini-goals:

When I learn a language I like to set myself a very large number of mini-goals with very short time limits. None of these goals in themselves are particularly impressive or difficult to achieve, but they all add up over time to speaking a language fluently.

In this post I’m going to take this a step further and suggest an alternative, more process-orientated approach to mini-goals that might work for people who haven’t had much luck with medium/longer-term goal setting in their language learning.

I want to be fluent!

If I asked you what your language learning goals are, you’d probably tell me: “I want to be fluent.” And that’s great – it’s good to aim high!

How do you reach that goal?

Well, the next step, in theory, is to break that big goal down into shorter, more manageable goals, then into individual steps, until you’ve got an action plan. Then you go off and do it.

So what are you waiting for?

Tangible goals like “writing a novel” can be broken down into logical steps that anyone can follow. Conceive the plot, flesh out the characters, write your chapter outlines… it’s quite formulaic.

But how can you break down “fluency”?

Experienced language learners, with a few languages under their belt, will eventually learn about the various phases that they go through on the path to fluency. Benny famously does this in three months and plans it out in detail. Luca plays the longer game. Richard has approached this by joining online courses or university programmes.

For most people, though, learning a foreign language for the first time, the process can’t be clinically broken down into steps. It’s a long, hard journey and there are too many unknowns.

Things take you by surprise. You get bored with your textbook. The vocabulary doesn’t stick. Work or family commitments disrupt your routine. You get sick. You have a bad experience speaking with someone and get demoralized. Your progress appears to grind to a halt for no apparent reason. You get frustrated that you still don’t understand native speakers even after months of study.

All these things happen. In fact, it’s quite normal. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it at the time! If you’ve got a plan, it’s not going to survive the ups and downs.

I don’t think you need plans.

I think you need to focus less on the product and more on the process.

I think you need action.

Introducing…

Sprints

“Sprints” are my answer to the goal setting problem.

It’s a term that I’ve borrowed from the business world. When entrepreneurs start out on their own, there are a thousand and one things they can do to build their business at any one time. But the one thing that really matters is finishing their product.

With no time or money to waste, they run “sprints” in which they set a deadline for finishing their product and then go all-out to get it finished by the launch date. Other things can wait. It’s an example of the 80/20 principle in practice – decide what really matters and focus most of your energy on that.

But here’s the thing.

Smart entrepreneurs don’t aim to make their product perfect first time round. They make a beta version, get it out the door, get feedback on it, learn the lessons, and make it better next time. A language learning “sprint” follows exactly the same principle.

Here’s how it goes:

“I’m going to choose one language learning activity. I’m going to do that one thing everyday, and I’m going to go deep with it. No messing about. No changing course. No fuss. Just that one thing, as well as I possibly can, for 3 weeks.”

It sounds simple, and that’s the point. Sprints are supposed to be actionable.

If you’re the kind of person who jumps from one thing to the next, studying in a different way everyday without a clear focus, take note! (I suffer from this, which is why this is a big deal for me!)

Over the course of 3 weeks you invest all your energy into one thing. In the digital age of instant notifications, status updates and news feeds, we’ve lost the ability to focus, and that’s a killer if you’re trying to learn a language.

With a clear, sustained focus on one thing, not only does your language benefit a lot, but you discover how you learn. After 3 weeks, you look back on what you’ve done and reflect on how effective it’s been for you.

If it worked for you, you have a new weapon in your arsenal. If it didn’t work for you, well that’s fine too – you’ve learnt an important lesson about your learning style, and you move on to the next thing.

Either way, you learn – both the language itself and about your ability to learn.

Why 3 weeks? It’s a period of time that I’ve settled on naturally that is long enough for me to properly get stuck in, but not so long that I start to get bored! I’m usually ready to do something different after that.

What can you do on a Sprint?

The important thing is that you choose an activity that’s meaty enough to really learn from, and that’s going to hold your interest over a few weeks. You don’t need anything new – you probably already have all the resources you need at home.

Here are things that I’ve done at different stages and with different languages:

A chapter of my textbook
Flashcard sessions
Listening to a podcast episode and studying the transcript
Conversation with a language partner in Tokyo
Writing a journal and getting it corrected
Learning the lyrics of a song
Copying out Chinese characters
Reading a book
Intensive daily private lessons in Buenos Aires

What can you learn from Sprints?

I’ve learnt a lot from a number of sprints over the years. Here are some examples:

I used to believe that watching TV in the target language was a good use of study time for beginners. I don’t any more. I learnt that lesson during one Cantonese sprint last year, where I watched episodes of a Hong Kong TV drama every night for 3 weeks and learnt very little. I don’t do that any more.

I used to think that online flashcards weren’t for me. (“I don’t want to spend hours glued to a screen!”) Then I got an SRS app for my phone and went on a flashcard binge. My vocabulary more than doubled over the space of a few weeks. Having figured out that they work for me, flashcards are now a vital part of my daily routine.

In an effort to keep up my Japanese, I recently spent a 3-week period reading an interview from a Japanese magazine – the same interview, over and over, 30 minutes every night (it was quite long!). The effect was amazing – I had lines from the interview floating around my head for weeks afterwards and it all went firmly into my long-term memory.

The lessons learnt here were incredibly important for me, and will directly influence how I learn languages in the future.

They were learnt through a clear focus on one thing over time.

Do the work

Even after seven languages, I still get a bit overwhelmed by the size of the task. Since I’ve begun learning languages remotely, I’ve had ups and downs and wonder whether I’ll ever be able to learn another language as well as when I’ve been living in the country, surrounded by native speakers. I find some books that I like, others that I don’t. I see some great movies, and some rubbish ones.

I have the same painstaking first steps in speaking the language that everyone else goes through. It’s enough to make that goal of “fluency” seem all the more elusive!

Sprints have helped me to harness the power of focus, remove those unproductive daily deliberations of “what shall I study now?”, and ensure that the work gets done. So here’s what I want you to do:

Commit to trying out one sprint this month
Decide what it’s going to be
Leave a comment below to tell me what it is
Get started, and kill it!!

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Sprint! Take goal setting in language learning to the next level is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

Touring the UK/Ireland and encouraging language learners: Fi3M on the road

Time for a travel update!

After launching the book in Texas, my girlfriend and I flew to the UK to start the first leg of our book tour. I’ve been in London before, but this was the first time I was to ever venture outside of London.

We’ve been touring the country, meeting people, encouraging aspiring language learners, running into old friends, speaking various languages with other learners and discovering the country next to the one I grew up in, that I had never truly visited even after 11 years of travelling the world.

In this post, I can share some of the fun on the UK/Ireland branch of this year long road trip!

A polyglot in an English speaking country

Immediately after arrival, my UK publisher Collins had set me up with a host of mainstream media interviews. I had three in the BBC building (pictured), was taxied to Bloomberg, while other news articles were popping up elsewhere about my book.

That was great fun, but the main goal of this trip was to meet other language learners face to face. As such, the first book signing took place at the Piccadilly Waterstones.

It was my first attempt to try to talk to an audience of aspiring language learners like this (all other times I had spoken were in closed conferences, rather than open to anyone in the public who may be very casually interested and need more inspiration than most), and I gave it my best shot and people found it encouraging. My girlfriend had lots of feedback, and I’ve applied it to get better and better at inspiring people in the short-time we have there.

The next day we had a memrise meet-up, where Ben and Ed invited my readers and their users to their headquarters for a casual get-together. We even got to meet the feline CEO!

Coming home to Ireland and hitting the big screen

Immediately after, we had a long weekend in Dublin, which started with a book event in Hodges Figgis, the oldest bookshop in Ireland.

Still improving my presentation I found the best part of all was the Q&A to answer the real issues people were having. From then on, I resolved to just give a quick intro and make future book events about interacting with people, and trying to encourage them no matter what doubts they may present.

So far, Dublin has been my most multilingual event, because while I was signing books after speaking, I got to speak Portuguese, Spanish, German, Irish, Mandarin, Italian, French and Esperanto! Eager learners wanted to practise, and native speakers wanted to see if I was for real

Next, it was time for this fun interview on The Saturday Night Show with Brendan O’Connor (skip forward to 35:55 – video must be watched within the next 5 days before it’s taken down).

I don’t tend to get nervous, since I speak on stage and even on radio/TV more and more with time. Years of learning to speak to strangers, making mistakes as a beginner in foreign languages, and then getting started speaking on stage, has made me pretty confident even when in front of huge crowds of people. Even before the Bloomberg TV slot, I wasn’t flinching.

But being on Irish national TV made me more nervous than even prime-time American TV (with many more millions watching) ever would. My whole family and many friends were watching this, and I wanted to make sure I did them proud. Luckily, it went really well. I was so exhausted after that long and nervous day (the interview was at 10:30pm) that I literally fell off the stage when I was leaving!! (Very luckily this was off camera…)

After the weekend I had an interview with Pat Kenny (Newstalk) followed by Ray D’Arcy (TodayFM), both of whom I was thrilled to be talking with; for instance, Ray was the host of “The Den”, a show I watched when I was younger, so it was really cool for me to meet him. Both excellent interviews, and Ray liked talking to me so much he even kept me on air unexpectedly for 45 minutes!

The UK tour begins: Surprise visits from other polyglots

We flew back to London, and picked up a car rental. I’m really lucky that Collins is supporting me on the UK book tour (my US book tour will be very likely be self-funded) and is cutting my costs in half by covering the car rental and a lot of my accommodation. In an expensive country like the UK (especially if you are only staying a single night in places) this makes a huge difference!

 

 

 

We went straight on to Oxford and had a casual reader meet-up in a pub to talk language learning.

One of those attending was none other than Britain’s most multilingual student, Alex Rawlings!

We were now on a new city every day week, which brings in annoying complications like lack of time to do laundry, barely making it in time for events due to travel complications, and almost no time online. My email/work backlog was getting monstrous!

But we zoomed on to Cambridge and rushed in just in time for a book event at another Waterstones. After I gave my book intro, I opened the floor up for questions and got some fascinating ones from people with one of the warmest receptions we’ve gotten in the country so far. Then I saw a hand raised by a familiar face… Tim Morley!

I had met him in Esperanto events in the past and saw his convincing TEDx talk about how learning Esperanto first can be a great springboard into other languages, which is a concept I’ve talked about myself and even introduced in the print book. It was a great surprise to see a familiar face in the audience! He asked me what language he can ask his question in, and I of course said Esperanto (translating it for the audience after!)

Getting better at encouraging new language learners

After Cambridge we went back to London for a day, for the second Piccadilly event. This time I was ready with an improved (less rambly) talk and better answers for audience members.

The great thing about this tour is that when I do it in conjunction with a bookshop, the vast majority of people attending have discovered it from seeing it advertised in the bookshop’s windows in the days before.

This means that they are not necessarily people who have been following my blog (although they too come of course!) but people who may just be mildly curious about this language learning thing, and a chance for me to plant a seed and create a few ripples across this English speaking country.

As such, the kinds of questions I get asked are very general and from people who haven’t read the book yet or even heard of me before that day. Most people have no experience at all in learning any language, and really just need that initial nudge. And then of course there are others who have tried and failed, or even reached an intermediate stage and are stuck at a plateau.

Every speaking event is a chance to understand a completely new group of people’s language learning woes and think of a good way to encourage them. I’ve gone out of my way to make it about giving advice that works well for them, rather than promoting my way. As such, this isn’t really promoting “The Fluent in 3 Months approach” or “Speak From Day 1″, but to alleviate people’s doubts and lack of confidence in moving forward.

Encouraging language learning is the point of this entire year. At the end of each talk, when I hear people one-on-one (to get my silly signature and multilingual good luck wishes on page 1 of their book) tell me that they never thought language learning was for them, but feel the push to dive into it now, I know that meeting has been a success! I’ve created several brand new eager language learners!

And of course all stops on the book tour are free to everyone to attend! No need to even buy a book to show up. This has been great training for me as I get more and more requests for paid speaking opportunities for businesses.

Hiring a full-time language encourager and reaching Wales

We left London and drove on to Cardiff. On the way we pulled off for a bite to eat and unexpectedly and whimsically found Windsor Castle!

I popped into the local Waterstones and was pleased to see several copies of my book stocked there, in a stop we weren’t even planning. It really was available everywhere!

As I said, time was running incredibly short, so my initial plan to spend the afternoon before my Cardiff meet up giving myself a crash course in Welsh fell through. I was so far behind on work, that I had to accept that I simply could never catch up with my current lifestyle, which isn’t going to change any time soon.

As such, I decided to hire a full time language encourager. I mentioned it briefly on the blog and on Facbeook/twitter and got hundreds of replies. Ironically, my attempt to get someone to help me with my email backlog meant I had an even greater email backlog from needing to select the right person!

In the short time online each day, I’ve gone through applications, called up people, and the right person will be announced in the LHL email list later this week. This person will be helping me encourage you all more directly!

This helps me vastly with my work backlog and I hope that soon I’ll be on top of things and never have to sacrifise the chance to have an interesting experience because of lack of time, such as the couple of hours to dip my toes in Welsh that I wanted.

Even so, the informal meet-up in Cardiff was great fun! Being in Wales was eerily familiar – seeing bilingual signs like in Ireland, and somewhere I’d like to investigate more in future! On the plus side, I did learn Good luck in Welsh – Pob lwc! – not from a book, but from one of my readers. I’ve been writing it ever since in signings if I hear someone is learning Welsh!

Final days in England

We drove on up to Birmingham to leave our things there, and zoom down to Cheltenham for a smaller destination than most of our stops. We got a great warm reception here though, and the locals didn’t mind my slight tardiness from zooming across the country. Since then I seem to finally have caught up on everything enough to be punctual in this tour!

Back in Birmingham, we had another casual reader meet up, and one of those attending brought my book with them, not to have it signed, but to show me that the local library was stocking it!

The popularity of the book was shocking – several branches of Waterstones kept saying they were selling out consistently, it had become the best selling book in some stores and was getting featured, and I heard that back in Ireland Easons are now stocking it on their best selling shelves (rather than in the languages section).

Next, we hit Liverpool for a very casual style Waterstones event in their coffee shop and on to Manchester for one of the biggest events with 80 people attending!

Finally, last night we were in Leeds for another smaller event and I think I am finally getting the hang out of making sure people get the best out of attending, and also meeting other language learners. My girlfriend is of course being a huge help throughout all of this!

On to Scotland and Ireland next!

As this post goes live, I’m hitting the road to drive half of the day up to Scotland for a meet-up in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

With all this moving around, we are really looking forward to staying in one place (Edinburgh) for a whole week (a relatively long time when you have been on the move every day for weeks) to decompress and take a break over Easter. We’ve also had pretty much no time to be tourists and explore each city other than walks around in the evening after each event, which is a pity as I would have loved to have explored so many places we passed through.

We have however met the locals and had a chance to chat to them, and this is (as always) the core of why I travel in the first place!

I look forward to continuing the next (Scotland/Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland) leg of the book tour, meeting so many aspiring language learners, and spreading some encouragement! And now that I’ll have someone new helping me with the blog/emails and keeping up to date on the best language learning news, I can catch up and get into blogging more myself (with lots of high quality guest posts coming often too!) and finally making videos again!

Exciting times are ahead on Fluent in 3 Months, and I can’t wait to share many new updates with you, but I wanted to start with this fun travel update first. Thanks a lot everyone, and I can’t wait to meet the rest of you on this trip!

Add in your comments below about anything you’ve read here – looking forward to your feedback as always!

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Touring the UK/Ireland and encouraging language learners: Fi3M on the road is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

9 Reasons You’re Hitting Language Learning Walls (& How to Break Through Them to Finally Become Fluent)

Soon, I’ll have some exciting stuff happening here at Fi3m (a full time language encourager is going to be helping make the blog way more interactive and active!), but since my book tour has me offline so much, I was very happy to see this great guest post submission from Cher.

Cher Hale is an instigator of adventure and romance on her blog The Iceberg Project, where she teaches people how to charm Italians with their own language and finally become fluent in Italian. Here she talks about brick walls that may be holding you back from your own language learning projects. Over to you Cher!

———-

It’s the feeling of stagnation, like sitting around and waiting for something to happen because you know you’ve been putting in the work.

It’s what happens when you feel a huge rush of demotivation because you’re really tired of studying this language every single day and not seeing much of a return for it. Benny Lewis has definitely hit them before and so have thousands of other language learners.

BRICK WALLS. At the end of the day, some get through them and some don’t.

So what makes the difference?

What separates the language learner who breaks through these walls and becomes fluent in their target language from the person who just keeps plugging along, hoping to make progress “someday soon”?

I had the same question as I was learning Italian and Chinese Mandarin, and all of my questions were clearly answered the minute I finished reading the most incredible study from Cambridge University. But not everyone wants to sift through a 27-page academic paper, so I’ll give you the short version of what Jack C. Richards lays down in this piece, answering the question, what keeps intermediate learners from ever becoming fluent? It turns out that there isn’t just one wall, but several.

This is something we feel instinctively, but often don’t realize because we’re always hearing about that ONE proverbial wall that’s holding us back. How could we ever become fluent if we expect ourselves to get through one wall and then reach success…when there are really seven or more walls that separate us from our goal?

That, my friend, sets us up for serious expectation problems.

So here are the 9 ways that you are hitting walls in your language project (whether you realize it or not), and more importantly, how you can break through each one of them to become fluent.

1.) My vocabulary is too basic to hold a conversation

The problem: Your vocabulary is made up of surface language.

What do I mean by “surface language?”

I mean that you’re stocked up with basic language, like “That is a chair,” without being able to make deeper distinctions, such as “That is a dining room table chair,” or “That is a rocking chair,” or “That is a recliner.” You know the words for basic things, but you can’t distinguish between finer shades of meaning.

An example that I remember learning in Italian was the difference between bells.

• La campanella – School bell

• La campana – Church bell

• Il campanello – Doorbell

• Il campanellino – Small bell you might find on a dog collar

Your Fix

Play a game in your everyday life where you get in the habit of describing what’s around in your target language in exact detail.

Don’t just say, “I’m looking at a park.”

Say, “I’m looking at a park, and I see weeping willow trees. There are six ornately decorated, white benches that seem to be antique. There are red rose beds in a hexagon, and a fountain that has a dolphin carved in marble.” Go into serious detail, and look up words that you don’t know. Keep note of these new words as flashcards (in a good system like Anki), in a notebook, or any way that you can continuously revisit them.

2.) When I learn a new vocabulary word, I still don’t understand it when a native uses it

The problem: You can’t distinguish between the multiple meanings of one word.

There’s a fancy word called polysemy, and that’s the difference between multiple meanings of one word. In the Cambridge paper, Richards references the word “head” and describes how in English it can mean many things–from the head of a person to the head of a pin to the head of an organization.

Your Fix

Learn words in chunks so you have a better idea of how a vocabulary word is functioning in context.

Going further, you may want to consider switching from a dictionary that translates your native language to your target language to one entirely in your target language. This will give you insight into how the natives themselves would describe the multiple uses of the word.

You can find many of these online for free. For example, WordReference offers definitions in Italian, Spanish and English. You can also simply search “{target language} dictionary” in the foreign language you’re learning.

3.) I can’t speak fluently, even though I understand the language when I hear it

The problem: You might understand more complex grammar tenses, but you’re not using them.

You might be conversational and able to hold your own, but you’re not fully aware of how to use the more complex grammar tenses that are necessary for more in-depth expression.

This doesn’t apply to all foreign languages, as there are languages like Chinese Mandarin with a simple enough verb tense structure, but then there are languages like Italian, which have and use their complicated subjunctive mood often.

The subjunctive mood is one that isn’t taught to students until they reach an intermediate level, and by then the present indicative tense has been mainly used. This makes it tough for students to restructure the knowledge they already have and make space for this new complex and common grammar mood.

Your Fix

Make mastering more complex grammar tenses your focus by being conscious of them in your target language’s clips, movies, songs, and articles.

Write compositions for native speakers to correct, and post them on sites like Italki or Lang-8.

Have “shower conversations” (a term coined by Sid Efromovich) with yourself with an intention to use those tenses.

In these personal conversations, you can realize what you don’t know how to use and then go to your teacher or to the drawing board to help remedy those problems. This is all a part of the process of restructuring the way you to accommodate these new tenses/moods. Let your neurons fire away, and make new connections.

4.) I don’t know how to stop making the same mistake over and over again

The problem: You are continuing to make errors that you learned as a beginner but that were never corrected.

When you start learning a new language, especially as an autodidact, or someone who learns on their own, there is SO MUCH new information to digest.

This marathon of learning that often happens at the start of a language journey can result in many mistakes that become “fossilized” over time.

If you do work with a tutor or a teacher, it’s likely they’ll focus on your bigger mistakes and let the small ones fall through the cracks. That’s great in the moment, but it’s one of the reasons you will hit a language wall and not know why automatically.

Your Fix

Start taking one-on-one or one-on-two lessons with a native teacher.

Be very clear with him/her that you would like to be corrected as soon as you make the mistake or as soon as you finish a sentence. Then ask for time to write down your mistake if you learn by writing.

If you learn best by listening and repetition, ask your teacher if it’s okay if you can record the lesson. Then you can listen to it while you’re in your car, jogging, or cooking.

If you’re on a Mac, you can easily do this by opening up the free program Quicktime Player and recording audio. If you’re on a PC, you can use a free program Sound Recorder and recording audio.

As you take care of your bigger mistakes, you can ask the teacher to focus on the small errors, too.

While this might sound expensive, it doesn’t have to be. Italki (which also offers free exchanges) and Google Helpouts offer affordable, customized lessons. It’s also possible that you can use Craigslist to find native teachers in your area if you like being in person. However, this does tend to be a little pricier.

5.) I can understand the language, but I just can’t speak it

The problem: You’ve spent your time practicing reading and listening to the target language, but you’re not confident in speaking.

As Benny says, you gotta speak from day one.

If you avoid speaking, you’re avoiding the entire point of learning the language (unless you’re learning Greek just to read the literature or something similar), but since you’re here, I’m guessing that isn’t the case.

Your Fix

If you want to get your speaking skills up to par with how much you understand, you can’t just be in the environment passively listening, but you must actively notice and pay attention to what’s going on around you.

When you’re conscious of what you’re hearing and reading, then you can make real progress.

So the first step is be more conscious of how specific vocabulary is used when you’re listening and speaking and then actually reproducing that language in situations where you’re forced to speak. This can be as extreme as moving to the country of your target language or as relaxed as meeting with a language group once a week via Meetup.com wherever you live.

If your target language is a little more obscure, you might have more luck finding online forums for that specific language. Consider creating a weekly Meetup group on your own via Google Hangouts or in person.

6.) The language I’m learning has too many words that all mean the same thing

The problem: You can’t tell the difference between verbs that have seemingly identical meanings.

Similar to knowing differences in vocabulary, not knowing distinctions between verbs can make your target language sound elementary.

For example, in English we have the verb “to tell.”

We can:

• Tell a story

• Tell something to someone

• Tell two things a part

• Tell a lie

• Tell your name

Other similar verbs for tell might be:

• Chronicle

• Describe

• Explain

• Narrate

• Recite

• Recount

• Report

• Reveal

But since English is a first language for many of us, we know that we wouldn’t use all of the verbs above interchangeably with “tell” in every situation. Some sound outdated, and some are a bad fit. It’s the same thing in your target language.

Let’s take the verb meaning “to tell” in Italian: Dire.

We can:

• Dire la verità – say the truth

• Dire addio a qualcuno – to say goodbye to someone

• Dire bugie – to tell lies

• Dire di no – to say no

• Dire di sì – to say yes

• Dire parolacce – to curse

• Dire stupidaggine – to say stupid things

• Non dire niente – to not say anything

Verbs similar to “dire” might be:

• Comunicare – to communicate

• Esprimere – to express

• Dichiarare – to declare, proclaim

• Manifestare – to demonstrate

• Narrare – to narrate

• Raccontare – to tell

• Parlare – to speak

Specifically if we’re talking about how someone told us a story in Italian, we would want to use the verb “raccontare – to tell” instead of “dire – to say.”

Your Fix

Go on a synonym adventure. When reading books, note verbs that are similar but different in context. Make note of these and make it a goal of yours to use them in conversation.

If possible, get some native advice on which verbs are used often, sound odd, or are antiquated. You can do this through sites like Italki, the WordReference forums, or Lang-8.

7.) I want to sound smoother, more native and more eloquent

The problem: You don’t have an arsenal of proverbs, idioms or phrases at your disposal.

It’s likely that in your native language you have a lot of proverbs, idioms and phrases that you use each day to make your conversation more colorful and easier to understand. Your target language will probably have these too, and it’s in your best interest to learn them so you can sound more like a native and continue progressing.

Your Fix

Learn a few idioms, phrases or proverbs every day. Pepper them into your “shower conversations” and check in with native speakers to determine their relevance and in what context you should use them.

For example, there’s a Chinese expression about relationships that goes like this:

心有靈稀一點通。

Xin1 you3 ling2 xi1 yi4 dian1 tong1

This is a phrase that expresses how people who are close can understand each other just with a look. You could use it with friends, family, and lovers.

Or this one:

百聞不如一見

bai3 wen2 bu4 ru2 yi1 jian4

This is a phrase to express that a certain place is amazing according to many people, as in “I heard Taiwan was GORGEOUS from 100 different people so now I have to go see it for myself.”

8.) I learned a new language in school, and I just don’t sound like a native speaker

The problem: You always sound like you’re addressing the Queen of England in your target language.

A common problem most students from university face is that they have learned an academic version of their target language. So when they open their mouths in that country or with any native speaker, they might sound … cold.

It may all be grammatically correct, but you’re missing the warmth that comes with a common, everyday language spoken between people of a common country.

Your Fix

Learning the everyday idioms, phrases, and proverbs will definitely help.

If it’s appropriate in your target language, try to be less formal in situations among peers.

Watch more shows and movies (not ones just dubbed to your native language, but actually based on a story from your target language’s culture), try to pick up on the slang and to see how people of certain relationships interact with each other.

Notice:

• How do they speak to each other at work?

• What do they say to their family members who are older than them?

• What do they say to people who are older than them, but are friends?

• What do they say on holidays, birthdays, or during festivals?

• How do they speak to children?

• How do they write letters/emails?

Become a detective of social situations.

9.) I’ve been learning a language for years, but I’m not getting anywhere

The problem: You’re not comparing yourself to native speakers to see where you stack up.

Usually I’m not a fan of playing the comparison game, but when it comes to language learning, studies have shown that it’s a great tool, which rapidly shortens your learning curve.

Your Fix

Find a native speaker that you can practice with (again, sites like Italki or Lang-8 are great for this). Then play a game where you say a sentence in the target language to them and they say it back to you with how they would express it in their target language.

Then do it backwards. Have them say a sentence to you in your native language and you’ll translate that sentence to the target language.

Richards refers to this kind of practice as “carefully structured and managed output,” which is “essential if learners are to acquire new language.”

So there you have it. 9 brick walls… and 9 language-learning jackhammers.

Which language walls do you think you’re hitting right now, and which ones are you going to focus on first? What has worked for you to break through them? Share in the comments below!

Post by Fluent in 3 months.

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9 Reasons You’re Hitting Language Learning Walls (& How to Break Through Them to Finally Become Fluent) is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

Ridiculous translation blunders that cost millions of dollars (and why you should learn a language for better business)

Embarrassing mistakes are really not that big a deal when you make them with your friends. Making mistakes is an art that individual language learners need to embrace if they are truly to learn a language well.

If you conjugate a verb wrong when ordering your first coffee abroad, the world does not come to an end.

But something that continues to boggle my mind, is how businesses with a budget of millions or billions of dollars get sloppy with second languages, when they are not being heard/read by a single person but by an entire country that they advertise to.

Here are some real-world examples that astonish me to this day:

Embarrassing and costly translation mistakes made by major businesses

Pepsi’s Chinese Blunder

In the 1960’s, Pepsi took its “Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation” slogan to China, which was not well very well received. The reason? In Chinese, this translates to “Pepsi brings your relatives back from the dead.”

Clairol and Canadian Mist’s German Blunder

Canadian Mist, a brand of whiskey, failed in German markets because “Mist” in German means “manure.”

The same happened to Clairol when it attempted to sell a curling iron called the “Mist stick” to German markets. Who wants to put a shit stick into their hair?

Coors Spanish Blunder

A Coors slogan, “Turn it loose,” was translated into Spanish for its overseas campaign, resulting in the slogan: “Suffer from Diarrhea.” The beer did not sell well…obviously.

KFC’s and Coca Cola’s Chinese Blunders

In the US, KFC’s slogan is “Finger lickin’ good.” The company stuck with this when moving its campaign into China, where unfortunately this phrase translates to “We’ll eat your fingers off.”

And when Coke first attempted to translate its brand name phonetically into Chinese, its first attempts were botched as well, sounding to native speakers like “bite the wax tadpole” and “female horse stuffed with wax.”

Jolly Green Giant’s Arabic Blunder

The familiar Jolly Green Giant, when translated into Arabic, came across initially as “Intimidating Green Monster!”

Schweppes Italian Blunder

The company Schweppes introduced its “tonic water” into the Italian market without overseeing its Italian translation: Schweppes Toilet Water…

General Electric’s French Blunder

And finally, General Electric once attempted to release its new partnership brand in Europe under the name GPT. This caused a bit of scandal, because in French, GPT is pronounced “J’ai pété”, which means, “I farted.” Money was lost and reputations were damaged.

——

These mistakes—hilarious in retrospect, but embarrassing and costly for the companies who made them– may seem silly or trivial, but can add up to serious consequences. Situations like this that stem from language or cultural misunderstandings cost businesses (in the US alone!) around $2 million a year.

Here’s something even more amazing than that: Fixing these blunders does not require a mastery level in any of the languages.

In each of these cases, even an intermediate level speaker in the language could have prevented these mistakes from happening, saved these companies money, time, and resources, and allowed them to build relationships with these new markets, rather than alienating them.

I’ve always advocated for language learning in terms of the cultural benefits that being multilingual offers. It opens up your worldview, and connects you to new people. And this absolutely does not begin and end only in our personal lives.

Learning a new language will make you more employable

If you’re running or starting your own business, being multilingual will make you a hell of a better employer (or entrepreneur, or business strategist) as well.

And this is because businesses are about people. Every company that has ever existed, anywhere, has had at its very core a very simple common ground: people. The goal of any business is in helping people, assisting them in getting the things they want, providing them with something that they need… or sometimes trying to convince them to buy something they may not need.

My point is that the business world is about communication. It’s about forming connections and relationships with people, first and foremost.

The same is true of languages.

I’ll always maintain that one of the most important “keys” to learning a new language is to have a passion for developing your skills in that language and for communicating with that language’s people. But let me point out something that may or may not be obvious: Work and passion are not mutually exclusive!

If your job or your business is your passion, then there are huge opportunities–and incentives–for including a language learning project as part of your “work” and as part of your business strategy.

Becoming fluent in a new language, especially in the language that your customers, clients and partners abroad speak, allows you to build more relationships, and therefore allows not only for your business to grow, but to give you a greater understanding of the needs, wants and cultural perspectives of the people whose lives you’d like your business to touch so that you can serve them better.

Some of these relationships may already exist in the form of partnerships you may have right now with a foreign country abroad or with a specific community that already uses your product or service. Or they may be sitting there, untouched and untapped, waiting for you to start building a relationship with them.

Big businesses also know that languages are important

While the above examples are unfortunate cases where businesses fail, there are cases when an international mindset is apparent.

Big names like Facebook and Twitter, whose business platforms are largely excluded from China for cultural reasons, have responded to this disconnect by making an increased effort to understand Chinese culture. Mark Zuckerburg, whose business is all about connecting people, said “How can you connect the whole world if you leave out a billion people?”

So if you have to learn a new language for your job, or if you think that knowing multiple languages will “help your business” in some vague way—I’d like you to think not just about the job and not just about the business but about the people on the other side who you can connect yourself to by building this kind of bridge.

Have you had your own translations blunders creep into your business, or seen other businesses mess up? Let us know in the comments!

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Ridiculous translation blunders that cost millions of dollars (and why you should learn a language for better business) is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

4 language learning revelations from a Ms. World contestant

Karen who runs Immersia offers these words of encouragement – I love seeing the same realizations from such a wide range of people, and am happy to share hers with you today, especially since she has such an interesting and different background. Over to you Karen:

———

I was born in the Ukraine and my mother tongue is Russian. In school I learned German for 5 years. When I was 15 I immigrated to Israel, and learned Hebrew in an “Ulpan” (a speed-course for learning Hebrew).  In my twenties I travelled the world and learned English. I also learned some French, mostly because I love the way it sounds.

A few years ago I was a contestant in the Miss World pageant. The morning before “the big night”, all the girls were preparing and we started talking. Everybody talked about what they did the night before, and when they asked me how my night was and if I was nervous, I told them that I was actually feeling quite relaxed, and in my then broken English explained it was all thanks to “being faxed by my boyfriend” the night before (which, with my pronunciation could have been mistaken for something else entirely…). Needless to say they were all quite shocked, and we laughed about it the entire weekend.

If there is one thing I have learned about languages, it’s this: You have to experience a language to really get it. We remember stories way better than we remember flashcards.

As I said, I “learned” German (the flashcard way) for 5 years, from 4th to 8th grade, and I was a pretty good student too! I always got straight 5’s (the maximum grade in the Ukrainian grading system. We stole it from the Russians). But when I try to think back and remember the German I learned, all that comes to mind is – Ich heiße Karen; Straße; and “Houston, wir haben ein Problem!”, from a German version of Apollo 13 I saw once.

Revelation number 1: We remember things we like and that makes us laugh

I guess the main reason for this is that we only really remember neutral facts when we have to,whereas fun learning moments we enjoy coming back to every now and then.

When I got to Israel, I stayed in a boarding school for a while, with other Russian speakers. We studied Hebrew in an Ulpan, but spoke Russian with one another. As I said, I was a pretty hard working student. I spent hours on end reading to myself out loud from a book, preparing for the oral exams we had every week. We learned a lot of Hebrew grammatical rules (and believe me, there’s quite a few of those!), but even after spending months there, I could hardly speak a word.

It was only one Passover, when an Israeli family took me in for the holidays (thanks, Roza!), that I started talking for the first time. None of the family members knew any English, and the little Russian one of them remembered was more entertaining than informative. I had to speak Hebrew, so I did. Slowly at first, but gaining confidence quickly, I left their house a week later a whole other person. No more “davai” for me (a wonderful Russian word, used as alright, let’s go, or give it here). From now on, it’s only “yalla, yalla!”

Revelation number 2: We remember out of necessity

You can go live abroad for years, but if you live, work and hang out with people who speak the same language as you, you’ll never have to speak the local tongue. Unfortunately, language learning is a road best travelled alone.

As I said before, we remember emotional events much better. But it doesn’t only happen with fun light-hearted moments. We also remember fear and frustration. I once spent an hour in a supermarket in Michigan trying to find “Adashim”, a form of legume that I couldn’t recall the English translation of.

I think my exact words were “I’m looking for a small, bean-like food”. I wanted to make them for dinner, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what they were called in English (this was BSE – before the smartphone era). It was only after 15 minutes of playing a guessing game with one of the saleswomen (Black beans? Peas? Chickpeas? Alfalfa?!) that I found what I was looking for – lentils. I’ll never forget that word for as long as I live.

Revelation number 3: Every moment you feel frustrated – a memory is formed

Use this to your advantage. And after a while, it will probably also become a funny story, and we’re back at revelation number 1.

A few years later, I had a modeling gig in Paris. My host showed me around and we got to talking, in English, of course. The show was in a new and beautiful ecological building – it wasn’t painted, just raw concrete with a lot of Vegetation on the walls. I told my host that I liked it, and he replied that he did too, although he would have painted the… the… oh, sorry, he forgot the word in English, but in French it’s “béton”. I started laughing, and he didn’t understand why. Guess what the Hebrew word for concrete is…

Revelation number 4: You probably know more than you think

There are thousands of English words of French origin, and they still sound similar enough. And even if you’re learning Japanese, Hindi, or Swahili, I’m sure you picked up more than you think you did.

They say that the 100 most common words in any language make up 50% of any text, written or spoken. Doesn’t that sound more reasonable than “learning a new language”?

I spent more than my share of time in language classes. I studied German in school, Hebrew in an Ulpan, English in evening classes and French at the embassy. At the end of the day, I came out of those knowing barely anything more than I knew going into them. I enjoy languages, and I’m sure you do too, or you wouldn’t be reading this. My advice is this – don’t rely solely on teachers and classes. When you want to really learn a language, make sure it’s an adventure. Give yourself moments when you have to speak the language, and speak the language you will.

———-

Today Karen is using her language learning experiences as an entrepreneur. She co-founded Immersia, an online adventure game for learning languages. Play a new language at Immersia’s website or go to its Facebook page for more posts, updates or just to say hello.

----------------------------
4 language learning revelations from a Ms. World contestant is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

4 language learning revelations from a Ms. World contestant (plus: want to work as a full-time language encourager?)

Quick aside: How would you like to have a location independent job as a language encourager? I get so many messages with language questions that I can’t possibly answer due to travels and time constraints, so I’m now hiring a full-time worker (starting with a 2 month test period) to help this site become an even better resource for language learners! This is a great opportunity for experienced language learners to help others while earning a living from it. The best part of all is that you can do it from the comfort of your own home, or bring it with you while you travel!

Check out details of this Internship (that may expand to longer-term work) right here. Looking forward to reading your applications! And I promise this is not an April Fool’s Day joke!

Now, on to today’s guest post – Karen who runs Immersia offers these words of encouragement – I love seeing the same realizations from such a wide range of people, and am happy to share hers with you today, especially since she has such an interesting and different background. Over to you Karen:

———

I was born in the Ukraine and my mother tongue is Russian. In school I learned German for 5 years. When I was 15 I immigrated to Israel, and learned Hebrew in an “Ulpan” (a speed-course for learning Hebrew).  In my twenties I travelled the world and learned English. I also learned some French, mostly because I love the way it sounds.

A few years ago I was a contestant in the Miss World pageant. The morning before “the big night”, all the girls were preparing and we started talking. Everybody talked about what they did the night before, and when they asked me how my night was and if I was nervous, I told them that I was actually feeling quite relaxed, and in my then broken English explained it was all thanks to “being faxed by my boyfriend” the night before (which, with my pronunciation could have been mistaken for something else entirely…). Needless to say they were all quite shocked, and we laughed about it the entire weekend.

If there is one thing I have learned about languages, it’s this: You have to experience a language to really get it. We remember stories way better than we remember flashcards.

As I said, I “learned” German (the flashcard way) for 5 years, from 4th to 8th grade, and I was a pretty good student too! I always got straight 5’s (the maximum grade in the Ukrainian grading system. We stole it from the Russians). But when I try to think back and remember the German I learned, all that comes to mind is – Ich heiße Karen; Straße; and “Houston, wir haben ein Problem!”, from a German version of Apollo 13 I saw once.

Revelation number 1: We remember things we like and that makes us laugh

I guess the main reason for this is that we only really remember neutral facts when we have to,whereas fun learning moments we enjoy coming back to every now and then.

When I got to Israel, I stayed in a boarding school for a while, with other Russian speakers. We studied Hebrew in an Ulpan, but spoke Russian with one another. As I said, I was a pretty hard working student. I spent hours on end reading to myself out loud from a book, preparing for the oral exams we had every week. We learned a lot of Hebrew grammatical rules (and believe me, there’s quite a few of those!), but even after spending months there, I could hardly speak a word.

It was only one Passover, when an Israeli family took me in for the holidays (thanks, Roza!), that I started talking for the first time. None of the family members knew any English, and the little Russian one of them remembered was more entertaining than informative. I had to speak Hebrew, so I did. Slowly at first, but gaining confidence quickly, I left their house a week later a whole other person. No more “davai” for me (a wonderful Russian word, used as alright, let’s go, or give it here). From now on, it’s only “yalla, yalla!”

Revelation number 2: We remember out of necessity

You can go live abroad for years, but if you live, work and hang out with people who speak the same language as you, you’ll never have to speak the local tongue. Unfortunately, language learning is a road best travelled alone.

As I said before, we remember emotional events much better. But it doesn’t only happen with fun light-hearted moments. We also remember fear and frustration. I once spent an hour in a supermarket in Michigan trying to find “Adashim”, a form of legume that I couldn’t recall the English translation of.

I think my exact words were “I’m looking for a small, bean-like food”. I wanted to make them for dinner, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what they were called in English (this was BSE – before the smartphone era). It was only after 15 minutes of playing a guessing game with one of the saleswomen (Black beans? Peas? Chickpeas? Alfalfa?!) that I found what I was looking for – lentils. I’ll never forget that word for as long as I live.

Revelation number 3: Every moment you feel frustrated – a memory is formed

Use this to your advantage. And after a while, it will probably also become a funny story, and we’re back at revelation number 1.

A few years later, I had a modeling gig in Paris. My host showed me around and we got to talking, in English, of course. The show was in a new and beautiful ecological building – it wasn’t painted, just raw concrete with a lot of Vegetation on the walls. I told my host that I liked it, and he replied that he did too, although he would have painted the… the… oh, sorry, he forgot the word in English, but in French it’s “béton”. I started laughing, and he didn’t understand why. Guess what the Hebrew word for concrete is…

Revelation number 4: You probably know more than you think

There are thousands of English words of French origin, and they still sound similar enough. And even if you’re learning Japanese, Hindi, or Swahili, I’m sure you picked up more than you think you did.

They say that the 100 most common words in any language make up 50% of any text, written or spoken. Doesn’t that sound more reasonable than “learning a new language”?

I spent more than my share of time in language classes. I studied German in school, Hebrew in an Ulpan, English in evening classes and French at the embassy. At the end of the day, I came out of those knowing barely anything more than I knew going into them. I enjoy languages, and I’m sure you do too, or you wouldn’t be reading this. My advice is this – don’t rely solely on teachers and classes. When you want to really learn a language, make sure it’s an adventure. Give yourself moments when you have to speak the language, and speak the language you will.

———-

Today Karen is using her language learning experiences as an entrepreneur. She co-founded Immersia, an online adventure game for learning languages. Play a new language at Immersia’s website or go to its Facebook page for more posts, updates or just to say hello.

----------------------------
4 language learning revelations from a Ms. World contestant (plus: want to work as a full-time language encourager?) is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

Russian: Why it’s easier than you think, and should be your language of choice, now more than ever!

Can you believe I haven’t had a blog post about Russian yet?

Very timely with how much it’s in the news lately, David, who has his own travel blog where he documents his and and his Russian girlfriend’s travel adventures, wrote me to write some encouraging words about this language.

On a fun side-note, someone has dubbed over my TEDx talk in Russian. It’s the quickest I’ve ever had a video just with me in it uploaded in another language

Over to you David!

———-

If there’s one country that’s been on the news more than any other lately, it’s Russia.

Russia evokes powerful emotions from all of us. It’s nearly impossible to feel indifferent towards it; you either love it or hate it.

Having just hosted the Sochi Olympics, and now in the midst of confrontation with Ukraine that leave some to question whether this is Cold War Two, it is clear that Russia isn’t going away anytime soon, like it, or not.

And yet, despite its international prowess, there is a severe lack of interest in wanting to understand Russia; its culture, its people, and its language.

And that’s a shame.

I studied Russian for 4 years in college. I studied abroad there for a semester, worked a summer in Moscow, and have traveled there on several occasions as a tourist. My girlfriend of 5 years is Russian.

Russian has changed my life, and I believe it can change yours too – if you are open to it.

Why Russian Should Be Your Next Language Of Choice
English Is Not A Fallback

Ever wonder why Russians seem to always visit the same countries and do so as part of large, Russian speaking tour groups?

It’s often because they are not comfortable speaking and travelling in English.

If you go to the list of countries by English speaking population and sort it, you will find Russia near the very bottom with only 5.5% of the population claiming English as a first or second language.

Westerners tend to gravitate towards other Western languages like French and Spanish due to their familiarity, but the fact is a much larger proportion of people in those countries can at least communicate in English if need be.

With Russia, however, you have over 140 million people that downright will not understand you if you don’t speak even a little Russian.

That’s a lot of people we can meet with one language.

Travel To Russia And The Eastern Block

Russia is a country rich in history, culture, and traditions.

But too often we don’t even consider it as a travel destination on account of our own intimidation with the language and people. Russia gets about half the tourists that Spain and Italy get, and only one-third what France gets.

It’s true that traveling in Russia can be quite difficult on account of the Cyrillic alphabet, visa restrictions, and the lack of English speakers.

But consider what bucket-list worthy items we’re missing out on if we don’t even try:

Travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway
Attend the 2018 Fifa World Cup (didn’t I mention Russia is not going away?)
Visit Red Square and Saint Basil’s Cathedral and other beautiful attractions in Moscow

Couple that with the fact that Russian opens doors to communicating with people in the Eastern block (I’ve gotten by with Russian in Poland and the Czech-Republic) and you’ve got a world of opportunities.

Expectations For Westerners Are Low

The great news about learning Russian is that people will love you even if you only know a little bit. So few Westerners even attempt to learn the language that it’s refreshing when someone shows initiative.

And Russians are not shy, as I find Asian cultures to be. They can be quite chatty even, once they get to know you.

My Russian has been at all sorts of levels from when I was just starting out and only knew a few words to now where I am proficient in everyday conversation, and I can tell you that never once did anyone turn their back on me on account of my level of Russian.

Understand And Partake In Customs

Westerners, unfortunately, often harbor the opinions that Russians are cold, crude, and downright unpleasant. While it is true that Russians can be a little rough around the edges at times, I find that once you break through this hardened exterior they are warm, welcoming, and incredibly hospitable.

It also just so happens that Russia is filled with confusing customs, traditions, and superstitions that can downright befuddle a Westerner.

As Benny can attest to, the best way to understand a culture is through its language.

Had I not learned Russian I would have been excluded from the vast majority of these customs, and likely would have just sat on the sidelines awestruck.

Instead, I have been able to be active in these various traditions, like giving a meaningful toast at a reception or singing a song in a group. At the time, these seemed somewhat trivial, but I realize now how paramount they were in building the foundations of a relationship with strangers.

Abundant Resources And Interest

Russian may be a complex and intimidating language, but there are plenty of resources to help you on your way. Russia has a population of over 140 million and there are another 27 million living abroad. A large proportion of them are interested in learning English and engaging with English speakers.

They love Western culture, and they do learn English in school. They just don’t use it frequently.

Although I went to college for Applied Math, I probably spent the bulk of my time chatting with Russians who I connected with on social search sites like Italki, Scrabbin, and Papora. I would study sites like RussianForFree.com and listen to Russian radio on ListenLive. Youtube has a nice selection of videos with subtitles. I’m particularly fond of cartoons for beginners.

You Will Understand Your Own Language Better

Perhaps my most unexpected benefit from learning Russian is how much it has deepened my understanding of my own language.

Unfortunately, I never really approached English from a linguistics perspective and as a result, never really appreciated the various constructions that make English different.

When you start learning Russian you really have to dive into the grammar and the rules, and this opens up a number of parallels to English that I never knew before. Things like why English sentences are ordered the way they are whereas Russian ones can take a completely different form and still convey the same meaning.

I would even say my French got better as well, just by learning Russian, because finally grammar started to make sense.

Hacking The Language: Why Russian Isn’t As Hard As You Think

I’d be lying if I said Russian was easy.

After all these years of studying and interacting with Russians, I still consider myself to be only conversational. Verbs of motion, verbal aspect, and completely unpredictable verb/preposition pairs will make your head spin.

Luckily, I’m happy to report that of several articles I checked around the topic of “hardest languages for English Speakers”, Russian didn’t appear in the top 10 for any of them. It’s still considered easier than Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

So let’s focus on some of the bright sides of learning Russian.

Alphabet – easy to learn and wonderfully phonetic

One of the first things that turn people off from a new language is having to learn a different set of characters or letters.

People vastly overestimate how difficult this really is. They see the backwards “R” (я pronounced [ja]) and immediately want to turn the other way.

Benny has written extensively about why Chinese is not as difficult as it seems, pointing out in particular that the number of characters in the language should not be seen as a huge obstacle.

Well, if that’s true for Chinese, which has thousands of characters, it should certainly be true for Russian, which has only 33 letters.

Remember, it may be Cyrillic but it is still an alphabet, and alphabets are made up of letters, just like English. But what makes it even easier than English is that these letters have consistent pronunciation. Ever try to say this poem in English aloud? Then you’ll know how welcome a consistently pronounced alphabet is!

While Russian tends to have longer words than English, as well as some tricky sounds, at least it doesn’t have this problem of sometimes needing to guess how a word is pronounced, like in English. Can you imagine?

You pronounce it like it’s spelled and you spell it like it’s pronounced – the way it should be.

Honestly, you could learn Cyrillic in a day, and while you may make a few mistakes here and there with a few tricky letters that pose as English letters, after a few weeks you’ll have it down pat and you’ll never have to think about it again. Promise.

In fact, there are several letters in Cyrillic that are exactly like their English counterparts in look and pronunciation: A, B, D, K, L, M, O, T.

And many of the other ones have the same pronunciation, they just a look a little funny. For example “г” is g and “ф” is f.

All and all, there are really only a few new sounds that need to be learned.

Additionally, I find the Cyrillic alphabet to be visually distinct. It still has that boxy look that English has where, at least to me, each letter looks relatively different from the other. I don’t feel that as much with say, Arabic, which looks very curvy.

All of this will help expedite the memorization phase.

Adaptations From English

Romance languages are not the only ones to have adopted words from the English language (cognates). Russian has plenty as well, you just wouldn’t know it because it looks different in Cyrillic. For example, while Russian has its own word for doctor – врач (pronounced vrach), you could just as easily say доктор (doctor) and that would be completely normal.

Additionally, there is a whole class of verbs that pretty much have just been Russified from English, for example:

парковать (pronounced parkovat – to park)

адаптировать (pronounced adaptirovat – to adapt)

адоптировать (pronounced adoptirovat – to adopt)

This may not be the case for all ‘ова’ verbs, but there is enough to help you out.

In fact, more and more English words are finding their way into Russian on account of growing Western media influence as well as technology based words, which seem to be adopted almost with a general agreement across various languages. For example computer, micro-chip, camera, and television are all pretty recognizable in Russian.

Immense Flexibility With Sentence Structure

One of the things I realized about English AFTER learning Russian was just how rigid the sentence structure is. There’s a right way to say something. For example, if you want to express that you are going to the park, you would probably say

I am going to the park

You wouldn’t say

To the park, I go

Unless you want to sound like Master Yoda.

Russian isn’t like that.

I could translate that a variety of ways, such as

я иду в парк (“I am going to the park” )

в парк иду (“To the park I go” without the subject)

в парк я иду (“To the park I go” with the subject)

Also did you notice how in the second variant I left out the subject?

In English, we almost always include the pronoun, partly because we don’t have a unique conjugation for each (example “I go to the park, they go to the park”)

Because Russian has a defined conjugation for every pronoun, you don’t need to include it.

LOTS of Rules, But Few Exceptions

One of the aspects of Russian that appeals to me the most is that it’s a very rule-based language. I was a Math major so I cling to repeatable procedures and a set of defined rules that I can wrap my head around.

This was one of my major turn-offs in high school when I was learning French.

For example, in French you have to memorize the gender for each individual word. Sure, there are tendencies for things to be masculine or feminine but in general it’s not scalable. This creates additional annoyances when you add adjectives and possessive pronouns that also require agreement, stemming from the noun.

Russian isn’t like that.

There is a set rule for what is masculine, feminine, and neuter (neutral third case) with almost no exceptions.

Rules for determining if a noun is masculine or feminine

1. Look at the last letter of the word:

2. If it is a consonant, or “й”, the word is masculine.

3. If it is “а” or “я” it is feminine.

4. If it is “о” or “е” it is neuter.

5. If it is a soft sign “ь” then it could be either masculine or feminine. (relative to the above four, this doesn’t happen to often)

There are very few exceptions to these rules, but there are five notable ones which occur mainly because of physical gender.

Папа – (Daddy, Papa) – Is Masculine

Дядя – (Uncle) – Is Masculine

Дедушка – (Grandfather) – Is Masculine

Мужчина – (Man) – Is Masculine

Кофе – (Coffee) – Is Masculine

And gender is just one instance of this. This carries over to how verbs change in the past and future tense, how nouns become plural, etc.

Rules, rules, rules.

For example, while it doesn’t make much sense that mouse becomes mice in the English plural, Russian has these rules in the nominative case:

For masculine nouns:

If the word ends in a consonant, add “ы”.

Replace “й” with “и”

Replace “ь” with “и”

For feminine nouns:

Replace “я” with “и”

Replace “ь” with “и”

Replace “а” with “ы” (unless previous consonant is Г, К, Х, Ж, Ч, Ш, Щ then replace with “и” as per the spelling rules.)

For neuter nouns:

Replace “о” with “а”

Replace “е” with “я” (don’t forget the spelling rules)

Examples:

студент (student) – студенты (students)

газета (newspaper) – газеты (newspapers)

здание (building) – здания (buildings)

I find this much preferable to the randomness of English and romance languages.

The problem with Russian is that it has six declensions: Nominative, Accusative, Prepositional, Genitive, Dative, and Instrumental. If you’ve ever studied Latin, German or another Slavic language you’re probably familiar with these.

And they kind of stink, and lead to tables like this:

source www.russianforfree.com

This is pretty nasty looking, I know, my argument isn’t that it’s easy, but that it’s reliable.

It also helps us break down the sentence structure and see how words relate to each other. It’s because of these declensions that we can organize the sentence a bunch of different ways and still distinguish between the subject, the verb, and the direct object.

Conclusion

Russian is a commitment, and even the most talented language learners will probably struggle for months or even years before they really crack it.

However, it brings with it a world of opportunities in terms of people to meet, places to go, and experiences to be had.

If you have any further questions about Russian, feel free to ask them in the comments. I will do my best to answer them.

Or, if you are Russian, давайте говорить по-русски “let’s speak Russian”!

In 2012 David left his corporate banking job to travel the world for two years. He speaks English, Russian, and basic French. Check out his travel blog and his new business blog at SelfMadeBusinessman.com. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

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Russian: Why it’s easier than you think, and should be your language of choice, now more than ever! is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

“Languages shouldn’t be learnt, they should be lived” – Fluent in 3 Months in the media: BBC/Bloomberg/4 hour blog…

What a week! I’m still on a book launch buzz, before I can get back to “normal”, if there is such a thing for someone constantly travelling. And now that the book stuff is finally winding down, I can start focusing on what’s next on my agenda: Visiting you all and encouraging language learners in person in the UK, Ireland, US, Canada and beyond, at the book signings and language exchange meet-ups I’m organizing

But first some updates!

Fluent in 3 Months blasted its way to Amazon’s Best Seller lists in both the UK and Canada (making it an “international best seller”!); hundreds of people have already followed the links in the book to my new site fi3mplus that expands on the book through in-depth video and other multimedia; I launched the book in the US with standing-room only for my book reading and a very long line for signing; and now I am in London, having completed a whirlwind media tour 24 hours after my plane touched down — jetlag be damned!!

And tomorrow I begin my UK/Ireland tour with a book signing (already sold out – a second one in April is selling out quickly already!), and with a “Memrise.com” meet-up the next day, before I head over to Dublin for an Irish media blast. See the book tour page here, and follow my Facebook page for more frequent updates.

And finally, for those of you in the UK/Europe, as well as meeting up with me in person over the next weeks, you are welcome to join the Google Plus On Air hang-out Monday at 7pm GMT by signing up here. There, you can to ask me any questions you like, which I’ll answer live.

Now, while they are still accessible online (some of these media links will be removed soon), I wanted to share some of my appearances on big media, as well as on a host of other websites.

One thing I said in all three of the following interviews (all of which took place in the same 3 hours!), since I noticed the quote getting retweeted a lot after the first interview was “Languages can’t be learnt, they can only be lived” – a paraphrased quote that I got from Khatz.

Enjoy!

[Note: If any of these are blocked in your country (I'm in the UK now, so I can't tell), I'd highly recommend you install the plugin "Hola" for your browser and select UK as your country to make it viewable]

Bloomberg TV

Short, but sweet, for a business audience:

(The video was chopped shorter, so they cut out the part where I specified which languages are “fluent” and which I can speak at a conversational level)

BBC Radio 4 Midweek

This longer interview was a chance to give a little bit more encouragement – my segment was the first one, up until the 10 minute mark.

BBC World Service

This interview on BBC World Service starts at the 23:45 mark of the audio file, on the same day as the other two interviews (jetlag from my flight from Texas was starting to creep in by now, but I kept it off until just after the call!) – and what I liked about this was that they inserted two of my music videos into our tight slot (Skype Me Maybe and English Words in Japanese) to liven up the interview a bit!

4 hour work-week blog

The above interviews may not be much news to some of you who have heard me interviewed or read my blog long enough, but you would have to dig through my entire site to get my best advice, between fun videos and travel updates. That’s precisely why I wrote the book – one place to find my best advice, presented in as clear a way as possible.

But if I have to refer to one place other than my book to get a summary of my advice, it would be the guest post I wrote on Tim Ferriss’ blog: “12 Rules for Learning Foreign Languages in Record Time — The Only Post You’ll Ever Need”

This post took me a whole week to write, and takes you from absolute beginner to polyglot with a tonne of resources cited. It’s like a preview of the book in compressed form! I highly recommend you check it out if you haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, to see the kind of things I discuss, and to get loads of tips you may not have considered.

How to Learn the Basics of Any Language for Your Next Trip in Four Steps

Rather than try to summarize everything, I wrote another post where I focus on what beginners need to do to get started, especially if they have a spoken focus to use the language abroad very soon or immediately. I did this on Nomadic Matt’s blog!

Business Insider/Yahoo

This article on Business Insider and syndicated on other sites like Yahoo has some bullet points to get people started.

Huffington Post: Literature!

On a completely different topic, that I’ve never discussed before, I was invited to become a contributor at the Huffington Post, and used it to write this unique article:

Re-Appreciate Classic Literature: Learn Another Language

Also, since I could write there, I squeezed in another article for Paddy’s day similar to the one already on this site about how to speak English like the Irish.

Fluent in 3 Months elsewhere online lately:

How to Land a Book Deal While Traveling the World with Benny Lewis
Review: Fluent in 3 Months by Benny Lewis
Japanesepod101 interview (also Englishpod101, Polishpod101 and all other podcasts in the series) – free sign-up required to listen

Thanks, and I look forward to getting active on making a series of encouraging language learning videos and getting back to sharing excellent guest posts from other language learners, now that the initial book launch has wound down. Thanks so much to everyone who helped during this time

Your comments are welcome as always – cheers!

 

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“Languages shouldn’t be learnt, they should be lived” – Fluent in 3 Months in the media: BBC/Bloomberg/4 hour blog… is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

5 crazy ways to get over shyness immediately, no drink/drugs required

The book is selling like hotcakes in both the US and the UK and has already made best seller lists!

Just remember that I’m taking down the US giveaway and UK giveaway goodies on Monday morning. For those of you who already have your copy of the book, I would REALLY appreciate reviews (good or bad; it all helps people decide if the book will be useful for them) on Amazon US / UK, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones.com, goodreads.com and all other book review sites.

It would mean the world to me to see all those kind words you’ve been emailing, tweeting and Facebooking me on the sites that let people know if they should buy the book.

Finally: Book tour dates have been FINALIZED! Come meet me in the UK/Ireland/US/Canada and get your book signed or ask any questions about language learning!

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My philosophy in language learning is, always has been, and always will be to Speak From Day One.

But for many people, this is terrifying! And because I have been talking so much about how effective I’ve found using Skype and language exchange websites, or in-person meetings early on in a language project to chat with native speakers right away, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about what to do if you’re too shy to speak from day one.

So today I’m going to answer these questions.

I used to be very shy

But before I do, I want to make something very clear: I used to be extremely shy.

It may be hard to believe because I seem so outgoing now–and I am!–but I had to overcome a lot to get to the point where I am now, where I can gladly walk up to a stranger and proceed to make an ass out of myself in their language considering I’ve just started to learn it. This fearlessness is a skill I have crafted, a learning process, and definitely not something that is inherent or genetic.

But I had a hard time of it. I don’t drink, so I never had “liquid courage” to give me any advantages.

And until into my 20s, I wasn’t very good at talking to girls–having attended an all-boys high-school and a mostly male (engineering) university course (luckily, I now have my wonderful girl in every port and can make both male and female friends equally easy now).

The first years I started to go out, I was always the guy in the corner who would play with his phone or pretend to send a text message, rather than be seen as awkwardly not able to speak to people. For a while, all social events did for me was make me a better player of “Snake” on the old Nokia phone.

But that’s behind me now. And I want to share with you all some funny stories of the insane things I did to force myself out of my shy delusion and to have no choice but to become good at talking to strangers. These stories are crazy, but true!

1. HOST Couchsurfers

Even a couple of years into my travels, I was still a little awkward around people that I didn’t know very well yet. I didn’t know what to talk with them about. The catch-22 here is that you can get more comfortable the more time you spend with people, but how do you get that time in the first place if you are too awkward to be around?

That’s when I discovered Couchsurfing, and realized that I could invite interesting people to my city and hang out with them for several days at a time. I felt useful because I knew the city better than they did, and I would research the history to give them a walking tour. Talking about my home was easy, provided instant conversation ideas, and helped us get into other topics.

As well as this, if someone stays at your home (even on the couch, hence the site name), you have breakfast together and hang out more than you normally would with people. They are a complete stranger at first, but you get comfortable and can learn to open yourself up a little better to people you don’t know extremely well. Best of all, the site has a review system so you know you can trust them before you even invite them to hang out.

2. Become an amateur photographer

I’ve never liked the idea of drinking to become more social. The placebo effect may often contribute to people being more “tipsy”, and even if it didn’t, I think it’s very limiting that you can only be more outgoing on Friday and Saturday evenings. What if an opportunity to be social suddenly springs up at 3pm on Tuesday?

As idealistic as I can be here though, the fact of the matter is that people drinking at social events feel uncomfortable at times if you don’t have something in your hands. So rather than give in to peer pressure, I’ve found that having something in your hands can actually ease the tension, and give you an interesting conversational starter.

So what I did in university was save up for one of the very earliest digital cameras. The display was a tiny LCD screen, but big enough to see the photo just taken. I made myself the official “campus photographer“ and went around with that camera and no actual photography skills–and amazingly having a full hand meant that nobody would push drinks at me any more.

Another great thing is that the camera itself helped me make friends. I would simply walk up to people and say “Hi, can I get a photo of you for the university website?” and they’d say yes every time. All I had was a basic static page that that happened to be hosted at the university, and I’d post the photos I’d taken to the page for everyone to find later. It worked great, and soon after this I got more popular as “the photographer”, since nobody else at the time was putting photos online!

This tip is harder now (everyone and their dog can upload photos online in an instant), but there are many other things you can do to help make people’s parties run better. When I was at Burning Man, I handed out free ear-plugs (a tub of 200 of them cost me $10) since it was a noisy event and sleeping was hard. At concerts, I’ve activated an app on my phone that makes the phone look like a candle, and hold this in my hand instead. Made me so many friends!

Another fun one was when I was in Valencia (the first time when I was 21), I managed to find a tandem bike for a really good price. I made friends (nearly always male) by offering a ride home to anyone who needed it, since I had space to carry them.

Finally, I’ve found that carrying around random confusing items as a conversation starter can work wonders to encourage other people to talk to you and take some of the edge off you always having to initiate conversations.

I find people’s “peer pressure” to drink is not as much that they need you to drink, but they don’t see you doing something or having fun, and want to change that. Simply not looking like you’re awkwardly missing “something” changes everything at these events, and if you can bring something that can make the event more fun, all the better!

3. Clink first, ask questions later

I think the biggest problem I had when I was shy though was thinking myself out of perfectly good opportunities to meet people.

Someone interesting would be right there, beside or in front of me, and I’d start thinking about what I should say to them, or maybe phrase out a good opening conversation thread that could last at least 10 minutes, or wonder if maybe I’m too boring to talk to them, or what if they are in a bad mood tonight and don’t want to talk to me….

And before I knew it, I had been thinking so long the opportunity had come and gone.

Now that I do interact with so many people at social events, I can let you in on a little secret: most people don’t have very clever conversations and nothing needs to be over-analysed. In fact, I have indeed messed up and said something really strange in my intro, but laughed it off and gotten into a normal conversation.

This is why now I have a strategy of simply walking up to someone and saying “Hi! I’m Benny from Ireland, what’s your name?” and seeing what happens. The most important thing that I think about before I approach anyone new… is nothing.

I like to call this my “glass clink trick” at times, because I introduced it to a friend in Germany who wanted to practise English, and simply grabbed her hand and forced her to clink glasses with some Americans and I then ran away. Her time to think of something “clever” to say had been taken away, and she simply had to say “Hi” and go from there. Two hours later she told me she had been practising English all night!

4. Embrace your inner Klingon

While actually speaking Klingon (yes, I do) can be equivalent to nuking your chances of making friends if that’s how you start a conversation, I’ve found that finding extremely specific common interest groups and attending them has made making friends WAY easier.

When I first started travelling, and was still unsure of what to talk about with strangers, I found groups about particular topics that I know that I can talk about, to be a great way to get me to open up! Since I was into language learning, I attended meet-ups with language learners (like the kind I’ll be organizing myself this year, where I’ll be encouraging people to mingle among one another to make new friends and practise their languages).

I’ve found that there are events on meetup.com, on Couchsurfing’s meet-up pages, on Facebook if you search for events in your city, where people informally get together to talk about what they are passionate about. If you are into chess, flying kites, dog walking, yoga, coding websites, or anything else, you can find a group that you can meet with.

And whenever I’m in the states I find it so curious how specific conferences can get! There are conferences not only for bloggers, but specifically for travel bloggers, wine bloggers, or finance bloggers. I of course attended the Star Trek convention, and finally found my online polyglot conferences.

So think about what you are passionate about, and search around for events where people with that same passion come together. You may be surprised how your specific interest has so many people finding one another thanks to the Internet, and coming together every week or once a year.

Talking about language learning when I first started travelling, and then talking about my passion for travel at Couchsurfing meet-ups, really helped me get over the “What do we talk about?” problem with meeting strangers, because we already had a topic I had lots to say on.

At the Star Trek convention (by then, I was much more outgoing) I remember meeting someone who was clearly very shy, and who I had seen alone the entire weekend, but when I said hi to him, we had a lively debate about the merits of the temporal prime directive, and I was so happy to see him shine.

5. Aim to fail

One of the most intimidating things for me in my early travels, when I’d arrive somewhere new and know absolutely nobody, would be to go to a social event completely alone and need to make friends.

How well those initial attempts to make friends are crucial to having a positive experience over the next months, and this is a lot of pressure. At times I felt like if I didn’t do it perfectly, then I’d not have any friends at all for months.

And then I had an idea from a friend of mine to try social skydiving, and just go up to as many people as possible and realize that the more I try, the more likely I am to make a friend. While quality trumps quality every time, you need a little quality at first to meet the right people.

Otherwise your first attempt could be to make a friend with someone totally unsuited to hanging out with you, and how poorly it goes can intimidate you and deflate your ego for the rest of the night.

That’s why my new approach was to not get nothing but positive interactions, but to go into each interaction with the mindset that “this attempt to make a new friend may crash and burn, and that’s OK”. I would try my best and accept failure to be not only an option, but a likely outcome most of the time. Aim to fail.

Amazingly, it turns out strangers don’t want to bite your head off, and you get pleasantly surprised the vast majority of the time and your confidence comes across as a charming character trait and people want to get to know you better. When I go up to new people I faked being confident so many times, that now I kind of am.

Go up to more people, act confident and accept that maybe they won’t buy it, and excuse themselves. Shrug it off and try again. Rinse and repeat and you will have new friends by the end of the night.

Language learning tips for introverts

But Benny… I like being shy! I don’t want to share my bike seat with strangers or tell anyone about my passion for Star Trek! What about me??

Using your language skills to be social and make new friends across cultures leads to so many fulfilling experiences, and I’d love for all of you to go out there, overcome your fears, and become the life of your own parties!

But, not everyone wants to “overcome” their shyness. So here are some options for you, my introverted friends!

If you WANT to talk to a native, but are too shy or scared to pull the trigger:

Have a Skype chat with the camera off!

There’s no rule that says you have to speak from day one face to face—you can simply ask your exchange partner to do a voice only chat. This means you can lounge on your bed, and not have to worry about the other person being able to see your nervousness or hesitation.

And this comes with an added benefit! Because you can’t rely on facial or other body language cues to help you understand the language you’re practicing, you can really focus on the language itself, the way it sounds and it’s intonation, for bonus listening practice!

Have a Skype chat with a dictionary and Google Translate open

I actually do this all the time myself in the beginning stages. If you’re nervous about an impromptu conversation, one thing you can do is to tell your exchange partner in advance that you’re a beginner, and that you will be using a dictionary or translator throughout the entire conversation. Then, learn how to say “I don’t understand. Can you please type that out?” in your target language (you can have that phrase translated for you on the italki message boards or submit it to hear it spoken by a native in a day or so on Rhinospike).

Then have your Skype call (camera on or off—your choice!). Go sentence by sentence, and EVERY time your teacher says something new—which could be every sentence, but who cares!—simply ask them to type it out, and then submit their written phrase through Google translate. This is a great way to learn as well, because you’ll learn new words and phrases through casual conversation, and don’t need to have a plan for what to talk about, or any prior knowledge of the vocabulary in advance.

When you want to respond back to a question, the process stays the same. Put your phrase into the translator, and repeat it to your partner. They’ll correct you on any mistakes in word order or pronunciation—and BAM! You’re learning vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar all in one, without having had to study beforehand.

If talking to a native at all makes you nervous:

Use multimedia!

It’s really important to hear a native speaking under natural circumstances, and you can do this by watching TV, movies, or listening to podcasts in the language.

Write down phrases you want clarified and post them to message boards

One of the benefits of speaking with a native is that you can get instant clarification on anything you don’t understand by simply asking, “What does that mean?” or “Can you say that slower?” This is harder when you’re just listening, but not impossible. Let’s say you come across a phrase while listening to a podcast in your target language that you don’t understand. Write it down, and ask someone in a language community, like the Fluent in 3 months forums or the message boards at italki. They’ll tell you what it means happily.

Get pronunciation/writing clarification

Another major benefit of speaking with a native is that you begin to internalize their speech patterns and will get better over time with replicating their accent. But, you can also do this with a lag—using a voice or text submission system like Rhinospike and Lang8, and get natives giving you what works back.

I really hope these tips help and that many of you can get more active in using your target languages. Let me know your thoughts on these in the comments below, and share your own tips for overcoming shyness with the rest of us!

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5 crazy ways to get over shyness immediately, no drink/drugs required is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip) to read two chapters free of charge!

“Fluent in 3 Months” the book is out!

Hi everyone! I just got an email from my mother, who told me that the bookstore in Cavan (my hometown in Ireland) has Fluent in 3 months on its shelves. The book has finally been published!I absolutely can’t wait to share this incredibly encouraging language learning advice with the world and am so glad you all finally get to read it!! I really look forward to your feedback and welcome all reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.

If you don’t have it yet, get your copy on Amazon US paperback or Amazon US Kindle (or Barnes & Noble as a book or on the Nook or on Indiebound or Books A Million and many other vendors) or on Amazon UK or Amazon UK Kindle (or Waterstones/) or your local online store like Amazon Canada or even non English stores like Amazon Germany (book available only in English in all stores just this year).

If you order it TODAY, then you will have your copy this week if you are in the US or Canada. UK vendors have already exhausted their stock! But worry not, they are already very quickly restocking and will ship the next batch on Friday, so order now to have it as I’m touching down in the UK myself next week!

Alternatively, call your local bookstore and ask them to ship it today! They’d need to know either the ISBN-10: 0062282697 or the ISBN-13: 978-0062282699 in the US/Canada, or ISBN-10: 0007543921 | ISBN-13: 978-0007543922 in the UK/elsewhere.

Here are the initial reviews of the book:

“Benny Lewis is the Eckhart Tolle of language learning. Fluent in 3 Months is the definitive self-help guide for anyone who wants to master a foreign language.” Anna Codrea-Rado, the Guardian.

“This is a lively and down-to-earth guide to learning a language. It really communicates Benny Lewis’s own passion for languages and encourages readers to take a more unbuttoned approach to learning them.” Professor Mike Kelly, Honorary Secretary and Director of Speak to the Future.

“Buy this book and prepare to experience the world-no matter where you live or travel.” Chris Guillebeau, author of New York Times bestseller $100 Start Up.

“Benny is an inspiration! What a great motivator!” Paul Noble, language guru.

“Fluent in 3 Months is the essential first step for anyone interested in learning languages. Its practical and insightful advice will inspire a whole new generation of polyglots.” Alex Rawlings, Collins Most Multilingual Student 2012

Giveaway still available for just a few more days!

The giveaway, where you can get hundreds of dollars/pounds worth of language learning goodies for more than one purchase of the book, is still in action and I will take it down within the next week. So make sure to check that out:

Giveaway for US/Canada
Giveaway for UK/elsewhere

Get your copy signed IN PERSON

Some authors have a special way to order signed copies online, but I thought I would one-up them; I’m a full-time traveller after all (enough to get a head nod from National Geographic as among their favourite of the year), so I will be going to major cities/towns across England/Wales/Scotland/Northern Ireland/Republic of Ireland and to every state and province in the US and Canada.

I’m combining this insane international book tour with a “make America multilingual” campaign and a similar scheme in UK/Ireland, with language exchange meet-ups, and this monster trip will actually my priority for the entire next year!

This means that I won’t be far from many of you, and if you get your copy today then I’ll be happy to sign it when you see me in person soon!

Make sure to check out this list to see a city near you. All UK cities have been confirmed with venues and attendance limits, and the first London signing has already sold-out (it’s free to attend, so sold-out as in no seats left!) with a second one filling up quickly. Check back later this week to see more US cities added (dates and venues confirmed within the next month or two), and soon I’ll confirm venues and exact dates in Ireland.

Reviews appreciated!

A LOT of work has gone into this book, and as such I appreciate your feedback (positive or negative). So if you own a copy, please go onto Amazon or other review sites and share your thoughts with us as soon as you have your own book! Reviews encourage people to buy (or let them know of a books weaknesses).

If you’ve found inspiration or help on my blog at any time, then it would mean the world to me to see your review on Amazon!

Google+ On Air Hangout TODAY

For those of you in the states, there will be a Google+ On Air open to everyone who has pre-ordered, ordered or already received their copy of Fluent in 3 Months. Click here to sign up! It will take place at 8pm EST, 7pm Central, 5pm Pacific.

Next week I touch down in London to start my UK/Ireland tour and media appearances (Bloomberg, BBC, Irish TV etc.) and will set a time to chat to European readers! Check my Facebook page for updates!

Thanks to everyone for getting a copy of Fluent in 3 Months and I can’t wait to read your feedback, as well as meet many of you face-to-face finally.

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“Fluent in 3 Months” the book is out! is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!

Have you seen my TEDx talk? You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here.

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