Hello!
Seiiti Arata.
There’s the idea that the best way to learn to do anything is simply by doing it.
It is not reading about it, it is not watching videos about it, it is not speaking about
how to do it.
If you want to learn how to invest in the stock market, the best way to learn is investing
in the stock market.
If you want to learn how to cook, the best way to learn is cooking.
If you want to learn how to speak Spanish, the best way to do it is speaking in Spanish.
That is why the most powerful technique you can use to learn any language is by immersion.
There are many cases of people who have spent years studying a language in a classroom and
who have not advanced too much.
And there are some other people who do a six-month language exchange in a foreign country and
who learn much more simply because they are immersed in the language.
(Of course there are some people who do an exchange, they make friends only with those
who come from their same home country and, obviously, do not learn anything, but this
is a topic for another day…)
For a long time, living abroad was the only way to do an immersion.
You needed to have the financial conditions to spend at least six months or a year living
in a country where your target language was spoken at.
But nowadays immersion is not exclusive of financially privileged people.
You can start your immersion right now, without leaving home and spending very little.
Immersion works because the only way to really learn a language is practising it in real
life.
Being immersed in a language means that you will experience that language twenty four
hours a day, or the longest time possible.
When you travel to a foreign country, immersion happens almost automatically.
For example, imagine you are going to live in Spain for six months.
People on the street speak Spanish.
TV shows and radio programmes are in Spanish.
Books are all in Spanish.
If you want to buy food from the market, get medicine from the pharmacy or ask for directions
on the street, you will have to speak Spanish.
Since Spanish is around you everywhere, twenty four hours a day, your learning speed is much
faster than it takes someone who studies only three hours per week at a private language
school.
In just one day, you are going to have five times as much contact with Spanish than that
other person who goes to Spanish classes will have in a whole week.
Now, if you cannot just leave and go to a country where your target language is spoken,
you will need to do a simulated immersion.
Simulated immersion consists in surrounding yourself by the language you want to learn
and keep that contact for as long as possible.
Maybe you cannot travel to Spain and spend six months there learning Spanish.
But you can simulate you’re in Spain right now.
How?
By changing as many things as you can into Spanish.
You can start by changing to Spanish the default language of your phone, your computer, your
email account.
You can create new social media profiles and start following only people who speak Spanish
on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
You can choose to only subscribe to Youtube channels, podcasts and blogs that are in Spanish.
You can watch films, series, TV programmes and read books only in Spanish.
Until recently, all of that was very difficult.
But today, thanks to the Internet, there’s a great amount of options that allow you to
do a simulated immersion in any widely spoken language in the world.
That does not mean that you need to leave aside your language course or your formal
studies.
But you need to see that study time as a complement to your practice.
Listen: what will make you actually learn a language is to practise that language in
real life.
And when I say real life, I mean that the materials you use for your simulated immersion
must be average materials, made for the native speakers of that language.
The reason is that this is real content, different from teaching materials like basic books,
podcasts that speak slowly so that you can learn or movies and series with subtitles.
Before the immersion, you need to have a basic knowledge of the language.
It’s no use wanting to run before knowing how to walk.
In order for the immersion to work, you should have been in touch with the foundations of
the language for a few months previously.
If you know absolutely nothing of a language, then trying to watch films, read books or
listen to podcasts won’t be very helpful.
And what can you do to attain that knowledge?
In our course How to Speak Languages, I show you a quite different method that you can
get to know at https://arata.se/speaklanguages, but if you follow the more traditional way
to learn the basics of a language, you can resort to courses and easy books focused on
learning.
These materials teach you basic words, with simple terms, with people who speak slowly,
everything with the ideal conditions for you to learn.
But, unfortunately, they’re not the conditions you will find in real life.
When you are on the street in a foreign country, people will speak fast.
They will use slang.
They will have different accents.
Sometimes, they will even make mistakes.
That is why a lot of people get scared when they understand everything in their Spanish
class, but they do not understand anything when they travel and they need to speak Spanish
in real life.
To really become fluent in a foreign language, you need to understand and speak with those
people in real life.
A good way to test yourself is to listen to a news broadcaster in the language you want
to learn.
Look for a radio station in Spanish, French, German or any other language you want to learn
and start listening.
I’m talking about actual news stations, those that provide the listeners with information,
give interviews, talk about the traffic.
I’m not talking about podcasts in which the guests speak slowly in a studio with good
acoustics.
Radio stations, oftentimes have noises from the street when the newscaster speaks or a
listener calls in and you can listen to a native person speaking.
To reach the level in which you understand the language spoken that way, you’ll need
a lot of hours of practice.
Consider spending at least two years of practise, listening to the language you want to learn
for about half an hour every day.
In order to have that kind of consistency in the long term, the secret is to match the
content you consume in your target language to the things you enjoy.
Consume contents that you find interesting so that your immersion stays consistent.
In simulated immersion, you need to be in touch with your target language for as long
as possible.
And the secret to do this is to include activities that you like, that you are interested in
and that you are already used to doing.
For example, imagine that you currently spend a good part of your time on Instagram.
You can keep doing the same, but instead of following the profiles you’re subscribed
to now, start following only profiles in the language you want to learn.
Follow celebrities you admire, companies or organizations you’re interested in, profiles
related to things you like.
The same way, if you like watching films or series, start watching them only in the language
you want to learn.
At first, you can even use subtitles in the same target language, but that is as if you
were using training wheels to learn to ride a bike.
As soon as you get confidence, remove the training wheels or you will never learn how
to cycle for real.
Remember the beginning of our conversation and understand that the best way to learn
how to watch films without subtitles is watching films without subtitles.
A good piece of advice to make that transition and stop using subtitles altogether is to
watch films or series that you have already watched, but this time in your target language
and without subtitles.
Since you already know the plot, understanding what is being said gets easier.
If what you like is reading books, start reading only in the language you are learning.
Some time ago, buying an imported book took a lot of time and it was expensive because
of the international shipping costs, but now that we have ebooks, you can find whatever
book you want and download it in a couple of seconds.
If you prefer to read news, change your national news portal to another one in the language
you are learning.
The ideal is to always start practising your listening and your reading.
But you can practise your speaking and your writing as well.
As I said in episode 195 of Hello!
Seiiti Arata’s series [https://arata.se/hello195], you can use conversation apps to communicate
with native speakers.
And you can also use chats, emails, or even create a blog to practise your writing, if
that’s your goal.
Also remember to use your idle time to listen to podcasts or radio programmes in your chosen
language.
Just the time you spend going to and from work, doing physical exercise or even washing
the dishes, is probably more than an hour per day in contact with the language.
A tip is to have a news station app installed on your phone.
This way, you don’t need to think about what video or podcast you will have to find
when you want to take advantage of the idle time to listen to your target language.
All it takes is opening the app and the radio will start playing, speaking your target language
in a real way.
Regardless of what you do, the important thing is to always stay in touch with your target
language, for as long as possible.
Progression at first seems slow, but your brain gets used to it little by little and
it learns in an almost exponential way, so, after a while, you will notice an incredible
leap in your learning.
Immersion is the most powerful technique to learn foreign languages because it’s the
only one that gets you in touch with the spoken language in real life, without the tricks
used in language courses and teaching books.
But that’s not the only technique.
There are several other tricks you can use to speed up your learning.
I will show you those advanced techniques in the course How to Speak Languages, that
you can access at https://arata.se/speaklanguages