Do you want to know how to learn a language as fast as possible? Are you interested in saving
so much time that you end up reaching fluency in months, rather than years?
After 30 years of learning languages and 10 coaching others to do the same,
I believe I've finally figured it out. And today, I'm going to share it all with you: I'm going to
tell you how I would go about learning as much language as possible within 90 days.
If that sounds interesting to you, keep watching! And don't forget to stay until the end; if you do,
you'll get to hear the one piece of advice that will ensure that you,
too, can learn a language really, really fast! Hey, I am Luca Lampariello, I am a language coach
who speaks 14 languages. and on this channel I help people learn foreign languages more
efficiently, faster and in a fun way. So, how do you learn a language super fast? Let’s find out!
Not too long ago, I spent a month visiting Budapest, the capital city of Hungary. While
I was there, I became friends with Jonathan, a Belgian guy who happened to speak Hungarian.
I know a little Hungarian myself, but as I went around the city with him,
I remember being in awe of the comfort and fluency with which he spoke the language.
Curious, I asked him how long he had been learning Hungarian for. Given his apparent skill,
I expected his answer to be anywhere in the range of ten to fifteen years.
But no! He hadn't been learning for fifteen years, ten years, or anything in between. In reality,
he had begun learning Hungarian only TWO YEARS prior to my visit.
TWO YEARS?!? I had been learning Hungarian for SEVEN years at that point,
and I was barely even conversational. So what gives? What did this guy know
about language learning that I somehow didn't? What essential piece of the
puzzle was I missing that prevented me from learning Hungarian at that breakneck speed?
Now even more curious, I asked him to tell me as much as he could about his history
with Hungarian. I hoped that the details of his story would reveal something that I could use
to improve my language learning speed, too! The whole story is too long to recount here,
but here are the most pertinent details: He began learning Hungarian in a school that
followed an "immersion learning" model. Even from day one, the students were not allowed
to speak any other language but Hungarian. Shortly after that, he moved in with his
then- Turkish girlfriend, and they decided to use only Hungarian with each other.
After a few short months of a lifestyle in which both his home and school lives
were all in Hungarian, my friend was able to speak reasonably well,
and he had only gotten better since that time. This was fascinating to me. Hungarian is not
an easy language to learn for nearly anyone. It's not really related to any other languages
in Europe (with the exception of Finnish and Estonian), so most people learning the
language would struggle to speak it well even after a few years—myself included!
But, as I've just described, my Belgian friend's circumstances were very special.
He was able to immerse himself in the language practically from his very first day of learning,
and that gave him some immense advantages over most learners of Hungarian.
But what about those other learners? What about people like you and me,
who want to learn languages quickly, but don't have the benefits of an immersion
school and a Hungarian -speaking significant other. What can we do to learn a language,
and do it really fast, like my friend did? I think I have the answer, but before I
share it with you, let's begin by defining exactly what it means to "learn a language".
Clarifying this definition will give us a much better understanding of our goal,
so that we know exactly what kind of target we're aiming to hit by the end of our 90-day period.
Lots of people disagree on what it actually means to have "learned" a language,
or "become fluent". For some people, it means merely being able to communicate, while for
others, it means having a solid mastery of the language, as an educated native speaker might.
Personally, I only consider a language "learned" when I've reached a very specific skill level.
That level, in fact, is one of the six levels described by the Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages, or CEFR. If you're not familiar, the CEFR is what we use in Europe to
measure language proficiency. The CEFR has six levels:
A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2. In my opinion, fluency begins at the second
half of that range, precisely at the "B2" level. According to the Council of Europe,
the organization in charge of the CEFR, someone at a B2 level is able to:
Understand most TV news and current affairs programs, as well as the
majority of films in standard dialect. Interact with a degree of fluency and
spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible.
Present clear, detailed descriptions on a wide range of subjects related to my field of interest.
In my experience, a B2 level in a language is NOT something it’s genuinely possible for any
learner to achieve in three months, no matter the language. There’s quite simply too much to learn,
and too little time to do it. If you’re interested in learning more about why I
feel this way, please check out my video about the myth of reaching fluency in three months,
a link to which should be popping up now in the corner of your screen.
On the other hand, I believe three months is entirely enough time to reach a level of B1,
which is the level just below B1 on the CEFR scale. Let’s take a look now at what that entails.
According to the CEFR, learners at a B1 level can: Understand the main points of clear standard
input on familiar matters regularly encountered in work, school, leisure, etc.
Deal with most situations likely to arise while traveling in an area where the language is spoken.
Can produce simple connected text on topics which are familiar or of personal interest.
Describe experiences and events, dreams, hopes & ambitions and briefly give reasons
and explanations for opinions and plans. To me, those capabilities mesh well with what
I think of when I consider a language learned, and together, they are things that a dedicated
language learner can accomplish within 90 days. Okay, now we've decided to only call a language
"learned" when our skills reach the criteria for a B1 level, let's define another term: "fast".
When we say we want to learn a language "fast", how fast do we actually mean?
This is pretty subjective, since "three days","three weeks",
and even "three months" can all be considered pretty quick, from a learning perspective.
However, for the purposes of this video, we'll stick with three months, or 90 days. This might
not be fast by some people's standards, but it's definitely a short period of time compared
to the three or four years it likely took us all to become fluent in our mother tongues.
Alright! With our key definitions out of the way, you're now ready to learn exactly how I
would go about "learning a language fast", or, in other words, how I would reach a B1
level in three months. Let's dive right in!
Before I share this plan, let me explain a few things:
First, I'll share this plan as a series of steps that YOU
can follow in order to learn a language fast. Second, our end goal of "B1 in three months" is
only realistic if your target language is similar to your native language. If you're a native
English speaker learning Japanese, for example, the time period to reach fluency needs to be
adjusted to six or nine months, instead of three. And last, in terms of general structure,
I'll be explaining the steps month by month, and describing what you should do in each month in
terms of three things: WHAT you should do, HOW you should do it, and WHEN you should do it.
So let's begin with Month 1. Month 1
WHAT To begin your quest for
fluency, you need a good beginner language course to follow. The best, in my opinion,
are the "With Ease" series of coursebooks provided by Assimil. You can find them online
by searching for "Spanish with Ease", "French with Ease", "Hungarian with Ease", and so on.
Assimil's courses are particularly handy because of their excellent content and structure.
Typically, they consist of small, portable coursebooks that contain around 100 authentic
and interesting target language dialogues. Each dialogue comes with audio, a translation
into English (or some other language you know well), and short but helpful grammar notes.
Typically, Assimil is the only resource I recommend for the beginner stages of learning.
But since we want to go FAST, I'll recommend another resource to use at the same time:
Innovative Languages' "Pod101" or "Class101" language courses!
These courses, all of which have names like "GreekPod101" or "KoreanClass101",
are essentially massive collections of audio and video lessons, each dedicated
to a specific language. They often contain tons of authentic, useful language content that is
delivered alongside English translations, grammar notes, and all sorts of other useful information.
Access to these courses is subscription-based, but there are a bunch of different pricing options
to choose from, so you can usually obtain a lot of high-quality language content at very little
expense. And there's even a free trial! Best of all, Pod101 courses aren't just
limited to beginner content. I've learned several languages using these courses,
and they've served me well from the beginner level all the way to advanced proficiency!
So that's how I would start. After choosing my target language (say, Dutch),
I would pick up Assimil (Dutch with Ease) and then the appropriate Innovative Language course
(DutchPod101) HOW
Now that we have our resources, we need to know how to use them. If we wanted to
go at a normal pace, I would say pick either Assimil or Pod101 and do one lesson a day.
But our pace, of course, is anything but normal. We want to go FAST, so we need to do more each
day. A LOT more. Specifically, I recommend covering three lessons of Assimil and three
lessons of Pod101, every single day. But how exactly should we go
about doing these lessons? I recommend the following:
First, read the content and listen to the accompanying audio at the same time.
Next, read the text in your target language, and try to focus on the meaning.
After that, just listen to the audio by itself, and focus on the sounds of the language.
Once you're comfortable with the sounds, try to read the text out loud to yourself,
in an effort to build your pronunciation skills. Listen to the audio again, and repeat what you
hear as soon as you hear it. This is a technique called "shadowing", and it will
help you really improve your articulation. When you're done with all that, review the
grammar notes that come with the lesson, to help clarify any doubts you may have.
That sounds like a lot (and it is), but we're not quite done yet. In addition to
covering six new lessons each day (3 Assimil and 3 Pod101), you should also review the six
lessons you learned the previous day, either by re-reading or re-listening to their content.
That's a lot to manage, I know, but this kind of intensity is essential if you
want to attempt a B1 in three months. By the way, if your curious how to do
all this at a more reasonable speed, check the link in the description box to learn about my
Bidirectional Translation Method course, which teaches a lighter version of this
approach for people who want to simply reach the intermediate level (an A2 or B1) in three months.
WHEN We've got our resources, and we know
what activities we need to do. But for our first month, when should we actually do these things?
First off, you'll have to do this every single day. If you skip any days,
it becomes much less likely you'll learn your target language within the three month period.
Next, you must keep in mind that I'm recommending that you cover twelve language lessons each day:
six new lessons, and six old lessons (as review). For most people, that will take up to three hours
each day. Try not to exceed three hours, though, since that might lead to burnout,
which is the opposite of what we want. Do your best to schedule these three hours
of learning when you have the most energy. That will give your brain the best chance
of absorbing the new material. Take breaks here and there as you need, but always try to
make sure you're learning when you're most focused and engaged in the tasks at hand.
On to Month 2! MONTH 2
WHAT At the end of
the first month, you likely will have completed all of your Assimil coursebook, and most (if
not all) of the beginner content from Pod101. From here, you can continue on with Pod101, if
you'd like. However, I recommend trying a couple of new resources as well: LingQ and LingoPie.
These resources are useful at this stage because they are usable with a wide variety
of authentic language materials. Specifically, LingQ is great for learning from podcasts,
and LingoPie is great for learning from videos. More specifically, LingQ is a language learning
platform that helps users learn and practice new languages by providing access to a wide range
of lessons and activities, as well as tools for tracking progress and monitoring comprehension.
LingQ offers a variety of features, including a dictionary and flashcards,
and allows users to import content from various sources, such as websites, books,
and podcasts, in order to create personalized language lessons. The platform also provides
a community of language learners, where users can interact and support each other in their language
learning journey. I used it extensively for a number of languages, and in particular I had a
real blast using it to improve Mandarin Chinese! LingoPie is a platform that provides a a vast
library of high quality content in the form of video. It has a stunning design and it is fun
to use. It has excellent and vast TV content in many popular languages such as Spanish, French,
Italian, German, Russian and Portuguese, and it is great for learners in that it has a number of
features such as double subtitles that make the whole learning experience pleasant and rewarding.
Both of these resources are repositories of language content that is made comprehensible
for learners thanks to a variety of tools that each service offers. If you’d like
to check them out for yourself, look for my affiliate links down in the description box.
Both of these platforms have tons of great content to choose from,
and LingQ even has the option for you to upload your own authentic texts, so you can technically
make a "podcast" out of any text you want! When using LingQ and LingoPie,
you should follow two key guidelines: First, only learn with content you find
interesting. If you don't find something interesting, you'll be much less likely
to actually learn from it. So when choosing content, remember to always follow the fun!
Second, try to learn with content that you mostly understand, but don't completely understand.
This kind of content is what I like to call both "comprehensible" and "rich" content, because you
know enough to it right away that you can quickly learn and understand the parts you don't know.
So try to learn rich and comprehensible content every day. You've already been doing this with
Assimil and Pod101, but using LingQ and LingoPie will open you up to a lot more
challenging content that covers a wider range of content than your beginner materials could.
In the second half of Month 2, you might even want to hire a tutor, which you can do relatively
cheaply using services like italki and Preply. The goal here is to speak, but you want to follow the
same theme of learning (and discussing) content and topics that heavily interest you. Don't focus
so much on speaking perfectly; just speak and listen as much as you can, and your accuracy will
steadily and gradually improve. WHEN
As with month one, I recommend that you continue learning for at least three hours a day during
month two. If you can, however, try to push for four hours a day. You should be
more accustomed to intense learning at this point, so learning for this long shouldn't
burn you out like it would have last month. Adding another learning hour to your day will give
you more time to cover a greater range of language learning content (as provided by LingQ and
LingoPie), but it also gives you time to fit in the tutoring that I mentioned a few moments ago.
Speaking of tutoring, I recommend scheduling at least two lessons every week, at a rate of
one every three days or so. This will help keep costs low, and give you an opportunity to review
between each session. On to Month 3!
MONTH 3 WHAT
For this month, the answer to "what you should be learning" is simply "more of the same!"
You should be very comfortable with intermediate-level podcasts and videos in your
target language now, so for this month, you should try to broaden your content base and learn from
content on an increasingly wide range of topics. Fortunately, YouTube has a near endless amount
of videos in a huge variety of languages, so if you change your YouTube location to
a country where your target language is spoken. As you go through more content,
try to strike a balance between quantity (watching as many videos as possible) and quality (watching
videos which most closely suit your interests). You can also increase your ability to learn
from YouTube videos by using handy subtitling and translation tools like those provided by Language
Reactor. More about them in the description box. For month three, you can also continue working
with your tutor. If you feel like it, you can even look into hiring a second tutor, just so you can
gain experience talking to different people. HOW
The "How" for month three is roughly the same as in month two. Just read and listen to as
much content as you can, in the same way as you've already been doing. Similarly,
you can keep having conversations with your tutor on a wide range of topics that interest you.
WHEN For the "When" of Month 3, you'll want
to ramp things up even further. Assuming you took my advice for Month 2 and are learning for four
hours a day, for this month you should push for a full five hours of learning, every single day.
With the extra hour of learning, you'll gain a lot of benefit from more frequent speaking practice,
so this is the right time to move up to 3-4 conversations per week,
rather than the original one or two per week. This will help you inch ever closer to conversational
fluency by the end of the month. THE END (OR IS IT?)
At the end of Month 3, you'll probably want a way to determine if you've achieved your
goal of fluency in your target language. A good way to do this is to see if you
can manage a full, thirty-minute conversation with a native speaker where you are speaking
comfortably and confidently, and with little difficulty. If you can manage that,
I'd say you've definitely reached your goal! This, of course, is not an objective measure of
your skill compared to the B1 level of the CEFR. That's only truly attainable through studying for
an official CEFR test, which might take you longer than three months to do. But if you're
looking for that objective measure, then that's something you should look towards doing next.
Speaking of "next", that reminds me: whether or not you're able to have a thirty-minute
conversation in your target language (or even pass a B1 exam), you should plan on continuing
to learn your target language! There's no real "finish line" in language learning,
so you should always be open to learning more, and improving your skills in new ways.
Okay! That was a long one, but we're just about done.
Before we go, though, let's do a quick recap of everything we've talked about here:
First, it is possible to learn a language super fast, but it's impossible to know what
that really means until you define your terms. In my book, a language can be considered "learned"
when you reach a B1 level, and doing that "fast" would mean getting it done in about three months.
And then, if I wanted to reach a B1 level in three months, I would follow this plan:
In Month 1, I would grab two beginner resources (Assimil and Pod101), and cover 12 lessons a day
(6 new, and 6 old) for three hours a day, at most. In Month 2, I would use LingQ and LingoPie to
expand my learning content to authentic podcasts and videos,
respectively. I would also begin meeting with a tutor for conversation practice, and fit all of
these activities into at least four hours a day. In Month 3, I would do all the same things I
planned for Month 2, but I would broaden the range of content I learned from,
and upped the intensity of my learning plan. This means learning for at least five hours a day, and
meeting with a tutor three or four times a week. At the end of all that, I would determine if I
reached my goal by challenging myself to have a comfortable conversation with a native speaker
for at least thirty minutes. Additionally, if I had the time and inclination, I might
even sign up to take a B1 proficiency exam. Oh, by the way, if you want a more in-depth
look at the steps I take to learn any language from the very beginning, check out my course
Become a Master Language Learner, Level 1 - The Bidirectional Translation Method. In the course,
I go into exhaustive detail on my most powerful language learning technique,
and show you exactly how you can put it into practice yourself, in your own life.
That’s all from me for now. Thanks for watching, and, as always, happy language learning!