So you've been learning a foreign language for a while and you've got this horrible feeling
that you're not making progress anymore. Try as you might, there's a single thought
you can't get out of your head: I feel stuck. If you're in this situation, you might be
wondering "how can I get unstuck, and start making progress again?"
Lucky for you, I know just the solution! And even better, I’ve got a special surprise
for you that will help you implement this solution into your language learning, so you’ll
never get stuck again! Just remember to stay tuned to the very end of the video!
Hi, I’m Luca from LucaLampariello.com, I am an Italian language coach who currently
speaks fourteen languages, and I help people learn languages better, faster and in a smart
way. So, as I was saying, there's one point in
the language learning journey where even the most serious language learners get stuck.
A place where, despite their best efforts, progress just doesn't seem to come as easily
as it used to. This is a place most language learners call
The Intermediate Plateau. We call it a “plateau” because it’s
one of the first places on your language learning journey where progress becomes virtually flat.
It's not like the beginner stages, where you're seemingly learning new things every time you
sit down to learn. Nor is it like the advanced stages, where learning feels easy, like you're
just filling in the gaps. If you're stuck at the intermediate plateau,
learning feels difficult and slow. You're not seeing easy, daily progress, and you don't
feel competent enough yet to go out and make friends, read books, or watch TV shows or
movies comfortably. But let me quickly teach you something that
most people don't know about the intermediate plateau: it has a lot to do with your language
learning “comfort zone”. When you first started learning a language,
everything was fresh, and new. Because you were learning basic words and phrases, everything
felt risk-free, and relatively easy. As time went on, everything that once felt
"new" suddenly felt comfortable. You could understand a few things, say a few things—usually
just enough to feel competent at the things you wanted to do. And because you felt competent,
a certain range of learning activities became your "comfort zone".
This is probably where you are now. There's an expression that goes "what got
you here won't get you there". In a language learning context, it means that to move beyond
where you are now, you need to change how you do things.
And to move beyond the intermediate plateau, you specifically need to change how you go
about practicing your target language. You need to move beyond what I call "simple practice",
to a more challenging type of practice called "deliberate practice".
Deliberate practice is a research-backed form of skill development that involves breaking
down skills into their essential components, recognizing and addressing your weak points,
and then rebuilding that skill anew, stronger than it was before.
Language learning is, at its core, a set of skills, so if you can learn how to break down
and rebuild your skills in this way, you can learn to stretch your capabilities beyond
your "comfort zone", and finally get out of the intermediate plateau.
Take, for example, my deliberate practice-based approach to improving my speaking skills.
This is an activity I only engage in when I'm around the intermediate level, usually
three to six months after I start learning a language.
The first thing I do is find a reliable native speaker that I can regularly talk to. Most
of the time, I use a service like italki to hire a tutor that I can speak to every week.
Most people would stop here. They talk to the tutor a couple times a week about anything
and everything, maybe get some feedback, and then they probably never think about that
session ever again. That's simple practice, which again, won't
get you where you want to go. To deliberately practice my speaking skills,
I: Schedule regular, 30-minute sessions with
a tutor (usually once or twice a week) Prepare exactly what I want to talk about
before every session, including coming up with a list of words or key phrases that I
want to use. I direct the conversation towards the topics
and ideas I prepared for. I ask for specific kinds of feedback, tailored
to the exact aspects of my speaking skills that I want to improve.
I record the entire session (with permission), and save it for later review.
In the days after the session, I re-listen to the conversation, and note anything important
I want to memorize or address in later tutoring sessions.
As you can see, this process is much more involved than a typical tutoring session,
but I've found that it's exactly what I (and other learners) need to push their speaking
skills beyond the Intermediate Plateau, and towards fluency.
And although this is a process I designed just for speaking, the rules of deliberate
practice can be applied to all the other language skills as well, like listening, reading, writing—even
grammar and pronunciation. If you want your language skills to survive
beyond the plateau, this is the kind of action you need to be ready to take. You need to
narrow your focus on specific skills, break them down, fix them, and build them back up
again. If you've watched this far, you might be saying
"But Luca, I'm a busy person. How can I do all that, all by myself, when I've never even
reached fluency in a language before?" Well, that's why I'm here. After spending
over 30 years learning languages and more than 5 years coaching others to learn them,
I've visited the intermediate plateau again and again. I've learned its ins and outs.
I know where the pitfalls lie, and I've guided others safely past them.
Simply put, as a speaker of 14 languages, I can show you the way beyond the Intermediate
plateau, so that, even if you're ever stuck there again, you'll know just how to get unstuck
and find a way through. And now for the surprise I mentioned at the
very beginning: As I said, I know just the right strategies
to help you overcome the intermediate plateau, for your current target language and any language
you might learn in the future. And I want to teach them to you. Not just
one or two strategies, but all of them.
And I plan to do that through my brand-new six-week webinar course, titled Overcoming
the Intermediate Plateau. This will be a six-week webinar-based course,
where you will work directly with me, my team, and other like-minded language learners to
help take your existing language skills and bring them beyond the dreaded "intermediate
plateau", to the point where you can use your target language at a fluent, conversational
level. These are powerful methods that will challenge
your skills, and give you structure and direction at a time when language learning progress
is slow, and hardest to see. If you master these methods, you'll have everything you
need to finally become fluent, just like you've always dreamed of.
But don't take my word for it. Here's what some of my students have to say about the
very same methods you'll be learning in these webinars.
Hi my name is Brian i am not a polyglot, in fact french is the first language that i've
been tackling as an adult and i'm probably about the a2, b1 level right now, and I have
been studying for about a year, and i want to tell you a little bit about my impressions
of working with Luca. So before Luca, I spent probably the first eight months of this year
trying a variety of different methods, some focused on speaking right away, more grammar
study based, others using prepared stories and dialogues, and tons of different apps.
But what I think Luca offers that really separates himself from the pack is that he has a really
sound understanding of language learning theory and then on top of this theory he's built
really effective tools. So his language learning theory is distinct from some of these other
approaches in that he understands that the research shows the best way to learn languages
is more like how a child's learns language - by exposure to comprehensible input in that
in the target language um and this tends to work a lot better than just learning a bunch
of grammar rules or vocab lists and then trying to apply that knowledge. So that's first.
But then using this theory he's built a bunch of really effective practical tools that will
help you know exactly what to do every day when you sit down to do your language work,
whether you're studying for 15 minutes a day or an hour a day or more, and they scale really
nicely from the beginning stages all the way up to advanced stages. And also they really
allow you to use all this amazing free content on the internet to center your language studies
around, and plus they're just a ton of fun. So my experience so far with luca for the
last several months has been amazing, my French has been getting better very quickly and i've
been having a lot of fun at it, so it's my opinion that if you've come across luca's
content i think you should consider yourself really lucky, and just go for it just go ahead
and work with it so i just want to say thanks to Luca for sharing all this wonderful knowledge
with the rest of us. Hi my name is George Dick um a couple of weeks
ago i planted a couple of cherry trees in our yard and later was having a conversation
with somebody about fruit trees in general and he said” the best time to plant a fruit
tree is 10 years ago the second best time is right now” and that's really how i feel
about working with Luca. I can't even imagine the kind of progress I would have made in
my last 30 years of studying languages on and off if I had been working with Luca in
his methodologies. I really started working with Luca as a coach about a year ago. I think
the amount of progress I've been able to make in just a year compared to the amount of things
that I did that weren't particularly effective over the previous years is just amazing. Whether
it's starting a language from scratch or working up to something - i'm about to take the c1
exam um in a few weeks for spanish finally and i think i'm gonna pass we'll see - but
the the strategies that he has for getting better at speaking, getting better at writing
or just just astounding, and whatever service that he puts together is just something I
would jump at the opportunity to work with. I'm so glad that I found Luca when I did and
I hope that you take advantage of his methods sooner rather than later because you just
will be thrilled with the impact that he's able to have on your language learning adventures,
thanks a lot bye-bye!
These words fill me with joy. They are proof that when you’re armed with the right mindset
and the right tools, anything is possible. That’s why I am so excited to release this
live course. I can finally share my intermediate-level language learning techniques and strategies
with many more people than I could ever do in a one-on-one coaching session.
And if you think each of these webinars sounds exciting, wait until you hear about all of
the extras you'll be receiving, as well. Beyond the six two-hour webinars of the course,
in fact, you'll receive access to our: Two weekly 1-hour group calls with Luca to
ask questions and share your progress. Access to our BMLL learner community on Circle,
so you can interact with dedicated learners just like you.
Weekly missions, along with PDF guides that will teach you how to tailor the course techniques
to specific languages Monthly Q&A sessions with me and my team
And a lot more! Best of all, if you join this six-week course,
you'll automatically gain access to our video-based online version of this same course, when we
release it next year! So, what do you think? You now know everything
you need to know about my brand-new Overcoming the Intermediate Plateau live course.
Are you finally ready to conquer the intermediate plateau and reach the fluency you've always
wanted? There will be only 100 seats available for
this webinar series, and they will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis, without
exception, so if you are interested, please click the link in the description box to learn
more about how you can sign up. I’ll see you in the course. Happy language
learning!