Recently there was an interesting article on Lifehacker called I learned to speak four languages in a few years. Here’s how by Gabriel Wyner. He got in touch with me and asked to guest post about his relevant experience as an Opera Singer (as you can see in the photo!) to help him learn several languages really well, and I was glad to share his thoughts here!

Over to you Gabriel!

If you have the chance to see a vocal studio recital at a music conservatory, you’ll often see something remarkable.

In general, the students will sing pieces in various languages with varying degrees of success, and the audience will clap, and the singers will bow and this will go on for 40-60 minutes until the end, when the students usually sing pieces in their native languages. At this moment, something magical can happen. The singer and the audience both relax.

This is the moment when the singer’s language barrier disappears, and he is able to express himself fully, and even when the audience and the singer don’t speak the same native language, they will be able to communicate on a deep, emotional level.

Dropping this barrier in a foreign language is a serious challenge and it comes with a serious reward – my first moment without that barrier in German was what got me addicted to both singing and language study from that point forward.

Singing and language are inextricably linked; singing is, in some ways, slow motion, concentrated speech. At its core, the goal of a singer’s training is the same as the goal of anyone having a meaningful conversation – the goal of communicating with others.

And so, singers have a lot to offer language learners (at least, those who wish to communicate with others; some people study languages for their literature, or for the mental fun of it, for example, and they may find more suitable advice elsewhere!):

Barrier 1: Accent

A singer’s training focuses on dropping barriers between himself and his audience – language barriers, personal barriers, etc. – and parts of this training can be helpful for all language learners.

One of the first steps in this training involves eliminating the accent barriers between the singer and his audience, and I’d like to note that there are two barriers here: one, a German audience listening to someone sing in German with a heavy American accent will be uncomfortable, even if the singing is wonderful. There’s a wall between the audience and the singer, because the singer isn’t really communicating in their language; the audience needs to struggle to understand what the singer is singing.

Secondly, the singer is never really comfortable in this language; he’s struggling to make the sounds and doesn’t quite know what he’s doing. This is nerve-wracking, and makes both singer and audience uncomfortable, even if the audience isn’t German. These barriers are not unique to singing; anyone who tries to speak a foreign language will struggle with the exact same two barriers: native speakers will tend to be more distant when they try to understand a foreign accent, and you will be less comfortable when you’re wrestling with the foreign sounds.

In a formal conservatory education, singers overcome this barrier in 2-4 semesters of diction classes, where a singer learns the sounds of his own language, as well as the three main languages of classical music: German, French and Italian (and sometimes Russian, too!).

But wait a second! Why learn the sounds of a language you already speak?

As I mentioned above, singing is a sort of slow motion speech. If you say the word “Ride”, it takes you about a half of a second and if you’re an English native speaker, the amount of time you spend thinking about what your mouth is doing is approximately nil.

Now, if you’re singing the word “Ride” for 5 seconds, you suddenly have a whole host of decisions to make. Ride is composed of five sounds, depending upon how you count them. You have the initial R, you have two vowels – an “ah” and an “ih” – you have a D, and if you listen for it, you even have a quick “uh” after your D (otherwise it would sound more like “Rite”).

How much time are you going to spend on each of these sounds? If you experiment, you’ll find that RRRRRide and Rah-EEEEEEEEEEEde are both less than excellent options, and in the end, you’ll probably settle on spending as much time as possible on the “ah” vowel.

Singers learn this stuff because these choices are not necessarily simple or obvious, and they use the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) as a helpful tool. IPA shows you all of the sounds of a word, and “Ride” in IPA is written [ɹaɪd(ə)] (I’ve marked the “shadow vowel” after the D in parenthesis. Sometimes it’s written in superscript, like this ɹaɪd^ə, and sometimes it’s not written at all). IPA is a powerful tool because you can see every sound in a word, and with a little bit of practice, you can hear it in your head. This is helpful for singing, and extremely helpful for learning a new language.

Many French learners, for instance, have difficulty noticing the difference between the words “rue” and “roux”. French is a nice example because the spellings can be so complex. Words that rhyme with “rue” include perdu, dû, eu (only for past tense of avoir as in j’ai eu), aigüe, etc. (and roux, roue, tout, où, and goût all rhyme with each other).

These rhymes are a lot easier to recognize in IPA: rue, perdu, dû, eu and aigüe turn into [ʁy], [pɛʁdy], [dy], [y], [egy]; all these words end in the sound [y] (and all the others end in [u]: [ʁu], [ʁu], [tu], [u], [gu]). Making a few flashcards with spelling rules (-ou is pronounced [u], -û is [y], etc.) makes French much easier, once you’re familiar with the IPA symbols. Simply knowing how IPA and the spelling rules of the language interact is about half of the story – the other half is in learning how to hear and say the sounds accurately.

Learning this takes two steps:

• Step 1: Theory

You need to understand what the symbols mean in terms of your mouth and tongue. For instance, [u] is the same sound as in the English word “food”. Your lips are rounded, your tongue is high up, and it’s pulled back near your soft palate. [y] also has rounded lips, and your tongue is still high up, but this time, it’s much more forward in your mouth – in the same place as [i] (“Cheese”). I’ve made a video series that explains these concepts over here: http://youtu.be/-e66ByetpDY

• Step 2: Practice

Once you know what the symbols mean, you need to listen to recordings of native speakers saying various words while you listen for those sounds.

Go to http://www.forvo.com/ and put in example words like “roux” and “rue” and listen to the differences between them. Write out a list of words with difficult sounds and have someone on http://rhinospike.com record them for you. Try to mimic the recordings.

Once you’ve wrapped your head around the theory behind the sounds, it should take you 1-2 weeks of practice to start getting a real feel for those sounds in your mouth and to really hear the differences between them.

Barrier 2: Automaticity – Practicing the simple parts of a complex whole

Classical singing is one of the most natural and simultaneously unnatural art forms in existence.

Humans have been singing for thousands of years – it’s part of our nature. And yet, over the past 450 years, an art form has developed where a single person is supposed to get behind a 100 piece orchestra with trumpets, flutes, basses and horns and sing so loudly that they can fill a 3000 person concert hall – and do it beautifully, with a perfect accent and perfect style, all while hanging off of a chandelier in a giant viking outfit, or whatever else the director has in mind.

Each aspect of singing can be considered simple – in general, you need to raise your soft palate, release your jaw, breath into your diaphragm, etc. The common joke is that classical singing is just a matter of doing 18 very simple things all at once, and what you learn pretty quickly is that focusing on all 18 things (I think it’s more like 50, honestly) is impossible.

Since our brains just can’t handle more than 1 or 2 things at a time, the real goal is to make everything automatic with practice.

A singer who is worrying about the location of his tongue or jaw, or whether he remembers the next word in his text will have an uncomfortable time on stage, and the audience will usually feel that discomfort, too.

To solve this, singers take each aspect of their art and practice it separately: we’ll take a piece of music and learn the rhythm, and then we’ll learn the notes, and then the meaning of the words, and the pronunciation of the words, how those words feel in our mouths when we sing high or low, how it feels to do it with a raised soft palate, or with a released jaw, and on and on and on.

We alternate working on one specific aspect of singing with putting them all together in practice performances. By the time we get to the real performance, if we’ve done our jobs well, we can focus on what we mean to express, instead of how to express it.

Sound familiar? Languages, too, are comprised of tiny, simple pieces. Learning a single word or conjugation is easy. It’s just putting all of the tiny pieces together naturally that can be difficult.

So rather than focusing on trying to put all of these grammar rules and vocabulary rules together, perfectly, and all at once, practice them separately. I like to use Spaced Repetition software like Anki to break every complex language concept down into its simplest components – the words, the individual conjugations, the connecting words, any irregular pronunciations, etc.

Then I can practice putting them together when speaking. This process, of working on the small parts individually and of working on combining them them when reading/listening/writing/speaking builds up automaticity step by step, and that’s the eventual goal: to speak while focusing on what you mean to express, instead of how to express it.

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Gabriel is an opera singer, and part of his job involves singing in Italian, French, German, English, and Russian (and sometimes Czech, Spanish, Hebrew and Latin). After several unsuccessful language learning attempts, he tried his first immersion program in German in 2004 and got hooked.

Since then, he set out to see if he could become fluent in all of these languages. He’s gotten through German, French, and Italian and is aiming for fluency in Russian by September. He’s currently living and singing in Vienna, Austria, where he has been teaching English using these methods and has recently finished writing a book on language learning.

The companion website is at www.TowerofBabelfish.com, where these ideas are described in a bit more detail.

Let us know your thoughts on this post in the comments below!

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Dropping Barriers: What opera singers study, and how it can help you learn languages easier is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZcwpCgzMUk

Fun video to share with you today… in Esperanto!

Click “CC” to activate subtitles in English (as well as original Esperanto, added shortly. I’ll add any other language if anyone wants to email me translations), or if you’re in China (and not using VPN software to circumnavigate the “Great Firewall of China” as I’m clearly doing to be able to use Youtube) then check it out on Youku.

I made it to Xi’an, and after checking out some typical sites, thanks to a contact in the Esperanto community I got to meet Miaohui at his monastery, which is a bit outside of Xi’an along the Silk Road (China’s “Route 66″). He’s a Buddhist monk who also happens to be an active Esperanto speaker. Since I like to use my languages to share cultural insights, it only seemed right to make a video with him about the monastery and Buddhism in general.

First he gives me a tour of the most important halls and statues, with appropriate historic context, and then I sit down with him to ask him some questions. I hope you enjoy the video!

Esperanto as a useful language when travelling

As with several other videos I’ve made in Esperanto, the purpose is never actually talking about the language itself or how it works. I use it to socialise and experience other cultures, in much the same way as I have with my other languages.

As mentioned before, I don’t consider myself a passionate language learner, and dislike the learning process, so it’s very unlikely you’ll see me take on a language learning project without some real practical day-to-day uses for it, such as Latin or Ancient Greek (well… OK maybe there has been one or two brief exceptions). It would seem like Esperanto is the exception to this; surely I can only speak it with other “language nerds”?

Actually, people may be surprised to hear that I’ve spent an entire 7 weeks of my life just communicating in Esperanto. Both at Esperanto events, and from directly meeting up with other speakers and hanging out with them during my own travels, such as my day with Miaohui.

I always encourage people to spend just two weeks learning Esperanto, for the purely pragmatic reason of it giving them a boost in their main focus language. There was a great recent TEDx talk specifically about this idea of using Esperanto as a springboard to learning other languages. But moving on from that, those you can use Esperanto with make it all the more worthwhile to learn.

At Esperanto events, I’ve made some fantastic open minded friends, and sang, laughed, argued, flirted (and more…), played, explored and eaten with them there. And while travelling, I’ve met up with other speakers who I know will share the philosophies of the community of open mindedness and friendliness, while being modern and forward thinking.

One way you can meet Esperanto speakers in many cities is via Pasporta Servo, which is kind of like Couchsurfing, only it started many decades before. I also simply use Couchsurfing itself and search for speakers of the language and Google info about the local city’s community. It turns out every city in China has an active Esperanto community, and I’ve met up with several speakers in this trip already!

Of course many of them are into language learning and travel, but we tend to talk about whatever else comes up. In many situations, the structure of the language actually lets you be more expressive than non-constructed languages.

Esperanto is bigger than you think!

It turns out that Esperanto is pretty big online! There are actually more articles in the Esperanto Wikipedia than there are in the Arabic version!

On my way to meet Miaohui, I wanted to read up on Buddhism, so I took out my Amazon Kindle 3G, and simply accessed articles (from the bus) in Esperanto about Buddhism. You’d be surprised how many articles that you typically read have an Esperanto translation linked on the left!

There are plenty of Esperanto materials online, like news sites, lots of dictionaries, radio and podcasts, and an excellent multilingual site that acts as a free means to learn the language, active forum, chatroom, dictionary and much more at Lernu.net. For those of you in the states, you may be interested in attending an upcoming Esperanto learning course in Texas in June. I started learning the language at a similar event in Europe, SES.

And plenty of software interfaces can be changed to Esperanto (especially if they are open source), with spell-checks, and even including entire operating systems! Of course, Google Translate added Esperanto to their list of languages recently too.

To add to the mix of Esperanto stuff to read, the multilingual copy of my Language Hacking Guide will soon be updated to include this language

Contrary to what you may think, there are indeed many native Esperanto speakers, and while the numbers of speakers are hard to give precisely, many estimate it to be several million worldwide. Whether it becomes the international second language that some dream it should be, or not, doesn’t interest me as much as the fact that right now there are plenty of ways to use it and to make some cool friends via Esperanto. I hope today’s video demonstrates one such example!

Let me know your thoughts on this language and the video in the comments below!

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Esperanto video and how useful the language can be: Interview with a Buddhist monk and tour of monastery is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

When you understand “language genes” to be something that some people have and you don’t, then you’re being ridiculous. I’ve seen this in many iterations: language talent, gene, skill, knack etc., and today I’m going to tell you why I think it’s all nonsense.

The part of your genetic makeup that helps you deconstruct and understand languages is clearly already there as you can understand what you are reading right now. So congratulations, you have “the language gene“… just like every single other person on the planet (who doesn’t have a real communicative disability).

To discuss it beyond geneticists pinpointing genes things that we all have for biological research purposes is madness.

So, getting more to the point – is the ability to be able to speak a second (or third) language something you are either born with or or not?

A multilingual planet; we’re ALL born with the “gene”

Look, most of the planet speaks multiple languages. Many places in the west have a huge amount of speakers of two languages, like Quebec, Catalonia, Switzerland etc., where the place itself has two (or more) recognized official languages. Then in many countries in northern Europe it’s quite typical to speak English very fluently as well as one or two foreign languages, and that’s on top of your native one.

Here in China, everybody in the country learns Mandarin, but at home they tend to speak a “dialect” (which, many would argue should be called distinct languages, as unintelligibility can be quite frequent between dialects). I’ve already met several people who can converse in two “dialects”, as well as Mandarin.

In India, it’s quite common to come across people who can converse in five languages, which are as distinct from one another as European languages are.

If you happen to be an American, then don’t forget that your heritage comes from countries that have plenty of people who speak multiple languages, so pulling out the “genetics” card is as weak an excuse as they come.

To suggest that some people can not be born with the inherent potential to become a polyglot (or definitely fluent in at least one other language) is pure insanity! If you, with exactly the same genetic makeup, were born in Brussels to a European diplomat father and a different nationality mother, the only way you could possibly be monolingual would be if they went out of their way to shield you from all but one language.

The fact that a monolingual culture breeds monolinguals doesn’t say jack about your true inherent potential.

In the nature vs nurture debate, to me there is no room for doubt: Your environment, genuine need, attitude, time invested, exposure and other such things (many of which are totally in your control as an adult) are what decides it.

In a country of monolinguals, any average intelligence visitor looks like a genius

The only reason such ridiculous concepts as “language talent” are entertained, are when it is done by a monolingual country that is not used to the phenomenon. But things can change.

I’m reminded of when I was in my early teens, and known in my town as a “computer genius”. One of my first jobs was in the local computer shop, where I would be driven around town to solve people’s computer issues. They stood back in awe as I glanced at the issue and in the blink of an eye solved all of their Windows 95 woes with just a few casual clicks.

However, the truth is that the only difference between me and them is that I had put a lot of time into sitting in front of computer screens, playing around with settings, reading some manuals later on to understand it better, and I wasn’t intimidated by the technology, but embraced it as an inevitable part of the future. Really, all I was actually doing in these awe-inspiring computer-wizz-kid sessions was putting in a floppy disk and clicking the .exe file to install a driver, clicking “settings” to undo some simple alteration the user had done, adjusting the monitor’s contrast settings with the buttons on the front, and once I actually “solved” a problem by plugging in the damn printer.

The fact of the matter is that I’m not a computer genius. Absolutely everything that I did back then, pretty much any one of you reading this now would be well able to handle because you’ve been using a computer for at least a few years. I wasn’t hacking into the FBI or reprogramming operating systems, I was just clicking stuff. From an outside perspective, when a computer is this untamable beast, it looks like an incredible feat. But once everyone can do it, you see how run-of-the-mill it really is.

No matter how impressed people in my town were, clearly elsewhere in the world lots of others could do the same, and a few years later pretty much anyone can. So clearly, I wasn’t born with something as ridiculous as a “computer genius gene”.

This situation is precisely how I see the current awe awarded to successful language learners by monolingual countries. Those of us who have learned one or more foreign languages are not necessarily any smarter than you. We are the like the people who knew how to use a mouse and were confident enough to press “Next” in the early 90s, which is now totally the norm.

When someone looks at me in awe that I can speak a few languages, I roll my eyes exactly the same way I do when an elderly relative looks at me in awe because I can digitally remove red-eyes from a photograph.

Ah, but what about supercalifragilisticespialiadicioushyperpolyglots?

There is no black and white, have-it-or-not elusive “language genius”. I’ve seen a few TV spots and even noticed an entire book that tries to put very successful language learners on a podium, to be wondered at as glitches in the matrix, whose brains absolutely must be scanned, or whose genes must be spliced to find proof that the rest of us can be lazy because they were blessed from birth.

The way I see it, it’s very simple: Some people fail to learn a foreign language because the way they did it was inefficient, or some other reason in their environment made it trickier.

Some people on the other hand found a way that was efficient for their goals and situation, or conquered that barrier when others would have given up upon reaching it. Because of this, they successfully learned a foreign language. No inherent genes, just finding a way that worked for them. A champion of spirits, not a champion of brains.

A smaller number of people did exactly the same thing a couple of times, each successive time slightly easier than the previous one. Impressive? Maybe, but it’s just repeating the same process over again, improving and getting a little faster with more experience.

And a smaller number of people still, devote a considerable amount of time, effort, blood, sweat and tears, to repeat the process over and over so they speak a bigger number. In my opinion, they aren’t “geniuses”, but they should be congratulated for their dedication.

I see this title “hyperpolyglot” floating around and I just see it as another way to needlessly put people on pedestals above the rest of us mortals. Firstly, it’s silly – isn’t that a redundant double “many” prefix? What’s next – hyperpolygamy for when your orgies are more than a baker’s dozen? Hyperpolyunsaturated fat for I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-50%-fat-butter?

Commitment, not talent, is the deal breaker

It’s time to stop making excuses.

People do impressive things because they work hard at them.

If they don’t seem to work as hard then there is probably a good reason behind it. If someone can learn vocabulary quickly, then maybe they have a well structured system for remembering it, which pretty much anyone could adapt themselves too.

The only “talent” someone has is that they have the patience to sit down and study longer than most others, or to get over their fears to speak the language earlier., or to put up with painful experiences to get over annoying plateaus, or find ways to make the experience more enjoyable, or whatever it may be that gives them their edge. The “edge” is perhaps inherent to them; they are determined, focused and passionate. But these are indirect to language learning, which is a non-gene and a non-talent issue.

Passion can be nurtured, determination can be inspired and focus can be reached. None of this is placed upon your DNA helix on conception.

The tributary contributing factors can be learned, and you can even try to emulate a part of their success if you decide to devote yourself enough to it. Most people don’t have the level of devotion of those at the very top, and this is a psychological and strategic failure, not a genetic one.

It’s simply not fair to dismiss these people as geniuses with talent and who “pick up” languages, as if they casually find a pretty penny when out for a stroll in the park. They are as human as you, but worked harder. The lesson shouldn’t be “stand back in awe as they work their magic”, but “get inspired to try to work maybe even half as hard, and you could achieve something half as good”.

Half as good as amazing, is still pretty damn amazing.

Stop using genetics as an excuse holding you back. If it has held you back thus far, well, self-fulfilling prophecies are pretty good in doing that.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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The Language Gene delusion is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyoyZv2sXx4

Here it is! My video of the epic 2,000km (that’s about 1,250 miles in “old money” as we say) train ride I took to get to Chengdu, starting from Shanghai. This video shares the people (and pandas) I met along the way! Click CC to enable subtitles (in English, and traditional or simplified Chinese) or watch the video on Youku here.

The last videos I uploaded were from Shanghai. From there I got a fast train to Nanjing and you can see me check out the Confucius temple there at the start of this video. Luckily, you can buy your ticket for this train just before boarding it in Shanghai.

Next, I wanted to head on to Wuhan and was thinking of getting the ferry through some of the river between there and Chongqing, but unfortunately, getting to the train station 2 hours in advance wasn’t enough and I had to stay in Nanjing longer than I had planned so extra travels had to be cancelled if I was to continue onward. From then on, I would buy my tickets a little in advance.

After just a day in Wuhan, I got the most interesting train of all, which was a 16 hour ride! I got the “soft sleeper”, so I could get a decent night’s sleep and arrive in Chongqing well rested. Most of this video covers that train ride and the chats I had with those I was sharing the carriage with.

You can see the moment that they gave me my Chinese name! What do you think?

本领 (Benling) means “ability/skill”, since my new friend 李慧 LiHui was impressed with my language story. There could have been a word closer to Benny, but in her accent the ‘n’ and ‘l’ sounds are closer, which took some getting used to at first before I could understand her better. I think the confusion is a happy coincidence since it works with my initials B.L. Since I have it on camera as them giving me this name, I think it only fits to stick with it!

To pass some of the time, LiHui read a decent amount of the Language Hacking Guide (which is of course in Chinese too, along with 2 dozen other languages [next addition coming soon as a free update: Esperanto!]) on my Kindle and shared her thoughts with me on camera.

Her party left at around 11pm (they had gotten to their hometown of Enshi), so I turned in and some time later the two girls I talked to in the morning came in.

I stopped in Chongqing for a few days, and on my way out went to buy the ticket for the following week to Xi’an, since my original plan was actually to cover 2,800km by train all the way there. I wanted to take the hard-sleeper this time to see what kind of people I’d meet there instead, despite a poorer night’s sleep. But sadly, all tickets were sold out (including soft-sleepers) over several days that I would have travelled apart from standing room.

Hmm… Standing for 17 hours straight, with no assigned place to put my bags… OR getting a one hour flight that wasn’t particularly expensive… not such a hard decision . I’ll also be flying from Xi’an to Qingdao in a week, to save time and get to know the coastal areas better – I’ll hit the trains again from there, but I’m sure it won’t be as interesting as this longer journey!

Finally, on the last leg of the trip, on another fast train, I made another friend and met up with her here in Chengdu! Yesterday I checked out the famous panda sanctuary, and now I’m ready to head towards Xi’an!

I hope you enjoyed this video, as it shares what the whole point of learning the language was for me in the first place; not speaking Chinese with perfect diction or passing an exam or adding another one to the list, or proving myself etc., but to meet and chat to interesting people as I travelled through this country! Just using English, this trip wouldn’t have been a fraction of how interesting it was!

Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts on it in the comments below!

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2,000km train journey video: Benny gets his Chinese name, makes new friends and meets pandas! is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Today, I want to encourage more people to learn Chinese.

If you already speak Chinese and disagree with the premise of Chinese not being super-duper hard compared to every other language and are angry at me for daring to take it off this untouchable pedestal you’ve placed it on, then TOUGH LUCK. I’m not writing this post to you. I hardly ever write posts to experienced language learners – they don’t need encouragement, the rest of us do.

What I’ve read from those who write about Chinese, and especially the discouragement I’ve been given (only ever online) tells me how much the Internet needs some positivity for people considering learning this wonderful language, so they don’t get scared off. There’s nothing to be scared of when you compare it to learning other languages.

Today I want to write a retort to an article about how hard Chinese is, as well as the “shi shi” poem and so many other points that so many people sent me to prove Chinese’s difficulty, relative to European languages.

I’m but a social speaker of Mandarin. I can’t hold philosophical debates in the language, or write essays in classical Chinese. But this week I made a new friend on the train and we talked for two hours straight about many things without using any English, and just today I took her out for dinner for another 2 hour chat. I’m currently 2,000km deep inside China and got here by train, reading signs, buying tickets, ordering food and most importantly: genuinely socialising in Mandarin. I still have plenty of work to do to tidy it up, and you will continue to see me progress in the language as I upload more videos, but right now I have a useful enough amount of Chinese to have an opinion about its difficulty, and today I want to share that opinion.

I have a lot to say on the subject. This is only the first of several posts discussing learning Chinese (other posts will discuss specifics of how I’d recommend learning particular aspects), and it’s already the longest post I’ve ever written on the blog.

“Mastering” Chinese can indeed take a long time to do, but getting to a very useful intermediate level is well within the reach of most people, and from that point progressing further won’t be that bad. It is indeed hard work, but if you put it side by side with European languages, then saying it’s “damn hard”, or “orders of magnitude harder than European languages” is nothing but an exaggeration, usually made by people with no actual familiarity with the languages they are dismissing.

Comparing to “easier” languages

There’s something I want to be clear from the start: learning any language (except something like Esperanto) is hard work. It takes serious dedication, sacrifices, countless hours of hard work, feeling embarrassed, getting out of your comfort zone, studying dull grammar and seemingly endless amounts of vocab and much more.

Sadly there is no magic pill to get around this. I’ve found that with an efficient learning strategy it can certainly be a manageable task, even for us mere mortals who did poorly in languages in school, but (unless you have some natural knack for it) it’s definitely hard work, no matter what language you learn.

So the point of this post isn’t to tell you that learning Chinese is a walk in the park – hell, anyone who has read the blog over the last few months has seen that it’s been a draining experience for me. But here’s the thing; everything that has been “hard” about Chinese is something that I have found to be a challenge in every language I’ve learned (unless I speak one very close to it already). The struggles to understand the fast streams of noise, the challenge of trying to convey my thoughts in a coherent manner despite recently starting to learn the language, dealing with people speaking at normal speed, forcing yourself to remember words in a high-pressure situation, and every other issue that you have to deal with when learning any language.

The reason I want to write this post is very simple; too many people avoid Chinese and pick what they consider to be an “easier” language, because they are too intimidated. Even though their true passion may actually lie with Chinese. This is a very sad state of affairs.

Learn Spanish or French if you really want to learn them. And learn Chinese if you really want to learn it – ignore wasteful discouragement from people that it’s on some higher level of difficulty. This is pure and utter NONSENSE.

The fallacy of saying European languages are always easier

Too many people dismiss European languages as incredibly easy in comparison to Chinese, and in the vast majority of cases they are basing this on nothing but speculation, and can’t even converse in those other languages. They just “know” they are easier based on glances at formal text that they get the gist of. Well, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to pay close attention to it:

When it comes down to a direct comparison, then I can honestly tell you that Spanish was HARDER for me to learn than Chinese. My spoken Chinese level is superior to what my Spanish one was after about the same number of hours invested.

This is why you’ll never get me to budge on this. The reasons are quite complex (my learning approach with Spanish was terrible, I was ashamed of making any mistakes initially, it was the first foreign language I properly tried to learn etc.) but at the end of the day this European language was a greater challenge to me than Chinese has been. When you ignore essential factors of motivation and approach, then comparing languages is pointless.

You can try and interject with “all things being equal” but they never are. You simply can NOT put Chinese and French side by side and linguistically analyse them and be sure that one is harder than the other, because if someone is moving to China, has a Chinese exam to pass soon, wants to get in touch with their roots, is passionate about Chinese history etc. then they are a hell of a lot more motivated to learn Chinese quickly than they are French. Telling them that French (or whatever) is “easier” is simply WRONG. If they were to try to learn French they’d be frustrated and get nowhere because they don’t care about it like they do Chinese.

Take out the human factor when mechanically comparing languages and all you’ve got is academic puffs of air that hold no value at all in the real world.

Unlike so many Chinese learners who dismiss European languages as easy I do know a lot about these languages, I AM justified in making comparisons. I’ll stick to the usual ones that are pointed at (French & Spanish), but point out the obvious fact that European languages are incredibly varied, so the concept of the label in the first place is flawed. Some of the biggest branches of languages in Europe are the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages, and a language in one group is a world apart from a language in another group.

If you are learning Chinese, then perhaps these arguments might give you that boost you need that your counterparts learning European languages aren’t quite strolling through a rose filled garden themselves, but I want to mostly focus on pointing out that within Chinese itself, the gloom-and-doom points brought up by many aren’t as clear cut as many people make them out to be.

Why Chinese is damn hard – a critique

I have so many things I want to write about for Chinese, to help people try to take it on and see it as a manageable task based on my experience of learning it to at least a useful level, but today rather than offer my specific advice, I’m going to retort some of the biggest arguments that have come up when comparing it to European languages.

To do that, among other things, I’m going to critique a pretty well known piece online, called “Why Chinese is damn hard“. Believe it or not, I like this piece and recommend you read it – it’s well written, in a tongue-in-cheek style, (it reminds me a lot of Mark Twain’s piece on “The awful German language“, which is hilarious, albeit discouraging) by someone with plenty of experience with Chinese. I’ve also been told by those who know the author personally that he’s a cool guy, and I’m sure we’d get along!

The piece may be written in a not-so-serious tone, but the arguments themselves have been used many times to compare Chinese to other languages, so I think it’s a good place to start.

So go have a read, and when you are feeling a bit gloomy that Chinese will take forever to learn, then come back here to read me go through some of his pretty unconvincing points Anything I quote from his text will be in blue.

Treating Chinese like all languages

“Part of what I’m contending is that Chinese is hard compared to … well, compared to almost any other language you might care to tackle”

This hasn’t been my experience when comparing it with Spanish. And the author has (apparently) never learned any other language (other than English) to the same level that he has learned Chinese. This tells us from the start that most of the article will be based on speculation, rather than actual experience in comparing languages.

“…Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but it’s also hard in absolute terms…If you don’t believe this, just ask a Chinese person.”

Uh huh. Ask a typical Parisian, a Czech, a Hungarian, a Pole, and many others, and I guarantee you they will tell you that their language is “the hardest one in absolute terms”.

I’ve heard this broken record of “THIS is the hardest language” so many times over the last decade for almost every language I’ve taken on, that I consider it nothing more than background noise. Whenever I take on my next language that too will be “the hardest one”, and so will the next one and the next one. Each time the person who tells it to me will be absolutely sure… even though they usually have no basis of comparison. I’ve written more about this ridiculous hardest language concept here.

People’s opinion of their own language is clouded by ego, pride and lack of familiarity with other languages in most cases. If the opinion isn’t helpful in any way, discard it as irrelevant.

The writing system

I’ve got so much to say about the Chinese writing system! It is way more manageable than you would think! But for now, just a few retorts:

“The Chinese writing system is harder to learn, in absolute terms, than an alphabetic writing system”

I have to agree with him here, but I have a wonderful way around this problem!

You see, I simply don’t write. Like, ever. I don’t dip feathers in ink and I rarely scribble on a dead tree.

If you do, then good for you I suppose and you can ignore this point, but all the “written” communication I do is via technology. I send text messages, write emails, use online chat programs and the like, and have been doing all this in Chinese on a daily basis. To type all of this, you just need to use pinyin. Chinese people do it this way themselves (I’ve seen people try to write text messages in Hanzi characters on their phone and its cumbersome and incredibly slow in comparison).

Computers convert it to Hanzi for it to be sent in real Chinese. Most interfaces have contextual extrapolation included, so when you write the pinyin for various characters in many cases it knows what you mean.

When there is ambiguity, you need to point out the characters yourself, but rather than intimately knowing every single stroke, as long as you have a pretty good idea of what a character looks like then not only can you read it fine, you can write it very fast!

Because of this, writing Chinese (more specifically typing Chinese) has only been slightly harder than writing any other language, especially when you learn to work with your computer efficiently.

Since pinyin is just as easy to learn as any alphabetic writing system – the true difficulty mostly comes in recognising those Hanzi characters:

“What about the sheer task of memorizing so many characters?”

If you prefer to use technology rather than tie your hand-written notes to pigeons’ legs to communicate with people, then all you really need to do with a Chinese character is recognise it, rather than write out every single stroke in precisely the right order. In this case, things simplify for you immensely.

With an effective association system, you can indeed learn to recognise these characters quite quickly! This lets you both read a text, and type it by selecting the appropriate character from your pinyin.

I’d highly recommend people check out Memrise.com for some fantastic inspiration for quickly remembering Chinese characters.

For example, the character 大 is pronounced “dà” and means big. If you imagine a person stretching out his arms indicating “I once caught a fish that was THIIIS big” then you will actually find it hard to think of anything but “big” for the meaning.

Now, when I see this character, I don’t even think about it. It’s pronounced dà (I used the same technique for any other language to associate the sound, more on incorporating the tone as well in another post later) and it means big, or it has that kind of “larger” sense to contribute to a word, e.g. 大学 (big learn) is “university”, compared to 小学 (small learn) for primary school, and 中学 (middle learn) for high school.

We do this all the time in the west. You see picture-based representations such as:

and you know immediately what they represent and how to pronounce that concept, even though no phonetic indication is given. Note that you can also recognise these among other similar looking icons, even though you may not be able to reproduce them from memory precisely and render an impressive artist’s impression of each. This is the same way I treat reading Chinese.

For more complex Chinese characters, you have to take a minute to think of a good way of associating it with something, but you get the hang of it and can quickly fly through them. Even in complex characters, it gets easier to do this with practice!

For example:

學: the character for “learn” (this time the traditional variant), used in school, student and many other learn-based words. The part underneath is 子 and can mean child, so I think of a young person wearing a battered up hat with stitches in it (sort of like the one I wear at the start of this video), because he’s a poor student. Stroke order is irrelevant because I see the entire pictograph as one concept and remember it immediately.

For way more examples, go to memrise.com, or read the first 100 character entries of Heisig’s book which is free online (I wouldn’t recommend you buy the whole thing though; I’ll write why another time). If you ignore stroke order (irrelevant for typing) and focus on visualising the entire character, or putting component parts together, it gets easy fast. To me 大學  (or simplified 大学) jumps out to be pronounced dàxué and just is “university”, the same way any of the images I’ve put above jump out to mean the brand or concept they represent.

And before you know it, you can read aloud while understand the underlying meaning of a character. You won’t be reading as quickly as European languages any time soon, but it’s certainly more manageable than people would have you think. I’ll come back to this in more detail later.

So many characters to learn!!

Let’s think of the sheer number for a moment. It’s hard to know how many to learn, but a few thousand is more than enough for the vast majority of people, as it’s said that around 2-3,000 will be all you’d need to read a newspaper, and what most educated Chinese people know anyway (if you want to aim higher than an educated Chinese person, then it’s your funeral, but some of us don’t go for overkill). There are other characters, but unless you study linguistics or literature professionally, I don’t see why you’d need to care about things you’d see once every few years.

OK, so 3,000 sounds like an immense number – even impossible! But hold on a second – sure, if you are trying to learn the entirety of Chinese in a few months, this figure could stump you unless you had an incredibly intensive project specifically about reading the language. But most people will be learning over a year or a couple of years. If you learn just ten characters a day (and with a good mnemonic system, you’d get through these in 2 minutes, and then perhaps another few minutes to review the right ones from the whole set using a good spaced repetition system), then you’d have everything you need in less than a year.

Less than a year seems pretty fair enough for this supposedly monstrous writing system that makes Chinese so famous as being that hard. I honestly think you could get them down in a much shorter time if you were really devoted.

But it’s actually much easier than dealing with 3,000 individual pictographs! Each character is not an island. Even though I haven’t been focusing on reading as much as others have, I am already starting to see so many patterns emerge that make learning a brand new character almost instantaneous. I’m sure books explain the concepts well (as it happens, I didn’t really come across any in Taiwan – any good resources online, let me know in the comments), but many learners are aware of the general concept of how some radicals help with pronunciation, and then quite a lot introduce the general meaning of a character.

For example, as a vegetarian one thing that helped me immensely is how many vegetables have the same radical above them that implies that it’s a vegetable or grass related. Spinach is 菠菜, green onion is 葱, tomato is 蕃茄, potato is 薯, aubergine (eggplant) is 茄子, lettuce is 莴苣, and so on. Can you see the same fence looking component on the top?

And the pronunciation component, while very far from consistent, can actually be a huge help! Since it’s the name of the language, one of the first things you will learn to read is 中文 (Zhōngwén). But that first component will come up a few times in “new” characters. You have 种, 钟，肿，all pronounced zhǒng, (actually there are WAY more, this is just a really quick sampling), and the other part of the character gives a hint as to what it might mean, such as 肿 having the 月 component, which tends to mean “flesh” in many cases – this character means to swell.

It’s not immediately obvious, but when someone scares you with the boogie monster of Chinese’s ten bazillion characters, then the way they say it, you’d swear each character is based on spaghetti that someone puked up, rather than being incredibly consistent and even limited. 3,000 seems like a big number, but that’s typically the number of steps many of us take in a single day.

Vocabulary

“…over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones. But what such accounts don’t tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words “up” and “tight” doesn’t mean you know the word “uptight”.)”

This is actually a vocabulary issue, which every language has – for example, “uptight” in Spanish (depending on the context) can be mojigato, which has nothing to do with cats This particular point has nothing to do with writing systems, or anything to unique to Chinese, and (like many points in this article) just confirms that “learning any foreign language is hard work, no matter what language”.

“(The existence of both traditional and simplified Chinese) … puts an absurd burden on the already absurdly burdened student of Chinese”

Having dealt with both sets, I don’t see what the big deal is. Quite a lot of the characters are exactly the same, and only a handful are different enough to really require the extra work of learning a completely separate character. I see it as more along the lines of learning two words for two different cultures, like English’s high school versus secondary school, or Spanish’s coche versus carro.

Quoting from an article on HackingChinese about simplified vs traditional Chinese:

“(Very different characters) are very, very far from being typical. Let’s have a look at the following characters and see if you think they are easier:

• 銳　－　锐
• 銘　－　 铭
• 釘　－　钉
• 鎮　－　鎮
• 釣　－　钓

Doesn’t look so scary, right? As we can clearly see, the only thing that has changed in these characters is the radical: 釒-> 钅. It takes about five seconds to learn the above characters, provided you know either the simplified or the traditional version first.”

In more complex versions, I simply learn two characters if I have to. (I use Pleco for learning my Chinese and it presents both at the same time, so I learn them both similtaneously as I’m travelling in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong), and in most cases they really aren’t that different. When they are different they usually follow a very distinct pattern. You may see 車 within many traditional characters, and it’s just replaced with 车 in simplified ones. The work you put into distinguishing these two characters actually gives you dozens more “different” characters for free.

“In Taiwan I could pass a shop with a sign advertising shock absorbers and… (not understand it)”

Here he uses the example, that in French you might come across the word amortisseur and just need to remember the pronunciation to find out what it means, while looking at Chinese characters leaves you helpless.

In fact, Chinese is so much easier than any other language I’ve come across to deduct the meaning of something. A much smaller subset of prefixes and suffixes (to use a European way of looking at it) pave the path to much more words.

So using the same example the author has created, let’s say that I come across the following in Chinese:

减震器

I see it advertised on a product or something and would like to know what it means.

Now, if I am a new learner of French, then there’s little chance I can figure out what “amortisseur” means, other than knowing that the -eur ending can sometimes mean “he/that which does” like English’s -er, which is quite vague – is it a person or a thing? OK, well the part before that is amortiss – what’s that then? With enough experience in French you learn that conjugation issues (which don’t exist at all in Chinese) add in an -iss component to many words.

OK, so we are left with a likely core word (after some serious grammatical extrapolation, which is tough until you get to intermediate stage) of “amortir”. Still, no idea though if you’ve never come across this word before.

Now, Chinese makes this so much simpler.

减

This comes up quite a lot – it is pronounced “Jiǎn” and usually means reduce. For example 减肥 means “to lose weight” (reduce fat) and 减价 means “sale” (reduce price), so if you have learned enough characters it’s very likely you’ll know this one. Next,

震

means to “shake” – let’s presume you don’t know this one yet. And

器

usually means “tool”/”device”, and you really can’t miss this in Chinese!!

So after this, you know it’s definitely some kind of a tool for reducing something. In French, trying to deduce it from the ground up, you just know the word is likely a person or a thing that does something, which is hardly as helpful.

With a little context it’s way easier to extrapolate that the Chinese word means what it could be, than the French version. I only took this example since he used it in his text, but there are WAY better ones!!

This overlooked aspect of Chinese is crucial! You get all these more complex words for free after you learn as many core components as you can. This goes for both spoken and written, since you will hear reduce-something-tool when listening to someone (see phoneme issues below), so when he follows up with:

“You can’t cheat using cognates”

Then I have to say that yes, you can cheat. You can “cheat” by having a much smaller subset of word-building components to deal with, and the meaning can be much more obvious and in many cases you can even guess it!

Let’s say you wanted to guess how to say “bottle opener” in French. Well, bottle is bouteille (Take that Chinese-without-similar-looking-words!) and open is ouvrir. Where do you go from here though? Add in an -eur again? bouteilleouvreur? Actually, it’s décapsuleur. Hmm, seems a little harder to guess something that looks more like decapitator, but I suppose it makes sense in a weird way, since it’s de-cap-ing the bottle. Still not something that jumps out at you.

In Chinese? open… bottle… tool: 开瓶器 Simple and effective, and quite hard to forget once you hear it once! I don’t know about you, but I find open-bottle-tool way easier to remember than de-cap-er. Any Chinese learner knows these syllables/characters (or at least their pronunciations), so will have no problem coming up with it. When you get to 3 characters, then you can be pretty confident that whatever your computer/smartphone suggests is pretty much the only right answer, even ignoring tone markers. This means that you can write this and only one possible set of 3 characters will come up that you can be confident to go ahead and use, even if you don’t know these ones yet.

And you actually find that when you look at pretty much any multiple-syllable word, it makes a whole lot of sense based on the components. There are plenty of exceptions, but it’s a lot easier to figure out what something is the first time you see it, or give a stab at what it might be if you know enough component characters. In European languages, this is possible in the likes of Czech and even German, which builds a lot of words quite logically, but much less possible in Latin languages in the same kind of simple consistency.

Apart from relying on cognates, it’s REALLY hard to guess what a word could be from scratch in Spanish or French, but you can give a pretty good attempt in Chinese and you may even be right!

When European languages do have this simple common components building upon one another to give overall meanings, in many cases there are complex rules for how they interact with one another (like the French -iss, or German vowel changes), but in Chinese you just plonk one after the other.

You can’t “cheat” using cognates, but if you learn enough core components of words, then you start to leave your European language learner counterparts behind in the dust.

In fact, Chinese is so much more consistent in how vocabulary is formed than European languages.

Something someone else wrote on the subject of encouraging Chinese learners:

[  Let’s consider the word for a common ailment which occurs when the lungs become inflamed with congestion. In Chinese, this ailment is called 肺炎, or taken character by character, lung inflammation. In English, this condition is known as pneumonia, a combination of letters and syllables of Greek origin, which hold little in common with the conventions of modern English. In English we have hepatitis. In Chinese, we get liver inflammation. In English when we eat the meat of a pig it’s called pork. In Chinese, it’s pig meat. And in English when you have a problem with your toilet, you find a plumber. In Chinese you call the water pipe worker.   ]

Learning new vocabulary in Chinese is incredibly intuitive. This more than makes up for the fact that you aren’t given a head start with a large list of cognates – it almost seems too easy at times when you hear a brand new word and instantly know what it means, whereas in many European languages you would be able to offer nothing but a blank expression back.

Now I should definitely add in here that there are cognates with English in Chinese. The way pretty much everyone says goodbye/see-you is 拜拜 (bàibài), which is a direct borrowing from English’s bye-bye. Technology, product, brand and country words and many others are actually exactly the same, albeit following strict rules of usage and tones (for example I have to pronounce Ireland like an American would, rather than how I would, and remove the ‘d’: 爱尔兰 Ài’ěrlán). More on this later – but you are NOT starting from “absolute scratch” when you are learning Chinese, even if Europeans get more of a head start.

“Imagine you are a diabetic, and you find yourself in Spain about to go into insulin shock. You can rush into a doctor’s office, and, with a minimum of Spanish and a couple of pieces of guesswork (“diabetes” is just “diabetes” and “insulin” is “insulina”, it turns out), you’re saved.”

Yes, they look the same. But if you say to a Spanish doctor: énslen (what he’ll hear), you better hope he has a pen and paper handy. In my experience Spaniards are not so imaginative in guessing things not pronounced correctly.

As it happens, I am allergic to peanuts. Inconveniently, I can’t just say “peanuto” in Spanish or “les peanuts” in French, and despite what the author says, no amount of guess work will get me anywhere without a dictionary handy. It requires learning an entirely new word: cacahuete / cacahuète. When you are selective about your examples, you can indeed make it seem like French is just English spoken through your nose and Spanish is just English spoken with an -o on all words. No such luck in the real world.

Remembering cacahuete, a four syllable word is much more work than remembering 花生 (hua-sheng) – two syllables, with component words meaning “flower-life”, both of which you are very likely to know even in the early stages of learning Chinese. I maintain that learning vocabulary in Chinese is much easier than in European languages, since they are much shorter, almost always more logical based on the component characters, and of course there are no declensions or genders to remember with it. If you rely only on cognates in European languages, you’ll run out of luck quite quickly…

Use of the language

“Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated”

We can forgive the author for this one, as apps like Pleco weren’t available back then. I haven’t had any trouble understanding things I see, since pointing my phone at the text, or writing it out if it’s more calligraphic, almost always gives me what I’m looking for.

The inefficiency of paper dictionaries isn’t something that should concern people in this century. Pleco is only the first of many tools that will open this up to many people.

When I hear something I don’t understand, I write it out based on the pinyin on my phone and show them a few examples that come up and they point to the right one (this example though would indeed work with a dead-tree dictionary too).

“If you think that after three or four years of study you’ll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you’re sadly mistaken” .

Confucius died 479 BC. Voltaire died in 1778! That’s 1778 AD in case there is any confusion!!

This point really seems like it’s clutching at straws. Of course French from 200 or so years ago isn’t too hard to understand. Compare it to reading LATIN, not reading modern French!!

Perhaps it’s important to refer to some old Chinese once in a while, the same way we do with Latin. Fine: tempus fugit, a priori, Cave canem – I can learn these phrases off and sprinkle them into conversations to make me sound smart if I really want to, without learning how complicated Latin is.

Either you are complaining about Chinese in this century or you are complaining about Chinese from thousands of years ago. Pick one. Good god, who cares how hard a language from 2500 years ago is? If you think I do, “you’re sadly mistaken”.

“Unfortunately, classical Chinese pops up everywhere, especially in Chinese paintings and character scrolls”

Oh noes! Not character scrolls!

It’s not like you trip over them all the time here in China. I saw some of those character scrolls around the Chinese New Year. I didn’t understand what they meant and someone explained some to me. Interesting, but not quite so relevant to helping me the rest of the year.

The same way if you are in Rome and keep seeing Latin written in some places, you can ask. You’ll be enlightened, but it won’t help you do anything else in Rome but read the rocks.

Tones

“Tonal languages are weird”

Obviously a major point that people bring up about Chinese, but it in the end I can’t say it’s that bad. When I started learning, I put a lot of effort into distinguishing tones (both listening and speaking), so when I’m consciously focusing I can tell you what tones a spoken word is, or say a word with the right tones myself.

This just takes a bit of practice. We have tones in English too, (although they indicate mood rather than meaning) and when you realize this and make the right associations you start to distinguish the tones in Chinese much easier. I demonstrate this in this video (it’s about Thai, but a lot of it is quite relevant to Chinese).

I add in a tone in my association of learning any word and will expand on this later, so I have no trouble including tones in my vocabulary learning.

Although, when speaking quickly I still tend to mess up quite a few tones. This isn’t a big deal because rather than calling Chinese a “tonal” language, I’d prefer to call it a “contextual” language. Even when I say something with completely the wrong tones, someone will almost always understand me because the context makes it clear what I’m talking about; this includes people with little or no prior exposure to foreigners.

In other words; getting your tones right is not that big a deal for communication. It really isn’t. But it’s important for sounding eloquent. How I’m fixing my tone problems (as well as my hesitations) to have nicer sounding Chinese is something I’ll get back to, but to be honest tones have been the most minor of my problems over the last months.

When you get used to it, mā, má, mǎ and mà sound as completely different as rebel and rebel do in English. Work on it and it won’t be weird.

And here’s the thing – as much as people complain about tones, I find them incredibly helpful! They distinguish a syllable in a noticeable way so that it stands out. I gives Mandarin its distinctive “choppy” sound, so you will almost always hear every single syllable very clearly. Compare this to French!! Sure, French is not so bad to read, but where do all the consonants go when its spoken?

In Chinese, you have an individual syllable that falls in a very small range of possible sounds, and the tone gives you that extra information about it. When you sing it out, you start to hear the differences between how things sound.

Tones are very much different to what we are used to, but it’s just another thing to learn, and you can. If you keep telling yourself that it’s “weird”, then this attitude will always make it foreign to you. Just accept it and embrace it, and it will become second nature to you.

The Shi Shi poem: Chinese homophones

Those are the main points I had issue with in the “Why Chinese is so damn hard” article, but there are plenty of other arguments that he didn’t get to.

During my time learning Chinese, about twice a week someone would post a link to the shi shi poem on my Facebook wall. I got so sick of seeing it, but despite that I’m going to share it with you today:

Shī Shì shí shī shǐ

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

What on earth is this? Why, it’s further proof that Chinese is damn hard of course! Since the language has a much more limited way of forming sounds of word components than European languages, where many letter (and thus sound) combinations are possible for any given syllable, this means you have a much smaller subset to deal with, which are distinguished by their tones or context.

Sounds like a nightmare right? Especially when you see a poem like this crop up as if people actually speak like that all the time. In fact, the poem really looks like this:

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。
氏時時適市視獅。
十時，適十獅適市。
是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。
氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。
石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。
石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。
食時，始識是十獅屍，實十石獅屍。
試釋是事。

(Full Wikipedia article here)

It was specifically designed to demonstrate the need to use Chinese characters, since pinyin doesn’t convey the meaning as well. But the poem itself is a bit nonsensical. A few problems with it include:

• When spoken it’s absolutely and totally incomprehensible to every single native Chinese speaker that has ever existed. That includes Confucius, a Peking university graduate and any one of the billion people who speak Chinese or its dialects today, unless they read it. This isn’t like “she sells seashells on the sea shore”, this poem is absolutely meaningless without Chinese characters, and as such it is pointless to care about how it sounds.
• The poem uses some turns of phrase that simply can’t exist in modern Chinese, such as not adding a second syllable to “lion”. You can do this in classical Chinese, but there’s a catch…
• If the poem works better in classical Chinese, then you should read it as you would read classical Chinese! Scroll to the bottom of the Wikipedia article for how it would sound in classical Chinese, for example: “dʲi̯ěɡ dʲi̯ər dʲi̯ěɡ dʲi̯əp ʂi̯ər, dʲi̯əɡ ɕi̯ər ɕi̯ad, sli̯əɡ dʲi̯ěɡ dʲi̯əp ʂi̯ər dʲi̯ad ɕi̯ad.” I can’t quite say this, but it’s clear these words don’t sound the same (there are g’s, p’s and d’s at the end). So basically it’s a classical style of Chinese, pronounced in modern Chinese. This is like pronouncing a Latin poem using modern Portuguese phonetic rules.

It’s a great demonstration of the need to use Chinese characters, but is a poor demonstration of how hard the language is when you realize it literally sounds like gibberish.

But back to Chinese in the real world; as I said above, I’ve found that two syllables together give you a much smaller set of possible meanings. But going with an example in the “so damn hard” article:

“How is it possible that shùxué means “mathematics” while shūxuě means “blood transfusion””

Now, I would like to know exactly when you could possibly think someone is talking about one over the other. Seriously, give me a real world example where confusion will arise! If someone asks me what my favourite subject in school is and I accidently say 输血 rather than 数学 then are you really going to think that I’m taking a medical course?

You’re dealing with a human being, not a computer that will say “error, error: first tone, third tone does not compute!” People know what you mean. I’ve used my not-so-great Chinese with enough total strangers to know this.

However, with a little practice you will just know it that xue pronounced with a second tone must mean learn, and you can’t say it any other way.

Most examples (and I’m sure there are plenty) of embarrassing examples, are actually similar stories of embarrassment that you’d find in any language. But with enough context, it will always be clear what you actually mean, and such examples are given only to scare people.

In English we also have homophones. When I say “way”, do I mean a path, or do I mean “weigh”? Seems so easy when you see it written down. Well, if I’m on a hiking trek and I ask you if you know the way , then you can be pretty confident that I’m not interested in how much the mountain weighs. Confusion could arise, but it doesn’t. And it’s all thanks to CONTEXT.

Context tells you what character someone means, and makes the question of homophones irrelevant. Context tells you what something is if a tone wasn’t clear, and context helps you fill in the gaps when you don’t understand.

Measure words

I didn’t see this complained about in some articles, but since some bring it up, I’ll mention that Chinese uses measure words and this can be annoying to some learners. Actually, I loved them!

You see, if you take a little time to learn this very small set of words that tell you what kind of noun is to follow (it’s a flat thing, it’s a long thing, it’s a room of some sort, it’s a liquid etc.) then what this means is that if you hear a word that you don’t know, the measure word is a clue to help you figure it out!

If I’m in a noisy bar and someone asks me if I “want a $/!·$()” and I don’t hear or understand that last word, I can’t really do much. In European languages the gender of a noun rarely gives you much of a clue as to what the noun is. They could be asking if I want a dance, if I want a cigarette, if I want a bathroom break, etc. but in Chinese you will hear the measure word, such as 杯 bēi, and know that the word that follows must be a drink of some kind, even if you are not so sure what that drink may be.

In engineering, adding redundancy to a system (including a communications system) increases its reliability in case any errors might come up. So when you make a phone call, the 0s and 1s being transmitted aren’t just your voice being coded, but there is extra information in case environmental factors lead to the signal being deteriorated in any way. This is how I see measure words in Chinese – they add that extra little bit of “redundancy” into a sentence that you can be extra confident of its meaning, and it can help you extrapolate any following words by providing you with more context.

Long live measure words!!

European Grammar

Before I wrap up, it’s important to note that arguments for how “damn hard” Chinese is, always focus on points it has that European languages don’t have, and brush off things like European grammar as an afterthought.

European grammar is where the vast majority of your work lies in learning to use those language correctly. Chinese doesn’t have a hint of definite/indefinite articles, verb tenses, verb conjugations, plural nouns, inflected cases, complex pronouns (and possessive is simply created by adding ‘de’), word genders, and a host of other things with annoying linguistic titles I’d rather not use. Word order isn’t that complicated – in most cases it’s the same as English, and adjectival phrases can take a wee bit of getting used to, but are very much logical.

When learning Spanish, I remember being so intimidated by this HUGE book I had of its conjugations. 14 different tenses, with vowel changes, way too many irregular verbs, and so much memorisation. Even if you know that the verb “to tell” is contar, when you start to hear it used in its many iterations it becomes unrecognisable. Present tense cuéntame, past tense contaste, conditional contaríamos – when you see these written down it looks pretty simple, but when you are in a conversation and all these new syllables come from out of nowhere and the ‘o’ suddenly changes to a ‘ue’, you get lost very quickly. In Chinese? All 14 of these tenses, all 6 of the conjugations within all of them – they all boil down to one word.

One… word.

And it’s like that in many cases. Something incredibly complex in a European language boils down to being conveyed in the context in Chinese. Context is your friend, and you will know what someone means when you are genuinely using the language with them, even after learning for just a few months.

You can’t dismiss grammar as one point that European languages “win”, where Chinese wins everything else. It’s a HUGE load off your mind!

Conclusion

Many people will feel the need to retort this post saying that they found Chinese to be very hard, and I agree with you! Of course it was hard, but that’s because learning a language is hard.

I could write a post 17 times longer than this one about why I found learning Spanish to be so painful, but when it comes down to it what I have now that I didn’t have then was a positive attitude.

As I look at the Chinese learning journey that awaits me, what I need more than anything is plenty of practice, learning lots of new vocabulary, and above all, to hold my head up high and to keep going in high spirits, and let other people complain amongst themselves about how hard it is, while I focus on using the language in the real world and on sources that help and not hinder me. Outside of “interesting” theoretical discussions about hardest languages, such discussions have no practical applications for individual language learners.

Ignore the scare tactics. Chinese isn’t as hard to learn as you think. Take it easy – if something challenging comes up, take it in your stride and remember that many people before you mastered this particular point, and that for every aspect of Chinese that you could complain about, those learning every other language in the world have a completely different list of reasons why they should be complaining. So why bother? You aren’t going to get a medal if you beat someone into admitting that your task is harder than theirs – nobody wins in such pissing competitions.

If you are learning Chinese, then forget how “damn” hard it is compared to those “lazy” European language learners. You’re fooling yourself and you’re wasting time. Stop thinking about it, and focus on learning the language itself. It’s not that bad, and when you do conquer some of your biggest challenges on this adventure, then you are ready to use the language with a very large number of interesting people and a pretty huge chunk of this planet.

Reporting live from deep within China, I can confirm that ignoring how hard it is compared to languages that you are not even learning, and focusing on the task at hand instead can get you very far

Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments below. Just know that I have no interest whatsoever in someone “proving” to me that Chinese is hard, as this helps nobody. Shoot someone else down, as I don’t have time for discouragement; I’m too busy speaking Chinese Thanks for reading, and if you enjoyed the post, don’t forget to share it on Facebook etc.!

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Why Chinese isn’t as hard as you think: over 8000 words of encouragement for potential learners is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Someone thinking you are a native speaker of your target language is the holy grail of language learners. It’s something many of us dream about, but then sigh to ourselves that it’s just never going to happen.

Well, today I want to burst that bubble and tell you that many people genuinely thinking you are a native speaker of your target language IS possible, and way sooner than you think, without requiring you to absolutely master every possible aspect of your target language, and thus waiting until your hair has gone grey.

You see, I’ve personally been confused for a native French, Spanish and (Brazilian) Portuguese speaker on so many occasions that I’ve lost count, and this is despite not even being able to even introduce myself in any of these languages before my 20s.

To help you understand how I’ve done this, I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news. Let’s get the bad news out of the way first:

Being mistaken for a native (if you aren’t one) 100% of the time is pretty much impossible

Anyone who reads this blog long enough knows that I really hate this word “impossible”. People overuse it a lot, and I will correct you almost always if I hear it.

But I’m using it here because 100% of the time is so much as to become unrealistic. It’s a perfectionist demand and a pipe dream, even for those who are much better language learners than the norm.

I was listening to an interview with Richard Simcott the other day (best known from his hyperpolyglot video). I can’t hold a candle to his language achievements and listening to him speak on Youtube, his accent is incredibly convincing in many of his languages.

But in this interview he said something that echoes my opinion: he has never in his life come across a language learner who is mistaken as a native the entire time, including himself.

If you speak your target language enough, you’re always going to find someone that will hear you slip up, especially in demanding contexts like if you are talking to a linguist or putting a video of yourself online for scrutiny by many thousands of people. Even the most accomplished language learners have slip ups that I’m aware of myself… but it’s because I’d be listening out for them.

Realistically, most people you will meet are not linguists or are not scrutinizing you enough to notice

This lack of full scrutiny by absolutely everyone you meet is the crucial reason why being confused for being a native becomes so much easier.

For example, a mission I had a while back was to convince Brazilians that I was Brazilian. In the end I was successful, and in social situations (bars and parties), several people genuinely believed I was Brazilian, even if it was just for a half a minute of continued conversing after introductions. I’ve made it much longer in both French and Spanish though before the truth comes out.

A few months later I recorded a video in Portuguese and uploaded it. Some people felt the need to point out how they think I dreamt up all the times a native was absolutely convinced I was Brazilian and pointed out based on this video, they’d never think it in a million years.

Well duh, I’m wearing a leprechaun outfit, you’re watching the video on a Youtube channel called Irishpolyglot, you know where I’m from before you even press play, I actually say “welcome to Dublin, Ireland” and you are scrutinising the video specifically to see if I sound like a native and can easily point out a few mistakes I make. (This is forgetting the fact that it was several months living on the wrong side of the planet with no practice).

So no surprise that I’m not Brazilian! That’s one hell of a starting-point to work against!! This is not how the real world works. If the goal is to convince everyone on Youtube then I give up right now! Satisfying the entire world is not something I care much for! As Bill Cosby once said:

I don’t know the secret to success. But the secret to failure is trying to please everybody.

In social situations, people don’t know where I’m from, and they are not testing me. They are just being social. I tell them my name and what I do, and skip the “where I’m from” bit until it comes up later. People are relaxed and so if I start speaking to them in their language, then it’s just a case of not making my slip ups obvious and they will presume that I’m one of them until proven otherwise.

When your starting point is this guy is likely a native then it’s WAY easier to convince someone by trying to keep your mistakes as infrequent as possible (while still having a few that might slip through), than it is if your starting point is “this guy is a foreigner and I know this for a fact, but I shall analyse his intonation, rhythm and correct use of phrases, and then, if I’m impressed, hand him the ‘good-as-a-native’ badge”.

Thankfully, you are very unlikely to come across a huge number of such dull people in your day-to-day interactions with a language.

How it really works: way less about phonology, way more about context and how you behave

Sounding like a native does indeed (obviously) entail speaking as closely as possible to them. The way I’ve greatly improved my accent, at least in Portuguese and Spanish, was to take singing lessons. Singing is a wonderful way to train yourself, and if you get a music teacher with a good ear he/she can point out what you are doing wrong to sound more authentic way better than any language teacher ever will.

There are many ways to work on these sounds, some of which I’ll come back to another day (one such trick is what I’m attempting to get rid of my hesitations in Chinese, even if sounding like a native isn’t something I’m worried about right now; more on this later if it works well!) and of course it’s important to be good with the language overall, and use slang/expressions/have a good scope of vocabulary etc.

But this isn’t actually what truly makes the difference in someone thinking you are a native speaker. Sounding like a native and acting like a native are completely different and it’s important to be aware of this.

I’m reminded of a Swedish guy I knew in Spain while I was preparing to sit for my C2 exam. His Spanish was impeccable – he could quote Cervantes at the drop of a hat, knew the most obscure Spanish words you could think of, was writing complex essays in Spanish and when he spoke, he sounded exactly like a Spanish newscast reader. He definitely sounded like a native speaker.

So how often do you think people thought that he was from Spain? Most likely never.

The reason is that his body language screamed I’m-not-Spanish. He kept at a very unLatino distance from people, walked around with his eyes far too wide open for some reason, was stiff and unanimated whenever speaking, and even though we would be out in a party using curse words and the like, his fashion style was “preppy”, and he would keep his Spanish formal and polite. Even though his Spanish was certainly technically superior to mine in many ways, my ability to blend in was way better than his.

One reason I suggest that people are your greatest resource is that you simply can’t learn things like body language, social interaction rules and how you should act, what clothes you should probably wear and so on, from being locked away in a room with books. You can probably Google a lot of this stuff, but you can only emulate it such that it becomes a part of your personality if you spend time with people of that language’s culture.

Language, culture and context are intertwined.

For me “learning a language” involves a lot of this stuff. I analyse how people walk, how they react if they are angry, how many seconds their hugs tend to be, if wearing sports shoes is common, how fast or slow they walk and as many other things like this as I can.

When you focus so much on this stuff, then if someone walks up to you and sees the pose you have, what you are wearing and how you feel at home, then they will think you are at home until proven otherwise. Then you can give a 90% convincing job, with a few mistakes being brushed off as you coming from a strange town or having slurred speech, until you make a major enough boo-boo to get the “Where are you from?” question.

Multiple countries means multiple opportunities

To take this further, you can greatly increase your chances of being confused as a “native”, if the native you are aiming for is not the same native that you are speaking to.

Unfortunately, a Spaniard has rarely thought that I’m also from Spain after a few seconds, but many South Americans have! I obviously don’t look Peruvian or Mexican, but since it’s not so common for native English speakers to have a high level of Spanish (as unfortunate as American, British etc. monolingualism is, I use the general attitude to my advantage), if your Spanish is good then they’ll hear which accent it is and go for that.

This means that if you are as white as me, you can still be confused as a “native Spanish speaker”, if you go for a Spanish or Argentine or other accent where people look like you do.

Similarly, only one French person has ever told me I sound convincingly French. But thanks to 3 months in Quebec, I have a bit of a Quebec twang at times and if I force it then it’s so unlikely for an Irish or American person to speak with that twang that quite a lot of Frenchies presume I’m Quebecois.

Now remember, I’m not saying that I sound like a Quebecer all the time or could convince you if you were analysing me – just that a French person who isn’t intentionally scrutinising my accent who meets me in a social situation may casually think that I am one. Interestingly enough, the reverse is true, and at the end of my time in Montreal after I had improved my French greatly, several people thought I was French, since I still spoke with my Parisian-learned accent.

And finally, a country like Brazil is so large (and ethnically diverse, so no worries about having white skin), and Portuguese is, as yet, not such a studied language, that if you speak a little strange they will presume you are from some other state, or even Portugal.

In each of these languages, you know you’ve slipped up if someone says “your French/Spanish etc. is very good!!” I actually prefer not to hear this compliment, and aim to hear it ideally not at all when learning a language (in Chinese I hear it several times every day, from natives who say it mostly to offer encouragement, so I know I need to work on improving my level. The less I hear it, the better I’m doing).

The greatest compliment of all is something that I beam with pride when I hear, along the lines of “Which city in Spain/France are you from?” and the reaction that follows when I say where I’m really from.

It gets easier depending on who you are talking to

Being confused with a native speaker is a two way road. It depends on your skills to emulate the speakers (both outwardly and in how they actually speak) and it depends on the person you are actually talking to.

Most people you meet are not language experts, and are not trained in distinguishing phonemes and the like.

Someone absent minded and not particularly clever can be fooled quite easily, someone listening to you but who has probably never spoken to a foreigner before or has stereotypes you are not currently satisfying can be fooled sort of easily, someone who has met many foreigners before and sees you in a social event likely filled with other foreigners can be a really tough nut to crack, a demanding linguist should only be attempted if alcohol is involved (for him, not you), and (in the words of a fellow frustrated video poster) Youtube trolls can kiss my accent.

So keep this in mind – you can indeed get that fantastic compliment of someone genuinely telling you they really thought you were a native speaker. It’s much more complex than simply “speak better/improve your accent”. More complex, but also much easier

Hold on – what about skin colour??

Since I’ll of course get this question, I’ll throw it in before I wrap up: what if you are learning a language where the ethnicity of the people who speak it is very different to yours?

First of all, don’t forget the solution I mentioned above; if it’s for Spanish you can get confused for a native because countries like Argentina and Spain have a huge white population. But there are plenty of places where this of course can’t work.

For example, I’m an Irish guy learning Chinese. So even if I had excellent Chinese – hell, even if I had a brain transplant with a Chinese person, they still wouldn’t be convinced because of my white skin.

So all hope is lost? Not quite…

Something else I can tell you about being Irish is that the reverse is also true. When I was growing up, Ireland simply wasn’t the kind of country that had immigration. I very rarely remember seeing people of different skin colour in my home town, and never even saw a black person before (in person) before going to university in Dublin.

When I did go to university I met someone with dark skin, and I asked where he was from – and he said Ireland. What?? I couldn’t accept this – Irish people are white - end of story, no exceptions. But it happened again… and again… until eventually it got through to me. Times have changed in Ireland and the Celtic tiger (the economic boom of the 90s) had such an influx of new people from all around the world, that now even my home town is a much more interesting place. There are children from my town who don’t look like me, but I don’t doubt their Irishness one bit.

What I’m getting at here is that times change. Yes, right now it’s pretty much “impossible” that someone will ever think I’m Chinese (and that’s forgetting that I still have plenty of work to do to improve my level), but the world is a small place and even a country with a billion people is not a closed country.

When I was in Thailand two years ago, I met a girl who spoke to me in English with an American accent. I asked her where she was from and she very seriously told me “I’m Thai”. She had been born in Thailand due to the large number of expats there, grew up attending a Thai school, and had an equal balance of Thai and expat friends. In fact she had only ever spent a total of a few months in America in her life and got her accent from her parents. She was a white girl (in her early 30s), but she was Thai.

She told me that nobody has any problems accepting her as Thai, even if at first it might seem strange. I suspect that as more people like that crop up, it will get less and less strange.

Nothing is impossible. Mark my words, some day, it will not be in any way strange to call a guy as white as me Chinese, and that will make it all the easier for late adult visitors like me to get confused for one

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So what do you think? Ready to dive back into your language knowing that being confused for a native speaker might not be as far off as you think it is?

It’s a great buzz and a fantastic compliment, and I can highly recommend it! But much more important than the ego boost is that the locals accept you as one of them, treat you as an equal, and talk to you as they would with their local friends – even when they are consciously aware that you are a foreigner, when you act and sound like a local, the foreigner-treatment starts to disappear, and you truly feel welcome. This is what makes it all worthwhile in the end.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

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Why getting mistaken for a native speaker is much easier than you think is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOmG-ufK0UI

Note: this video is not an update of my Chinese level, because I recorded it the day after the previous one (John is also a co-host on Chinesepod). [I actually do a little worse with my Chinese than the previous video because I was a sick this day and tired because of it.] Youku link on the way shortly.

I interviewed the show’s other co-host Jenny in Mandarin, and she throws in plenty of English words (as she does during her podcasts, she’s probably used to doing that in that recording studio with a white guy beside her), and then she gives us a tour of the Chinesepod offices, eventually transitioning to mostly English. All parts of the video are subtitled in English, and traditional/simplified Chinese (click CC on Youtube to activate).

As stated in the video, Chinesepod ended up being my favourite resource (apart from the obvious one) for improving my Chinese, especially my listening comprehension. This review has no affiliate links and I’m not paid by Chinesepod, so this is just my honest opinion. I’ll point out a few of my favourite features here, but mention the major drawback that this is a premium paid product, and as such may not be for you because of its price.

Chinesepod’s level system

When I started off, Chinesepod was one of the resources a lot of people had mentioned for me to try out. I’ve tried language learning podcasts out before and found that they fail miserably due the major issue of being stuck on the same level (usually too easy to be a real challenge), and covering the exact same content you can get from any decent course (basic travel and the like). Because of this I tend to advise people to go straight to native content.

But if it’s possible to transition in with something easier than typical native content, then it’s good to take advantage of that! And luckily Chinesepod managed to solve these two major problems I have with other podcasts; they actually have quite a large amount of varied content and separate each podcast into one of six different levels.

They attempt to take inspiration from the European Common Framework system, where Newbie and Elementary are A1/A2, Intermediate is B1, Upper Intermediate is B2, and then Advanced and Media are C1/C2. I wouldn’t agree that they have it down precisely, but it’s a good enough ballpark to make it so that you can stick to a level that works for you, while aiming to bring yourself up as part of a long-term strategy. For my own purposes I currently have no problem understanding their Intermediate podcasts, but still struggle with their Upper Intermediate ones, and this is from lots of forcing myself up a level throughout my intensive 3 months learning the language.

So from my first week I started off on Chinesepod’s first level: “Newbie”. I didn’t quite find this to be so unique – you’ll have covered this kind of stuff in any beginner’s course already. Then I moved into “Elementary” and stayed there for about a month. In this level there is a very short dialogue, followed by the hosts explaining (in English) what everything means, and the lesson usually lasts for about 15 minutes.

All levels that I went through (Newbie, Elementary, Intermediate and Upper Intermediate) have the format of a brief introduction, then the actual dialogue (played multiple times in the lower levels, and only once in intermediate levels but is much longer), then the rest of the recording is for picking apart that dialogue so that the listener understands it entirely, as well as any thoughts from the host about what’s happening.

I’ve glanced at the Advanced and Media levels, but the discussions are much more complex, so I still can’t quite follow them enough to check them out.

In lower levels, they give a word-for-word translation in the discussion after the dialgoue, as well as a more appropriate natural translation. This idea of two different translations is something I definitely appreciate, and find that the likes of Assimil do it in their courses, and that it helps immensely in learning the target language.

Once Elementary was starting to get comfortable, I moved myself up to Intermediate. This time the dialogue that they will be discussing is much longer, and they transition into one of the hosts only speaking Chinese (Jenny or Connie), while the other (John) sticks to English. This is part of being eased in, so even though Intermediate can be trickier, you can still keep-up somewhat. At this stage, translating everything is not necessary so the hosts only discuss the slightly harder words or phrases.

And for Upper Intermediate, both hosts only speak in Chinese, although occasional English is thrown in. It’s an effective system of easing you into the language, while still challenging you. So for people who don’t like high-pressure systems you will indeed enjoy it! As a rule, I kept myself in the level that was challenging me, rather than the one I felt comfortable with. So at this stage, most of what I listen to is Upper Intermediate precisely because I find it hard, and find Intermediate comfortable.

The content

I think what really makes this stand out is the fact that Chinesepod have been doing this for so long, and have such a business built around it (and plenty of people working there as you see in the video), that they can make quite a lot of podcasts!

They produce a new one pretty much every day; although it must be pointed out that this is not necessarily a new one for the level that you care about. So you actually get about one new lesson a week that you can use, which is an important consideration before paying for it that I’ll mention below.

But what this means is that when you sign in, you have a LOT of lessons to choose from, from their archives. Their automatic counter tells me that they are approaching 2,000 different podcasts at the time of writing. I’m not sure how evenly it is distributed, but this means about 250-300 at any given level, probably more for some than others.

And the topics can be quite varied! Work related, social, getting around, dealing with private issues, technology – actually almost any general topic that someone could have suggested could have been covered at this stage. The crucial thing this means is that you can go through and pick and choose what you want.

I found it way more interesting and relevant to listen to topics about travel, socialising and technology than say, applying for work, office etiquette and family issues. Even skipping a lot of lessons, I still had plenty to keep me busy at any given level, and this was from listening to about 3 a day!

The process

As well as plenty of interesting topics and an appropriate level to do it on, I definitely appreciated the way in which this information was presented.

For example, John is a very skilled host and teacher and manages to talk on the listener’s behalf even though he clearly knows much more Chinese than he’d be letting on. So he would ask if something is a first tone, or if one word is a particular (common) character – questions that the learner needs to know at that level, but that John is obviously fully aware of. But he asks it in a non-condescending way, as if it’s really the first time he’s ever finding out. I also think he brings a great English-native perspective to things, pointing out how strange some turns of phrase are and the like.

It’s great that they don’t take it so seriously, and even point out on occasion how strange a particular dialogue might be.

Another thing I was surprised at (but appreciated) is that during the dialogue the speakers often use an informal register (if appropriate), and many times speak quite quickly (from Intermediate up). This is a stark contrast to most learning material where they speak intentionally slowly, clearly and formally for you.

Jenny (or Connie) speak a little too clearly in their explanations in the levels I was on, and consciously form their Chinese into something that a learner is more likely to understand, and even throw in some English words (a little too low-pressure for my liking, which tends to be much below the level of the actual dialogue, but at least it keeps you in the conversation, and only the dialogue itself is the tricky part).

But this is balanced out by the fact that the dialogues themselves are not translations of English dialogues. It’s important to point this out, because most learning material I’ve come across is written by English speakers who get translators to produce the target language, and a formal result is created. Here the dialogue is kept as original Chinese, with slang or natural flow intact, and then translated to English, even if a literal translation is quite strange in English. This allows much more potential to really find out how Chinese works, than starting from English dialogues, formally translated, would.

So while I found the dialogues themselves quite difficult, and the explanations much easier to follow, it’s great that the dialogue is a much more natural non-watered-down Chinese that you would typically hear when in the country. The actors do a good job, and the sound-effects are effective in making you feel like you are in the scene rather than a recording studio.

While I know there are some systems that prefer a target-language only approach (Rosetta Stone for example are pretty keen on this idea), I’ve found that this ignores our potential to take advantage of being adults, and using translations can indeed help (when done efficiently). So this “easing in” process worked for me with Chinesepod, the same way some books I use to learn Chinese were also in English. (Although my practice time with people still always follows a no-English rule.)

Whether or not this would work for you depends on what you are looking for. To be honest I find most Chinese TV quite tedious, so I’m happier to go with something that caters more for an international audience, especially when the dialogue parts are more natural conversations, even if scripted. When listening just to the dialogues (not the podcast that follows), you can get exposure to completely natural Chinese that brings up turns of phrase that you should be learning at your current level, while also being an interesting or very much useful exchange that you could really need.

Extra features

What I listed above are the main parts of what I like about the system, although there is plenty more. Some other aspects I appreciated included (note: most of these are part of premium and not basic subscriptions, including use of their app):

• A very well written app – so good that I actually accessed all content entirely from my phone. Their tablet interface is even better.

The catch is that older lessons don’t come up in your feed unless you go online off the app and “subscribe” to it from their website so that it is forced into your feed. So browsing actual lessons (apart from new ones) must be done on the site.

• Ability to switch between simplified and traditional so you only see one in the entire system; important while I was in Taiwan
• Ability to download just the dialogue audio without the explanation podcast that followed – when I saw an interesting dialogue in a lower level I’d listen to just the dialogue to test myself rather than the longer entire podcast.
• Fully written transcripts (Chinese and pinyin) and translations; a huge help to be able to follow the entire (scripted) conversation, and try to force myself to get used to faster speech by checking what they really said.
• Active commenting on each podcast, and interaction from Chinesepod staff to answer any questions that might come up
• System for storing flashcards on key vocab. It’s very easy to add new vocab as you come across it, although the flashcard review system itself is very simple. It’s better to export it to be used in Anki or similar.
• Exercises and other examples – as well as the main content there is further review material and questions to test your vocab in audio format.
• Integration with Skritter – while stroke order is something I don’t care much for at all when learning to read/write (more on that later), to improve your own stroke order and practice using particular characters, the website integrates a simple version of Skritter’s interface, which is a very effective means of learning stroke order of Chinese characters.

There are also other premium features of Chinesepod, such as one-on-one tutoring, but I found alternatives to be much more affordable. The difference between the premium package and the full package with lessons is $460 for 3 months for 2 20 minute lessons per week, which works out as about $60 per hour, which is way more expensive than almost every other alternative I know.

Chinesepod were kind enough to give me some sample lessons for the review, and I’ll mention how it went when reviewing and comparing general live-lesson sites, but in general I’d say to use more affordable alternatives. Chinesepod stands on its own for the rest of its site.

There is also a Praxis option that I checked out to access other languages (Englishpod, Spanishpod, Frenchpod, Italianpod), but there is way less content in each of these, and no app access at all, which was a major justification for paying as I saw it.

The only problem: the cost, and how I’d recommend using it if you do

The main issue I really have with recommending this universally is how much it costs. This is a premium product, and as such is suited to a particular demographic of learners, and is an impractical investment for people on a tighter budget.

The cheapest access is the “Basic” one, which is $14/month or $124/year (with other term options). This gives you access to the actual audio lessons, but not to the review and dialogue-only audio, activities, mobile access, personal flashcards list, or synch across devices. “Premium” access, which does include all this, is $29/month or $249/year.

Based on the investment, research and time Chinesepod makes, they are justified in putting up this price, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you are justified in paying it, since you may not use it to that value of an investment.

One of the things I like about Chinesepod is that it doesn’t try to be everything, and as such it works great when combined with various other programs (so I only really used it to help me with my listening comprehension, and did my vocabulary study and the like with other tools). As versatile as it is, you absolutely must use it with other systems/courses (or much more ideally, with real people) if you are serious about learning Chinese.

And as such, price tags of a quarter of a grand a year is nothing to be sniffed at and not practical for most people, since this is just one aspect of your Chinese learning investment. I have spent a chunk of my own money on Chinesepod, but this is because learning Chinese was a full-time job for me, taking up a huge amount of hours every day. So if you are also learning Chinese full time it could be worth it to go for a package specifically around the timeline that you are studying for intensively.

But if you are a casual learner, or realistically spend most of your time on other material, it’s much harder to justify this pricetag. The premium monthly fee works out as about $7 per (15 minute or so) podcast that you’ll listen to, maybe $3.50 if you decide to cover two levels.

What you pay is much better justified as accessing their database of already made lessons. This is why I have a suggestion if you are going to try it out and if you can afford the one month fee (after looking at their free courses to see if you like it beyond what I’ve said here):

Sign up for basic access for one month, spend a few hours downloading all of their audio and PDF transcripts for as many lessons as you think look interesting for the levels and content you think will keep you busy for the next 6 months, going through their archives to get all this, and then deactivate your paid subscription. Other premium features like exercises etc. are useful, but you can learn more or less the same rules and such as part of other courses. For the sake of downloading for later study, the premium access option is more worth it for the “dialogue only” MP3s to listen to something quickly or take advantage of content within a level below what you need.

To me, the monthly fee does not really justify just four new lessons for your level. It does justify mobile access (much simpler than downloading files and transcripts etc. and a lot less work), but unfortunately, once your subscription runs out, your app becomes useless and you can’t even access content you’ve already downloaded to the app! It also justifies many other features I’ve mentioned such as the exercises and community to ask questions of for each podcast, but in the end I didn’t use a lot of them myself.

Since new lessons are so infrequent and not really time-sensitive, there isn’t such a huge need to stay subscribed the entire time, unless you like the much simpler way of downloading via the app, and the ability to add new words to the flashcard database easily or other features I’ve mentioned.

If you don’t mind some manual downloading (get ready for lots of clicking) and working on your flashcards separately, then a once off one month subscription is what I’d recommend you go for, and then maybe come back in 6 months or so to catch up again.

———————

There you go! My overview of Chinesepod after using it a LOT over the last 3 months. I’ll keep using it as a paid subscriber while I’m still actively learning Chinese, since I like to access the lessons on the app, and I do recommend it, but for most people the one-month workaround (if they don’t mind the manual downloading) would be how they’d get the best value out of it.

Overall I have to hand it to the Chinesepod team for doing a great job. Some of their earlier lessons needed some tweaking, but they’ve taken feedback from people and created a pretty damn good system in the end! Having met the team myself and seeing all the work they do, I know they’ll be going strong for quite some time, so I was glad to have gotten the tour of their office while passing through Shanghai, and I hope other companies get some inspiration from them for interesting ways to present teaching a language!

If you have used Chinesepod yourself, let us know in the comments!

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Review of Chinesepod & chat with co-host Jenny is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
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Here you go! My 3 month and one week Mandarin video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pffLh3all3w

[Video also available on Youku. Click CC to enable captions in English, Simplified Chinese, or Traditional Chinese]

My interviewer is John Pasden, who writes at the 10-year-strong blog dedicated to all things Chinese-learning, Sinosplice. He is a co-host at Chinesepod (which I’ve been listening to regularly throughout the 3 month project – separate post about that coming up next week, with another video interview with the other main co-host, Jenny).

This will probably be my last video interviewing another white guy for a while This is also the last video where the main point will be to show my level, as I’m going to attempt to use my Chinese to share much more interesting things in future, during my cultural exploration of the country (hence the new video introduction).

Despite that, we did manage to have an interesting discussion. I’ve written about this topic in great detail before regarding the hardest language to learn, and in this video I mention how wasteful I find the idea of comparing language difficulties for non-linguists.

It’s an “interesting” thing to ponder over, but I personally find it as useful as the question “I wonder if I’m in the matrix?” – perhaps a fascinating discussion about what-ifs and theory, but it involves unrealistic precursors that apply to nobody, like “all things being equal”, and has no real world applications at all. It’s nothing more than an annoying distraction for people who are more pragmatically focused on using their one key language.

For most people, it’s a completely impractical thing to ask in the first place. If you are only learning one foreign language then who cares about relative difficulty with other languages that you are not currently learning? Focus on your own language and stop wasting time wondering how easy or hard other ones are.

The same goes for any such question. If someone is a smarter language learner than you, has more free time than you or whatever, well good for them I suppose. But who cares when it comes to you and your situation? Don’t let anything like that distract or demotivate you. Only ask questions with the ultimate purpose of improving your learning strategy.

You have your own story to live, you will overcome your challenges, and you will focus on your situation. Nothing else matters.

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Benny’s 3.25 month video: questions that waste your time is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
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As you all know, there are countless ways to go about learning a language.

I have a general plan of action that I like to apply myself, but there’s no such thing as a “perfect” way to learn a language. Perfection is not something that humans need to concern themselves with in anything outside the realm of mathematics and the like, as the real world has too many variables to make such a pipedream worth pursuing. However, it is important to tweak and improve what you do to get the best possible results.

You absolutely must try to see how you can improve your approach to achieving something you deem important, such as learning a language. While it’s easy to shift the blame to your environment/circumstances, and say that it’s lack of time, working too much, being too old, the language is too hard, not having the “best” learning materials, and all sorts of other rubbish (where millions with the same setback but succeeding prove you wrong), the reason you learned slower than you could have is very simple:

IT’S YOUR OWN DAMN FAULT.

Stop blaming everything/everyone else – you are your own worst enemy.

With that in mind, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and demonstrate this critical analysis, by looking at what I could have done to have noticeably improved the result of these 3 months learning Mandarin.

Mistakes are good! It’s all part of the learning process

As proud of the result of these 3 months as I may be, I’m still a few weeks off what I would call “fluency”. While some were hoping that I’d finally break, and “admit” that Mandarin is an oh-my-gawd-super-duper-hard-language, my conclusion is quite far from that. I’ve got so much to say about Mandarin that I’ll get to soon enough.

Actually, all the mistakes I’ve made that are worthy of really looking at, are approach/technique mistakes that I’d apply equally to learning any language. This post isn’t going to be some linguistic analysis (remember, I’m not a linguist, I’m an engineer) where I’d say things like

“I should have learned syntax before morphology, as well as applied semantic lexicons within accusative nominals in reference to indefinite conditional subordinating predicates.”

[This is what most linguistic texts look like to me]

Actually, everything I’ll mention here is something that will be extremely applicable to the next time I attempt to learn a language as intensively, whether that language be Swahili, Icelandic or Lithuanian. With this in mind, analysing my mistakes is essential, and even though I was off target, this has actually been an excellent learning experience! That’s forgetting the actual practical applications of why I learned the language in the first place.

It will also help me as I continue to improve my Mandarin. So I have no regrets at all – the only way I could come to these conclusions (or at least truly appreciated them even when they are logical enough) was by experimenting. Get your hands dirty because simply reading about it is not enough – you learn by doing!

So, here are my biggest mistakes that I’m really glad to have put the time into figuring out:

Biggest mistake: All work and no play make Benny a bad language learner

The biggest mistake I made by far, which took several weeks out of my potential to improve, will sound counter-intuitive when you first read it: I was working on my Mandarin too hard.

While I still have part-time online work, I am “lucky” enough to have had a lot of time to invest in this project. The logical course of action is to pour as much as you possibly can into it and work damn hard. The more time you put in, the better the results will be!

I think it’s clear enough that I was doing this, as I had to make a lot of sacrifices, and would have a headache many days.

I want it to be clear that I think the vast majority of this work is the reason that I progressed as quickly as I did, and I will continue to encourage a “no pain no gain” approach to language learning, over a have-fun-all-the-time! one that too many people promote.

If your goals are different to mine, then a mostly enjoyable approach could work wonders, but if you need to learn something as quickly as possible, then it’s way less effective than buckling down and doing things you don’t want to do most of the time. Embracing the fact that I dislike language learning has worked to my advantage, as I don’t waste much time on fun-games that don’t push me out of my comfort zone.

One of my worst weeks in terms of morale, was the week where I decided to up my game and spend 3 hours a day in Mandarin-only language lessons. It was a really rough week, and I felt absolutely terrible, but it was by far one of the smartest decisions I made in the entire 3 months as it forced me to improve very fast and get over a huge plateau of being able to start participating in long conversations.

However, the problem I want to focus on in this post, is this:

I would improve very quickly for three weeks and then I’d reach a saturation point. The entire last week of every month had no major jumps to another level, and I’d barely be able to focus enough to even study in less pressured situations. My energy was totally dissipated and I made very little progress in those weeks, apart from learning a bit of vocabulary or some grammar rules.

But I kept at it nonetheless and tried to force the Mandarin into my head. It just wasn’t happening, so I eventually (and reluctantly) gave in and would watch some silly Hollywood movie, give myself an “English break” and allow myself my official once-a-month English night-out, get a massage or something else that would finally make me feel better.

While I was doing all of these I still felt guilty because I was breaking my Mandarin-only rule, but I got my mojo back and would dive in even stronger. After easing off a bit during that first bad stretch, the last week of January, I was in a good enough frame of mind at the start of February to attempt the best decision of the mission I mentioned above.

No matter how hard I tried, I ran into the same problem at the end of February, and wasted an entire week again. And in March, I was actually working extra hard in the days leading up to my last video update, so after that I reached saturation point earlier and learned a lot slower in the entire last two weeks of March. I was so exhausted from working up to the day I recorded that video, that I slept for 14 hours straight the day after I recorded it.

This ultimately means that out of the 12 or so weeks that I devoted to this project, an entire four involved me learning at a dramatically slower rate than I could have.

So, what I’m ultimately getting to is this: we all have our own saturation points, where we just can’t squeeze anything else in, no matter how hard we try, and we need to just let our hair down. Your saturation point may be very different to mine, but I now know that my limit is 3 weeks, working very hard every single day 7 days a week, (and a little less if I push myself to an unhealthy sleep deprived limit).

Don't work yourself too hard, or you'll get grey hair!

With this in mind, next time I attempt a 3 month project, I will specifically set aside an entire weekend every 3 weeks to do anything but work on the project. Go to a night club with cheesy American pop songs, read a novel in English, speak other languages, watch silly action movies, travel, catch up on online episodes of the “Big Bang Theory”, buy and play with some silly electronic gadget that I don’t need and will just end up selling before I travel again, or whatever else looks like fun.

While a 3 month target to travel in China was what I was looking at to make it all worthwhile, that is too far off in the distance to seem real and you lose sight of it quickly. As well as my one-week mini-missions to focus on, in future I will have my major time-off always within a maximum of 3 weeks to work towards. This way the time I “waste”, actually recharges my batteries and gives me that extra boost. Rather than waste four weeks as I did this time, I’d “waste” just one overall, and be a lot less wound up in the process, since my pauses this time were sporadic, unorganised and riddled with guilt. Such a better frame of mind would make the remaining weeks work all the better.

Keep in mind that while I consider this a mistake, I absolutely do not regret this experience, because this process has revealed to me what my limits are and opened my mind up to how I can better learn intensive projects for the rest of my life! This idea will not be new to many of you – I know that the “4 hour body” book for example has a “cheat day” in its restricted diet program.

This concept of working hard most of the time and letting yourself take it easy once in a while at a very specific and planned time is a very powerful psychological tool to keep us at our best. Working hard all the time is actually a very bad strategy.

If you attempt something similar yourself, try to see what your limit is and give yourself a real break once you reach that limit. Once-a-week is a good starting point. So you could socialise with that English-only expat group I always warn against, as long as you limit them only to Saturday for example, and no other days under any circumstances. But ideally, I’d see if you are a 3-week person like me, or if you can handle an entire month!

Kill every single black hole of time immediately

This one isn’t quite a new lesson to me, but is one I do need to improve upon and apply more universally.

I have killed major black-holes of time in the past, such as TV (I’ve pressed the on button on a TV remote control literally about 5 times in the entire last 12 months, despite devoting several hours a day to it when I was younger), and speaking English when you should be speaking the target language, and anything else you really shouldn’t be doing, but a new one that crops up needs to be treated with equal vigilance, or every other leech you’ve squashed was for nothing.

One obvious one (that people have been telling me to ditch right from the start, so it hardly takes a genius to figure it out) was to not give time to the fact that “someone is wrong on the Internet“. I’ve grown thicker skin in the last few months from dealing with a particularly annoying wave of criticism that comes with the kind of exposure this blog gets. While the advice to ignore people who just want to argue with me is obvious, the immense stress I was (putting myself) under made it harder to follow through, and I made things worse by engaging with them without a clear head whenever I did.

While such a lesson is hardly useful to the vast majority of people, how I solved the problem is.

Many of us have a habit of wasting time on websites that really do not contribute in any positive ways to our lives. If you spend considerable time on any site on a daily basis that is not helping your life’s projects, then you need to seriously consider putting a cap on it – that includes Facebook and Youtube.

One excellent way to do this for the weak willed among us, is to install a leechblocker plugin for your browser – there are various grades of them too – so you can allow yourself 10 minutes on Facebook a day to catch up with your family or update your status, but no more, and no more than 30 minutes on Youtube a week – or whatever else seems most logical to you.

If you use Firefox, install Leechblock right now and fill out the sites that are sucking away your time and either block them entirely so that you can never give in to temptation, or block them for work-periods so you can waste time on them only when you are supposed to. In Chrome, install the equally effective (and in some ways more versatile) StayFocusd, and in Safari use WasteNoTime. (If you use Internet Explorer, first download any of these three browsers by typing their name into a search engine, install the associated plugin and then uninstall Internet Explorer. )

So I blocked all sites that I knew would drag me into endless discussions, deleted messages sent to me from people who clearly wanted to pick a fight, and made it clear that troll comments would not be approved on my Youtube channel. The second month I wasted way less time because of this. If I had done this from the start, then I’d not only have had much more hours free, but I’d have been less frustrated and distracted for when I was trying to focus.

Make important gradual and deliberate habit changes BEFORE you attempt an intensive project

Last year I was slown down immensely by health issues during the summer. Since then I’ve been slowly improving many things I let get away, such as by eating healthier and sleeping better. Although my time in the states knocked the healthy eating out of whack and I had to start over again in Peru.

I had been much better in Taiwan, but there was still plenty of room for improvement; in fact, enough to make me low on energy too often. I kind of had this idea that I’d just go to Taiwan and automatically eat healthier and sleep better from the start. Unfortunately, doing this and trying to take on the immense challenge of learning a new language simultaneously was a lot to juggle!

Something that Scott Young brought up when I interviewed him about his fast progress in learning French, as part of the audio for LHG+SFD1, (which I’ll be updating in a couple of months with everything I’ve learned in the last 2 years – that will be a free update) which he himself was inspired by from the impressive and immense habits blog, Zenhabits (my guest post on that blog here), was of the importance of focusing on one major habit to change at a time, usually just one per month!

It’s tempting to try to turn your entire life around ridiculously quickly, but this hardly ever sticks. I couldn’t quite switch to my most ideal healthy way of living as quickly as I had wanted, but am on the way and will change particular habits gradually over the coming months so that I don’t have to worry about them in time for my next project.

More specifically, I would eat too much heavy and unhealthy foods, especially since western-style desserts are plentiful in Taiwan, and I’d “treat myself” to Italian food a couple of times a week, despite eating with chopsticks the rest of the time. Putting on weight wasn’t as much of an issue as feeling groggy after eating too much, and this slowed me down for studying over the next hours, or focusing during a conversation.

You may also remember that I joined a gym at the start of my time in Taiwan! This was fantastic, as I went to great dance lessons and got an affordable personal trainer to help me get into a good rhythm and use the equipment correctly. My only issue is that I didn’t go as regularly as I should have – sometimes just once or twice a week.

When I did go, I’d feel so energised and learn much more efficiently as a result, but many days I’d say that I “don’t have the time” and should focus on the language. This was a terrible idea. I’m sure you have all heard many times before about the mental capacity benefits of regular exercise. My own experience has confirmed this, so I need to exercise more regularly, even if just a little every day, not just for the long term benefits, but also for the immediate ones!

If I had been eating more healthily and working out more regularly I’d have had way more energy and be able to focus much better when studying, and not lose track of conversations so easily when trying to take part in one. Energy levels are incredibly important, (when not-so-energetic, even sitting for hours studying would get me nowhere) so trying to solve these will be a continued priority for me over the coming months. By the time I take on a fluent-in-3-months language learning project again this issue should not pose the same problems. This month I’ve already gotten a major start on some poor eating habits that I’ve had to fix for a while.

With this in mind, if you ever feel like attempting an intensive learning project like this one yourself, then you need to fix any such health problems that may otherwise leave you low on energy and start changing your habits efficiently right now, while doing it in such a way as to make the habit stick. This way, when you do attempt it, you’ll be so much better prepared! Don’t even think about trying for “get fluent AND get fit in 3 months”!!

For further inspiration to live a healthier life, check out my good friend Steve Kamb’s blog NerdFitness. I’ve personally had great success from exercise and food tracking apps, especially Noom on Android (although it’s expensive). Counting calories can be so time consuming, but simply tracking anything is a great psychological reinforcement to remind you of whether what you are doing is healthy or not, and I like Noom’s very quick ballpark input.

To improve your sleep, consider giving siestas a try, and once again, a sleep tracking app can help you wake up at a better time to be more energetic. I was sleeping WAY better than I was last summer (I’ll never again live in such a poorly lit apartment as I did in Istanbul), but still far less efficiently than I could have. On the days when I slept and ate well, I learned way more and excelled in my conversations, forgetting almost no words that I had previously learned. If most of my days were like this, the progress would have been immense in comparison!

Many other things that I did wrong

I made several other mistakes during these 3 months, but will be going into some in detail in other posts, where it’s more relevant. Actually what I mentioned above really is 95% of my most important problems in this time. Any minor language related problems were only small tweaks I’d make if recommending an approach to others.

Overall, I am very happy with this time! Any mistakes I made were excellent learning opportunities for me to do it better next time, and I’m happy to share the story with the world on this blog. In fact, the video updates themselves were so essential as milestones to force me to improve that I’ll probably switch to one every week next time I do this.

What I didn’t do wrong

Just so we’re clear, the following are a few things people suggested that I’d be regretting by the end of this experience, and I just want it to be clear that that’s not the case

• Aiming for C1 was a fantastic idea.

It forced me out of my comfort zone and pressured me to go beyond what I would have done if I was simply “working hard”, since I was trying to stick to the road map that would somehow get me there. In the “Aim for the moon; even if you miss you’ll still be amongst the stars!” philosophy, there is obviously no “drifting off aimlessly into space” – anything between the earth and the moon is useful, so you should aim as high as humanly possible and don’t be a crybaby about “failure” on the highest target being a real option.

People really need to aim higher than they “should” – it’s how great things have been achieved throughout history. Prudence has never produced greatness in the same way as taking risks has.

If I can manage to fix the major issues I mentioned in this post, I think C1 in a language from scratch may still be a possibility in this short a time, so you can bet I’ll be aiming for it again in another totally unrelated language some time later

• Confidence is VERY effective.

I’ll continue to encourage people to dive into their languages with the same spirit. Humility is an important personal quality, but a terrible one (in my opinion) when taking on a project that you want to get results out of quickly, as a completely positive mentality is the best way to make strides forward.

I am very humble when speaking Chinese in person and constantly apologize for how terrible it is. In fact, if someone asks me how long I’ve been learning Mandarin, I prefer to say “it feels like years”, to avoid compliments that I’m speaking better than I should after such a short time.

Doing anything but at least acting humble would be a huge cultural mistake, especially in China. But I will continue to start my day with an upbeat attitude, aim high and ignore advice that I see as doing nothing but slowing me down. More about why you shouldn’t be “humbled” by Chinese (at least no more so than what you should be for any other language) in future posts.

———–

I’m very glad to say that now I’m much more relaxed than I was in the last 3 months, and am finally truly enjoying the language, so all this hard work has indeed paid off Last night I was out socialising all evening, visiting a food market, and eating dinner with some locals, [Note that such regular travel updates will be shared frequently in detail on my Facebook page] and today I shared some of the frustrations I’ve written about in this post, with someone in person, in Mandarin.

That’s actually been one of my sources of stress – that for three entire months, I haven’t been able to open up (offline) to people apart from that once-a-month English meeting. This is quickly becoming less and less true.

It feels so great to be at this level, so despite some mistakes, and despite 3 very rough months filled with frustration, some of which I now know I didn’t really have to go through as badly, I am able to use the language in a truly useful way. I’ll continue to improve on this, and will share videos so you can see me continue to improve, but when I hit the road (actually, train tracks) and can do what I need without any English, then it will all have been worth it!

Hopefully you liked this further glimpse into the approach I took and the major problems and lessons learned. I know there are still plenty of questions more relevant to Mandarin etc., but don’t worry I’ll get to them!

Thanks for reading, and let me know your thoughts below!

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Analyse your mistakes: An honest look at what I did wrong these 3 months is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
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Today marks the 3 month point since I started learning Mandarin!

I won’t be uploading a video today (simply because I couldn’t find someone willing to be recorded on camera with me in Shanghai this week, and Youtube has enough monologues as it is!), but will have several videos in Mandarin, interacting with others, from next week, and plenty more throughout my upcoming travels.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, this wasn’t about leading up to one single 3 month video, but preparation for something much greater.

One confusion people have when they arrive on my site is this non-existent “claim” that I’m here to prove that fluency in 3 months is possible, which I’ve never made. But I find the question itself (asked generally) quite silly: of course it’s possible. When a savant can learn enough Icelandic to be interviewed on television in it after just a week, then of course he would be fluent by anyone’s definition after 3 months (or actually much less).

When a 16 year old can speak 23 languages to various extents (including fluency in several), then there’s no doubt that he’d be speaking C1/C2 of whatever you throw at him if he gave it his full-time attention for 90 days.

And in my own personal experience, I have met dozens of people who have genuinely reached high level fluency in a language in 3 months or less, thanks to a combination of passion for the language, full time immersion, and a general good knack for learning it. You simply can’t argue with me that “fluency in 3 months is not possible” because I’ve seen it happen.

The name of this site (as I’ve said it many times before until I’m blue in the face) is based on my objective to reach a useful level of a language in as short a time as possible. I’m not a savant, and I’m not someone who has a knack or enjoyment for learning languages – I actually dislike learning languages, but I’m trying anyway.

But I have found that aiming high and timeboxing it into a tight deadline, and having both being as specific as possible creates much better results than “try your best” does. “Fluent in 3 months” is an example of a specific deadline, and a specific timeline, and is an important part of my learning philosophy, and so an appropriate name for the site, especially since I’ll be trying the same target again later. If you don’t like it, and would prefer if I had a less ambitious blog name, tough luck

Do you actually even NEED to?

But getting back to the question of “is fluency in 3 months possible?” – I know when it’s highly unlikely to ever be possible: when you don’t need it.

Really think about that: “Do I need to speak a language fluently in 3 months?” That’s “need” as in, your basic quality of life actually depends on it. Most people would be very quick to say that they want to speak a language as quickly as possible, as well as possible. But actually needing it, is a whole different world.

I get so much grief from people online, who really need to use their Internet time more efficiently than for complaining and nitpicking (I’d recommend 10 hours of the nyan cat as a comparatively more productive use of your time), that I’m misleading the Youth of Tomorrow with my snake-oil promises of fluency in 3 months. That’s not the point of the site, and if you bother to read past the URL, you’ll see that I never once in 3 years blogging made such a vague one-size-fits-all promise.

A few people have asked me why I am getting all this grief and trolling that I mentioned in earlier posts. I see it as boiling down to 3 things: 1. I’m a confident guy and a bold writer, and language learners “should be humble”, 2. I earn a living online (apparently, earning from your work or writing a book means you “deserve” aggro from people who will never even buy it) and the most important one: 3. Their goals are different to mine.

Let me say this clearly so there’s no confusion: Not everyone needs to speak a language fluently in 3 months, and if you don’t need to, then that goal is a terrible one for you.

Perhaps there is this presumption that I’m telling the entire world “You all need to learn your language in exactly 3 lunar rotations, or you’re a sucker!” – but nothing could be further from the truth. Most people DO NOT NEED to learn a language to a high level in a few months.

For people who enjoy the language learning process, and have taken their time to investigate ancient literature, understanding advanced topics that they may not even be able to follow in their native language, learning advanced vocabulary and the like, then the idea of reaching a useful level in just a few months sounds nothing short of absurd or arrogant. And that’s fine.

If you learn a language for passion, then there’s no hurry and you should take your time. If you’d like to visit the country “some day”, but have other priorities right now, then there’s nothing wrong with taking your time. Enjoy it!

But the truth is that this is NOT the situation for everyone. While some people can get angry at my audacity to urge some people to hurry up a little, I get equally angry with statements like “It takes years to speak this language”. It boils my blood!! The reason is that I get to meet thousands of people abroad who have not learned the language at all because of this “take your time” philosophy. These people need a kick up the ass and some serious pressure to improve.

“Take your time” does work – it works if you are a language enthusiast, it works if you dream of moving to Italy when you retire, it works if you only plan to devote a couple of hours a week to the project. But it does NOT work if you are in the country right now, plan to move to it, or have any other sense of urgency in your language learning project.

I don’t care how many PhDs he has – if anyone makes a sweeping statement that “it takes years to reach a useful level in a language”, as if it applies to absolutely everyone, then he’s an idiot. The logical retort to this is that you would be right to think that I’m the idiot if I were to demand that people without the urgency I described are learning too slowly.

The speed at which you learn the language should depend on the urgency involved. I am going to be over 2,000 km (that’s about 1,250 miles in old money) from the Engrish filled cities of Shanghai and Beijing, trying to live my life, making friends, interviewing people on camera, possibly facing very dangerous situations and trying to stay safe, all with no tour guide or interpreter to take care of me. So how quickly do you think I shrugged off the incredibly useless “it takes years to learn Mandarin” discouragement I’d get online, when the fact of the matter is that I just have about three months to prepare?

I’m not interested in anyone imposing their limitations on me. I may not be a savant, or have a background that would lead to being a good language learner, but despite just being an engineer, I’m going to try my damndest to learn any language that I have to use as quickly as possible. My reality distortion field ignores all discouragement, and that’s why I can actually get something useful done.

Forget him, forget others, forget ME – this is your story

The real question – and the only one that matters, is the one we should ask ourselves: “Can I reach this objective?” Whether Benny Lewis can do it, or someone you’ve seen on Youtube can do it is irrelevant. Such stories are nice soundbites for prime time TV, but prove nothing when it comes to your situation.

My “power” is that I’m very pragmatic – despite not liking learning languages, I’ll go through hell and spend far more time out of my comfort zone than most learners would because I focus on the short-term gains. These 3 months have been a really shitty experience to be honest because of that, but of course the reason I went through it all was due to the pressure of a trip where I absolutely must speak and read good Chinese looming over me.

So, if you’ve asked yourself “is fluency in x months possible for me?” then ask yourself the follow up question of do I really need to even learn so quickly? If in 3 months and one week you are going to be trying to have a nice conversation with the Chinese person sitting next to you on the train for 7 hours, then you should probably stop all this needless speculation and get busy, ignoring what’s possible or what isn’t, because such discussions are wasting your time. If in 3 months and one week you’ll still realistically be using English all day long, then why on earth would you need to be fluent in 3 months??

I’ve ended many days this year with a headache and incredible frustration that I can’t begin to describe. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, and think that it’s a terrible “one size fits all” way to learn a language. But if you are in the country now or going there soon, then grow a pair and deal with it – have a shitty time (but do it efficiently; getting out of your comfort zone with a good plan of action) and do it intensively so that you can come out the other end with something useful as quickly as possible.

If you aren’t going the country any time soon, or don’t have this pressure, then skip over any parts of my blog posts where I tell people to stop being so lazy, because they simply don’t apply to you. I don’t see enough people lighting a fire under the asses of those who genuinely need to learn a language as soon as possible, so I’m not going to waste time in every post prequelling who needs to pay attention and who doesn’t.

But if you are learning slowly, (and good for you, as it’s a very effective way to learn and absorb a language when you do have the time to do it over the long term) then don’t worry I’ve got plenty to say that might help you! For example, if you think the concept of “fluent in 3 months” is controversial, wait until you see the posts I have lined up specifically explaining how I feel people should tackle learning Mandarin…. and reading Chinese.

My 3 month point

Sorry again that I’m not demonstrating my level exactly at the 3 month point (hopefully 3 months and one week will suffice!) but just to be clear, I’ll quickly mention where I’m at:

I won’t be speaking C1 Mandarin this month, but that’s quite OK! Whether I got that or not was never the point of this endeavour – it was a great point to aim towards, and forced me to listen to content that dragged me up (kicking and screaming) in that general direction. So now I can follow B2 level conversations and get the general gist, since I forced myself to listen to a lot of them, and follow B1 conversations almost entirely. And while I’m not speaking so articulately, I do actually know a lot more vocabulary than I let on. I’m still trying to think quicker to remember them in a conversation though, and am working on tidying that up for the next week or so that I’m in Shanghai before I hit the road.

So in general I’d say I’m a comfortable B – a very safe B1, and dipping my toes into B2 on occasion, i.e. “intermediate” speaker. Whether I’m fluent or not depends on your definition. My ultimate goal of “high level fluency” of being able to do what I do in English in the language, is still a bit off, but I’d be happy to call what I have “conversational fluency”, not right now, but likely some time this month, since I’ll continue the annoying intensive learning experience while in Shanghai, and be studying a lot of the time while on trains over the coming months, even if the purpose will be to speak most of the rest of the time.

I’m very proud of what I’ve done in this time – if you decide that the 3 months is a “failure” because I didn’t get the C1 target, then that’s your own sad problem – some of us don’t live in a pass or fail black and white world. That wasn’t the true mission – the point of all of this was to prepare myself to be ready to have as a worthwhile experience and as deep conversations as I possibly could in this short time while travelling in Chinese speaking areas for 3 entire months. And I think I might indeed be ready for that!

There were some things I would have done differently, which I’ll be blogging about of course, and with that in mind, not only do I not regret aiming for C1, but I’ll very likely be doing it again When I do, it will be for a similar concept of focusing on learning the language first, and on the cultural experience second. This has been the first time that I’ve genuinely put 3 entire months into such an intensive language learning project (I’ve otherwise reached “pre-fluency” in 2 months, or fluency in 6 or more months), and I’ve learned a lot from the experience!

Last year’s very fast travels (2 months in a country while learning the language) were an anomaly for me – I’ve had different styles of living in countries for an entire year, or 6 months, or 3 months over the last 9 or so years travelling, but for at least the next year, I’ll focus more on this style of language first, then travel – depending on how I feel after my time in China.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed following along over the last 3 months! I’ve made many notes during this time and have so much to say about learning Chinese!! I’ve been light on the details up to now. For example, I was successful in my objective to be able to read Chinese on signs, menus, getting the gist of some articles, and went beyond that by being able to chat with someone online or via SMS entirely in Chinese. I use a dictionary to understand what they write sometimes, but can write most of what I want to say independently. In some cases I actually prefer the Chinese over the English if it’s available, such as metro stops – as they jump out at me much better.

And the coolest thing of all: I can do all this for both simplified and traditional Chinese – the reason being that my next 3 months will require both. Based on what I’ve learned so far, I’ve got a LOT to say about Chinese in upcoming blog posts.

Of course, I still have plenty left to learn in Chinese, and I will continue to study it for a very long time, but these 3 months will have been the most important and crucial of my time with this language. The next 3 will be the most important in terms of understanding the Chinese people, but also of course essential to improving my language skills!

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I really feel that more people, especially those who are abroad or going abroad soon, should aim for “Fluency in 3 months”, or something as concrete, even if not quite as ambitious. It’s not guaranteed that they’ll get it, but the point is that they’ll end up with something very useful for having pushed themselves so hard. If I was aiming for the level I have now rather than above it, then I wouldn’t have pushed myself as hard, as I’d see it in sight and ease off at some point.

But because of all this pressure it certainly hasn’t been a pleasant experience. More should try it… but if you do it, be ready to wish you hadn’t many times during the intensive experience. Language learning can be lots of fun when you take your time, but the best way to make progress quickly if you truly need it, is to be out of your comfort zone most of the time – it’s unpleasant, but it’s very effective.

Thoughts on all this welcome below as always!

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Is fluency in 3 months possible? is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

It’s time to announce my next 3 month project, while clarifying what the real motivation behind my Mandarin 3 month project has been!

I am going to travel deep into China – beyond 1,000km inland – by land (no flights), over the next two months, and then travel through Taiwan (outside of Taipei) for several weeks after this. (I’ll also visit Hong Kong for a few days.)

While three months is nothing near what is needed to get to know the unimaginable vastness of land that spans the home of Chinese culture, I hope to understand the Chinese people a little better by July. Not so much by taking photos of their walls and temples, or sampling all their food, but by talking to as many of them as I can.

You see, the point of the last three months was not to simply add Chinese to some list of languages I speak, not to prove any non-existent “claim” about the magic number of how many days/months etc. it takes to learn a language, not to work towards a win or fail of a final video, and absolutely not to impress armchair linguists.

The point of these 3 months was actually to force me to learn as much Chinese as possible as quickly as possible so that I’d be better equipped to have as authentic a cultural experience as I could in this time that I’ll be travelling.

My upcoming China travels

Last year, when I was thinking about how to plan for this coming year, I saw that I could devote up to six months to a single project before I had other engagements. I could have had a “fluent in 6 months” project, while getting to know Chinese culture as best as I could simultaneously, but I found it more efficient to slice it in two: 3 months just for the language, and 3 months just for the culture and people.

While I’ll definitely continue to improve my Chinese over the next 3 months, as I’ll be practising it a lot and of course still studying (maybe an hour or two a day), the priority is to actually use it. I’m not hopping on trains to random towns only to have my head in a book the entire time while there!

This map shows the preliminary (very flexible) plan of the small slice of China I’ll be investigating on this trip: (Edit: I may end up going as far as Chengdu, which is actually 2,000km inland).

I’ll be slowly making my way to Xi’an, which I’ll base myself in for a week or two. It’s one of the oldest cities in China (over 3,100 years old) and where you can find the famous Terracotta army. While I have no problems with being a tourist there and in other on-the-beaten-track places (but at least doing it in Mandarin), the real fun will be in going off in other random directions, and in stopping in many places on the way, to get to hear people’s stories.

If I can convince them, I’d like to ask the most interesting people to share those stories on camera for the blog (as I’ve done elsewhere), so I can share what really makes me passionate for travel with the world; using the local language to see a side of a culture that only speaking English never lets you see.

Afterwards, I’ll make my way up to Beijing, probably diverting from the map towards the coast – likely arriving at the end of May.

Nothing here is written in stone. I don’t have any agencies organizing this for me. The whole point is to attempt to travel this part of China solo, so I’ll be open to spontaneous changes in plan.

Of course, I will check out the Great Wall, but it will be one of the last things I’ll see before I have to leave China (2 month-visa), so by then I’ll have some kind of a real impression of the country, rather than what I might see just on the air conditioned bus to the Great Wall from Beijing with an English speaking guide…

In the third month, I’ll check out the rest of Taiwan – a country I’ve neglected unfairly with my focus entirely on just improving my language abilities. I’ll check out the coastal cities, and then see what all the fuss is about regarding the sun-moon lake and maybe hike the central mountains for a couple of days (doing it in Peru was a worthwhile experience!)

THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is why I’ve had a shitty 3 months only focused on learning the language as efficiently as possible, at all costs, and why I was in such a hurry. The more I learn, the richer the following experience will be!

Of course, there are many dialects in China that are unintelligible with Mandarin, so I won’t be able to eavesdrop on random conversations, but the people I’ll be speaking directly to (as well as formal announcements I’ll hear and anything I’ll be reading) will be manageable in the standardised version that I’ve been learning.

I do plan to learn the very basics (maybe just an hour or so study) in each dialect of a place I’ll be staying in – not so much to aid communication, as to help break the ice, as people always appreciate when you say something in their dialect!

And of course… the better I’ll be able to survive and stay safe, and take care of myself, while still being able to actually talk to people. THAT’s the real reason I was learning quickly; not to impress the Internets

More on the language learning experience, and the point of trying to learn so quickly and what I have to show for it coming up in a later post this week. As you can imagine I have a LOT to say about the topic of specifically learning Chinese and will be writing many posts about it

Hopefully I’ll find someone in Shanghai to help me record a 3 month video – although as you can see there will be many more videos coming up in Mandarin, with content way more interesting than what I’ve uploaded recently.

This is something I’ve been looking forward to and can’t wait to get started! I hope you’ll enjoy reading along

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Benny travels China: the real point of the mission to speak Mandarin as quickly as possible is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Just like last year, on April 1st, I wrote a blog post to celebrate April Fools’ Day with a ridiculous article! While this one was a lot more obvious than the last one, those subscribed to my Youtube channel who didn’t see this post, did genuinely think that I was faking my video as if it wasn’t or forgot to take my mask off or something.

Basically, this post is to emphasise some very silly criticism that trolls send to my blog, by writing this post as if what many things they say are true, like that I fake my videos, think that there is a “magic” number of days to learn a language, make “claims” (instead of simply aiming high. Rather than the quote below, I specifically said “this is not a promise” in the introduction video) about what I’ll do, think that I’m so smart, and so on.

If you read the post after this one, you’ll see me say the opposite of many things in this particular article, and come back to the true point of the “Fluent in 3 months” philosophy and the point of my Chinese mission.

Benny’s last video in Mandarin!

So, my time is up! It’s been 3 months since I began my Mandarin project. When I started, you may remember the words from my introduction video of:

 This is a promise! I hereby claim that I will definitely speak amazing Mandarin within 3 months!

and

If I don’t speak perfect Mandarin in 90 days, then I’ll eat my shoes!

My favourite colourful shoes are quite hard to come by in my size, so I really did not want to resort to this.

I’m no stranger to tough challenges, but as you all know, I started to learn Mandarin for one main reason: to show the world once and for all that I’m the best and smartest language learner in the history of time.

The secondary reason was of course to prove that 90 days is the magic number, applicable to any and all languages, and any person in any situation, and that you’re plain old lazy or stupid if it takes you an entire 91 (or more!!) days to master your language. The blog is called “Fluent in 3 months” after all – so you don’t need to bother reading a single blog post to know what this site is all about!

You knew the rules, and so did I!

With the pressure specifically to impress those in Internet forums and various Youtube channels, who reminded the world repeatedly of my “claim” (quoting me so precisely is a testament to their intelligence and how well they pay attention; you wouldn’t get this from any other language learner!) After giving it my full commitment, I am glad to say that I have reached my objective!

It was a close one – can you imagine if I only ended up speaking “pretty good” Mandarin? I’d never be able to live with the shame!

In case you are still not sure, this video (English, simplified/traditional Chinese subtitles) of me using my Mandarin on the street, leaves no room for doubts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vabJv2VQmTE

(on Youku)

Now that I’ve completely finished this project (there’s really nothing left to learn at this stage), and can add a tick beside Mandarin on my laundry list of languages, I am ready to move on. People will know that I’m a true language learner, now that I’ve tackled the world’s hardest language!

But since I’ve wrapped up learning Mandarin, I have no real need to hang around this part of the world any more. I can impress western girls in parties by simply saying that I speak Chinese, (let’s face it, that’s the real reason I started learning it in the first place), so I’m already bored and am ready to start a new language mission. It’s time to say goodbye.

After a couple of days in mainland China, specifically to take some photos of me in front of temples and the Great Wall, I can start the second hardest language in the world! (Announced here) I will master that in exactly 90 days too of course.

My dream is to be in the Guinness Book of Records for speaking the most languages – why else would I bother learning so many? The main reason to learn any language is to wear it like a badge!

I’ll announce that next mission on the blog in full detail tomorrow. It’s going to take a lot of work, but I never give up!

Let me know your thoughts on this video in the comments!

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April Fools’ joke: Benny’s “last video” in Mandarin is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Back in December, I hiked a segment of the Inca trail over several days to eventually end up at Machu Picchu. This photo is of me looking on to Huayna Picchu (in Quechua, literally “the young peak”, where Machu Picchu is “the old peak”); about 400m (or 1,300ft) of vertical hiking that I still had ahead of me.

The problem is that a previous hike two days before of twice that height elsewhere on the trail had given me really sore blisters on my feet, I had only slept 3 hours the night before so that I could get in to watch the sunrise from the ruins, I only had a small bottle of water – not enough for a full morning of activity, and the mountain awaiting me was a lot bigger in person than it looks in photos.

400m in one morning isn’t that much compared to real hikes, but looking at that big peak and then realizing that you have to go down again from the ruins before you even start hiking up (so it’s even bigger a hike than it looks), was really intimidating, especially in my current exhausted and thirsty state. (3 months of eating too many IHOP breakfasts in the states just before this definitely wasn’t helping my physical state)

Maybe I should have been sensible and realized that I just wasn’t meant to do this hike.

But after a few wasted moments of despair, I discarded the negativity, and just got started on it. I stopped thinking about all the problems I had, stopped being such a crybaby and just got on with it.

Whatever countless number of steps awaited me didn’t matter. The way I got to the top was simply by focusing on making each step, and reaching my next rest point. Some parts of that mountain are so steep that you can only hike them with the support of holding on to a rope, so it would tire you out quite a lot at times. However, I saw a point that I was determined to make it to just up ahead, and thought of nothing but getting to that point. My impatience to do so meant that I would get there that bit quicker, focusing on the task rather than my physical limitations.

I don’t know how many steps it was and don’t care. All I know is that I had my mini goals of reaching one particular point so that I could rest, and as painful as it was to get to each one, I soldiered on through until I did. I didn’t like that hiking experience at all (you try doing it with blisters on your feet while smiling), but disliking it made me want to get it over with to reach the top that much quicker.

While perhaps I could have done it better if I was better prepared with exactly the right hiking equipment (not buying crappy shoes for $15 a week before would have helped), I dealt with problems as they arose. When I ran out of water, I used the most valuable resource available to me and simply asked for another kind hiker to share some of his with me. If you are more pragmatic about things, and focus only on progress and the most urgent immediate problem, you will solve it, and the only way you can go is up!

Focusing on how damn steep the mountain is and how many problems I had, would have been a terrible way to go about getting to the top. All that matters is getting there in as efficient a way as possible.

By focusing on the steps and getting to the next rest-point, I did indeed reach the top. Perhaps other people enjoy taking their time with the hike, but it was this view that I was looking forward to most, and it was totally worth it when I got there. Of course, I stopped for a long time to take it all in and swap stories with other hikers.

While this post is about a hiking experience from someone who is not an experienced hiker, it actually has everything to do with language learning and taking on any seemingly daunting task. When climbing your mountain, are you so intimidated by how steep and tall it is, that you get too dizzy to even move forward?

Getting to the top of that mountain seemed next to impossible when looking up from the base, and the actual process definitely wasn’t easy, but there is no “impossible” when dealing with so many real world tasks. Break it up to solve the tasks you have right now, and don’t get stuck. Because I focused on the task itself, rather than its “impossibility”, I was progressing the entire time and I did indeed get to the top.

Feed any opportunities and starve the problems; it’s the best possible way forward.

With the same mentality, getting to the top of a mountain of speaking a foreign language can also be within your reach. Forget about how much you don’t know yet – that doesn’t matter and a woe-is-me attitude about how hard it is will never, in a million years, actually help you.

All that matters is progress. Think about that progress and nothing else. How steep the entire mountain is, is irrelevant. Can you deal with your current one little piece of it? Good. After that, you’ll deal with the next one. Before you know it, how steep that mountain is won’t even matter – you will eventually get to the top!

Let me know about the mountains that you are facing in the comments below!

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When climbing any mountain, focus on the steps, not on how steep it is is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

One of the biggest questions I get asked by people already deep into their language learning project relates to how they should get over the plateau they are stuck in.

There are many different types of plateaux you could be looking at. Maybe you have learned some basic vocab but can’t muster up the courage to use it with people? Maybe you’re already talking but can’t get past speaking more than a few words? Maybe you are actually speaking, but stuck at a certain level of conversation with lots of mistakes? In the intermediate spot and wish you could jump up to advanced?

Wherever you are, it seems like no amount of work, studying, practice or anything else is getting you out of this spot.

Today’s advice is very simple for how I’ve learned the hard way to get out of such a plateau, as I’ve encountered dozens of plateaux in my language learning projects over the last decade:

Completely change your strategy

This may seem obvious, but if what you are doing now isn’t working to bring you forward then what you are doing now is not good enough.

I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has emailed me to say something along the lines of “no matter how much I study, I’m not progressing!” Well, then clearly just more of the same thing is not going to help. A favourite quote of mine defining “insanity” is:

“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

It doesn’t matter how wonderful you think the software you are using is, how many rave reviews the course you paid for got, or how much of a difference you think an approach like good old studying should work. If it isn’t working to genuinely bring you noticeably forward, ditch it right now.

REALLY think about what is holding you back

In this Chinese project of mine, one of the key factors of ensuring fast progress has been that I have changed my approach entirely every week, based on what my biggest issue to overcome that week is.

This has in fact been the key to fast progress. I have ultimately run into some “plateau” every week and thought hard about how to get around it (or applied something that I knew from experience with other languages would work).

So if you were to ask me what my “typical day” learning Chinese was, then I simply can’t give you a useful answer, other than to give you a typical day of one particular week. If I did have the same strategy every single week, then there’s no way I’d be able to converse with people by now.

For example, after pushing myself ahead, at the end of the first month I could use basic Chinese with people, and remember sentences I had learned off (as demonstrated in my one month video), and have quick exchanges if the answer I was looking for was a simple one word or set phrase. But I couldn’t actually converse with anyone. A million hours of studying or repeating what I had done for my first month, wouldn’t have gotten me around this problem.

As efficient as a strategy might be, no strategy will work for every stage of learning a language.

Looking at my situation, rather than my “biggest problem” being that Chinese is too hard, I don’t have enough words, or other such nonsense that has no actual short-term actionable solution, the problem was actually that I hadn’t tried to speak to people hard or long enough.

So what I did was bite the bullet, and set myself up with 3 hours of conversation a day.

This does not mean that 3 hours of conversation a day will solve every possible problem I will encounter but it was by far the best way to deal with the problem of “I can’t hold up a conversation for more than a few seconds”. I threw myself in the deep end until I fixed this problem – all other problems can be put on hold.

It was a really rough week or two; especially the first sessions since I was drawing too many blanks and feeling incredibly exhausted from the brainmelting of trying to say anything beyond the comfortable quick bursts of “Can I have that please? Thank you”. But at the end of it, I could talk as long as I wanted.

Adapt your approach to your biggest problem

After dealing with that problem of not being able to speak for very long, another issue I had was simply not being able to properly interact. If the topic was very easy, like my travels or work, then I could go off on a soliloquy and simply have the person interact with me to correct my mistakes, or ask me the next question. Now long speaking sessions were more comfortable, but I clearly had other problems to fix.

This sounds like a huge enough task to take on, but I broke it down into sub problems that I could handle and fix on a week per week basis, until I was able to fully understand the questions directed at me two weeks ago, and then next, to being able to have a more complex discussion and not have the other person speak so slowly this week, with more interaction than before.

Now I have other issues I’m working on that I’ve decided should take priority, such that they reduce communication potential in some way.

When this mission has ended, I’ll be coming back to describe the many steps I took (as well as, of course, particular tricks specifically relevant to learning Chinese) but to be honest the key to it all has been this approach of solving my biggest problem THIS week.

This impatience has been a key to moving forward.

I have totally abandoned many techniques that I had applied vigorously in previous weeks. For example, in my most intensive week of lessons I had paid for a whopping 15 hours of private lessons!! (Luckily cheaper in Taiwan and online than you might think, and luckily for my wallet, only so many lessons that one week). This week I’ve only received two hours of private instruction.

On the other hand, I’ve kept up my “speak from day one” philosophy, and last weekend was out socialising for 3 hours on Saturday night; as it happens the priority that night was to attempt to keep up with multiple people speaking, since I could handle one-on-one conversations fine with someone adjusting a little for me, and need to pick up the pace to catch up to natives speaking naturally.

Think about it for real and fix that problem now

This is why one size fits all approaches of language learning drive me crazy – a generic course is designed to follow the same basic strategy in the first week as it does several months in, and presumes everyone learns in the same way.

I’ve found that learning grammar your first week is a waste of time, but coming back to it when it has suddenly become your true biggest priority is the best use of your time. My first week I need to learn off essential phrases and pleasantries, since this is something I can use right now. But if you aren’t in an immersion environment, you may have other priorities.

Yes, I know you have a million problems in your language to fix. But look at them all and decide which is the most important one right now and think of a way (no matter how painful) to fix it.

Seriously, stop for a second and ask yourself If I had to fix just one issue that I realistically could attempt to fix in a short time, what would it be?

In getting feedback for my videos, it’s been frustrating to see people not appreciate priorities. Like one thing that comes up a lot is me saying “em” a lot as I currently speak. Yes I know and I’m getting to it, but that’s such a silly low priority thing to be commenting on starting from my second month, as if that some how hinders communication in any huge way. I’ve been hearing about this the entire time and only now in the last couple of weeks do I give a crap.

If you’re the kind of person to be worried about saying “em” instead of precisely the right filler word, when you have much bigger fish to fry, then you are doing it arseways in my opinion. Saying “em” isn’t stopping me from having natural conversations with people, other things are, which I’m currently focused on.

I’ll deal with “em” when I’ve dealt with the bigger issues, and such a low priority thing like sound like a native with your hesitations can and should be postponed (unless of course you are cursed with the worst possible affliction known to language-learners; perfectionism. If that’s the case then you have my condolences).

Apply some kind of a “triage” system to it; a hospital emergency room doesn’t deal with the guy with a sore ankle and the GSW at the same time; it prioritises. When you look at that ER and see all the sick people, it seems like you should treat them all, but there are certain ones that need your attention more than anyone else.

Prioritising, and changing your approach to focus specifically on the biggest problem, which can be quantified and acted on, will ultimately get you out of that plateau. You’ll find a new plateau waiting for you on the other side, but with a similar approach that there is no one method to solve all your problems, you will charge forward, taking the most important step each time. In fact, this is part and parcel of the language learning journey. I look at it like this:

The difference between a stumbling block and a stepping stone is how high you raise your foot.

So are you going to keep stumbling, or are you going to raise your foot high enough over that one problem to get up to the next step?

Let me know in the comments!

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How to get over a plateau stopping you from making progress: how I’m doing it with my Chinese is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyCNhGGhFyg

First thing’s first: This video is my 2.5 month point in Mandarin! Subtitles included in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, as well as English. [Youku version  here]

I met up with fellow Youtube polyglot Mike, a.k.a. Glossika and he agreed to bounce some questions off me to demonstrate my progress since the last video. Check out his Youtube channel to see him give some impressive lectures in an incredibly convincing Taiwanese accent, as well as videos in English and other languages, as he explains his particular approach to learning a language and discusses some interesting linguistic discoveries in foreign languages that he makes.

On the same channel he has dozens of detailed videos that he made himself to implement his approach as he gives a free online Chinese video based course. His approach is quite different to mine though, and is much more appropriate to a longer-term strategy and as such is not one I’ve implemented myself during this mission.

He is half way through his “mission” to learn 16 of Taiwan’s languages and dialects (some of which have almost no native speakers left), and his story is an interesting one that I look forward to coming back to another time to interview him. But for the moment, I did most of the talking to share my current level.

You can see me a little bit more comfortable, but still hesitating a bit and unsure about some vocab (like where I forgot the word “impression”). Nevertheless, the progress from the last video should be clear enough, especially since Mike speaks much quicker than those who I was talking to in other videos. I’ll be going into greater detail later about some things I touched on, such as the point of this mission in the first place and if I’ll really be “fluent” in April, in other posts.

For today though, I want to describe the step-by-step process of how I added the subtitles (captions) to this video on Youtube, because to be honest I haven’t seen anyone else explain it well and Youtube makes it far too hard (hopefully some day they’ll upgrade their captioning system and this post will become redundant).

You should add captions to every video you can!

Inspired by spending most of a month with the deaf community to learn some American Sign Language, I’ve been adding captions to pretty much every video I upload over the last year and it’s something I’d highly recommend others try too!

As well as allowing those who are hearing impaired to be able to enjoy it, you can also open it up to those at work or in other places where listening is not possible (a huge amount of the Internet is consumed by those at work).

Another reason is that your captions are text that is implemented into Youtube’s search algorithm and can lead to much more clicks on your videos as people search for the topic you are discussing (and your headline may not mention such words). This combined with the fact that restricting searches just to captioned videos being an option mean that if you want more views on your videos, captioning them is a very good idea, no matter what the video is about.

But the main reason that I do it for most of my videos now is because it makes it opens it up to an international audience. One video from last year I’m particularly proud of is when I managed to get Peruvian fabric producers to explain the entire production and dyeing process to me in Quechua. That video is captioned in original Quechua, Spanish and English. When you go through the process of adding one language’s subtitles, it’s incredibly easy to replace it with any number of translations.

Adding captions is much easier than it might seem when in Youtube’s confusing interface, and actually takes as much or less time than adding them in your video editing program (with the added advantages that I mention above). I highly recommend people record videos to encourage progress in their language, and it has worked well for several Fi3M readers.

Without captions, videos in foreign languages simply can’t be appreciated by your friends and family as much. As well as this, I’ve seen some multilingual videos online without captions and I find it quite ridiculous – as impressive as it may be, only other polyglots can appreciate what you are actually saying, which is incredibly restrictive. (One interesting work around I’ve seen, from an older video from before Youtube implemented captions is Richard Simcott’s polyglot video that uses annotations instead, although annotations of course only let you apply one language and it’s more work than what I describe below).

Just from within Youtube it’s quite complicated

The reason I need to write a guide like this, is because quite frankly Youtube’s current captioning implementation system is terrible.

If you are uploading a video in English, then in some cases it will add in automatic voice detection and most of your work is done (in this case, download the caption file and edit out the machine transcription errors and upload it back up again; done).

When doing it for any other language though, you have to create a new file yourself which follows a really annoying captioning standard that can’t be veered from. You need to timestamp your speech; the slightest mistake of one space bar in the wrong place and the whole thing gets messed up. As well as this, there is a steep learning curve for saving the file in the right unicode format if it uses a different script (like Chinese does). I’ve tried doing it manually and it’s an incredibly frustrating process.

Luckily there is a much quicker way that uses a different website with a much more user friendly captioning system, called Dotsub. You go via this website, but still get to upload it to Youtube with captions! So without further ado, here are the steps I’d recommend you go through:

Step 1: Listen to the video and transcribe the original audio into a text file

Very easy – just open up a text file (in Word or notepad etc.) and write out what you hear.

Press Enter at natural breaks before one subtitle would get too long, such as at ends of normal sized sentences, or in the middle of particularly long sentences.

So in the above video, I went through the 6 minute segment and wrote down everything as I heard it in Chinese. (A native checked over it for me to make sure everything was spot on)

Leave this file open as you go through the next steps.

Step 2: Log into DOTSUB and upload the video there first

Dotsub is a really cool site that handles the captioning aspect way better than Youtube does. Before Youtube added captioning, I actually relied much more on Dotsub to share my non-English videos since it was the only way to allow one video to use multiple subtitles. While it’s still a cool site, I won’t be using it as my main video hosting service because Youtube’s social features make it easier for videos to be viewed more.

Nevertheless, you should definitely sign up and get a free account.

Rather than upload a high quality video (the Youtube video above is 1080p and originally an almost 500MB file), I rendered a second low quality video to upload to Dotsub since I won’t even be making it public, so it doesn’t matter if it’s low quality.

When uploading, the “make public” link is automatically not ticked, so you don’t have to worry about people finding it, and make sure to select the language as the original language the video is in (not translations), since that’s the first one you’ll be transcribing. Most other info can be left blank or filled in with some random word if it’s a required field.

Step 3: Go to “Transcribe” screen and use the incredibly simple interface

This is what Youtube needs to add in some day: an incredibly straightforward and user-friendly system for adding in captions!

Watch the video again, and when you start speaking a particular segment in that video, press “CTRL + SHIFT + ↑”, and when you finish it, press “CTRL + SHIFT + ↓”. That’s it. No need to mess around with numbers yourself as it’s managed fine.

Next, pause the video for a moment and copy and paste the text from your document that corresponds to this segment into the “add a transcription line” box, and press the green + and continue.

Repeat this process until the whole video has been transcribed. Simple as that!

Step 4: Export, then upload!

All you need to do after finishing all lines of the transcription, and playing it through once from beginning to end to make sure it worked out fine (you can edit the numbers if they need tweaking) is to press “Export transcription”. Download this file to your desktop or other folder.

Next, go to Youtube, upload the video there too (in my case, the high quality one, but otherwise exactly the same), and then click the “Captions” option in your video settings.

From here Browse to the file you just downloaded and select the appropriate language and “Upload file”, and you’re done!

That’s it – now whenever someone watches the video, the “CC” option will be enabled and they can select the language(s) you’ve uploaded. You can see how that works in my emebedded video above.

Bonus step: Translations!

The great thing about Youtube is that it lets you select one of any number of translations for your captions, so why upload just one?

If doing a language relevant video, you should upload the original and the translation to your mother tongue so your friends and family (or the English speaking Internet or other language if appropriate) can watch it too.

Simply going through the process of translating the content of your video can also be a great learning experience!

Go back to that text document and get cracking! Try to do it yourself fully so you really get a feel for how to use the language properly. If you are feeling lazy, use Google translate to get something somewhat resembling a language, and then spend a while tidying it up.

When you have the text ready, go back to Dotsub, mark the first translation as “complete” and then on the next screen go to “translate into” and select the appropriate language and continue.

You’ll see a screen similar to the first one, but this time you can zoom through it much quicker. Just paste the corresponding text in under the appropriate original until you get to the end, and export again!

When copying and pasting in this way, I like to resize my browser and text document to both fit on the screen at the same time, to make it way easier and quicker to flick between them. There is no confirmation buttons to press, just keep copying and pasting and it all gets updated automatically – so you’ll zoom right through it.

Note that if you decide to go the Google translate route, the system integrates with Google translate to provide a translation on a line per line basis from within Dotsub, so this eliminates the need for switching between windows.

In my case, I did this first for switching between simplified and traditional Chinese, and then for adding in the English translation.

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And there you have it! Make sure to add as many subtitles (captions) as possible to your videos so that more people can check them out! Let me know if you’ve tried this before in the comments!

Of course feel free to share your thoughts on my Mandarin progress too – I still have several things to iron out, but I look forward to getting into a completely different format for my Mandarin videos quite soon, since me getting interviewed all the time is not quite what I want to fill my Youtube channel up with

Way more interesting videos on the way soon! Let me know your thoughts on this one below.

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The simple guide to adding captions/subtitles to Youtube videos: My 2.5 month Mandarin video is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

This weekend is St. Patrick’s Day, the background of which I discussed in this post a year ago (while insisting that Americans do NOT call it “Patty’s day”)

Another thing that happens this week is Seachtain na Gaeilge [literally, Irish (language) week] – an awareness initiative aligning with the week leading up to or around Paddy’s day, to promote the Irish language. This post is my small attempt to contribute to that promotion!

First thing’s first; have a read through this post where I give a summary of the Irish language (a.k.a. Gaeilge). It’s a beautiful language in the Celtic branch of European languages (along with Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Breton and others) and the official language of Ireland, while being very different to English. In fact, the English we speak in Ireland (a.k.a. Hiberno English) is highly influenced by Gaeilge, and you can read about the components of Irish English here.

While some might be tempted to think of it as a “dying” language, only used in the countryside, today I want to share how incredibly prominent the language is on the Internet, and very much alive and kicking! You have a vast amount of resources for consuming Irish used naturally, as well as for learning it. Hopefully today’s summary post gives you a good start!

Video content

1. Youtube is sprinkled with lots of stuff as Gaeilge (“in Irish”). Here is a small sampling of some cool videos in or about Irish:

Stephen Fry was filming a documentary about languages and it brought him to Ireland where he had a fun cameo in the soap opera Ros na Rún! You can see that funny scene here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgL802oG7-k

One short film, (which I find even more cool to watch now in an ironically reversed way) is the fictional story of a Chinese man who decides to learn Irish, and not English, and then moves to Ireland. (It’s quite misleading though, as the very basic Irish that he speaks in one scene would be understood by many people even with weak Irish, so remember this is just a cute story!)

Seeing him struggle with a knife and fork and use them as chopsticks is quite clever!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA0a62wmd1A

Des Bishop’s “in the name of the fada” is a great documentary series (all online) about an Irish-American comedian who decides to move to the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking region in Ireland) and learn the language. He even manages to incorporate Irish into his stand up routine!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3__IaUGA4Q

2. TG4 is the national Irish language TV station, and it’s made a huge difference to bringing the language not into the homes of everyone in the country, but also around the world.

TG4′s website has free streamed videos of many of their shows. Click the various categories to see new interesting content updated daily, including full episodes of “Ros na Rún” (the soap opera first video shown above), daily news/weather, children’s shows (I’m a sucker for Spongebob Squarepants in Irish), documentaries, and a live stream (occasionally restricted depending on what is on at the time).

What I really like about TG4 is that it is not IP restricted, so (unlike most official streamed online access to TV shows), you can indeed watch it from any country in the world.

3. Benny TV

OK, there isn’t actually any “Benny TV”. But I’ve made a handful of videos in the Irish language myself, specifically about my travels and cultural discoveries abroad (and even explaining what the online term “RSS” is). You can see all those on my Irish videos page, and several are subtitled in English on Dotsub.

Live audio and podcasts

As well as the TV station in Irish, there are actually quite a lot of ways to get tonnes of Irish to listen to on a daily basis!

First head over to the RnaG site, and click “RnaG Beo” (beo means “live”) around the top right to have a pop-up live stream of the radio. This is the national Irish language station.

Next, check out Raidió na Life, Dublin’s own station, and click “Éist Linn” (listen to us).

To download some cool podcasts check out Raidió Uladh (Ulster Radio)’s Blás podcast. If you search iTunes, you may find other podcasts in Irish depending on your country.

Stuff to read in Irish

While it may seem like quite the daunting task to attempt to read in Irish if you are starting off, and don’t look forward to having to consult a dictionary slowly for many words, you can use a great completely free resource to read online in Irish and have your new vocabulary tracked (to be added to a flashcard app) and the dictionary very easy to access by using this’s sites: Learning with Texts tool. In the video demonstration, I show you a text I am reading in Irish.

One place I like to find nice articles is beo.ie, especially since they have a mouse-over option to see tricky words translated to English. You also have the regularly updated Foinse, Nuacht24 and Gaelport, or you could check out some of the over 14,000 entries on the Irish language Wikipedia, a.k.a. Vicipéid.

Learning resources

Of course, learning the way the language works is important, but actual exposure to real Irish should be the priority – so don’t get bogged down with studying!

For dictionaries when reading the above texts or otherwise coming across words you don’t know, use the online Irish dictionary, or for technical or formal vocabulary try focal.ie.

And don’t forget that recently Google Translate added Irish as one of their working languages. Definitely don’t rely on this too much, as I can confirm that its translations are worse than what it produces for Chinese, which really says something, but it can of course come in handy to get the gist and is great for some short snappy set phrases or single words.

If you aren’t in much of a hurry, then post your question on the Irish Gaelic translator forum – when someone comes along you’ll get a pretty good answer as it’s a really active forum, and they are happy to translate any very short text or complicated concepts. First do a search to make sure your question wasn’t asked already, as people ask many questions every day. They were a huge help to me as I attempted to script my complicated documentaries. (I wrote them in Irish and asked for proofreading feedback). The Daltai forum also has lots of active threads in and about Irish.

To see how the language works, this incredibly detailed grammar guide covers pretty much everything, but I’d only recommend it to language enthusiasts who enjoy such technical explanations and understand “grammar-ese” terminology. Along the same lines, the Wikipedia article on Irish has lots of links within it to separate technical articles about interesting aspects of the language.

This less intimidating collection of free PDFs/MP3s will give you the basics to get started.

While it disagrees with the title of the post (not free), I would generally recommend people starting the language from scratch to go for Colloquial Irish and lower intermediates or Irish people who learned it in school to use Turas Teanga.

If you speak French, L’irlandais de poche happens to be my favourite introductory presentation of the language! Buy it in any major bookshop in France though, as it’s expensive online for a pocket book. I usually like the “Teach yourself” series in other languages, but in my opinion they do a poor job at presenting Irish, so skip that one.

If you’re feeling really adventurous then get yourself a copy of Harry Potter agus an Orchlach!

Other cool resources

If you come across some text online that you really wonder how do you pronounce this?? then head straight over to abair.ie! Paste the text in and this will produce a synthetic artificial version of what the text sounds like (with a Gaoth Dobhair/Ulster accent, which is the one I tend to speak with, although the one you’ll see and hear in many courses is the Connemara dialect).

Next, change your computer’s language to Irish! Install the free Ubuntu operating system (takes a few hours to get used to, but you can do pretty much everything you can do in Windows or on a Mac, and more. And it works so much faster and never crashes) and then change the interface to be Irish! Interfaces like Firefox and Open Office and many more are in Irish. Install Firefox’s Irish dictionary to help you not make spelling mistakes and many Open Source projects that have translations and wide audiences have Irish interfaces. You can also set Facebook to be in Irish!

Or why not just join a new social network that is entirely in Irish?

While I’ve given a lot of links here, the Omniglot site has a page devoted to Irish with plenty more to check out (not so up to date though). One thing I appreciate on that page is that he requested that I record his spoken example

Lots to keep you busy!

You could fill your entire day with Irish using just a handful of some of these resources, even if you are many many miles from the Emerald Isle!

This summer I’ll be back in Ireland and devoting time to bringing my level up a little higher and more professional, especially since I’ve been invited to be interviewed by some of the radio stations I listed above and would like to make sure I’m up for a very complex conversation! More on that mini-mission later though!

(If you’re curious about what I’ll be doing before that from April for the next 3 months, join the Language Hacking League email list to find out before I post it on the blog!)

Of course, this weekend, the most important Irish phrase you need to know is “Lá Fhéile Pádraig Sona Duit/Daoibh” (Duit for addressing one person, Daoibh for more than one), for “Happy St. Patrick’s Day!” Paste it as your Facebook status and maybe send some people over to this post to get into some true Irish spirit this Paddy’s day!

Don’t forget to share your thoughts on the Irish language with us in the comments below, and feel free to share any useful resources that I may have missed in this post!

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Free online Irish language learning resources and cool videos is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

When discussing language learning with people who have unrealistic standards for what they must have in their second language before they consider their level good enough, I’m left amazed at the screamingly obvious issues they don’t seem to be aware of:

The elitist standards you require are something that we may not even have for our native language, so why should we have them for our second one?

Someone may say that to speak a language fluently or “good enough” by their standards, you must be able to:

• Participate in a debate on a complex topic, such as one on philosophy
• Speak with no hesitations
• Use complex vocabulary and advanced expressions
• Never have any serious miscommunications
• Be able to give the definition or translation of a low-frequency use (but still important) word
• Write a complex essay
• Never make basic spelling mistakes or misuse a common word
• Be able to participate in a discussion that any typical native may have

But here’s the thing – based on these criteria I don’t speak fluent English, my native language. I break many of these rules and others. Going through this list again, in order:

• Philosophy is something I’m quite weak at, and debating is something I’m even worse at. If you gave me this test in English, I’d fail it. This is a fact of life; there are some complicated matters I can discuss, but many I can’t.
• I’d fail miserably at a requirement of no hesitations too. Have a look at my TEDx talk, and count how many times I say “ehh…” in the first few minutes. It’s a LOT. Hesitation can be caused by lots of factors (in my case here, by nerves from talking on a stage).
• I don’t have as many videos in English as I do in other languages online, but there are still a lot. If you watch any of them (like these interviews) you will see that I don’t tend to use really big words, and I don’t go out of my way to pick clever quotations or use really well worded expressions. In fact, many English learners tell me that they enjoy reading my blog because I have a straightforward and simple way of writing. This isn’t intentional; I simply don’t use extremely complex English with anyone. I did quite poorly in English in school actually.
• Because of speaking Hiberno English, I’ve had some moments where I have had to scratch my head and wonder what the hell that other English speaker is saying, or vice-versa. What the F is a “nitch”?? Why are they so confused by me saying “Stop giving out about your man”? And that’s forgetting the cultural misunderstandings; I’ve had way more with Americans than I have with Spaniards for example.
• Many times, people have said words to me that I probably should know, but simply don’t. One of my most common uses of Google is actually “define X”, where X is some English word. With enough context I rarely have to do this, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
• I can’t write an essay at academic standards. I rely on spellcheck all the time when writing something like a blog post. And even despite that, since Firefox doesn’t have a context-homonym-spell-checker that I’m aware of, there are still one or two mistakes that make it through that someone comments about. Right now (pretty much only from writing so much on this blog), I’m very confident about which to use between your / you’re or it’s and its, but to be totally honest, 3 years ago I had no idea. Many natives don’t; I see these mistakes every day from my family and friends’ Facebook updates.
• I can’t participate in “any” discussion. If I find it boring, I’ll lose interest and lose track in what’s going on in the conversation. Sorry, but this is just the truth. There are a very large amount of possible conversations that I can’t participate in English, even when it has nothing to do with technical issues or enough vocabulary. Talk about shoes/fashion or many sports I don’t follow and you’ll quickly lose me, even though these can be quite simple conversations.

Many language courses and discussions take place or are prepared among those who are clearly in academic circles (such as linguists). This is fine, but I have one very important criticism about what many of them do: they hold their academic standards to what speaking a language is, to others who don’t value these standards in their native language.

I am not an intellectual. If you like to have philosophical debates, use complicated expressions, and have the oration skills to never slip up, that’s fine, but that’s just not me nor is it the vast majority of people.

I find it incredibly arrogant to force these standards on others. It’s elitist: to them you only speak a foreign language if you speak it like rich very well educated people do. I compare myself to normal people I hang out with, and make sure I’m as comfortable and confident as possible with them. Rather than learn formal dialogues, I’d rather learn slang and text language.

Most people talk much more about every day things than the complex situations that some elitists demand. Football games, how the work day was, how cute that girl is, how shitty the job situation is, how they can’t wait for that holiday, or many other things that normal people talk about. Not epistemology or quantum physics.

There are, however, times when we do get more technical with our languages, but something you must never forget:

The standard that REALLY matters: can you do what you do in your NATIVE language, in the target language?

Forget all of those ridiculous requirements others are imposing on you, where they are trying to turn you into clones of their academic ideal of how and what people should be talking about. My criteria for any language is simple: can I live my life in that language the same way I would in English?

For me this means that the technical and complicated things that I need to know are related to the technical and complicated things I know in English. My Spanish and French are C2 (“mastery”) level because I’ve worked as a professional engineer and translator of engineering documents in these languages. I can talk or read all about transistors and remote control interfaces and software specifications in the language. The fact that the Instituto Cervantes also agrees with me helps (i.e. I was awarded an official C2 diploma in Spanish, which can’t be disputed), so I’m not dreaming this up.

One interesting nitpick that has come up lately (from the incredibly long list that I get on a daily basis) is that if you look through videos of me online talking in Spanish, you could suggest that my level is only B1 (“intermediate”), which seems to conflict with my C2 assertion above. But the thing is, I’m talking about my friends’ experiences as aupairs, and don’t use much complicated vocabulary on purpose. Why on earth would I use complicated vocabulary in a casual chat like this? The only reason I can think of would be to show off for the camera, rather than stick to the topic at hand.

I could upload a video of me explaining the technical workings of trellis code modulation (what my undergraduate thesis was based on) in several languages… but that would be incredibly boring for most people, and really pointless to watch. I think the cultural topics I actually tend to share are much more interesting, and the level of Spanish I used for them was quite fine and aligned with that of the person I was speaking with.

To me, if I’m having a casual chat with someone in English and they use very big words or formal language when it’s not appropriate, I find this pompous. If anything I feel that this shows poor command of the language, because they aren’t appreciating context and social dynamics.

So far, things are going well with my Chinese mission (despite lots of stress, which is part and parcel of learning any language as intensively as this). You’ll be very happy with what I have planned to demonstrate my level in April! But the fact of the matter is that I know that a lot of the perfectionists who have been critical of me the whole time will not be pleased, because I’m not going to use Mandarin like they would. I won’t be debating politics, I won’t be quoting Confucius in his original words, and I’ll still be nervous at times and slip up or hesitate…

… exactly like I do in English.

Time to take languages back from the academics

Sometimes I feel like those who put such unrealistically high standards on languages almost want to keep the languages to themselves. Like if people like me who have a history of not being good at languages into adulthood found out that we can actually have fun with our languages if we used them the way we want, then speaking a foreign language wouldn’t be their special thing any more. I say enough of that.

Languages need to be taken back from those who hide them behind the bars of “use the language like we do, or we won’t give you our seal of approval”.

For example, when I was teaching English I found out what my students wanted to learn rather than what I wanted to teach them. I modelled some of my classes around Sponge Bob Square Pants episodes or used the scenery from their favourite computer games to teach them vocabulary. It was far more interesting and relevant for them, and it inspired language learning even in the weakest students.

So if you are learning a target language, and see it as impossible because of these stupidly high standards that others impose on you, forget them. This language is yours to use as you wish.

What I say about ignoring those telling you what to do applies equally to what I say. Speak if you want to do that, but forget my advice or that of any particular method and watch TV or read comics if that’s what you prefer to do in your target language (I am totally and utterly wrong to follow if your priority isn’t to speak a language socially, since I don’t care much for TV/comics etc. I suggest checking out many other language blogs for other priorities). Focus on reading if that’s the enjoyment you get out of foreign languages, and aim to read the kind of things you would read in your native language.

If you read comics in your native language, read them in your target language. If you watch Star Trek in your native language, watch the translation in your target language. I like how Khatzumoto does this for Japanese.

And, of course, if you enjoy debating politics, speaking with no hesitations as you do in your native language, and using fun references to classical literature, then by all means do that too. In that case it truly is how you were meant to use the language.

Hold the same standards for your target language as you do for your native one, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Thoughts?

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Unnecessary elitist standards: get rid of them and fluency is yours for the taking is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

Today’s guest post is from Susanna, author of Language is Music, who speaks seven languages and promotes learning languages with music and the media. Susanna and I made a multilingual video together in San Francisco and she also wrote a previous guest post here about listening techniques and how to use songs to learn languages.

Below is the video of a call Susanna organized with fellow female polyglots Jana Fadness (also a travelling language learning blogger) and Fasulye to discuss how to encourage more women to show their languages on the Internet, and it’s followed by her guest post about the multiplier effect of women learning and speaking foreign languages, to celebrate International Women’s Day. Take it away Susanna!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm5jE7Sz7UM

Today is International Women’s Day and I am writing about why women need to be multilingual and why women should show their language skills. If you are male and are about to click away from this page because you think this is a “chick” article just for a female audience, please reconsider.

Men and women both benefit when women are multilingual.

Multiplier effect of educating women in foreign languages

When women speak more than one language, not only do they have more employment opportunities, therefore raising family incomes, but their children (both male and female) are more likely to speak another language. In general, mothers spend more time educating their children than fathers do. Educate a woman and you educate a family or group of people.

For those of you who are learning a language as an adult and grew up in a monolingual family, do you wish your mom could have sung lullabies to you in a foreign language and taught you the sounds early-on so that you wouldn’t have to struggle with it as an adult?

Even women who don’t have children are more likely to be involved in raising siblings’ children than men are. A multilingual aunt, cousin or other relative could serve as a role model and motivator for children to learn languages. My nephew and niece have no choice about whether they want to learn a language or not, they’re stuck with me as their Auntie!

It’s not that educating males in foreign languages is not important, it is. The point is that there’s a serious multiplier effect when women are educated that doesn’t occur in the same degree when men receive the same education.

The impact of the bedtime story or poems in a foreign language

My maternal grandmother, whom I never met, was a German language teacher in Leningrad, Russia. After the Nazi siege of Leningrad was over, my grandmother returned from evacuation in the Ural Mountains to her city with her two young children, my mom and aunt. Many of Leningrad’s inhabitants, including my grandmother’s close relatives, had died of starvation while the Nazis blockaded the city.

The German language was obviously not a popular language to study after World War II in the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, my grandmother read the poems of Goethe and other German poets in German to my mom and her sister before the girls went to bed.

She wanted my mom and aunt to appreciate the beauty of the language despite politics and the horrors of the war. Though my mom and aunt went on to study English and French, respectively, they still fondly remember the verses of Goethe and how beautiful they sounded in German. My mom often reminds me of her mother reading to her as a child in German and how my mom learned to differentiate the German language from the Nazi regime and World War II.

A parent reading to a child in a foreign language can have a lasting impact, reaching to future generations.

We need more female polyglot role models

There’s a gap between the amount of female language learners and public female polyglots.

Most of the foreign language teachers I’ve met worldwide are women. Many language students are women. I think there are many more multilingual females out there who are not public about their language skills.

Why do we need female multilingual role models?

We need women to show their language skills publicly for girls and women who are studying languages to see that how gaining fluency in their languages can benefit them professionally and personally.

Polyglot women are powerful, but underrated

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, www.art.com

When you hear the name Cleopatra, do you think of a lascivious Elizabeth Taylor seducing Richard Burton?

Or do you think of her as a polyglot ruler who spoke nine languages (Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Syrian, Arabic, Persian, Aramaic, Hebrew and Troglodyte, an Ethiopian tongue) which she used to her benefit as she ruled over Egypt?

Don’t be embarrassed if Elizabeth Taylor’s seductress role comes to mind. Unfortunately, powerful and women are often characterized by their looks and personal romantic relationships rather than for their intellectual and professional merits, especially by Hollywood.

“it is true she [Cleopatra] was the only Ptolemy ever to learn to speak Egyptian, and she was one of the few members of her family able to converse with neighboring dignitaries in their own tongue. Her language skills made her useful in political discussions. It also earned her the respect and affection of the Egyptian people living outside of the Greek influence of Alexandria.”

Cleopatra: Egypt’s Last and Greatest Queen by Susan Blackaby

Luckily, things have improved since the Cleopatra movie, but female polyglots are still underrepresented in the public sphere.

Madeleine Albright: www.smithsonianmag.com

When Madeleine Albright became the first female Secretary of State (Minister of Foreign Affairs) in the US, the American media often mentioned that she speaks at least five languages. What the media failed to point out is that several of her male predecessors didn’t speak any foreign tongues. My hunch is that she would not have been taken as seriously as the first female Secretary of State if she were not so well versed in foreign languages.

There are many more famous women who speak foreign languages and I won’t go into detail about all of them.

Foreign language skills, especially in English speaking countries, are not well valued. But if women don’t showcase their languages at work, they may get passed up for raises because their bosses may not see how important having a multilingual person on staff is for the organization.

Foreign language skills can get you a job

Let’s switch from politics to economics. I see foreign language skills as one of the ways for women to bridge the salary gap between men and women.

In my experience, women are more apt to be humble about their language levels while men might be more prone to say they can speak a language even if they are not conversation or fluent.

If this is your case,  you need to step up and be counted. If you know that you really can speak X language, but you need to brush up on vocabulary and grammar rules, then dust off those textbooks, get a language learning podcast, practice it with people or do whatever it takes to feel confident in saying you can speak another language because your chances of getting a job increase.

On January 30, 2012, I did an interview on the BBC

Language jobs aren’t all low-wage

There’s this idea that multilingual women get typecast into low-wage jobs in education and translation. You can use your language skills in all sorts of professions. Doctors in California have an easier time getting a job if they speak an in-demand language. Engineers may work on international projects requiring their language and cultural knowledge.

You’re not bragging, you’re inspiring and gaining respect!

Michael Erard, in his recent book on hyperpolyglots, Babel no More, shows that the vast majority of the active You Tube polyglots are mal,e as are the language bloggers and participants of a popular language learning forum, which has a competitive quality to them, perhaps detracting female participants who are not keen on bragging and competing about their languages.

You might think that telling people that you speak another language is bravado but think of yourself as a role model. If you were unemployed for five months and then got a job because you can speak Japanese, you are not bragging if you admit this. You may motivate other people to improve their language skills or to pick up a new language, especially if they are hungry to get a job.

If posting videos of yourself speaking in different languages doesn’t appeal to you, then write a blog about how you use your languages, encourage your friends to learn languages, organize events like dinner parties or foreign movie nights with friends where you speak in another language. I once had a poetry night when everyone had to read poetry in various languages and the English translation. We all had a lot of fun! Both men and women declaimed poetry around the dinner table. Everyone agreed that hearing the original poems were much better than the English translations even if we couldn’t understand the original language.

Safety

Beyond political power and money, there’s the basic element of safety. The more languages a woman can speak, the safer she is when abroad and in her own country.

In November and December 2011, I wrote two blog posts on female sex trafficking in Eastern Europe, and bride kidnapping in Central Asia and how speaking another language, particularly English, could liberate women who would otherwise be shackled to brothels or unwanted marriages.

In the movie The Whistleblower, some of the abducted and abused sex slaves from the former Soviet Union spoke in English to the US police officer in Bosnia played by Rachel Weisz. This is fiction. In reality, trafficked women most likely don’t speak such good English. If they did, they would have had more of a chance to escape because they would feel confident that if they got away from the brothels, they’d be able to communicate. I know for a fact that the safe houses in Bosnia for trafficked women from the former Soviet Union needed a Russian interpreter because I was either asked to volunteer or I offered my services to interpret from Russian to English for these women and girls.

When I was in Kyrgyzstan giving presentations about learning languages via music for the US Embassy, I learned of bride kidnapping where men can literally kidnap a woman who he wants to make her bride and it is almost impossible for her to refuse. The upside to a woman being educated, is that she is less attractive to a potential kidnapper/suitor as he may be overwhelmed by her language knowledge and think that she’ll find a way to escape or get a job abroad.

Please pass on this post on to women you know who are multilingual or who keep on wanting to learn a foreign language but always have an excuse not to pursue their goal.

Take this opportunity on International Women’s Day to congratulate the female polyglots in your life and encourage women who are learning and teaching languages. Also make sure to leave a comment to expand on this discussion, or join in on the female language learners section of Fi3M’s forums.

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How we all benefit when women are multilingual is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

I’ve spent 3 hours today looking like this, and currently have a splitting headache.

To contrast with yesterday’s post, where I talk about comfort in the language in the pre-fluency stage, I thought I’d give you another glimpse into the huge amount of discomfort I’m also going through a lot of the time.

Since I know from pre-fluency experience that there IS a lot you can do in the language at that stage, it’s tempting to take things easy and just stick to the friends who are patient enough to speak to me slowly, and know that being able to do what I can now (which is a lot) is enough. But there are too many limitations of this stage, so I’m of course charging forward.

One point I really need to fix and jumped into immediately was the fact that I only understand if people speak to me slowly. And in-person meet-ups (with one person) and casual chats are fine, since a lot of visual cues can help me quite a lot, so over the last week I’ve started getting more lessons online entirely by audio calls. I hate audio calls – I even have a policy of almost never answering my phone if it rings, even when in an English speaking country.

The first one last week was really hard without visual cues or seeing the person’s expressions or body language to help me, so even though they spoke slowly it was a rough hour. But in the spirit of progress I stuck with it, and after lots of daily lessons with different patient teachers, I can handle audio only conversations with a slow speaker in the same way I can when there are lots of visual cues.

But today, I started with new teachers (info on resources I use to find them coming later; suffice it to say, it’s super easy to learn online, and it actually has advantages over in person lessons!!) and requested that they speak normally to me. One of these teachers was from Beijing and their “normal” speed sounds like an auctioneer on Red Bull… in a very different accent I’m not familiar with.

For an entire hour I had to be incredibly focused and it was exhausting. Infuriating actually. They don’t speak that fast on Taiwanese radio, and unlike with the radio, I had to react and interact immediately – I felt like I had to process a dozen words a second, and was doing a pretty poor job at it, but scraping through to try my best to keep some form of conversation going.

Even two whole months into learning the language as intensively as I’m doing, I’m having these very difficult periods because of pushing myself out of my comfort zone. Once again, my brain felt like it was melting, and despite the comfort in doing the kinds of tasks I talked about yesterday, I feel like an idiot once again.

After the first hour-long class I was at the point where if I was the kind of person who smoked or drank, I’d be going for a puff or a shot. Instead, I opted to bang my head against the wall a few times.

The frustration of individual sessions like this isn’t helped by the overall frustration of two whole months not being able to socialise at the deep level I can in my other fluent languages (although I am socialising with patient listeners), since I’m sticking to the plan of keeping everything in Mandarin, and still dealing with cultural adjustment issues. But rather than give up, this frustration has me even more determined to keep at it until I can get to the other side and be able to have deep natural conversations in Mandarin too.

An entire hour of Mandarin that’s way outside my comfort zone felt terrible, my ego is destroyed (again), my head really hurts (from over thinking, not the wall banging) and I feel like my brow will be permanently furrowed… so despite (or actually because of) all this, the last thing I did in the class was to book the teacher for her next available slot this week.

The only way I’ll move forward through this tricky stage is by lots and lots of painful exposure. I accept that many parts of language learning are really annoying and that you don’t have to enjoy it all, so I’ll keep putting myself through these frustrating tasks, so that I can come out the other end that little bit more comfortable. I’m not looking forward to my next Beijing auctioneer teacher lesson, but I’m going to have as many frustrating sessions like this as I can until they aren’t frustrating any more.

No pain, no gain.

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No pain no gain is a post from: Fluent in 3 months. Click through to the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League weekly e-mail list (on the top right) for way more tips sent directly to your inbox!
If you liked this post, you'll love the Language Hacking Guide! Click here to see a video I made in 8 languages to introduce it!
As a subscriber you get a bonus sneak peak at the Language Hacking Guide! Download it here (zip)!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep_II02ZZM4

[Captions in traditional and simplified Chinese, as well as in English. Youku link for those in mainland China]

Keeping up with the video-every-two-weeks plan, here is my two month point! After a bumpy start, where I hesitate a bit because of being quite aware of the camera, once I got used to it, you can see that I am much more comfortable and a wee bit quicker to use the language.

Vivian is my second teacher (I tried out a few, but now only get lessons from Dory and Vivian in person), who has been a great help and you can hear her say first hand that she’s seen some serious progress even in the last week or two.

While I expect the usual criticism of nitpickers, today I want to discuss why I am actually quite happy with the current level I am at, and confident in the progress I can make in the coming weeks, even though I only have one month left for my fluency goal. I also want to talk about the many good things of an almost never discussed level in a language: pre-fluency, which is something like what I have right now in Mandarin.

There are tonnes of courses to give you the basics in a language, and an army of teachers willing to focus on the Holy Grail of speaking the language “perfectly”, but what about being able to use the language comfortably in a lot of situations, especially socially and for long periods of time, despite speaking incorrectly and still having some work to do and needing people to adjust or slow down for you? This is way more than “getting by”, but it’s definitely not fluent yet. However, is it something we can aim for in itself (at least at first) and get great use out of?

The many opportunities pre-fluency opens up for you

The level I currently have in Chinese is something along the lines of what I had after two months of learning Hungarian, or Czech. For those two languages, at this two month point I had to stop learning, but I got so much out of my experience in these countries thanks to my pre-fluency level in the final weeks!

One thing that stands out for me is a time I was waiting at a tram stop in Prague and a nice old lady struck up a conversation with me. After some pleasantries, the conversation went towards Prague’s past, and she started sharing her experience as a child during World War II, in Czech. I was listening intently and asking her about particular points and it was one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve ever had. She had to slow down for my benefit and rephrase a few things, but that didn’t take away the power of our conversation.

While in Budapest, I got invited to a night out with a decently sized group of locals and after introductions, I used my pre-fluency Hungarian to assign myself to be the official organizer of where the night would go. Many times during the night, the whole table would look to me in our first bar (keep in mind that I run on orange juice on night’s out like this), as I weighed out the advantages and disadvantages of going to a particular club, and asked a few of them for their feedback. When the decision was made, I rounded everyone up and encouraged the few who were too tired to join us anyway. Some groups have an obvious leader, and in this case even though I wasn’t qualified enough with my Hungarian level to be that leader, I did it anyway.

In both of these languages, (unlike with Mandarin) I decided not to maintain the language afterwards (maintaining a large number of languages is hard work, so sometimes learning a language for me is for the purposes of enhancing a particular travel experience), but that doesn’t change the immense impact speaking it at a not-yet-fluent level had on my interactions with natives. I made some great friends and saw a side of the country that someone getting by with a few pleasantries in the language (or just English) never would.

On the other hand, someone who waits until they were fluent before ever trying would miss out on so many of these wonderful opportunities.

It’s not about what you do or don’t know, it’s what you can do

I really dislike approaches that are far too long-sighted in learning a foreign language, because they ignore the great potential for communication the person has right now.

For example, it’s very easy to point out a few obvious flaws of the above video, like I misused ‘le’ or have incorrect tones at certain places etc., and you’d be right, and as explained below I am going to be more focused on such “cosmetic” improvements to my language over the next month.

However, the point of this video is to show you how comfortable I am in engaging in someone in conversation, and I can keep up that comfort for many hours.

After dealing with a large number of languages in the field, I really am absolutely confident when I say that the amount you know is worthless if you are not comfortable in using that language. I’ve seen it happen countless times before that some other foreigner technically knows way more in the target language than me; they have more words, they know the grammar and syntax inside-out, and can read classical literature in the language etc., and yet when out with natives they stall if they haven’t been trying to speak with them from the start, or unless they’ve had years of exposure.

Such learners tend to think too much, and are so afraid of making mistakes that they don’t try at all.

A native doesn’t care how many words you know, they care how much you can maintain some flow in the conversation. Even in my first weeks in learning a language, I get out and use what I know.

If one English language learner came up to you and confidently asked “Excuse. You know time?” followed by “Thank. And where train station?”, you would likely shrug off the unimportant mistakes and be happy to help them. If someone else came up to you and asked in perfect, yet excruciatingly struggled English “Excuse me……. could you…… tell me what…. time it is?”, while obviously sweating and looking really awkward, then their amazing BBC accent isn’t going to make any difference to helping you feel comfortable by their awkward body language. I don’t know about you, but I’d feel way more comfortable hanging out with the first speaker for longer periods of time.

It’s taken me two entire months, but right now I can truly say that I feel comfortable with Chinese. The characters don’t look so exotic anymore; they are just words or syllables of words. Someone speaking to me doesn’t sound like a machine gun of random noises any more. It’s a language that I have been so immersed in that it’s a part of me now. I’ve even started thinking in Mandarin. The voiceover in my head always says it in Mandarin if I think “Damn it, I always forget to bring a bottle of water with me!” or “Wow, that girl’s cute!”

But of course, there are still many problems I have, but I didn’t want to have these problems consume my time until it was the right time. And this last month is that time.

My last month strategy: the logarithmic improvement curve

What has been immensely helpful thus far is that I’ve adapted my learning strategy to what I need to know this week, every single week. It’s never been about C1 for me – that’s the overall target that dictates how fast I should be learning, but I don’t concern myself with that target right now. I have mini goals that I focus on to improve this week’s biggest issues.

Now perhaps you’ll look at this video and think that I’m way off being able to fine tuning my spoken Mandarin to remove some simple mistakes, improve my pronunciation, or express myself more complexly, but I thought long and hard about my approach before starting this mission, and based on reaching genuine fluency in several other languages, I know what I feel needs to be worked on first and last. To give you a better idea of how I’ve been approaching this, have a look at this imaginary graph:

Basically, the amount of work that I’ve been doing has been intense for the first two months, and it will be equally intense this last month. But if everything goes according to plan, my “apparent” level should be improving at a much greater rate this month.

By apparent, I mean what would be viewable on video, i.e. a superficial look of how good my sentence structure, vocabulary or pronunciation is – when you talk to someone who has interacted with me in person you’ll get the real story (it’s really hard to demonstrate spontaneous genuine conversations on camera without forcing it a little, especially when my focus is social, and the whole point of Youtube is that you are not part of that social spoken interaction).

Based on a few strategies (that, I’m not going to write about for the moment; as said in the video, I like to be a bit secretive and keep you in suspense ), the improvement of these aspects should occur in a “logarithmic” style over the next month, since I’ve laid some important foundations in being comfortable in the language.

I still don’t know if I’ll reach my fluency target, but the point is that I am happy so far because the work I’ve put into having comfort and familiarity with the language, and ease in using it in social situations, means that the technical stuff that I’m getting to now is way easier than it would have been from the start.

For example, learning words initially was difficult because of the fact that I’m used to learning multisyllabic words, without worrying about tones. In fact, I’ve found that once I have gotten used to Chinese, learning new vocabulary is incredibly simple compared to learning new unfamiliar vocabulary in a typical European language. I’ll explain why another day, but for now the point is that I am absorbing a large number of words per day, and increasing that amount every day. I can only do this now – the rate at which I can learn new vocabulary wouldn’t have been possible my first month since the language was so strange.

And I’ve got some cool suggestions from others to help me improve my currently choppily spoken level to be more fluent (not sure which one of them will work best so I’ll try a few ideas out), but these could only be applied when the language itself made sense to me. Those with more experience than me with Chinese have some very interesting ideas, but in my opinion they are better applied this month rather than my first month, since speaking “prettier” Chinese is not something I cared to prioritise in my first two months.

I’ve reached a certain level of comfort that I can now focus on the other curve and bring it up dramatically (or at least try to!) over the next 4 weeks. Hopefully this graph is somewhat clear in demonstrating what I mean! Once again, I have no idea if this will work, but I’m going to try Worst case scenario, I end the month with much better Chinese than what I have now, and what I have now is very useful.

Are you impressive in your language, or are you genuinely functional?

To illustrate a high level of comfort, despite clearly speaking with lots of mistakes, today I had to ask for a refund of a voice recorder. You can see in the video that I’m using a separate microphone now; this is because recording in a noisy outside environment like where we were makes it a little harder to hear when the camera’s microphone is almost as close to other people as it is to us. Since I’d like to record much more interviews in future I invested in this voice recorder and microphone to add the audio separately; but the device is faulty.

One reason the video is short and some scenes are cut out is because I ended up repeating myself too much from what I said in the first video, so it simply isn’t interesting. Another reason is that the sound kept cutting off because of the bad voice recorder – so I went back to get the refund. Now I had to explain that every 3 minutes there was a loss in synchronisation in the audio recording, so it messed up my video since the lips were out of synch. I showed the precise points in the audio clip to the clerk and asked if she could hear the problem. I suggested that maybe this particular device is OK for quick notes, but it’s terrible for professional style longer recordings, and I’d rather just pay a little bit more for a good brand like Sony.

There wasn’t a single communication issue – she understood everything I said, and I understood her replies and further questions (are you sure it’s not the microphone? etc.) and got my money back. This kind of complicated issue is something I can handle fine even though I lack some key words, and my sentences sound quite weird. She wasn’t weirded out, and the exchange was quick and efficient. I’m high up in the “comfort” part of the curve, despite being low in the vocabulary and sentence structure part, and can handle many situations in Mandarin.

(One of the situations I can’t handle just happens to not be “impress perfectionists on Youtube”… but that’s a lost cause, I’ve simply given up on as I have more important things to worry about )

There are many people who can impress you with a list of words they’ve learned and so on, but all that really matters (at least to me) is what can you DO in the language? And I don’t mean what tests can you pass – can you spend an evening talking to one person casually? Can you make small talk with the taximan? Can you tell jokes in the language? Who cares if you do it with A1 or B2 or C2 vocabulary, or with a native accent, or an ugly twang, can you bloody do it or not??

With some efficient use of a heap of practice, lots of trying and failing, and study that’s focused entirely on helping you do these particular things better, pre-fluency can be your key to an amazing new world of communication in the target language. It’s not the end-goal for the rest of your life, but it’s certainly a useful stepping stone.

If you think fluency is out of your range for now, then why not aim for this? Accept that you won’t sound like a poet, but know that you can do a million things in the language, including making real friends.

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I really hope those who were having difficulty understanding what I’m trying to do here are starting to get it. There is no way that I can fail this mission, because the point has always been that I’ve been aiming as high as possible. So far, so good. If I keep this up, I’ll have a really useful level of Chinese this time next month! Reaching fluency on top of that would be icing on the cake, and my mind is on the prize!

So it’s back to work Let me know your thoughts on this in the comments!

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