Quick reminder: To get frequent updates about my day-to-day progress and thoughts on learning Mandarin and life in Taiwan, make sure to like my Facebook page, or follow me on twitter or Google plus!

Today’s edition of the Irish times has printed an article about my language learning adventures, and I’ve had some requests for radio interviews on Irish stations this week. While I’m glad to usually write to an international audience, it’s great to see some interest sparked back home! So, welcome to new readers from Ireland!

If you’re wondering about a precise explanation regarding how I learn languages, and some encouragement to make it clear that it has nothing to do with natural talent, the best thing you can do is check out my TEDx talk (17 minutes long).

If you are more curious about how I’ve been travelling for so long, just keep in mind that travel is way cheaper than what you think it is! I’ve had dozens of different jobs to fund this, but at the moment earn from sales of the Speak From Day One package I created that some readers of this blog decide to get (on the link you’ll see a fun video of me speaking my best languages). You don’t have to pay me money to progress in a language though – there are so many ways to learn a language without spending a cent.

Also, for articles more relevant to Ireland, one of the most popular posts I’ve written with almost a million reads has been How to speak English like the Irish, and I’ve also written specifically about learning Irish (Gaeilge), and made a silly video about it. And the book I wrote has been translated to Irish (as well as 21 other languages) by two native speakers from the Gaeltacht and you can see the sales page written entirely in Irish here: Treoir Teanga. Last time I was home I recorded some footage of the Fleadh, since it was in my hometown Cavan!

The biggest article on the site by far has been the 29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight.

About every 3 months, I move to a new country and try to learn a new language. I don’t promise or claim anything, but I do aim very high and share my progress. At the moment I’m trying to learn Mandarin Chinese to a fluent level in just 3 months. It’s pushing me to my limits and I’m working really hard, but sharing my successes and struggles on the blog. So I hope you’ll subscribe by clicking the RSS button, joining the email list (both around the top right of the site) or liking the Facebook page!

And most importantly, I hope something on this site will inspire you to give a second language a try yourself – especially considering that my background may not be so different to yours (I did pass Irish for the Leaving Cert and only got a C2 [For non Irish readers, this is half way between a C+ and a C-] in my Leaving Cert German exam, which ironically is the same name (C2) used to describe the highest level exam you can take in the advanced diploma in German that I sat after trying a second time, with just 3 months to prepare!)

In Cavan, we have a weekly meetup on Wednesdays in the Farnham hotel for Irish speakers to practice their level – check out your local library/paper to see if there is something similar near you to speak a wee bit as Gaeilge, and if you live in a bigger city, say hi to a tourist, or do a search on social networking sites to find a native of many other languages to speak with in person.

If you are going abroad soon and are serious about learning the language, don’t make the mistake that I made for the first six months I was living in Spain, and speak the language immediately! Make mistakes, the world won’t end – extensive research that I’ve done over 8 years has confirmed this!

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave me a comment below, or to join the very active forums on this site to get advice to any specific questions you may have! All the best from Taiwan!
Similar Posts:

• Happy Paddy’s day!
• Benny’s birthday request: 1982 clicks!
• Irish & Czech added to Language Hacking Guide
• Resources for language learning, travelling, blogging and new site design!
• Social media Saturday – What happens in Vegas… gets blogged and tweeted!

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Welcome to new Irish readers! 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)!

Reading the language independently is an important part of my Chinese project. However, my focus is on speaking. So until I can read a larger amount by myself, I needed a boost to allow me to use the language immediately in everyday situations like making purchases, reading signs, and understanding menus and ingredients on products.

Without being able to read, it would be tempting to retreat away from such situations until I was “ready”, and this is absolutely unacceptable if I’m to get into the flow of speaking. But there is a solution! Even a language like Chinese with a complex writing system, can be worked with if you don’t mind using a little technology!

To do that I’ve been using the Pleco app that I describe in detail, in this video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgIyrqRcQOo

[Sorry that it's 20 minutes long. If you are pressed for time, the coolest part (the OCR feature) starts at the 5:30 point in the video. If you are reading this from a country that blocks Youtube, check out the video on Youku instead].

For much more details about Pleco and its features, please see their website, or download the free version of the app from the iTunes or Android app store.

As I said in the video, the coolest features of the app, like the OCR option are paid. I mention some of the prices in the video (based on Android version, iPhone prices are a little different) and you can decide if it would be worth it, depending on if you’d really need the features, which you may not if you are learning the language without access to printed Chinese, or if most Chinese you read is on your computer (in that case plugins like this one are a big help).

If you are in the country however, then I do recommend you give it a try. (Note that I don’t earn any commission from Pleco, this is just an honest recommendation).

Of course, using this app could be viewed as “cheating”, but as I said in the video it has been helping me to speak more, and it’s been helping me to learn faster, since I can hear the correct pronunciation and read the pinyin (and do some other things like save tough words to review later in a flashcard module), as I see characters that I need to understand and pronounce in the real world.

Use of the app does not count towards the objective of getting the gist of menus and newspapers that I mentioned at the start of the mission, since obviously I need to be doing that myself. In the next post I’ll explain what I’m doing that’s essential in that regard. But I will continue to use this app throughout the mission to make sure that I don’t avoid any situation that presents me with written Chinese I may not be “ready” for yet.

[Keep in mind that one strategy I'm implementing this week is to force myself to speak quicker and not think so much about saying things fully correctly, so I'm well aware that my tones are quite off in many of the brief segments of Chinese I spoke. Please save all thoughts, positive or negative, on my current level for when I upload a video entirely in Mandarin again next week!! ]

I’m happier to share this app with you because I can see that the developer who works on it has been focused on helping people learn Chinese via such apps for quite some time and is quick to accept feedback from those learning the language. It’s presented as a means to help you learn Chinese, and not a replacement for needing to read. Some app devs have been terribly misleading in presenting the usefulness of their gimmicky apps, but luckily that’s not the case here!

Would you use this app to help you read Chinese? Let me know in the comments!
Similar Posts:

• Benny’s first video attempt in Mandarin: 2 weeks after starting

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How to read Chinese from day one: Video review of the Pleco app with OCR and handwritten recognition 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)!

The late and great Steve Jobs was famous for many things, and was arguably one of the most influential contributors to how advanced personal use technology developed over the last few decades. But another thing that he was quite well known for, which definitely contributed a huge amount to how much he achieved, was his reality distortion field (RDF).

Rather than the mystical powers the name (and my silly photo) suggests, this is simply charm, persistence, boldness and, most importantly, a refusal to give up, which leads to great things being achieved that the average person won’t, since they simply don’t try hard enough.

It’s “distorting” reality, very simply because one “reality” is what people think about you failing, and another is what you think and do, to make sure you succeed. You have to ignore the naysayers, even if some of what they say may be true (i.e. a “reality”), but actually totally irrelevant to you and your situation (e.g. maybe some unhelpful studies show that kids are better learners, but others show that adults are), and focus only on what will bring you in the right direction.

I don’t actually think Steve Jobs was unique in having one. It’s something that could be argued (depending on how you define it) that everyone applies in one way or another. The difference is that some people have configured their RDF to work for them (or to help other people), while the majority of us have ours set to self-sabotage mode. Those who have achieved great things despite setbacks have had a way of living and a mentality that made these things much more likely.

In my mind a RDF is synonymous with a lifestyle and mentality that hacks luck, filters for success, ignores any “signs” from the universe that you should stop, is filled with passion, and helps you to surround yourself with people who will help you achieve that goal.

This is not about the law of attraction; a cheesily marketed and questionably explained technique to “think” yourself to greatness. The point is that a positive mentality combined with a LOT of hard work is what’s really required here. No bogus explanations about quantum psychic energy are required to understand why the following suggestions, with video illustrations, simply work:

1. Don’t let anybody tell you what you can’t do

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEGSiX0JA-s

Will Smith explains it best here. [And I like the fact that there are Taiwanese flags in the background ]

I don’t care if you have 9 university diplomas, or have an IQ of 200; if you are telling me that I can’t do something, then you are wasting my time, and I will ignore you. Some people take “being realistic” too far, and are obsessed with protecting people from getting disappointed. A life without trying is way more disappointing if you have a dream you never even truly pushed yourself to achieve.

2. Shoot for the moon

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-5_8af3TiY

Before a big fight, Muhammad Ali would intimidate his opponents with powerful (and ridiculous) words like “I’ve handcuffed lightening, and thrown thunder in jail! Only last week, I murdered a rock!”

Way too many people aim very very low in life. Modest objectives and modest promises will yield modest results. I don’t just aim for fluency in 3 months, I start my day M.Ali style and tell myself “Today I’ll out-talk an auction host, say the word that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue before they know it themselves, and give a discourse so great they’ll elect me president before lunch!”

When you start the day with that up-beat attitude and work hard to go in that direction, then doing something like ordering food you’ve never had before in a language you just started to learn, seems way more achievable.

Today, I started my day with that silly mantra above to myself, and this upbeat attitude made me put my doubts and second-guessing aside. I ordered a breakfast that I never had before, in somewhere new and in a language I’ve been learning for only 3 weeks. And and for the first time, it felt natural – no pausing, no struggling, no misunderstanding. The language was just flowing – both the words I was saying and my understanding of everything being said to me. It isn’t the same as having a deep conversation with someone, but aiming high has got me this far already, so I have no intentions of watering down my objectives.

A “realistic” mindset where you are constantly reminding yourself of your limitations, instead of your potential, can never bring you this far. Be unrealistic.

3. When the going gets tough, remember the struggles of those before you

www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wRkzCW5qI

While this short video is quite cheesy (in a clever, very well synched way), all of these movies (some of them based on true stories, and some of them just Hollywood silliness) remind me that if I bitch and whine about a little thing like a language being too hard, then that’s nothing.

Others before me have had to fight wars, racism, starvation, poverty, and the most resilient among them have, against all odds, and sometimes for many years, somehow managed come out on top. How can you give up when those with obstacles way more immense than yours have charged forward?

Almost every problem you face can be overcome if you keep things in perspective like this. Giving up on something small and manageable is pure insanity!

4. When you fall, get back up again

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOlTdkYXuzE

Yes, the more you try, the more you will fail.

Failing isn’t what matters; it’s how you finish. Keep trying again and again: the last time will be the one that counts the most, since you will either give up, or you’ll succeed. Finish strong.

5. Be a round peg in a square hole

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dX9GTUMh490

Challenge the status quo and see things differently. Yes, perhaps most people would fail if they attempt what you want to achieve. But you aren’t most people. Limiting yourself by the status quo is for sheep. Be different.

Effective people are not problem minded, they are opportunity minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems. Ineffective people do the opposite.

6. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK2XvOs8e1s

While it’s likely many of you would have seen this speech over the last months, this short part at the end is my favourite bit, since it encapsulates the essence of an efficient RDF to me. Keep trying, keep enjoying, take risks, aim high, and never give up. One “reality” is that you could fail, but do absolutely everything in your power to make sure that the alternative happens.

In attempting to learn to speak fluent Mandarin in just 3 months, I’m taking lots of risks, getting discouragement from dozens of people (online, never in person) every day, feeling lonely since I don’t know anyone within thousands of miles yet since I’m intentionally avoiding those I can communicate with easiest, working so hard to stay outside of my comfort zone that it feels like my brain is going to melt most of the day, putting my ego aside while I feel like a complete idiot every time I open my mouth…

And I’m hungry for more.

What will determine my success is not the materials I use, the teacher I have, the ratio of input vs output or other technical details. It’s entirely determined by how much I am devoted to the reality of me succeeding, and in making that happen. My RDF is very well configured, and is likely to lead to success because of this. Failure is always an option, but I don’t care about that because trying hard is always an option too.

When someone tells me again that what I’m aiming for is impossible, I don’t think twice about ignoring them. The people who gave or who inspired the speeches in these videos didn’t concern themselves with what was “impossible”, and if it’s not breaking any laws of physics then neither do I. If someone gives me some useful advice, I take it to heart. If I have a minor victory then I enjoy the moment and make sure another one happens very soon. If I have a failure, I learn from it and try again.

And I can feel the goal creeping closer. Every step forward is like a mountain in itself that I struggle to climb due to the immensity of what I’m trying to do, but I’m not giving up any time soon.

The advice in these videos are more important to language learners than anything else I can think of.

Yes, I’ll give technical updates of what I’m using and tricks relevant to what’s unique to Chinese, but a glass is half full mindset, and an absolute certainty that it is far from the hardest language in the world – these mentalities so quickly dismissed by cynics as barely relevant, are what will truly decide if I succeed in this or not.

So, is your RDF properly configured? Let me know in the comments!
Similar Posts:

• How to achieve the impossible
• Your worst enemy on the path to success? You!
• Perfectionist paralysis
• Fake it ’till you make it
• Stop being such a crybaby

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6 short videos to help you configure your very own reality distortion field 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 problem with seeing the end-result of any feat, is not understanding the processes that went on to get to that point. As my friend Khatzumoto said to me once;

Olympic coverage really ticks me off… you can’t just go up to a person on game day and say how talented they are. So I came up with this rule, that in order to earn the right to watch the Olympics you should have to watch all of their training too!

This issue of ignoring the work that person had to go through to get to the point you see him is a huge problem in language learning. It’s easy to see someone speak a foreign language and dismiss that person as a “genius”, or say that it just comes naturally to them. As if it was their destiny, or a universe-conspired explosion of luck. This is discouraging as each of us thinks about how much we have to struggle, and study and fail because we don’t have natural talent.

While I will always strive to learn as quickly as I can, the fact of the matter is that I can’t, and no other learner can, skip the frustration involved and required to reach a useful level in a foreign language. One reason the title of this blog tends to annoy a lot of people is because of this presumption that I perhaps claim to go to the country, hang out with pretty girls and party all the time in glamorous James-Bond style and magically speak the language at the end; it’s just not fair, so it can’t be true. Learning a language takes hard work, and since spending “only” 3 months on it isn’t hard work, I must be lying.

But here’s the thing. Three months is a really long time. It’s not about counting the months, but counting the hours and the quality of those hours that makes the difference. A lot of my time, especially initially, is spent quite a bit outside of my comfort zone, and actually being tremendously frustrated, and this is something that very few learners do much, even if they spend “lots of time” studying.

The only way to get anywhere meaningful is through hard work

And I’ll let you in on a little secret that those who think I party my way to fluency don’t know: I’m pouring blood, sweat, tears and a crapload of sacrifices into this mission. More than the vast majority of those who have been “learning the language for years” can ever imagine. It’s about priorities and insane devotion to the task, not simply “working hard”. This is something that anyone else can do, but sadly most don’t.

One reason it will indeed take you years to learn a language is if you make sure you are comfortable the entire time. Stay indoors with software that mostly requires that you just click a few buttons, sit down with a book or go for a pleasant jog with a podcast on, go to a class and let the teacher do all the talking, or do exercises only at the level prescribed to you. Even if you are pouring everything into studying hard, is that really trying as hard as you can? Working hard is not the same as living hard.

In my mind, this isn’t good enough and it’s too academic. The real world presents you with problems and learning opportunities before you are ready. The more you are exposed to them, the faster you’ll be forced to learn.

To illustrate this, let me give you a comparison of what I am doing and what a typical expat learning the language might do:

My own long road through the shortcut: a typical day

Most expats: Get up, work, study some vocab in the break, after work get the weekly one hour private lesson, and speak in English the entire time, go home and study for an hour, then go out with your English speaking mates for the rest of the night, complaining about how hard Chinese is… in English. Satisfied that 2 or 3 entire hours of “hard” work mean he’s done his part on the “long road” to speak the language some day.

Me: Wake up to a radio in Mandarin telling me the news and desperately force myself to pick out as many words as I can, and wish I knew what was going on in the world after I understand only fragmented basic words. Start off grumpy.

Go somewhere completely different for breakfast today to force myself to get out of the lazy routine I was getting into, since my favourite place already knows what I want and I just confirm it with 2 or 3 of the same words. It’s possible I’ll order the wrong thing because of this. Order in broken Mandarin, with no more pointing and just saying “that” and consider it a success if I get what I wanted. Starting the day off with the wrong breakfast is damn annoying, but you can bet I won’t make the mistake again next time.

I really could have done with that filling hot egg and spinach muffin they have at the Starbucks across the road… but deal with the fact that a breakfast is a breakfast. At least I ordered it in a way that forced me to practice beyond repeating the same words I already know.

Study for several hours, then after doing work for several hours after that (yes, I have to work too! Luckily it’s part time for the moment) get out of the books and out of the house to do the important spoken project of that day (e.g. explain my way into having my cellphone repaired, go get a quick tea somewhere and force myself to ask a non-tea related question of the waitress, ask directions to something that I know the answer of to help me get used to expected vocab, record a video in Mandarin for Youtube commenters to take dumps on me etc. – anything that forces me to speak the language) Every experience is like pulling teeth as I am way out of my comfort zone, but each time I learn something important and remember the minor victories.

Then it’s time for the gym! But treadmills and dumbbells are boring. Instead I go to dance lessons included in my membership. An entire hour of instructions being shouted at me and others… in Mandarin of course. Trying to divide my attention between mimicking the instructor’s body movements precisely (luckily I have some experience dancing, so I keep up fine), and trying to figure out if I can contextually figure out what he’s saying and learn some new words. End the hour exhausted physically and mentally.

Go to a crowded cafe with lots of people speaking and try to study there until they close. Studying is the easy part. Sitting in a comfy chair with nice music and nobody pressuring me or waiting for me to say what I want to say… I could do this all day! Which is exactly why I shouldn’t…

An expat walks in with his local girlfriend, speaking in English, and is soon joined by several expat friends. I sigh about the fact that I still don’t know anyone in the city yet (I’m certainly not too shy to make new friends, just not able to do it effectively in the local language yet and not interested in the slippery slope of hanging out “just a little” with English speaking expats), and put my earphones on with the radio (some easy listening station, since love songs have much easier to distinguish slower lyrics) as I continue to study. My time to shine and really get into the meat of the part of language learning I love most will come in a few short weeks. All this studying is based on the issues I actually have with speaking, not on blindly going through courses.

Come home, and try to communicate with my terribly broken Chinese in an online chatroom. Succeed in convincing someone to meet up with me next week! Then realize how incredibly unprepared I am to sit down with someone and talk for more than 5 seconds in Mandarin. Anyway, I’ll figure that out when the time comes…

Then finally it’s time to “reward” myself with two hours of non-work-related English to end my day, but I keep it entirely online to make sure I actually speak as little as possible or no English at all in that day.

I naively think that they Internet is going to be a warm friendly and encouraging place, and then see forums, blog posts, comments, youtube videos reminding me (as if I haven’t heard it enough already) that I’m going to fail miserably and am not “taking this seriously”. After a pretty rough day of taking it seriously I get angry with Internet trolls and waste my wind-down time feeding them. Ironically these comments are helping me because I’m getting great negative reinforcement about exposing myself to English. When I speak in Mandarin everyone is friendly, and smiling and encouraging… and I feel energised after each time I’ve tried to say something new to someone, despite how awkward it is. But when I discuss speaking Mandarin in English then it’s doom and gloom.

The solution to this problem is obvious. More Mandarin, less English.

I shrug off the discouragement, and filter it out for some useful comments and feedback and take that to heart. As well as this many people are indeed giving me useful encouragement, which is crucial, and something I really need after the day I’ve had. There is an important process of dealing with the immense amount of negativity I’ve been getting for this project, and your own doubts that slow you down, and a process that has been the core of helping me to learn faster that I’ll discuss in the next post.

Then I remember that there is a big X at the top right of the window and I can turn them off… and I go to bed to start the process all over again the next day.

Are you under pressure to improve all the time?

It’s not fun to be stuck in this stage, and the whole point of it is that if you want to stick to your guns and be 100% devoted, you can’t start sharing your frustrations with anyone in person yet, because you don’t even know the word for “frustration”. But I know from experience how much all this hard work can pay off in terms of friendships and exposure to sides of a culture many passers-through never get to see.

Despite the fact that I’m not enjoying myself much in this stage of the language learning process, I am enjoying the language. It’s the most logical, consistent and straightforward language I’ve ever come across!

Studying the grammar, vocab, tones, word order and characters are the easy part. The hard part is to force myself to actually use them instead of just sitting down with a book all day, which is so tempting as that is well within my comfort zone. The hard part is to go up to someone when I speak so desperately slowly still, and doing it anyway.

All of my frustrations are based on the interactions I force myself into, as it’s quite lonely to have to go through this rough stage of not being able to express myself at a useful level yet. Many expats don’t really have this frustration, because after a few brief attempts at trying, they will go back to their friends and vent in English. I know that if I can stay with this frustration a little longer, then the level of frustration will very quickly start to evaporate.

Since I didn’t make it clear before, I’ll specify it now: I’m learning Chinese so that I can speak it for the rest of my life. This is not like some other missions I had in the last year or two where I was just checking out a language and learning what I needed for that single experience. So all my work is focused on long term benefits for short term sacrifices. I am not hanging out with the many fun and interesting Taiwanese who speak English because this is only the first time I’ll be in the country, and I want to make sure I can see the many sides English speakers are prevented from seeing, in my last month here on this visit, as well as helping me fully appreciate mainland China when I get to visit it after these 3 months are up.

If this means I have to have a rough one or two months of really frustrating entire days and way less socialising than I like (but still plenty of speaking) before I can use the language confidently and start to make deep friendships, then it will have totally been worth it.

Everyone struggles, but some struggle more efficiently

Those of you who will have seen my first video attempt at Mandarin, will see in my face how much I’m trying to think to force basic words out of me (or in this case… ba…sic….syll…a…bles), and may appreciate that maybe there is no quantum leap of merrily skipping through frustration for anyone. This is why I shared that video with you, and will likely make another one again in two weeks – just one video at the end could not possibly tell the whole story.

Everyone struggles, and I hope you can see that I’m going through the same problems any language learner has to go through, and actually many other issues that most language learners don’t have to go through because of my intensity and avoiding of English speakers, leading to all of my interactions throughout the day being superficial.

There is a huge difference in how I’m approaching this. Instead of skipping frustration, I do what few others will – I charge into it and fill my entire day with it. It’s like tearing off a band-aid; most people do the “hard stuff” of feeling like an idiot in early stages of language learning in very small doses. I’m doing lots of study of course, but what really defines my day is what I do away from the books and audio and comfy chairs.

While I got the usual Internet “warmth” of people laughing at me, or reminding me… again… that what I’m aiming for is impossible (seriously people, look impossible up in a dictionary or figure out what it really means will you!) after uploading that video, I also got some useful feedback of what to focus on next, and having produced the video forced me to learn things I hadn’t before, that no book could EVER teach me.

The video isn’t so impressive and that’s the point. I’m not pulling any rabbits out of any hats in this mission and I’m not merrily skipping my way up to higher spoken levels overnight. I’m struggling, but doing so more efficiently and more consistently than most learners would. When learners tell me that it takes “at least 5 years” to speak Mandarin, I have to ask them frankly – what the hell were you doing for those five years? I’m not smarter than you, I’m just more willing to take more punishment and feel like a complete idiot most of the day.

I feel like the myth that you are “smart” if you learn languages, makes too many people unwilling to accept that they will not be able to argue politics and deeply share their feelings if they dared to speak in their first weeks, before they are “ready”. Any idiot can learn a language, and knowing this means that I can accept that perhaps I have to be that idiot.

You feel really stupid when you try to use a language in situations that are outside of your comfort zone, and that’s precisely why you need MORE of these situations, not less of them.

If you charge into the frustration, embrace it, and fill up all your free time with it, then you WILL get to the other side much quicker. Too many learners only do these annoying practice things, once in a while, and it’s what slows them down tremendously. Doing it the hard and intensive way is damn stressful, and I can confirm that. I’m not interested in the easiest way to learn a language, I want the most efficient way.

Enough of this easing yourself in gently nonsense. That’s precisely why it’s taking you so much time.

Hopefully my next video will be much more interesting (unlike the first one, something I’d be very happy to show to a native) and it will be because I’ve been through hell to get to it But I’ve been to hell and back several times by now and know the path intimately.

Totally worth it every time.

Your thoughts on this welcome in comments below as always!
Similar Posts:

• How to think in a foreign language (it does NOT “just happen”)
• Learning enough of the language to get by on the flight over
• Benny’s TEDx talk: Speak from Day One
• Travel phrasebooks: a serious language learner’s best first book to study
• How to make time if you are too busy

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The only way to get far quickly is to get out of your comfort zone (my typical day learning 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)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=On26D1X8-4M

[Captions in English, Traditional Chinese (native written) & Simplified Chinese (automatic conversion). If you live in China and Youtube is blocked, then check out this video on Youku]

As I’ve explained in great detail before, uploading a video of yourself speaking just after you’ve started to learn a language can be very beneficial.

So with that in mind, a couple of days ago I asked my Chinese teacher (I’ve getting private lessons for now) to translate a script with everything I would say if I was giving a tour of my home in a language I speak fluently. I wanted to explain complex things, like that I replaced my laptop with a desktop, that I don’t really use my fridge etc., and she wrote it up for me in Chinese (which I used for the captions) and in pinyin, which I was studying to learn all the new vocabulary, and memorising the lines themselves since then. This video is the result of that!

Before all the annoying trolls jump down my neck with their usual crybaby comments, I’ll clarify that no I don’t force locals to listen to me speak like this for 10 minutes. I actually speak better/faster than this when ordering food and the like, since I only have to remember one phrase, not an entire script, and I don’t have a camera (and ultimately thousands of eyes) on me

I’ve got a LOT of improvement to make (after recording it, I noticed several obvious mistakes myself), but since people have requested that I upload more video updates of different stages of my progress it’s only fair that I share this! Also, it’s a huge 10 minutes long, as far as apartment tours go… even though it’s the smallest place I’ve lived in for 14 years! So I will certainly forgive you if you don’t make it all the way through

Obviously this video is scripted – I managed to memorise the whole thing apart from 2 or 3 words you saw me glance at my notes to see. It’s been an excellent mini-project to burn this particular vocab into my memory, as well as forcing me to start speaking complex sentences beyond ordering food etc. quicker than I would than by letting it “happen naturally”. As well as learning the vocab, I’ve gotten a sense of typical sentence structure and a better understanding of tones (even if I can’t reproduce them so well yet), since I wanted to understand absolutely everything of every aspect of what I was going to say.

Since I am only two weeks into learning the language, I’d be very happy to hear that natives can simply understand me most of the time without needing to read the captions. I’ll work on improving my pronunciation, and getting more comfortable with speaking – as you can see I’m thinking too much, especially about the tones, but this is just a stepping stone. Fast progress or bust!

Any thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
Similar Posts:

• How to read Chinese from day one: Video review of the Pleco app with OCR and handwritten recognition

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Benny’s first video attempt in Mandarin: 2 weeks after starting 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)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yhnWnR1g7M

If you’re a new reader here and would like the most concise version of my best advice to speak from day one, then this video is for you

If you’re a long-term reader and have wondered who/what precisely inspired me to start on this road to become a polyglot some day, then you will see me finally share that story in this video.

Although this was only the second time (hopefully of many) in my entire life that I’ve spoken publicly in front of a decent sized audience (the first being at TBEX), a combination of several camera men, a decent microphone and a cool audience made me look like I didn’t hurriedly prepare the speech the night before, and I think I actually managed to convey the speak from day one message pretty well!

Speaking at a TED associated event has been something I never even dreamt possible, but I was hoping to some day. You may remember that I asked for some help from my site readers (as a birthday present) to vote for me to speak at SxSW (an event in Austin in March)? In the end, they weren’t interested despite the many votes (probably for the best as that would have made it impossible to have 3 uninterrupted months to devote to Mandarin), but the real reason I wanted to speak there was to build up my speaking resume to maybe be considered by a TEDx event some day.

Luckily for me, those at San Antonio wanted me to share my simple message in true TED style. It turns out San Antonio has America’s largest Hispanic population that does not speak Spanish, so they were especially motivated to hear my story. Since I’m so grateful for the opportunity, I’ll forgive them for misspelling my name

Since this was only my second time ever on stage like this, if you have any feedback make sure to let me know in the comments! This way I’ll improve the message in any future speaking engagements. If, however, you think this is the kind of quality you expect in a TED talk, please contact the TEDx team and let them know that so that they may consider putting it on the big TED! Being hosted as a TEDx video means that most of the people who view it will likely come from my website, but if big TED took it on, I could get this message in people’s iTunes stream, and on TEDs official Youtube account and main webpage.

Of course there are no sales pitches and not a single mention of my website on the video, since I wanted to focus only on the simple, but life-changing message that speaking a language is what makes a world of difference, not studying it.

To suggest this video for TED, just write a quick message to tedxtalks AT ted DOT com mentioning my name as the TEDxSanAntonio speaker, with the title “Rapid Language Hacking”, as perhaps a candidate for TED and hopefully they’ll consider it! To be honest, I really feel the TED stream needs something like this after their discouraging message about language learning somehow got shared. The stream needs some balance!

After sending the email, leave your thoughts in the comments below; really appreciate it!
Similar Posts:

• Language Hacking tips for English speaking travellers (My TBEX talk)
• Redifining your motivation
• Combining learning languages with your hobbies: My first video in Czech!
• 7 reasons why you should sing to learn languages
• How to prepare, record & upload a video entirely in a foreign language just after starting to learn it

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Benny’s TEDx talk: Speak from Day One 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 the end of week one of what has definitely been the mission that has stirred up the most interest and discussion, since I started the blog!

I can confirm that after this initial exposure to the language, I have not quite been “humbled” into saying what I’m attempting is impossible just yet, despite what many naysayers are suggesting What I’m attempting is extremely ambitious, and I may not achieve it precisely as I’ve defined it (and get something lower, but still very useful instead), but it is not impossible.

I’ve read the word “impossible” directed at me more in the last week than for any other mission. I’d suggest people read this post for my thoughts on impossibilities.

As annoying as all the “you’ll fail miserably” comments/forum posts/Youtube videos have been, the few that care to actually explain why Chinese is “so hard” have basically given me a summary of the biggest challenges I will face, and advance warning to allow me to think of ways to get through these challenges quicker, with an example or two mentioned in this post. At this stage I believe I’ve heard most of the language’s greatest challenges explained to me, and have some ideas to help me get through them that I’ll update you on as I implement them, or otherwise have found good resources to get tips from those more experienced who are less interested in shooting me down.

Otherwise it’s the usual hardest language mentality that I’ve seen so many times before. In each case (Hungarian, Czech, French, Chinese etc.) where an army of people are ready to inform me that THIS one is the hardest, those arguing dismiss the challenges of learning any other languages as trivial, and in the vast majority of cases they have little to no understanding or appreciation of those languages. Frankly I find this way more arrogant than someone like me saying that maybe he could get somewhere with Chinese quickly. Once I have more experience, confirming (along the lines of this post) that Chinese is not as bad as everyone is making it out to be, I’ll definitely be coming back to this point to explain it in greater detail.

Call me arrogant if you will, but my purpose here is to present Chinese as a manageable task to encourage language learning, for those intimidated by it and sticking to European languages (or worse, and just speaking English) for no reason other than this intimidation.

First week summary: Arrival

Anyway, here is a blow by blow update of everything I’ve done this first week!

The greatest challenge by far in this first week has not been tones, the writing system, learning vocab, pronunciation etc., but what I feel will always be the decider as you learn a language: real world problems (not those in grammar etc. books). The RWP that’s slown me down the most has been that I only got 2 hours of sleep a night for all 4 nights before flying into Taipei, and this combined with jetlag (which, when well rested, I’ve found ways to get over very quickly normally) has totally messed up my sleeping patterns, similar to the poor start I had in Istanbul.

So I’ve been very tired for most of the day my first days, and wasting time and less able to focus because of this. Luckily I made sure to have my apartment very well naturally lit this time round (I’ll give you the “grand tour” in scripted and terrible sounding but hopefully understandable Mandarin next week, although it’s only a humble studio), so I’m finally adjusting to local time. Hopefully this slow first week won’t affect the routine I plan to get into consistently throughout the rest of my stay.

When I arrived at the airport late on Tuesday, I took the lazy and more expensive route of getting a taxi since I was too exhausted to deal with transfers and finding my way around. I told the taxi man “Qing… Da-An MRT”, and he understood.  I pronounced qing as ching, although I know now it’s a different type of initial sound, but he understood me (probably simply because airport taximen are so used to foreigners, although if he spoke English he didn’t care to let me know about it). Thanks to Google streetview, I knew from memory based on the buildings exactly where I needed to go. 這裡, 謝謝! Here, please! He pulled over despite my incorrect tones.

I arrived at night on Tuesday, and my PA who found the cheap apartment for me did all the talking with my landlord, handed me the keys in exchange for rent, quickly showed me some essentials on my street (explaining everything in English), and then I went to sleep. So my first day really began as soon as I was up very early on Wednesday.

Day One

I wouldn’t be so consistent if I wasn’t to actually speak from day one, and I can confirm that I did just that! [Note, parts of this section are copied directly from the Language Hacking League email newsletter, which you can sign up to on the top-right of the site].

I went out for some breakfast and to withdraw money. My card was giving me problems, and I just got a chocolate roll from a 7-11, with the little I had left after paying rent on arrival. So all I needed to say was “hello” and “thank you” (你好 and 謝謝). Easy enough start! Although I was saying these without the right tones, I didn’t get a slap in the face. I’m confident that out of all the things I could say to the clerk, these two coming from a guy as white as me, will allow the local to extrapolate to understand what I mean. Relying on this for more than a few hours was obviously not something I was planning.

One of my bank cards wasn’t working and the other was, and this was confusing me a bit. I walked to a large bookstore to get the main study materials I needed (shown in the screenshot in my introduction post). I went to the counter and gave her my credit card, and she said something back to me after trying it in the machine a few times.

I don’t have a clue what she said precisely, but the context couldn’t have been clearer. My credit card simply wasn’t working. I realized that my bank probably blocked it from strange activity of being used in six countries over a single week thanks to airport transfers, so I took out the cash I had just withdrawn from the other card instead. I handed the notes to her using both my hands, since I’ve started to observe that even if something weighs one gram, they will still hand it to you with both hands here, so I want to emulate it, or I may appear rude.

And of course she was happy with that!

I went home for a “quick nap” and six hours later (thanks to jetlag) I woke up definitely ready for an evening lunch, I headed towards a huge shop (Carrefour) to get some supplies I’ll need while here (buying a metro ticket was easy, since the machine was in English too). When I got out of the metro station, I went looking for some food.

In Taiwan, this isn’t a problem! There are hundreds of stalls all over the place! But the catch of course is that they are all written in Chinese, and everyone I asked Ni huishuo Yingwen ma? to, gave me a blank look back. “Do you speak English?” is more complex than hello or thank you, so in this case my lack of good tones made me incomprehensible, even for a simple question.

Scratching my head at a way to feed myself with something other than what I’ll get in the supermarket, I chanced upon a sign with a picture of pasta. Hardly traditional Chinese food, but as a vegetarian I wanted to not have to think too much right now. I asked the same question as before, and got yet another blank face as if I was telling her that my hovercraft is full of eels.

Even a reply indicating no would have made me feel like I was at least understood. So I pushed on, ignoring the fact that she probably doesn’t understand me, and pointed at the pasta saying “this, please” in equally un-understandable Mandarin. Finally, some sign of recognition! I sat down, and a couple of minutes later received what I had ordered. A minor but important victory!

After getting everything I needed in Carrefour, I went to the checkout and had just looked up the word for “bag”, since I could see them scan the bags for people, so you have to request it or bring your own to encourage recycling. I didn’t have bags yet, so would need to ask for one.

And when I walked up to him, I had my first proper exchange! He said something like blah blah blah (bag) blah (question word)? I replied with “I want please” and he scanned it through. And then I went home

What is important is to have minor successes every day, rather than huge successes very rarely

Next days

The tiredness issue means that I’ve not been social at all, and have continued in a similar vein to my first day for most interactions, while studying for a few hours every day. On my second day I prioritised pronunciation. While it’s not using my favourite resource, I’ve got both Michel Thomas‘ Mandarin course and a full subscription to the ChinesePod course, both of which I’ll be sure to share my thoughts on later, and both of which are audio based.

After going through the tones explanation in both courses, and comparing my basic experience with distinguishing Thai tones, I felt more ready to say what I had already been saying, but better. Now I clearly hear the difference and know how wrong my initial “Ni hao” and everything else was. Natives speaking these slowly for learners on audio in sound recording studios is all well and good, but it will take time to get used to these in the real world.

The most important thing is that I am more confident in knowing that people are more likely to understand me. This has been proven by the amount of blank faces I get back going down dramatically.

I was still relying a lot on pointing though, and have found a useful workaround to get what I want on the menu when I’m confident from the photo that it’s vegetarian (something, which hopefully soon I’ll simply ask directly). Menu items here tend to be numbered, and numbers all the way up to 100 are terribly easy in Chinese (no new vocabulary to remember after ten, with “eleven” being simply ten-one etc.), so I simply say the number, then [please], and get what I want!

Starting to understand

Continuing on with numbers, Chinese has a very interesting system for large numbers (which you must learn, since use of 1,000元 notes can be normal), which actually specifies zeros before other numbers, but not so much after. For example, 5100 would be “five thousand one” and saying hundred is not necessary, since it’s clear from the way the language works. But 5001 would be “five thousand zero one” and 5010 would be “five thousand zero ten”.

It’s a little strange at first, but totally logical. I’ve learned this system (really doesn’t take that long) and can recognise most numbers I’ll hear now, which means that when prices are told to me I can understand them without looking at the till. The catch is that I need several seconds to do the calculations and make sure I remember all the numbers correctly. I’ve found that fumbling through my wallet for 2 or 3 seconds gives me the time to figure out what they said without cheating and looking at the answer.

As well as this, the little amount of vocab I’ve learned is starting to make its way out of the “noise”. Rather than Chinese being a stream of blah-blah-blah, I am starting to pick out very occasional words from metro announcements (names of stops) or people’s conversations (not, please, coffee, big etc.)

Not looking at the language as incomprehensible noise is an important step, and I’ve already accepted the mentality that it’s a language thanks to these rare bursts of understanding (which, easy and obvious a mentality as it seems, is simply not accepted by many learners, who see it as noise that those foreigners are making that they are trying to mimic).

Can read already!

Another major milestone and important aspect of all this “impossibility” I’ve been warned about is that I can actually read and write already! To a very very limited extent of course, but it’s not as much of an unsurmountable monster as everyone makes it out to be.

I’ve been using Heisig’s book to learn the characters, which I have mixed feelings about. The memory techniques are similar to what I’ve used myself to learn vocabulary in general, and some are very clever and have been a huge help! But many don’t really work for me (like references to baseball), so it’s better to get inspiration from it and get going yourself asap.

Learning the book from start to finish has turned out to be a wasteful idea, since I’m given silly words I don’t need like “recklessly” from the start, and more useful words like “want” are near the end! The order presented is useful for understanding the characters that are the building blocks of many words, but is more suited to those who don’t plan to really expose themselves to the language until they finish the book. As well as this, there’s an important difference between characters and words, so I’m focusing my vocabulary studying from other sources that are more practical for day-to-day use.

After learning the first few dozen characters in his order, I’ve decided to only use the book as reference. If I see a complex word I want to remember I look backwards through its components and learn them in context. This is much more memorable, although all the page turning is a little annoying. Especially since the pinyin (pronunciation) is only given at the back.

But a combination of using that book and simply being independent means that I have a few dozen characters I recognise confidently (and could write a crude version of them for you, with the wrong stroke order). While I have plenty left to go, the little I have are high frequency characters or words and I’m starting to recognise them in signs, although I still can’t understand the meaning of the sign unless it’s something like “exit”. I can very easily see the 不 “no(t)” component in No smoking signs and the like.

This means that this idea of seeing Chinese as nothing but random squiggles is already gone in my mind. I’ve prioritised food to allow me to eat in cheaper restaurants asap, and can already see that a restaurant is vegetarian (素食) and know what to avoid, since most meat vocabulary actually includes the word meat 肉 (“cow-meat” is beef, “pig-meat” is pork etc.)

It’s slower, but I’ve learned all these characters not just to recognise them visually, but to also say (or recognise) the sound, incorporating a story with the image to remember the pronunciation and tone. I’ll explain in more detail how I’m doing this later.

And what if you want to understand a word you’ve never seen before? If you use ancient 15th century technology, then it’s pretty damn hard. You must learn stroke order with your words, as part of a complex system for looking words up in a dictionary. It would take ages before you can even dream of trying to look up words, let alone begin to understand them, with any efficiency.

If you have a smartphone though, you don’t need to worry about such things. I’ve been testing out the Pleco app, and will likely share its functions with you in a video to discuss if its worth paying for. You can either draw the character yourself (more useful for scripts that look like handwriting) or simply point your phone’s camera at the character and its OCR will tell you what it means, as well as give you the pinyin pronunciation, and other useful info. No dusty old books required.

Learn to write Chinese in 2 minutes

And I can also write! Actually this writing part of the mission is complete

All you have to do is enable the Chinese keyboard on your computer (very easy to find in settings, and then very easy to set that you can switch to it in an instant) and then write the pinyin and tone number. So 好 is hao3, and you will see a list of characters with the same or similar pronunciation+tone, and then you select it. Or the most likely one is given to you directly.

What this basically means, is that if you vaguely remember what the character looks like (since those in the list presented to you will usually be quite different, so a precise memory of all strokes is really not required, although I imagine there are rare examples of same pronunciation, same tone and similar characters), and remember the pronunciation and tone correctly, you can write any word you like.  I haven’t been learning the characters for words I’m much more likely to just speak rather than read or write, for efficiency purposes, but I have still been able to do a lot. All the characters you see in this post were those I wrote myself rather than copying and pasting.

Of course, I’m not interested in writing on dead trees for now, as I don’t do this in any of my languages beyond signing my name. At most I’ll have to learn to write my address, marital status etc. in Chinese for forms, and do the majority of everything else on my computer or phone.

Useful “listening” practice

For listening practice, rather than use that big TV you saw behind me in the intro video to keep up with cheesy soap operas, I’ve got a much more fun idea!

Four months in America last year combined with several weeks ill in Istanbul, meant that I didn’t eat very healthy food and put on a bit of weight. Losing this is a priority for me while I’m not travelling and have some consistency, and so I joined a gym. But I didn’t join for the threadmills and dumbbells (quite boring). My gym membership includes unlimited access to group classes in everything from yoga, to hip hop dance lessons to random aerobic bouncing around… which apparently they give classes in too. These take place all day every day.

And of course these classes are in Mandarin! I went to one and it was confusing as hell, and I relied too much on copying those around me, but the instructor is yelling at us to do something, and when you hear him say something and perform a motion you start to get the idea and learn that word. I plan on going to these classes several times a week. Exhausting both physically and mentally, but definitely worth it!

How’s that for trying to get a bit more “active” in my listening practice?

————–

So, there you have it! I have a long road ahead of me, but I plan on sprinting that road rather than crawling backwards on my ass, which considering the fact that I’ve been assured it takes anything from five to ten years to reach a “useful” level of fluency in Chinese, I’m convinced is the way most people are tackling this issue. Sorry for the bluntness, but I’ll make fast progress because of a much more efficient learning approach than them. (And no, it’s not because languages are simply easier for me).

The choice of where to live in the city has been a really good one because I have seen next to no other expats around here. In fact, it took me four entire days (most of which I spent outside walking around and in metros or restaurants, when not sleeping) to find my first other white guy!! (a.k. Waldo/Wally)

I’ve also been warned that “everyone” would speak English with me. Despite the requirements of the mission, I’ve specifically asked people to speak English to me at times when I’m really stuck and have been given hopeless looks that it’s not going to happen, forcing me to use the little Mandarin I know. The only English I’ve gotten apart from my PA has been from likely candidates such as Starbucks, that I’m going to more out of laziness to have access to a menu in English, and a habit I hope to break soon. But I’m still the only white guy in there.

I’m sure it’s different in other parts of the city, but I’m really happy with my choice of central and not living in expat-land. It’s been a tough first week, as I’ve gone hungry sometimes for longer than I should have due to not having a clue where or what to eat (there’s no kitchen in my studio), and since I haven’t gone straight to the expat meetings and haven’t tried to talk to locals beyond services, I haven’t made any friends yet, but it’s forcing me to do what needs to be done to speak Mandarin quicker.

This is just week one, and I’ve done less than I wanted because of tiredness, but am actually on schedule in terms of eliminating language learning problems, especially since I have some level of tones, reading and writing. More updates and videos will come of course over the next 3 months! Some of my languages have given me a bit of a headstart, like knowing ASL has helped tremendously with word-order making sense (“Your name what?” “You go where?” etc.) and some of the sounds of the language (forgetting the tones) don’t exist in English, but do in other languages I’ve learned. Even so, I’m confident that most of what I explain as being the basis of my learning approach over the next 3 months could be applied by anyone.

Let me know your thoughts on the progress I’ve made, and any suggestions to help make sure I keep on track. Thanks!
Similar Posts:

• Learning Mandarin Chinese Is Easy; You Just Think It’s Hard
• New Mission: Fluent Mandarin in 3 months!
• Reading Thai and its tones isn’t as hard as you think
• Next mission: Read and speak Thai in 8 weeks
• Tagalog: a fun language to learn in the Philippines!

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First week speaking/reading/writing 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)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YSRjW5Gzb4

As explained in the video, I’m currently in Taipei, Taiwan, and this is day one of my mission to speak fluent Mandarin in 3 months!

That’s fluency as in being able to do most of what I can do in English, in social situations in Mandarin. I’ll still make some mistakes, but I won’t hold up the flow of conversations (on either my side or the person I’m talking to) i.e. conversational fluency rather than professional level fluency. (Or something along the lines of level C1, specifically for the oral component of the European Common Framework of languages testing system, although I don’t plan to sit any tests this time).

As always, I’ll update you with videos as I progress, starting with a quick look at my home in a week or two, which I’ll be giving on camera entirely in Mandarin (with a script prepared in advance), and hopefully ending with a spontaneous interview with a native at the end of March! This is coming from a start point of only knowing “ni hao” as I boarded my flight!

And yes, I will be incorporating reading abilities into this mission, as I’d otherwise be illiterate, and not able to function socially. My priority will be to be able to read menus and signs, but soon after, I do want to be able to get the gist of almost anything I see, with an effortless ability to recognise the most common 1,500 symbols (about half of what most people would consider the number needed to be proficient, so I won’t call my reading abilities fluent). For this mission I won’t go as far as to try to be able to read the likes of full newspaper articles beyond headlines, as that will take too much focus away from my main spoken objective.

[Edit: People are suggesting that I focus on the first 500, as that will be enough for my purposes and the extra work would take away too much from my spoken mission, so I may stick to just 500 to start with and see from there if I've learned quickly enough to learn some more.]

Also note that I am learning traditional Chinese, which is used in Taiwan and not the simplified one (used in mainland China), further complicating the reading aspect of the mission! The good news is that this investment will make it easier to learn simplified Chinese, and even read Japanese, whenever I decide to go in that direction for a later mission.

I chose Taiwan, rather than mainland China, because a communist country with many Internet restrictions do not work well for someone who is a full time blogger, and an outspoken loudmouth in what he writes about (Yes, there are workarounds to access some sites, but they seem rather annoying and inconvenient to apply all the time, and I’d be breaking the law and doing it publicly). Also, I’ve had no bureaucracy at all to get a passport stamp on arrival (no visa) to stay for 3 months, which is not going to happen in China. Also, for the reason given above, I’d prefer to start with traditional rather than simplified Chinese.

But forgetting about such nitty gritty things, the real reason I’ve come here is because I’ve heard so many good things about the Taiwanese people, and have met a few in my travels and wanted to get to know the country and culture much better! So here I am

Having said that, I will still definitely visit China for a week or two, possibly immediately after this mission.

A few books/courses to help me start

I don’t ever consider my language missions to be linguistic objectives, but rather social ones. Everything I work on will be for the purpose of improving my ability to interact with the Taiwanese and ultimately have deep friendships, without limiting myself just to those who speak good English as too many expats would.

I plan to use all the techniques discussed in depth in the Speak from day 1 & Language Hacking Guide package, however, I will make regular updates about how I’m tackling issues specific to Chinese, and if I have really good ideas I’ll make videos about them to add some to the blog and most to the Speak from Day 1 series.

As you can see, I’ve already got some material I’ll use to help me learn, and I’ll be sure to keep you up to date and let you know which books or other resources I’d recommend!

Thanks for reading along, and I hope to successfully reach fluency in Mandarin in 3 months! Any thoughts, or advice? Let me know in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• New Language Mission: Speak Tagalog (Filipino) in 2 months
• Fluent in TWO months: The Dutch mission!
• First week speaking/reading/writing Chinese
• Quechua: Quick overview and Benny speaking it with natives
• New mission: Speak Turkish in two months!

----------------------------
New Mission: Fluent Mandarin in 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!
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)!

My flight is about to leave for my new home for the next 3 months (announced here on the blog on Wednesday), so I’ll make this quick

I have just released a brand new video series called Speak from Day 1. I will be packaging it with new purchases of the Language Hacking Guide from Thursday 12:00EST, and increasing the price of the overall package from the current price of the Language Hacking Guide. So the best time to buy is now before that price increase. Also, from Thursday you will no longer be able to buy the Language Hacking Guide by itself.

For full details of what’s included, click this link and check out the tabs at the top that expand on the price options and what you get if you buy it:

Speak from day 1 video course

I receive many emails from people who say that they are considering getting the Language Hacking Guide some day. Well, as a friend of mine always says “There are 7 days in a week, and some day is not one of them” . Also, I imagine many of you have a New Year’s Resolution to perhaps finally get a hold of your language and really speak it! So if you’d like to get it, right now is the time to access a combination of my Language Hacking Guide and new Speak from Day 1 video course, before the price goes up!

It’s also an excellent opportunity to get a cheaper series of just the brand new Speak from Day 1 course. Right now there are not so many videos, so I’m offering it for a lower price. Soon I will be adding much more (just as I kept adding to the Language Hacking Guide, which now has 23 native-written translations) and you will get all updates for free even as the price of the package increases for new buyers.

And to make it even better, I’ve also updated the Language Hacking Guide to include a full audio book! I read the entire book (English version) aloud myself and recorded 42 MP3 files, as I know many people prefer to absorb the contents of books from their MP3 players if they can. This addition is a completely free update to all those who already purchased the Language Hacking Guide (sending the email later today). Current owners of the guide also get an interesting discount on the new Speak from Day 1 course, so wait for that email before you buy if you already have it!

Thanks and I’ll see you soon from another new country
Similar Posts:

• Language Hacking Guide now in 21 languages (Russian & Japanese added)
• Irish & Czech added to Language Hacking Guide
• Fi3M wins the Top 100 Language Lovers competition! Have a look at the other amazing 99 of them!
• Benny’s 2011 music video
• Welcome to new Irish readers!

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Speak from Day 1 video course now available (+audiobook of Language Hacking Guide) 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 that time of the year again! I’m back in Cavan with my family, and sharing my favourite posts on the blog this year

Best language tip posts

Most of the posts below are more related to travel or ideas I wanted to share, but I know many people read the blog for specific inspiration and tips in learning their language – here are some posts that share these tips:

The linguistic genius of adults: Research confirms we’re better learners than kids!

Since this excuse is by among the biggest ones (kids are better learners than adults, so why bother?) I wrote not one, but two posts on the topic. This one refers to scientific research that tests both groups fairly (most comparisons are made in purely academic settings, which I would agree that children probably do better in).

Why adults are better learners than kids (So NO, you’re not too old!)

This post shares some more initial thoughts about how invalid this excuse is.

6 easy ways to roll your R

I’m amazed that some English speakers can be learning a language for a year or more and STILL use an ugly English R in their target language! And they are surprised that some natives don’t want to speak that language with them? I dealt with the R issue first when I was learning Spanish, and this post shares several easy ways English speakers can get started to sound more authentic in the target language.

Why does the language have to be so weird?

Everyone was enjoying this post so much from the Language Hacking League email list, so I decided to share it on the blog – trying to inspire people to look at their language differently rather than complaining so much about the fact that it is different.

Best stories of 2011

Here are two anecdotes that I loved sharing and that were well received by the readers! I’ll be sure to give you more blow-by-blow accounts of particular (mis)adventures in the next year!

Speed dating in Dutch: 25 completely different conversations with natives, 5 weeks into learning the language

Yes, I genuinely went “speed dating” and considered it an excellent opportunity to practise some Dutch even though I had been learning it for only about a month.

This post explains, in great detail, how most of my mini-dates went and how great a chance it was to work on my small talk in Dutch… as well as meeting some pretty girls!

How I escaped from being locked up by the Brazilian federal police

While it actually happened a few years ago, this year I decided to share this pretty funny (and still a bit scary) story of how I used my wits to outsmart the Brazilian Federal police, after they locked me up!

Although, in future I’ll just avoid getting locked up – that’s a much better solution to the problem

Most popular posts of 2011

These posts went ridiculously viral on various social networks and led many new visitors to the blog.

29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight

This one post has been read well over a half a million times. It shares some of my thoughts about people and the world on my 29th birthday, and on my 8 year travel-anniversary.

17 cultural reasons why this European never wants to live in America

Unlike the previous one, this post went viral not because it was an inspirational read, but because of pure controversy. In general I like to frame my cultural experience as positively as possible to promote cultural understanding, but this time I didn’t do that for the reasons explained in the post (and because Americans already have big enough egos to be honest…)

So far it has been accessed a quarter of a million times by people, and has the most comments out of any post ever on this blog (both agreeing with me and disagreeing).

Funniest posts

While these didn’t go hugely viral, I personally had a great time writing them, and enjoyed the confused reaction of people from them!

Introducing the best language learning system in the world: HB 2.0

Products, products, products – apparently the only way some people see to learn a language is by spending money on some pre-packaged course that will solve all their language learning woes. I’ve reviewed some big names like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur and do not find them to be great at all. When I take on my big language project in January, I will review another big name in the business.

But since everyone wants a sales pitch for something, I gave them one! This post is my sales pitch for HB 2.0 – the “system” that I genuinely do think that you should “invest” in.

April fools’ post – Benny’s confession

When you run a popular blog, no matter what it’s about, even something like language learning, you will get Internet trolls annoying the hell out of you (right now around the holidays, more than usual are coming out from under the rocks to send me annoying messages). And one thing they constantly say is that I’m a”fraud” and don’t really speak these languages that I claim to.

Despite ample Youtube evidence to the contrary, I decided to feed the trolls with this “confession”, explaining in great detail how I “faked” those Youtube videos. I dropped lots of hints in the text (before adding “April fools’” to the title the next day) that it was a joke, but even some regular readers fell for it and got angry with me…

——————

What was your favourite post or video on Fi3M this year? 2012 is going to be even more fun with lots of fun stuff to read and watch, and some very very interesting language missions (starting with a big one! I will reveal that first in the email list on January 2nd, so join it in the top right of the site if you haven’t yet).

So until then, have a great time over the holidays with your family everyone!!

Any other thoughts? Share them in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• Fi3M wins the Top 100 Language Lovers competition! Have a look at the other amazing 99 of them!
• Happy holidays and best posts of the year
• Language Hacking Guide now in 21 languages (Russian & Japanese added)
• Results of survey and planned changes to the blog
• Benny’s 2010: A video summary (& singing in Spanish)

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Best Fi3M posts of 2011 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)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3T9NslNuDA

So here it is! Ending the year on a positive note of another successful language mission completed! I had only aimed to learn the basics of Quechua in the few weeks I was here, and I think this video shows that I did indeed get something out of my experience with it!

Like with the previous Quechua video, this has subtitles (captions) in English throughout, and the last minute where I’m speaking Quechua with the natives is also captioned in original Quechua. Hopefully you like my quick analysis of an example Quechua sentence and to hear me use some basics with locals.

You can also see in the introduction that I did indeed make it to Machu Picchu! In January I’ll edit the video about my adventure to get there.

Today I’ll be heading back to Ireland to spend Christmas with my family (after almost two whole days worth of travelling), then on to Poland for two days (Gdansk) to celebrate the New Year with some Esperanto speakers, and on January 2nd I fly to my first 2012 destination where I will be learning an important non-European language to fluency in three months. To find out which one that is, join the email list (top right of the site) to get notification the day I fly out, several days  in advance before I announce it on the blog!

I’ve got some fun videos/posts to summarise the year coming up before I get started on the next one! I hope your language missions go well in 2012, and of course I plan to share some tips in the new year to help you (including a video series I just recorded here in Lima, being edited professionally similar to how this Quechua video was, about how to speak from day one, which I’ll also make available on January 2nd).

Let me know your thoughts on this Quechua mission and the videos in the comments below! Thanks!
Similar Posts:

• What does Quechua sound like? Traditional fabric/dyeing presentation in “runasimi”!
• What will Benny’s next language be?
• Having fun at Esperanto events
• Il sabato della scoperta – Who wants a postcard / What’s Benny’s next mission?
• New mission: Speak Turkish in two months!

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Quechua: Quick overview and Benny speaking it with natives 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)!

My mission to learn a little Quechua (a.k.a. “Runasimi”, the language of the Incas) has been so fascinating!!

I’ve recorded lots of video footage about my experience here in the Andes, including my four day adventure hike towards Machu Picchu that I’ll edit to share some time in January, and even footage of me using some very basic Quechua, which I’ll share next week with a technical summary of the little I learned of the language in my few weeks here, for those curious about my (superficial) summary of it.

But first, I wanted to share this wonderful footage I got in the town of Chinchero, which I had passed through on a rented motorbike while exploring the Sacred Valley. In this town there is a group of people willing to demonstrate how fabrics are prepared and dyed with native plants to make traditional clothing or blankets. If you’re around the area, ask for “Wiñay Away” (Calle Albergue) to see for yourself.

To make the video more interesting, they gave me the full presentation entirely in Quechua. I wanted to share how the language is naturally used by natives with you. When I searched Youtube initially to hear some Quechua, I didn’t find anything useful (longer than a few seconds) and non-academic that had subtitles to hear the sounds and understand what they were saying, so I’ve included subtitles (captions) in English, Spanish and the original Quechua! Click “CC” on Youtube to select English, Spanish or Quechua to follow along with what Lucy is saying!

As far as I know, this is the only video on Youtube captioned entirely in Quechua Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EiBo-rZ0Nw

Big thanks to Lucy for giving the demonstration to me, even though the camera was a little intimidating, and thanks to Soledad for helping me to understand the video enough to create the multilingual subtitles.

Your thoughts on this unique language? Let us know in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• Quechua: Quick overview and Benny speaking it with natives
• Singing in French & Spanish, dancing salsa & working efficiently: A day in the life of an Irish polyglot in Colombia
• The Cavan Fleadh: Irish music and culture festival [flashmob & music videos]
• Istanbul not Constantinople, Benny’s music video in Turkish
• Combining learning languages with your hobbies: My first video in Czech!

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What does Quechua sound like? Traditional fabric/dyeing presentation in “runasimi”! 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)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=amdIY8DR_wY

And… that’s a wrap for 2011! It’s been a fun and very hectic year! I’ve been in so many places and met so many people, so I wanted to give you an idea of how the whole year went over just 4 minutes! This video collects some fun video clips and photos from each country.

To make it even more fun, I decided (as always) to sing the background music to it! My family assures me (in true Irish bluntness) that I sound terrible and I should tell everyone to press mute before they press play… but I’m sure you are well used to my bad singing at this stage! I took the same tune that has been used in 3 languages (Kaoma – Lambada, J-Lo – Get on the Floor and the older original they were based on: “llorando se fue”) and mixed them together, since I think the combination portrays the beachy, active and then Andes theme of the video!

In 2012 I’m really looking forward to travelling a little slower, and especially focusing on three-month stays (as well as a few short visits elsewhere), and making deeper connections in each place… and of course reaching higher levels of language proficiency during my missions thanks to the extra time.

The one I start next week is going to be big!

Now that I’ve had my nice little break back home, after partying New Year’s with some Esperanto speakers in Gdansk (Poland), on January 2nd I fly to my next destination! Here on the blog that day I’ll finally share the speak-from-day-one video course I’ve been working so hard on, with a separate fun update to the Language Hacking Guide, and then two days later I’ll have a video update on location to introduce the next mission!

And of course, those in the email list will find out first on Monday morning where it is I’m actually going, and what the mission language will be. You can also follow me on twitter and Facebook and Google+ to see where I’m going announced as I’m travelling.

Any thoughts on the year, these clips or on how terribly I’m singing? Let me know in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• Benny’s 2010: A video summary (& singing in Spanish)
• Speak from Day 1 video course now available (+audiobook of Language Hacking Guide)
• Happy holidays and best posts of the year
• Best Fi3M posts of 2011
• April Fools’ post – Benny’s Confession

----------------------------
Benny’s 2011 music 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)!

While many guest posts here are from people I’ve met in my travels or been in touch with online a lot, occasionally I’ll be sent a topic so damn interesting that even if I don’t know the person yet, it’s definitely worth sharing. Today’s is an excellent example of such a topic, which takes a fantastic twist to language learning of thinking outside the box that I hope will inspire some of you! It combines music and language learning, which is also a passion of mine.

It was written by Idahosa Ness, who writes at mimicmethod.com, and who you can see in the video below, going to a “roda” in Rio. Take it away Idahosa!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lOHarcqCS4

While living in Rio de Janeiro last year, I would religiously attend the “Rap na Farani” hip hop event every Thursday in Farani park, a block away from Botafogo beach. In these gatherings, amateur musicians would break off into separate “rodas” or ciphers and rap improvised lyrics over live guitar and percussion instrumentals.

I randomly stumbled upon the event on my way home one evening, and once I realized what it was, I knew I couldn’t leave without kickin’ a little sumthin’ sumthin’ real quick in English. Taking advantage of the fact that I look more Brazilian than most Brazilians, I threw the audience for a loop when I started my rap in Portuguese and transitioned smoothly to an English freestyle:

Ninguem me entende, quando eu falo/ Eu sou americano com sotaque carioco/ oops *carioca, por favor desculpa/ mas deixa-me speak English and I promise you no Bullsh*%t!

English: No one understands me when I speak/ I am an American with a Rio-native (Rio-native intentionally pronounced wrong) accent/ Oops I mean “Rio-native,” please excuse me/ but let me speak English and I promise you no Bullsh*%t

The audience was impressed, but I was disappointed in myself. I had considered myself “fluent” in Portuguese and prided myself on my English freestlying ability, but it took me almost 15 minutes of serious mental exertion just to conjure up those two mediocre bars of Portuguese rap. I had a strong sense that my Portuguese was missing a certain “something,” and I resolved there and then to find out exactly what that something was by hunkering down and stepping up my Portuguese rap game.

Unexpectedly, after an intense week of listening to and rapping Portuguese, my normal Portuguese skills improved drastically. I no longer needed to actively listen or think of things in my head first before speaking.  Portuguese just felt easy to me all of a sudden.

The “something” I was after was starting to take shape within me, and now that I know what exactly that “something” is, I am convinced that it is THE most valuable asset for a language learner to have.

The Difference Between Words and Sounds

This “something” I keep referring to is the unconscious command of speech sound. Whether they’re learning Portuguese, Patois or Punjabi, I always tell people the same thing: speech is NOT a sequence of words, it’s a sequence of sounds. Words are fickle and unreliable as language learning tools. A single word’s pronunciation will vary depending on factors related to the speaker (e.g. region, gender, social class, level of education, emotional state, etc.) and factors related to the context (e.g. surrounding words, grammatical mood, lexical stress etc.).

This is how you can learn a thousand words of vocabulary and still understand nothing that a native speaker says.  It’s not that you don’t know the words, you just don’t have the ability to recognize them in real time.

A more efficient approach is to focus first on mastering all the component sounds of your target language before studying the meanings associated with those sounds. As it turns out, the majority of phonemes (distinct speech sounds) in one language will also exist in the next language. For example, as an English speaker, you already know 22 of the 25 phonemes of Spanish. What makes Spanish sound so different from English is how these phonemes combine and “flow” in normal speech. If you dedicate the time familiarizing yourself with this “flow” before doing anything else, you will develop a mental sound framework flexible enough to incorporate new words and structures regardless of variation in pronunciation.

Lyrical Music as a Means to Building Second Language Flow

Through a process I call Rhythmic Phonetic Training, I train students in the “flow” of their target language by teaching them to sing songs with a perfect accent. Each time they recite these song lyrics, they actively develop the ear sensitivity and speech organ muscle memory needed to process and speak the target language unconsciously.  Indeed, several studies have already shown that learning song lyrics helps develop the fundamental language ability of segmenting word boundaries in connected speech.

My language program is named The Mimic Method because the student’s first goal is to develop an ability to effortlessly and accurately perceive and reproduce native speech, or “Mimic.” As Benny very correctly argues in his Language Hacking Guide, the only real way to learn a language is to put yourself out there right from the start and maximize your amount of language input and output. The Mimic ability optimizes this experience by freeing up the mental resources learners typically waste struggling with pronunciation and segmenting native speech. With the sound-processing on autopilot, you can dedicate more brainpower to acquiring new expressions and structures as you become more comfortable in more contexts.

Optimizing Rhythmic Phonetic Training through Rap

I generally build my Rhythmic Phonetic Training materials around the musical tastes of my students, but the truth is that rapping is far superior to melodic singing as a learning tool. There are several technical reasons for why this is, but I won’t get into them here. In short, because rap more vigorously highlights the natural rhythm and sounds of a given language, the act of rapping is more effective in developing the language student’s mastery of that rhythm and sound.

Think of rapping like language sprinting. Each time you hit the track and do an intense rap circuit around the track (nice pun huh?), you break down your language muscles and regenerate stronger ones with rest. Eventually, normal speaking just feels like a “walk in the park” in comparison.

If you’re like most people, you probably wouldn’t describe speaking in a second language as a “walk in the park,” in which case you probably never even considered the possibility of rapping in a second language. But just like language, rap is nothing more than a series of sounds strung together rhythmically. If you break things down and start off slow, you can learn to rap a song just as you would learn to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the Piano.

Take this line from the song “Somos Pacifico,” by the Colombian Latin Grammy award winning rap trio, ChocQuibTown. First read the line, then listen to it on loop.

Si dejaste al que está malo o te lo ha rumbeado?

If you read the sentence in its fully-enunciated form, you will count 18 syllables. But if you count the number of syllables the rapper actually says, you will only count 14. What happened to the other four? They were lost in the “flow” of connected speech.

This is how words can be misleading. In connected speech, certain sounds are dropped or fused into an adjacent word, completely transforming the words themselves. So looking up song lyrics online can only take you so far.  If you really want to learn the song, you first need to learn the rhyhtm.

In Rhythmic Phonetic Training, I use what I call Universal Rhythmic Binary to reduce speech to its most elemental form of stress and syllable. In URB, DA represents a stressed syllable and di represents an unstressed syllable (the syllables with the most stress are emboldened and underlined). Listen to the audio line of URB, then try to sing along with me.  Repeat this until you have the line committed to memory.

DA di DA di DA di DA di | DA di DA di DA-DA

Once you have the rhythm down, the next step is to learn the individual syllables. Listen to the same line slowed down 40% and follow along with the special rhythmic phonetic transcription.  Then listen to and try to repeat after me as I articulate each syllable individually.

SI de HA te KE ta MA lo O te LO rum BYA – O

If you have no Spanish experience, you might struggle with the alveolar trill, or “rolled ‘r’” as it’s commonly referred to. The rest of the sounds in this phrase, however, also exist in English and should thus be no issue.

Now that you know each individual syllable, all you have to do is say them in order slowly and gradually speed it up until you get to the original tempo. At first, this will be awkward and difficult since your mouth has never made these sounds in this combination before. This is why your mouth needs training in foreign language just like your fingers need training for the piano. Try repeating after me while keeping the beat in the audio file below.

Voila! You just rapped your first Spanish line. With proper instruction and sufficient practice, you can learn your first rap verse in just three days. As you progress, you will find that each verse is easier to learn than the last one. This is because all speech draws upon the same limited set of sounds and rhythm patterns, so as you expand your repertoire, you will run into more and more already familiar patterns. Eventually you will be able to learn lines on your own with just a few listens. This level of rhythmic perception is perhaps the most valuable asset you can have for language acquisition. It is also key to becoming the Ill-nasty multilingual freestyle rapper you always dreamed of becoming.

How to Freestlye

It’s one thing to recite pre-fabricated lyrics, but to come up with your own on the fly is something else entirely. Flocabulary, the education company that brings hip Hop to the classroom, has a very entertaining but informative ten-step guide for learning how to freestlye. These steps apply generally to freestyling in a second language as well, but these three steps are particularly relevant:

• Memorizing lyrics to other rap songs to internalize different individual flows.
• Having an arsenal of “filler phrases” to help you get from one keyword to the next, and
• Using items in your physical surroundings to come up with the next keyword you want to rhyme with.

In addition to these general strategies, I’ve created my own special exercises for building freestyle ability in a second langauge.

Exercise 1: Snoop-Doggifying it

Rap icon Snoop Dogg is famous for adding the “-izzle” suffix to the end of words to make everything rhyme with everything. In effect, he made freestyle rapping the easiest thing in the world.

You can achieve a similar effect by rapping your way down a list of rhyming words. Google search your target language’s translation of “rhyming dictionary” and input whatever word comes to mind into the search engine. Start easy by simply chanting each word on the list out loud to a steady beat.  Then, try to go down the list with more complex rhythm schemes.  Switch up the order of words with each attempt.

With this exercise, you are developing the ability to anticipate a strong musical beat and line it up with your keywords, which will vary in number of syllables and stress placement.  Listen to this example of me rapping through the rhyme list for the spanish word “cosa” (thing).

cosa, fabulosa, brillosa, moza, osa, alumbrosa, chistosa, saboreosa.

English: Thing, fabulous, shiny, girl, bear, bright, funny, tasty

Step 2: Write your first Verse

Choose a word to input in the rhyme dictionary and learn the meanings of four of the words (this is also a very effective way to learn and memorize new vocabulary). Next, write out four well-thought-out lines with these words as the final keywords of each line. Recite the rap over and over again until you have it committed to memory. Here’s an example with “cosa” again.

Eres una mujer saboreosa/ Pero se dice cuando hay algo brillosa/ se tiene que tener cuidado con esta cosa/ Y por eso yo la dejo, no la quiero a esa moza.

You are a fine woman/ but they say that when you have something shiny/ you have to be careful with that thing/ and for that I’m leaving her be, I don’t want that girl.

Step 3: Improvise on your first Verse

Now using the same list of keywords, try to improvise the four lines. Don’t worry about keeping to a strict meter; take as much time as you need for each line. The point of this drill is to develop your general creative ability. When you first do this, your improvised lyrics won’t differ much from your original written ones, but with each attempt you expand your horizons and thus your general ability to vary your verses. Listen to this example of me freestlying in Chinese (not my strongest freestyle rap language) with the rhyming words hao (good), zhidao (know), pao (run) and zao (early).

Zen.me yang, ni hao?/ wo mei you zhidao/ ni zhei yang keyi pao/ pao de hen zao.

English: How’s it going how are you?/ I didn’t know/ that you could run this way/ run so early.

Step 4: Rap in Phonologically Consistent Gibberish

Phonologically consistent gibberish is nonsensical, made-up words that are made up only of the speech sounds of the target language. The point of this exercise is to develop your ability to “flow” within the sound constraints of the target language without having your native or other foreign sounds interfere. To catch the flow, start with the first two lines of your written rap, then just go into it. It’s okay to throw in real words and phrases, but the most important thing is to keep the flow going whether it makes sense or not. Below is an example of me rapping in English-Sounding Gibberish.

Step 5: Just Do It

Just like with anything else, the only way to really get good at something is to jump in and do it. Start by flowing without worrying about meter, and whenever you get stuck on a word, write it down and look it up later on the rhyming dictionary. When you get more comfortable with this, add a steady meter to raise the stakes. Use the Flocabulary freestyle techniques to make your rhymes more sophisticated and longer lasting. As you get better, you’ll eventually be able to keep a flow going for several grammatically correct bars. From there, it’s simply a game of endurance.

Wait. Why Am I Doing This Again?

A fast growing body of research suggests that our brains acquire musical systems much in the same way we acquire languages. Indeed, several experts have conducted studies showing that musical training increases a person’s language-learning aptitude. Moreover, many scholars argue that everyday speech is analogous to musical improvisation, since both involve spontaneous creation of meaningful sound within constraints. In my own research, I try to apply these new insights to the practice of second language education. Given freestyle rapping’s unique position at the convex of musical and linguistic improvisation, there is no doubt that it has enormous potential as a language-learning learning tool.

But even if learning to freestyle ends up doing nothing for your language skills, how badass would you be if you could start a dinner party conversation with: “This one time at a park in [insert exotic locale here] when I was freestyle rapping in [insert exotic language here]…”

[insert awe and adulation from your peers here]….
Similar Posts:

• Handcrafted audio for remembering what you learn
• Language Hacking success story: Marcus speaking Portuguese in Brazil
• Case study: How Niall Doherty reached conversational competence in Spanish in 3.5 months
• Learning Japanese in a year: Manga-style explanation!
• How ditching perfectionism helped me speak Spanish all evening for the first time

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The “flow” of fluency: How to freestyle rap in a foreign language 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 understandable misconception from people when they first arrive on this site is that I would think it takes exactly three months to learn a language.

To me the question and answer “How long does it take to learn a language?” “X months/years/lifetimes” is ludicrous, as it leaves far too much undefined and only caters to lazy one-size-fits-all mentalities, which is something I personally detest about many major expensive language learning courses.

Why 3 months then?

The reason I chose three months has nothing to do with any linguistic research about the time it takes to learn the “right” amount of words, or how long it takes for your mind to adjust to a local language, or anything of the sort.

It’s because that’s typically the tourist visa limit for visiting a country, or the time I personally like to spend in a country.

Yes, that’s where my three months comes from! It’s lifestyle related, not language related.

In three months, I can get into a comfortable routine, maybe have a girlfriend, get to know a city well, take a few weekends to visit the surroundings, and most importantly make good local friends. And yet, it’s short enough that I know another trip is on the way soon so I am still definitely a “nomad” and traveller. I consider it the “Goldilock’s zone” of not too little and not too much.

The question should never be “how long does it take one to learn a language” but How long do you have? or How intensively are you willing to invest your time?

Four year MIT course in one year?

To show you a parallel example that emphasises intensive use of time, my good friend Scott Young has decided to do the entire four year Computer Science course offered at MIT in just one year (and is blogging about his “mission” in the same way I blog about mine).

At the two month point he recently confirmed that he’s done approximately the equivalent of the entire first year course already, so it looks like he’s on track! What he is doing isn’t being recognised by MIT, but he is sitting the tests and correcting them himself and at the end of his year he will very likely know as much as any MIT Computer Science graduate.

This mission really emphasises how it makes little sense to say that it takes a very specific amount of time (e.g. four years) to learn anything. It depends on the person. Most people at college are not structuring their time as well as Scott is, so they’ll attempt to fit into their university’s randomly assigned four year box.

If you don’t learn independently, the fastest you’ll ever learn is as slowly as the course progresses. There is something to be said about independent learning.

Why you can learn a language quicker

The thing is, I fully intend to learn a language to fluency (without arguing too much about semantics, I’d simply say it’s along the lines of the level of comfort I have when I spontaneously speak French or Spanish or my other languages with natives) in three months starting in January, for a language totally unrelated to anything I’ve ever learned before.

The reason Scott and I can do such things is because we set ourselves tight deadlines and plan in a way that allows us to make them realistic. For me, the “secret sauce” is constant exposure to natives in real social environments and speaking from day one.

I don’t spend my three months studying the language, I spend them living the language. As well as this, I’m never learning a language full-time. I spend time alone on my computer, doing work (writing these blog posts take time, but as you’ll have seen this year I’ve also been adding lots of features to the site. This month I’m preparing a video course about speaking from day one that I’ll release just after the New Year). So even with less than half-time work investment, I still force myself to use the language as much as I possibly can.

I see anything else as an insult to the language itself, as you are ignoring the human aspect. Travelling to the country isn’t a necessary part of this; I learned most of my Portuguese while living in France, finding ways to meet up as regularly as possible with Brazilians.

When you learn independently you start to cut out things that are quite irrelevant. I use my engineering philosophy to decide that making mistakes is OK, and actually necessary – something many language courses tend to punish severely for, which is as idiotic a way to encourage learning to speak a language as I can imagine.

As well as this, I don’t focus much on literature or being able to write professionally in a short time, because that’s not directly related to my goal of speaking fluently. Such goals are important, but would work better as separate missions in my mind, if you wanted them. I don’t. I write text messages and read newspapers or magazines in my day to day life, so that‘s the level I need. When I feel my level is good enough and I am indeed ready, I have gone ahead with such things and consider several of my languages to be quite professional (having studied for and passed official European diplomas for these languages, which require such studies).

If you have short-term very well defined goals (make a phone call in the language within two weeks, learn all kitchen related vocab within an hour, have a 30 second chat in the language by the end of the first week etc.) rather than long-term goals that mean nothing (like “learn Spanish” – a New Year’s Resolution bound to failure) you can do so much more. It can feel intimidating to imagine doing everything that is involved in learning a language, but if you take it one step at a time, but make it so those steps push you to your limit, you CAN do a lot, much quicker.

It’s not the years you put in, but the hours you put in.

Enough with perfectionism; stop saying that you want to know every part of a language by some poorly defined end-goal (usually infinity), and be specific and do it quicker. When I say “fluency” I allow myself to make the odd mistake, and still have an imperfect accent. Fluency is not the same as being bilingual, and the fact that I’m not aiming for perfection is great because it means that a mere mortal like myself can do it in a finite time.

How much time does it take “the average person” to learn a language? Who bloody cares! I’m not a statistic, and I hope you don’t consider yourself one either. So “average” means nothing here, because you are unique in your advantages. Pick a tight deadline and a realistic solid end-goal and work with it. Even if you only get to 90% of your end-goal you have achieved so much more than most people.

Thoughts? Share them in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• How to achieve a New year’s resolution to learn a language: turn it into a mission
• Mini-goals are the path to achieving fluency
• Hitting a brick wall in your language progress
• Redifining your motivation
• Learning grammar… do I have to?

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How much time does it take to learn a language? 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)!

Erin and Simon are a British couple who I had been talking to for some time, and following their really cool blog “Neverendingvoyage.com” until a year ago when I actually got to meet them in person and hosted them as my Couchsurfers in Medellín! I’ve used the advice on their blog about eating vegetarian to help me quicker in particular locations, and Simon helped me to tweak some technical issues on my site.

To contrast with my most previous post about solo travel, the thing is they are a couple who may usually speak English to one another, but still want to learn the local language! As they say, it’s different to what I have to do, so I was very happy to have them explain their twist to language hacking… for couples! Have a read of what they have to say:

Learning a language while travelling as a couple can be more challenging than for solo travellers. Benny’s biggest language learning tip is to stop speaking English and immerse yourself in the target language as much as possible. This can be difficult if you are with your partner all the time as it’s hard to break the habit of speaking to each other in your native tongue. Plus, successful language learning comes from having the right motivation – you have to need to know the language, not just want to. Solo travel can be lonely if you can’t speak to the locals but couples don’t have this same need to get out and socialise.

There are some advantages of learning a language as a couple though, and you can definitely overcome the disadvantages if you are committed enough – don’t use it as an excuse!

Establish a Shared Desire

When you begin to travel with your partner you need to find out if they want to learn the local language too. If you are both committed there is a lot you can do to reach your language leaning goals by following the tips below.

If only one of you is interested then it’ll be trickier. Social situations are difficult when only one of you speaks the language, and if the local speaks English they’ll often revert to that so your partner isn’t left out. In this situation you will need to pursue opportunities to practice alone – take lessons, find a conversation partner and maybe even socialise without your partner.

If both you and your other half are committed to learning a language here’s how to ensure that you achieve your goals:

Arrange No English Days

You could try to stop speaking with your partner completely in your native language but this is probably unrealistic, especially in the early days. After being inspired by Benny’s Language Hacking Guide we had a No English Week while studying Spanish in Buenos Aires. We managed to speak in Spanish about 70% of the time and it really helped our fluency, as when we spoke to locals we didn’t have to make the mental shift from English to Spanish. It was challenging and quite tiring though, especially when we needed to constantly use a dictionary to talk about complicated subjects.

I would recommend setting No English days as often as you can manage. Even when you are starting out use as much of the language together as you can, even if you have to mix some English in.

Use The Language As Much As Possible

Even if you manage to practice speaking the language together, it’s still vital to practice with native speakers and use the language whenever you can. Here are some ways couples can do this:

• Attend a language exchange together – we used the conversationexchange.com website to find a partner to practice our Spanish with. We met a lovely Argentine who became one of our closest friends in Buenos Aires. We also attended the Spanglish events where we practiced our Spanish with a range of locals.

• Couchsurf – even if you don’t want to stay with a local, use the couchsurfing group for the city you are in to find out about events. It’s a great way to socialise with native speakers.

• Talk to strangers – this really pushed us out of our comfort zone but even making small-talk with a waitress or chatting to a taxi driver can help your language improve.

• Do activities in the target language – we learnt to cook papas rellenas in an all-Spanish cooking class in Bolivia, took a five day jeep tour through the remote Bolivian salt flats with a guide who only spoke Spanish, and went horse riding with a Colombian family.

• Watch films in the language together.

• Make use of wasted time by carrying around vocab to test each other when waiting for buses etc.

• Sing together – seriously, singing is a fantastic, fun way of practicing a language and it’s even more enjoyable if you sing with your partner. For Spanish I love the Bueno Entonces You Tube videos.

Couples can of course use immersion techniques that solo learners use too. We changed our Facebook language to Spanish, read Spanish magazines and books (ones we really wanted to read, not ones we thought we should), set up a Spanish Twitter account, and used Anki to practice vocab every day.

Consider Lessons

This goes against Benny’s advice as he quite rightly says that you don’t need to attend classes to learn a language, and it’s more important to speak than get bogged down in grammar. That said, we found Spanish lessons a great way to keep ourselves focused and motivated. We started with group classes in Buenos Aires but after three weeks switched to private lessons (separately as we were at different levels) and found these much better. We got to learn what we were interested in and had an intense hour or two of conversation in Spanish.

On a number of other occasions on our year-long travels in South America I took conversation classes for a couple of hours a day for a week or two. Simon was working hard so didn’t have the time to focus on his Spanish as much, but as I wanted to reach fluency I found private classes a great way to get some intense practice.

When taking classes you might also want to consider a homestay if you really want to improve quickly. By living in the home of a local you’ll have many more opportunities to practice. We didn’t do this (as we needed privacy to work) but we did meet an impressive couple in Bolivia who were taking Spanish classes at different schools in the same town and staying at different homestays! By cutting themselves off from each other for a week or two they definitely improved at a faster rate. It’s not for everyone but if you are seriously committed it might be the way to go.

Be Supportive

Learning a language with your partner can be a great experience. You always have someone to practice with, even when you leave the country, and you can encourage and support each other on the learning journey. It can be helpful to point out each other’s mistakes but be gentle. Believe me, calling your partner’s “arigato” lame on your first day in Japan after a stressful travel day, even in jest, is not the best way to encourage language learning!

Share Speaking Tasks

If one partner’s language level is more advanced than the other it can lead to them doing all the talking – booking bus tickets and accommodation, ordering in restaurants etc. Make sure you both share the communication tasks so you can both improve. If your partner is reluctant then send them off on errands or set them a challenge like enquiring about bus times.

Get Off The Beaten Track

It can be tempting when travelling as a couple to become lazy about speaking the language. One way to make this impossible is to travel to places that are off the beaten track and where few people speak English. If you have to speak the language to get by you’ll improve more quickly. We also found people in countries like Paraguay, which see few foreigners, very curious and keen to speak to us so we got lots of practice. In a remote part of the Peruvian Andes we ended up volunteering in a local school and attending a community feast where no one spoke English.

Your progress in learning a language will ultimately come down to how committed you are. There may be some challenges to learning a language as a couple but if you are motivated enough you won’t let that stop you reaching your goals. The most important thing is to get out of your couple bubble and find opportunities to speak the language whenever you can.

Erin McNeaney and her partner Simon sold everything they owned and left the UK in March 2010 to travel the world forever. They run a WordPress web design business on the road and have travelled to Latin America, North America and are now in Asia. You can follow their adventures at Never Ending Voyage. Let us know about your thoughts on learning a language as a couple in the comments below!

Similar Posts:

• Case study: How Niall Doherty reached conversational competence in Spanish in 3.5 months
• Language Hacking success story: Marcus speaking Portuguese in Brazil
• The “flow” of fluency: How to freestyle rap in a foreign language
• How ditching perfectionism helped me speak Spanish all evening for the first time
• How to travel the world like Indiana Jones

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Language Learning Tips For Couples 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)!

Photo taken using my camera's auto-timer of course...

Whether or not I feel lonely in travelling by myself for such a long time is one of the biggest questions I get asked when people hear about my lifestyle of over eight years of solo travel, and something I’ll tell you all about today. What you read may surprise you!

“Isn’t travelling alone… lonely?” I get this question several times a week, both in person and via email.

I find it very interesting and curious, because the question itself is loaded with presumptions and bias.

To show you what I mean, picture this:

The non-travel lonely lifestyle

For four years I studied Electronic Engineering in UCD (Dublin) – one of the country’s most demanding courses, with full time classes (9am-6pm, Mon-Fri), some evening courses, labs, homework, incredible amounts of studying for very complex course material (including quantum physics and very advanced applied Mathematics) and a looming sixteen examinations at the end of the year, where if you fail just one of those many examinations, you have to repeat the entire year!

Because of this it had the highest failure rate of any course at the university, and many people would simply not make it through to the next year. With my drive though, I didn’t just want to pass, but to get a first class honours to ensure better opportunities later in life.

The pressures of this course meant that I poured my whole life into it, and barely had any social life in college, and definitely no girlfriend or even time to “play around”. I got up, went to class, came home, studied and did assignments, watched TV by myself to relax and then all weekend long gave private Mathematics lessons to schoolkids to help me fund the expenses of living in Dublin.

I went out to parties about six times a year. Not quite the fun college lifestyle I was seeing on my TV shows.

It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to realize that this was a very lonely lifestyle. And yet how many times over the four years do you think people asked me “Are you lonely as an electronic engineering student?”

Zero.

The thing is, many lifestyles are lonely. A single mother who has to work two jobs, people who are settled away from their home town for work purposes who find it hard to make new friends, unhappy introverts, and thousands of other types of people stuck in situations and routines they see no way out of. And yet nobody ever asks them how lonely they are. I am very sure that so many people reading this post feel the same way.

It has always struck me as unfair that travellers (who do this by choice) are the privileged few to be asked this question, when so many other people who have no choice on the matter would need to share their frustrations much more than us.

And the ironic thing about it all? I’m way less lonely now and way happier about my life than I ever was as a “settled” student in Dublin.

What is lonely?

The thing about the question is that it has really leaves a lot to be defined. Lonely compared to what? Compared to before I started travelling? Compared to you? Compared to locals where I am? Compared to a “typical” single guy my age? Compared to a a married guy with children and an active social life?

The thing is, there are many aspects of loneliness. You can be lonely even if surrounded by people who know you because you feel they don’t “get” you, you can be lonely in a long-term relationship because you realise it isn’t going great, you can be lonely because you are stuck in a routine and not having deep conversations with people etc.

It just seems so obvious to many people that I must feel lonely as a solo traveller, since I don’t have the same person physically constantly there with me. But to me loneliness depends way more on the person’s mindset than on their situation.

By getting over the shy delusion, and maintaining some personality when I meet new people, I can make new friends very quickly, generally no matter where I am. Some places have been tougher to do this, but with persistence I always make one or several true friends.

“But you can’t make a true friend in just a few months!!” Of course, I disagree. Like learning a language, you can either take many many years to piece together aspects of a relationship, or you can do it intensively and get to know someone quicker and open yourself up to them at a much deeper level, even in a short time.

In Ireland we say “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet”. I keep this philosophy on the road, and don’t restrict my definition of friend to the sadly restrictive one of someone who I have known since childhood. No matter where you are on the road, if you are open to making a new friend – either with other travellers like yourself, or (more ideally) with those from the location you are visiting – you will never feel alone.

The need to have someone there

As well as this, there are certain people who definitely need company more than others. Despite many crazy posts on this blog implying that I’m a 24-hour party animal, I actually spend most of my time on my computer by myself.

And I’m quite happy with this. Some people may desperately need people there all the time (so-called “extroverts”) and some are quite happy by themselves, reading a book, surfing the net, or working on some interesting project.

Even when I’m on my computer, I’m not actually alone. I video Skype my parents every week and feel like I’m back home with the camera in the living room and the fact that I can show them around my place. I chat to great friends of mine from all around the world to see how they are doing via Facebook. To some this “virtual” connection may seem meaningless or superficial, but to me it’s the next best thing to actually being there with someone.

If I’ve had a rough day, I can tell someone about it. Even if I’m in a country where not a single person knows my name, I can always open myself up thanks to the level of connectivity of the 21st century.

So thanks to the Internet and anybody I know being just a phonecall away, I am never truly alone. And that’s forgetting the fantastic local friends I am making that I can open myself up to.

The loneliness and friendships that comes from hurried travel

This year has been a bit different compared to my normal 3-month stays. I decided at the start of the year that I’d have many intensive language and cultural immersion missions, which has ultimately totalled learning six languages. It’s been fun, but next year I will be back to mostly three month stays (starting in January by learning a language I’m not even vaguely familiar with from scratch to fluency, more appropriate to the blog title).

One reason that I’m looking forward to returning to my slower pace is that this year has been more stressful than most because of the lack of deeper relationships due to a quicker pace of travel and other obstacles. I only spent a month in Puerto Galera for example, and adjusted to the local culture slower than usual, so I didn’t make any local life-long friends sadly. I was in Amsterdam and Istanbul for two months each, but I found the Dutch to be very reluctant to make friends with me when I was honest about leaving so soon, and I was ill for most of my stay in Turkey so I wasn’t out much with the very friendly Turks.

Even so, despite these setbacks I made some real friends in these two places that I will stay in touch with for life. It’s harder, but it’s always possible. Even after a measly five days in Cali, I managed to make some incredibly deep friendships and enter into aspects of the locals’ lives that I feel few visitors ever will. Even in short stays you can make friends that count.

As well as this, as the world gets smaller, you start to bump into more and more people as your paths cross again and again. For example, I’ve met Gary Arndt, Matt Kepnes, Rob “Bloggeries”, Scott Young, Jodi Ettenberg, Karol Gajda and actually dozens of others numerous times in various cities, countries, and continents. Not really intentionally, just that our paths happen to cross frequently from common interests. As fellow travellers, I find it very easy to pick up where I left off with each of them, especially since we understand the life of a vagabond (or vagablogger…) and can relate to one another in that way.

Even here in Peru I’ve been hanging out with Dave, my friend from Medellín.

The world is smaller than you think

In Couchsurfing, we have a saying that “The world is smaller than you think”, and I genuinely believe this. You can feel like a little spec alone in the vast lonely universe, or you can accept that we have so many things in common with one another, and that this brings us all closer together.

Perhaps I won’t be meeting someone who I click with perfectly around every corner, but the diversity is what makes this all the more interesting; especially when you see all the things you do actually share with someone despite thousands of kilometres of separation your whole life and a very different culture and upbringing.

Rather than focus on all the reasons why I could feel lonely, I like to look at it with a more “glass is half full” perspective . Loneliness is a state of mind, not a state of latitude and longitude . I simply refuse to think myself into loneliness, the same way I refuse to whine about how hard everything is. Such negative thoughts are self fulfilling prophecies.

The fact that I travel solo encourages me all the more to meet new people, to get outside of my comfort zone, and of course to learn much more about the local language and culture. The “mission” aspect of my travels and the work I do on this site gives me lots to focus on, whereas if I was just a rich kid bouncing around with no purpose, then I’d probably have plenty of time to think myself into loneliness.

I’m very grateful for my current lifestyle. I know I won’t be travelling forever – when I feel like I’ve had enough, I can always decide to settle down and become a long-term part of a community. Until then, such loneliness questions are not something that I ever have on my mind, other than to assure people asking the question that I’m doing quite OK

Of course, the aspect of finding love on the road and how that can contribute to feeling a deep connection and avoiding loneliness is a very different kettle of fish, which I’ll come back to in another post to give it the detail it deserves!

Hopefully this post helps put the first two biggest questions in perspective! Thanks as always for reading along and share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• Frequently asked questions for a long term traveller
• Solo travel hacking: How to make new friends using a stethoscope and 200 ear plugs
• 29 life lessons learned in travelling the world for 8 years straight
• Easy lifestyle adjustments to get a huge boost when things are going slowly
• Is it better to travel to villages for language/cultural immersion?

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Is long-term solo travel… lonely? 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)!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9e8gk3N-dI

Fluentin3months keeps on growing!

As well as the increasing readership of the blog itself, more and more features are getting added to the site; as well as the very active forums, and extremely useful Learning With Texts interface, this week I have added a fantastic live chat feature!

Continuing the theme of all interactive features added to the site, this is completely free for all users.

All you have to do is log in (as you would for Learning With Texts or the forum; the same log in, or register here), and you will see a bar at the bottom of your screen whenever on the site. I demonstrate some of the coolest features in the video above, but here’s a quick summary:

• Browser and Operating System independent chat application; no need to install any software; it all works while you browse the web
• Chat (instant messenger) with anyone who is logged in and set themselves as available to chat. Set yourself to offline/invisible if you prefer not to chat right now.
• Video or audio call that person. HD camera quality supported. Works from within your browser!
• Share your screen, send a file, handwrite a message or draw an image with your mouse
• Transliteration tool; write in Chinese, Arabic, Greek, Russian and many other languages that don’t use the Latin script with an efficient transliteration algorithm. Automatically sent in chat window.
• Games! 25 two-player games include Pool, Connect 4, Backgammon, Battleships, Checkers, Chess, Sudoku and Tic Tac Toe. While playing, chat feature and audio call feature is included in the game window. Many other one player games also included.
• Group chats and live (automatic) translations: There is a room for many languages, or you can create one yourself and chat to people in that language live. If you need a hand in understanding it, activate the translation tool for a Bing translation to your native language given in parenthesis after the original. [There are a few bugs in this feature I'm still trying to fix, but ideally you would try to understand by yourself ]
• Facebook chat & Google chat integration! So you can stay in touch with everybody without having to use different windows or software. Your Facebook/Google details will remain private and separate to your account here.
• Chat from your mobile device! Just point your browser to http://fi3m.com/cometchat (you will need to log in separately on fi3m.com/forum) and a special mobile-chat interface will be presented.

Note: advertising is inserted while playing games. I’d recommend you install Adblock plus (or similar) for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer etc. to turn off these and other annoying cheesy banner ads on all websites.

Also note that some of the advanced features of this new system (not the basic chat) use Flash. Hopefully an update later will replace this with HTML5, but just keep in mind that you need to have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed.

The forum already has a conversation exchange section, with many people actively exchanging Skype details, but now all you have to do is coordinate a time and make sure both are on the website and logged then to chat! No need to swap contact details, just remember the user name! If there are many people online, just search for that person to see them come up.

My hope is that the fantastic discussions that go on in the forums will expand to the next dimension of live interactivity, and people can share their language learning stories and advice, as well as finding a native of their target language and to set up a “tandem” exchange to practice that language, while helping that person learn yours… for free of course!

Tip: If you are using the chat feature, install a dictionary for your target language in your browser and have your spelling mistakes corrected as you type!

And as I said in the video, I’m quite partial to a game of chess myself, so if you happen to see me online and I’m not about to head out the door to hike up the Inca trail, then I might be up for the challenge! And of course you’ll see plenty of other people online that you can interact with in group chat and invite to interact with you one-on-one, to see if they want to help you practice a language, or even just play a game with you.

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Since a lot of my American readers are on holiday for Thanksgiving this weekend, I hope you’ll come join us! I’ll be in the group chat room at 6:00 EST both today (Friday), tomorrow Saturday, and Monday. Click here to see what time that is in a city near you.

Thoughts on this new feature? Let us know in the comments below!
Similar Posts:

• Introducing LWT: The free, open-source computer, iPad & mobile foreign language reading tool
• How to write non-intrusive multilingual updates in Google Plus (& Facebook/twitter) + video hangout!
• How to make your computer multilingual
• Introducing the Fi3M forum! Fantastic free resources, share your mission & discuss!
• Honest & detailed review of the LingQ web-based learning system

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Free video/audio chat, language group chat and games with other language hackers and native speakers! 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)!

Marcus in the Brazilian rainforest

There are many people out and travelling the world, and luckily more and more are trying to speak the local language when they see it isn’t so hard.

Every day I’m hearing/reading more and more success stories from others, and I thought today’s one was among those worth sharing! This guest post is from Marcus, who had followed my advice to be able to have a much more authentic and fun experience in Brazil.

He may not be fluent yet, but he certainly did way more than so many tourists I met in Brazil and this is something to be very proud of! Here it is:

I’m back from Brazil now, and I have to say that Language Hacking really worked well for me. Kudos to Benny the Irish Polyglot. After two months of studying, I was able to have simple conversations and get complimented on how good my Portuguese was. In particular I was able to:

• Order and pay at restaurants – including asking about an incorrect bill
• Buy baked goods and other items at grocery stores
• Ask for directions
• Check into a hotel
• Get help shopping for gifts
• Ask people about themselves and their families
• Ask to have my flight changed to the same itinerary as my wife’s
• Joke around

Brazilians make it very easy to practice Portuguese. They aren’t uptight about the language and they love it if you smile and joke around.

When I went into stores, very few people spoke English, which is really helpful. It avoids the situations where they feel the need to put you out of your language misery by speaking your native tongue. Instead, we would just smile and laugh while I used filler comments called connectors until I figured out another way to say what I wanted.

I was amused by the number of people who asked me if I used Rosetta Stone to learn Portuguese. They’re definitely doing their marketing well – I even saw a kiosk in the airport.

Here are the learning techniques I used to prepare before the trip – mostly taken from Fluent in Three Months:

• Studied a Lonely Planet phrasebook for Brazilian Portuguese
• Found a co-worker who speaks Portuguese and had three conversation sessions with him
• Practiced greetings and pronunciations with a Brazilian vendor at the local farmers market
• Learned numbers, colors, food, phrases, and pronunciation from a language CD by Euro Talk Now
• Watched Brazilian movies from Netflix, first with English subtitles, then with Portuguese subtitles
• Used Anki Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) flashcard program and iPhone app to study connectors, phrasebook vocabulary, and finance-specific terms
• Wrote emails in Portuguese to co-workers in Brazil using Google Translate as a supplement
• Changed my iPhone, iTunes, and Facebook language settings to Portuguese

Once I arrived, I just kept in mind that I had to go out and speak in order to improve. And I had to replace the anxious look I get when I can’t find the words or understand everything. Instead I focused on smiling, nodding, and using filler comments.

As an aside, some of my favorite words are “ôtimo” (o-chimo), meaning “great”; “legal” (lay-gow), meaning “cool”, and “moleza” (mo-lay-zah), meaning “piece of cake”. I also like that futebol (soccer) is pronounced “fu-tchy-bo-oo” and PowerPoint is “powerpoin-tchy”.

I can’t write about a trip without a section on food, so here goes. I had amazing pizza there (who knew there was such a huge Italian influence?). I ate delicious cuts of meat at the Fogo de Chao churrascaria (Brazilian barbecue). Every lunch buffet was full of deliciously savory sauces and spreads. We went to a great sushi restaurant (who knew there was such a huge Japanese influence?).

The draft beers (“choppe”) were heavenly smooth – with Devassa’s Negra as my favorite. But the best was the Pao de Queijo – cheese bread. Not just lower-case cheese bread. More like a glorious merger of light francese rolls and melted longhorn cheddar cheese at perfect nacho consistency so that it pulls away in a long string and falls all the way down past your chin when it finally snaps. Good thing I have a ten-year visa, because I may have to buy another ticket soon.

I thoroughly enjoyed learning Portuguese, but it was even more fun to learn so many tips to learn any language. I plan to shift my focus from Portuguese, which means it will join my ever-fading traveler’s knowledge of Italian. We’re traveling to Zambia in two months, so I’m going to apply all the techniques I just learned to my study of Bemba. I want to see if I can accelerate my learning pace. At the same time, I’m going to start brushing up on Spanish, with a goal of being conversational by next summer.

What language would you like to learn?
Similar Posts:

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Language Hacking success story: Marcus speaking Portuguese in Brazil 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)!

In this post I want to outline how I am writing multilingual updates in the new social network Google plus that only those who want to see them (natives and people learning the language) will.

I’ll also say how I’m doing the same thing in Facebook and twitter, and invite you to a video “hangout” to get a live tour of my home in Cuzco… with commentary and to ask me questions in the languages I speak!

My multilingual updates

While I’m travelling I like to use my social networks to stay in touch with people, both that I know and those who follow my story online who like to keep up to date with what I’m doing.

While doing this in English is straightforward enough, I’ve gone a step further and actually write my updates in all the languages that I know! This is part of my way of practising a language no matter where I am – by outputting something, even if very brief, in that language to make sure I’m still thinking in it. Twitter/Facebook/Google+ are great for forcing yourself to write something in the language as regularly as possible.

It’s something I’d highly recommend you try doing yourself on your favourite social networking sites in your target language.

I had been doing this every single day throughout 2008 & 2009 on the following twitter accounts:

English: twitter.com/irishpolyglot

Irish: twitter.com/ilteangach

Spanish: twitter.com/poliglota

French: twitter.com/polyglotte

Italian: twitter.com/poliglotta

Esperanto: twitter.com/poligloto

Portuguese: twitter.com/irlandes

And since last year I added German: twitter.com/mehrsprachig and this year Dutch twitter.com/meertalig (which I may get back to updating if I return to Dutch). I also opened Turkish, Hungarian and Czech accounts that I used while I was active in those languages.

This year you’ll notice these accounts have been very inactive – my hectic travel plans have made it very difficult to keep up, but I’m going to get back into regular or daily updates on these accounts from now, and especially next year that I’ll be back to travelling slowly again.

It’s been a great way to force me to remember difficult vocabulary and to make sure I use these languages, since I try to write the same update in each account. If you are interested in that language, follow me and make sure to @ me to keep up the conversation!

But the whole point is that I do this in such a way that anyone following me will NOT have to read me write updates in every language I know, most of which they wouldn’t be interested in or understand – seeing such a thing in your stream would be quite frustrating! Instead I segment my updates each time.

This could be an issue some of you have – you may want to write updates in the language you are learning, but many in your social networking site may not be so interested in reading or interacting with them.

With twitter this is easy as I have separate accounts, but rather than create one account per language on other social networking sites, I’ve found other ways of making sure that the right people see the updates and others don’t!

New Google plus “pages” and how to segment updates

Google plus is quickly catching up with Facebook in terms of features, and in the last week they added the “pages” feature, which is very similar to what Facebook offers for brands. But since G+ is in its infancy, there are still many restrictions.

One of them is that a brand page can’t segment its updates to particular users very easily, as Facebook can (explained below). This was a frustrating aspect of the pages for me, but luckily I talked directly and in person with someone who works behind the scenes of Google plus and he gave me a great temporary work-around until they offer a feature like opt-in circles or similar.

And with that in mind, I’ll be using my Google plus page to send updates in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German, Esperanto and Irish.

You can follow my updates in English on my Google plus profile here.

And you can follow my non English updates as follows, by circling my Google plus page:

1. Add this page to a G+ circle and +1 the page, both of which you can do right here within this website:

(If viewing this from an RSS reader or email, click here to go directly to that G+ page)

2. Go here and +1 the appropriate flag image representing the language, to see updates JUST in that language…. That’s it!

While it’s less ideal than automatic opt-in, the way it works is that just before I write an update in that language, I’ll quickly look at the flag image and see if new people signed up. If they did I will add them to my circle specifically for that language – so if you +1 the Spanish flag, I’ll add you to my Español circle.

It’s very important to circle/follow my page first, as brand pages cannot circle anyone that has not circled them first.

This way when I write an update, say in Spanish, I’ll specify that only my Español circle can view it. The fact that you +1 the image is a very simple way of segmenting people, way more efficient than you asking directly what circle they want to be a part of, and it’s only a couple of seconds of work before each update for me to add new people to that language circle – a step that I imagine Google plus will simplify and automate soon enough.

If you have your own Google plus page, try uploading images and making a similar request of those who circle you to +1 them! Of course if you know everyone in your Google plus profile this is unnecessary as you can just add them to your own language circles directly without asking them, since you personally know what language they’ll understand or care to read.

Since I’ll be following you myself from my G+ page, I’ll make sure to pop in and comment on what you write, and hope to see your updates in the language you specified, so I can reply to you in that language

Get a live video tour of my Cuzco home in that language!

A great feature of Google plus, which is not present in other social networking sites in the same way, is the multiple party video hangout!

For anyone following my Google plus profile and page, I’ll invite you to get a live video tour of my place in Cuzco! I’ll do this in a different language every day for a week (starting in English tomorrow/Friday on my profile and all other days on my page) and invite only those in my language circles (those who have followed me first and then +1-ed a flag) to a “hangout”.

I’ll only be online for about five minutes each time, and will try to do it twice about 12 hours apart to cater for various time zones or working schedules around the world. If the maximum number for a hangout is reached, I’ll do it again for another group immediately after. Feel free to ask me questions in that language if you like, about how things are going in Cuzco and my Quechua mission!

(For language learning or travel advice you are best Skyping me privately though.)

Other video hangouts will of course be on the horizon in future.

Facebook segmentation

For the moment Facebook makes the segmentation process much easier. Because of that, if you follow my Facebook page, you will see updates in various languages (after liking the page) if your Facebook language settings are in that language.

Just like that page here:

I’d recommend you change your Facebook language settings anyway along with any other interface you can because of the many benefits to helping you learn the language that brings.

I outlined precisely how to segment your updates per language or per location in this post. You basically just need to separate people into groups (on a Facebook profile), or just click the lock symbol under the status update bar to select a country or language pre-assigned for you, if it’s for a Facebook page.

So when I write an update in Spanish on my page I will click the lock symbol and select that only those with their language set to Spanish should see it. On my personal profile I select a pre-made Spanish group of friends I created instead.

Note that you can also follow my personal Facebook updates in English (which tend to be less language/travel related; things such as sharing a cool video my little brother made about himself in a real-life version of Sonic the Hedgehog), by subscribing to my Facebook profile here. Please don’t add me as a friend or message me there though, as I block anything from people I haven’t met in person several times and am serious about the 130 or so real friends I’ve added. Subscribe only!

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As well as following my multilingual and English updates based on your favourite social networking sites, don’t forget to create these yourself and use them in a similar way to what I’ve suggested here!

If you have any thoughts on this process, make sure to leave a comment below or reply to my message about this post in that particular social networking site!
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• Pimp out your browser searches for language learning

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How to write non-intrusive multilingual updates in Google Plus (& Facebook/twitter) + video hangout! 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)!