Fluent in 3 Months. Benny LewisЧитать онлайн книгу.
have the time to do what it takes. Sure, being able to devote several months full-time to your project would be nice, but if that isn’t possible, just devote as much time as you can and you will still reach the level you want to reach, even if the time it takes is longer.
Ultimately, it’s not about the number of months or years, but the number of minutes every day you devote to this challenge. These minutes are what truly count.
4. Language Courses Are Expensive
Another huge misconception, often, is that language-learning is a privilege reserved for the rich. You have to pour money into expensive language-learning materials, software, immersion courses, flights around the world, books, and private teachers – or you will fail miserably.
Not quite. I blame products like Rosetta Stone, which can have quite a high price tag. I have tried Rosetta Stone myself, but I can’t say it’s superior to cheaper alternatives, or free sources of information like online tools, blogs, or time with foreign friends. Spending more does not guarantee you’ll succeed any more easily than someone who works with a much tighter budget. In fact, in a survey I ran on my blog, I found that spending money on several different products actually reduces your chances of success. You’re far more likely to succeed if you pick just one basic product – like a phrasebook, for instance – and set yourself to start speaking the language right away. Spending money, or hoarding language products, does nothing for your progress.
5. I’m Waiting for the Perfect Language Course
You can spend weeks or months saving up for a language-learning course, but a course won’t solve all your problems. In fact, it won’t even solve most of them. Courses provide the content of a particular language but offer nothing concerning what you can actually do with that content.
To get started, I generally just grab a phrasebook. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best way for you, but my point is that even if a perfect course exists, it will still be only as good as the effort you put into using the language regularly.
After flipping through my phrasebook, I go to my local bookshop and buy a course for next to nothing, or visit a library to get one out for free. I generally find the Teach Yourself, Assimil, and Colloquial courses to be pretty good ones to start with, but there are also plenty of free online alternatives.
Does this mean that these are the perfect courses? No, but they are certainly quite good. They give me the general words and phrases I tend to use at the start in everyday conversations, while also missing others, such as vocabulary more specific to my situation – like that I studied engineering or that I write a blog.
No course will ever be perfect. With that in mind, get an affordable book or sign up for a free online course, like Duolingo.com, and remember to do lots of language work on the side – activities that will keep you in genuine interactions with human beings.
That’s why, instead of study material or a particular immersion course, I prefer to focus on whom I spend time with and how, conversing as often as possible in their language. A self-guided learning approach based on more structured study sessions works wonders.
6. The Wrong Learning Method Will Doom Me Before I Start
A lot of us feel that if we get off on the wrong foot, our early mistakes will sabotage an entire project. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s okay to have a bumpy start. The trick is to begin!
Even if you pick the wrong course, or you’ve tried one before and it didn’t work out, that doesn’t determine how things will go this time. And if you run into new challenges, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again. A little persistence pays off.
Any energy you put into researching the best possible way to begin would always be better spent on actually learning and using the language.
7. I Need to Study Before I Can Have a Conversation
You should start to speak a new language from day one. This may seem counterintuitive. Many of us feel we need to study first, until that glorious day when we are ‘ready’ and have ‘enough’ words to finally have a real conversation.
The truth is that day will never come. You can always justify, even when you have all but mastered a language, that you are not ready. There will always be more words to learn, more grammar to perfect, and more work to tweak your accent. You just have to accept that there will be a few communication problems and you will deal with them.
This requires embracing a little imperfection, especially during the early stages. Use the language, even though you may slip up a little. Being okay with this is the trick to using the language now, rather than waiting many years.
8. I Can’t Focus
My friend, Scott Young, took exams for an entire MIT computer Science undergraduate course in one year, has a formal education in business, and studied psychology, nutrition, mathematics, physics, and economics. He is also a successful entrepreneur and enjoys life to the fullest. On top of this, he learned French in a short time, and the first time we met we spoke only in this language (even though he’s from the English-speaking part of Canada). He has more recently had his very own projects to learn a language in three months, very similar to mine.
He clearly has quite a lot on his plate!
When I asked him about how on earth he keeps focused with all of these things going on, he told me that it’s very simple: focus on one major project at a time. He stays committed to the priority project no matter what, even if distractions may tempt him to try to take on two or more interesting projects simultaneously.
Those with focus will make the various interests they have in life work sequentially rather than in parallel, so that they are not spreading themselves too thin. This way nothing gets neglected.
Focus is not an unusual trick, but it is a seldom-applied one. Scott gets so many things done by not attempting an overwhelming balancing act of divided interests. Instead, his method involves working patiently and systematically, adding each new skill to his life one at a time.
9. Some Languages Are Just Too Hard
It doesn’t matter what language they’re trying to learn – some people will always claim it’s the hardest language in the world. I’ve heard it for every single language I’ve ever taken on, except Esperanto.
There is no ‘hardest’ language. It’s all biased opinions from proud natives who have no idea what it’s like to learn that language as a second language, or from other learners who have learned it slowly and may feel their egos challenged if you try to learn it more quickly than they did. Discouragement is always for their benefit, not yours, and frankly, they have no idea what they are talking about.
When I publicly announced on my blog that I was going to learn Chinese, a lot of Westerners who had learned Chinese tried to discourage me (though never in person, and never did a native speaker do so). They went out of their way to repeat over and over again that all my previous experience was irrelevant because I was now learning the ‘hardest language in the world’.
What I found, though, was that most of them had almost exclusively learned only Chinese. They had little or no experience with other languages. Many of them said European languages like French and Spanish were very easy, even though many learners and native speakers with much more experience in these languages disagreed. Also, it turned out Chinese wasn’t that bad after all, and I explain why in detail in chapter 6.
Nobody wins in this comparison game. If you aren’t learning other languages, then forget them and focus on the one you’re truly passionate about. Think about the many reasons you want to learn a language, and dismiss outright any unhelpful discouragement about its difficulty.
A good attitude will get you far, no matter what language you’re learning.
10. Plateaus Are Inevitable
Plateaus themselves are not myths. The fact that we have to be stuck on them is.
You won’t run into