Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

Various Grades of Success
Remember that language is a means to communicate. The only way you can
fail is if you don’t try to communicate at all. And the only way you can fail
in your language learning mission is if you are at exactly the same point at
the end of your first mission as you were at the start.
I’ve missed my goals plenty of times. When I moved to Taiwan, for
instance, I aimed for fluency in Mandarin in three months, but I didn’t reach
it. Was my Mandarin, and the entire project, therefore a waste of time? No.
I actually reached B1 (conversational, which was checked independently by
the Live the Language [LTL] Mandarin School in Beijing). As long as a
person spoke slowly to me or rephrased what he or she had said, I could
socialize. I wasn’t fluent, but I was conversant. And I was really proud of
this. Thanks to that intensive project, I can continue to speak Mandarin for

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the rest of my life, and I have a fantastic new place to start from as I strive
toward fluency and beyond.
With language learning there is no true failure if you can communicate
with other human beings. However, you should always strive for the highest
grade of possible success. If you can “only” speak conversationally, rather
than fluently, after your intensive three months, you have still successfully
learned how to communicate with another person in a new language, which
will inspire you to take your language skills to the next level.
However, be careful not to use the “even small successes count”
perspective as a crutch to rationalize slacking off. Be sure to push yourself
outside your comfort zone. If the goal you’ve set for yourself has a 100
percent chance of success, then frankly you aren’t aiming high enough.
Mini-Missions
Mini-missions, as I like to call them, take on the absolute biggest specific
problem you may have at a particular moment with a language and help you
focus on solving that problem as quickly as possible.
For instance, when I started studying Mandarin there were, of course,
many things to learn, and I found that when I tried to use phrases from my
phrase book, people didn’t understand me. My tones were way off. Because
of this, my mini-mission—my absolute priority—was to focus on getting
my tones right. I focused only on tones, not on vocabulary or reading
Chinese script or any number of other things—just tones. I didn’t “solve”
this problem in my first week, but I did become easier to understand when I
spoke. Once my tones were in good enough shape, I was ready to tackle
basic vocabulary.
By week two, my biggest problem was that I relied too much on my
phrase book. I needed to work on saying things spontaneously, from
memory. So I tackled this issue as a mini-mission, and soon enough I was
able to speak several phrases from memory, and I continued with this
pattern of setting mini-missions for myself throughout the project.
These mini-missions give you a very real—and earned—feeling of
accomplishment and progress. They are specific plans of action that fit your