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

particular language needs precisely and help you deal right away with your
most immediate challenges. This helps you focus on each challenge until

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you conquer it, while also helping you make huge strides toward the bigger
goal a few months down the road. As an example, rather than assigning
myself a vague weeklong mission to learn Mandarin vocabulary, I made
sure I processed sixty flash cards a day with the specific intention of
learning how to order food while traveling freely around a new country.
At the end of my first month learning Mandarin, I felt I had reached
something of a plateau. I could have basic touristy exchanges from memory
and with passable tones, but these exchanges lasted only ten to fifteen
seconds. I couldn’t have an actual conversation. So I gave myself a brain-
melting mini-mission. As the name implies, brain-melting forces you to
think fast, try to extrapolate what you’re hearing, and remember vocabulary,
all while processing the context for clues. During the week following that
first month, I scheduled time to sit down with native speakers for hour-long
conversations.
What a week! But at the end of it, I had practiced so much that I could
hold a conversation for several minutes. These weren’t complex
conversations—I mostly described what I did that day—but this is exactly
the point of a mini-mission. I had successfully forced myself outside my
comfort zone and, in the process, figured out how to talk for several
minutes and understand a native speaker’s questions beyond my limited
range. Plus, since I had only one goal and one mini-mission, it was a lot
easier to tailor my work specifically to make this happen.
I remember when I was beginning to learn a little Hungarian, and I
received my first phone call in that language. I couldn’t rely on visual cues,
as I tend to do in the early stages, and the call quality wasn’t all that great. I
had to think fast and attempt to get information out of the caller. After that
very short one- to two-minute call, I felt exhausted. I could almost feel my
brain being pushed into overdrive. Since then, I’ve added phone or Skype
calls to my mini-mission itineraries.
Through brain-melting mini-missions like these, you can push on to a
new language level. If you don’t try several brain-melting sessions
throughout your project, then you’re simply not pushing yourself hard
enough. Learning a new language should certainly be fun and enjoyable,
but pushing through the frustrating parts determines whether or not you’ll
reach the next level. You have to move out of your comfort zone. And the
mini-missions are designed to do just that.

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Focus on your biggest issue and tackle it. It will be hard (that’s why it’s
your biggest issue!) but get through it, go headfirst into frustration, and, like
tearing off a bandage, you will come out on the other side happy that you
got it over with quickly.
Burnout
For those of you taking on this project full-time, there’s a catch. If your
entire project is made up of brain-melting moments, you can burn out
incredibly quickly. Unfortunately, burnout is one of the biggest reasons
people give up on learning a language entirely.
At first, I thought three full months of focused learning would be the
ideal amount of time to reach my target, without any breaks at all to speak
English. What I eventually figured out, though, was that I could only keep
up this kind of active, intense learning for about three weeks. After three
weeks, I couldn’t retain anything else for about a week. I reached a
saturation point. If you have greater endurance than little old me, then
perhaps you can keep on going, but I think most people realistically reach a
burnout point.
Absolute full-time immersion and pushing yourself as much as I suggest
require you also take breaks. Since discovering this, I have found that
working full-time all week on a language, then giving myself one evening
off each week to socialize in another language, helps me recharge my
batteries and, ultimately, work the most effectively.
Once a month I would also take an entire weekend off the language
project and hang out with other foreigners like myself, go for a swim, dance
for a few hours—anything not related to the language I was learning. I got
great mileage out of this while doing my Arabic learning project in Brazil,
as well as my most recent one, to learn Japanese in Spain.
Breaks like this are also an effective psychological tool. I had weekly
goals and then “rewarded” myself with a break just after (hopefully)
reaching those goals, and I gave myself much longer breaks after achieving
any much larger monthly objectives. Breaks are essential during a full-time
immersion project. Use them to recharge your batteries and as motivation to
work harder to reach a specific milestone.

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Frustrating moments are inevitable. To keep them to a minimum, try to
have fun with your language every day. Assign yourself language tasks that
you actually look forward to. Reward yourself after studying several dozen
flash cards, for instance, by watching a few minutes of a silly soap opera in
the language you’re studying or reading a comic book in that same
language. When it doesn’t feel like work, you can accomplish so much
more.