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

Immersion Without Buying a Plane Ticket
You don’t need to be in a foreign country to learn the language.
You can do it from the comfort of your home or local community.
Y
ou have likely realized by now what my “secret” is to learning
languages. It has nothing to do with buying the right materials, finding the
lazy or easy way to learn a language while you sleep or jog or participate in
some other activity, or clicking your way through expensive language
learning software.
You must speak the language with other human beings.
Soon enough, I will walk you through the process of how to keep a
conversation flowing with a person, so we can start striving toward fluency,
but first we have to actually find those people to speak with!
Many challenges may prevent you from speaking a language, but one I
want to squelch right now is the idea that you can’t speak a foreign
language unless you’re in that foreign country. This excuse has held too
many people back for too long and we need to put a stop to it.
In this chapter, I delve into the many ways you can create an effective
immersion environment and get genuine practice with native speakers of the
language you are focused on without needing to buy a plane ticket. And I
even suggest why it could be better to learn the language from home.
The Expat Problem
Visiting a country to learn its language isn’t as great as you might think.
When I first moved to Spain, I was under the delusion that something “in
the air” would ensure that I simply picked up Spanish. I was in the country
—what more could I possibly need?
Almost six months into my trip, I realized I needed much more. I could
barely string together a few basic sentences. Sadly, my case is not the

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exception. In my travels, I have met literally thousands of expatriates, or
expats, who barely speak the local language.
I met a man once in Prague who had lived there for a decade. He was
married to a Czech woman and their children all spoke Czech. He told me
that my understanding of the language after only two weeks was already
way beyond his. I met people with similar stories in Poland, China,
Thailand, France, and Germany. An entire decade in a country without
speaking the language. I’ve met people all over the world who still don’t
know much of the local language beyond simple pleasantries, despite living
there for several months or a year.
Of course, they all used many of the same excuses I outlined in chapter
1. But the real reason they didn’t succeed was a combination of laziness and
the temptations of what is called the expat bubble, both of which I
succumbed to my first time in a non-English-speaking country.
The expat bubble is a protective shell of friendships that forms when a
group of people live or work abroad for any length of time, and everyone
within that bubble speaks your native language. When you arrive in a
country, “just while you settle in,” you go out with this group and speak
English (or another language that isn’t the local one). Sometimes working
in your native language is unavoidable, but you still have many hours of
free time that can be put to good use every day.
The problem is that the temptation to hang out with people you can
relate to and express yourself with easily is so powerful that you end up
making almost no local friends, or only meet local people who have
excellent English language skills. This is exactly why people continue to
think that “everyone speaks English.”
Because so many people feel being in a country is the be-all and end-all
solution to their problems, they start to believe that learning a new language
is impossible when they don’t speak it themselves after months of being
exposed to it. So no, I do not think flying to a country is a crucial part of
your language learning strategy.
On top of this, I have found that, with so many things to deal with when
you move your entire life across the planet, all these distractions and mental
strains wear you down. Even as an experienced language learner, I learned
Mandarin more slowly than I might have because I had to deal with cultural
integration issues as well as the language. It was a lot to take on at once.

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Getting used to a new country, trying to make friends, dealing with
loneliness, and facing the frustration of cultural differences are all
distractions from learning the language. This is why I think it’s actually
better to learn a language in advance, before going to that country.
Spoken lessons via Skype are just as effective—and far more
convenient. Instead of traveling to Taiwan, I would have been better off
staying somewhere I was more familiar with, so the only project or
challenge I had to think about was learning Mandarin.
Keep in mind this is coming from someone who has learned most of his
languages by arriving in a country not speaking a word of the local
language yet. There is indeed a certain sense of adventure and pressure to
speak when you do this, but the other distractions can unfortunately take
over and leave you unable to focus on the language. Is it any wonder so
many people just give up and spend their entire time abroad with others
from their own country?