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

How to Speak When You Don’t Have the Words Yet
The first thing someone might say when I suggest speaking from day one is
“I haven’t learned any words yet!” How can you speak when you are
starting with absolutely nothing? Surely you should study for a while first
and then speak when you’re “ready.”
Well, there’s no such thing as “ready” in language learning. There will
simply never be a day when you are 100 percent ready. You just have to use

---

whatever you know, even if you have only been studying for a few hours.
You are not actually starting a new language from absolutely nothing.
As explained in chapter 6, there are always cognates and common words
you have when you start off. And we each have decades of experience with
context, body language, and other social cues.
Speaking during the first hours of your very first one-on-one
conversation is not about spitting out thousands of words, but about
knowing just enough words to ask and answer a couple of questions,
hearing the first instances of the language used naturally, and challenging
yourself to try to understand a little bit more the next time. You learn by
doing—by trying to speak, making mistakes, and learning from them so the
next time you make fewer mistakes.
You always have enough words for some level of communication with
people. The trick is being okay with the fact that you can’t have any deep
conversations just yet and working through the simpler conversations first,
so you can get to those more interesting chats sooner.
The First Hours
What exactly will you do during those first hours? Keep in mind that you
are going to have only a basic question-and-answer first exchange with
someone.
Make a Plan for Your First Conversation
Decide that you will walk up to someone you have heard speaking your
target language or you know would be a good partner for language
practice, or
e-mail someone through a social networking site and set a specific time for
a coffee meet-up, or
set up a language exchange online via Skype.
Now that you have scheduled your first conversation, you have a
deadline in place to work toward. This makes it much more real than

---

learning random words and grammar rules that you may need “someday.”