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

Keep It All in That Language ASAP
Your conversations in the target language, even at the very start, must be
just in that language. No English! This is the core of a truly communicative
learning approach.
A traditional academic way to learn a language, on the other hand,
teaches you how the language works in your mother tongue. Your teacher
essentially speaks in the wrong language—English—for the entire session
as you dissect the target language’s grammar and vocabulary, just as you
might a frog in a biology class.

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Don’t treat your language like a collection of facts you have to learn, as
if it were a history or mathematics lesson or a set of rules to follow. You
can’t learn a language efficiently this way. Language is a means to
communicate and should be learned and used as such from the start.
That’s precisely why I promote a speak-from-day-one approach. You
genuinely speak in that language and hear that language spoken back to you
from day one. This means that you must eliminate, or at least drastically
reduce, any other language use during the time you are focused on your
target language.
Everything coming out of your mouth should be in the right language.
While I was able to do this with Polish, when I started learning Arabic,
it took me about two weeks to keep my side of the conversation all in
Arabic. I did use some Arabic in my first lesson, but I kept switching back
to English. It wasn’t because Arabic was more difficult for me; it was that I
doubted myself and lacked the courage to take the leap.
When I finally did, I realized that I could have done this much earlier,
and should have, to force myself to progress quickly. But it’s hard. It’s
embarrassing, frustrating, annoying, and exhausting. (In my earlier learning
stages, I felt like my brain was melting after a good spoken session.)
You must pass through this if you want to get to the more fun bit.
Keeping your sessions mostly in the wrong language will do nothing but
slow your progress. This is why it can take years to learn a language; if you
spend years not actually using it, of course, you can’t have even the
simplest of conversations.
Once you make the decision to keep your conversation in the right
language—your target language—do not under any circumstances allow
yourself to break from that resolution. Look up a word if you don’t know it,
or use simple language work-arounds with words you do know. You may
think that saying the precise word you want to use in English instead of the
target language helps the conversation, but it hinders your language learning
progress.
The trick is to make this decision as soon as possible. You can do it on
day one, as long as you are okay with long pauses while you look up words
(and you can tell your teacher or other speaker that he or she should
translate or spell words for you to look up, to help you with understanding
them), but it’s very frustrating. This is all about mind over matter and just
accepting the frustration. Once you do, you can get through it much faster.

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