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

Tips for Starting Specific Languages
Learning a specific language is easier than you think. Here I tell you
why.
U
p until now, everything in this book can be applied to learning any
language. The communicative approach, philosophies, and guidelines I suggest
have worked for me and many language learners for many years. I have even
applied my speak-from-day-one approach to learning sign language (of course
with a basic terminology adjustment of sign from day one) and learned to
communicate in ASL (American Sign Language) in the same way I have in
Chinese, Irish, French, Spanish, and many other languages.
Having said that, when we take on specific languages there are indeed
tricks you can apply to give you an extra edge. In this chapter, I discuss these
advantages and apply them to the language you might be taking on. I also offer
lots of encouragement, especially for languages that have been traditionally
viewed as difficult.
Before I get into listing each linguistic family and particular languages
within them, I want to introduce a few terms and concepts that will help you
here.
Cognates
A cognate is a word that not only looks and sounds like a word we already
know, but it also means the same thing we know it to mean in our mother
tongue as it does in our target language.
No matter what language you are learning, you will find that some
international words tend to be the same, albeit with a localized pronunciation.
“Obama,” for instance, as with most proper names, is the same in every
language you will come across. Brand names also tend to be very similar
across languages, such as Coca-Cola (even in Mandarin, where it’s Kekou-
Kele, ignoring tone marks).
There are also cognates that aren’t spelled exactly the same, but it doesn’t
take a feat of imagination to make the connection, such as posesión in Spanish

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and “possession” in English.
There are exceptions, of course. In Mandarin, Pepsi (Cola) is actually
called Baishi (Kele), for instance. Rather than expect all cognates in a