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

Always Look for Ways to Improve
We have already seen how plateaus can hold us back and how mini-
missions can help us overcome them. But it’s easy to forget these when we
finally reach a stage where we can communicate in a language.
After working so hard to get here, it’s almost too easy to get lazy and
decide that what we have now is good enough. This is why so many people
reach a certain level and stay there indefinitely; they’ve already put so much
hard work in and they feel they deserve to reap the benefits of all that work.
It can be so tempting to stop learning and just use the language as you
can now, because it’s “good enough,” especially if you can perform most of
your essential social and other basic interactions in that language. But if you
are still conducting your most complex discussions in your native language,
it’s important to remind yourself that your work is not done; in fact, the
most fun part of all lies ahead!
Having reached that C2 (mastery) level myself, I can confirm that the
extra work is so worth it! Being able to do anything that you could possibly
want in the target language, including working in it, having very complex
discussions in it, and so much more, is a whole world apart from being able
to have conversations with a patient speaker.
To reach these upper levels, you have to continue to eliminate plateaus,
seriously examine what your biggest problems are right now, and solve
them.
When I was starting to get comfortable with my A2 Mandarin, for
instance, and started to set my sights on B1 and beyond, I found that I could
meet up with someone in person and chat about basic things pretty well. But
I was relying a bit too much on context and, especially, visual cues. When I
realized this, my next step—trying to have more conversations on Skype
with the video turned off—seemed the best way to force me to focus on the
words themselves. When I did this for the first time, even though I had
already been learning Mandarin intensively for a couple of months, I felt
like I was starting over from scratch again due to how challenging it was,
and my head actually hurt from having to think so much during the session.
It wasn’t fun (at first), but thanks to focusing on a problem that I knew I
had, I pushed my level up. And now my conversations are better both in
person and via Skype. I’ve pushed my understanding level up several
notches and forced myself to recognize many more words than I could with

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my temporary fix of extrapolating what they were likely to mean, which is
what I did to help me get through earlier stages.