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

Cheap Generic Courses vs. Expensive Courses
I get asked all the time my opinion on particular well-marketed language
learning courses, especially by Americans overwhelmed by marketing and
advertising campaigns. In my experience, the price of a course and its
quality, usefulness, and results are not related. In fact, my favorite first
resources, which I would buy in a target language, come cheap (between
five and thirty dollars) and provide excellent teaching materials.
I’ve tried Rosetta Stone, for instance. There are some useful bits in it,
but far too many aspects of it I didn’t like at all. Overall I can’t say that a

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higher price point delivers better results than much more affordable book
courses. There are also completely free courses, just as good or better, such
as the ones at Duolingo.com.
One thing that is generally effective, if you do spend a lot of money, is
the purely psychological effect of feeling more pressure to work harder
because you’ve spent so much money. How effective this truly is, is
debatable (you can’t throw money at all your problems), and I find I get the
same kind of pressure from simply being public about my project.
As such, the tools I recommend for learning a language are the
following books, which you can get at your local bookshop or on
Amazon.com:
For an absolute beginner (phrases and words, with very brief
grammatical overview), I suggest a Lonely Planet, Collins, Berlitz, or
Assimil phrase book.
Colloquial and Teach Yourself are two basic book courses that provide
very good representations of the dialogues tourists are likely to have, and
they introduce you to some basic grammar. The presentation is friendly, and
they teach what you essentially need to know.
Assimil also creates excellent language learning courses, and I
especially like how they indicate the level you are aiming for on the CEFRL
scale. As such, I have used Assimil in both the early and later stages of
learning, although they have more versatile courses in French, so I use the
laddering technique discussed in chapter 9 with this.
Of course, some books, courses, and materials can be better than others
depending on the language you are learning. Make sure to see the language-
specific summaries at fi3m.com/langs that expand on the language
introductions from chapter 6 and go on to mention recommended learning
resources.