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

Cheating When You Don’t Know a Word
Okay, so you’ve survived the first few moments of your first conversation.
After that, even if the exchanges last no more than ten seconds before you
decide to switch to English or say good-bye to the native speaker, you can
go back to your books or notes and refresh your memory with what you
thought you knew or wanted to say but couldn’t remember. Add these
phrases to a flash card deck and make sure to study them.
From here, you simply repeat the process and learn more phrases and
words. You will find you can expand those ten seconds to twenty or thirty,
and eventually to an entire minute.
Early conversations may always be the same. Give yourself a little
momentum. In fact, try to learn the first ten seconds—both your side and a
few likely replies—by heart, because starting off well is essential, and this
part of any first conversation is incredibly predictable.
Generally, during my first conversations, I find I cannot cram for all the
possible words and phrases I might want to say. It’s just too much to
process in too little time, no matter how good my memory techniques are,
especially since the techniques are better suited to long-term recall rather

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than short-term cramming. Because of this, I “cheat” a little and carry some
notes with me.
If I am Skyping someone for my first conversation, I’ll leave open a text
file with a list of things I want to say and some tough words I haven’t
learned well enough yet, like “engineer” and “writer.” If I am sitting with
someone in a café, say, I’ll have a little sheet of notes I can glance at for
reference. This person will already be well aware that I’m a beginning
learner so he or she won’t be surprised or offended when I’m in need of
“training wheels.”
My notes will also include some words that might come up on the spot,
or I might bring along my phrase book and use the dictionary in the back to
quickly look something up. If I’m on a computer using Skype, I’ll use
Google Translate or an online dictionary specific to that language. This way
I’m not limited by my active memory, which at the very start of this process
may have a couple dozen words ready at best.