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

The First Days
This doesn’t mean that you will only talk about something as mundane as
the weather during these first exchanges. I personally don’t care much for

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discussing the weather, in any language, including English. For me, it’s
more interesting to find out what the person did that day or if that person
has plans, and then to talk about my plans for the day. At this stage, a
phrase book starts to become less helpful, even though it still has plenty of
useful nuggets.
Speaking incorrectly is fine. I may say something like “This morning I
wake up at eight 
A.M.
” (rather than “woke up”) or go full-out Tarzan mode
and say “Tomorrow dance.” You will start to feel minor successes when you
get a look or reply that implies you were understood.
If you are in a more formal learning environment, such as a language
exchange or an affordable private lesson, then your teacher might correct
you. Make a note of it so you get it right the next time. And this is the trick:
feedback is essential when you start inventing your own phrases.
Continue to expand your conversation skills, repeating things you said
in a previous spoken session, but this time saying them a little bit more
confidently. If you find that particular phrases come up often, script out a
predictable exchange and memorize it. This way you can get that entire first
minute down, and then move on to the second minute.
When new material comes up, add it to the script. Relying on
predictable patterns is not a good long-term strategy at all, but remember,
you need to change your strategy as you progress in a language. Most things
I discuss in this chapter are not applicable to anyone working on moving
from conversational level to fluency, and later toward getting confused for a
native speaker, which I discuss in later chapters.
What will happen in these first days, though, is that you’ll get so used to
saying particular phrases, they start to seem natural, and you can
experiment with using new words and combining them with your previous
sentences, replacing other, simpler words.
When you are talking with someone who is there specifically to help
you improve your language skills, that person will be more than patient and
will work with you on these basic conversations, adding a little more to
what you can do each day and hopefully challenging you with new words
and new concepts. Build on what you are confident about—through both
actual practice and solid memorization between spoken sessions—and add
to that over time. This way you’ll start to get a foundation in the language.

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