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

Apply a Triage System to What You Learn
Constant conversation practice is the core of what I would recommend to
people with a spoken-communication focus in their language, as opposed to
those who are learning a language to pass an exam or to read it well. All of
your study attempts should be about making that next spoken session a little
bit better.
This gives you a more immediate experience, and you can work on your
language skills more directly. This is vastly superior to taking generic
courses that try to prepare you to speak a language fluently “someday”
instead of right away. Despite this, I recommend sometimes returning to a
traditional language course, especially if you find one more appropriate to
your needs than those with a spoken focus (such as Teach Yourself,
Colloquial, and Assimil courses), and go through the course
recommendations alone or with a teacher, as long as you solve your biggest
spoken issues first. This way you are working on your day-to-day issues in
tandem with the more general issues and topics you need to cover in this
language.
When you come to an aspect in your course that you don’t feel is super
relevant to you right now, skip it. This might be, say, a grammar feature you
don’t see as fitting your “triage” system. Good courses tend to have relevant
information pop up at the right times, but when a course is very tourist
focused, it may include something like how to ask for directions, which
would not be a priority for you if you’re preparing for a Skype lesson and
would prefer to ask your conversation partner what he or she did that day.
Concentrating on a triage system of learning requires a much more
active effort on the part of the learner. Take an active role in your language
learning story and you’ll go much further.
But I Can’t Understand the Reply!
Up to now, I’ve been focusing on what you want to say. There is another
person in the equation, however, and that person may not come up with the
replies you were expecting—and therefore the dialogue you have studied.
Most things you will hear at the start of your language learning
adventure will seem incomprehensible. It is essential to accept this and not

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be so surprised by it. Other people will be hard to understand—especially at
first. Audio lessons associated with courses tend to be recorded in
soundproof rooms with people speaking unnaturally slowly and clearly.
Audio files that you can pause and replay are quite different from what
someone less experienced teaching foreigners might say, even if that person
is technically saying the same phrase.
This is why I don’t try to understand an entire phrase in the early stages.
Listen for any particular words or segments of a person’s speech that
you can understand, and extrapolate what is being said from that. We do
this all the time, even in our native languages. If I were to talk to you over a
bad telephone connection and you heard me say “ . . . dinner . . . six 
P.M
. . . .
think?” with everything else drowned out by noise or static, it would be
reasonable for you to extrapolate that I’m inviting you out for dinner and I
perhaps ended with “What do you think?”
I consider my progress in language learning comprehension to be
nothing but a constant attempt to improve the quality of this telephone call.
It’s very fuzzy at first and gets clearer with time. I may start with only
understanding one word out of every one hundred, but after a few days, I
pick up two or three more words, then ten, and so on.
So rather than thinking I don’t understand, imagining that what you just
heard could be anything, realize that it can’t be anything; it has to be related
to what you were just talking about, within reason. What is this person
likely to be saying in this context, which single word or words did you
understand, and based on that, what can you imagine with reasonable
confidence was said back to you?