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

My Two-Hour Polish Experience
When I visited Poland to speak at a conference, I was too preoccupied with
my TEDx presentation (in English) to spend time learning the language
over the long term as I usually tend to do. I did, however, manage to invest
two hours in learning a little of the language, and I was able to use my
Polish after such a very short learning period despite its notoriety for being
among the hardest languages to learn.
You can learn from my experience. Here’s a step-by-step guide to your
own first Skype language session, if you want to give it a try:

---

Use a phrase book to learn some basic phrases related to your anticipated
first conversation, and prepare other phrases using a dictionary. For
example:
“I just started learning Polish.”
“I am going to Poland soon.”
Since you’ll be using a computer, look up online words in the dictionary
that you think will come up in the conversation with your teacher,
knowing that they will be encouraging you to do most of the talking.
Open a text document onscreen to use as a “cheat” for words you aren’t
confident you will remember. Have several dozen prepared.
Whenever your teacher says a word you don’t know, ask him or her to type
it in the chat window, then copy it and paste it into Google Translate or a
better language-specific dictionary (for a list of completely free online
dictionaries by language, please see fi3m.com/dict).
When I connected with my teacher via Skype, thanks to my prepared
phrases, I managed to keep my side of the conversation going for half an
hour. Only Polish came out of my mouth, but of course I was “cheating”
with my prepared vocabulary list.
During this half hour, there were many times when I didn’t understand,
and I admitted that. There were times when I wanted to say something very
simple but didn’t have the words or couldn’t look up the words quickly
enough, so I had to try to change the subject. It was far from perfect, but as
I keep saying, it will always be far from perfect, just less so with time.
Next, I had another half hour to improve on what I had done during the
first conversation plus prepare specific questions for a friend, Goshka,
whom I was meeting in a mall.
I wanted to record this first-ever in-person interaction in Polish on
camera, so the first question I asked her when we met was “Is it okay if I
record this conversation?” Of course I couldn’t find this phrase in my
dictionary, so I just went with “Problem with camera?” and pointed at it,
fully aware that my grammar was way off. But she understood me and said,
“No.”

---

I went on to ask her what she was doing today, even though I already
knew what she was doing—I had already invited her out for a coffee and to
meet up with some readers of my blog. So when she said that, I can only
confidently say that I understood “coffee,” “blog,” and “Benny” (as in
Benny’s blog), but based on those words coming up and the question I had
asked, I understood what the entire phrase was likely to have been.
*
Whenever I didn’t understand what she or any other Polish speaker said,
I smiled and laughed a little at my own silliness to help the other person feel
more at ease, rather than switch to another language. It worked. The
conversations stayed entirely in Polish in both my Skype exchange and my
time with Goshka, minus the rare clarifications, even though I had just
started to learn the language.
As I progress in a language and understand more of what is being said
to me, I have to rely less and less on extrapolation and what I call
contextese. I’ll never stop using these entirely, but I will eventually rely on
them almost as infrequently as I do in English.
I have a strange suggestion for you: spend two weeks learning
Esperanto. A study in Sweden found that students who had been
learning French for two years were outperformed by those who had
learned Esperanto for one year and then French for just one year.
They had ultimately learned less French but actually did better in
French exams!
You don’t need a whole year, though; keep in mind that you are not
in an academic environment, using traditional study methods and
only for a couple of hours each week. I find that with an efficient
learning approach and working at it intensively for just two weeks
(or longer, if you can’t do it so intensively), you can make a lot of
progress in a language. The reason I’m suggesting Esperanto is that
it was intentionally designed to be the easiest language you could
possibly learn. It was artificially created in the nineteenth century
and has gained a lot of support with a very strong community
behind it. As such, you can easily find someone willing to have a
practice chat with you in Esperanto!

---

One of the best resources for this I’ve found is Lernu.net. The
forums and chat rooms will have other people to practice with, and
the site has a detailed (and completely free) course to teach you the
language. Because it’s so straightforward, you won’t have much
grammar to drag you down, and the vocabulary is very easy to
learn.
Since Esperanto is so easy, you can get much further in it in a very
short period and focus on using the language, rather than studying
complex grammar or vocabulary tables. This means you can
conquer that hard aspect of language learning: simply getting used
to communicating in a language that isn’t your own. This shift in
mentality can be applied to your next language, and I have found
that you can potentially shave months off your learning period for
any other language with just this two-week investment. Thanks to
Esperanto, you can remove this setback of not being confident about
using any foreign language.
Also, the Esperanto community is incredibly welcoming, friendly,
and provides one of the best introductions you could have to the
language learning world. I have many lifelong friends thanks to this
language! For much more information about Esperanto, including
videos of me speaking it, please check out fi3m.com/esperanto.