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

Traditional Learning Suddenly Becomes Useful
It’s very hard to give a precise road map of what to fix, because we each run
into different problems due to our varied focuses, learning strategies,
passions, language choices, and personal challenges. Some of these are like
the one I suggested previously with my Mandarin, which required some
lateral thinking to see the best way to solve it.
But at the end of the day, many of these problems can be what I’d call
content problems—problems with how the language itself operates (how to
conjugate verbs, structure sentences, acquire vocabulary, and so on), as
opposed to confidence issues or a lack of familiarity, which are actually
much bigger problems most of the time for beginners.
The good news with content issues is that the majority of language
learning material out there focuses specifically just on content problems.
Almost every single language learning course is all about how a language
works, with technical explanations of why grammar works the way it does,
how words are formed, the rules of how a letter is pronounced differently in
different words, and so on.
I think it’s a mistake to focus just on pure content issues for the start of
your language learning project, especially the way they are presented in
most courses; they’re simply too boring, and they’re not immediately
relevant, because there are so many rules to cover that you feel like it will
take years to get through them.
But if you first focus on communication, by patching words and
sentences together as best as you can, then you get a true sense of how a
language works and the start of an intuition for how to use it.
That’s why, for me, saying something is my priority until I reach the
basic conversation level, even if I am speaking Tarzanesque in that
language. To hell with speaking perfectly—mistakes help communication
flow! But once you have that basic flow, it’s time to go to those book
courses to start to get some solid footing in communicating formally in the
language.

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