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

Input: Working Toward Mastery Through Movies and Books
In this book, you will notice that I have prioritized interacting with those
who speak the target language; studying is almost an afterthought. This is
different from many other approaches, which tend to be more input focused;
that is to say, the work is to absorb the language in less interactive ways,
such as reading, watching TV and movies, and listening to the radio.
The reason for this is because my priority is to communicate live in the
language, so I need to practice that interactive communication first, much
more than I need to be able to read or understand movies well. Being able to
understand a TV show or read a newspaper simply doesn’t help me as
effectively when traveling in a country or socializing with people as much
as spoken practice does.
But there is a point when I tend to shift my focus toward more of these
input methods, using material that isn’t interactive. I usually turn to input
methods when I’m trying to jump from fluency to mastery. Before I have
learned enough words in interactive conversations, materials I tend to enjoy
in English would be too complex for me in the target language to enjoy on a
similar level. For instance, I can’t enjoy comedy shows (except for slapstick
or very simple jokes) in a language as a beginner, so I generally avoid them
until I reach fluency. Then I dive into everything I would tend to enjoy in
English, but in my target language.
I remember trying to watch a comedy TV show in Spain as a beginning
learner: Aquí No Hay Quien Viva, about the antics apartment-block
neighbors get up to. The jokes and level of speech was just too far beyond
me. I tried to watch it for “practice,” but I really felt that I had learned
nothing after the hour. Since it wasn’t interactive, the speakers weren’t
slowing down a little for my benefit, as those I’d speak to directly would.

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Then again, after reaching C2 (mastery) level in Spanish, I started
watching the same show (technically rebranded and now called La Que se
Avecina), and there are many moments when I am almost crying in laughter.
It’s one of my favorite shows, and I can appreciate it now that I brought my
level up enough to be able to truly enjoy it. What I could have done, though,
was use this or a similar show when I was at level B2 and study it
intentionally to try to bring my level up.
I also read newspapers, listen to radio debates, and enjoy novels in my
stronger languages to bring my levels toward mastery. Doing these at first is
quite challenging at a B2 level of fluency, where I still need to refer to a
dictionary, stop and think for a moment to understand what I heard, or look
up complex sentences. It definitely pushes me to my limits, and after a
complex session of listening or reading, I can feel exhausted if I have tried
very hard to keep up, but I’ll be that much better for it next time!
Find as much of this as you can to bring your level up toward mastery. I
wouldn’t recommend jumping into complex themes as a beginner, though.
It’s just too complicated for you to even appreciate on a small level. This
kind of frustration is a major contributor to why so many learners give up;
they try to process native material just after starting, see that it’s too hard,
and give up entirely. When you instead try to speak to people, it’s a lot
easier to get eased into it and control the direction the conversation goes, so
you can feel some sense of achievement even as a beginner.
If your focus is much more reading- and listening-based than spoken,
though, you can—and will—find great ways to get into appreciating input,
even as a beginner. Simpler content, or that which you are familiar with in
some way, can be a huge boost.
I sometimes watched The Simpsons while trying to learn Spanish.
Because I had already seen every episode in English and pretty much knew
what each character was saying, I could learn new Spanish words and
understand them as they were being said, which gave me a tremendous
boost of confidence. Others have read comic books or manga in their target
language, and the images certainly provide tons of context to fill in the
gaps.
Input can be a huge help when you know that it’s appropriate to your
level or just above it. But hearing a constant stream of noise or needing to
look up every single word in a dictionary can be terribly frustrating. It’s also
an inefficient learning experience. Then again, as I’ve said elsewhere in the

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book, there is no one way to learn a language, and many have told me that
they have successfully brought their level up through lots of pure input. The
catch is that it definitely takes much more time to interact with a language
when you delay speaking with a pure-input approach. This is ultimately
why it takes years for so many people to reach a conversational level, when
others do it in a few months. The former are simply not practicing
conversations enough for that aspect of their language skills to improve.
Efficient input works only when you give it your full attention. I
thought that simply having the radio on in German for many hours every
day would help me learn the language through some kind of osmosis, that it
would naturally seep in. But language doesn’t work that way. Expecting to
learn a language while doing something else is lazy and counterproductive.
Focus is the key.
If you are listening to audio, don’t do something else at the same time;
instead, take notes to make sure you are following what you’re hearing, or
try to repeat it over to yourself, making sure you understand each word. The
less attention you give to it, the less efficiently you will learn. You could
spend ten hours listening to audio while you are jogging and thinking about
something else, but you would learn as much as if you had simply listened
to a single hour while pausing and thinking about what was being said with
your full focus. Don’t multitask language learning!
When I’m jogging or driving, I review past audio I have already focused
on while sitting down and in study mode, or alternatively, I listen to audio I
am going to go back over later, now that I’ve heard it all through a single
time without pauses. I use the multitasking period as prep time rather than
counting it as study time.