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

Thinking in the Language
Thinking in the language for most people refers to your inner dialogue, and
I force myself to do this from the start.
If I’m out of milk, say, rather than think (in English) Damn! No more
milk. Looks like I’ll have to go to the store, I force myself to have this same
inner dialogue in the language I’m learning. If I don’t know a word, I need
to look it up, because my inner dialogue typically follows the kind of
vocabulary I would use and the conversations I would have casually with
friends. As mentioned previously, if I don’t know the words, then I’ll still
have that dialogue, just with simpler choices and bad grammar, like Oh no!
No milk. I must go store!
I think this is an essential part of advancing in a language, because a
major crutch we rely on in the beginning stages is constantly thinking
through translations. We form a sentence in our mind in English and then
try to search our minds, word by word, for how to say it in our target
language. Not only does this slow us down, but our native tongue also
influences our word order and grammar.
This is why a lot of successful language learners try to talk to
themselves as much as they can, presuming they can’t meet up with native

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speakers (which I hope I have shown in chapter 4 is much less of an issue
nowadays). But even if you can talk to people, try to fill your alone time
with some thinking (aloud or to yourself) in the language. When I walk
along a street and see a dog or a hat or a fast bus or an advertisement or a
traffic light or anything else, I try to have my inner dialogue comment on
that, or I see if I know the word for that thing or can understand a word I
see. I’ll naturally come across something I don’t know the word for and I
will force myself to think of alternative ways to describe it, or I’ll take out a
pocket dictionary or app and look it up.
You can learn in every moment by getting inspired by your
surroundings. Thinking in the language is a decision you make, not
something that magically happens. Force yourself to think in the language
whenever you might otherwise think via your mother tongue and you will
speed the language learning process.
Training your inner dialogue means that, in later learning stages, you
skip the slow process of translating what you want to say and just say it in
the language, because you are not only thinking in that language but it is
now flowing out of you naturally and immediately. Thanks to forcing
myself to think in a language and ask myself questions in that language, I
don’t translate my Spanish, French, and other languages anymore. I hear a
word and just understand it. I want to say a word and just say it. No long
sidetracking via English.