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

Grammarese
While practice is the key ingredient, and ultimately the rules for learning
your nth language are the same as learning your first one, there are certain
other tricks of the trade that you can start applying. One of them is that you
tend to pick up a side language I like to call grammarese.
As I said in chapter 7, starting to learn a language through grammar-
heavy materials is something I wholeheartedly recommend against for
beginning language learners. But once you reach a certain stage, grammar
drills and rules can help you improve your skills effectively.
An interesting thing happens after you have gone through grammar
rules once or twice; you start to pick up on all the specialized terminology
most people are not aware of. I remember when I was training to become an
English teacher to help me extend my time in Spain, and I had to relearn the
definitions of article, conjugation, adjective, adverb, declension, case,

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pronoun, determiner, possessive, participle, subjunctive, preposition, and so
many other things.
I have come across these terms so many times in so many books by this
stage, I feel like I’ve picked up an extra language, as I can discuss the
grammatical features of a language, even though such a thing didn’t interest
me in the slightest when I first got into all of this.
This is another reason you can learn multiple languages more easily—
you don’t have to go through learning an oblique language of terminology
every time because you have already learned it. This is why I would
suggest, when you do get to that B1+ level in your first foreign language,
tidying up what you have with some grammar studies. While it may slow
you down a little, it’s worth the time to truly understand and learn the
terminology and presentation of tables, because when you come across a
similar explanation in your next language, you will be able to flick through
these pages much faster as a result.
When I came to the “notoriously grammatically complex” language of
Hungarian, I have to say I didn’t find it even the slightest bit intimidating.
To me, it seemed perfectly logical and consistent. As I read through heavy
grammatical explanations, I didn’t see what all the fuss was about. I might
even argue against linguistically minded people and tell them that
Hungarian’s supposed dative and other cases are actually nothing more than
agglutinative postposition suffixes that follow very simple vowel harmony
rules, and the definite articles don’t even have any gender or case
declension!
That last sentence would have been nothing but pure gobbledygook to
me a few years ago (and may indeed be to many of you reading this), but it
now comes naturally. The point is that you start to appreciate a language on
a meta-level of how the pieces fit together in this grammatical and linguistic
way. You also start to see how language families blend together and evolve
apart, and to predict logically how and why a rule should work even before
you ever come across it written down, based on your previous experience
with other languages.