How to actually learn a language in a month

[Music] so you want to know whether it would be possible to learn a language in a month and even better how plenty of people claim to have done it some make even bigger claims seven days six days 24 hours 7 days again 7 minutes learn a language in your sleep learning a language i didn't even want to learn now among this melee of information misinformation click bait and straight up lines there is good news and bad news and some more bad news and finally good news but we'll get to all that in order to make a good attempt at answering this question we need to be clear on a few definitions firstly possible possible and likely are two very different things it's possible that with enough training i could run 10 kilometers in under 40 minutes lots of people my age do it all the time however it's not likely that i will carry out the necessary training to do so so possible very likely no see the difference good now to the definition of month [Laughter] lamont you joker everyone knows a month is 30 days yeah yeah but actually no because it's not the majority of months are 31 days summer 30 and then there's just february also have you considered the relationship between the word moon and the word month if you haven't well you should this is also where we get the word honeymoon like the month of honey i guess which is a lot more subtle than the swedish which calls a honeymoon a caressing month yeah the swedes don't mess about with this stuff anyway a month how long is it it's 40 days whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa you just mentioned the moon and now you're saying that a month is 12 days longer than the lunar cycle yeah i am you see humans aren't actually very good at intuitively sensing time measuring it yeah we can measure it super accurately sometimes but actually feeling the length of things we suck at that say your friend leaves for a holiday on july 27th and the next time you see them is on the night of september 4th that's about a month right yeah it's about a month in that it's 40 days also i had to check what a month was considered to be before the extra months were added because i assumed that they had to be longer right no they were actually luna months back then but get this there were like 70 days of winter that just weren't called anything like okay sure so anyway our month is 40 days long deal with it so now we have to answer the much trickier question of just what it means to learn a language now i have been a bit cunning when it comes to what a month is but i'm not going to do that for this part which is where most people hide the rabbit mainly because hiding the rabbit is boring people say if you can make yourself understood in a language then you can speak it i can make myself understood in like eight languages and in most languages we could all learn to do this in about three days because it's just not that hard to make yourself understood now we're gonna come back to this but i'm going to use a much stricter definition of speaking a language speaking a language is the ability to in most situations have forty percent of what you hear and say be comfortably comprehensible for all parties put simply more than forty percent of the time what you're hearing and what you need to say feels comfortable both for you and the people you're speaking to rather than feeling uncomfortable for one or both of you this means that even if you happen to be a confident person who's just comfortable sounding like an idiot what you say still needs to be clear enough that the person you're speaking to is also comfortable you're allowed to make mistakes you're allowed to clarify things but it all counts to your linguistic aggregate if you're not comfortable saying how do i say this properly then you're going to dent your average a lot but if you just stay silent because you don't have the language to express yourself then you're not linguistically comfortable in that moment so that counts as well if either party is confused for linguistic reasons for six or more of every 10 seconds you don't speak the language it's actually quite a high standard if you don't like my definition then i don't really care because all definitions of speaking a language are pretty arbitrary including the cefr standards which seem clear when you read them but when you've actually experienced those levels you realize that yeah if you need to know what this level would be on that scale we're talking somewhere around b2 but b2 is one big slightly different colored area in the eternal grey desert that is speaking a language b1 is actually pretty easy in a bunch of languages and c1 is a whole different ballgame that is widely accepted as being well and truly fluent so we're left with b2 and 40 days to get there so now we have our target and we have our time period let's make it simple and by that i mean overly simple like simplistic even a google search of how many hours it takes to learn a language throws back the result according to fse research it takes around 400 hours of practice to reach basic fluency in all group eins languages 480 hours over 40 days is 12 hours a day well that's neat that's doable fair enough but what's this group one languages jargon well it basically means easy languages these are normally thought of as being languages similar to those you already speak but as you can see that's not the only factor now i just want to mention that while a lot of people cite the fsi both on number of hours to learn a language and difficulty of languages for english speakers it's far from being a holy text because when you check various versions of it you see that some languages skip around the different groups some languages are marked with random caveats saying that they're actually a bit harder than their buddies and even the number of groups has dropped from five to four suffice to say it's a guide and a very rough one at that there's a whole bunch of important detail that it doesn't go into and for the sake of brevity nor will i now the bad news is that there are more languages in categories three and four than in categories one and two so no you're not going to be fluent in uzbek 40 days from now sorry if i got your hopes up the good news is that there's a good chance that you're more interested in french spanish italian german and they're a lot easier i mean they're still hard but easier but the next part is good news sort of because there are actually more than 12 hours in a day three more by my account that's 15 hours a day it'd be obvious to say 16 because 24-8 but if you're seriously doing this like for real you're going to need an extra hour's sleep ideally you're having a long sleep at night and a siesta or if you're not learning spanish a nano nap and this brings us to the first major obstacle here which is maximum acceleration you see my sneakily adding nine days to the month was even more sneaky than you thought because everything you try to learn or remember has to fit within a framework if i tell you that the capital of scotland is edinburgh even if you had believed it to be glasgow it's going to be very easy for you to overwrite that with the new information because you have an existing framework for scotland and you've at least heard of edinburgh hopefully so you're just reorganizing things within the framework but when you start out in a language you don't have much of a framework and so generally the most efficient way is to piggyback off a language you already know but this is still slow and far from ideal and the upshot is that until you're really quite competent you're going to learn the language with increasing efficiency the longer you do it for which means that assuming you do the proposed 465 hours in the first 31 days the 9 days after that should be as effective as the first 31 if not more so so for the first two or three weeks 15 hours a day is going to be really hard like just grueling and the last 19 days well no actually yeah equally grueling just just horrible and yeah which brings us to the question of what you will actually have to do here's the part where i justify the outlandish video title by informing the unwashed masses of something that the masses need to hear because they're ignorant in their unwashed massiveness there's very little difference between knowing a language and speaking a language staying on the theme of scotland have you ever heard a scottish person say i can where we normal people would say i know well that finds its roots in old norse where to this day scandinavians express knowledge of a language as to can a language to know to can to be able to to speak they're thought of as pretty interchangeable in a good number of the world's languages and with good reason there's a myth among people who have not seriously learned a foreign language that you can understand the language on a profound level and actually know it very well and even be able to tell if one little thing is out of place because you know it so damn well but when you go to speak the little people jump in your mouth and tie up your tongue and you know there must be some pill that you can take to stop the people tying up your tongue because that's the only problem right wrong yes of course it can be difficult to clearly articulate your thoughts in any language i mean you think these videos write themselves they don't support me on patreon but mostly if you can't find words in a foreign language it's because you don't know the language well enough when you spend time learning to know the language to understand it predict its patterns and truly be able to hear when something sounds off you realize that speaking it is relatively simple so how do you spend most of the month learning to know the language and that brings us to the second major obstacle see although at 15 hours a day for 40 days we'll actually hit an impressive 600 hours of exposure to the language that's not going to matter as much as how much of that 600 hours you can actually understand and this is a catch-22 how do you increase your comprehension when you don't yet have any well you you cheat obviously like i did with my definition of a month all that you need be concerned with in the first 500 hours is the percentage of the language you understand even if you are boosting that artificially we're talking about things like getting a series of conversations or short stories in let's say spanish and listening to them along with the english translation until you can remember the ideas that were expressed in the whole conversation and then listening to and reading along only in spanish until you've all but memorized the spanish as well it might sound unrealistic but if you were to do this with a hundred conversations that are each a minute long you'd actually end up with the basics of spanish nicely solidified in your subconscious at an average of 10 conversations per day for 50 minutes per conversation you'd be spending eight and a half hours a day doing this and would complete 100 conversations in 10 days in the remaining hours of those first 10 days you'd do something like repeated listening of audiobooks with which you're already familiar reading along if possible and probably some spaced repetition oh and in case you're wondering when you're supposed to eat and well yeah basically just eat it's while you're listening to the audiobooks you will need to be exposed to the target language for every waking minute and no i don't think that listening in your sleep will make any difference your brain will already be furiously processing everything it's being exposed to so i would at this point say don't overdo it but well it's pretty clear that we're already overdoing it now the details of exactly what to do when and how much to look up words how much spaced repetition etc greatly depend on the language in question and you as a person so what happens after 10 days well you're only a quarter of the way there so you'd pretty much just rinse and repeat except hopefully you'll have access to more complex and longer conversations to do the same thing with assuming you've found a suitable audio book one that you already know the story of which contains suitable language you'll be listening to each chapter 10 to 12 times before moving on so one book should keep you going for a while at the end of 20 days you'll have pretty well internalized 200 conversations listened to and hopefully read along with a medium-sized audio book 10 times over and learned about 500 words in spaced repetition but you might understand something more like a thousand words or if the language is close to your own 2 000 words and here's where it gets interesting because sometime around now you'll hit a sudden spike in comprehension and the speed at which you learn will greatly increase and i mean like greatly which means a lot you'll probably also find that what you do at this stage is more intuitive you'll just know what's effective and what's not and the micro processes that your brain undertakes in order to decode the language are happening far more frequently and to greater effect it might be at day 14 it might be at day 27 but a sharp increase in effectiveness will occur by now you should be able to listen to a normal conversation or audio book and get at least the gist of what's going on and depending on some of the a4 mentioned factors maybe even quite a lot of detail at this point you just keep doing the same things but with more breadth and less repetition this time you might be listening to 10 longer conversations four or five times each and each chapter of a new audio book just a few times you're still doing spaced repetition and you're still streaming the language through your eyes and ears or both at all times and we've reached day 30 most people's incorrect idea of a full month and you might be wondering when you're actually going to speak well we'll get to that but think about what you've achieved by this point the amount of language you've been exposed to is coming pretty close to the fsi's lower figures for basic fluency in a group one language it's a flawed number for a bunch of reasons but even if every factor is against you you've definitely now got some decent ability in a language that was foreign to you just 30 days ago so now you'll start to transfer some of that subconscious ability to active ability through speaking but not speaking to a person having a real conversation in which you have to do all the things that you would normally do during a conversation is actually a terrible way to practice because a large amount of your cognition is used up with matters separate to the language it'd be like trying to learn to hit a baseball while explaining the rules of baseball to someone else they're entirely different activities and should be practiced separately therefore you're going to instead mimic existing conversations and passages from your target language what you choose to practice is up to you but remembering our 40 comfort rule the more the situations can reflect your life the better it's also best if it's material you've already been exposed to because that way you're activating subconscious knowledge rather than trying to learn new language at this stage you're not going for perfection in accent you're just priming your brain to the task of taking the language you've fed it and moving your mouth to produce that to repeat producing a new language does carry some difficulty but mostly it's a lack of knowledge and understanding of how the language works that stops you from producing it well this activity should not be all you do from here in fact it will only account for about three to four hours a day of the next five days the rest of the time should be spent on the same things as before with about five days to go you've spent almost 20 hours speaking the language aloud over the last week and that should be starting to feel quite comfortable you can now also be speaking to yourself in the mirror or on camera what this does is to make you aware of what you're unable to say which will help you to listen out for it in your continued immersion which is still taking up the bulk of your time you're not going to subconsciously acquire the idiomatic way of saying absolutely everything but with this much exposure to the language this act should also help you to become good at thinking of ways to say things so that you're understood in the last four days you're going to actually speak to a native speaker for a total of eight hours two hours a day in at least eight separate conversations that take place a few hours apart the reason that you don't do it in longer conversations is that you get significantly better at using the language to converse after each conversation not during it i would recommend that at this stage you could even back off the amount that you're immersing on top of your conversations you might want to immerse for about six hours of the other 13 hours of every day and for the remainder resting no exposure to any language even your own [Music] so you've done it you've arrived at the 40th day having spent almost 600 hours in a new language 20 hours producing it allowed and eight hours actually conversing in it you may think that this ratio is skewed but those hours spent speaking the language are many many times more effective because you waited until you had a tangible knowledge of it that's why the last nine days are so sneaky they're not a thirty percent gain in this experiment they're more like a three hundred percent gain so given these extremes your blatant disregard for everything else in your life and my blatant disregard for the 31 day month could you genuinely expect to pass the 40 test honestly if you're learning a language that would be in groups one or two for you then i think it's possible speculating i think some people would pass and some people wouldn't if we're talking a more clearly foreign language as found in groups three or four then i doubt it except for the occasional freak but doesn't 40 seem a bit low anyway remember i said that i think most people could learn to make themselves understood in any language in about three days that's because making yourself understood by any means necessary has little to do with linguistic skill we're doing it all the time in our native languages even though our percentage of linguistic comfort is near 100 so if everything's comfortable 40 of the time it'll most likely be uncomfortable and clumsy around 58 of the time and that leaves a very small amount of things that you simply won't have the language for earlier i mentioned the grey area that is b2 and i honestly think that most people who actually did this would pass a b2 exam depending on the language in question not bad for 40 days now we still have two more things to deal with bad and good the bad news first even if you actually do this and even in an easy language that c1 level the one pretty well accepted as being fluent that'll take at least this number of hours again but that brings us to the good news because this plan i've laid out here it's actually inefficient the framework for the language is so loose for the beginning of this plan that almost half the hours you spend in the first 20 days are of little benefit for the sake of the experiment it's still better that you're exposed to the language for that time rather than not but it's actually a shame because you probably get 90 of the benefit by doing half as many hours and 70 of the benefit by doing only a quarter so imagine then that you were to do this instead for four hours a day for 160 days the results would be vastly superior because of the increased opportunity for post-practice improvement rest and recovery and just more time for you to find and filter resources you clicked on this video wanting to know how to learn a language in a month and while it is theoretically possible it's not realistically achievable but if you're willing to put the hours in becoming competent in a language in five months is achievable and a much better idea so you've got two choices keep looking for the easy way out the 20 minutes a day method the one month method the one week method the ones that do not work or get started listening to your language today my name's lamont peace

Channel: Days and Words

Views: 84,905

Keywords: how to learn a language fast, how to learn a language by yourself, how to learn a language in 6 months, how to learn a language in 2 weeks, how to learn a language in 1 month, how to learn a language in a month, how to learn a language in 30 days, how to learn a language in a week, hacks for learning a new language, tips for learning a new language, tips for language learning, how to learn languages fast, learn a language in 6 months, learn any language in 6 months

Id: YxesNlTeV4M

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 19 2022