How to Study 1 Hour a Day and Become Fluent in Any Language

let's talk about how to study one single hour per day and still become fluent in any language now if your dream is to become fluent in a language but you work full-time or study full-time and are having trouble finding the time to learn this video is for you for most people depending on the difficulty of a language it takes hundreds of hours to achieve B2 fluency in a new language 2 to 3,000 hours if you're looking at a more difficult language like Chinese Japanese or Arabic at Mandarin blueprint we've managed to get Chinese down to around 1,000 hours for B2 fluency on average through our courses but 1,000 hours is still a tall order I mean most of us have full-time jobs and many of us also have to juggle family exercise Hobbies enjoying life as well which can make it almost impossible to imagine spending a th000 hours on pretty much anything now over 10 years learning Chinese and coaching people on language learning I can say with confidence that almost anyone can carve out at least one perhaps even two for 3 hours every single day for language learning by using some simple life hacks now these life hacks and techniques can be immediately implemented into your life and in this video first we're going to focus on the mindset you need to learn a language in a fast and sustainable way then we'll go over specific methods for making and finding more time and at the end I'll share some killer ways to get more out of that time and become fluent in just 1 hour per day let's talk about your mindset first this is such a vital Foundation that we need to start with you need to find your why you need to find a good reason for wanting to learn this language and it could be multiple reasons now I could actually make an entire separate video on the reasons to learn language but you've got to find your reason is it something to do with your spouse or where you live or career opportunities making more money and what it's absolutely fine to choose any reason that works for you I personally would encourage you to think of the kind of experiences that you want to have in the language visualize yourself enjoying the experiences that speaking this language well will bring you life is all about experiences that's really what we want you know when we say oh I want to find the perfect man or woman or I want to have a better job it's like what you really want is a better life experience I have tons of really positive experiences with speaking Chinese in the past that really stand out in my memory for example helping a Chinese woman order coffee in English because she didn't understand I took her order sort of casually understood what she was saying and then ordered for her in English helped her out and the look of gratitude and amazement on her face you know just made my day or making a entire group of Chinese friends laugh while eating hot pot at a table I mean these sorts of feelings are really what we're after in life so I want you to think of an experience that you would like to have in your native language then I would like to write it down and visualize it and keep it somewhere you'll need that that will keep you motivated when the times get tough and your motivation won't last forever every now and then you'll need to refer to that amazing experience that you want to have in the language and that will keep you going that will restore your energy bar another really important mindset tip for you is to remember that it's not about the years it's about the hours so for example 1 hour a day you could achieve fluency in Chinese in under 3 years but if you could push that to 2 hours a day you get fluency in under 18 months and if you could push that even further by making 3 hours a day you could be fluent in Mandarin Chinese in under a year I still keep that mindset right now and it really helps me push and get that extra 5 minutes 10 minutes wherever I can knowing that over the long term it all adds up now that we have our reasons for learning the language and the experiences that we want to have it's time to talk about your identity if you're going to learn Russian for example you're not just aiming to learn Russian you are aiming to become a Russian learner your aim is to become that person this is probably the biggest Insight I got from James clear's Atomic habits if you make a habit identity based instead of just just outcome based like I want to speak fluent Chinese it's more like I'm going to become a Chinese learner or a Russian learner or a French Enthusiast I'm going to make this language and learning it a part of who I am and in order to do that you just need to cast votes for that identity by showing up every single day as much as you can and doing things that a person with that identity would actually do and the remaining tips in this video are going to teach you how to do that let's talk about some highly effective methods me for racking up those hours in any language even if you are crazy busy starting with the lwh hanging fruit I personally still spend 45 to 100 minutes per day learning Chinese despite working full-time at a very demanding job having two young kids with very little help and I know people far busier than me who find just as much if not more time daily to invest in their language study first step towards finding the time and sticking with it longterm is finding methods that actually work and are fun in the long term when you know that every minute you invest into a website or a course is actually moving the needle it's moving towards your goal of fluency it's really easy to show up in fact you'll be trying to carve out as much of your day as you possibly can to devote to this resource unfortunately most Learners don't actually make it to this stage because they don't understand how to acquire language in any sort of reasonably efficient manner they'll end up using resources like dualingo for example that feels really good but then you realize after a year that you're not actually good at the language you were just playing some funny game whatever language you're learning I believe the approach is pretty much the same first you build a foundation on pronunciation and the first thousand words or so of the language you can learn those manually using flashcards demonic devices got other videos on my channel teach you how to do all that stuff we call this the build stage and the next stage is get you're getting comprehensible messages into your brain through your eyes and through your ears through input compreh rible input of the target language you can't do this second stage without first building some foundation so you can actually understand simple sentences but for most languages doesn't take too much work to get there spend most of your time immersing in the language in stuff that you can understand and ideally enjoy then once you actually start to comprehend the content in the language you are ready to start speaking and you can spend still the majority of your time immersing but a good chunk of your time outputting practicing speaking and writing that's pretty much it build get activate activating the words that you've consumed through immersion now if you're learning Chinese specifically we've got you covered we can just teach you step by step from zero to Advanced Chinese just check out the blueprint in the description there now if you want to massively speed up your progress through especially the build stage which is for most people the most boring and annoying stage I highly recommend you use space repetition software flashcards and memory techniques theonics chunking memory palaces all this good stuff to build those words quickly do not waste time obsessing over grammar the why or the how words are structured just get the language into your brain and your brain will figure it out textbooks are mostly a waste of time as well just consume the language and produce the language and you will get great results some other great tips of finding more time is making sacrifices where you can that's reasonable for you I personally still love to listen to English language audio books and I watch English language YouTube but I know my limits I decide on a minimum amount of Chinese that I know I will consume every day and I get to that minimum and then I switched to my native language you'll figure out what sacrifices you can make over time I stopped going to bars and just hanging out with my friends and that was partly to do with also having two young children but I knew that I needed to spend what little spare time I had maintaining and improving my Chinese level so I made those sacrifices heavily related to this idea of sacrif sacrifice is Keystone habits sleep diet and exercise these are habits that if done well will vastly improve all the other habits in your life if you're able to do some of that and live healthier and combine it with maybe sacrificing a little bit of Netflix YouTube swiping videos in the evening that kind of thing that's easily an extra hour or two for most people that you can be spent on doing other things like learning languages another great tip for finding and making more time for your language learning is habit stacking so before or after an already well established habit slot in your language learning activity so for example after I have my first morning coffee and before I start my morning reading I will finish my flashcard reviews while I'm walking my dog I will do shadowing and after my dog has been walked I will read Chinese for half an hour actually half an hour is probably way too long especially if you're just starting this habit out and that leads us nicely onto the next tip for you which is just do one the reason why we procrastinate and don't do the things that we know we should do is that our brain sees them as these big scary activities that take way too much time focus on starting something don't worry about finishing it say one thing out loud in your target language review one flash card listen to one minute of audio use chat TBT to have a two-minute conversation keep it short quick and easy and most of the time this will naturally turn into a lot more learning anyway next find More Time by crafting your environment set up your environment so that you have constant cues to keep learning when I come downstairs in the morning I have my book that is there ready for me make sure there are like target language comic books sitting by the toilet make sure that at work you have posters or pictures things that are telling you hey this is a thing in your life this is your identity go get started this next tip is huge I use it every single day and I use it to find probably hundreds if not more than a th000 or 2,000 extra hours of immersion time throughout my year I'm talking about passive listening so put your target language on while you're doing mundane household tasks while you're traveling anywhere by any means while you're working out anywhere you can find those gaps throughout your day and insert your target language into those gaps there are hacks you can use to learn languages faster but at the end of the day you can't really hack the idea that you just have to listen and experience and expose yourself to the language as much as possible and so you should find any chance you can throughout your day squeeze in some extra immersion time joining a community is just another source of inspiration motivation and just another reminder it's like hey this is your identity this is who you are get going open up that podcast at open up your flashcards another huge tip for you there's going to be a game changer is to have an ever growing and developing diverse and entertaining pool of immersion resources to use at any one time we get bored as human beings even stuff that you find amazing right now and entertaining you'll either run out of it it will end or you get bored of it or your level will increase and it will no longer be suitable for you these inevitable factors mean that you need to constantly be on the lookout and be exploring new forms of content to consume now if you're just starting out then you're mainly in the build stage and you're sort of getting your foothold in the language and developing that Foundation but as soon as possible you want to start diving into real native content so I personally at any one time will have at least three different forms of media that I love in Chinese right now I have this amazing audio book series of all seven Harry Potter books and they're amazingly acted with great sound effects and stuff I'm really into it but before that I was listening to Sherlock Holmes and I still have Sherlock there and I loveed that show but then I found Harry Potter and I started listening to that aside from that I also have the Power of Now by eot tole the Chinese version and those are the three things I'm sort of into right now I'm sort of switching between those three things at any one time and I also have a couple of backup TV shows and movies that I've written down in my note app on my phone that I can at any time just open up my Netflix and just start watching in Chinese too so it's really important to constantly try new things I'm really into audio books right now but I used to love reading comics in Chinese like one punch man and things like that now I've talked a ton about immersion so far in this video and that's because it's the most important thing you need to do when it comes to learning a language but speaking practice is also super important and chat gbt is a fantastic way of dipping your toe into speaking and I also love to use it even as a higher level speaker because it's just convenient it's so fast but there's really no true sacrifice for real human connection and finding shors or language Exchange partners that you love to interact with is really important and I think you should try and maintain at least once a week chatting with a choor that you love now I highly recommend that you do at least 20 demos so try out 20 30 40 even 50 different chors over say a year period or 6 month period and of those let's say 50 shors you'll find five that are just absolutely great hang on to those five and make those your long-term speaking partners and connect with them regularly now my final tip for finding and making more time is using a habit tracker this thing for me has been an absolute godsend and I can track my total progress in terms of how much immersion how much shadowing time and I track not just my Chinese but other aspects of my life that I'm trying to improve such as exercise romance this sort of thing and I just add any Habit to that habit tracker and it gets done at the at the end of the day because that ticking off of these habits throughout the day and at the end of my day is so satisfying and addictive it just keeps me showing up there about a million of these on the App Store so just go ahead and choose one that works for you so in this video so far I have laid out the highest leverage techniques to make and find the most time possible throughout your day without leading to burnout of course but there's another very important factor that I want you to take into account and that is making the most out of the time you already have I've already mentioned passive listening and that's a perfect way of not only making more time but using the time you have more effectively if you're at the stage in your journey where you can start to enjoy at least graded immersion content at least lower level stuff made for Learners then congratulations because that's where real progress is going to start to be made in terms of your comprehension and ability to speak but to get the most out of your immersion time I highly recommend adding just a little bit of extra effort during that immersion time just sitting there listening to a podcast or watching a movie is great but if you can actually spend that little bit extra effort to make a flash card out of new or interesting words that come up that is going to make a world of difference over the long term it's going to make your time spent immersing in the language so much more effective and it doesn't have to be this elaborate flash card creation setup that I've seen all over the internet where you're like exporting cards and cutting them up using software and all this sort of fancy stuff literally my favorite way of making flash cards is just while I'm listening I open my flash card app I type the word or phrase in manually and then I just save it and maybe I say it out loud a couple of times or rewind it but I'll at least make that flash card or while I'm watching some Chinese content on my phone I'll just take a screenshot of it with the subtitles there visible and I'll just copy and paste that image into my flash card it's really fast low friction way of hanging on to the new words that you learn while you're immersing now this idea of spending that extra 10% or 20% effort and getting a ton more back in return is heavily related to my final tip and this might be the most important tip of this entire video and that tip is related to focus earlier on the video I said that it's not about the years spent with the language it's about the hours right and I'd like to take that a step further and say that it's not about the hours it's about the amount of focused study and practice when you're reviewing flashcards or you're shadowing or you're creating pneumonics or you're conversing in the language you're watching a TV show listening to a podcast focus with as much of your being as you possibly can in that moment if you can't focus then you probably need to take breaks or improve your Keystone habits change what you're using to actually learn maybe you're just not interested enough in the actual material meditation is great for living in the moment and focusing on what is happening right now you can also check out a book called The Power of Now by echart tole it's Fant fantastic and you can even find it in your target language that's what I did for Chinese oh speaking of learning Chinese if you do fancy doing that or you are currently doing it you might want to check out this video next

Channel: Mandarin Blueprint

Views: 77,372

Keywords: How to learn Chinese, How to Learn Mandarin, How to Learn Chinese Language, Chinese Video Lesson, Chinese online course, chinese course, learn chinese fast

Id: oV4SfZ0L65M

Length: 17min 10sec (1030 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2024