Accelerated Learning I think a lot of people have misconceptions when it comes to this phrase It conjures images of having to be a superhuman or machine But that's not how I see things. Accelerated learning from me is about being smart with your time and energy so you're making the biggest impact possible and really about finding enjoyment in the process. Languages, after all, are about people They're about sharing ideas And this is what so many schools and institutions get so wrong They make it so stilted and frustrating when really it's a mind-expanding, humbling and extremely enriching experience I'm gonna share a lot of information in this video, but if you stick with me I promise you'll have a new way to approach learning foreign languages. Last year I made a video called "I learned Italian in 7 days" and I can now read, write and speak in Italian The mini series that I made, documented experience received a bigger reaction than I was expecting and I got thousands of messages and questions about all of it. This new series on learning Portugese will hopefully answer many of your questions and also adress criticism that I received. I completely understand the degree of scepticism when we have all seen how incredibly inefficient and frustrating high school French and Spanish classes can be. I'm gonna push myself to see how far I can go and at the end of this 7 day period I'm going to facetime some of my Portugese-speaking friends to test my ability. I hope to prove to you that you can accomplish a lot more than you think if you're smart about how you approach things. For the record I have never studied Portugese in my entire life and I've never been to any of the 10 territorial entities where Portugese is an official language. Just before sitting down to film this I wrote out a list of all the Portugese words that I do know right now The list is about 20 words. It's pretty pathetic ! It's just stuff that I've picked up whenever I've been around Brazilians I can tell you right now I've probably made spelling mistakes on here... We have some of the basics here I don't know how to pronounce necessarily correctly so... It can feel very overwhelming to learn an entire language but instead of having that as your goal I think the goal in the beginning should be to learn to speak, essentially communicate with people as quickly as possible. Because at that point once you're able to have interactions with people that speak this language natively that's when things start to get really interesting. And my method is built around trying to get to that point as quickly as possible because before that point it's just a bunch of random words! Furthermore I will not be spending any money to make this happen You do not need to spend money to learn a foreign language. That is the beauty of the Internet. And there are a lot of interesting apps and services that exist out there and if you find them helpful then fantastic, but I'm going to go down a different route a more efficient and more enjoyable route in my opinion so come and get me bird ! There are several steps to this process The very first one is what I call step 0 which is finding your mission. You need to have your motivation for learning this language clear as day. You are essentially committing to a long-term skill, ok? You're learning this language so that you have it from now on. It can be whatever you want, but the deeper you dig, the better. What is going to trigger that grit? Maybe you want to connect with your Nonna from Sicilia, and you want to finally be able to speak with her in her mother tongue. Maybe it's because you think Brezilian people are attractive (spoiler: they are) There is no wrong answer and it's even better if you have multiple. Write whatever your reasons are down and put them in a place so that you can see them so that they can remind you. Fuel the fire! Imagine what it's going to be like when you can express ideas in that language. Seriously, I cannot emphasize this enough, there are very few things more exciting in my experience than the discoveries that you will make when learning a new language. A new life and a new way of thinking awaits you, I promise you. Just hopefully to spark some ideas, I'll give you my reasons. First of all, I think Porto, Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro all seem like incredible cities and I'd love to spend some time, potentially in the future, living in either Brezil or Portugal. I had amazing exeriences with Brezilians and Portugese people. In my experience Brezilians really are always life of the party This is also a way for me to reconnect with my roots My ancestors left the Iberian Peninsula five hundred years ago Thanks to a funny little law that was passed a few years ago I am in the process of getting Portugese citizenship which will hopefully happen at some point in the nearish future And then of course Portugese language music is so beautiful you know, the list goes on. And even just talking about this is getting me so excited! Step one Today what I'm going to be focusing on is what I call gathering the building blocks It'll help for me to show you how I see the process of learning a new language. Let's start with the bad news which is that there are hundreds of thousands of words in any given language The good news is you don't need to know them all to be able to speak and communicate with people not even close! In fact, only a few thousand words make up the majority of language usage on a daily basis This is known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule, as it's often called in the business world So focusing as much of your energy and focus as possible in learning the words that live here will have the biggest impact. Paul Nation is a leading linguist's acquisition researcher whose work perfectly illustrates my point. He states that "a much smaller vocabulary size is needed to read" than we are normally taught in a classroom. Notably "the most frequent 2000 words of English plus an academic word list provide coverage of about 87% of general academic text". And he adds that "when we look at less formal uses of the language such as informal conversation, reading newspapers, reading novels we find that fewer words are needed to get good coverage". That is significant. I'll leave a link in the description to all of my sources. Ok so how do you go about gathering the building blocks, you know? How do you learn the top one or two thousand words in a given language? I learned both of those words this morning! Let me explain a little bit how I spent my first 24h of this challenge. There definitely are lists already available out there if you just do a quick little Google search you will find, you know, the top one thousand words in any given language. I've used that method before and I don't really trust those lists. I don't think they... I don't know how they make them But... I have found that the words that I use the most often don't fully align with the words that I find on these lists. So I make my own list with a mixture of research and observation. I start by looking up the top most common nouns, adjectives and verbs not conjugated, just the infinitive form and I start copying them down on this notepad that I've got and I start creating lists, essentially. This has resulted in a list of... We're probably at 4 or 5 hundred words at this point With all that vocabulary gathering research it ends up looking like these lists of... You know it's a mess! I'm just like that, I'm a messy... I'm a messy writer. So I'll take all these notes and I'll throw them onto a spread sheet that's nice and organized. These are words I know I'm going to need in pretty much all the conversations that I have. I have, of course, my list of top verbs, pronouns also on this list We're maximizing focus on the most core essential aspects One of the big obstacles I've been coming up against that I wasn't expecting to cause me so many problems is not knowing how to say the words. I mean, Portugese phonetics are totally foreign to me. It's funny because a lot of the words look somewhat familiar thanks to my knowledge of Spanish but I'm actually having to unlearn so much, because, again, the pronounciation is so different. And it's actually kind of been killing my confidence because it's hard to take the lead into creating full thoughts and full sentences when you don't even feel like you can get the words out. So what I have gotten ahead and done is enlisted the help of fellow language-obsessed, content creator and all around wonderful person Joe Franco to read both English and Portugese words that I put on my spread sheet. I do wanna tell you that I am a Carioca which means that I'm from Rio so the accent that I will be speaking in is Carioca not to say that it's the correct accent in Brezil or the correct sotaque, but it's the one that I have so you're gonna speak like a Carioca! Slang: "bacana", I love that word "legal" for cool "cara" is dude And I'm using that audio to listen over and over again to help me in the memorization process and to become familiar with how to say these words which is something I cannot emphasize enough I mean this is not about having the perfect accent, ok I'm going to sound like a foreigner no matter what and I'm accepting that, you know. This is about confidence. You've gotta get really familiar with saying the words because eventually the goal is to get to the point where you're not even thinking about it. That's what it means to become conversational. I made a lot of progress gathering and memorizing the building blocks, the core vocabulary especially conversational vocabulary which is so, so integral in any language. and now I feel like it is time to dive into step 2 and this is where stuff starts to get interesting. And this step I call the Glue. What I have right now are long lists of very useful vocabulary but they're still just words. I lack the ability to create full thoughts, to create full sentences. And so now what I'm focusing on are all the connector words That includes: the most important conjugations the most important verbs and the most important tenses and if Portugese is anything like other Romance languages the conjugation is an absolute monster, ok But you don't, again, you don't need to know most of it to start speaking. In fact, I found that in Brezilian Portugese the first and the third person are enough to talk about yourself, about somebody to the second person about him or her and about us! So you don't have to memorize everything. This also includes words that we take for granted in our mother tongues like "the" which is a deceptively simple looking word. From doing just a little bit of research I found that there's a variety of ways to say that in Portugese and it's really important that I master that because it's hard to create sentences again without using words like "the". Think about it! Now schools teach these things - words like the and a - as concepts because that's what they are They would be called indefinite and definite articles which is good to know. It's good to know the concept so that you can look it up and better understand it. But it's also important not to get lost in all of that and to remember that if you know the day you're just learning little words that help you connect things to create ideas and I find that mindset really helpful in not losing confidence You know, it helps me to remind myself that children learn how to speak languages without going to grammar school. I'm not saying that's not important, that's definitely useful if you want to master the language but that comes a little bit later down the road to get to the point where you can start exchanging with people and understanding what they're saying you don't need that. I feel a little bit like my head is going to explode I'm pretty sure nobody is immune to this feeling but now comes my very favorite step. Trust me: nobody enjoys memorizing lists of nouns and verbs and prepositions I consider it a necessary evil and then I always try to get to step 3 as fast as possible. You absolutely need that base to work with but strangely there's a huge difference between the correct way to use a language and how people actually speak. You honestly won't be able to understand that much without any of the slang and the expressions that people use. I mean, that's what we do! So the only way that I've ever learned how to speak a new language is not in a classroom but through consuming the art and culture made in that language. I went to Instagram for help building a playlist and it turns out half of the world already listens to music in Portugese and there's so much out there! Movies, podcasts, TV... Based on my analitics more than half of you guys watching this video right now come from non native English speaking countries so you already know this. This is the best way to learn! I found a podcast called "mamilos" which in Portugese means nipples I have no idea why it's called that but I'll put it on and I'll leave it playing for hours while I focus on picking out words and expressions It's important to remember: this is supposed to be fun. This is not supposed to be an exercise in beating yourself up. You're giving your brain a mega workout. In the beginning you'll understand very little, maybe 5%, maybe not even. I always start stressing because I start thinking it's going to be impossible for me to get good. But don't worry about that. Just focus on training your ears and identifying as many of the words that you are memorizing as possible. I watch stuff on Netflix with the subtitles on, in that language and I'm constently rewinding to relisten to stuff and to write things down and to translate specific words and also even practice saying stuff that I'm hearing. You know, repeating sentences out loud. because our mouth is not familiar with saying these things you've got to get used to it! It's definitely slow but your brain is incredible! I mean, seriously, like overtime all of this is will become easier in easier It'll happen more naturally. Language is about imput. Slowly you'll enter into the gigantic bubble that is, at least in my case, the Portugese-speaking world. People view all the things that you're familiar with in different ways. Different jokes, different culture references, different histories... It is so cool! Alright, my time is up. I have absorbed as much as I possibly can and tomorrow I'm putting what I've learned to the test It's been an intense week. I'm nervous because I obviously don't want to sound like a dumbass I already do that enough in English. I did this not to belittle what goes into learning a foreign language but because I wanted to show that it's actually much more accessible than most people think if you attack it with the right mindset. I think everybody in the world should learn a foreign language at some point in their lives Because I legimately feel like it changes you as a person. Considering that we have the Internet there are no more excuses anymore if this is something that interests you. As I mentionned before, all of the ressources that I've been compiling are freely accessible in the description box down below and you can adapt most of it to whatever language that you're learning if it isn't Portugese. All you have to do is sign up to my Newsletter which, you know, it's not even really a newsletter. I try to make it a lot more than just a newsletter. I'll be releasing part 2 where shit will probably get very real as soon as I can. So please subscribe if you don't wanna miss it and thank you for watching! And I hope I said that right
