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

Your story, like mine, begins and ends with passionthe surest path to learning a new language.

Stop making excuses. Theres simply no reason you cant learn a new language, and Ill tell you why.

Do away with vague daydreams, such as learn Spanish, by setting specific end goals within specific time frames and incorporating new language learning techniques to achieve concrete results.

If you dont have the memory of a supercomputer, dont worry. This chapter explains why we forget things and teaches a much more efficientand funway to remember foreign words.

You dont need to be in a foreign country to learn the language. You can do it from the comfort of your home or local community.

Start speaking a new language right away with easy-to-follow cheats for when you dont know the words you want to say.

Learning a specific language is easier than you think. Here I tell you why.

Strive toward fluency and beyond by coming back to the academic aspects better suited to this part of the language learning process.

Its time to go beyond fluency by adapting to the local culture, until a stranger mistakes you for a native!

Take language learning to the next level. Speak multiple languages without mixing them up or forgetting the one(s) youve already mastered.

Study a new language beyond spoken practice sessions with invaluableand mostly freeresources.

I would like, first and foremost, to thank all the many thousands of people who have showed me, over the span of a decade, how to have more faith in all people, from all countries, to appreciate communication, and to not worry about a few mistakes. I have almost never been judged as a beginning language learner, and its thanks to these wonderful people of countless nationalities that I have been able to discover so many different cultures and make lifelong friends. Their patience has been infinite, and I am glad to say that they will be as kind to any reader of this bookany new language learneras they were with me.

Also, a huge thank-you to Jorge, the first polyglot I met in my life, who is from Brazil and whose name I couldnt even pronounce when I met him. He inspired me to get started (bumpy as the start was) on this wonderful road to language learning.

While writing the book, the biggest help by far was my polyNot friend Anthony Lauder, who read through the entire first unedited draft and sent me feedback longer than the longest chapter of the book, which helped me realize the many ways I could improve my arguments. He also helped me appreciate the perspective of a newbie, who may find certain aspects of language learning difficult, though he himself has great skills and thoughts about language learning and has inspired many others to give it a try too.

Lauren Cutlip, M.A. in rhetoric, also helped me vastly improve arguments from the perspective of someone completely new to language learning, as well as present certain thoughts more clearly while maintaining my voice.

John Fotheringham from languagemastery.com helped me improve the Japanese section, since I was learning that language while in the editing stages of the book and needed someone with experience to present the language in an encouraging light. At press time, Ive added Japanese to my list of languages.

Next is the group I lovingly call Team Linguist, all of whom have masters or Ph.D. degrees in various fields of linguistics. I sent them parts of the book to get their professional or academic opinions on the scientific validity of what I was saying. Their feedback was essential during fact-checking and ensured the book had a solid foundation beyond my experiences and anecdotes. Team Linguist included Agnieszka Mizuu Goroska (M.A. in ethnolinguistics), Rachel Selby (M.A. in TESOL/language acquisition), Sarah McMonagle (Ph.D. in language policy and planning), Seonaid Beckwith (M.A. in psycholinguistics of second-language acquisition), and Judith Meyer (M.A. in computational linguistics; also a polyglot with her own site: Learnlangs.com).

Your story, like mine, begins and ends with passionthe surest path to learning a new language.

I n late July 2003, just a couple of weeks after my twenty-first birthday, I moved to Valencia, Spain. To help me adjust to life in a foreign country, I enrolled in a Spanish class.

It was a small class, and it was taught entirely in Spanish, which was a bit of a problem for me because I only understood English. I had just graduated with a degree in electronic engineering, and I had barely passed the German and Irish courses I took in high school. Languages were definitely not my thing.

After several classes, I was getting absolutely nowhere. Each lesson ended with the other students wearing great big satisfied smiles on their faces. I knew they had figured out something about the language that they didnt know before, while I still couldnt understand a single word. My ego was destroyed. I was, without a doubt, the worst student in the class, and as I walked home with my head hung low, I couldnt help thinking, Its not fair! Why were those guys blessed with the language learning gene and I wasnt? Im never going to learn Spanish.

After six months in Spain, I could barely muster up the courage to ask how much something cost or where the bathroom was. I really started to think I would never learn Spanish. I began to worry my experience immersed in a different country would be a total failure. I was convinced my destiny was to spend the rest of my life speaking only English.

Fast-forward seven years. One night in Budapest, I ended up at a couchsurfing party at a local bar with an international crowd. I confidently strolled in and said hello to everyone in Hungarian, one of the most notoriously difficult languages in the world. I started chatting with a local, in Hungarian, about my progress with his native language. I had been learning it only for about five weeks, but I was still able to have this rudimentary chat with him.

Next, I noticed a slight Brazilian Portuguese accent from the guy speaking English to my left. I asked, Voc brasileiro? (Are you Brazilian?), and when he told me, in Portuguese, that he was from Rio, I immediately switched to my Carioca accent, using slang from his own city, telling him how much I missed it. He was shocked to hear an Irish guy speak his own Portuguese dialect in a random bar in Budapest!

Then I recognized a Spanish friend of mine across the table and immediately switched to fluent Spanish, asking her how her Hungarian was coming along. Later, a couple from Quebec arrived, and I turned on my Quebec accent and expressions while speaking French. We exchanged contact information and made plans to hang out the next day.

That night I also managed to use some Italian and Esperanto and wowed a Thai tourist with a few phrases of basic Thai, using all the right tones. I even flirted in German with a German girl I saw regularly at these meetings.

In one evening I spoke eight languages (including a little English) casually, socially, and naturally. I switched between them effortlessly, without mixing them up, andmore importantmade some amazing new friends in the process.

Since then Ive learned several other languages, and at the time of writing this, I can confidently use twelve languages in varying degrees of proficiency, from conversational (in Dutch, Mandarin Chinese, and American Sign Language) to certified mastery (in Spanish) and everything in between for the other nine. I understand the basics of another twelve languages on top of these. I also run Fluentin3months.com, the worlds largest language learning blog, which, to date, has helped millions of people around the world learn a new language.