Tips and inspiration I got from Fluent In 3 Months by Benny Lewis

I recently read Fluent in 3 Months by Benny Lewis. He’s a polyglot who was relentlessly mocked and made fun of in the langblr community a few years ago. Couple of days ago I came across his book on Scribd and decided to give it a go. I have gathered some of the language learning tips and nuggets of inspiration I got from his book. Many of them are nothing new or groundbreaking, but still legit, good pieces of advice or just great words of encouragement. Some of these tips may not make sense taken out of its context and listed like this, so if that’s the case, feel free to message me and ask me what it’s about or read the book yourself. • Learn a language to use it, to learn about the culture and people of the country, not to gain some side-benefits.  • Live the language instead of learning it. • You can always make time to learn a language.  • Surround yourself by your target language in your day-to-day living. • Start speaking your target language as soon as possible, don’t wait until you’re “ready”.  • You should put two hours or more into studying the language every day, and ideally more.  • Experiment with different studying methods to see which ones work for you.  • Find fun, enjoyable ways to study.  • Accents are charming, and native speakers speak in many different accents too.  • Don’t compare yourself to others.  • Push yourself out of your comfort zone and through the frustrating parts.  • Keep going despite obstacles. • Be proud of your achievements.  • Set specific end goals within specific time frames.  • By giving yourself a short deadline you are more likely to study efficiently.  • Divide your language learning progress into “mini missions” where you tackle one problem at the time.  • Make language learning fun by assigning yourself language learning tasks you enjoy. • You can use CEFR to measure your level of fluency.  • Remember to take breaks to avoid burnout.  • Announce your language learning mission to the world to make yourself more accountable.  • Make sure you can both recognize and produce the new words you learn.  • Use associations and visualizations when learning new words.  • Use flashcards. • Implement spaced repetition system.  • Start learning a language by learning full phrases or sentences.  • Use songs to remember sentences.  • Learn mini-scripts of typical, often used sentences and predictable exchanges.  • Learn words and sentences you use the most first. • Create yourself an immersion environment and expose yourself to native speakers.  • What matters is that you can understand and make yourself understood, not having perfect grammar and accent.  • Body languages and social cues will help you understand what the other person is saying. • Listen for any particular words or segments of a person’s speech that you can understand and extrapolate what is being said from that.  • You can use cheat-sheets when conversing with natives.  • Go for “close enough” rather than perfect, keep it simple and be flexible.  • Being incorrect is fine.  • If you get corrected, take a note of it to get it right next time.  • Don’t switch to your native language or the common language, stick to your target language.  • No language is too difficult to learn.  • Refer to cognates for heaps of “free” vocabulary.  • Learn modal verbs (can, should, would like to, must, have to, want to) early on.  • Learn conversational connectors or filler words to keep the conversation flowing.  • “It’s not necessarily about having a ‘perfect’ approach, but continuing with a learning strategy that encourages you to improve and helps you make those improvements.”  • Always look for ways to improve.  • Hit the books and study as much grammar and do as many book-assigned exercises as you need to understand what you are learning.  • Study through input - movies, TV-shows, radio, etc.  • If you’re listening to an audio, take notes to make sure you are following what you’re hearing, or try to repeat it over to yourself. • Take an officially accredited examination for your language.  • Once you’re good at conversing in the language, practice writing and reading more to reach a higher level of fluency. • Have inner dialogues with yourself in your target language.  • You can learn in every moment by getting inspired by your surroundings.  • Emulate your clothing sense, body language, distance between speakers, facial expressions, the topics you discuss, and all the things related to what native speakers would do to seem more like a native speaker.  • Fix your pronunciation of certain letters/sounds early on to have a better accent.  • Do sentence drilling and repeat native-recorded phrases. • Sing in your target language. • Pay attention to the particular prosody (rhythm, stress and intonation in speech) patterns of the language.  • Trying to become a polyglot is a terrible goal. You can only become a polyglot if you are passionate about each language and not because you want to ‘collect’ a large number of languages.  • If you’re not willing to put in the work, your chances of success drop.  • It’s better to focus on one language until you’re comfortable with it and then turn your full attention to a second language.  • Never listen to anyone who tells you what your limitations are.  • There is no secret or magic formula to learning languages.  • Use different body language and a sense of personality, a different mindset for each of your languages to compartmentalize them in your mind.  • Learn basic grammar terminology (article, conjugation, adjective, case, preposition, possessive...), it will help you understand the language and your textbooks better.  • Try laddering: learning a language through another language.  • There are plenty of free or very low cost resources available, use them. • Spending a lot of money on language resources might pressure you to work harder because you’ve spend so money, but it’s debatable.  • No course can be the one all-encompassing solution to your language learning problems.  • Any time you spend researching for the best materials (or methods) will have been better spent actually practicing the language.  • Keep a language log and document your language learning experience in some way. • Join some kind of language learning network.