#1 – Spend the Time
Hi, this is Steve Kaufmann Founder of LingQ and I'm going to speak to you about the Seven Secrets to Successful Language Learning.
I have learned 11 languages, four of them since the age of 50. I'm working on my 12th, which is Korean. I will tell you what works for me; you'll have to decide if this can work for you. The first secret to successful language learning is spend the time.
When I study a language, I spend at least an hour a day trying to learn that language and I know that it's going to take me months and months of continuous studying to learn the language. But when I say study, I don't mean sit in a classroom, I don't mean answer questions or drills, review grammar rules or review lists of words, what I mean is spend time with the language. Be with the language, so listen to the language, read things that are written in the language or listen to songs that are sung in the language, watch movies if you can.
If you have friends who speak the language, spend time with them, even if most of the time you're just listening because you don't speak well enough to really say very much, Spend time with the language, that is the first secret and I say at least an hour a day.
It's not difficult to do because nowadays we have these very convenient little listening devices, like an iPod or an mp3 player which can carry vast libraries of interesting content that you can easily download from the internet or from wherever you want to find them. This is very different from many years ago. So when I say spend time with the language, the time we spend in the classroom almost doesn't count.
What matters is how much time do you spend away from the classroom with the language? The classroom can be very important as a place for you to meet with your friends, to find stimulus from a teacher, but in the classroom you're listening to the teacher half the time or you're listening to your classmates, some of whom might be better than you. In which case, you're afraid to speak up. Some of them are worse than you and so you find it annoying to listen to them, perhaps, I know I do. The important thing is how much time you spend with the language away from the classroom, listening, reading, watching movies, listening to songs, talking to people.
Spend that time with the language, do it month after month after month and don't let too many days go by where you don't spend time with the language. Depending how difficult the language is, that means how different it is from your native language or from a language you already speak, the amount of time required might be years. If you can only spend an hour a day, it could be six months to a year, two years. If you can spend three hours a day, then it might be less than a year, but it does take time. There is no shortcut to fluency. So my first secret and it's absolutely essential.
If you're going to make any progress in language learning, spend time with the language. So that's secret No. 1 and I will continue on to the other six secrets. There are a total of seven secrets to successful language learning. Thank you for listening.
