Conquering Foreign Languages:
An Uncommon Guide to
Reaching Fluency in Any Language
By Tristan King
***
Official Copyright
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Published by Tristan King
Copyright 2012
Smashwords Edition
Version 1.0, All right reserved.
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Before We Get Started: A Letter From The Author (That’s Me, Tristan)
Who This Guide Is For, And Where It Can Take You
But Wait, Who Am I To Tell You All This? (In Case We Haven’t Met Yet)
A Fire Inside: My Inspiration For Rapid Learning
PART I.THE BEAUTY OF BEGINNING
Starting Out: Good Old-Fashioned Human Interaction
Learning Verb Tables: Do I Haveeee To?
Light A Fire: Finding Your Inspiration
Embracing The Quirkiness Of Languages
PART II.MIND-BENDING: HOW TO SKYROCKET YOUR LANGUAGE SKILLS (AND OTHER INTERROGATIONS)
Super-Boosting Vocabulary (And How Robert De Niro Helped My Spanish)
Seek And You Shall Find: Interrogating Your Way To The Top
Searching For Opposites: A Fool-Proof Way To Elicit Words From Friends & Strangers
Using Downtime To Skyrocket Your Fluency
So, When Am I Going To Listen To All This?: Downtime Is Your Friend.
Beating The “Kill Me Now” Classroom Moment
PART III.TO BECOME FLUENT, SPEAK YOU MUST
The Best Strategy to Conquer Your Target Language
Creative, Free Methods To Make Learning Part Of Every Day
Finding Guinea Pigs: Practice Makes (Almost) Perfect
PART IV.PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
The Point Of No Return: When You Can Say You’re Conversationally Fluent
An Example Of How This Can Really Be Done
BONUS MATERIALS, EXTRAS, AND CLOSING
Bonus: Tips For Getting Discounts On Language Courses
Extra Resources And An Invitation To Join Me
Superstars and rockers: Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
Before We Get Started: A Letter From The Author (That’s Me, Tristan)
Great – you’ve made it to the guide! Thanks for picking it up, and I’m really excited to be able to help you develop your fluency in another language.
I first started learning languages when I was twelve, and I had no idea where it would take me. After more than fifteen years, thousands of hours of study and much laughter at my expense, I’ve learnt a lot about foreign languages. These days I speak every day with my wife in Spanish, often with friends and colleagues in Japan, and regularly with German friends. I’m learning French at the moment, so I am going through the same process as you (the fourth time around!).
Languages are a huge part of my life, and have given me huge rewards. This isn’t to say I have all the answers – far from it - and I still make quirky mistakes all the time. That’s all part of the fun.
What I hope to do with this guide is simple: give you practical, useful and fun techniques that will rapidly increase your language skills. They’re all relevant regardless of what language you’re learning: from Russian to Estonian to Portuguese, almost all of the techniques can be applied across the board.
They’re not from a textbook, they’re not from a university, and they’re not from an academic fuddy-duddy who doesn’t speak any other languages (you’d be surprised how much linguistic advice comes from people who only speak English, but that’s another story).
I used these techniques as I was progressing my languages from beginner to conversational fluency. In particular, I developed many of them while I was learning Spanish, and transformed from a complete newbie to teaching adults within a year, without leaving Australia.
All of the techniques are applicable to the real world, and don’t take a lot of time or effort.
The goal: make language learning part of your everyday lifestyle.
This is easier than it sounds, and it’s my hope that, very soon, you’ll be feeling so much more confident with your foreign language.
Let’s get started.
Tristan King
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Who This Guide Is For, And Where It Can Take You
Who this guide is for
This guide is intended for anyone interested in learning a foreign language. Specifically, it will help you if you:
*
Have tried to learn languages and given up because it was too hard,
you didn’t have the time, or couldn’t find the motivation. I
will give you tangible solutions for all of these.
* Are
interested, but haven’t tried to learn yet because you think it
will be too difficult.
* Are learning a language now, but aren’t
progressing as fast as you want to.
* Have always wanted to
visit exotic places and blend in with the locals, or impress your
partner who speaks another language.
Where it can take you
The techniques in this guide will help you become fluent faster, feel more confident, and give you ways to practice every day without having to squeeze ‘extra’ time out of your schedule. These tricks allowed me to develop my Spanish and Japanese to a level where I could work professionally and lead a daily life in those languages.
Most importantly, I’m a believer that anyone can do it.
Don't believe me yet? That’s okay. All you need is an open mind. The key is not having innate language learning abilities, slaving over charts for mind-numbing hours or quitting your job to attend weeks of intensive language classes. It’s about subtly making the language an ongoing, significant and utterly important part of your everyday lifestyle.
Anyone can become fluent by using the right recipe. The goal is to make you sound like a natural.
What This Guide Will Not Do
Although I will recommend other resources along the way, this guide will not deal with:
*
How to learn grammar for one particular language. There are plenty
of other guides which will help you do that;
* Purely
‘traditional’ learning techniques, like sitting in a classroom
for one hour a week in the hope that fluency will come soon;
*
Passive listening. If you don’t need to speak or write on your
target language, this guide won’t help you a lot. It focuses on
increasing active language skills.
But Wait, Who Am I To Tell You All This? (In Case We Haven’t Met Yet)
I was born in Australia to English-speaking parents, and I grew up speaking only English. In early high school, Japanese was part of my high school’s curriculum, and so began my adventure and passion by coincidence. I continued Japanese through to university, where I was inspired by many great lecturers, students and friends. Since then, I’ve spent most of my adulthood focusing on languages.
Largely because of the great people who taught and encouraged me, partly due to my stubbornness in achieving my goals, and equally because of the techniques you’ll learn in this guide, I’ve fumbled my way through enough languages to be able to speak with 631 million more people than I could before I started [See footnote 1].
I speak conversationally fluent Japanese and Spanish, advanced level German, intermediate French, and a few snippets of other languages.
Some favourite moments in my language-learning career:
*
Seeing the faces of Japanese children when a 187cm
gaigokujin (foreigner) – me - asks them in Japanese how their
lunch is going;
* A Japanese
colleague who, for a couple of minutes, thought I was a native
speaker and asked repeatedly to “put the real Tristan on the
phone”. This was short-lived, but still put a smile on my face;
*
Interacting in Spanish with my Colombian in-laws on my first
ever trip to South America, and seeing the smile on my wife’s face
when I could manage on my own without her translating;
*
Being asked by a drunken German whether I was Swiss
(strange, I’ll admit - more on this later); and
*
Teaching my first Spanish class without having visited a
Spanish-speaking country.
Textbook not required
The advice I give isn’t coming from a ‘textbook’ or academic standpoint. My suggestions are all practical and applicable to daily life, and will help you gain fluency faster. I promise I won’t lecture you about how important it is to learn grammar, how crucial it is to remember every apostrophe when you write an essay, or how rolling your r’s will make-or-break your quest to language domination.
Whilst these are all important, there are plenty of other books which can lecture you about this, and I believe that focusing on them too much is actually detrimental to your language learning. Although I do hold a Masters in Applied Linguistics and a few other official-sounding qualifications [2] l studied many of these after I’d attained fluency in Japanese and Spanish, and reached a reasonably high level of German, so the academic studies are mostly for my own interest and are not necessary to become fluent in a foreign language.
Why I wrote this guide (and started languagemusings.com)
After many years of in-class and self-induced learning, countless fumbles and plenty of fun, I started noticing friends and colleagues who tried to learn languages and, demoralised, gave up. I found this both puzzling and depressing, so I decided: I wanted to start sharing the techniques that had worked well for me – maybe they could help other people too.
Languages have enriched my life so much that I felt it would be a shame not to share what I’ve found out. I really want to help people like you achieve their goals in whichever language they are learning. It is my hope that you will learn the techniques, try out what works for you, and soon be embracing the multilingual daily lifestyle.
Of course, everyone learns in different ways, so I’d encourage you to try out the ideas in this guide and apply what works best for you. If you have other techniques that work well, I’d love to hear about them.
A Fire Inside: My Inspiration For Rapid Learning
“Nanniiiiiiiiiiiiiii?!” rang out across the classroom for the third time. We were all still dumbfounded by the bopping introduction music, not so focused on the Japanese conversation booming from the tape recorder. Safe to say, our crew of twelve in Japanese high school class weren’t the most attentive language learners (myself included). We’d convinced ourselves that the subject was worth pursuing to get bonus points towards our university entry scores, rather than because we loved grammar and Japanese kanji. High school came to a close. So far so good, but I didn’t consider myself very good at learning languages at this point.
In choosing my university course, the possibility of being able to study a language in conjunction with my degree was critical. Having registered, I was surprised to be told by the staff on open day that my course didn’t allow elective subjects in the first year. Strange, and it would rule out Japanese. It wasn’t until an interview for a completely non-related position that the Head of School told me: “languages are the only exception to this rule”. And so it was that my life changed in an instant, now opening up languages as an elective.
I thought it was a ‘smart’ move to study a language.. Little did I know it would soon become my life’s passion. Something changed in me. In high school, I sat in class like a good boy, did my homework and achieved reasonable grades in Japanese, but I wasn’t a linguist by any means. Upon taking classes at university with native teachers, movies, music, and lectures in Japanese, I began to feel a fire every time I attended a class. My friends and family thought I was nuts - What was there to get so excited about? - but I started coming out of every class with a silly grin on my face.
And so began my fire.
An accidental introduction
“Sorry, I can’t go for lunch.” Michael said. “I have to go and attend a seminar about an exchange program.”
“Why?” I retorted.
“Well, I thought it might be interesting. Why don’t you come?”
And so I went. You can live with a host family, they said. You can enter the cultural program, they said. You can visit castles, make friends, and sing karaoke like a lunatic at three in the morning. Before I knew it, I was writing letters to every local politician and school, trying to get a scholarship to attend the exchange program in Japan. Many polite but unsuccessful replies later, I decided to fund it myself, and came back after three months with a few extra kilos and a high level of Japanese, which I continued to work on at University.
What does all this have to do with rapid learning? I knew that I loved studying Japanese, but I didn’t know why. A trip to Germany then enticed me to study some German. Turned out, I loved that too.
When I met a Colombian girl a couple of years later through a mutual friend, and we started seeing each other, I thought I should try my hand at Spanish. After all, I’d had a little practice at learning languages - why not try another? My newfound Colombiana’s male friends had already taught me all there was to know about terrifyingly rude Spanish, and insisted on making this innocent-sounding Spanish-speaker-wannabe showcase his newfound language abilities, much to the amusement of all who understood. Ruder words had never been spoken at the Hard Rock Cafe dinner table.
Several polite requests from my girlfriend later, I started to realise that I had better start on some Spanish which wasn’t going to land me in a fight or in accidental trouble with the in-laws. After she moved back to Colombia for four months with our relationship intact and plans to return to Melbourne, I decided to spend those months getting my Spanish up to scratch, in an effort to better understand her and be able communicate with her family and friends. Two years later, I said my wedding vows to her in Spanish.
It was during this period that I started to realise how I could accelerate my language learning, picking up vocabulary, the humour of the language, grammar and cultural subtleties in a way much faster than I had before. Japanese had taken me ten years to learn to a conversational level. Spanish, less than one. This guide will show you how.
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FOR YOUR READING PLEASURE
These techniques can be applied to any language (not just one, or two)
This guide is not focused on any one language. It’s not geared to teach you vocabulary or grammar from one language in particular. Why? Because the techniques are applicable to any language.
I will reference Japanese, German and Spanish often, because they are the languages I speak: but the techniques will always be phrased in such a way that they can be applied to any language, and I encourage you to use my examples as exactly that: examples. All instances I use in this guide could easily be replaced with samples from Russian, Indonesian or Latvian, and the techniques would be equally as applicable.
A Cautionary Note: The Internet Alone Won’t Get You Booking Hotels in Portuguese
As you will see, I am a big advocate of using the internet and other tools to improve fluency, so much so that they inspired me in part to write this guide. However, I must begin with a word of caution: some websites will have you believe that the internet alone will allow you to speak with locals very soon after taking their online courses. Whilst I am a firm believer in the benefits of online resources, this approach needs to be taken with caution. I do not believe it is possible to become fluent using the Internet alone.
Enough disclaimers. Let’s move on to the mischief.
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PART I. THE BEAUTY OF BEGINNING
Nagano, Japan, 2006
“Kazuma, iru?” Oi, is Kazuma there, or what?
I cringed, and wondered how this must have sounded to the Japanese receptionist. I was working in a Japanese hotel, and my Australian friend was innocently asking whether the owner’s son was available. I imagined the listener giving a slight cringe and thinking about how to respond. My friend was inquiring about the whereabouts of second-highest ranked person in the entire organisation, the owner’s son, using the most casual Japanese in the universe.
My friend spoke very well, and was always well-liked by everyone. She’d learned her Japanese from friends and colleagues over a period of a few years, so she wasn’t aware (nor interested in) the honorifics and other forms of Japanese that allow one to show respect and be polite. Had she asked “Kazuma-san irasshaimasuka”, “Is Mr. Kazuma there, please?”, her Japanese would have been elevated to another level.
It’s still admirable, and lots of people acquire language in this way. I’m not discouraging it. But if we want to be mistaken for locals, feel comfortable and fit in when speaking another language, we have to start with the basics: some good old-fashioned human interaction.
Starting Out: Good Old-Fashioned Human Interaction
As much as many who despised blackboards and chalk in school will shudder to think about, the best way to get started is to take some basic classes. “That’s not very practical advice from a guide about rapid language learning” I hear you thinking. You’re right. It’s an obvious but integral part of your learning process.
Why? Without basic grammar and workings of the language, it is extremely difficult to reach real fluency. I have several friends who get their meaning across very well in different languages, but because they didn’t learn the grammar and structure in the beginning, they fell into the admirable habit of ‘make it up as you go along’ and are now loveable dead-giveaways for a non-native speaker. This in itself is also an outstanding accomplishment - but our goal here is to make you sound like a natural.
So the first step is to find a reputable language school and study for a few weeks to get your artistic brain ready for rapid fire mode.
Choosing A Language School
Most major cities have reputable, well-known schools for the most popular languages. I have personally had excellent experience with all of these. Goethe Institut and Alliance Française are two such schools, both with outstanding curriculums and even better teaching staff. Choose a school which tells you the curriculum up front and has a focus on useful language learning rather than rote methods that ask you to spend countless hours mindlessly memorising facts or words. It’s also worthwhile searching online for reviews of the school prior to enrolling – see what others have said.
When choosing a school, try to find one that has a clear segmentation of levels and milestones after each: After Level One, you will be able to introduce yourself, speak in the present tense, and talk about your hobbies; After Level Two, you will be able to speak in the past, talk about your family, and order your favourite brand of coffee. And so on. It doesn’t matter exactly what the milestones are, as long as they are known and achievable.
If your chosen language is not covered by a well-known school, not to worry. Private tutors are often a great option, where low-cost professionals will meet at a mutually convenient time and place. Choose one who demonstrates experience, has a good working knowledge of the learning process, and who will let you customise your curriculum. Tutors all over the world are now advertising on popular web directories and employment websites tutor sites. A quick trip to local universities, schools or notice boards in your area can often yield quick leads to tutors too.
Intensive, Or Non-Intensive?
Personally, I find intensive classes to be the fastest way to kick start learning. Four quick-hitting weekends of three to four hours later, you’ve completed what would normally take three months. It’s satisfying, and often allows you to group your knowledge together because you haven’t forgotten what you studied at the beginning of the term. If intensive courses aren’t your cup of tea or you don’t have the time, the techniques coming up will guide you through how to learn quickly in standard classes.
What I want you to remember
Classes are an important part of kick starting language learning. Taking them simultaneously - whether it be one, two, or seven hours per week - while you employ the techniques in the following chapters, will get you the best results. Classes go hand in hand with lifestyle integration of languages.
Learning Verb Tables: Do I Haveeee To?
In many languages, one step to fluency is learning how to conjugate verbs. I don’t know many people who enjoy conjugating verbs [3], or any other necessary part of rote-learning a language. Fortunately, there are ways to speed up this necessary evil. Here’s my method of tackling verbs and vocabulary:
Take out one page of A4 paper. Draw a small table with a few columns. Write the verb up the top, and the subjects (I, you, he, she, we, they) down the left hand side.
Fill
in the conjugations one-by-one, and take note of the endings. The
verb itself (underlined in the picture below) is what we’re
practicing. Here’s an example, with the French verb “aller”,
“to go”:
Then do it again. And again. Are you bored yet? If so, that’s good: the sooner you learn it, the sooner you can start using it! If you’re getting bored of conjugating it, chances are it’s sinking in. If you conjugate the verb six times on paper (writing it out, the same as the picture above), and use it in a sentence six times in real conversation, you will remember it. You can do the paper conjugation in five minutes, and vary the speaking part over a few days or in one of your language classes. Take it one verb at a time, and soon they’ll start flowing. Give it a try.
Light A Fire: Finding Your Inspiration
To really become fluent in any language, it helps to find a passion point. For me, this was finding my wife and listening to music (Spanish), Japanese cuisine and culture (Japanese) and, I’m not ashamed to admit, the wonderful creamy wheat-beer served with healthy doses of Oompah music in Germany (German). Lately, the simply wonderful sound of French accents has me hooked on learning French, and the idea of one day sounding like French-speakers do. Spend a few minutes thinking about where your passion really lies. This will not change you in an instant, but it’s amazing how quickly, given the right material, you can build up your language abilities. Here are some suggestions:
* Friends and Lovers (or both)
Do you have any friends, family who speak your target language? How about someone you’re trying to get closer to? Imagine yourself being able to have a fluent conversation with them. Friends are usually extremely encouraging, and will laugh along the way as you learn by making mistakes. Added benefits of speaking with friends include being able to have a private conversation anywhere (you and your friend conversing in fluent Russian on a train packed with non-Russian speakers) and visiting them in their home country. Had I not been able to speak Spanish during my first trip to meet my Colombian in-laws, I would have been sitting like a little boy in the corner for four weeks. Being able to actively converse with everyone made my trip all the more worthwhile, and established my in-laws as close friends for life.