How To Learn a Language in 7 Weeks When It Normally Takes 7 Months
By: Anthony J. Yeung
Tags: Self Improvement, Productivity, Language, Life, Learning

I failed language classes when I was a kid and always thought I just wasn’t good at them.

Yet at the beginning of this year, I did seven weeks of immersive French and went from the least-qualified student in my class to skipping an entire level and reaching the top — while being the only student working a full-time job simultaneously (on a different continent).

The truth is if your goal is to learn a language as fast as possible, you have to transform how you approach everything. You have to be willing to do things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. You have to create demands that others don’t. You have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable because your entire ambition is completely different.

But while others focus on tips like the flashcard systems, apps, etc., in this article, I’ll explain the strategies and mindsets I used to learn faster, feel more confident, avoid frustration, and maximize my very limited time. No matter your level, situation, or resources, I'm confident you can gain something to help you with your language learning.

1. Be comfortable being wrong.

“Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, impostor syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, looking stupid: Your avoidance of these feelings is stopping you from a life greater than your wildest imagination. These are the feelings that accompany a life of success. And yet, these are the very feelings most often avoided.” — Dr. Benjamin Hardy

You will never learn at your highest speed if you’re afraid to be wrong.

The unfortunate truth is a lot of people have their ego attached to their learning. In other words, if they fail, if they’re wrong, if they mispronounce something, etc., it makes them look bad, they feel stupid, and they judge themselves for it.

The result? They traumatize themselves and tend to avoid doing it again to protect their ego, which makes it harder to learn.

But there is no faster way to learn than to make mistakes, adapt, and repeat. Feeling uncomfortable and taking risks is how you grow. The deeper problem, however, is this goes against everything you ever learned in school where the only thing that mattered was being correct, instead of having courage or trying your best.

To become comfortable with being incorrect, avoid judging yourself. You’re just starting; there’s no need to criticize yourself for every mistake or condemn yourself for not being at the level you want to be. From an analogy in The Inner Game of Tennis, a popular sports psychology book, think of yourself as a seed: It takes time to grow and mature, but you don’t get mad at it when it’s tiny or underdeveloped. You enjoy the process, take care of it throughout its journey, and know it has all its potential within.

“Similarly, the errors we make can be seen as an important part of the developing process. In its process of developing, our tennis game gains a great deal from errors. Even slumps are part of the process.” — W. Timothy Gallwey

Mistakes when learning a language are incredibly valuable so don’t tie your ego into your successes or failures. Understand that no matter if you’re “good” or “bad,” you’re still the same person.

This is the most important step and makes everything else in this article a lot easier.

2. At school, I always talked with people better than me.

During breaks, I noticed students generally spoke their native language and didn’t try to practice. But if your goal is to learn a language as fast as you possibly can, you can’t let these opportunities slip. That’s why I forced myself to only speak in French with other students.

I also noticed people only spoke to those in their same class or level. (Perhaps it was a familiarity thing or perhaps they didn’t want to feel silly talking to someone much more advanced). Instead, I tried to only speak with students at a higher level or class.

Talking with people better than you helps you learn much faster; you have to exercise your muscles and you learn things that aren’t possible with people at your own level.

Finally, I made sure to talk to students who were highly motivated to learn, not just trying to get by—that way, we could push each other forward and encourage each other to learn more.

3. Talk to native speakers as much as possible.

When you talk to classmates or teachers, they purposely speak much slower and in a more basic way. As a result, I often met students in more-advanced levels who still couldn’t communicate well with locals. For me, however, I’d rather have the opposite: I’d rather have mediocre grades but excel with native speakers.

So once I landed in France, my number-one priority was to talk with locals as often as I could: Shop owners, neighbors, random people on the train — I didn’t care. I forced myself to chat with regular people who spoke fast and used slang. I wanted them to talk to me like I was French. (I also used this same exact strategy when I lived in Taiwan to learn Chinese years ago.)

Putting myself in these difficult situations forced me to acclimate and learn how to think under pressure. It also hammered home the entire point of learning French in the first place: To use it to communicate.

If you don't live in your target country, no worries. There are countless websites where you can find native speakers for free or at an affordable price. Here are some language sites you can try:

Italki (I used this site and enjoyed it)

Preply

Verbling

My Language Exchange (I used this site over 10 years ago to learn Chinese, and hilariously, it still looks the same)

Conversation Exchange

Meetup (you can join a language meetup in your city)

4. In school, always volunteer when possible.

Teachers regularly asked students if they could read text aloud, tell a story, or answer a question, yet I was astonished that almost everyone was hesitant to raise their hands.

I was always the first person to volunteer. Why? It's free tutoring! It’s the perfect opportunity to practice and have a native speaker correct your pronunciation, give you feedback in real-time, and track how you're progressing. It's an invaluable experience and you should take advantage of every chance.

Always volunteer to read aloud. Always volunteer to answer questions. Always volunteer to say something. (You might make mistakes in front of others, but again, that’s why it’s so important to be okay with being wrong.)

5. Always raise the stakes.

The key to learning things quickly is to learn it and then increase the demands on yourself. Speak faster. Read faster. Write faster. Think faster. Try to pressure yourself beyond your current abilities. Do more things in public. Do more things with complete strangers.

Sure, take time to learn a skill — vocabulary, sentences, grammar, etc. — but once you tried it a few times, do it faster and faster. Surprisingly, putting yourself under higher stress forces you to be more present, slows things down, and allows you to use all of your skills.

That’s how you force yourself to give 100% effort, not 98%, and make bigger leaps.

6. Measure your “gain.”

When you study a foreign language, you’ll regularly challenge yourself, which can be difficult. Worse, the finish line always moves further away because the material and exams get harder as you progress. But if you continually feel like you’re falling short, it can hurt your confidence, motivation, and persistence.

The trick to confidence isn’t to look forward; it’s to periodically look backward at your starting point. (After all, it’s hard to gauge your progress when you hear yourself daily.) And even if you’re having tough moments —which I certainly had—you’ll see that you’re actually improving.

This lesson comes from Dan Sullivan who teaches that you should measure the “gain,” not the “gap:”

“…if you turn around and measure your progress against where you started, then you’re in The Gain, and you’ll experience a sense of having moved forward, of having achieved something, and you’ll be motivated to continue on to your next stage of growth.” — Dan Sullivan

The “gain” refers to how far you’ve come from when you started.

The “gap” is the opposite: how far you have to go to where you want to be.

Focusing on the gap hurts motivation and confidence because you’re constantly thinking of your lacks and failings. Instead, regularly find ways to see how far you’ve come so you feel more confident, accomplished, and motivated.

What I did was find a tutor online outside of school and check-in with her every few weeks. She could see how much I improved between sessions, which helped encourage me and remind me that I was moving forward, even though I feel like I wasn’t.

7. Force your own hand.

“Don’t join an easy crowd; you won’t grow. Go where the expectations and the demands to perform are high.” — Jim Rohn

Whenever there’s an opportunity to challenge yourself, take it. Always skip a level when you can. Even if they might say no, that’s fine; but always try. That way, you put yourself in a tough environment and have no other choice but to figure it out.

This is what’s called a “forcing function”—coined by Dan Martell, it’s basically creating a situation that forces you to produce a result. For example, working on your laptop and purposely not bringing a charger to force you to work faster. Or parking your car farther away from your destination so you have to walk more.

Using forcing functions to learn a language will unleash a level of drive within you that wouldn’t be possible in a less-demanding environment.

You might worry, however, you won’t know a lot of things after making a jump. That’s true. But you’ll have forced yourself to learn it now rather than waiting for the predetermined time to learn it. (Remember: The goal is to learn as fast as possible, not at the speed the class goes.) The key, yet again, is you have to be comfortable being “behind” the class until you catch up.

Do this right and you can learn languages—and anything else, really—a heck of a lot faster than ever before. (You can always come back down if it really is “too hard.”)

8. Let it rip.

“Don’t intellectualize it. See what it feels like to ask yourself to do something and let it happen without any conscious trying. For most people it is a surprising experience, and the results speak for themselves… The more you let yourself perform free of control…, the more confidence you tend to gain in the beautiful mechanism that is the human body. The more you trust it, the more capable it seems to become.” — W. Timothy Gallwey

Once you learn some basic skills and are going to use them, here’s my best piece of advice:

Don’t think.

Don’t try to be correct.

Just let it rip.

Many people judge themselves after every word and every sentence to make sure that they’re "correct." But overthinking and trying hard to be “right” inhibits their ability to act freely and spontaneously—and they end up speaking… like… this… because… they… are… constantly… thinking.

When I talked to locals, I felt nervous, but I just tried to shut my brain off, breathe, relax, and just let whatever I already learned come out. Crazy enough, the less I tried to be right, the better it came out. (Maybe that’s why everyone jokingly says you speak better when you're drunk.)

“Quieting the mind means less thinking, calculating, judging, worrying, fearing, hoping, trying, regretting, controlling, jittering or distracting. The mind is still when it is totally here and now in perfect oneness with the action and the actor.” — W. Timothy Gallwey

No matter what, you will make mistakes. So rather than trying to avoid them, just let them happen and know that, as you continue on your journey, your mistakes automatically become fewer and fewer—they’ll naturally correct themselves seemingly on their own.

The formula is simple: Stop judging yourself either good or bad. Stop thinking of what you “should” say. Just be in the moment, breathe, enjoy, and let whatever happens, happen.

You might just surprise yourself.

Bon courage.