You're learning languages wrong

If you've been learning a language for a few months and your comprehension and speaking skills are very basic, you're doing it wrong.

Most people are doing it wrong.

Because most people are trying to learn with:

1. Gamified Apps like Duolingo.

2. In-person classes or an online tutor.

3. "Just move to the country and talk to people bro"

These are the most popular language learning methods and the results speak for themselves.

None of them give you what you need to improve your skills fast.

The winning formula and why those 3 methods suck:

The 3 main things you need to learn to understand a language are:

1. Vocabulary

2. Grammar

3. Pronunciation

The 3 sub-skills you need to speak well are:

1. Fluency

2. Accuracy

3. Pronunciation

Yes, pronunciation is important for both comprehension and speaking.

If you rationally analise those 3 methods I mentioned, you'll notice they're quite bad at developing most if not all of the skills I mentioned.

Apps are the worst.

Because they'll teach you some random vocabulary you'll never use at a very slow pace.

Learning random words piecemeal will do nothing for your listening comprehension or your speaking skills.

You get to brag on social media about your 700 day Duolingo streak.

Congrats, amazing achievement.

But you still suck at Spanish.

Classes and tutors aren't much better.

Classes are painfully slow, for a couple of reasons.

Teachers are often lazy and there just for the paycheck.

They want to drag out the exercises as much as possible to take up as much time as possible with the least amount of work possible.

There will also be students in class who are much slower than you, because they don't really try hard, pay attention, do the homework, etc.

Those guys will slow down the already slow class even more.

Classes also tend to be focused on grammar exercises, an unnatural and impractical way to learn a language.

Much less input and speaking time per hour invested than if doing it on your own.

Results speak for themselves.

People go to classes for years and still can't understand or speak well.

One on one lessons with a tutor are a slight improvement but still highly inefficient.

What you need at first is comprehension, by acquiring thousands of words as fast as possible.

Having someone feed words to you one by one is extremely slow and inefficient.

Also, trying to learn by having conversations when you don't even have 5% of the vocabulary you need to have a basic conversation is a waste of time and energy.

You'll spend 99% of your time with the tutor mumbling filler words like "ahm", "uhm", or switching to English to ask questions.

Speaking of wasting your time by trying to speak to soon...

You get those who try to learn by "immersion" abroad.

"Immersion" is the biggest myth in language learning.

Almost no one does real immersion, they just pretend to.

You get a remote job and move to a country where you know no one.

You use English at your online job and spend most of your free time on the internet on social media and watching content in English (you need to relax too, amirite?)

How do you think that's going to end?

I'll tell you how: Living in the country for years and still knowing less than 500 words.

Unless you're a walking, talking Dunning Kruger like Mark Manson, you need 10 or 20 more words than that to claim you're fluent in a language.

Let's say you make an effort, go out and try to talk to people.

Even then it's not going to work all that well.

You'll make some quick progress at first and gain some confidence.

You'll learn basic words and phrases for the common scenarios.

And that's it.

I met plenty of foreigners living in Germany that tried to learn the language by showing up to language exchange meetups.

Years later their German is still Scheisse.

Again, trying to learn by having conversations when you don't even have 5% of the vocabulary you need to have a basic conversation is a waste of time and energy.

Finally...the really dumb advice.

I hear more and more people recommending to "just get a Latina girlfriend" as a method to learn Spanish.

Without getting into ethical or practical considerations of getting into a relationship as a means to learn a language, let's just look at its effectiveness as a method or lack thereof.

Even if (and that's a big IF) you actually manage to get and keep a girlfriend long term...

How's that going to work?

Do you switch to only speaking Spanish to each other?

Or you mostly speak English to each other with some broken Spanish here and there?

What's her level of education?

What topics does she normally talk about?

Are you going to structure and plan your conversations?

Will you even manage to speak Spanish more than a few sentences a day?

This so-called approach basically takes the worst parts of the individual tutor and the worst of "just move to the country" and combines them.

Again, even if you keep it going for years. You'll know less than 500 words or 5% of what you need to be fluent.

Wishful thinking at its best.

So what's the solution?

A good plan and hard work.

As always, this is my advice to learn vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation and develop your fluency and accuracy fast:

1. Memorise vocabulary with associations.

2. Massive Input

3. Language Islands

4. Listening & Repeating

5. Translation

6. Questions & Answers

Want to do this in a structured way to get results fast? Join NLL.