OK, good.

Have you ever held a question in mind

for so long that it becomes part of how you think?

Maybe even part of who you are as a person?

Well I've had a question in my mind for many, many years

and that is: How can you speed up learning?

Now, this is an interesting question

because if you speed up learning, you can spend less time at school.

And if you learn really fast, you probably wouldn't have to go to school at all.

Now, when I was young, school was sort of OK but...

I found quite often that school got in the way of learning

so I had this question in mind: How do you learn faster?

And this began when I was very, very young,

when I was 11 years old,

I wrote a letter to researchers in the Soviet Union, asking about hypnopaedia,

this is sleep-learning, where you get a tape recorder, you put it beside your bed

and it turns on in the middle of the night when you're sleeping,

and you're supposed to be learning from this.

A good idea, unfortunately it doesn't work.

But, hypnopaedia did open the doors to research in other areas

and we've had incredible discoveries about learning that began with that first question.

I went on from there to become passionate about psychology

and I have been involved in psychology in many different ways

for the rest of my life up until this point.

In 1981 I took myself to China

and I decided that I was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years.

Now, you need to understand that in 1991, everybody thought

Chinese was really, really difficult and that a westerner could study for 10 years or more

and never really get very good at it.

And I also went in with a different idea

which was: taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point

and applying them to the learning process.

What was really cool was that in six months I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese

and took a little bit longer to get up to native.

But I looked around and I saw all of these people from different countries

struggling terribly with Chinese,

I saw Chinese people struggling terribly to learn English and other languages,

and so my question got refined down to:

How can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively?

Now this is a really, really important question in today's world.

We have massive challenges with environment,

we have massive challenges with social dislocation,

with wars, all sorts of things going on

and if we can't communicate, we're really going to have difficulty solving these problems.

So we need to be able to speak each other's languages,

this is really, really important.

The question it is: How do you do that?

Well, it's actually really easy. You look around for people who can already do it,

you look for situations where it's already working

and then you identify the principles and apply them.

It's called modelling and I've been looking at language learning

and modelling language learning for about 15 to 20 years now.

And my conclusion, my observation from this is

that any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside six months.

Now when I say this, most people think I'm crazy, this is not possible.

So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress,

it's all about expanding our limits.

In 1950 everybody believed that running one mile in four minutes was impossible

and then Roger Bannister did it in 1956 and from there it's got shorter and shorter.

100 years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesn't fly.

Except it does and we all know this.

How does heavy stuff fly?

We reorganise the material using principles that we have learned

from observing nature, birds in this case.

And today we've gone even further...

We've gone even further, so you can fly a car.

You can buy one of these for a couple 100.000 US dollars.

We now have cars in the world that fly.

And there's a different way to fly which we've learned from squirrels.

So all you need to do is copy what a flying squirrel does,

build a suit called a wing suit and off you go, you can fly like a squirrel.

Now most people, a lot of people, I wouldn't say everybody

but a lot of people think they can't draw.

However there are some key principles, five principles that you can apply

to learning to draw and you can actually learn to draw in five days.

So, if you draw like this, you learn these principles for five days

and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this.

Now I know this is true because that was my first drawing

and after five days of applying these principles that was what I was able to do.

And I looked at this and I went:

"Wow, so that's how I look like when I'm concentrating so intensely

that my brain is exploding."

So, anybody can learn to draw in five days

and in the same way, with the same logic,

anybody can learn a second language in six months.

How? There are five principles and seven actions.

There may be a few more but these are absolutely core.

And before I get into those I just want to talk about two myths,

I want to dispel two myths.

The first is that you need talent.

Let me tell you about Zoe.

Zoe came from Australia, went to Holland, was trying to learn Dutch,

struggling extremely, extremely... a great deal

and finally people were saying: "You're completely useless,"

"you're not talented," "give up," "you're a waste of time"

and she was very, very depressed.

And then she came across these five principles,

she moved to Brazil and she applied them

and in six months she was fluent in Portuguese,

so talent doesn't matter.

People also think that immersion in a new country is the way to learn a language.

But look around Hong Kong, look at all the westerners

who've been here for 10 years, who don't speak a word of Chinese.

Look at all the Chinese living in America, Britain, Australia, Canada

have been there 10, 20 years and they don't speak any English.

Immersion per se does not work.

Why? Because a drowning man cannot learn to swim.

When you don't speak a language you're like a baby

and if you drop yourself into a context

which is all adults talking about stuff over your head, you won't learn.

So, what are the five principles that you need to pay attention to?

First: the four words,

attention, meaning, relevance and memory,

and these interconnect in very, very important ways.

Especially when you're talking about learning.

Come with me on a journey through a forest.

You go on a walk through a forest

and you see something like this... Little marks on a tree,

maybe you pay attention, maybe you don't.

You go another 50 metres and you see this...

[image of bear footprint] You should be paying attention.

Another 50 metres, if you haven't been paying attention, you see this...

[image of roaring bear] And at this point, you're paying attention.

And you've just learned that this [marks on tree] is important,

it's relevant because it means this [roaring bear],

and anything that is related, any information related to your survival

is stuff that you're going to pay attention to

and therefore you're going to remember it.

If it's related to your personal goals

then you're going to pay attention to it,

if it's relevant, you're going to remember it.

So, the first rule, first principle for learning a language

is focus on language content that is relevant to you.

Which brings us to tools.

We master tools by using tools and we learn tools the fastest

when they are relevant to us.

So let me share a story.

A keyboard is a tool.

Typing Chinese a certain way, there are methods for this. That's a tool.

I had a colleague many years ago

who went to night school; Tuesday night, Thursday night,

two hours each time, practising at home,

she spent nine months, and she did not learn to type Chinese.

And one night we had a crisis.

We had 48 hours to deliver a training manual in Chinese.

And she got the job, and I can guarantee you

in 48 hours, she learned to type Chinese

because it was relevant, it was meaningful, it was important,

she was using a tool to create value.

So the second principle for learning a language is to use your language

as a tool to communicate right from day one.

As a kid does.

When I first arrived in China, I didn't speak a word of Chinese,

and on my second week I got to take a train ride overnight.

I spent eight hours sitting in the dining car talking to one of the guards on the train,

he took an interest in me for some reason,

and we just chatted all night in Chinese

and he was drawing pictures and making movements with his hands

and facial expressions and

piece by piece by piece I understood more and more.

But what was really cool, was two weeks later,

when people were talking Chinese around me,

I was understanding some of this

and I hadn't even made any effort to learn that.

What had happened, I'd absorbed it that night on the train,

which brings us to the third principle.

When you first understand the message,

then you will acquire the language unconsciously.

And this is really, really well documented now,

it's something called comprehensible input.

There's 20 or 30 years of research on this,

Stephen Krashen, a leader in the field,

has published all sorts of these different studies

and this is just from one of them.

The purple bars show the scores on different tests for language.

The purple people were people who had learned by grammar and formal study,

the green ones are the ones who learned by comprehensible input.

So, comprehension works. Comprehension is key

and language learning is not about accumulating lots of knowledge.

In many, many ways it's about physiological training.

A woman I know from Taiwan did great in English at school,

she got A grades all the way through,

went through college, A grades, went to the US

and found she couldn't understand what people were saying.

And people started asking her: "Are you deaf?"

And she was. English deaf.

Because we have filters in our brain that filter in

the sounds that we are familiar with

and they filter out the sounds of languages that we're not.

And if you can't hear it, you won't understand it,

if you can't understand it, you're not going to learn it.

So you actually have to be able to hear these sounds.

And there are ways to do that but it's physiological training.

Speaking takes muscle.

You've got 43 muscles in your face,

you have to coordinate those in a way

that you make sounds that other people will understand.

If you've ever done a new sport for a couple of days,

and you know how your body feels? Hurts?

If your face is hurting, you're doing it right.

And the final principle is state. Psycho-physiological state.

If you're sad, angry, worried, upset, you're not going to learn. Period.

If you're happy, relaxed, in an Alpha brain state, curious,

you're going to learn really quickly,

and very specifically you need to be tolerant of ambiguity.

If you're one of those people who needs to understand 100 per cent

every word you're hearing, you will go nuts,

because you'll be incredibly upset all the time, because you're not perfect.

If you're comfortable with getting some, not getting some,

just paying attention to what you do understand,

you're going to be fine, you'll be relaxed and you'll be learning quickly.

So based on those five principles, what are the seven actions that you take?

Number one: Listen a lot.

I call it brain soaking.

You put yourself in a context where you're hearing tons and tons and tons of a language

and it doesn't matter if you understand it or not.

You're listening to the rhythms, you're listening to patterns that repeat,

you're listening to things that stand out.