Yes, I know, that sounds a little bit ridiculous, even to me, but it is true, and it's actually the only way that I could have posted 56 videos of me surprising strangers by speaking their language in just the past few years.

So I've talked about this before, but I was actually terrible at learning languages in high school.

Not that I got bad grades, my grades were actually pretty good, but I just couldn't actually speak any of these languages that I studied.

I would just see this language textbook full of super intimidating alphabets and scripts and charts and tones and just become totally overwhelmed.

You know, and having grown up in a monolingual English-speaking environment in the United States, I would just think to myself, man, it's either geniuses or Dutch people who can actually learn to speak multiple languages.

And I really wanted to learn to speak, but I would try by reading the textbook, which is how I thought you were supposed to learn a language, but I would inevitably get bogged down in the details and then just totally give up.

But after I moved to China and started learning Chinese, I started experimenting more and more with language learning on my YouTube channel, and especially since this became my full-time job a few years ago, I actually started getting really, really good at learning languages to the point where now I consider myself possibly the world's leading expert on how to learn a language as quickly as possible, which by the way, does not make me anything close to the world's greatest polyglot.

There are millions of people in this world who have way better language skills than I do, but having gone from zero to basic conversational ability in 56 languages from every continent on the planet except Antarctica, I do think that I at least have some experience in the topic of how to learn any language quickly.

See what I realized the problem with typical language textbooks is, is that they front load too much.

You have to learn all of these alphabets and weird scripts and charts and tones and grammar before you even get to chapter one.

They're these incredibly boring and by themselves useless things that you're somehow just expected to memorize out of context.

And it isn't just textbooks that teach like this.

This forms the basis of our language learning pedagogy in almost all language learning classrooms around the world.

And while I do understand the desire to create a solid foundation, I think you end up instead intimidating beginners and mystifying language learning.

You make language learning feel like calculus when it's actually much easier than that.

Don't get me wrong, learning languages is hard, but as Matt vs Japan likes to say, it's hard in the way that exercise is hard, not in the way that calculus is hard.

It does not take a genius to go jogging, but it does take a certain level of commitment.

And this textbook style, by the way, is also not the way that 99% of people who actually learn their languages.

A really interesting example of this is that most Chinese teachers like to teach you Chinese characters on day one before you even learn to speak because that's how they first learned Chinese when they went to elementary school in China.

But what this overlooks is that on their first day of elementary school in China, they already spoke fluent Mandarin, which they had learned word by word, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence from their parents and not from a textbook.

So by the time they were learning the writing system, they already understood the entire essence of Mandarin speaking and grammar to which they could then apply the characters.

So my system has two parts and part one is speaking practice.

The key to my rapid language learning is spending one hour per day speaking with online tutors or friends.

And I do this for 10 to 15 sessions spread out over three weeks.

The focus here is purely on practical conversation skills.

I start from zero, from very basic phrases, and then we gradually build up to more and more complex conversations.

And I do, by the way, actually have a free list of phrases that I like to use for this purpose, which you can also check out the link in the description.

I like to call them my magic sentences.

And I think speaking from the very beginning, literally day one, is crucial because it helps to demystify the language and it also helps to get over your fear of speaking, which is precisely the problem that I had in high school when I would spend all this time studying my textbooks and then when it came to actually speak, I would be petrified.

I wouldn't know what to say because I had never actually spoken before.

Everything I learned had come from the textbook.

Plus the direct interaction with native speakers helps me internalize the flow of the language very quickly.

An analogy that I often use is that trying to learn to speak a language by reading a textbook is like trying to learn to ride a bike by reading a textbook.

You know, you're just studying the physics of how your feet move and the rotations at this number of RPM create this movement.

So all I have to do is turn left into the torque and like we've all been brainwashed by school into thinking that's how it works, but it's not.

And in theory, maybe it is possible to learn how to ride a bike by reading a physics textbook.

But practically speaking, you do need to understand the rhythm of bike riding and actually ride a bike in order to learn how to ride a bike.

Now part two of my method is sentence mining.

After each speaking session, I collect and record key words, phrases or sentences from the session into Anki, a free flashcard program to gradually memorize what I just learned in the speaking session over the next few weeks.

By the way, always front card English and back card target language to make flashcards that force you to actively recall the words rather than just passively recognize them.

And I only put sentences whose grammar I fully understand into Anki, so I have to learn the grammar of the teacher before I can go and memorize the sentences.

And so this means that I'm not just wrote memorizing sentences, I'm actually memorizing grammar as well by natural osmosis.

What I'm definitely not doing, which I used to do in high school all the time, is memorize big conjugation charts or memorize alphabets or memorize tone rules or things like that.

And so as I memorize these sentences, I'm also naturally memorizing the grammar of the language.

As I said before, the grammar of most languages isn't too hard.

Hard as in calculus, that this is really so difficult, with the possible exception of some Native American languages, which, you know.

So for each language that I study over these 15 sessions, I end up developing Anki decks, you know, that contain anywhere from 50 to 100 cards.

And that really is all you need to know in order to have basic conversations in any language.

About 50 to 100 words and phrases.

And yes, you also pick up other things by osmosis from your speaking sessions because you're continually practicing as well.

So the Anki deck doesn't form the entire basis of what you learn, but it forms much of the key grammar and vocabulary that you'll need to actually have conversations in your language.

And the phrases in the Anki deck are all things that are natural and immediately useful to me.

And I'm typically not learning stuff that I don't think I'll need to use.

A lot of textbooks will start you out by focusing on color and direction words, and I find personally I never use those.

So why would I learn those at the beginning as the first things that I ever learn?

And again, I don't learn the alphabet or the script in the very beginning either.

I actually write everything into Anki the way that the word or the phrase or the sentence sounds to me, rather than how it's written in its native script.

Which I find actually helps me learn way faster, because I'm not so worried about like, what sounds the CH make in this language, or like, what does this weird squiggle mean?

I don't really care.

I just write what it sounds like to me.

I'll be honest, I do have very good auditory memory, but I do think you can do this even if your auditory memory is not so great, you can actually put audio samples into Anki as well.

So every time you load up the card, you get an immediate sound cue for what it sounds like and you can play the audio from a native speaker.

So if you do it like that, you don't have to worry that you're not perfectly remembering the sound either.

I found that learning the alphabet can come later, once I have an actual conversational level, or never, you know, because if you're not interested in becoming literate in the language you're studying, you might not be interested in becoming literate.

That's your choice.

You know, you can completely ignore the alphabet, or the script of the language.

And so this way, this way I'm not bogged down in the task of learning a new script from day one.

I do these Anki reps every day, so I'm going to show you right now, let's load up the language I'm currently learning, which is Scottish Gaelic, let's see what we have, cows, that's nebacht, okay, good.

What whiskey do you like?

Hm, um, jay, short shit, tushkabehe, untillit, something like that, right?

Jay short shit, ushkabehe, untillit, okay good, that was good.

And so you see, I'm learning things that both are culturally relevant, but um, also like these basic phrases, you know, sentences like do you like, or cheers, or basic nouns like cow, things I can actually use to build more complex conversations off of.

Scotland is beautiful.

Um, haalapabria, haalapabria.

And you can see, when I'm learning these sentences and phrases, I'm not just memorizing sentences either, I mean I am memorizing sentences, but these are sentences that, you know, can be modified and changed, and a sentence like Scotland is beautiful is the same thing as a sentence like the apple is tasty.

You know, they work the same way.

So if you memorize Scotland is beautiful, um, and you also know the words apple and tasty, then boom, you have two sentences there, right, you didn't have to memorize two sentences, you just needed to memorize one to get that grammar.

And so spaced repetition systems like Anki are an absolute game changer because they help me review these phrases at intervals optimized for memory retention.

So by reviewing my Anki for just a few minutes every day, I actually ensure that these phrases stick in my long-term memory, ready to be whipped out in any conversation.

Though because I'm lazy, I actually do archive the decks of languages that I'm not actively studying, meaning that I forget languages that I've learned in the past, and so right now I can't speak anything like 56 languages at the same time.

So that's basically it.

Speak from day one, use sentence mining to record the key words and phrases, and then This approach has helped me learn languages as quickly as possible while ensuring that I don't get lost in translation.

So if you're interested in learning more about how I learn languages, make sure to check out my masterclass at the link in the description below.

And now you can get speaking practice with an AI tutor at my new website, yourteacher.ai.