Alright, all good, set up?

Yeah.

All right.

So, what do you know already?

Um, well,

hola,

como estas,

gracias.

Oh, God.

[Connor] This probably sounds familiar.

Like you, I've taken a stab at languages a few times.

Three years of Chinese in school,

of which I remember almost nothing.

An attempt at Indonesian that lasted two weeks.

It never stuck.

I couldn't keep up the motivation.

I didn't have the language gene.

I wasn't a little kid anymore, so languages were harder.

All this was complete bullshit, I soon found out.

But first, a little about me.

I'm a 20 year old digital nomad.

For the last year and a half,

I've been travelling and living around the world

from Saigon to Barcelona,

working wherever I could find Wi-Fi.

I lift weights, rock climb, tinker with my diet,

take nootropics, read books,

and mingle with like-minded people.

And apparently, I have an addiction

with learning things in a month.

Last June, I learned to DJ in Prague,

and in November, I gained 26 pounds of muscle in a month,

after a lifetime of failed attempts.

And now, I'm in Medellin, Columbia,

where I'll do the same with Spanish.

Before we get started, it's important to define

what exactly I'm shooting for this month.

It's easy to get caught up in the word fluency,

but what does that really mean?

I aim to be functionally conversational,

meaning I can have friends who speak no English,

and get by fine, and have normal conversations.

But I'm not perfect, and I still don't know some words.

It's an ambitious goal for one month,

and I'm going to need some help.

Luckily, I have a few people to call on.

Hello?

This is Benny Lewis,

author of the most-read language-learning blog online,

Fluent in 3 Months.

He speaks close to 10 languages,

and has helped tens of thousands learn before,

so his advice will be pivotal

in my overall learning strategy.

- [Benny] Ah, reaching level B-1 requires minimal grammar.

It does not, it requires a little bit of grammar,

but not a lot, so I would highly recommend

for the next month that you do not worry about conjugation,

and you don't worry about um,

getting the masculine and the feminine right,

and all of these things that are associated with grammar.

These are not going to help you out in this project.

As you go beyond, once you reach that B-1 level,

then that is when I do recommend

people actually get their head

into a grammar book to tidy it all up.

But if you, if a lot of your time and energy

is put into learning tables to speak correct Spanish,

that's going to slow down this project.

Because you want, you want to just express yourself.

So I would just say, "Today I to write".

"Yesterday I to write."

"Tomorrow I to write."

And it is not correct, but it is completely understandable,

if you say "Hoy yo escribir", "Today I to write".

So, I would try to keep that in mind

that your goal, as you speak,

is not to speak correct Spanish,

but to speak something in Spanish.

What I would do during my intensive projects,

is at the end of my day, or at the, after a study session,

I'd open an Excel sheet, and I'll create a list.

Left-hand side first column,

left-hand side is Spanish words,

right-hand side is English words.

You export that as a CSV file,

and you import that CSV file into Anki,

and then you have a flash card that is pre-made by you

specific to the words you're learning that day.

If you find that the biggest thing holding you back

from having comfortable conversations

is a lack of vocabulary,

then lean towards studying more words

related to the topics that you talk about.

Um, and,

Keep in mind if you don't like the tutors

that you find in person,

you have a wealth of online tutors.

One thing that I found

when I was learning Mandarin in China, in Taiwan, sorry,

is I had three or four teachers, and I just found

I wasn't learning with them as quickly as I could learn.

So even though I was in the country that speaks the language

I still got Skype-based lessons,

because then I had a wider range of teachers,

and I found exactly the right teachers

to help me with the project.

- [Connor] Luckily, the teacher I found in person

was incredible.

(door clicks)

- Connor?

- Hola, como estas?

- Bien.

Voy a, it is your typical "going to".

So we have ...

- Same usage in Español as English?

- Yeah, it's like future, short future.

It's similar to English,

when you say "I'm going to," Carulla.

That's because that's a destination, that's a place.

- Right.

- And you can use it to, eh, like this.

- That's -- - right?

- If it's how you say here, how it's going to be used,

how I'm gonna hear it, that's how I want to learn it

- [Connor] It's important to note

that I'm not deferring to Adrian for what to study when.

I've lined up the most important things to learn first,

which is why we're already covering "I'm going to"

before I know how to talk about the weather,

which usually comes way too early in traditional textbooks.

I have a small set of starting versatile words

that I'll be front-loading.

These are specifically chosen,

as they will get the most mileage,

but also help me express myself

in a wide variety of situations

once I add more vocabulary.

There are connectors like

before, after, but, so, still, yet, because.

There are heavy-use verbs like

tener, ir, estar, ser, and hacer.

There are directional words like

north, south, left, right, straight, go back,

and some coping phrases like

please repeat that, how do you say, more slowly please.

I've taken a big list of these important words

and wrote them down on my window, a makeshift whiteboard.

When I know each word cold, I can erase it.

Before I start memorizing things too much, though,

I need to make sure my pronunciation is on point.

This will help with listening as well,

but it will prevent me from memorizing a word

with the English pronunciation in my head

and then not recognize it in speech

with proper Spanish pronunciation.

Luckily I know just the guy to ask for help.

This is Idahosa Ness, creator of the Mimic Method.

He's famous for speaking with no accent at all

in each of his six languages,

and the rhythmic phonetic song training he uses

to hack each language's sounds.

Learning pronunciation first speeds up everything else.

Idahosa's system is the best out there.

- You acquire your first language

as well as any foreign language

through mimicking native speakers.

Any when I say mimicking, I mean,

the sounds they make and recreating the sounds

they make to communicate.

We really get technical,

and train your ears, train your mouth

to be able to create those sounds.

So for example,

you as an English speaker learning Spanish,

how to tune your mouth,

the position of your tongue,

to the vowels and the consonants of Spanish,

to the rhythm and cadence

of Spanish and speakers in Colombia.

And once you have that ability,

then all these things that trip up most language learners

like understanding native speakers when they talk fast

and being able to communicate fluently without

tripping over your tongue and stuttering.

All of these kind of core abilities of communication

come together once you train that foundation.

Most people, when they learn a language,

they learn by paper,

they learn how to read and write,

and can think,

someone learning English, for example,

they might know the words,

what,

are,

you,

doing,

and tonight,

they might know those words,

but then struggle to understand someone like me or you,

speaking casually like,

"Yo Connor, what are you doing tonight?"

You know, because,

it's different sounds,

a different reality in how we speak

than how we write.

So, this kind of training allows you

to process those sounds much quicker,

and get a better sense of what

people are actually saying

when they talk every day on the street.

We have a musical process where

you learn how to articulate the lyrics

of a song in Spanish.

And your goal is to be able to articulate it and

to pronounce it with the exact same pronunciation

as the original artists,

the native speaker who made those lyrics.

And what we do is you break it down syllable by syllable

and we explain each syllable in detail

and then you make your attempt.

You have uh, we'll do a line-by-line

and then through a process, like it's,

it will take about like 20 or 30 minutes

of trying to memorize

this sequence of syllables.

You don't know what you're saying yet,

you're just memorizing the sequence of syllables.

Once you have it, you record yourself,

submit your recording to us,

then we listen and we pinpoint

the exact sound you're mispronouncing.

And then we can actually tell you

what you're doing wrong with your mouth

and what you need to adjust to fix that sound.

So, to give an example in English,

if this, if the lyric was, you know,

"everybody sit down,"

and we would break that down into its component syllables

of, eh,

vree,

bah,

dee,

sit,

down,

and we kind of transcribe those syllables so you can see

and listen to each one,

and then put it to a beat, so you're,

"everybody sit down, everybody sit down."

Then you record yourself.

Now, obviously this'll be easy to you

because you speak English,

but if I were uh, Colombian for example,

I don't speak English,

I might say, "everybody seet down, everybody seet down."

And then we listen and we pinpoint that,

on the word, "sit,"

you're saying "seet,"

and there's uh, the vowel is wrong.

So you wouldn't be able to hear that until we point it out.

We point it out and say,

"Hey Connor, you're saying 'seet'

instead of 'sit.'"