How to learn languages really fast

Anyone of you who here speaks Russian, Spanish, Chinese or German, Italian can give a Frenchman some tips on how to go to business conversational level really fast? Where do I start? (pssst I bribe you some silver banane)

22 Comments
 
[Comment removed by mod team]
 

I learned 2 of the above.

Living in the countries comes first and it's not even close. Do not even attempt to learn Chinese if you don't plan on spending time there, you'll get nowhere and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere.

Watching lots of Netflix films and listening to music works for me. I try to learn 1-2 songs a week and I pick up the grammar from that as opposed to books.

Next up is discord servers. There are servers for language exchange.

Finally I'd say sentence mining. Just like with the songs, learn off full sentences and repeat them. Your brain will eventually understand what each part of the sentence means and how to apply it elsewhere.

 

This is the best advice, nothing I would add. Immersing into the culture is going to be important also to learn context/slang/idioms that you otherwise would not learn.

Quant (ˈkwänt) n: An expert, someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
 

best thing about chinese is there's a lot of pockets of chinese all over the world. You don't know if they speak mandarin or cantonese do.

 

I speak multiple languages - English, German, some Spanish, and also started Swedish and Italian. No French yet.

1) Duolingo is fairly fast, at least for me if you are a complete beginner

2) Movies with subtitles will help

3) The absolute fastest way is to date someone from that country, she'll teach you all the important words.
(this is not a joke, if you are with someone who is a native speaker, it can really help you with how quickly you are learning the language)

 

Hi, try “Easy Russian” channel etc on YouTube. I find podcasts and YouTube helpful because they show pronunciation. For Chinese I started using the app “HelloChinese”.

 

For Italian and Spanish, I would find side by side translations of text from French and simply compare them to jump start the learning process... There are a lot of similarities (I speak all three), and for instance:

You can make the observation that many French words like application become aplicación in Spanish. (corruption --> corrupción, déclaration --> declaración, etc.) There are many types of words like this that follow a slightly different rule, and knowing how much of your French knowledge you can directly translate will speed up the language learning process immensely. This reduces the vocabulary you have to actually learn by a lot. 

This can also apply to grammar. In Italian, the past tense (passato prossimo) is like the passé composé in French. You say "ho mangiato" (j'ai mangé) with the verb avere (avoir), but instead say "sono andato/a" (je suis allé(e)) with essere (être). The rules are very similar, if not identical. One more thing you don't have to learn! 

Language learning is a lot easier when you realize that you're not always starting from scratch. I'm sure you know all of this and have already figured out everything I've said, but thought I would mention it just in case. I think you could pick up Spanish or Italian pretty quickly!

 

Business conversational is almost above fluency. I am conversational in Spanish, but also have a Spanish degree with multiple courses in composition and business Spanish. 

Best practice for me was to go to bars in Spain and also take business Spanish courses in Spain. I think for the most part though, English is a universal business language. 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
Monty Burns

This guy is a 1000x better shitposter than Ben Matan Biran

I liked the height of Ben’s posting as it overshadowed my frequency at one point, which is pretty hard to do. 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
Most Helpful

this video's principles have really helped me: 

here's what I do personally

1. daily exposure in multiple media - vocab practice on duolingo, read books/articles that are interesting to me in target language, listen to podcasts and music in target language

2. several times a week I chat with native speakers, sometimes lessons are structured, sometimes just chatting, for this I use italki.com. in terms of cost, I've had 60 lessons this year and have spent just under $1k on it

3. try to think in the language, like when you're walking down the street and there's some weird sign or some dude in high heels smoking a blunt and you would make a comment under your breath, try to do that to yourself in your target language

I will emphasize this - the biggest difference makers for me are speaking frequently (and without judgment, so you're not afraid to make mistakes) and reading/listening to things I'm interested in versus textbook bullshit, if you're doing things that are already interesting to you (for me, it's reading books I've already read in english but in my target language, watching sports I like in my target language, etc.), it doesn't feel like work and you'll find yourself defaulting to your target language more often than not

also for spanish (mi idioma preferida) don't pick someone from colombia (too pretty spanish, not realistic) but also not someone from the caribbean, honduras, bolivia, etc (uncommon or very thick accents). mexico, venezuela, and spain would be best in my opinion

finally, tagging the polyglot Pan European Monkey as I believe he speaks a couple of the languages you mention

 

Agree with all of your points. Whilst I do speak many languages I had the luxury to learn them young in favorable contexts - that was 1) at home, 2) at school or 3) by living in a country speaking the language or a mix of these. 

I cannot really imagine learning a new language these days, it would take me a good year of intense practice to have a decent conversation in a brand new language. However to keep up my languages, I do use some of the tricks above, primarily through Medias & TV shows and where possible with friends or at restaurants chatting to staff in their language (quite easy in large cities like London - where I am based)

 

I know Spanish fairly well and the knowledge of Spanish has made it pretty easy to learn a bit of Italian. I'm not good at it yet but I have no time to learn/practice, but when I can I immediately notice the similarities. 

Dayman?
 

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