What is the fastest you could learn a language, at least, enough for you to converse with a native? Years? Months? Weeks? Days? Hours? This was the question I asked myself after coming across this video:
While I have come across a polyglot who could speak broken polish after 30 minutes, Nathaniel Drew, the guy in the video, took 7 days to speak in his target language. Bravo. But this got me thinking: is it real? It would be amazing would we all just able to pick up languages like that. Imagine studying Indonesian only 3 hours a day, one week before your trip to Bali, and BAM! You arrive and you're speaking, reading, and writing in Indonesian. The royal family hears about you and invites you to their palace and you live happily ever after in paradise on earth.
WAIT, let's not get ahead of ourselves: we don't want to turn this into a fantasy, a paradise lost. I was thoroughly impressed with Daniel's conversation at the end of the video (I am fluent in Italian, so I know what's up). I was so impressed, in fact, that it inspired me to try this on my own, with Turkish. Why Turkish, you may be asking? It's not like Chinese, Spanish, or Hindi, spoken by more than a thousand million people. It's not a famously beautiful language (though it is beautiful) like French and it's only really spoken by the 90 million native speakers (I learned Dutch which is even less relevant with its 25 million native speakers). I'm not living there, so why should I learn Turkish? I struggled with this question myself for a long time. But let me just say that, when I visited my friends in Turkey this summer, I fell in love. I fell in love with the cities, the food, the sounds, the nature, the people! So much so that after watching Nathaniel Drew do it with Italian, I said to myself: let's go for it.
But where to start? Well, Nathaniel's video outlines a simple three step language learning strategy that sounded like a pretty good starting point to me.
Learn the 1000 most common words in your target language
Learn the glue. aka learn grammar, amigo/a.
Create a connection with the language.
Just now, as I wrote his strategy down, I realized that while I thought this was my starting point, I changed things quite a bit, while still maintaining the core of his strategy. Spoiler alert. I still don't really speak Turkish as well as Daniel spoke Italian in that video. If you want to watch me embarrass myself, you can check my next blog post, in which I interview my friend Yaz, in Turkish, over some nice wine.
What I hope to do with this blog is to demystify the process of learning a language. I will show you what I did, how I did it, and how I felt while doing it. I am by no means an authority on linguistics or anything like that for that matter. I am, a learner, however. Like you, like them, like her, like him... I also believe that there has never been a better time to learn a language in terms of ease. Technology. Technology makes it so that I can skype with a person on the other side of the planet and speak with them at no cost whatsoever. Technology makes it so that I can have amazing flashcards that play audio recorded by native speakers on a little square box I keep in my pocket most of the time. Technology means that this box also has access to countless music, movies, and content in your target language. The only problem with technology, is that it's not real interaction (I will cover this theme in another post). You can't interact like our human body and brain is hardwired to interact. But there are ways around technology's only shortcoming (psst...go to a language café).
So, without further ado, let's get learnin'.
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