5 things that will get you FLUENT in any language

A list of 5 activities that you can do in order to become FLUENT in any foreign language

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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Start
00:54 X-task to learn a language
02:24 Comprehensible Input
03:48 Fragment Your Language Brain
06:04 Language Leaners and Scuba Divers
07:46 It's Like Shadowing But Not
09:48 Eat Reps
11:20 You Should ALSO do THIS

5 things that you can start doing today to quickly become fluent in any foreign language you want to learn.

[stevencarr]

Children learning their native language often demand to hear the same story, time and time and time again. Bad news for grandparents who have to watch Peppa Pig 20 times, but good news for people wondering how children learn their native language, and if they can copy how children learn.

[mtalhed]

I started babysitting a seven year old recently, and she's so incredibly smart! I always marvel at her vocabulary, but then I remember when I was a little kid -- I read the same books over and over, every night (and my parents swear I never shut up 😂) The first night I babysat her, she got me to read her favourite book to her three times before she would go to sleep! Kids are so amazing, their brains are just simply incredible.

[j]

Yes, I do need to know why you call it scuba-diving.

[zomepeople]

Repetition does magic. As a kid, I was obsessed with the Lion King, and I watched it probably hundreds of times. Sometimes literally multiple times a day. Now, at 25 years old, and without having seen the movie in maybe 3 years at least, I can still recite the whole movie with maybe 80% accuracy, and I'm sure that if I was watching it, I'd get more like 95% of the dialogue correct. Has this helped me any way in my life? No. No it hasn't. But it proves that the brain remembers what it's been fed the most. Good video, really good tips!

[philipdavis]

I love the term ‘scuba diving’. I find audio while reading is very powerful in learning, and more importantly, stops you getting bad pronunciation habits from reading alone. With French I find that the written text encourages me to hear the subtle difference between words i thought were the same.

[kupferknochen]

1:36 "best guess as to how it's spelled"
*cries in Chinese*

[AldebaranTV]

I'm a polyglot who's been teaching people utterly unconventional methods for picking up languages. In the old days I experimented with watching instructive videos trying to discover new techniques. To, I have to say, absolutely no avail. Now YouTube forced me to watch this and it actually contains some original, useful, practical material. Wow! Tack så mycket!

[Sonya]

I know this is an old video, but I just wanted to let you know that I regularly come back to it, mostly to remind myself to just keep doing these things. In my totally biased opinion it's one of your best videos, if not the best.

[TheHappyLilly]

The was exactly the kind of language learning advice I needed. Every other creator in this sphere never *quite* got the right fitting advice where I'd go "Ah, I can do what they did" and it feel natural. All these five points? They're EXACTLY fitting to the kind of stuff I'd want to do, have done in some form and am excited to do. Thank you for putting them in such good terms, Lamont!

[jdprettynails]

I decided to try scuba diving using Le Petit Prince since that was the only physical book I had that had a free corresponding French audio for me to listen to. My book is in English though so I’m listening to the French audio while following along in English. I’ve found that it’s helping me pick up new vocabulary and other interesting things are happening.

For example, I got into a silly argument with my French friend because I greeted him in English “good evening” he replied “goodnight” in English. I laughed cause I thought he was being stupid on purpose but he started getting into the semantics of when evening becomes night…..

But it’s actually a language/cultural issue. I didn’t know that in French, it’s totally acceptable to greet someone with “good night”. My French friend just didn’t realise that in English, goodnight is never used at the start of a conversation.

Reading the words “good evening” but hearing “Bonne nuit” made me realise that.

[gaslight.gatekeep.girlboss]

The saturation one is so true. I'm currently learning italian and I've listened to the opera Don Giovanni so much I know it by heart. I can recite in my head the meaning in my native language, and that really helps me to get a clear view of how the grammar works, the vocabulary, etc. With english I had the same experience. I watched A Clockwork Orange so many times I also memorised it, and when I read the book in my native language, I could recite in my head the english translation. It's my favourite technique, and also it's probably the reason why I haven't had much luck with German, I haven't found something to obsess over lmao

[arnosen]

One thing I came across by accident because I was just trying to memorize something without any goal in mind, works wonderfully when it comes to target language improvement is the following: I first memorized a poem and then learned the author's interpretation and background, and after that I was able to speak fluently about the poem in my target language. Memorizing is not only good for practicing your pronunciation everywhere, since you can just recite the poem, but you also have an interesting topic of conversation with another native speaker, in this case a poem.

[sheromovavasilisa]

Great video!

For those who are going to try the copycat technique, I found sketch shows very useful. They are basically just dialogues and the emotions there are usually very usefully exaggerated.

[NomadicVegan]

Once again, Lamont busts out some real nuggets of language learning advice that I've never heard ANYWHERE before, and I've watched a lot of videos about language learning!

I've gotten really into "scuba diving" lately thanks to you, and I've also been repeating simple stories dozens of times in a language that I'm a beginner in (Amharic). That helped a ton.

Before that, I would only read each story three or four times before moving on, and my Amharic sessions always felt sooo hard, so sometimes I just wouldn't do them. Now I can enjoy the stories because I understand them really well, and I see myself improving every day. Gonna have to try scratching next!

[CoachAjBuck]

I love the idea of fragmenting your brain. I often listen to Arabic as I walk, and I agree it’s a useful learning tool. Great video.

[NewportSolar]

I have taken to “over cooking” audio using Pimsleur and Speakly.

They are perfect for this. Especially Pimsleur because I get to hear the target language over and over, with pauses for me to repeat, and explanations of everything.

Pimsleur is such a phenomenal tool.

I supplement with other things, but I am so impressed with Pimsleur.

It is BY FAR the best comprehensible input language tool on the market (that I’ve found so far).

[UltraVega]

When my 8 year old daughter and 6 year old son came to America from Japan last year, my daughter could speak English well enough, but my son couldn’t. I enrolled them in school and put them in the ESL program. In addition to this, they spent lots of time with their cousins talking, watching TV, playing the game, and watching YouTube videos. It was pure immersion. At first, they only spoke Japanese to one another. Then they eventually started to use both. Finally, they ended up just speaking to one another in English. My daughter improved to fluency very quickly since she already had a solid base, but my son. He learned to speak fluent English so quickly everybody was shocked. I know he’s a kid, but the process was incredible to watch. Back in Japan, they still speak to one another mostly in English.

[swerv]

Just want to say i'm always suprised on how much new information your videos bring to the table in the Language learning sphere :)

[GwynneM]

I find that even with character-based languages, reading along in a written/printed book with the audiobook playing is still a super helpful exercise!

[DNAppm]

Hi Lamont, I loved this one, too!
I have one small little tip for beginners who try to get their pronunciation sound right and be fluent: say you as a native English speaker try to learn German, Spanish, or Finnish - try to make a mock accent of them, a bit too over the top. How do native Germans, Mexicans, or Finns (or whatever your target language is) sound when they speak English. That is exactly the accent you should start from when learning these languages. Imitate, exaggerate, and have fun! (Needless to say: I don't recommend to be offensive, nobody likes that.)