Editor’s note: This article was first published in April 2015, and the figures it gives for Luca Lampariello, aged 33 and speaking 11 languages, are from 2015.
Tim Ferriss was convinced that anyone can learn to speak any language fluently in 8 to 12 weeks, including the hardest ones such as Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. To do so, he said, you should skip the step of studying the language and go straight to speaking it.
Once you have a command of the language, you can then start studying its grammar. Doing it the other way round (the language-school method) is what makes it take years to master even the easier languages (English, Italian, French…).
(Read: Tim Ferriss’s best advice for business, career and life)
But who better to give advice on learning a language than Luca Lampariello, a 33-year-old Italian who speaks 11 languages perfectly, among them Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Polish, German and Hungarian.
Lampariello offers some very basic tips on how to speed up learning a second language:
1. Connect your life to the language.
Don’t isolate studying a language from the rest of your life. You are not learning a language in order to talk about language learning. Don’t make it boring or demotivating. If you want to learn English, start thinking in English and bring English into your everyday life.
Lampariello recommends switching your computer’s display language to English, watching films in English with English subtitles, and reading newspapers and magazines, listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos, all in English.
Whatever interests you or whatever you’d like to do, do it in English, and that way learning the language becomes automatic and inevitable.
This is the only way to get serious about learning a language, and the most effective and fastest. If there is another way, it is surely slower and less effective.
2. Connect with native speakers of the language.
As with learning any new skill, surrounding yourself with people who have already mastered it will speed up your learning. The best way to learn to speak English quickly is, without a doubt, to talk to native speakers. Visit places where English is spoken, and you don’t necessarily have to go to the UK. In Fuengirola, Nerja or Marbella, for example (towns on Spain’s Costa del Sol with large English-speaking communities), you will have the chance to hold your own in English with native speakers in many shops and bars.
Once you can hold a basic conversation in the language you are learning, find a group made up of native speakers that practises a hobby you enjoy: hiking, dancing, poker…
Remember that when it comes to languages, it’s all about constantly practising what you are learning. The more you use it, the less likely you are to forget it.
3. The imitation game.
The icing on the cake for anyone learning a language is having the accent of the language they are learning. That’s why Lampariello advises listening to native speakers and imitating their accent.
Think of yourself as an actor trying to get inside a character’s skin. Imitate the tones, expressions and voices of native speakers as precisely as you can. At first you will feel silly, but then you will get used to the sounds you aren’t accustomed to making.
Every language has its own characteristic accents, whether Italian or French. And every language has many regional accents (take Spain, for example). You could imitate a Basque, Andalusian or Madrid accent… and if we move on to the Spanish of South America, we would find very different expressions and accents. The imitation game is also a fun way to learn.
4. Daisy chain.
This is a pro tip for those willing to learn a third language. Once you have a good enough command of a second language to read, write and speak it, use it to learn the next one.
If someone has learned Spanish, then by learning Portuguese or Italian (languages very similar to each other) as a third language, they keep reinforcing the second language they learned. In many cases, according to Lampariello, it is easy to learn several languages at once when they share the same roots.
In any case, the process of learning a language is the same for every language, so the more languages you learn to speak, the more easily you will learn new ones.
Further reading
Featured image: Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
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