Technically, learning a new language should be easy. Babies do it all the time. But that takes too long. Tim Ferriss is a master at deconstructing learning processes. In his blog he says “Principles of cognitive neuroscience and time management can be applied to attain conversational fluency (here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months.”
He even writes here that you can indeed learn, but not master, any language in less than one hour. That’s what I am talking about!
Watch here as he describes how he suggests going about learning a new language.
ShaoLan Hsueh from Chineasy says, “When I began to teach my British born children Chinese, I realized just how difficult Chinese characters are for a native English speaker to learn. It was like torture for my kids! …I created my own method to learn how to read Chinese characters: Chineasy. And you know what? … Chineasy’s goal is to allow people to learn to read Chinese easily by recognising characters through simple illustrations. The magical power of the Chineasy method is that by learning one small set of building blocks, students can build many new words, characters, and phrases. Master a few sets of building blocks and your learning will accelerate to a whole new level.”
And she is right. I started her course a while back and found myself reading Chinese while in Chinatown. It was a big Eureka Effect for me.
Watch here as she describes her method of learning a new language.
But like so many things, other stuff gets in the way and my studies went by the wayside.
Although Tim and ShaoLan have the right ideas for sure, the one thing both fail to mention is that one of the first things most people learn when learning a new language is the dirty words. That is why these books are very helpful.
Learning the dirty words and phrases in a foreign language always makes me smile.
Read more about Tim Ferriss here and study Chineasy with ShaoLan Hsueh here.
Do you know a second language? How did you learn it? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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