The Secrets of Learning a New Language Introduction People want to know the secret of learning a new language.

The Secrets of Learning a New Language
I love learning foreign languages. I love it so much that I learn a new language every two years, currently working on my eighth one. People always ask me, "How do you do that? What’s your secret?"’ And for many years, my answer would be, "I don’t know. I simply love learning languages." But people were never happy with that answer. They wanted to know why they are spending years trying to learn even one language, never achieving fluency, and here I come, learning one after another. They wanted to know the secret of polyglots, people who speak a lot of languages. And that made me wonder, too. What do polyglots have in common? And what enables us to learn languages faster than other people? I decided to find that out.
There are several polyglot events organized all around the world, where hundreds of language lovers gather together to practice their language. I went there to meet other polyglots and ask about the methods they use.
And so I met Benny from Ireland, who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one. He learns phrases from a travel phrasebook and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations with them. He doesn’t mind making even 200 mistakes a day, because that’s how he learns, based on the feedback.
I also met Lucas from Brazil who had a really interesting method to learn Russian. He simply added a hundred random Russian speakers on Skype as friends, and then he opened a chat window with one of them and wrote "Hi" in Russian. And the person replied, "Hi, how are you?" Lucas copied this and put it into a text window with another person, and the person replied, "I’m fine, thanks, how are you?" Lucas copied this back to the first person, and in this way, he had two strangers have a conversation with each other without knowing about it.
And soon he would start typing himself, because he had figured out how the Russian conversation usually starts. What an ingenious method, right?
And then I met polyglots who always start by imitating sounds of the language, and others who always learn the 500 most frequent words of the language, and yet others who always start by reading about the grammar. A hundred different polyglots would have a hundred different approaches. Everybody seems to have a unique way, and we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently.
And it suddenly dawned on me: the one thing we all have in common is that we simply found ways to enjoy the language-learning process. All of these polyglots were talking about language learning as if it was great fun.
I realized that this is actually how I learn languages myself. We are no geniuses and we have no shortcut to learning languages. We simply found ways to enjoy the process, to turn language learning from a boring school subject into a pleasant activity which you don’t mind doing every day.
So meeting other polyglots helped me realize that it is really crucial to find enjoyment in the language-learning process, but also that joy in itself is not enough. If you want to achieve fluency, you’ll also need to apply three more principles.
First of all, you’ll need effective methods. If you try to memorize a list of words for a test tomorrow, the words will be stored in your short-term memory and you’ll forget them after a few days. If you, however, want to keep words long term, you need to revise them in the course of a few days repeatedly using the so-called space repetition. You can use apps which are based on this system such as Anki or Memrise, or you can write lists of word in a notebook using the Goldlist method, which is also very popular with many polyglots.
The second principle to follow is to create a system in your learning. We’re all very busy and no one really has time to learn a language today. But we can create that time if we just plan a bit ahead, Waking up 15 minutes earlier than you normally do would be the perfect time to revise some vocabulary. Listening to a podcast on your way to work would be a great chance to get some listening experience. The important thing is to create a plan in the learning. If you create a system, you don’t need to find that extra time, because it will become a part of your everyday life.
And finally, if you want to learn a language fluently, you need also a bit of patience. It’s impossible to learn a language within two months, but it’s definitely possible to make a visible improvement in two months, if you learn in small chunks every day in a way that you enjoy. And there is nothing that motivates us more than our success.
I vividly remember the moment when I understood the first joke in German when watching "Friends". I was so motivated that I kept on watching that day two more episodes, and as I kept watching, I had more and more of those moments of understanding, these little victories, and step by step, I got to a level where I could use the language fluently to express anything. This is a wonderful feeling that I can’t get enough of, and that’s why I learn a language every two years.
So this is the whole polyglot secret. Find effective methods which you can use systematically over the period of some time in a way which you enjoy, and this is how polyglots learn languages within months, not years.
If you’ve also tried to learn a language and you gave up, thinking you don’t have the language talent, give it another try. Maybe you’re also just one enjoyable method away from learning that language fluently. Maybe you’re just one method away from becoming a polyglot.
Thank you.