Getting Fluent In Italian In 6 Weeks (Weeks 1 & 2 : The 1000-Word Method)

is one of the questions i get most often is how to start learning a language from absolute zero this is a three-part video series detailing my process for reaching conversational fluency in italian in six weeks from scratch this is a language experiment and i'll be posting the videos as i go through this method week by week here i am on day one with absolutely no italian experience italiano pizza and here's a peek at day 14. [Music] i'm going to be 100 honest this method is intense compared to other language learning methods that i've used in

the past this method is by far the most unorthodox but it's turning out to be the most effective the goal is simple get extremely familiar with a fixed number of words and learn to use these words as masterfully as possible by exposing yourself to these same words every day for several weeks in the real context from my experience learning french and spanish i've learned one thing for sure when starting a new language spend a lot of time with a little vocabulary rather than spending a little time with a lot of vocabulary this method is built

on this premise alone here's the method step one i chose one italian video from youtube and memorized yes memorized the first 10 minutes of the video with the intention of making the script of this one video my entire italian vocabulary at least for now i looked up everywhere that i didn't know but i used an easy italian video so i didn't actually have to look up that many words step two once memorized i use this one video for my shadowing exercises and in the coming weeks i'll use it for my speaking exercises as well step

3 is mastering verb conjugations i didn't do this this week but next week i'll show you a method i developed to do this which is in my opinion significantly more intuitive than traditional approaches and finally step 4 start speaking to natives once all the words and phrases of this one piece of video content are mastered i plan on mastering italian with repetition alone no grammar studying no exercises devoted strictly to verb conjugation why because i have a theory that with enough input done correctly there's no need to actively study grammar or verb conjugation technically this

is more or less how we learned our native languages just not consciously or intentionally and nowhere near this intensely we repeatedly heard and imitated what other people said that's it second why why on earth would i memorize the entire script of the video trust me it's not that i think that memorizing a piece of italian content will make me fluent in italian far from it but remember the goal of this method is to become familiar with all the words in this video is humanly possible so i memorized the video for three reasons one memorizing is

a difficult task it heightens the level of attention that i have to pay to what i'm studying two the amount of repetition it took to successfully memorize 10 minutes of italian content was more than enough to allow me to master these words meanings and pronunciations and also to get very comfortable with italian grammar and sentence structure and three by memorizing re-watching and shadowing the same video daily i've given my mind hundreds of example sentences to pull from when i actually start speaking words phrases and sentences which by the end of this process i will have

heard and recited hundreds of times on a daily basis over several weeks to be honest i think one of the biggest hurdles for language learners is that we just simply don't spend enough time with the words in our vocabulary spend a lot of time with the little vocabulary rather than spending a little time with a lot of vocabulary you know i'm a fan of repetition our goal is to get this channel to 100 000 subscribers by the end of this six week challenge so please like subscribe and hit the notification bell if you want youtube

to show you more content like this here's how i handled the memorization there were four steps to my process for memorizing this video i broke the video down into 30 second sections and applied this process to each section step one i shout out the first 30 second section 10 times this is shadowing italiano interior examples play a few seconds of the video then pause it and try to repeat exactly what was said with the same pronunciation and accent the purpose of this was to get familiar with the overall meaning of the section in both english

and italian the video i chose was from the easy italian series so this was easy because these videos have subtitles in both english and italian oh by the way here's how i chose what video to use when starting a language from scratch you really only need to become rather fluent in a few areas like whatever field you work in and the things you like and don't like a vocabulary of just these things is enough to allow you to start having conversations with natives and over time you'll acquire fluency in several other areas so the video

i chose is called is italian difficult to learn because as a full-time language learner a huge number of the conversations that i have with other people are about how i learned whatever language it is that we're speaking in the same way i'll learn with just one piece of content at a time i also plan to build fluency in one area at a time this is also how choose the other pieces of content that i use for this method in the coming weeks things that i know will come up in conversation because they're relevant to my

life step two i set a timer and repeated each line of the thirty second section for one minute the purpose of this is extremely important the brain can only remember about seven different items at a time before it has to group these items in order to remember new items so repeating each line makes the brain see each line as a single item allowing me to memorize entire lines at a time rather than memorizing individual words repeating the lines so many times also drastically improved my pronunciation in accent after repeating each line for one minute i

went back and tried to recite every previous line that i had already covered so i wouldn't forget them step three after having repeated all the lines in the section for one minute with the process that i just described i started from the beginning of the section and recited as much of the section as i could remember when i didn't remember the next line i looked it up and restarted the section and recited what i could remember until i missed another line i did this until i could recite the entire 30 second section without stopping step

4 finally i recited the entire 30-second section 10 times from memory and then moved on to the next section and started this process from the beginning i maintained what i had already memorized by reciting everything that i had previously memorized at least five times before beginning the current date section i memorized the first 10 minutes of this video in 5 days i memorized 2 minutes a day every day except day 4 which was extremely challenging the guy who was speaking in this part of the video spoke particularly fast so there were a lot more words

to memorize in this section of this video than in prior sections on a normal day it took me about three hours to memorize two minutes of video but on day four it took me eight hours to memorize just one minute of video but i eventually but this meant that on day five i had to make up for the lost time by memorizing the remaining three minutes of video third why why use only one piece of video content reason one is convenience since all the words in my vocabulary are from the script of this one video

i'm able to study every single word in my italian vocabulary every single day just by watching and doing exercises with this one video that's extremely convenient and manageable i'll grow this vocabulary by repeating this process with additional videos in the coming weeks each time mastering all the words in the script of each video watching and doing exercises with each video daily will make the words of my vocabulary virtually impossible to forget reason 2 the power of repetition as you'd imagine i'd rather watch one italian video 100 times than watch 100 italian videos once each this

method is designed around mastering all the words in one piece of content at a time and growing your vocabulary by simply repeating this process with new pieces of content as you master the old ones and mastery comes by repetition in week one i spent more than eight hours a day doing exercises with just one piece of content i know what every single word and phrase means and in week two i did the same thing with a different kind of italian content one that i wrote myself in week two instead of memorizing another youtube video i

wrote about the subject that i named previously in this video travel hobbies career relationships etc these are popular conversation topics and my goal is to build a base vocabulary of about a thousand words that will allow me to start having conversations with natives in weeks three and four i wrote about these things in english translated them to italian using dbl and then memorized what i wrote each day with the same process i explained in week one this added another 400 unique words to my vocabulary leaving me with a solid mastery of just about a thousand

words the last thing i committed to memory was a list of several individual words related to people places things time and position that i've noticed facilitate basic conversation in any language this brought my italian vocabulary to a total of 1077 unique words once again memorizing italian content was for the sake of developing a very deep understanding of all the words and phrases that now make up my italian vocabulary in these first two weeks i've used repetition to build an italian vocabulary of over a thousand words i've drastically improved my italian pronunciation and accent and i've

become very familiar with italian grammar and sentence structure subconsciously from having repeated the same sentences so many times conversation was not my focus at all in these first two weeks but on day 14 for the sake of tracking my italian progress i got in front of my computer and did my favorite speaking exercise simply summarizing what i had learned from my italian experience so far remember this is my first attempt at speaking italian after two weeks of only listening and memorizing italian content weeks three and four will be talked full of live conversations with italian

natives as a real test but for now here's my current level and my first attempt at speaking italian italian pero [Music] in the next video i'll break down my verb method and show you how i'll expand the range of conversations that i'm able to have in italian please like and subscribe if this was helpful make the comments of this video a forum for language learners by asking and answering each other's questions i'll be active in the comments as well on the left is the video where i got fluent in french in 30 days and on

the right is the video where i got fluent in spanish in 44 days check them both out and i'll catch you next time the map now it's time to act out here we go