Polyglot Explains How to Become Conversational in Any Language

in this video it's my goal to get you from having absolutely no language knowledge to becoming conversational as fast as possible hi I'm tiger and I've been learning languages for the last 10 years across three different languages and today I want to teach you my five-step approach to learning any language by the end of this video you'll know how to go from complete zero to getting reactions like this what the oh yeah sure learning a language isn't easy but if you take it seriously and stick with me until the end of this video I'll give

you the tools you need to succeed all right so in this video I'll be using Japanese Chinese and Korean as examples since that's what I'm most familiar with but what I teach you today can be applied to any language you're interested in learning what really matters is that you're putting in the consistent time and effort and are actually following the steps that I outlined in this video a lot of the advice that I give in this video won't be what you expect so make sure to watch all of the steps even if you're more advanced

but with that said let's get on to the first step which is learning the writing system depending on the language you're trying to learn you might have different challenges to face for example with Japanese you have three different alphabets to wrestle with in Korean you have PIM in combination pronunciation rules something like French might be spelling with many silent letters and with Chinese it's just like the whole language for example this word in French means bird and it's pronounced um what W wazo this is pronounced wazo like what anyway I'm putting the writing system first

because I do think it is definitely important but actually if your goal is to become conversational as fast as possible then you'll be getting diminishing returns from spending a lot of time on this step so my advice is actually something a lot of people won't tell you but in the beginning I'd recommend not spending too much time studying the writing system and just focus on learning the Bare Bones of what you need to know for example with Japanese just learn how to read romaji and hiragana and Katakana optionally for Chinese you should learn pinion since

learning the whole character writing system would take you like 10 years of course you can spend more time on these steps if you enjoy it but for me when I first start learning a new language I want to progress as fast as possible so I try to learn no more than necessary on the [Music] step I'm recommending learning to speak as fast as possible because to stay consistent and improve with the language I found that it's key to have fun with it and in my personal experience there's nothing more satisfying and motivating than getting to

use what you've learned with real people having real conversations once you get to the point of being able to speak with others maintenance and motivation become much easier in my experience and I think once you become more familiar with the language and are sure that you're interested in learning it it'll be easy to go back and learn more advanced things like kanji later but I do think it's important that you understand at least the basics of the writing system since this will help you take notes in the future and most researchers you find out there

online will use these principles to teach you I wouldn't spend more than a couple days for hongle or pinion and maybe a week or two for hiragana plus Katakana optionally and there's actually an extra bonus part of this step which I'll come back back to later but for now let's move on to the next step okay so once you understand how your target language is written at a basic level I would move on to grammar before you click off this video Just because you don't like grammar please hear me out trust me it's crucial if

you want to become fluent or even conversational in a language you need to be able to make sentences that you've never heard before you've never read anywhere before so being able to say what you want to say when you want to say it and how you want to say it if you want to do those things you're going to need grammar and it's not necessarily as intimidating as it might seem every time I start a new language I simply start by learning my self introduction by learning your self- introduction not only are you learning some

phrases that you absolutely will need to use when you're talking to others but you'll also learn many fundamental aspects of learning the language what's different about how I approach self- introductions is that I'm not just learning them to learn the phrase I'm looking to use the phrases in my self- introduction as a starting point for what grammar I should be learning in the language I'm going to get a bit detailed here and go through my process step by step because I want you to have clear actionable steps you can follow and not just some kind

of vague hand waving yeah learn something like this I guess for example let me show you what I would do if I was learning Japanese from scratch the first thing I would do is just look up something like how to say my name is in Japanese I would then look for a page that breaks down the meaning for each word like this you can see here that it clearly explains each part of the phrase uh we don't want something like this where it's just a bunch of words and then a fill-in the blank without any

explanation because if our goal is to become fluent or conversational in the language we should really try our best to understand how the language works and not just some set phrases once we have something like this where each part of the phrase is broken down we can then see that there are some things that we're not familiar with like in English we have this no thing here and we have this W and Des thing as well so we can just do some Google searching like what is no possessive particle in Japanese so it took me

like less than a minute to find a page here which explains the possession particle no in Japanese and soon after I found a page here that explains the W and Des combination for Japanese as well and from reading these two articles we can learn that the the particle no is basically the equivalent of apostrophe s in Japanese and from the second article we can learn that awes is the grammatical framework to say a is B so from just this one simple sentence we now have the tools to make hundreds of phrases like this [Music] or

look I hope I don't get copyright strike for that but the point I'm trying to make is that if you approach learning yourself introduction by breaking down each phrase into its individual Parts it'll be a lot more time efficient because you're not just learning one phrase but you're learning the framework for infinitely many phrases for example let's look at a more complicated but very common in everyday phrase so we can see right here that the sentence is using the no particle that we learned earlier and if we look right here at this section here we

can see that it's using both the W and Des form right here as well so those are both the grammars that we learned earlier and this W and Des is actually modifying this whole section right here so it's really important that you learn this no grammar here and also this W desk grammar here so using this method I would learn all the phrases for my self introduction learning all the different phrases additionally I'd learn the 6 W who what where when why how yeah sure that counts as a W2 so I learned how to ask

and answer questions in this format though I'll admit when going through Google sometimes it's hard to find articles that are explained well so if you're having a hard time finding an article that breaks down the grammar clearly I'd recommend putting the phrase into chat GPT and it can break down the sentence for you then from there you can look up the specifics about certain grammar points and just be careful the double check anything chat GPT says about the grammar because it can explain it completely wrong but it's good at pointing out what grammar exists within

the phrase and you can use that information to look up how the grammar Works using more reliable sources like grammar guides outside of AI you could also look into some beginner textbooks and legit just go through it cover to cover and by the time you finish you should have a decent grammar Foundation to start with when I was learning Chinese for example I went through the beginner hsk1 and hsk2 textbooks which only took about one or two weeks to get through and then I was ready to start talking with natives but I think the phrase

learning method is really good since it makes the task a lot less daunting and more fun and it's very easy to see like clear progress as you go I guess the summary of the step is just to be curious about what you're learning and try really to understand why and how the phrases you're learning work would okay so at this point you've learned the basics of the writing system and you've learned about the fundamental grammar so the next part of my Approach would be actually using what you've learned to practice speaking with natives this might

be one of the hardest steps for a lot of people but I also think it's the most important because I think that speaking really requires you to own the language so that you really understand it inside and out and can bend it to your will so to speak maybe it's kind of a hardcore way to start but if you're really serious about this and willing to do what it takes I can't recommend the Step Enough of course I think that in order to really learn a language it's important to approach it from all angles and

not just from speaking there's a place for listening and reading and writing of course but I think that speaking is one of the steps that is often put off the most and is one of the main things preventing people from getting to that next level in their language learning because doing language exchanges really can be scary and it requires a lot of courage and bravery similar to public speaking in my opinion for my first few years of learning Japanese I avoided speaking and it was honestly one of the biggest regrets I have in my language

learning journey and I didn't see any significant progress in Japanese until I decided to just try and start speaking with Japanese people and not worry about what other people thought or about making mistakes when it comes to language learning I know it can be really scary to make mistakes but I honestly think it's one of the fastest ways to improve so it's not a bad thing at all and it's just a natural part of the process of getting better so please don't let the fear of making mistakes prevent you from practicing speaking so once I

started to speak more often I combined that with the rest of the steps I'm going to tell you in this video and I found that I improveed quite quickly and consistently which led me to where I am today if there's nothing else you take away from this video it should be please try to practice speaking as soon as you can in terms of finding a language partner there are a lot of different apps out there so I can't recommend a specific one but you can do some research on what apps there are out there and

try one that might be a good fit for you they can be a really helpful resource because for example if you're learning Japanese they can get you in contact with a Japanese person who wants to learn English and this works for any language not just Japanese my only disclaimer is that you will be talking to strangers and some people might use the apps for things other than language learning so do be careful but the vast majority of people that I've met have been genuinely good people just interested in learning languages so I definitely think the

language exchange apps are worth giving a try if you're having a hard time with the apps there are also various Discord servers that you can use for finding language Partners as well once you found a partner you can try to talk with them using whatever knowledge you've learned so far you can give yourself an introduction and they might ask you some questions about yourself and you can do your best to answer them at this point comes a very important step sooner or later you're going to reach a point where you don't know how to say

something maybe you don't know the word and how to translate it from your native language to your target language or you know the words but you don't know the grammar to convey your feelings in the moment it might feel a little bit awkward at first but this is actually exactly what we want because once this happens you'll know exactly what you need to work on you can just ask your language exchange partner to tell you the word or how to say the whole phrase and they'll be happy to tell you I'd recommend asking them to

actually type it out for you so you have a chat log of all the different words and phrases you didn't know during the conversation I don't recommend asking natives to explain their own grammar cuz most don't understand it at all or they might teach you incorrectly so I'd recommend if you have a question about the grammar just tell them what you want to say and have them send you the whole sentence and that sentence will contain the grammar that you need to study and you can then use some more reliable resources like grammar guides to

help you and basically at the end of your conversation you'll have all these phrases you can work with and using what we learned in step two we can take each one of these phrases and learn a lot from each one yeah if you've done the step correctly by the time your language exchange is over you should have a chat log that looks like this and this will be exactly what you need for the next step once you've gathered a list of words and grammar from your language exchange the next step is to learn and memorize

them this is a great way to build your vocabulary especially in the intermediate stage because you'll be focusing only on words and phrases you've actually encountered in real conversations as you progress in your language learning textbooks tend to introduce vocabulary that you rarely use like postal stamps or international relations and yeah I've literally never had to use either of these words or many of the words that I learned in my textbook so even though learning vocabulary by going out and trying to talk to people might take a bit more time but I think it's worth

it because when you're trying to remember vocabulary it'll be a lot easier to stay motivated because you'll know that the words that you're learning are genuinely useful for memorization I highly recommend a flashcard app with space repetition space repetition is just a system where you review cards more frequently the worse you are at them there are plenty of flashcard apps out there and I'm not sponsored or anything but I've personally been using Anki since I first started learning languages I've never had any problems with it and it's done everything I need it to do so

it gets my recommendation on Android and on the web it's free but on iOS it does cost money so so long as your app has space repetition you could probably just use a different app that has a system and you should be fine so this brings me to my final step which is synthesis so this is like reviewing your flashcards double-checking and practicing any grammar you learned writing down any questions you might have for your language exchange partner next time you call and practicing pronunciation this leads me to my bonus tip from Step One my

tip is to get familiar with some of the pronunciation rules for your language for example in Korean some of the sounds might change depending on which characters are next to each other for example with constant assimilation in Korean a beginner might call this tal but it would actually be pronounced d with Japanese you have silent u sounds like in the word Des or ski and in Chinese you have tone Sandy which results in this not being pronounced as booya but instead it's pronounced as booya so certain rules like these would be good to learn in

the beginning so that you aren't forming bad habits for pronunciation which can be a real pain to unlearn in the future pronunciation is such a big topic that I'm planning to make a dedicated video for it so if you don't want to miss that when it comes out please consider subscribing but in terms of General review one of the struggles a lot of people have is finding ways to do it consistently a common way of doing this is reviewing your flashcards while you're doing something like commuting on the bus or you have some downtime and

I have a pro language tip that I can guarantee you'll probably not hear from anyone else one of the best times I've found to study flashcards is when you're on the toilet like if you think about it when you're on the toilet you're probably just scrolling through Instagram or Tik Tok or something so even if you're having a really busy day it's basically free time anyway that you're not doing anything so you can turn your downtime into productive time I'm not even kidding you on how many many days I would have missed reviewing my flash

cards if it was not for just doing them when I'm on the toilet but yeah I mean so long as you're able to review your flash cards and find something that works for you that's all that really matters I should mention however that writing and reading wasn't really a part of my focus with this method and I would just learn how to read naturally by texting with my language Partners but you can also absolutely supplement this method with writing and reading practice as well and as for listening I think that talking with natives was sufficient

for me but I would also occasionally watch anime or dramas to help with my listening too I don't think that you should prioritize watching shows when you have time to actually study or do language exchanges because I think 1 hour spent studying will provide you much more value than 1 hour just watching shows but if you're feeling tired at the end of the day and are going to watch something anyways I think watching something in your target language could be really helpful for maximum efficiency I'd recommend trying to watch something that is in a setting

in real life and preferably featuring characters that are around your same age or demographic so you can learn how they speak but yeah so with this method I would just repeat steps two to five and you should see consistent progress so long as you're keeping with it and I'd recommend trying to have language exchanges two to three times a week if possible I haven't seen this exact method covered anywhere before and it's just kind of something that I developed over time from trying out different methods to see what worked for me and what didn't so

I'm not sure if there's already a term for it but for future reference I'll call it the the the whis the wiscus winus method yeah or just maybe I'll call it the tiger method for now if you'd like to see my results with this method you can take a look at some of my other videos as well videos like these take a lot of work to make so if you feel that I provided you with value you please consider supporting me on patreon it really helps me out a ton special thanks to Weston H Vanessa

p c Spirited One Fen jamman mom blue sheep and John 748 for supporting this video