I love learning foreign languages.
In fact, I love it so much that I like to learn a new language every two years,
currently working on my eighth one.
When people find that out about me, they always ask me,
"How do you do that? What's your secret?"
And to be honest, 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 language after another.
They wanted to know the secret of polyglots,
people who speak a lot of languages.
And that made me wonder, too,
how do actually other polyglots do it?
What do we have in common?
And what is it that enables us
to learn languages so much faster than other people?
I decided to meet other people like me and find that out.
The best place to meet a lot of polyglots
is an event where hundreds of language lovers
meet in one place to practice their languages.
There are several such polyglot events organized all around the world,
and so I decided to go there
and ask polyglots about the methods that they use.
And so I met Benny from Ireland,
who told me that his method is to start speaking from day one.
He learns a few phrases from a travel phrasebook
and goes to meet native speakers and starts having conversations
with them right away.
He doesn't mind making even 200 mistakes a day,
because that's how he learns, based on the feedback.
And the best thing is, he doesn't even need to travel a lot today,
because you can easily have conversations with native speakers
from the comfort of your living room
using websites.
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, thank you, and 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.
(Laughter)
And soon he would start typing himself,
because he had so many of these conversations
that he 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.
If I asked a hundred different polyglots,
I heard a hundred different approaches to learning languages.
Everybody seems to have a unique way how they learn a language,
and yet we all come to the same result of speaking several languages fluently.
And as I was listening to these polyglots telling me about their methods,
it suddenly dawned on me:
the one thing we all have in common
is that we simply found ways how to enjoy the language-learning process.
All of these polyglots were talking about language learning
as if it was great fun.
You should have seen their faces
when they were showing me their colorful grammar charts
and their carefully handmade flash cards,
and their statistics about learning vocabulary using apps,
or even how they love to cook based on recipes in a foreign language.
All of them use different methods, but they always make sure it's something
that they personally enjoy.
I realized that this is actually how I learn languages myself.
When I was learning Spanish,
I was bored with the text in the textbook.
I mean, who wants to read about Jose
asking about the directions to the train station. Right?
I wanted to read Harry Potter instead,
because that was my favorite book as a child,
and I have read it many times.
So I got the Spanish translation of Harry Potter and started reading,
and sure enough, I didn't understand almost anything at the beginning,
but I kept on reading because I loved the book,
and by the end of the book, I was able to follow it almost without any problems.
And the same thing happened when I was learning German.
I decided to watch "Friends," my favorite sitcom, in German,
and again, at the beginning it was all just gibberish.
I didn't know where one word finished and another one started,
but I kept on watching every day because it's "Friends."
I can watch it in any language. I love it so much.
And after the second or third season,
seriously, the dialogue started to make sense.
I only realized this after meeting other polyglots.
We are no geniuses,
and we have no shortcut to learning languages.
We simply found ways how to enjoy the process,
how to turn language learning from a boring school subject
into a pleasant activity which you don't mind doing every day.
If you don't like writing words down on paper,
you can always type them in an app.
If you don't like listening to boring textbook material,
find interesting content on YouTube or in podcasts for any language.
If you're a more introverted person
and you can't imagine speaking to native speakers right away,
you can apply the message of self-talk.
You can talk to yourself in the comfort of your room,
describing your plans for the weekend, how your day has been,
or even take a random picture from your phone
and describe the picture to your imaginary friend.
This is how polyglots learn languages,
and the best news is, it's available to anyone
who is willing to take the learning into their own hands.
So meeting other polyglots helped me realize
that it is really crucial to find enjoyment
in the process of learning languages,
but also that joy in itself is not enough.
If you want to achieve fluency in a foreign language,
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 word for a test tomorrow,
the words will be stored in your short-term memory
and you'll forget them after a few days.