How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) 660 Comments

Written by Tim Ferriss Topics: Filling the Void, Language

Deconstructing Arabic in 45 Minutes

Conversational Russian in 60 minutes?

This post is by request. How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I would argue less than an hour.

Here’s the reasoning…

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners…

So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

Consider a new language like a new sport.

There are certain physical prerequisites (height is an advantage in basketball), rules (a runner must touch the bases in baseball), and so on that determine if you can become proficient at all, and—if so—how long it will take.

Languages are no different. What are your tools, and how do they fit with the rules of your target?

If you’re a native Japanese speaker, respectively handicapped with a bit more than 20 phonemes in your language, some languages will seem near impossible. Picking a compatible language with similar sounds and word construction (like Spanish) instead of one with a buffet of new sounds you cannot distinguish (like Chinese) could make the difference between having meaningful conversations in 3 months instead of 3 years.

Let’s look at few of the methods I recently used to deconstructed Russian and Arabic to determine if I could reach fluency within a 3-month target time period. Both were done in an hour or less of conversation with native speakers sitting next to me on airplanes.

Six Lines of Gold

Here are a few questions that I apply from the outset. The simple versions come afterwards:

1. Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency? (look at SOV vs. SVO, as well as noun cases)

2. Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple time to fluency? (especially vowels)

3. How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere? (Will acquisition erase a previous language? Can I borrow structures without fatal interference like Portuguese after Spanish?)

4. All of which answer: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become functionally fluent?

It doesn’t take much to answer these questions. All you need are a few sentences translated from English into your target language.

Some of my favorites, with reasons, are below:

The apple is red.
It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.

These six sentences alone expose much of the language, and quite a few potential deal killers.

First, they help me to see if and how verbs are conjugated based on speaker (both according to gender and number). I’m also able to immediately identify an uber-pain in some languages: placement of indirect objects (John), direct objects (the apple), and their respective pronouns (him, it). I would follow these sentences with a few negations (“I don’t give…”) and different tenses to see if these are expressed as separate words (“bu” in Chinese as negation, for example) or verb changes (“-nai” or “-masen” in Japanese), the latter making a language much harder to crack.

Second, I’m looking at the fundamental sentence structure: is it subject-verb-object (SVO) like English and Chinese (“I eat the apple”), is it subject-object-verb (SOV) like Japanese (“I the apple eat”), or something else? If you’re a native English speaker, SOV will be harder than the familiar SVO, but once you pick one up (Korean grammar is almost identical to Japanese, and German has a lot of verb-at-the-end construction), your brain will be formatted for new SOV languages.

Third, the first three sentences expose if the language has much-dreaded noun cases. What are noun cases? In German, for example, “the” isn’t so simple. It might be der, das, die, dem, den and more depending on whether “the apple” is an object, indirect object, possessed by someone else, etc. Headaches galore. Russian is even worse. This is one of the reasons I continue to put it off.

All the above from just 6-10 sentences! Here are two more:

I must give it to him.
I want to give it to her.

These two are to see if auxiliary verbs exist, or if the end of the each verb changes. A good short-cut to independent learner status, when you no longer need a teacher to improve, is to learn conjugations for “helping” verbs like “to want,” “to need,” “to have to,” “should,” etc. In Spanish and many others, this allows you to express yourself with “I need/want/must/should” + the infinite of any verb. Learning the variations of a half dozen verbs gives you access to all verbs. This doesn’t help when someone else is speaking, but it does help get the training wheels off self-expression as quickly as possible.

If these auxiliaries are expressed as changes in the verb (often the case with Japanese) instead of separate words (Chinese, for example), you are in for a rough time in the beginning.

Sounds and Scripts

I ask my impromptu teacher to write down the translations twice: once in the proper native writing system (also called “script” or “orthography”), and again in English phonetics, or I’ll write down approximations or use IPA.

If possible, I will have them take me through their alphabet, giving me one example word for each consonant and vowel. Look hard for difficult vowels, which will take, in my experience, at least 10 times longer to master than any unfamiliar consonant or combination thereof (“tsu” in Japanese poses few problems, for example). Think Portuguese is just slower Spanish with a few different words? Think again. Spend an hour practicing the “open” vowels of Brazilian Portuguese. I recommend you get some ice for your mouth and throat first.

The Russian Phonetic Menu, and…

Reading Real Cyrillic 20 Minutes Later

Going through the characters of a language’s writing system is really only practical for languages that have at least one phonetic writing system of 50 or fewer sounds—Spanish, Russian, and Japanese would all be fine. Chinese fails since tones multiply variations of otherwise simple sounds, and it also fails miserably on phonetic systems. If you go after Mandarin, choose the somewhat uncommon GR over pinyin romanization if at all possible. It’s harder to learn at first, but I’ve never met a pinyin learner with tones even half as accurate as a decent GR user. Long story short, this is because tones are indicated by spelling in GR, not by diacritical marks above the syllables.

In all cases, treat language as sport.

Learn the rules first, determine if it’s worth the investment of time (will you, at best, become mediocre?), then focus on the training. Picking your target is often more important than your method.

[To be continued?]

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Is this helpful or just too dense? Would you like me to write more about this or other topics? Please let me know in the comments. Here’s something from Harvard Business School to play with in the meantime…

Other Popular Posts on this Blog:

How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise
From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks
Relax Like A Pro: 5 Steps to Hacking Your Sleep
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Odds and Ends:

Please help me break the Technorati 1000 today!
I’m around 1070 on Technorati’s rankings, and it’s killing me. Can those of you with blogs PULEEEEASE register your blogs with Technorati and find something interesting to link to on this 4HWW blog? It would really be a milestone for me and I’m so close! Just breaking 1000 would be enough. If you can find something to link to in the most popular posts or elsewhere, please do whatever you can in the next 24-36 hours! Thanks so much

Posted on November 7th, 2007

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660 Comments

Susan — November 7th, 2007, 8:43 am

I would love more language articles, I find this sort of stuff fascinating, and very useful in today’s world.
Reply
- Sanders — August 3rd, 2011, 4:45 am
  
  Learning is fun!
  
  The more ways or options you have to learn languages, the higher the chance is that you find a way that you like and this helps you to increase your speed of learning. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on how to learn a language, it increased my language learning skills.
  Reply
Garrett W. Hodgson » Learning a Language in Less Than an Hour? — November 7th, 2007, 8:54 am

[...] came across this article at Tim Ferris’s blog explaining how it is possible to learn any language in an hour or [...]
Lauren Muney — November 7th, 2007, 9:34 am

Yes, Tim, this is immensely helpful -but in my dealings with “most” people, they don’t have the attention span or even the brain-mapping to make these considerations. (Not meaning to generalize, either, but there seems to be generalities needed). You are talking about complex leaps in thought-processes which academic linguists make all the time; but not ‘normal people’, busy businesspeople, or even most travelers. (I was reading information on Euskara (Basque) this week for example, in preparation for a trip to Northern Spain in December.)

It’s fascinating that you offer these suggestions in your blog, which most people enter from reading about your 4-hour work week. I myself have been reading your blog since a client told me about reading your book. Granted, people with a 4-hour work wee often have more time on their hands that other businesspeople may not have – but these 4-hr people may not have the finely-tuned multiprocessing mind that you so obviously have. In short, your brain runs very hot and at extra speed. Congrats – but you may be a rarity

Back to the languages – I have just returned from almost 5 weeks in Shanghai, where I picked up a modicum of Chinese, probably a combination of Mandarin and Shanghainese and odd-assorted dialect pronunciations thrown in. I never fully got a handle on the language because its permutations were so vast – who was speaking what language? Laughably more, my international companions were often getting mixed up listening to other languages and trying to piece-out [English/American/Australian] dialects also. So meanwhile while I was trying to work out Chinese words and comprehension, the Chinese (and the other internationals) were off puzzling over our permutations of “English”. I have even spent the last week back here in the states getting some things translated into Chinese – weeding through Mandarin and Shanghainese idioms to recreate the feelings of the phrases.

Let’s just say that beyond sentence structure there is a lot of cultural comprehension, mind-multitasking, lingusitic scientific method as you describe – and LOTS of patience. Your brain works on overdrive, Tim, and at least there are a few of out there sometimes on the same page with you!

PS: Euskara (Basque) was so complicated that I’ll stick to Spanish while I’m there
Reply
- Rodney — April 22nd, 2011, 10:33 am
  
  Hi,
  
  I live in China, and have done for some years. I currently live in a small city of about 1 Million about 3 hours drive North East of Shanghai. The city is part of a bigger city. The bigger city, like this smaller city, has it’s own language. Both languages have similarities but they are not the same. Likewise in Shanghai; one area will have a similar language to that of another area but not the same. The phonemes will be different and the grammar too, but the meanings will be very similar. Those similar languages will be thousands of years old though affected by cultural changes, i.e. their basic structure will be as it was perhaps 1,000 or more years ago.
  
  A person native of Shanghai could master all of the Shanghai languages providing they heard them from early youth but if not they would not and would need an interpreter as is true of all local languages of the world. Putonghua is bridging language of which local variations exist for local bridging purposes such as in a big city as Shanghai or Beijing or the biggest of them all, Chongqing. In Shanghai the most common language will be Putonghua as the people speaking it will be non native residents of Shanghai as Chinese cities have a majority of non native residents. But, living in Shanghai one will find that the local Shanghai language is very common and many people trying to speak it creating even a greater number of local dialects. Such is true in any country.
  
  To really grasp Shanghainese you really need to go live there and find the common denominators of it, that is, the most common usages of it in a range of geographical locations. You won’t find that online, in a book or CD/DVD. I have found that to be true in the 4 large Chinese cities I have lived in; Qingdao, Zhengzhou, Shenhzhen, and Hong Kong, over 7 years.
  Reply
  - Tamil — June 4th, 2012, 9:10 am
    
    Hi Rodney,
    
    I like China too because, Jacki Chan is live there. I love chinees movie. I like your country. Have any idea to learn english quickly and clearly within 3 month.
    
    Advice,
    Reply
Jim Biancolo — November 7th, 2007, 9:38 am

Great post, I’d love to see more on the subject from you!
Reply
Jay Jackson — November 7th, 2007, 9:38 am

Tim, I like the language articles. You lead a very interesting and inspiring life, and I always appreciate your thoughts on things. I am creating a beer rating social networking website for craft beer. The new website launches about mid December. Once it does, I am going to be traveling and experiencing a lot more!! Check it out, Brewpot.com
Reply
Rolf F. Katzenberger — November 7th, 2007, 9:47 am

Very useful, Tim! Not at all “too dense”, I’d love to read about similar techniques for other aspects of learning.
Reply
Kevin Bedell — November 7th, 2007, 10:03 am

Tim –

I added you to my blogroll. I think that will give you a technorati bump. I linked to your site in a post last week where I mentioned the Low Information Diet.

I’m the guy you met at MIT who is working on a 2 year development project plan. We talked about Widgets and Facebook.

Breaking 1000 is great. I’m at about 17,000 right now, but I’ve only been launched for about 4-5 months so I feel pretty good about it.
Reply
Drasko — November 7th, 2007, 10:13 am

Hey Tim,

Awesome article and I would defiantly like to see more like this. Being that I can read Cyrillic (though I speak Serbian but not Russian) I can totally relate to how you suggested learning it. That would indeed be the best way.

Just as a side note, when is your PR teleconference going to be held? I know a previous post mentioned some time in min Nov. but you haven’t posted any updates for it? I haven’t gotten anything in my email either? Some updates would be great!

Drasko
Reply
Per Arne — November 7th, 2007, 10:14 am

Interesting piece! I’m a teacher of Norwegian as a foreign language, and am always interested in new ways of passing on language skills quickly and efficiently to a wide variety of students (I teach anyone from refugees to migrant workers to husbands/wives coming from abroad to Norway)…

As it is, I’m interested in learning Burmese myself, and will make use of your tips in “deconstructing” the language. Thanks!
Reply
Erik Cox — November 7th, 2007, 10:15 am

Tim,
Wow, I think this is the best post you have ever put up… Brilliant! I started learning Japanese earlier this year when a certain book came out PLEASE do continue this language series, your insights on language are awesome. Also, thanks for the link to myhappyplanet.com, I have been looking for just such a resource.

great work, thanks for the inspiration!

Erik
Reply
James — November 7th, 2007, 10:31 am

Great article. I’ll give it a try when I start raveling again. Looking forward also to your teleconference. Take the time to mention this article on my blog and in technorati.

James
http://www.marshalfirth.com
Reply
Chris Parandian — November 7th, 2007, 11:04 am

Tim,

I’ll add you to our blogroll…

As always, great stuff…

Chris
http://www.mobilediner.com/
Reply
Michal W. — November 7th, 2007, 11:09 am

Great post I’ll check out your methods. I’m from Poland myself, so I suppose that I should get a little bit different results (for instance Russian is quite similar to Polish). Anyway, I hope that I’ll manage to master English and gain some kind of fluency in Spanish and German
Reply
Zach Beauvais — November 7th, 2007, 11:14 am

Thanks for writing this, I found it very interesting. Having done a degree in applied linguistics in London, I felt the article rang true with some of what we were taught about language learning. It could be linked with personal learning styles and tactics for learning languages, I think, with even more success.

NB, I have also linked to the article from my (Technorati Listed) blog (http://www.zachbeauvais.com). Best of luck!!!
-Z
Reply
Nate — November 7th, 2007, 11:21 am

Tim,

Yea, the language learning is great, one of my passions as well! Perhaps you could do a post entirely about absorbing and learning Mandarin Chinese. And your take on what to learn 1st, speaking or character reading/writing or in conjunction with each other. Also, what do you feel are the best methods for being tutored and learning on a day to day basis. For example, do you prefer repetitious memorization of a few dozen loaded conversations or just a continuous flow of learning keeping in mind that you gradually absorb pieces of each sentence (such as the comics that you mentioned in an earlier post)?

Nevertheless, despite the method, probably the most important aspect to foriegn languages is simple a no-holds-barred trial and error with native speakers. You can’t let embarrasment of butchering pronunciation stop you from conversing.

Do you agree? Ni de zhongwen shuode hao bu hao?
Reply
- Rodney — April 22nd, 2011, 10:47 am
  
  Hi,
  
  It’s interesting how you refer to Han Yu as Mandarin Chinese. I live in China, am Australian and I speak some local dialects but mainly putonghua. In the 7 or so years I’ve been here I’ve not been able to find any Chinese speaking mandarin, they speak guo yu, han yu, zhong guo hua, and putonghua, and bendi hua, but not come across mandarin yet. The point I am making is that a name of a language is the name that the native users give it, that’s the name I suggest you should be using so that you can become familiar with it. To use names not derived from the target language would be contradictory to that language, would it not?
  Chinese here write Han zi, what we call simplified Chinese, but they call it Han zi, so until non Chinese start calling Han zi Han zi the Chinese, the majority Han, will not have a clue what you are talking about.
  
  Hope that helps in your adventure into the world of Zhong guo hua!
  Reply
  - Steven Wayne Lytle — May 19th, 2011, 10:52 am
    
    I must disagree. “Mandarin Chinese” is the English term for what he was describing, while the terms you offered (sans tones, BTW), are not English, and so aren’t appropriate for his purpose.
    English speakers know what Chinese characters are, but don’t know what hanzi are. Calling characters hanzi is confusing and unnecessary. Don’t mix languages.
    Reply
Matt — November 7th, 2007, 11:34 am

Tim,

This question is unrelated to the post.

When you try to contact “celebrities” in a field, do you leave a message with the gatekeeper if you’re unable to reach them or simply hang up and try again later?
Reply
Patick — November 7th, 2007, 11:56 am

This article was fascinating and I would love to see more like it. I have friends in and from brazil, yugoslavia, bosnia and several other countries. I would love to learn their languages so that I can converse with them in their fluent tongue and this article is going to be very helpful.
Reply
Alan — November 7th, 2007, 12:01 pm

Great article!

Indeed if you deconstruct a language, you can quickly get an idea on how it will be hard for you to learn it, according to other languages you speak, and the point is : The more languages you speak, the easier it will become to learn a new one, as you will eventually be familiar with most of the rules you will encounter in a new language.

E.g., if you know english, german and french, you will be able to pick-up easily any language from western europe : spanish, italian, dutch, finnish, swedish, danish, portuguese…

For me, the progression goes like this with a new language:
- you should be able to read after a few days
- speak it after a few weeks,
- write it after a few months
- understanding… that’s a whole debate… I think that’s the hardest, but apparently languages teachers think it is easier to understand than to speak…

I don’t agree… If you meet a native in a real situation, he will be able to understand you even if your sentences are broken… usually he will be even impressed that you can speak his language, so he will answer with his particular accent, his particular slang and languages specificities, and will probably be speaking way too fast for you to understand…

If you ever have some “tricks” to improve the “understanding” part, please post them, because the usual answer is “watch some news or listen to the radio in the native language”… I don’t believe it helps, and I see that the biggest obstacle when it comes to learn a language is the fact that you usually have almost no opportunity to face your language skill with a native speaker… Until you go to the country, and it’s when, despite your X years of learning, you feel that you can just speak like a 6 years old child! (i.e. you can only have basic conversations: “Hi, my name is Alan, I live in New York and I am hungry.”)
Reply
Jay Kelly — November 7th, 2007, 12:02 pm

More language stuff. Highly interested in what next steps are after deconstructing a language and deciding you want to learn it.
Reply
David Betz — November 7th, 2007, 12:15 pm

Awesome stuff, dude.

You use the same method in languages as I use in technologies, but I’ve never thought about using it for languages as well. I’m going to try that today.

I wrote a snippet on my own blog about this: http://www.netfxharmonics.com/2007/11/Accelerated-Language-Learning-Timothy-Ferris.aspx
Reply
Scott W — November 7th, 2007, 12:16 pm

Tim,
This is excellent info, definetly give us some more. I have highly enjoyed your diet and work out Colorado information. Thanks for taking your time. I have your book, I check your site every day. Great job.
Thanks,
Scott
Reply
Janice C Cartier — November 7th, 2007, 12:17 pm

Brilliant. Merci.
Reply
Lara — November 7th, 2007, 12:56 pm

Tim,
I have a question that has nothing to do with your language topic but I know you don’t check email so I’m exploiting the comments section a little, looking for an answer. : )

I read your book, I found my muse, I am about a third of the way through my To Do list to start the business, but my idea requires pre-purchasing a lot of merchandise and I know I’m going to need a loan to start it.

Your book doesn’t address the dreaded concept of banks, lending and writing a business plan in order to get a loan. I have read a few other “entrepreneurial” books looking for business plan templates, but the authors are the antithesis of the NR and I feel like I’m getting off track.

Do you have any resources for extraordinary BP templates? I have already downloaded everything in the Reader Resources, and searching in the Reader Forums brought back nothing.

P.S. You’ll be glad to hear I already quit my job at age 28 to take a 3 month mini-retirement in Europe last year and now I’m just starting to figure out what I want to do the rest of my life. Your book really helps.

Gracias / Danke / Merci / Spasiba / Arigato / Thanks
Lara
Reply
Tim Ferriss is a real inspiration - What Would Ellen Do? — November 7th, 2007, 1:22 pm

[...] blog at his website. Visit him and you’ll be as hooked on his wisdom as I am – his latest post gives some thoughts for how to learn a language in days (yes, [...]
Sean — November 7th, 2007, 1:39 pm

There’s a great site for learning languages and checking out transparency which is very important in picking a target. Here’s an example with Italian:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/similarities/italian/index.html

Italian shares 85% of its vocabulary with French and 80% with Spanish.

If you want language profiles, check out how popular languages are and their difficulty:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/index.html

If your first language is english (I’m guessing if you read this blog) then the closest ones to english to learn would be French, Italian, Spanish, Portugese, Norweigan, and Dutch in decending order.
Reply
Marcie — November 7th, 2007, 1:48 pm

I was here looking for a permalink to put on my blog – I just need to join technorati – glad to help!

~Marcie
Reply
Gerardo — November 7th, 2007, 2:09 pm

Keep it goin’, Timmy me boy!
I’m knee deep in learning German thanks to your teachings. I initially wanted to learn French, but am having an easier time picking up German. I’m already fluent in Spanish, so an extra language or two in my arsenal won’t hurt a bit!
Tri-lingual, baby!
Reply
Steven Dearholt — November 7th, 2007, 2:13 pm

This is extremely useful Tim. As I prepare for a huge life change I will soon find myself travelling from country to country with little time to seperate each place. This, along with the foreign mangas and foreign movies I should be able to get by in each country with 5-7 days practice on each language. Not to mention being completely surrounded by each language will be a huge help.

I was curious, where do you find your foreign manga for each language? Do you purchase the english version along with the foreign version?
Reply
Carlos — November 7th, 2007, 2:21 pm

Magnifico! As a native Spanish speaker, I find portuguese and Italian closely relative to Spanish and thus I can pick up words and sentences in conversations with considerable ease than other languages. Please more on this topic. By the way, will you be in Europe, say Amsterdam, this Thanksgiving?
Reply
Can You Learn (But Not Master) Any Programming Language in 1 Hour? — November 7th, 2007, 2:25 pm

[...] Ferriss has a fascinating post today about how he deconstructs any language to determine if it’s feasible to reach fluency in that [...]
Mike — November 7th, 2007, 2:31 pm

Fun article. I couldn’t help but find it funny that there is an error in the Arabic graphic that opens the post, though. Akalty would be you (fem.) ate, not I eat. Maybe that will get covered in hour two.

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LOL… some of the Arabic doesn’t correspond to the English next to it. Most of that is by design, but there could certainly be some mistakes in there. On to hour 2…

Tim
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Jeremy — November 7th, 2007, 4:06 pm

Great post, Tim! I’ve been reading your blog regularly after reading your book. As a fellow language enthusiast, I am fascinated by how linguistic comprehension seems to come out of exposure plus prior mental frameworks. Looks like your heading down the same path. I would love to read more about your approach.
Reply
Russ — November 7th, 2007, 4:20 pm

I was just wondering myself this week how difficult it would be to pull a “Loom of Language” rule-based approach for taking the idea that these languages are related, and converting them into an actual pedagogy.

This is a big step in that direction. Now if the experts can start building up fast courses from it… rather than the ass-backwards way languages are usually taught. My experiences with Hungarian, a language surely designed to fail your test for most English speakers, has definitely taught me that learning the rules is the best way forward.
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Garry Knight — November 7th, 2007, 5:02 pm

I wonder if you have heard of Michel Thomas who spoke several languages after having deconstructed them in a similar way to your own. He is no longer alive but his company still produces CDs. Though a little on the expensive side, they can really give one a great head start. For example, after listening to his 8-hour CD, I understood and could use just about all of the verb tenses.

I should add the usual disclaimer that I have nothing to do with Michel Thomas Language Centers, I just endorse the deconstruction process that you both use.
Reply
E. Griffin — November 7th, 2007, 5:13 pm

This is the type of post I love. I am a big fan of your approach to testing assumptions, pushing boundaries, and unconventional thinking and problem solving. Keep it coming!
Reply
Michel — November 7th, 2007, 5:33 pm

For Tim:

Saudações do Brasil.
Vou começar a estudar francês ano que vem e vou testar seu método para começar. Na verdade, eu prefiro dominar uns três idiomas (incluindo a língua materna) a saber como dizer “oi”, “tchau”, “táxi”, “me dá um hambúrguer” em vinte.
A não ser “na sua casa ou na minha” que eu sei dizer em várias línguas. Mas isso é uma questão de prioridades. :p

——————————————————-
For all:

Some thoughts about languages:
Monolingual people tend to think that there is an one-to-one correspondence between the words of two different languages.
You know “suck” means to hold something in your mouth and pull on it with your tongue and lips. The word for that in Portuguese is “chupar”.
But if you want to say that your job sucks, this verb (chupar) won’t help. So first thing is to dismiss this myth. Words have several meanings. These meanings are mapped differently by different languages. The Enuit have several ways of saying snow because they perceive different kinds of snow, they need these distinctions. We don’t have snow in Brazil (well, it is very rare), how many words do you think we need? One or two.
These things are kind of obvious but a lot of people don’t realize them.
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Michael Vanderdonk — November 7th, 2007, 5:52 pm

Good post Tim. I use a similar (but nowhere near as organised) method of language acquisition. In a nutshell, I learn the grammar first, as once I know the structure, words are easy.

And the other way I think about it, I don’t know all the words in English yet…

Enjoy,
Reply
Debra — November 7th, 2007, 7:08 pm

Nice strategy. I’d also throw in a question form there – say, “Where is the toilet?” – while you’re foraging for basics on the plane.

Oh, and though I linked you at http://japanscan.blogspot.com/ apparently Technorati has the hiccups at the moment.

Cheers!
Reply
marcia siegel — November 7th, 2007, 8:36 pm

hey tim, read your book. i am impressed. i am confused on drop shipping. where can i find drop shippers and how about ones that are legit.

any help would be greatly appreciated.
Reply
Ivan A. D'Mocracy — November 7th, 2007, 8:49 pm

Wow! Thanks. Unique and impressive approach: logical; manageable and even taxonomical for the mono-linguists among us (like me, {sigh!}). I crave to learn new language but am somewhat afraid to start. It gives me more confidence in approach to learning a new language. So sincerely, thanks.
And to answer your question:

Is this helpful or just too dense? Would you like me to write more about this or other topics?

… no, this is not too dense.But a suggestion, if I may: What would be awesome is to see you use this specific method and explain several languages in a very verbose fashion(i.e. one post each). After you have done your method, then have some respected, arm’s length educator(s) review, augment, amend, critique or whatever to provide even greater insight on learning that language.Hey, the Intertubes are about sharing ideas, and those of us wishing to learn a new language would appreciate it.
Reply
ryan — November 7th, 2007, 9:13 pm

i absolutely vote for more posts of this nature. i love learning languages, am always looking for new ways, and find this helpful. i spent 6 weeks intensively studying arabic at university of chicago, and we delved into esoteric grammatical rules, and at the end of the time, i had virtually no practical knowledge. i consider this method to be the exact opposite of that.

on a sidenote, have you read the language instinct, by steven pinker? a lot of your tips remind me of stuff i read in that book (which id reccommend if you havent).
Reply
Podcasting in the Year of the Dog » Playing With Sharp Objects — November 7th, 2007, 9:40 pm

[...] 2007-11-07: Check out this site on learning to speak languages…. http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07/how-to-learn-but-not-master-any-language-in-1-hour-p… Related [...]
Jenny Cornbleet — November 7th, 2007, 9:42 pm

Hi Tim,

Fascinating post! It will definitely help me choose which language to tackle next, or at least to help me know what I’m getting into. I would love more posts of this nature–not too dense at all.

One side note, though. I studied Sanskrit in college (not recommended according to 4hww principles). Learning a language that grammatically and semantically complex expanded the way I perceive the world, even though I never became close to “fluent”. There are more puns and multiple connotations possible in very dense languages, and pleasure results from learning just enough to experience that. So fluency might not be the only goal in learning how new languages work.

One question: how do you know when learning a similar language will be easy and when it will interfere? I learned Spanish and French at the same time in high school with no interference at all. Now that I’m older, I’m starting to mix up the two. I’d like to try Italian next–will this be easier or harder than learning a non-romance language?

Thanks again for the post!

Jenny Cornbleet
Reply
Carolena — November 7th, 2007, 9:51 pm

Hola Tim,
Saludos de una Venezolana que ahora vive en Tejas.
Si, esta informacion no es solamente practica, sino interesante. Me gustaria saber mas sobre tus ideas linguisticas y como pueden ser aplicadas en negociaciones internacionles (talvez este sistema no es practico para negocios?)

This is wonderful stuff! Thank you!
Cheers,
Carolena
Reply
Joe — November 7th, 2007, 10:08 pm

Tim,

Did you know that American Sign Language use SOV.

Joe
Reply
Tim Ferriss — November 7th, 2007, 10:28 pm

###

Hi All!

So many cool observations and questions. Let me try and answer/comment upon a few:

-Joe, I didn’t know that ASL uses SOV. That is too cool! Esperanto, anyone?

-Michel Thomas CDs are one of the few collections I recommend. Very, very good. The usual Pimsleur tend to be WAY too slow and repetitive for most brains. His CDs are Pimsleur on steroids.

-Celebs and gatekeepers. Make friends with gatekeepers. For many celebs and other high-profile folks, they make a lot of the decisions. Leave voicemail the first time, then wait a while before doing so again.

-Business plans for bank financing due to having to prepurchase lots of inventory. My rec’s: #1 – reconsider buying lots of inventory upfront and look at other business models that don’t require it. #2 – check out “guerrilla financing” http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Financing-Marketing-Bruce-Blechman/dp/0395522641/ref=sr_1_1/002-0498323-6621606?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194491939&sr=8-1,
#3 – get “The Entrepreneurial Venture” http://www.amazon.com/Guerrilla-Financing-Marketing-Bruce-Blechman/dp/0395522641/ref=sr_1_1/002-0498323-6621606?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194491939&sr=8-1

-Where to find foreign language manga? Amazon, Amazon in your target country, or find a friend in that city via Craigslist or whatever and beg

Hope that helps!

Tim
Reply
- Sandi — December 19th, 2010, 4:40 am
  
  Tim,
  
  I loved 4HWW and I absolutely love 4HB, although I have much more of it to read..I’ve just spent my first night actually reading your blog, and I don’t know why it took me so long to get here..;-)
  .Anyhow, for an excellent source of native language materials in another language, use eBay. I’ve picked up tons of foreign language material that way. Everything from children’s books (best for starting out in a more traditional style of learning, with easier grammar and vocab, although I would rethink that now!) to full length novels. If you enter the language you are looking for and “language” (eg. French language, German language, etc.), you are probably going to find something. Be warned, this will give you a lot of results, but if you cull through them, you’ll be sure to find some good resources for what you want. When you find a good seller, stick with them. I’ve had sellers throw in bonus books for being a good customer! (They seem to really like the fact that you are trying to learn their language, although this will obviously vary with sellers.) Also, if you have a favorite author, you can try looking for that author’s name plus ____ language (eg., Dan Brown French language). It may or may not work, but it’s worth a try. This is most helpful with international bestsellers such as the aforementioned author’s “The DaVinci Code,” as it was so widely printed.
  Reply
- Nigel — June 11th, 2011, 6:41 pm
  
  Over a decade ago I made a documentary for the BBC following Michel Thomas in the classroom. You can watch it here.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8jhy7ZQC38
  
  I was lucky enough to be taught by Michel as well. He was a remarkable man.
  Reply
  - Stephen — July 15th, 2011, 3:14 am
    
    Awesome, thanks for posting that link Nigel. I’ve been trying to find that documentary for a while now….
    Reply
- Jenn — June 12th, 2012, 4:55 am
  
  I was following up on the recommended reading in your response post to have it handy in case I hit these road bumps and realized the second link is a duplicate of the first and when I searched Amazon for the title you listed as “Action #3 – ‘The Entrepreneurial Venture’” Amazon can’t find anything. Do you have any other information on what you’re referring to by “The Entrepreneurial Venture?”
  Thanks in advance!
  Reply
Lara — November 7th, 2007, 10:32 pm

Thanks for the financing book links, Tim, I will keep you posted on how it all works out.

Lara
Reply
Jeff Galper 2.0 » Language — November 7th, 2007, 11:43 pm

[...] http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/11/07…; [...]
How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) - mycall et al — November 8th, 2007, 12:30 am

[...] deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners.article Published 07 November 2007 09:29 PM by [...]
Dameron Midgette — November 8th, 2007, 12:50 am

Loved the post!
I really enjoy the nuts and bolts stuff; it helps show me how you think as you approach things, and sparks my own experiments. That’s the biggest takeaway from your book so far for me: changing the way you act, perceive, and dream so that your life becomes what you wish it to be.
Method not working? CHANGE IT!

Cheers,
Dameron
Reply
Paul — November 8th, 2007, 1:08 am

Hey Tim, it might be helpful if you added a “Fav this blog” by technorati button if you want the lazy people to add it to their favorites.
Reply
Tim — November 8th, 2007, 2:01 am

Hi Tim,

I enjoyed your article, it is very true! 2 years ago I just sat down and broke apart the Korean language, and it was so easy from then on to learn it. Then after I went to Korea and the whole experience was amazing!

Last summer I went to China, but at that time I wasn’t as well prepared. I’ve found it more difficult to break down Mandarin Chinese, any advice or recommendations?

I have been using the Rosetta Stone software, I find it very helpful to keep me active at learning.

I think the main reason mandarin is so hard is because it does not have phoenetics like you mentioned in your article. I’ve used pinyin and understand that fine. But I still find the language more of a challenge.

Have you tried going to a foreign nation and testing out your knowledge? It is an amazing experience!

Thanks for the help
Reply
Dave — November 8th, 2007, 2:22 am

Not sure I fully understand the use or application of this. I mean, not sure this really buys you anything as you can get the same thing from the quick language section in a Fodor’s or Lonely Planet. Plus in order to deconstruct a language you need to know something about it, yea?
Reply
TS — November 8th, 2007, 2:26 am

Excellent article, I would love to see you write more (much more detailed) about this.
Reply
Jona — November 8th, 2007, 2:43 am

This is the first time I’ve seen language approached from anything other than a ‘wrote learn these words and phrases’. I’d love to hear more. I’ve been wanting to learn another lanugage.
Reply
Liene at Blue Orchid Designs — November 8th, 2007, 2:44 am

linked:
http://blueorchiddesigns.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-to-tie-perfect-tie.html
Reply
Alex — November 8th, 2007, 2:47 am

Bonjour

C’est un article trés intéressant, je vais essayer d’apprendre le cambodgien grâce à votre méthode.
Je vous tiens au courant !

Merci

Alex
Reply
Bumper — November 8th, 2007, 2:51 am

five minutes ago I was unable to understand english and now I can read and write and leave a comment on your blog, amazing, thank you !
Reply
shay — November 8th, 2007, 3:05 am

Hi.

Sorry to be a party-pooper, but I honestly don’t see the point of this post.

The process described above doesn’t talk about learning a language at all (as indicated by the title), but about learning which languages are close to languages you already know. Everyone knows some languages are similar than others – and naturally it takes more time for an English speaker to learn Chinese than to learn French. This is even admitted by the author in the text (“how long would it take to become functionally fluent”).

All this is nothing but the identification of several major grammatical traits (do cases exist, is the word order SVO or SOV), given the somewhat pompous name of “deconstruction” (which ignores the important meanings this term already has in the academic world).

So make no mistake – it’s possible to learn several interesting facts about a language in an hour, even some facts that would allow you to gauge how close a language is to your own (even though this info is usually already readily available), but learning a language in an hour like the title say Please…
Reply
kensan — November 8th, 2007, 3:09 am

Regarding GR vs Pinyin, I found at least one study online that concluded otherwise. “GR did not lead to significantly greater accuracy in tonal production. Indeed, the use of GR reflected slightly lower rates of tonal producation accuracy for native speakers of both American English and Japanese.”

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0026-7902(199722)81:22.0CO;2-R&size=SMALL

or just go to the wikipedia article on GR, and look at the rferences;-)
Reply
Robert — November 8th, 2007, 3:12 am

This is useful to a freakish extent! I’m a native American-English speaker and I’ve been trying to learn Dutch over the last few weeks, as well as master Spanish for the last 5 weeks. Your method worked very well and now I can safely say I’m conversationally fluent in Dutch! As for Spanish, which isn’t as relatable, I sat down with a Salvadoreño I know yesterday and we went over the pronunciations like you suggested. It helped greatly in learning to speak without an accent. That still doesn’t pass me with the Mexicans, who are certainly more populous in America than the Salvadorians, but it helps! Thanks a lot!
Reply
blaogin’i lapino » … rediredy fehizay … » Mianatra teny vaovao anatin’ny 1 ora monja — November 8th, 2007, 3:13 am

[...] Mba nanaitra kely ahy ihany, possible ve izany ? Manazava fikafika ilay article-na blaogy kely ity ahafahana manao an’izany : How to learn (but not master) any language in 1 hour ? [...]
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[...] C’est la faute à Internet ! ^_^ Ma dernière trouvaille : How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) [...]
yessuz — November 8th, 2007, 3:28 am

I am interested, would you be able to deconstruct Lithuanian language?
If you need any help with that I can try to help.
Reply
Michael — November 8th, 2007, 3:29 am

I like the idea behind your approach, but it seems to me you’re missing a few key factors. While deconstruaction is probably a necessary step in language learning, it shouldn’t form the basis of whether or not one learns a language. Your method does not address the issue of learner motivation, which I have found in my linguistic work to be very important. “I’m learning langauge X because it’s got the easiest rules” does not seem like it would be sufficient motivation to really get anywhere. It assumes that learning any language for a student is the same as learning any other language (from an application perspective). Furthermore, selecting a language based on it’s similarity to one’s native tongue seems contrary to the spirit of learning a language at all. If we’re setting the bar as low as possible, why not just rent a foreign film with subtitles, congratulate ourselves on being so worldly, and call it a day? Learning another language is one of the most difficult things a person can do; setting out to do so with a “minimal effort” mindset to me seems like bad idea.
Reply
yessuz — November 8th, 2007, 3:32 am

contect me if interested in Lithuanian
Reply
KE Mitchell — November 8th, 2007, 3:37 am

An hour seems a bit short (but, hey, it’s showbiz ), though i don’t disagree that common language teaching methods painfully under-emphasize what can be learned from a bit of linguistic deconstruction. Especially in languages with very synthetic morphologies, a bit of top-down can make the bottom-up so much more efficient. It’s blatant cruelty to omit it when it can do so much good. That’s been a big deal for me in Russian, and a big help in figuring out which English words are likely to be Spanish cognates.

Caveats: I know plenty of linguists who know all the trivia and little more. Also: listening?
Reply
Matt — November 8th, 2007, 3:40 am

I would have to say yes continue with the article was very inspirational .
Reply
Vítor Manuel Lucas Santos Lindegaard — November 8th, 2007, 3:50 am

It’s fine that you try to understand the challenge you’re about to face before starting to learn a language – or anything else, for that matter… –, and it’s fine that, if you realise that that challenge is too big, you just go into something else instead, but putting things the way you do is oversimplifying a bit…

First of all, not everybody – far from it – has linguistic knowledge enough to make the tests you suggest. Most of the people don’t have any idea what a case is, or even a direct or indirect object. But even people with more technical knowledge about language very often cannot suspect what the problems will be just by dealing with a few sentences – and the ones you choose are certainly not well designed to make you aware of the complexities of certain languages. Let’s take noun case as an example, since you talk about it: the sentences you propose will tell you if there is case declension only if that case declension is syntax-based, as in Russian or Latin, but what if the distinction is semantic, like in the so-called ergative languages? Even if you saw that the subject has different endings in, let’s imagine, “the soldiers fell” and “the soldiers fell upon their enemy”, you wouldn’t even probably understand why (or perhaps you would, but many other people wouldn’t…). But imagine that the problem is something that you don’t even know exists and these sentences don’t give you any clue about – a huge number of noun classes, for instance, or a fixed position in the sentence for some kinds of adverbs, or complex systems to mark time/mode/aspect/aktionsart, the list is endless… The same about phonetics: it’s not always the case that vowels are the problem. Sometimes, consonants are the problem and we can’t hear it, because we don’t recognize the relevant distinctive features – like difference between aspirated and non-aspirated occlusives, for instance…

Anyway, it’s good to try to be aware of what the problems will be, I repeat, but, as any language teacher knows, you don’t learn a language by being aware of its structure. Most of the learning process has little to do with awareness – although it cannot be bad to commit yourself and to study. Factors that can determine your success in language learning – or in specific parts of that learning, say, pronunciation – are far from any possible control – like age, which is one of the most important! Also other aspects of the learner’s background (like being used to learning languages, but also many others) can be of great importance. But not only: we don’t know exactly why, but some people are very fast at learning languages and some people don’t learn them at all – and my experience tells me that, in most of these extreme cases, the method used is completely irrelevant for success or the lack of it…

Another thing that, as someone refers in a comment to your text, you should take into account when determining how easy a language will be for you to learn is the amount of vocabulary that is similar to your language or one you speak well. One of the problems of learning Bahasa Indonesia for a normal English speaker – compared to learning French, for example – is to remember words that have nothing in common with the ones you already know, whereas 50% percent (or more) of the English words have some similarity to French ones; and, if I agree that too big a proximity between too languages can be a problem (like learning Danish after Norwegian, or vice-versa, or even simply learning Danish for a Norwegian native speaker), it is only a problem for speaking and writing properly: to know a very similar language is always a precious help to understand it and specially to read it.

Besides, most people do not (cannot!) choose if they want to invest on learning a new language and in which language they will invest based on some cost-benefit calculation. The reality in language learning is that most people learn languages they have not chosen to learn and for reasons beyond their control. Take the most obvious example – English. You do have to learn it nowadays, whether it is easy for you or not and whether you want it or not. You cannot simply decide that you’ll learn Chichewa instead….

By the way, there is nothing special about Brazilian Portuguese open vowels. They exist in most English dialects as well… What do you mean? Like in já, só e pé?
Reply
Metagg — November 8th, 2007, 4:01 am

Metagg is tracking this post…

Find out what Social News Sites are discussing this post over at metagg.com…
Dr. J. Robert M. — November 8th, 2007, 4:02 am

Tim~
What a great article, I know what I’ll be doing this weekend, thanks for the insight and advice! I added u to my favorites in TechnoRati and will (unless you object) list you as a ‘recomended Blog’ on my blogs (well the 3 of the 4 I keep updated)
~Dr. J. Robert M.
Reply
Iem?c?ties valodu at Sapnis — November 8th, 2007, 4:07 am

[...] interesanti padomi tiem kas v?las iem?c?ties jebk?du valodu. Tiek pielietots tas ko pats izmantoju – valodas [...]
Dave — November 8th, 2007, 4:12 am

Tim,
Excellent article, and I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who is fascinated by other languages. I’d like to think that I’m illiterate in French, German, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, Tagalog, and of course, English. I wish I’d had this article when I first moved to Japan 2.5 years ago…

More Please!
Reply
David — November 8th, 2007, 4:15 am

Hi Tim,

I think a lot of people would very much like to see larger images of the samples you have shown. It sounds all very well that you’ve deconstructed a language on one sheet of paper, but I can’t for the life of me make out anything you’ve done, so you can imagine it sounds very skeptical.

More personally, as a Japanese language learner for a few years now, I would be interested in how you’ve done the same for that language. I’ve been told that my grammar and pronunciation are superb, but my vocabulary is highly lacking and it seems like your method of deconstruction arrives at a similar situation. Hard to tell without some details
Reply
Dave — November 8th, 2007, 4:17 am

Very interesting read. I’ve been giving my own students a subset of these rules for choosing questions in exams for years, but I think it’s of limited use to anyone not looking to learn a language just for the hell of learning a new language. Then again, over here in continental Europe, English is so compelling as a second language that such considerations are largely insignificant.

What’s more, you’ll almost certainly end up better in a language you have a larger cultural interest/investment in, anyway, regardless of how tricky or weird it is.
Reply
Dagens länkar 2007-11-08 « Systemkollaps — November 8th, 2007, 4:33 am

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[...] Check out Tim Ferriss’s blog on how to learn a new language quickly. [...]
Dangelo — November 8th, 2007, 4:57 am

Good, I like.
Reply
Cubelogic Improv » Decostruzione di un linguaggio — November 8th, 2007, 5:12 am

[...] fantastico articolo!! Su alcuni metodi avevo ragionato anch’io per conto mio, ma l’approccio [...]
Ettore Pasquini — November 8th, 2007, 5:26 am

Hi Tim, thanks for the amazing article. Please continue with this stuff! It’s extremely interesting. I’m Italian, living in the US, and my inlaws are chinese (cantonese). I want to learn cantonese for a long time now, but I’ve always been discouraged. Your article instilled new hope! Do you have any specific insights about cantonese?
Please write more – it’s not dense at all, it’s awesome. Grazie mille!!
Reply
Matt — November 8th, 2007, 5:31 am

“You can merge this with the above comment if you want”

Just thought of this after commenting. Would you be able to show your notes on each of the languages you have deconstructed. Similar to the pictures you have posted just plus the others as well.

Matt
Reply
10″ de atenção antes de trabalhar - Os links de 8/11 « .: The worst kind of thief :. — November 8th, 2007, 5:39 am

[...] Aprender uma língua em 2 horas. Ou o seu dinheiro de volta. [...]
karolis — November 8th, 2007, 5:47 am

Hey,

I have to say this is interesting article and what is more, I think everyone can do that. For example in Lithuania everyone speaks three languages and it is matter of few months to learn new one. But I don’t agree that it is very easy to understand new grammar or spoken language. Technically – Yes it easy, but in reality You will face with problems like dozens and hundreds of exceptions in grammar and speech…

Good luck doing wonderful job!

(
Labas,
Turiu pasakyti, kad šis straipsnis yra ?domus, manau kiekvienas tai gali padaryti. Pavyzdžiui Lietuvoje kiekvienas šneka trimis kalbomis ir išmokti nauj? kalb? yra keli? m?nesi? reikalas. Bet aš nesutinku, kad nauj? gramatik? ar šnekamaj? kalb? suprasti yra labai lengva. Techniškai – Taip, bet realyb?je susidursi su problemomis kaip tuzinai ir šimtai gramatikos ir kalbos išim?i?…

S?km?s darant nuostab? darb?!
)
Reply
Lior Gradstein — November 8th, 2007, 5:52 am

There are some languages that are totally different. Basque and Japanese,to name a few. You suppose that all languages have structures including subjects, verbs and objects which is wrong (but mostly right for 80% of languages).

For example, Japanese’s structure is not as simple as you state (it is not SOV). The closest (but right) you could state would be V.
Other langugages have totally different meanings (because of their culture and beliefs). For example, hebrew (biblical) has a very particular notion of time (in fact it is not organized as past, present or futur, but as “to be done”, and “has been done”).

So your analysis only works with very similar languages.
Reply
??????? ?????????????? » ??? ?? ?????? ??? ???? ?????? ?? ??? ??? — November 8th, 2007, 5:55 am

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Harald Felgner — November 8th, 2007, 5:56 am

Sounds like a great approach to learning a second language but quite different from the methods used in our schools today. Time for a change?

And is it that maybe bilingually raised children subconsciously use that sort of deconstruction approach? It is said that they are much better at acquiring fluency in a third language.

[To be continued?] Please!
Reply
Kitten Lulu » Blog Archive » » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) — November 8th, 2007, 6:18 am

[...] » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) [...]
Kakcoo — November 8th, 2007, 6:47 am

Dette er en interessant studieteknikk. Takk

Think I’ll bookmark it for later.
Reply
Mike Curtis — November 8th, 2007, 6:56 am

This 4 hour work wee sounds worrying!!
I suggest you drink less coffee …

In the UK, we are told at school that Spanish is really close to English and that, by learning French, languages romance like Spanish become easier to learn. And I think that overlaps with some of what you are saying.
I come from a ‘memory techniques’ background and so I am always interested to hear about ways of learning languages quicker.
http://www.nakedscience.com/articles/foreign language.htm
Reply
Jef Maion — November 8th, 2007, 7:05 am

Very interesting post, Tim. I just hope I won’t ever sit next to you in a plane

Kidding aside, a key thing you did not mention are exceptions.

For example: I have studied both Turkish and Finnish. They share similiar construction logic, grammatic rules and have similar pronounciation. Finnish is much more difficult to learn because they are so many exceptions.

Of course, this is important mostly if you intend to be fluent (i.e. not to sound like a monkey or make the sames mistakes as a 3-year old). Then if your objective is “just” to be able to have a conversation, you might chose different targets.

The initial learning curve is steep for some languages and easier after a while (e.g. for Westerners: Turkish, German, French?), while for others, it is easy to learn the basics but very difficult to speak really well (English, Spanish or other Latin languages when you already know one). Then of course, some have a steep curve all the way (Finnish)…
Reply
s — November 8th, 2007, 7:49 am

Strange that no one noticed that this does not, in fact, describe how to “learn” anything, but it simply a way to filter which languages you should be considering…
Reply
Katrineholm Review — November 8th, 2007, 7:57 am

Please deconstruct Swedish next and post your results. Swedish is a difficult language for many. Tack! (That’s thanks in Swedish
Reply
Vaughan — November 8th, 2007, 8:06 am

Yeah, keep them coming, great stuff
Reply
nabin — November 8th, 2007, 8:10 am

Nice!
Stumbled!
Reply
Maurizio — November 8th, 2007, 8:13 am

great tips, man! i’ll wait the next post.
Reply
Sean — November 8th, 2007, 8:32 am

This, for me, has been your most beneficial post, hands down. I’ve been learning Mandarin since April. It’s nice to see language learning from a different perspective. Thanks Tim, and keep the language posts coming.
Reply
Dudeman — November 8th, 2007, 8:42 am

“Second, I’m looking at the fundamental sentence structure: is it subject-verb-object (SOV) like English and Chinese”

^^^ make sure to fix this “subject-verb-object (SOV)” to ‘(SVO)’^^^

Good times.
Reply
Ravi Vora — November 8th, 2007, 8:57 am

Nice article. Not sure it’s as definitive as it could be, so a follow-up might be a good idea.

I would recommend more examples or possibly going through one language as a simple reference.
Reply
Chris — November 8th, 2007, 10:11 am

This technique sounds very promising. I think I’ll try it out when I start learning Hebrew.

And your thesis sounds really interesting, actually. Any way you could provide us with a way to read that?
Reply
Hills — November 8th, 2007, 10:11 am

This is fascinating stuff, if a little hard to digest – I’d LOVE to speak Spanish, Italian and French – not necessarily in that order but probably. Are there any suggestions as to the easiest and quickest way (apart from moving there) to learn languages? Or indeed a suggestion for a fantastic course?
Reply
This is my pizza » Blog Archive » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour — November 8th, 2007, 10:24 am

[...] Unlocked to learning new languagesread more | digg [...]
Mike — November 8th, 2007, 10:33 am

In the following line, shouldn’t it read “(SVO)” instead of “(SOV)”?

“Second, I’m looking at the fundamental sentence structure: is it subject-verb-object (SOV)”
Reply
Paddy — November 8th, 2007, 10:36 am

Tim,

Excellent article.

I am a non-linguist learning Irish and I am watching my children (8 and 5) learn Hebrew with my wife. My children are also keen to learn Irish so, all in all, language acquisition strategies are very close to my heart.

As a matter of curiosity how did you find learning Irish and do you, or indeed anybody else, have a take on how easy or hard Hebrew is to learn compared to other languages?

Another question: would a moderately bright child learning Irish side-by-side with Hebrew be a mistake or a good thing?

Keep up the good work.
Reply
Steve — November 8th, 2007, 10:39 am

Excellent, yes I will read it if you write more!
Reply
Katie — November 8th, 2007, 10:44 am

Would you be willing to do an article per language? Like a series of sorts. Ive always wanted to learn Japanese, I know it a bit, but not enough to have a conversation. It would be really interesting to see how you came up with your system to learn it. I tried the Rosetta Stone program, but its awful.
Reply
cinderella13 — November 8th, 2007, 10:52 am

I’d love to see the notes you had on Russian. I have been thinking about learning it enough to carry a conversation. This method is fascinating. Thanks for the post!
Reply
q — November 8th, 2007, 10:56 am

Great post. My only problem is that I can’t even deconstruct my primary language, English, with such detail. I think a post explaining the deconstruction of the English sentences with examples and comparison of the same for a few different languages, like at least a similar and a very different, would be a great learning experience, at least for me.
Thanks
Reply
franklin — November 8th, 2007, 11:05 am

awesome blog, really dug it mang…actually it game me a lot of hope and drive to continue pursuing one of my dreams; To speak, or at least understand, Japanese.
Is it at all possible for you to post your deconstruction of Japanese, I don’t have anyone to ask the favor, so i figure i ask you. If you, do that would be great.

thanks either way
Reply
How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) « psxtavi — November 8th, 2007, 11:12 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) Filed under: cool — psxtavi @ 6:12 pm How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) [...]
mbourgon — November 8th, 2007, 11:16 am

Tim, any way to get copies of your notes for Cyrillic?
Reply
Paul — November 8th, 2007, 11:52 am

Excellent article. I’m one for learning as many languages as I can, even for just conversation purposes because my career could be overwhelmingly boosted with a few fluent languages.
Thanks for the post and please do continue with this subject!
Reply
Sonicsuns — November 8th, 2007, 11:53 am

Wait…so your advice for “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour” amounts to…choose an easy language?

That’s basically what I’m reading out of this. You’re saying that I should consider my own strengths and weaknesses, consider the various languages I might study, and choose the easiest.

What if I don’t want the easiest? What if I want to learn Chinese or Japanese, because I’m interested in those cultures? How does your deconstructing technique speed up the learning process? How much vocabulary can I possibly memorize in 60 minutes?

That’s another thing. Under one picture it says “Conversational Russian in 60 minutes?”. But later you imply that meaningful speech takes 2-12 months.

So really, this is not how to *learn* a language in 1 hour, but rather how to *analyze* a language in 1 hour, to determine how long it will take to achieve fluency. That’s useful, I guess. But what I really want is a method of *learning*.
Reply
Christian Knott — November 8th, 2007, 12:03 pm

Technorati: Done.
Learning the art of shameless self promotion: In progress: i.e. my blog is Blink Of the Day at http://blinkoftheday.blogspot.com

Love the blog (your’s and mine).
Reply
Grong — November 8th, 2007, 12:04 pm

Hej Tim,

zanimljiv clanak. Ako znas ruski, mozda uspijes razumjeti
Reply
Jon Hinson — November 8th, 2007, 12:08 pm

Hi Tim,

Great post! Can you post your thesis or any other writings you have on learning Japanese?

Thanks,
Jon
Reply
Che Carsner — November 8th, 2007, 12:09 pm

Tim,

Would you be willing to break down a full example, and show your work so us laymen might have a better chance of understanding? I think I get it, but I’m certain I couldn’t reproduce what you’ve done without a full example.

C
Reply
spudz.org » Post Topic » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) — November 8th, 2007, 12:12 pm

[...] linky dink [...]
Wendell Raphael — November 8th, 2007, 12:20 pm

Hey, Tim!

I’ll tranlate your article to portuguese and I’ll posting on my blog, ok? My blog (tradutorium.wordpress.com) is focused in translate the best Digg posts to portuguese, and your is very cool!
Reply
Weltenkreuzer » Blog Archive » Sprachen lernen leicht gemacht? — November 8th, 2007, 12:50 pm

[...] Blog eine Methode vor, wie man eine Sprache innerhalb kurzer Zeit relativ gut beherrschen kann: How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. Im Mittelpunkt stehen dabei einige wenige einfache Sätze, deren Übersetzung in die gewünschte [...]
Bored Mind » Blog Archive » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour — November 8th, 2007, 1:00 pm

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 HourBefore you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it. During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners. [...]
Jonathon Zone » Blog Archive » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour — November 8th, 2007, 1:14 pm

[...] Unlocked to learning new languagesread more | digg [...]
walking towel by Shawn Dowler » Blog Archive » So, You Want to Learn a Language? — November 8th, 2007, 1:18 pm

[...] first step in learning a new language: deconstruction. He claims that the fastest language learners deconstruct the language they want to learn before they start memorizing lists of vocab words. His reasoning is that for [...]
The other tim — November 8th, 2007, 1:19 pm

Hey Tim, — I liked your article. Check this site out as well. His courses are helpful and cheap.
Reply
Dave L — November 8th, 2007, 1:22 pm

I would love to have more language learning info. Looking to learn German myself.
Reply
Doug — November 8th, 2007, 1:25 pm

that was a pretty insightful article, i am trying to learn Japanese some-what on my own could you e-mail me what you have broken down yourself?

–Thanks
Reply
luke — November 8th, 2007, 1:33 pm

wow! i just started studying language at university and what you wrote catapulted me like into next year’s matters.

thanks
Reply
no — November 8th, 2007, 1:35 pm

I’ve never gone out of my way to learn another language, though I’ve picked things up here and there. For me, it’s an issue of investment and return. If I know that I will spend my career dealing with Japanese speaking people, living in Japan or otherwise indulging in their culture, then the strong return on the time and effort invested in learning the Japanese language would be a necessity.

On the other hand, learning Spanish, French, German or other languages over a period of four years in high school (a pre-requisite for college acceptance, usually) and then more years in college just so I can speak the language for the six days of my life that I actually spend in one of those countries or for the rare occasion where I meet someone who speaks that language and I want to show off (all four times in my life), then that is a terrible allocation of resources.

Most people in the world that you will ever deal with can speak English. Especially in the professional world. If you’re visiting somewhere, it doesn’t hurt to pick up a few things, but unless you’re going to spend months or years in another country, it’s another waste of energy.

So if you have a specific obligation or situation that would necessitate the investment of your time and effort to learn a specific language for a specific purpose – great. Otherwise, it just seems like a lot of masturbation so that you can tell people “I speak four languages”.
Reply
David Ross — November 8th, 2007, 1:43 pm

Absolutely – this is very much why I read your book, your blog, and think you’re a hero for the modern age – you’re maximizing time and turning what was impossible into the possible.

Learn to speak a different language in an hour – holy sh*t!!! I’m definitely interested in detailed step by step clarity that’s in your books.

The integrity, credibility, and consistency you’ve built will mean that this is truly possible.

-Dave Ross
NYC
Reply
Jeff — November 8th, 2007, 1:43 pm

Tim,

Your method sounds similar to that used by the 19th century explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton (no relation to the actor). In his book “The Devil Drives,” he describes his method of deconstructing languages. From what I recall, he was fluent in 29 and passable in 72. Burton was the first Westerner in the forbidden city of Mecca, translator of 1001 Nights, discoverer of lakes in Africa among other achievements. I recommend his book to you if you want to compare methods.
Reply
Evelyn — November 8th, 2007, 1:45 pm

Hi Tim,

This post is very good. Any suggestions about reading Chinese characters?

When I found out the Mandarin word for cat was ‘mao1′ I laughed and laughed, because my cat says that all the time

Also, mother being ma1ma. Coincidence? Also, that the character is a woman and a horse together, i.e. a woman that does the job of a horse…another coincidence?

FOr languages where it makes sense, learn the conjugations of ‘to be’ and the gerund of everything else…so you don’t have to say, ‘I go, he goes, they go’, but ‘I am going, he is going, they are going’, plus ‘I will be going, I was going, I must be going’ etc. My husband was studying (see, there it is again) Italian and struggling with the verb conjugations, I suggested he just learn the gerunds. He mentioned it to his instructor the last day of class, who agreed it would work but said, ‘but we want you to learn the language properly’.

I lived in Italy for six months and could get through whole days with nothing more than ‘Prego, dai, forza ragazzi, basta cosi’. And not just for sex either.

In Argentina, I’ve learned not to ask for a taxi by saying ‘Donde puedo coher un taxi’ because the reply (with much smirking) will be ‘para el tubo’.

Anyway, I’d be interested to hear from native speakers which languanges the gerund shortcut works for.
Reply
ajadoniz — November 8th, 2007, 1:45 pm

I learned Spanish and English simultaneously as I was growing up. Those two have given me a good base to go on and learn French and then Portuguese. I want to learn Arabic and Japanese next. I really enjoyed the article. I want more.
Reply
cinderella13 — November 8th, 2007, 1:49 pm

It’s funny I came across this today. Great post! I was thinking of learning Russian. I’ve been browsing through music and sites but this is helpful. If you have better images of your notes, I’d love to see a copy. Thanks again!
Reply
Tina Su — November 8th, 2007, 2:04 pm

What a great idea. I really enjoy the content of your blog. Keep up the awesome work.

Love & Gratitude,
Tina
Think Simple. Be Decisive.
~ Productivity, Motivation & Happine
Reply
Giulio — November 8th, 2007, 2:21 pm

please continue. I’m fascinated by your idea, I would like to learn how to learn new languages. I speak fluently Italian, Spanish and English and I would like to go for Germanic, Arabic and Chinese.

keep on writing, please
Good work
Giulio
Reply
Alex — November 8th, 2007, 2:44 pm

You may want to add Hungarian at the top of the list where Russian and German are. Ridiculously complex language from what I hear, though sounds similar to Finnish.
Reply
g-bot — November 8th, 2007, 4:32 pm

Please, more language articles. This was great.
Reply
Martin Bemberg — November 8th, 2007, 4:39 pm

Please keep writing about language. I enjoyed this article very much.
Reply
n0d3.org » Blog Archive » Learn Languages Fast. — November 8th, 2007, 4:44 pm

[...] Here’s a great article on language acquisition. While I’m a bit of a convert to the Pimsleur “no grammar” method, I do like Timothy’s quick teardown technique for languages. Can’t hurt. And if you don’t have the audio resources on hand or find yourself in a situation where language acquisition is unexpectedly required, I think his approach would come in handy. [...]
ozraven — November 8th, 2007, 4:45 pm

This approach is intriguing. It would be very handy if you had the time to post your deconstructions of the languages you mention.
Reply
Erin F. — November 8th, 2007, 4:46 pm

i have to agree with Lauren Muney’s comments about the density of your post. it was so Interesting but very academic as well – a good thing in many ways but a bit intense. (however, people knew what they’d be reading in the heading.)

I’m a big LISTS fan. it would be neat to see ‘lists’ of useful things: favorite websites, top 5 things to do on a saturday if you’re bored, a list of businesses you’d open if you had all the time/energy in the world, short tips for people who want to maximize their day, that sort of thing. the kind of stuff you talk about at dinner

Keep up the great work, I love your website!
Reply
PuttPutt.ca » Blog Archive » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour — November 8th, 2007, 5:00 pm

[...] read more | digg story [...]
steve — November 8th, 2007, 5:06 pm

Tim -

This is fascinating. Two things.

First of all, as some of your commentators seem to misunderstand, there are those of us who think best in terms of structures. I have wanted to learn other languages for a while now, but am terribly daunted by a never-ending procession of vocabulary words and verb conjugations. I have often felt that if someone could simply offer me the theory of given language, its operative conceits and tropes, no matter how complex, I would be much better off, as this is how I learn. Thus, the assertion, repeated above, that this wouldn’t work because some people won’t understand it ignores those of us for whom an approach like this might be the only option.

Second, as I am somewhat familiar with the term’s origin, I don’t think deconstruction is the word you are looking for. A deconstruction would aim to highlight precisely those aspects of a given tongue that your approach necessarily leaves out; idioms, local semantics, and various other irreducibles. Which is to say that deconstruction proceeds precisely by virtue of language’s ability to constantly elude or exceed a given architecture, and correspondingly that is perhaps its only virtue, strictly speaking. The proper term from the same lexicon for what your doing remains ‘structuralist;’ that is, highlighting and schematizing convergences and equivalencies across different contexts, with an aim toward easing learning and consumption – quite the opposite of a deconstructive praxis. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you, or that it really matters, but structuralist, though less sexy, is the more accurate term. (If it makes you feel better, if your structure is well founded, and becomes the standard, you can come back and deconstruct later if you like)

Anyway, found you on digg. Love the idea, please elaborate soon.
Reply
MyHappyPlanet and Language Learning « Fantasy or Ria Ludy? — November 8th, 2007, 5:11 pm

[...] looks like the site is closed, except to beta testers, but if you really want in, try this post on Tim Ferris’ Blog. The link is near the bottom, but the post is worth reading and applying if you REALLY want to [...]
links for 2007-11-08 « ?????? — November 8th, 2007, 5:22 pm

[...] » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) (tags: learning education languages) [...]
Eva — November 8th, 2007, 5:46 pm

I find it almost too simplistic. I don’t mean to say that this article isn’t useful, but it almost sounds misleading to me. Maybe it’s just how I interpret the article.

I just think that being conversationally fluent is one thing, but it’s implied in the title sounds a bit braggy. One may be conversationally fluent, but is one sure of what they are saying? Not everyone is language oriented and I know my share of people who aren’t.

You see (or possibly know, cause I don’t know you at all), English is a very difficult language to translate into, despite the fact that it’s still Anglo-Saxon. Anyhoo, I kind of see a problem with this because in China, there are so many dialects of Chinese, some with 9 sounds, some with 7 etc. and standard Mandarin has only 4. Furthermore, native speakers of Mandarin retain an accent from their own dialect, actually making it harder for the person who is using your tips to comprehend. Also, what about slang? Say that all the people you’ve met who spoke Mandarin spoke just Mandarin and no dialect. Simple right? Well, then comes the problem of local influence on the language. In Mandarin, there are 4 words for the exact same thing (Eg: Popsicle) and it’s all depending on where you are.

Same with Slovenian. There really is no actual standard dialect because there are 48 dialects with a population of just above 2 mill.

In addition, the more esoteric a language is (Euskara anyone?) the (sooooo much) harder it is to pick it up in any method. Also, since there are language isolates, their sense of humor (Japan’s for example) is much different, as well as semantics. Intonation also plays a big role. In French, it’s much more common to say Tu as faim? Instead of As-tu faim? The voice rises instead of the obvious VSO. Or even in German: Ich muß viel studieren dafür instead of Ich muß viel dafür studieren. The purest of any foreign language is spoken in a classroom, not in the country itself.

And on a closing note, Pinyin is much much more natural. GR and Wade-Giles are (to me) nothing but a western take on Chinese romanization. It angers me to see everyone use Wade-Giles instead of what is truly Chinese. It annoys me just as much to see other languages get botched up too.

PS: Alex, Hungarian and Finnish are related and both are ridiculously complex since there are like no languages related to either of them.
Reply
anne — November 8th, 2007, 6:09 pm

Fascinating!
On my fifth language (dutch) and using all kinds of “instinctive” technics to learn it without going to school (no time)
Nevertheless on learning my fourth one (danish) i went to the KISS (Kobenhavn International Sprog Skole). Their method although extremely boring was the most efficient one in order to gain sufficient fluency without being the best in grammar and spelling. The concept was based on repeting (hence the boredom) with a few “head sentences” where one word was change in order to form new sentances. (more or less your apple exemple, that is to say:
I like eating apples
I like eating fruits …..
It worked extremely well. No fantasy was ever allowed as how the teachers put it “we (student) were not there to express ourselves but to be able to comunicate in order that the personn in front get the message”. It worked perfectly alright and the difference between students who went to regular danish schools and those who attended KISS was striking.

Now don’t you think that some people have a natural ability to learn more and more languages?

Again i will take my own kids as an exemple and their best friends who are also brothers.

My kids were raised in one language with english and danish talked on regular basis around them. They’ve traveled and tend to have some kind of ease to pick up languages. But the older one has an accent in all languages even his mother tongue whereas the youger one seems to be a native of the three languages he speaks and the fouth that he is learing (dutch). My japanese sister in law also says that whenever he repeats words in japanese it is the perfect accent!!
Their friends were raised in three languages at the same time and the oldest one is actually on his 6th’s one (spanish) wheras the second struggle more. They are both polish which has (if understood correctly) a huge phonem potential! (oh all those kids are only 10 and 12!!!)

So my conclusion will be that you may get the best method to quickly learn a new language, you may not be gifted with the potential of being polyglot!!

By the way, which musical instrument are you playing??
Cheers
Reply
Feelin’ Guat, Guat, Guat! » How To Learn (But Not Master) Any Language In One Hour — November 8th, 2007, 6:24 pm

[...] Here is the link to the blog. [...]
AC Johnson — November 8th, 2007, 7:08 pm

Good article-I have used many of the same points in my teaching and language learning.
One key point is that the learner has to learn to stop looking for comparisions to first language and instead look for patterns and tendencies in the new language.
Reply
Doug Belew — November 8th, 2007, 7:42 pm

Tim: thanks for the article. I would very much like to see more of this.

And you finally got me to get off my butt, head down to my local indy bookstore, and buy the 4HWW.

Now to find the ways I can cut down my current 75-hour work week to something more reasonable.
Reply
An Interesting Take on Learning Language « Aaron’s Soapbox — November 8th, 2007, 8:50 pm

[...] » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) [...]
Foreign Language — November 8th, 2007, 8:51 pm

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour – an interesting explanation on “deconstructing” a language in order to learn it more easily [...]
How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) | The Best Article Every day — November 8th, 2007, 9:08 pm

[...] Written by the blog of tim ferriss [...]
Russ — November 8th, 2007, 10:04 pm

That’s not true, Eva. You get Mari, Chuvash… all incredibly easy for any native speakers of Delaware…
Reply
dburry — November 8th, 2007, 10:04 pm

I really like your analytical approach to languages in general. If more language courses taught this kind of thing, instead of mainly just “wrote memory” or “repetition” tactics, I would have learned a lot more at a younger age. When I was younger I lived in northern China (learning Mandarin) for a couple years before “discovering” various ways that helped me learn the language better. It was very frustrating to waste so much time first.

Here are a couple of my tips specifically for Mandarin Chinese:

1. Syllables and words: First of all, Chinese is a language where virtually every syllable is one word (or at least carries meaning all by itself). And also virtually every syllable is represented by just one written character. Since it is a pictographic language, and new pictographs cannot be invented (they wouldn’t become usable until after everyone learned them), they do not invent new words the way we do. Instead, they only invent new “compound words” (words made up of multiple smaller words). When you learn these, it does you well to learn the meanings of the individual pieces too, as that helps remember and notice patterns in how they are combined.

2. Pinyin and pronunciation: Don’t treat pinyin like an “alphabet” of individual letters, each one having a sound! It is not designed that way and doesn’t make sense that way, because the language isn’t natural that way like it is for English and many other alphabetic languages! Instead, treat “initials” and “finals” as the smallest possible atomic elements of their phonetics, and each word is made up of a combination of one of each, plus a tone added. You will have a much simpler time with the pronunciation after learning this. See: http://yellowbridge.com/language/pinyin-combo.html for a table illustrating this.

3. Homonyms and context: By the way, notice how that last table of every possible phonetic word in the language is surprisingly small. There are a *ton* of homonyms. Everyone has to use context to understand the spoken language, much more so than many other languages. Even native speakers frequently ask each other which word they are referring to, so don’t feel bad if you have trouble with that too. The normal written language (the characters) is not as bad in this respect.

4. Characters: If you learn their writing system, learn the parts of the character (called “radicals”), what they mean and where they come from. Sometimes the radicals give hints about meaning, and sometimes they give hints about pronunciation. Some are obscure and the etymology has been lost, but if you find a story about them (or even make one up if necessary), they’re much easier to remember. I don’t know of many good resources for this, very few people even in China ever think about this, they mostly learn them by memorization.

Speaking of memorizing… a big part of their culture is memorizing and following orders, not so much reasoning things out on their own using logic. So you will to a large extent be on your own if you use an analytical approach to help you learn their language. Good luck to those who attempt to learn Chinese, they will be enamored with you for taking the time!
Reply
geo — November 8th, 2007, 11:13 pm

I have found that finding a list of the 100 most commonly used words in any language is very helpful.

Then you memorize those first not whatever your text says.

these lists exist on the internet.
you can find lists of the most common 1000 words too.
since most people converse using only a couple thousand words you are well on your way to the ability to communicate if not grammatically correctly – at least you can get the intended message across.
Reply
kirk — November 8th, 2007, 11:29 pm

I would like to know which MMA opponents you have fought–dates, names…..thank you

###

Hi Kirk,

Please search for “Blogosphere Self-Defense” on this blog and I’ve listed them in the comments. Thanks!

Tim
Reply
Rich Cook — November 8th, 2007, 11:34 pm

I’ve always wanted to learn a lot of languages – ever since I met a guy (he worked with my folks) who spoke something like 16 languages. Thanks for the great intro to a fascinating method. I would love to know more about this method and others that would help me learn more languages. I’ve studied French, Arabic, Swahili. Can’t speak any of them!
Reply
David Greiman — November 8th, 2007, 11:59 pm

How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. Translation: you have a very good memory.
Reply
sbdc» Blog Archive » links for 2007-11-09 — November 9th, 2007, 2:24 am

[...] ? How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) (tags: communication howto language) [...]
Link Friday - November 9, 2007 | studenthacks.org — November 9th, 2007, 4:51 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour Tim Ferriss discusses the art of deconstructing languages – and learning a language like you would a sport. [...]
Daniel R — November 9th, 2007, 6:53 am

Dear Tim,

great post…by the way I’m trying to spread 4HWW in Italy
where I live now, with great results between my friends…I do something similar to LitLib in Africa…but that’s another story.

I just wanted to say that decostructing languages and phonetics are the key issues…and in particular I’m a big fan of Phonetics symbology…thanks to it when I was 19 years old I could already speak English fluently without ever being in an English speaking country before (I’m Italian)! Now (32 yrs old) I’ve been travelling a lot and I can really tell you you’re absolutely right!

My fav website (hoping to help the readers interested) for this is the Website of IOWA Univ. dedicated to Phonetics…
http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/
Brilliant for Eng (USA), German and Spanish…give it a try!

Enjoy!!!!!!!!!!!

My next big challenge is chinese and japanese…I’ll keep you informed

Dani
Reply
Der wilde Garten | links for 2007-11-09 — November 9th, 2007, 7:20 am

[...] » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) Wie man in einem Stunde die Grundzüge einer Sprache versteht. Ich werde es bei Gelgenheit ausprobieren. (tags: language lifehacks Tips tutorials howto) [...]
Novembrance — November 9th, 2007, 7:38 am

This is a fascinating article. I’d love to know, in your experience, which are the easiest languages to learn for a native (American) English speaker.
Reply
Whatever’s Clever: Dabbawalas, the original 43 folders, and email sins at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life — November 9th, 2007, 8:01 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour “How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I would argue less than an hour. Here’s the reasoning… Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it.” [...]
Whatever’s Clever: Dabbawalas, the original 43 folders, and email sins at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life — November 9th, 2007, 8:01 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour “How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I would argue less than an hour. Here’s the reasoning… Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it.” [...]
Friday Smackdown for Art, Call of Duty, Scrapbooking and more — November 9th, 2007, 8:09 am

[...] can make multimedia scrapbooks and share them. How easy is that? Real easy. Flickr should do this. Learn any language in one hour plus – I now know Spanish. Now to work on German, French and Chinese. Open Social – Googles new API that [...]
Jason P. DeFillippo | Badass — November 9th, 2007, 11:05 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour [...]
End of Silence - Freedom hating on the internets since 2002 » links for 2007-11-09 — November 9th, 2007, 12:17 pm

[...] » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) (tags: language learning education tips) This entry is filed under Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Leave a Reply [...]
Speaking in Tongues revisited at New Music Strategies — November 9th, 2007, 1:12 pm

[...] It turns out that Tim Ferriss has some good ideas. [...]
Dubber — November 9th, 2007, 1:14 pm

Thanks, Tim.

I’ve linked to you in http://newmusicstrategies.com where I’ve talked about languages recently. My free ebook ‘The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online’ has now been translated into Chinese, meaning it’s now available in six languages — five of which I can’t speak or read, which is a real shame.

I’m looking around for the ‘right’ language for me to learn, having invested a bit of time in French, and being reasonably fluent in English from a young age, since it was all that my parents, sisters, friends and schoolteachers knew how to speak.

Considering Dutch, though not because of the deconstruction. Just in love with the place and want to spend as much time there as I possibly can. It would seem rude not to try and speak the language, even though everyone there is pretty much fluent in English.
Reply
JJ — November 9th, 2007, 1:25 pm

Thanks for put a voice to something that “looked” to be true to me for years. Native English speaker and book-fluent in German, I have been able to pick up some French, Spanish, and Italian vocabulary here and there. Lately I’ve been learning the Korean alphabet, whose sounds are very easy and whose syllabic structure is very logical. I am looking forward to tackling the grammar (variant of SOV).
Reply
The Dude — November 9th, 2007, 3:17 pm

VERY interesting and helpful! Thanks for writing this, and please do write more detail about this subject when you have the time.
Reply
sk-rt.com — November 9th, 2007, 4:33 pm

How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor)…

great article from Tim Ferris about how to life hack learning a language…
Eva — November 9th, 2007, 6:10 pm

So…is this article mainly to pick up a language quickly and for future use or just for a short period of time?

I really like this article but it sounds so businessy to me. God I’m such a critic. But it honestly sounds like it’s just for business. Someone may know 6 languages fluently or even 29 etc. but the real question is, do they get the ‘real meaning’ of the language? I don’t mean lexicon. I mean that innate feeling.

I think that this is a great jumpstart to learn a language but the time and true sense of a language will never develop properly. I mean you can say ‘spa-see-ba’ or ‘xie xie’ or ‘arigatoo’ but there will never be that native hold over a language.

I still think that although the language is covered, the meaning isn’t. What’s funny in one isn’t funny in another. I can truthfully say that I’m funny in one language and flat in another.

And Russ, I was referring to the lack of languages related to the Finno-Ugric group. (Although I might have written it as none, my bad.) Didn’t I say how fast you picked a language up depended on what language you spoke in the first place?
Reply
Steve — November 9th, 2007, 6:16 pm

As a speaker of several quite different languages, I must admit I feel compelled to bookmark your page for later reading.
But I can’t stifle my bemusement. Do you speak a few languages yourself? I mean, have you tested your ideas and found them to work, or have others confirmed your methods? I still think you may be onto something. But if you haven’t tried it all out it strikes me as all a bit cheeky.

###

Hi Steve!

Thanks for the comment. I’ve used this on quite a few languages — see the beginning of the post — but this is definitely a blog post. It is not intended to be a peer-reviewed clinical review of language acquisition, not by any means. This is my subjective take, and that’s it. There have been a number of really angry posts and emails from PhDs and such with questions like “you’re ignorant — where is your clinical research?.” It’s just a blog post. All that said, I’m pretty cheeky regardless

Thanks for contributing!

Tim
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Paul — November 9th, 2007, 11:02 pm

“To be continued?”

Yes please, but you must include a link to larger versions of the images otherwise there’s no point having them.
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Greg — November 9th, 2007, 11:03 pm

Really interesting stuff.
I’m always interested in learning new languages but my biggest problem has been those little technicalities or ways of structuring sentences … but they were things I couldn’t identify.
I’d love it if you could expand on this further. I’m on the edge of my seat.
Reply
Russ — November 9th, 2007, 11:21 pm

Eva: No offense, but a sense of humor is an important personal asset…
Reply
James — November 10th, 2007, 12:49 am

Hey Tim, The language articles are great. Please keep them coming. I’ve just got back from 3 weeks in Japan – having packed light and even bought a Paktowl based on the advice of a previous article on your site

I’d already started conventional Japanese lessons and been listening both to Japanese language podcasts and Pimsleur’s Japanese audio lessons. Once I got there it felt like everything I knew went out of the window. For 3 weeks I used my truly terrible and meagre Japanese speaking ability at all times – I learnt more from this total immersion than I had from over a year’s worth of scratching my head back in the UK.

I lived on noodles, raw fish, and custard donuts. I was lost in Tokyo, homeless in Kyoto, and set on fire at the Kurama Fire Festival. I stayed overnight in a Buddhist temple on Mt Koya (Koyasan), fed Deer biscuits in Nara (then a Deer ate my map in Miyajima!), and also traveled round Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Osaka, and Nikko, amongst many other places.

Thanks for the advice and inspiration. My goal is to be able to speak and read Japanese before I hopefully go back to teach there next year on the JET programme from July / August, so I will be looking out for your language articles with great interest. I’m registered with technorati so I will gladly link to those articles, especially if they use Japanese as the model language!
Reply
Dave Robbins.com — November 10th, 2007, 8:10 am

Loved this post!!! These heuristics you’ve developed are similar to a concept in software development called “design patterns” where you identify analogies of your problem domain to a more generic set of principles.

As you have written before, this method works very well with immersion learning. Drop into a foreign country and struggle with asking directions. There’s more nuance and flavor in that conversation that can be learned than from any other contrived situation using the grammar translation method in a classroom. My wife taught German to elementary school students using “immersion”, and their brains pretty much filled in the gaps in a fashion like you have described above. Cool stuff!
Reply
Richard Banfield — November 10th, 2007, 9:34 am

Tim,

I added you to our blogroll: http://freshtilledsoil.typepad.com/

Good luck breaking the 1,000 mark.

Best, Richard
Reply
Make Money Online Blog › 2 Methods to Increase Blog Visitors? — November 10th, 2007, 10:22 am

[...] Ferriss recently made this post asking for readers to register their blogs at Technorati and find something interesting to link to [...]
Laynie — November 10th, 2007, 11:01 am

Okay now you’re #965. What do you win?
Reply
Debbie Weil — November 10th, 2007, 1:46 pm

Tim,

Kudos – great blog entry. I’m fascinated by learning languges and you’re spot on. I just spent two weeks in China and was surprised by how quickly I could pick up a few basics. Enjoyed interviewing you after your keynote at The New New Internet in Reston, VA (Nov. 1, 2007). Posted the video here: http://www.blogwriteforceos.com/blogwrite/2007/11/tim-ferriss-aut.html
Reply
Catch Me if you can… » Language learning made easy? — November 10th, 2007, 2:56 pm

[...] Ferris writes a blog that I read from time to time and today I read this post about language learning. I found it very insightful, though I don’t expect to be breaking [...]
Jim — November 10th, 2007, 3:34 pm

Post 171 – Interesting to test this on Korean. Hangul (Koran characcter set) may be esy to learn. That’s the only easy part of the Korea language.

Why ? This technique is void of the cultural content on a language and looks like it doesn’t pretend to answer that question.

Language is all about communication.
Reply
Austin Long — November 10th, 2007, 9:52 pm

Tim,

Tonya Harding is doing a dinner for two with martial arts exhibition in Kansas City ands its on EBAY.

If she goes for more than you did recently, that’s just… wrong.

Austin
Reply
Peter — November 10th, 2007, 10:14 pm

Congrats on breaking the 1000 technorati rank barrier Tim!
Reply
Mark — November 11th, 2007, 1:19 am

I would definitely love more language articles, so you can get more in depth with the subject, this was a great article.
Reply
Week In Review and On The Web 11/4/07-11/10/07 | Lifestyle13 — November 11th, 2007, 8:07 am

[...] If you’ve been wanting to learn another language, Tim Ferris has some tips on How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. [...]
ses5909 — November 11th, 2007, 12:18 pm

The Navy paid a few hundred thousand dollars to send me to language training 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for a year and a half to learn arabic. Maybe I should send a link to this post to them
Reply
Steve Lopez — November 11th, 2007, 4:07 pm

Hey, sounds good. I will put it into practice. Tim, I just purchased the book and read it 3x and I am having problems developing a “product” to put on autopilot. The things of interest or from fields of work are a dime a dozen on the internet…any suggestions? From anyone? I am 38 and lost everything I had and worked in “blue collar” telecommunications. I go into heart surgery soon and I wanted to buy myself a new FJ Cruiser for surviving the surgery with no complications. Since I will have to leave my field of experience and start from square 1 and now have absolutely no credit to speak of, this is the perfect time to live life instead of living to work.
Reply
theInput.net — November 11th, 2007, 5:29 pm

How to deconstruct a language in 1 hour (Plus how to learn vocabulary)…

Whenever people learn that I can speak 5 languages (Spanish is my native, English my second, Italian, French, and Japanese, as well as learning Arabic, Chinese and Greek) they inevitably ask how I can do it. I always feebly try……
Anna — November 11th, 2007, 6:13 pm

Hey Tim,

I was so so so happy to see you in the Times today!!!
Great surprise on a cold Sunday morning in New York.
My friend took a picture of me reading it today
and said I was “glowing”.
I’m so happy for you!

Anna
Reply
How to Evaluate a Random Language for Acquisition in an Hour | Sinosplice: Life in China — November 11th, 2007, 7:33 pm

[...] latest article is called How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. I have to say first that the title is entirely misleading. The whole point of the article is to [...]
John M. Schmidt — November 11th, 2007, 9:06 pm

This is interesting.

Tim, what would you say is the easiest second language for a native English speaker to pick up? If necessary, assume Midwestern American dialect and also that we have access to a native speaker of the language we are learning. A one word answer is fine. Thanks!
Reply
How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour « irrevocable stuff — November 11th, 2007, 11:13 pm

[...] read more | digg story [...]
selvaratnam.org » Archive » Weekly Round-up — November 12th, 2007, 5:04 am

[...] Tim Ferris reckons he can learn any language in 1-hour. [...]
Ben — November 12th, 2007, 10:03 am

I am curious as to how you came to your conclusion that Chinese learners who use GR have better tones than those who use pinyin. Tones are THE most important part of learning Chinese, and ultimately only way to properly learn them is by imitating native speakers speech, not reading them off paper. And if you use GR, you will be handicapped by the fact that native speakers do not use/know this system. Pinyin, however, is learned and mastered by Chinese students in elementary school. I learned Chinese by asking for help and assistance from many native speakers, and I think it would be virtually impossible to do so to any degree of success, without the help of native speakers. Using GR will just confuse those people who are necessary aides in your course of study.
Reply
Next Best Action » Blog Archive » Timothy Ferriss and the 4-Hour Workweek — November 12th, 2007, 11:25 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor), Tim ends with Please help me break the Technorati 1000 today! I’m around 1070 on Technorati’s [...]
Jim again — November 12th, 2007, 3:22 pm

What the heck, I’ll throw my $0.02 into the ring.

Background: Native speaker of (Canadian) English. Was a student of French from Grade 7 through to 2nd year university. Studied German for 4 years in high school, then majored in German at university. Studied Spanish for 4 years in HS (teacher was born/raised in Holland, French was his 2nd language, English his 3rd). Studied Mandarin Chinese for 2 years and Japanese for 1 year at university.

My first wife was German, born and raised. When exposed to snippets of Dutch, it completely baffled her. Conversely, I recall watching a documentary on current technology which was entirely in Dutch, and was able to understand at least 50% of what was being said.

I’ve heard Portuguese spoken, and it’s completely befuddled me. Didn’t sound like anything I should have recognized.

I also majored in Linguistics, so I got exposed to various other language snippets along the way.

I took a look at that GR Wikipedia reference and didn’t find it intuitive at all. Granted, when I studied Chinese, I was only exposed to pinyin as a tool, but I found that looking at the symbol above the syllable, it was quite easy to figure out what tone was being used there. If anything (and I’m sure my Linguistics background helped), I just sort of loped along for the first part of the course, then it was like a light went on one night. After that, I breezed my way through the pronunciation. Blew away my instructor (native Chinese) the first time I read for the class after that epiphany, too. The only roadblock after that was the writing system.

Regarding Japanese, you left out the bit about the syllables being sliced up into equally-timed pieces called morae. And the bit about the spoken sentence consisting of raised 3rds and raised 5ths (musically speaking), which was a useful tip for me when I studied it. Not sure how you’d flesh out those details using your system. (Conversely, Chinese speakers learning English would do well to understand that the duration of a vowel gives English speakers a clue as to whether the consonant immediately following is voiced or voiceless, eg, ‘beat’ vs ‘bead’, or ‘bit’ vs ‘bid’.

I tried Italian self-study about 7 years ago, as it was a language I’d always wanted to learn, and figured that given my French and Spanish studies in the past, it should be fairly straightforward. And it was. I was making progress (enjoyably so), but it’s a lot like the difference between weightlifting in your boring basement, or weightlifting in a nice, well-lit gym with other people around to help motivate. It’s also a little challenging to respond to a recording when the recording can’t correct you. While I typically know when I’m mispronouncing words, a lot of newbies might not pick up on that when left to their own devices. Then they go forth into the foreign land and are puzzled when native speakers have no clue what they’re talking about.

I like the sports reference, though. I’ve been doing various martial arts for years, and I always compare learning MA to learning 2 other things: language and music.

I haven’t really taken any deep language dives in many years, and having been exposed to other dialects (eg, Quebecois, Cantonese) has taken its toll on my vocabulary.

Actually, this is probably my biggest issue. I can learn grammar, tones, etc and lock that logic away permanently, but when it comes to vocabulary, it’s very challenging to hang onto those words I’ve learned. Doesn’t seem to matter how many times I write down lists, write in margins, write on cheat sheets, the words are like smoke in the breeze. Could be because I have a touch of ADD. *shrug*
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Danny — November 12th, 2007, 4:00 pm

Tim,
Thanks for this article. I’d love to see more on languages. I’m learning Serbian right now, and found the same thing…in 20-30 minutes I could read cyrillic easily. It was just a process of deconstructing the language, but I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing until I read this. Peace.
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Eva — November 12th, 2007, 4:27 pm

Russ…I’m bilingual and I speak Mandarin and English fluently. It’s not a matter of a sense of humor as much as the language it’s interpreted in. The Kancho in Anime is regarded as basically sodomy here. I’m not even kidding you. I’m hilarious to my friends in Chinese but in English, it’s kind of a dead silence going on. Language and culture play a huge part. Sorry to say this but judging from your posts, you don’t seem to know what Chinese people see as humor. American humor isn’t universal. Since I actually know what Chinese humor and American humor is, I can safely and honestly say that the language barrier issue isn’t resolved here.

And I have to side with Ben on the pinyin thing. I’ve never heard of or been in any Chinese school using GR. It’s disgraceful if they do.
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Steve Kaufmann — November 12th, 2007, 5:04 pm

I speak nine languages well, working on three more.

My Mandarin tones are OK (check my name and Mandarin Chinese on youtube). Phonetic writing system is irrelevant to learning tones. Just listen repetitively to natural(not text book) content you like, that grabs you. Listen for the rhythm, even if you do not understand it all, over and over. I used comic dialogues (xiangsheng).

Re grammatical differences in languages, what seems strange at first, becomes familiar and natural thru listening and reading.Not the decisive factor. Nor are sound differences.

Choose the language you WANT to learn. Your desire to learn it is your biggest asset, which will connect you to the language and keep you going.

The biggest challenge is vocabulary. You need lots of words to sound intelligent in a language. There are no shortcuts. But some methods are more fun and more effective than others.

Treat language learning as an ongoing activity that needs to be fun, because you need to spend a long time at it.Listen to and read what you like,whenever you want, talk when you want, and avoid the classroom. Treat it like jogging or Sudoku.
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- Nicasio — December 13th, 2012, 10:15 am
  
  Great, Thank you Steve, I completely agree with you. In fact I am going to use your advice to other subjects like mathematics.
  Reply
#include « Snappy title here — November 12th, 2007, 9:22 pm

[...] in the language vein, here’s a blogger who says you can learn (but not master) any language in the short space of time of an hour. To me his suggestions seem obvious, but maybe its because [...]
Rob — November 12th, 2007, 10:39 pm

Tim – This has been a fascinating post. You said earlier that you received “angry” responses from PhDs, but I haven’t seen anything like that here. What am I missing? Are they posted to another part of the site, or did you just not allow them to be posted? If the latter, why? I think we can make up our own minds about what is and is not reasonable on this topic.

My two cents…

###

Hi R!

Thanks for the comment and good question. For the angry e-mails/comments: criticism is great can be great, and there is plenty of it on this blog… BUT, I view this blog like my living room. I invite people in to discuss and compare notes, and if there is someone who attacks not only me but others in an abusive way, I don’t want them in my house.

This blog is a labor of love for me, and uncool angry people make me not love it. So… I delete them. Simple. I have plenty of time for disagreement and spirited debate, but there is a right tone and a wrong tone to use. If people are abusive, they can find another blog. I prefer to keep the blog more civil and less full of vitriol. Some bloggers feel they “have to” allow all comments to be published. Any they suffer for it — they tell me. I just keep the cool people (including those who post criticisms/questions) and delete the uncool ones who seem like they’ll be continued pains in the ass.

Hope that explains it!

Tim
Reply
Erik Cox — November 13th, 2007, 5:43 am

Tim,
Good for you keeping this blog free from negativity, I fully support that – there is plenty of time for that nonsense elsewhere. Plus it just gets in the way of those of us who want better things for ourselves… like logging into this blog after my first week long info-diet from Heathrow: just wanted to see what you have been up to

-Erik

###

Thank you, Erik, and congrats on the detox! All of recovery information addicts salute you

Tim
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Ken D — November 13th, 2007, 12:40 pm

Tim,
I don’t know if anyone else has pointed this out in the comments, but the process you describe leaves out a method for performing the required analysis. It’s somewhat like telling someone to learn the layout of a city before they get there, but without a map.

Are there any books that describe these structures for specific languages? Have you published your own investigations? That sounds like an ebook, or series of ebooks that people would want to buy.
Reply
Frederic Patenaude — November 13th, 2007, 1:51 pm

Thanks Tim! I can support fully that your method works. I have myself learn to speak 6 languages in a rather short amount of time. I’ve created a course on the subject called “How To Learn Any Language in a Flash” and I’d be happy to send you a copy if you are interested. I did interviews with people who learned 25 languages and included them in my course. I imagine you must not read all of these comments but if someone on your staff would be kind enough to forward this comment to you I can certainly send you a copy of this course and maybe you’ll find a few ideas useful for you in it as well. Keep up the great work! Fred
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stefan — November 14th, 2007, 9:40 am

I was very glad to find this article! I have been asking around (posts on other blogs, mostly) looking for stuff like this. My plan to learn a new language is to start with the foreign grammatical structure *in English*, then fill in the actual words later.

For instance, if I wanted to (re)learn German I would have a lovely time driving my family crazy saying things like “would you with me to the store and shopping do go?” all the time.

Are there resources for getting this material on various languages (that don’t actually require me to do the work myself)? Most of what I find is (unsurprisingly) *in* the target language, not in English (English structure) to English (Foreign structure) format.

I would prefer Mandarin but since my daughter is learning French I might try that first; I don’t want her to talk about me with her classmates in a language I don’t understand…

Any suggestions?
Reply
How To Learn (But Not Master) Any Language In An Hour « Ireneo’s Memory — November 14th, 2007, 3:16 pm

[...] How To Learn (But Not Master) Any Language In An Hour November 14, 2007 at 8:16 pm | In Psychology, Reference | Despite its hyperbolic title, this essay is actually quite interesting and useful. [...]
GADOURY _atelier 0,1 » Blog Archive » JOUR 9 - Gestion du temps, inspiration, impulsion — November 14th, 2007, 4:42 pm

[...] temps. On voudrait prétendre à être organique, ou organisé, ou très occupé, ou un maître du lifestyle design. Certains semblent au-dessus de leurs affaires, d’autres nagent dans le doute, plus ou moins [...]
Syven — November 14th, 2007, 9:35 pm

Identifying patterns is the name of the game in breaking any kind of activity down, that applies to language as much as it applies to life goals, but when it comes to language there is one other thing that is helpful and that is learning to think in the foreign language.

Thinking in the other language as opposed to simply speaking means that the immersion is complete, and that is important because we don’t often recognize that just because a person is responding to us in English, that they are still thinking in their own language.

That is where the bridge between SOV and SVO for instance is a good basic building block also when it comes to learning to synchronize thinking language with spoken language wherever that phonetic difference exists, something that we might otherwise ordinarily take for granted.

M.
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Nicolette JACKSON — November 14th, 2007, 10:38 pm

Very interesting method. I will give it a try.
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James H — November 15th, 2007, 1:16 am

This is excellent. Many thanks for taking the time to breakdown the structure of any language and post it up in such a simple way. This is like having a master key to the door of languages.
Reply
The Best Of The Internet : theblanchard [dot] com — November 15th, 2007, 11:46 am

[...] How To Learn Any Language In An Hour No wonder he only work 4 hours a [...]
Alex — November 15th, 2007, 4:08 pm

By the way has anyone else been able to put 34lb of muscle in a day? Bwahahahahahahaha.

Play or get played………..
Reply
Alex — November 15th, 2007, 4:15 pm

Sorry, I mean a ‘month’
Reply
JFP — November 16th, 2007, 8:20 am

I agree with a couple of the previous posters who said that there is no method of language-learning mentioned here and that what is given instead is a method of choosing which are the easiest languages relative to a given language. Several people posting here (#130, #154, and #155, for example) have given actual advice, and the only useful thing this blogger said was to try Michel Thomas’s CDs instead of Pimsleur.

Anyway, by his reckoning, I shouldn’t bother with Arabic. Arabic has many sounds not found in English, but in fact I don’t mind that. My biggest hurdle in learning Arabic has been the extremely poor materials available. The standard textbook is al-kitaab, but the authors have a very strange view of what words one should learn first. They include “United Nations” in their first chapter, although that is of limited value at the beginning. They give the verb “to be cut off” before they give the verb “to take.” This is madness. “To take” should have been in the first chapter, or at worst the second. Instead, it is in chapter 12, and in my class we didn’t get to that until the second year.

Also, I agree with #69 concerning open vowels in Portuguese. Is there a problem there that I missed? The nasal diphthongs were the problem, I thought, but definitely fun to produce once you learn how. Ditto for the q in Arabic.
Reply
Learning Bulgarian in an hour at blog.forret.com — November 16th, 2007, 8:31 am

[...] read an interesting post: How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. Let’s see how that works out with [...]
kmm — November 17th, 2007, 1:56 am

After two and a half years living in China, I’ve never met anyone who’s used GR to learn Mandarin. I have, however met huge numbers of people whose tones are perfect and who’ve only used pinyin. Why? Because pinyin is easy.
Recommending that people use GR is actually detrimental to their learning, because there are absolutely NO study materials available using that system. Learning it would be a colossal waste of time.

I must say, however, that by recommending an obscure system that nobody uses, it does make it harder to find any real evidence to prove you wrong, and at the same time allows you to appear to be much more than a dilettante. Well done.

###

Hi Kevin,

Princeton University has a great book series called “A Chines Primer,” I believe, that uses GR beautifully. GR is a lot harder to learn than pinyin, but I’ve found — again, just in my experience — that GR learners have less re-learning to tones to do when they arrive in a native environment. No doubt that there are some great Mandarin speakers who learned on pinyin, but %-wise, I find the GR learners to have more accurate tones. Results may vary, of course.

Thanks for the comment and for adding to the discussion,

Tim
Reply
Liz — November 17th, 2007, 2:37 pm

I am a Spanish teacher and languages fascinate me. My husband forwarded this to me and I really enjoyed reading it. I would love to hear more!
Reply
Learning a Language - Faster and Smarter « Jeremy Welch :: The Blog — November 18th, 2007, 12:47 am

[...] How to Learn but Not Master any Language in 1 Hour [...]
Learn a new language - on your lunch break | Do it Yourself — November 19th, 2007, 1:28 pm

[...] Week is at it again sharing his efficiency tricks and experiments with us. that moment he’s deconstructing and learning a new language in just one hour. He suggests that you ditch the books and CDs and instead delve into the mechanics of language and [...]
Learn a new language - on your lunch break | diyblog.info — November 19th, 2007, 1:44 pm

[...] Work Week is at it again sharing his efficiency tricks and experiments with us. that day he’s deconstructing and learning a new language in just one hour. He suggests that you ditch the books and CDs and instead delve into the mechanics of language and [...]
How to learn a language in one hour « To Czech and Back — November 19th, 2007, 7:20 pm

[...] Ferriss’s blog article is how to learn a language in one hour basically by deconstructing it and truly understanding the language you’re trying to speak. [...]
kmm — November 20th, 2007, 6:53 am

Tim, thanks for the quick reply. Sorry for my slightly hot-blooded response initially, but I tend to have very short patience for suggestions that any language (especially Chinese) can be learned quickly by an average or even highly intelligent person. I’ve met many people here who do speak Chinese well, and the only thing that they have in common is that they have spent years and years studying it.

As for the Princeton textbook, I am aware that there are some materials available for GR, so I am certainly guilty of a bit of hyperbole. The problem is that once you move beyond the very basic lessons these books provide, your GR will be pretty useless, as almost all other truly useful material is in pinyin. The fantastic resources of Chinesepod, for instance, or any number of excellent online Chinese dictionaries, are all in pinyin. In fact, is there a single, modern Chinese-English dictionary available in GR?

And, anyway, like I said originally, pinyin really isn’t that hard, and it’s not worth all this trouble to avoid it.
Reply
GODthoughts.net » Atheism, — November 20th, 2007, 12:47 pm

[...] you learn, but not master a new language quickly? Tim Ferris seems to think so. Find out if it works for [...]
Cobi — November 21st, 2007, 3:53 pm

Thanks, this is really useful! I’ve been trying to figure out what language to learn next, now I’m going to try this out before committing to my first non-Romance one (besides English!).

I just have to find enough bilingual people willing to sit down and deconstruct their language with me first…
Reply
Angela — November 21st, 2007, 7:13 pm

Very interesting. I’d like to see an analysis from anyone who knows Polish and a bit about grammar/linguistics. The only person I know who speaks it is not too knowledgeable about grammatical structures.
Reply
Kp — November 21st, 2007, 9:17 pm

These are great, great, great tips. However:
1) I feel like you’re suggesting we give up on language that different too greatly from our own. I just don’t agree with that.

2) I think the fact that you were a Princeton student says alot about your capability and capacity to learn. This may be simple puzzles for you, but for others, it’s easier to learn quantum physics then language (and many do actually take a year of physics as opposed to a fourth year of language).

###

Hi Kp!

Good comments. I’ll address these more in a future post, but quickly: 1) I’m not suggesting one avoid “hard” languages, even if it might seem that way. My first real fluent second language was Japanese, and I’m glad I started with that. 2) I actually attempted Spanish in junior high school and didn’t get anywhere with it, as I was only exposed to ineffective in-class methods. So, I don’t think going to Princeton means I have a special faculty for language. More to come soon

Tim
Reply
Break Free From the Mainstream: Reinvent Your Life | Personal Development Blog — November 22nd, 2007, 12:52 am

[...] Question the mainstream. It’s easy and almost natural to go along with flow, and to never stop and ask questions. Here is quick example for you. You know how it’s always been said that it’s much easier and quicker for a child to learn a new language than it is for an adult. Well that is very false. Usually it takes a child several years to learn a new language in school. However an adult can learn a new language in 2-12 months. [...]
Thanksgiving Link Karma | Copyblogger — November 22nd, 2007, 9:45 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in One Hour [...]
Randy Roedl On Wordpress Blogs — November 22nd, 2007, 10:41 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in One Hour [...]
cafedave.net » Blog Archive » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour — November 22nd, 2007, 2:40 pm

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour; this approach makes sense to me, having come to grips with Greek a little bit now (after a year). [...]
Derrick — November 22nd, 2007, 6:25 pm

Interesting – I’d love to see higher quality scans, also. Along with the others I think this post is more about picking a language to learn…funnily enough I happen to be learning Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. Bad choices by this method. [PS, got any info on people who learned Mandarin through zhuyin? Exceedingly rare but I don't think it's as rare as GR]

For some reason ‘deconstructing’ reminded me a bit of Japanese Step by Step.

What I’m most curious about is your neuroscience research. There’s been a lot of discussion/clashes on language learning and learning styles on the how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum site (search ‘learning style’). Did you find any indication of this or do you believe more in a ‘one style should fit most people’ approach?
Reply
Mark Lamerton — November 23rd, 2007, 2:07 am

Hi Tim,

I’d like to link to this post re language acquisition, and perhaps help your Technorati rating! Do you have any larger jpg images than the ones in the post?
Reply
cat — November 23rd, 2007, 6:36 am

I came over from Copyblogger. When I read the subject title, it was a loud “FOOF!” from me. So I came over to lurk.

You see, I’ve lived all over the world and have struggled with Japanese, Russian, French, Malay (ok, not much of a struggle) and Spanish. Although the opportunities were there, I knew better than attempt Chinese and Mandarin.

I’m now living in Thailand and dealing with tonal Thai. But, in Thai, it’s easier to learn to speak by reading first so I’m coming in from that angle. Wish me luck.

“Is this helpful or just too dense? Would you like me to write more about this or other topics? Please let me know in the comments.”

Too dense? No. I found it amazing. I can already see how it fits for Thai.

For more? I would love see what you come up with for Thai.

ps: I have your book. I just didn’t think about reading your blog. After this, I certainly will.
Reply
gale — November 23rd, 2007, 10:26 pm

wow, amazingly helpful. i speak english and mandarin yet do not know how to read/write in the latter. this will help me as i study mandarin
Reply
Anil — November 24th, 2007, 1:28 am

Tim,

Great article! I have always been interested in deconstructing languages I don’t speak, but it’s interesting to see how you can use that information to select the next language to learn.
As a native Turkish speaker and fluent in English and German, I bet you are a good candidate to learn Turkish in less than 6 months, which has similar grammar to Japanese, I have been told, and has its roots common with Finnish and Hungarian and although it is somewhat complicated and has a few unique sounds, the lack of exceptions should make it easy to learn for a methodical learner like you are.

Let me know if you need help deconstructing.
Reply
Le blog de Vincent Battaglia » En vrak - 66 — November 24th, 2007, 12:24 pm

[...] ai déjà parlé à plusieurs personnes : comment apprendre n’importe quelle langue en une heure [...]
Quick Takes - 11/24/2007 at Ray Fowler .org — November 24th, 2007, 1:06 pm

[...] Ferris tells you how to learn (not master) any foreign language in 1 hour. “How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I would [...]
Lalla Mira — November 24th, 2007, 3:08 pm

That’s not your handwriting in Arabic, is it? Is it?
Reply
Adam Kayce : Monk at Work — November 25th, 2007, 7:42 pm

Fascinating – and, I echo some other comments, in that I’d like more about how to go about learning a language. French is on my plate next; I’ve studied German and Italian many years ago.

Main question: Once we’ve chosen a language to learn, what’s the best way to go about it (short of plopping yourself down on foreign soil and having a trial-by-fire)?
Reply
Ehab — November 26th, 2007, 2:13 am

Wow

You went to Princeton. Been a dream always.
Reply
Kevin H. — November 27th, 2007, 12:48 am

Hey Tim. Great post. When you hear a foreign language being spoken that you’re learning are you mentaly trying to translate it into English, or do you try to convert the foreign language directly into meaning?
Reply
Andrew Reid - Constructivist Learner » Blog Archive » Learning a language in under an hour — November 27th, 2007, 4:26 pm

[...] came across this great article from Tim about How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor). It makes for some really interesting reading and provides lots of transferable ideas about [...]
Use Digg Comments To Drive Traffic To Your Blog — November 27th, 2007, 8:05 pm

[...] To get on the front page of Digg is really difficult if you’re not a very popular blogger with a loyal tribe following. This is a popular story by Tim Ferriss. [...]
Andy Evans — November 27th, 2007, 10:16 pm

hey this article is great. i find it very useful. and i would like to request if you could send me the notes on your japanese please. if not that is cool. but anyway nice article.
Reply
Spread Your Wings — November 29th, 2007, 5:09 pm

Deconstructing makes a lot of sense. I like your language related posts. I speak Mandarin and English and started to learn Spanish.
Reply
Julia — November 30th, 2007, 6:33 am

“this neglected deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners…”

My Latin book used this neglected deconstruction the other way round: Simple construction – and after the first hour I knew – learnable. My English book did, and I knew: learnable, easier – after my first hour of French, I thought: learnable, but a little bit more complicated, due to the differences/exceptions – I am Austrian.
To be honest, I think you describend what anybody who wants to learn a language will figure out during his or her first hour: Basic sentence building.How complicated is this language – spelling…
Teacher or book. No idea what webcasts or podcasts are like
But there is something strange going on today – are you all serious about what you describe?
Maybe you can help me – the last article I read complained, that you could not really tell how to talk fluently within an hour. so i clicked, thinking wow, what could be a decent excuse for the guy to expect it ? And the article before was this one:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/120/at-frog-being-green-isnt-easy-its-essential.html?partner=rss

Excuse me, if this sounded rude, I just wondered.
Reply
Julia — November 30th, 2007, 6:45 am

Oh oh.
I read “about” now.
Reply
Easily learn new language using Mango Languages | Joyce Babu — December 1st, 2007, 11:51 pm

[...] you are interested in Mango Languages, you might also be interested in the post How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour by Tim Ferris. Read More (No Ratings Yet) Loading [...]
Thorir — December 2nd, 2007, 12:53 pm

Have you tried Icelandic? I suppose that’s the ultimate test!
Reply
Alexandra — December 2nd, 2007, 2:27 pm

Way cool and clear. That’s how I learned English (I’m from Romania) and how I’m learning other languages now. And to reply to Julia: I’ve found it easier to get exposed to the full structures of a language and analyze them than to construct structures without a certain grasp on their rules. Very tiring, very frustrating. The other way around, the structure just embedded itself in time and I could construct much more easily after having it already in my head. I still can’t explain exactly how I can tell if an English sentence is correct or not, it just “sounds” or “looks” that way.

Success with your (psycho)linguistic pursuits, all!
Reply
Julia — December 3rd, 2007, 5:43 pm

Hi Alexandra !

I did already feel sorry for my harshness/being nosy short after, or maybe even before having pressed “send”.
I was in a strange mood.
But though: Personally, I always experienced construction and deconstruction at the same time – and have still problems to see the big difference, to me it seems to be more a “congruent perspective”, though “put into words from a different angle” (dangerous expression in this post.
I think you have to deconstruct in order to be able to construct, somehow naturally – we focussed on grammar first, and that did not stay with simple structures, it just started there, similar to “This is John’s apple”, going on, and never neglecting the rules.
(I am sorry Tim !:)
I just do not think that the deconstruction method is neglected, more included.
If tim’s method would allow to tell quite exactly how long it takes to learn one language compared to another, I would be more convinced of the approach, but 2-12 months seems to be a sign for huge individual differences – still.
And are there really a lot of people who invest hundreds to thousands of waisted hours until they find out that Chinese is harder to learn than Spanish ? (Starting from English)
I seem to have got into that strange mood again
I should start to learn a new language now, before I go on being (maybe unfounded) nosy here and maybe I will come back soon,in order to tell: I was wrong.
I try to approach my 4-h week first
Reply
Alex — December 8th, 2007, 12:44 am

thanks for the article, it seems very useful. I speak English and Cantonese but I’ve spent years learning Mandarin without success. part of that is to blame on the Hanyu Pinyin, which never really worked for me. I never learnt about Gwoyeu Romatzyh until your article, GR seems much more easier for English speakers. thanks again!
Reply
K — December 8th, 2007, 10:19 pm

what about sign language? Id love to hear your thoughts on that
Reply
Learn Portuguese in Six Lines « Mandingueira — December 11th, 2007, 3:07 am

[...] the full post, which has a more thorough explanation and additional tips on learning any language: Click here to go to post [...]
Harald Felgner & the Red Fez — December 11th, 2007, 12:36 pm

&58/ Just Found: Any Language in One Hour…

Timothy Ferris (face #5 you should know) explains how to learn any language in one hour: Deconstruct the language. Sounds like a great approach to learning a second language but quite different from the methods used in our schools today…….
David Gonzalez — December 12th, 2007, 1:08 am

What I find even more fascinating than your ability to create brilliant content over and over again such as this–
Is your ability to market it!

I mean really, if a linguistics geek had written this same post on their blog, they’d have titled it something like:

“How to efficiently deconstruct the grammar, phonemes and other elements of multiple languages.”

Not nearly as sexy, eh?

This post floored me. I already held you in the HIGHEST regards, but this post gave me a glimpse into the brilliance of your incredible intellectual (and marketing) skills.

BTW, your post reminded me of something–

My wife used to have a friend in college who made it his ambition to know how to say, “The Cheese is in the restroom” in as many languages as he could find… (he was up to 12 or 13).

The force is strong in this one…
David Gonzalez
Reply
Cecil — December 13th, 2007, 7:24 am

Deconstruct all you want. Probably a good idea if you are searching for a language / languages to learn. Maybe problematic with japanese – don’t know. Have you thought about Swahili and probably the majority of African languages where they put their grammatical add-ons as prefixes, not as suffixes.

Anyway I’ve got mine. I fell in love with Spanish at a young age, and have finally mastered it so that I can usefully read and write it. I, didn’t know it then but I do now, what a perfect choice. My access to the world through especially the internet, has practically doubled since I started surfing the web in Spanish. I don’t want to learn chinese – that’s too much. And I don’t need to deconstruct to know that. The size of the vocabulary, which consists of for me entirely new words is far too large. That is actually an aspect of the difficulty of learning a language that you left out. It is much more the size of unknown / (unrelated to yours) vocabulary that is the biggest obstacle to learning it. For example in the language that you are close to, Spanish, but probably as a learner – what is the meaning of “lograr”? – this is a word that I have serious problems in remembering the meaning for, because it is not connected, that I can see, to any of my other languages, Nordic, English, German, French, Italian, (Portuguese).

I think I disagree about your super claim – deconstuct and four hours, nonsense. The idea is good for the grammar but most of the language is vocabulary, so you are wrong.
Reply
- Sergio Arista — May 10th, 2012, 8:25 pm
  
  “lograr” means “to accomplish”
  Reply
nbt — December 14th, 2007, 2:46 pm

I wonder a bit how this article actually helps to LEARN a language that fast.
It merely helps to DECIDE which language you could pick up quickly if you wanted to try.
Reply
Amy — December 20th, 2007, 10:20 am

I’m learning a lot from you! If you have broken down the Vietnamese language could you send it to me. I’m here in Vietnam for awhile and haven’t been able to “get it”. Thanks!

Amy
Reply
Cameron — December 22nd, 2007, 5:51 pm

Tim,
I think this article is great, however, I started learning Arabic this summer, and while being close to fluent in 7 weeks, at 16 hours x 5 days a week, i don’t see how you can say it is possible to learn any language in 1 hour. Although that really depends on your definition of “learn”, which from your book is one of the most important things to do, define.
Sure, the basic greetings and the essential “where is the bathroom”, but more than the basic 10 phrases or so seems the problem. Sure, the equivalent of the first chapter of a language book is reasonable, but even with mapping out the tensing can be more than an hour unless you have resources available that have pre-consolidated all of it into only one location.
But, I am going to be learning another language this spring, probably Portuguese. Any advice? I already speak English, Español, ????????
Reply
Pedro Maal — December 23rd, 2007, 3:11 pm

Hello Tim and others,

I live in Prague and have written some learning tips to allow someone to understand and speak Czech (and I’m sure other Slavic languages) quickly, mostly because it is written from and for an English speaker’s perspective.

Czech is easy and it is possible to not only recollect words you might have heard months before, but to also invent perfectly acceptable words according to the system of the language.

I don’t know how to make the information readily available for download, but I’ll send it to anyone interested.

Pedro
Reply
THE CAPRANICA - » How to Learn Any Language in 1 Hour — December 24th, 2007, 1:53 pm

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) | The Blog of Author Tim Ferris… [...]
Alan Little — December 26th, 2007, 5:37 pm

I just had a stab at “the apple is red” in Russian and hey! You’re right. You can learn a surprising amount from those innocent-looking little sentences.
Reply
Mike — December 26th, 2007, 8:16 pm

Great article, I’m interested in Korean. My wife is from Korea but she came the US when she was 11 and has forgotten all of her Korean. Her mother is here now (for a couple of weeks) but this is the first time they have seen each other since my wife’s adoption. Her mother only speaks Korean. My wife and I would love to become fluent in Korean as quick as possible. Can you help? Right now all we have is Rosetta Stone.
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Barbara — December 27th, 2007, 12:46 pm

Tim:

I was tweaking my BlogLines account for any new feeds on language learning and this post on your blog came up several times (so, I guess that is one advantage of being in the Technorati top 2000). I am a language teacher and technologist and run a blog (with a very small Technorati score) called Language Lab Unleashed. I blogged your post over there and thought you might be interested to see what the responses are… they are slow in coming, indeed, but we have an audience of teachers who are slowly, carefully and thoughtfully taking exception to your “learning but not mastering” ideas. C’mon over and take a look sometime.
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hially — December 27th, 2007, 10:10 pm

Hello!

In the spirit of sharing related knowledge, those of you who are interested in more links related to the subject of language-learning should check out the follwing websites (I am not affiliated with any of these websites…I’m just a keen langauge teacher and learner):

Dynamic “language and media immersion called YABLA:

http://home.yabla.com/product/home.php?

BICS & CALPS explained in easy-to-understand format:

http://www.everythingesl.net/inservices/bics_calp.php

Yes, there are NEW approaches to teaching second languages in schools based on new research about how additional languages are acquired (i.e. AIM method by Wendy Maxwell):

http://www.aimlanguagelearning.com/hot-topics.htm

For those who want to learn on their own, another simple resource is LanguageGuide:

http://www.languageguide.org/eng/

Happy learning!
Reply
Lisa — December 31st, 2007, 2:14 pm

Though I’m a semi-native Mandarin Chinese speaker (closer to native fluency in English, due to moving around), I agree that GR is easier for native English speakers than pinyin. However, it’d be good to learn pinyin after mastering the various pronounciations because pinyin is used far more widely than GR.
Reply
The eduFire Language Learning Blog » Blog Archive » How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) — January 1st, 2008, 4:46 pm

[...] So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages. More here… [...]
phil — January 2nd, 2008, 9:23 pm

HI Tim, you should either wirte a how to book to learn these languages, there is a good angle there or recommend to us where the best progrm is to elarn a language. Anybody else have a suggestion on the best way to take basic french and portuguese into functional ability
Reply
al-haqiqah — January 3rd, 2008, 6:18 am

The Arabic is wrong: “I ate” is “akaltu”, “you (f.) ate” is “akalti”, but without a “ya”-ending, just a kasra…
Reply
Polly Glot — January 5th, 2008, 8:45 am

Hmmm… sorry to gripe, but I’ve spotted a slight flaw in the method: your inital English sentences.

> The apple is red.
> It is John’s apple.

These two are OKish, if slightly unnatural (I doubt you’d ever say either of these.

> I give John the apple.
> We give him the apple.
> He gives it to John.
> She gives it to him.

But these four subscribe to the curious myth of a present simple in English. In modern English, that’s led to the curious existence of a “present historic” (that you’re seemingly using), which only exists in stories and sports commentaries, not conversation.

If you fail to respect the “normal” form of English, then your correspondent won’t be able to equate the norm in your target language with that of English.

Furthermore, while you’ve examined the complexity of the noun case system, you’ve not explored the range of tenses of verbs, which can also contribute to the complexity of a language.
Reply
Tristan leon — January 5th, 2008, 9:14 am

Hi Tim,

Very intriguing approach! I look forward to giving it a go.

Cheers,
Tristan
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Bill — January 6th, 2008, 10:47 am

Hi all. Has anyone tried the Learning Spanish Like Crazy method? I’m looking at that vs Pimsleur to learn conversational Spanish for Latin America and any advice is appreciated.
Reply
TARA REID — January 11th, 2008, 5:51 pm

This is one of your best posts ever! Great thinking and strategy in order to learn some laguage.
Reply
chris — January 14th, 2008, 5:27 pm

This is just daft, very clever but also very daft.
Most people don’t give a gnats fig about the structure of their own language so this is essentially a useless idea.

Clever people will work out how to deconstruct (even without a knowledge of grammar etc.) in their own way using their own special strengths, and may be just as successful but not the same. Not so clever people will follow what you describe to the letter, and wonder why it doesn’t work for them.

You are obviously smart but do you have the ability to look beyond your own brain. Your comment about pinyin? I hope you haven’t led anybody astray. Some people can easily remember via the normal pinyin because they are already used to languge with diacritical marks. I couldn’t but my solution was to quickly get used to five new letters (1,2,3,4,5) very easy then for me to remember ni3 as a word with three letters. Glad I didn’t learn an obscure system that I would not be able to use in online dictionaries, in my handheld electronic dictionary, in my paper dictionary and wouldn’t be known by Chinese people I language exchanged with.
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Mitch Ronco — January 15th, 2008, 11:39 pm

fantastic post. I’m thinking Noam Chomsky would be very very proud. Have you thought about applying for the patent right to some of your processes?

Regards,

Mitch Ronco
Immortality International, Inc.
Reply
Michael — January 22nd, 2008, 11:11 am

Practical post – I’m an English native-speaker fluent in French, German, Dutch and Spanish. Having learned most of these formally I had informally applied some of your approaches to deconstructing when faced with new languages. Now finally, with your inspiration I am going to meet the challenge of a Swahili-influenced Punjabi (my partner’s native language). If you – or anyone else – has any pointers, I’d be glad to know.
Thanks and regards,
Michael Rivers
Reply
The Castle Steps — January 23rd, 2008, 2:16 am

You have pointed out a number of issues which make languages difficult to learn. I can speak Czech, German and French fairly fluently (i.e., normal business conversation, not tourist phrases), plus Hungarian and some Spanish.

The problem is getting from the basic level to proper fluency: this means an increase in vocabulary of at least an order of magnitude. To be able to use a language professionally needs at least another 5x increase in vocabulary.

Thus it’s clear that, whereas the problems in starting to learn a language are related to how different it is from one’s native language, these differences soon disappear. By far the biggest problem in learning a language properly is learning the vocabulary.

Romance languages are easy in this respect because more complicated, abstract English words usually come from Romance roots (via Norman French). However Hungarian is also surprisingly easy. Although the vocabulary is entirely foreign, it is built up of a core vocabulary of pure Hungarian roots using very logical rules. Thus, while it is extremely difficult to get started in Hungarian, it is not so difficult once once gets over the initial hurdles.
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David Gonzalez — January 23rd, 2008, 11:32 am

Very good points, Castle Steps. Everyone I’ve told about this idea immediately brings up the issue of vocabulary. And as I mentioned in my earlier post (above)… I marvel at Tim’s ability to to market ideas such as learning a language within one hour! It’s a great way to get people ‘in the door’– thinking about learning new language(s) and then mastering them after they’ve got the basic structure.

Again, very good points Castle Steps. I will one day be fluent in at least 4 languages too. 0 down, 4 to go.

The force is strong in this one…
David Gonzalez
Reply
Michaek — January 23rd, 2008, 5:53 pm

I am young and want to learn many languages before highschool is over. i do not know what you are talking and would love some help. please e-mail me at dragonreborn3475@yahoo.com with futher instructions. maybe you can tutor on line. Please i need your help.
Reply
Tim — January 26th, 2008, 9:39 am

Tim,

This is the first article I read from you. I found it while looking for better techniques to teach ESL in Japan. Sadly and truly ESL in Asia is a joke students pay big bucks to attend one hour a week and ultimately learn almost nothing after YEARS of study. The same is true in China and Korea in my experiences there. Most people here have been convinced by school owners that grammar is the way to learn a language, I believe grammar is the HARDEST way, and I think most school owners know that, so they stay in business forever. I am striving to get out of the industry mainly because it is a meaningless jobs since either the student don’t care to learn or the schools have a vested interest in teaching students as slow as possible English. I really like this article,and would ESPECIALLY like any suggestion you have about applying this to teaching ESL, while I MUST do it in the mean time, I want to make the most positive difference that I can. I am going to take these sentences and their gender, tense… variants and try using them in my classes, I will report back anything of note.

Tim
Reply
Andrew H. — January 28th, 2008, 12:31 am

I’ve just been reading the posts on language acquisition and feel compelled to mention someone I’ve known for many years, Powell Janulus. He lives in a suburb of Vancouver and can easily lay claim to being the best there is regarding languages spoken and speed of language acquisition. His Guinness Book title, years ago, as Greatest Living Linguist said 41. I asked him at the time “I thought you were court certified in 42?” He replied, ” I am, they forgot English.” That was 20 years ago. I once bolted large plywood letters to the side of his small language school in Vancouver that read “WE GUARANTEE FLUENCY” along with his phone number. 50 hours of his time (at $20/hour) and he would guarantee that you could read, write and speak in any language. He meant it and has done so for many years. He’s that good. Not only that, but he gives a Hell of a Christmas Party. Don’t know the name of his current company, but it used to be The Geneva Language Institute and the Certified Legal Interpreters of BC. Still lives in New Westminster. Track him down if you’re fanatical about languages, he’s still the best kept secret and worth a Vancouver stopover. Good Luck!
Reply
- Jillean — March 28th, 2012, 11:33 am
  
  I’m trying to get in touch with Janulus – if he’s still alive.
  
  Or one of his students.
  
  Can you help me out?
  Reply
Seigneur Belial — January 29th, 2008, 9:45 am

hey hey hey mon gars!
alors ça parle le français ou bien?
^_^
j’espère qu’tu te décourage pas, tu sais il y a aussi des tonnes de langues “non officielles”, parlées juste par quelques minoritées, qui sont dignes d’intérêt.
Ce que j’aimerai savoir c’est si il est possible de les apprendre de la même manière sans que cela ne vienne perturber les langues déjà apprises??

allez, kiss kiss.
__________________________________________________________

Hey hey hey guy!
So you know french, don’t you?
I hope you will stay so hard-worker. You know there are still tonns of “unofficial” languages, so interesting at all.
What I want to know is if it’s possible to learn these dialects with the same method, or if it would conflict with previously learned languages??

????!

.-SrB-.

(ps: what is the reliability of a site such as http://www.mangolanguages.com ??)
Reply
Rapid language learning through deconstruction | chinese4biz — January 30th, 2008, 1:46 pm

[...] when it comes to learning languages. Here he gives a useful but very demanding method for how to learn (but not master) any language in one hour by deconstructing sounds and grammatical structures. All he needs are a few basic sentences [...]
Services for a Hyperspeed Life: Faster Speed Dating, 100-Word News Summaries… | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — January 30th, 2008, 5:20 pm

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour [...]
The Weekend Retirement Test Drive: Groundhog Day and the Rest of Your Life | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — February 1st, 2008, 7:13 pm

[...] comments of this post and the one before it for ideas] The Top 5 Reasons to Be a Jack of All Trades How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour A Beginner’s Guide: How to Rent Your Ideas to Fortune 500 Companies Lack of Seriousness – The [...]
Nick Pagan — February 3rd, 2008, 12:46 pm

Wow! Great and insightful thinking. It’s so refreshing to discover new ways of approaching language learning.

What really bugs me about language learning is that 80% or more of using a language usage depends upon memory recall and I suck at that. I surely do wish that someone would come up with a language learning system that recognized that and built it into the process. I would have thought that in this day and age we could come up with something better than parrot-fashion learning.

Does anyone know of a system that builds memorization right into the heart of the process?
Reply
Tim — February 3rd, 2008, 1:00 pm

To Nick Pagan:

I am an ESL teacher in Japan and have been looking for the same so that I can teach my students better (it’s how I found Tim Ferris and his site).

Though it is specific to ESL there is a guy out of the U.S. who has a website called “Effortless English” and his ideas seems excellent to me, he may well be able to give you a template of how to apply his ideas to learning other languages. At the very least sign up for his 7 day newsletter which has some excellent suggestions, some of which may surprise you other’s you have seen before. I have come to several of the same conclusions as this guy, but from my psychology and learning background instead of his ESL background. This principles in this newsletter could be applied to learning language.

I recently demonstrated some of the same ideas he discusses in my adult classes and had my students tell me a classic Japanese fairytale in English, they won’t forget it and neither will I (my memory also sucks;-) Remember BEFORE writing people told stories and remembered the there NOT a rote list of words. I bet you remember near every fairy tale you ever heard as a kid

Hope this helps,

Tim
Reply
Holger Iburg — February 3rd, 2008, 2:18 pm

Hallo Timothy,
bin nicht der beste Sprachenlerner, aber versuche es gerade mit Spanisch, weil ich in vier Wochen nach Argentinien will. Kannst Du mir ein gutes Sprach-Institut in B.A. empfehlen? Und ein paar gute Tangoclubs?
Habe Dein Buch verschlungen und warte jetzt auf die deutsche Übersetzung. Kommst Du auf Tour nach Deutschland? Und wenn ja, wann?

Hi Timothy,
I am not the best learner of languages, but your advice (and your additional hiodden material on your website) makes a lot of sense to me after being frustrated with usual learning material. However, I am embarking on a trip to Argentina. Can you recommend a good school in B.A. (comparable to Hartnackschule in Berlin)? And, while you are at it, would you have some tango clubs, you could recommend?

Thank you and I am looking forward to rereading your book in German. Are you going on a reading tour in my country?

Best wishes
Holger
Reply
Andres — February 5th, 2008, 2:07 am

I don’t really think this post is so clever, in fact I think the title should be more like “How to find how close is a language to yours in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) so that you can choose to learn the closest one possible.”
Reply
David Gonzalez — February 5th, 2008, 9:55 am

Andres, maybe you should start a blog with titles like that. Then pray you get even one visitor.
Reply
sean savage — February 6th, 2008, 6:39 am

Bravo and thanks for much of your stuff but the title of this post is completely inaccurate. The post tells you how to determine how relatively difficult a language will be for you in an hour, NOT how to learn it in an hour.

If that’s the goal, why not just ask a native speaker of your language who learned the target language how difficult it was to learn? That lets you skip the deconstruction and save 55 minutes. Or have I overlooked something?
Reply
janderson013 — February 11th, 2008, 3:29 pm

Tim,

Loved the article. I would love to see more on the subject. Formal classroom study (at least in my experience) is one of the worst ways to get your foot in the door and start using a foreign language.
Reply
Pratyush Rathore — February 13th, 2008, 8:32 am

Great page and also great site dude!!
Loved the concept!!
You would love it if you are an Indian as I am doing now, coz all of our languages are so similar….
I can surely try out this stuff on the languages!!
Reply
John Wrenn — February 14th, 2008, 12:38 am

Hi Tim,

Here’s a website for your Japanese that you might find interesting.

http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/ja.htm

Kaeru pyoko-pyoko
mi pyoko-pyoko
awasete pyoko-pyoko mu pyoko-pyoko.

Take care
–John
Reply
Weekly Round-up « Christian Selvaratnam — February 15th, 2008, 5:42 pm

[...] Tim Ferris reckons he can learn any language in 1-hour. [...]
Brad Davis — February 16th, 2008, 10:13 pm

Hi Tim,

I’m in the midst of putting together a site on the best methods available around the world for learning anything faster and better. I found your information fascinating because, in my opinion, it forms a great left brain foundation for how we learn languages – through our right brain functions.

Let me explain in as few words as possible for the sake of these reading.

We actually have more than five senses. The senses our left brain are associated with are: Sight, sound, taste, touch and smell. What many do not know is our right brain functioning is associated with the “inner” senses of: Perfect memory, computer-like math calculation, rapid language acquisition, perfect pitch (musical aptitude) and subconscious intuition. Many call these inner senses “the 6th sense.”

My site (not launched yet) goes into each of these right brain senses in detail, but, when focusing on “rapid language acquisition”, I’ve found that immersion in the language is the best way to “pick it up”. I’ve witnessed families where both parents speak a different language, yet their young children can speak both fluently without mixing them up. That’s because most of the brain functioning of these young children takes place in the right hemisphere, where they are easily able to synthesize the subtle patterns of rhythm, frequencies, tone, pitch and accents. All these are stored in their subconscious mind and are easily accessed by their outer consciousness.

As we grow and learn, especially in our American culture, our left brain functions become dominant and it becomes difficult to tap into the vast knowledge locked in our subconscious mind where everything we see, hear, taste, touch and smell are stored as images.

I have many right brain-based games and training methods to help develop our natural right brain senses including rapid language acquisition, but let me end by echoing that your formula seems like a key that can open the door to the brain functions responsible for learning any language, especially when immersed in the language through recordings, foreign TV, culture, music and environment, where all our senses are stimulated and the synapses between left and right brain functions are formed – the bridge between subconscious and conscious thought.

Take care,
Brad
Reply
Tim — February 17th, 2008, 1:40 am

Brad Davis

I have a degree in neuroscience and feel you should use some of your statements with care. This whole left right brian thing is a simplified version of the way it actually works. Saying the subconcoius, or x function resides at y locations strictly speaking isn’t true. Brain functions for virtually all things is distributed throughout the brain with EMPHASIS (more activity)on some areas who’s location can vary form one person to another for various reasons. I’m not debunking what you are doing here only suggesting to be careful how you state what you are doing and how it works. Most people don’t know or care about the details, BUT to position yourself as a potential expert on learning and brain function be careful how you word it so as not to debunk your own expert status with your wording.

That said, I am interested in what you are doing and a long time student of learning techniques and strategies. Please post your URL when you are ready to, I am FAR MORE interested in valid and effective methods I can USE for stuff like this (I’m currently and ESL teacher, and perpetual student of ….almost everything), rather than neuroscience technicalities no one but a neuroscience geek like myself would pick up on. Do a little homework on brain plasticity and you’ll probably have it covered. Academic experts are a pain in the butt, and often don’t have any USABLE information outside their lab, but know some details could prevent you from losing credibility as an expert on brain stuff. Again please post that URL!!! I want more more more ways to teach and learn better.

Take care Brad,

Tim
Reply
Electronic Illusions’s Blog - Webdesign - Bruxelles » Archive du blog » News en Bloc d’un Dimanche pourri et froid — February 17th, 2008, 1:10 pm

[...] Comment apprendre une langue en moins d’une heure (Arabe en 45 minutes et Russe en 60 minutes) ? Voir le blog de Timothy Ferriss) [...]
Rick Wolff — February 17th, 2008, 1:32 pm

Not mentioned is the number of airline passengers who change seats after you get started on them.
Reply
Brad Davis — February 17th, 2008, 2:24 pm

Hi Tim,

Thank you for the clarification. I appreciate your follow up.

I believe what we might call right and left brain functions span throughout the brain rather than residing in one particular area. Millions of cells scattered throughout may hold one memory. In my opinion, simplification is a way to bring this concept down to earth. I’m no expert in neuroscience and appreciate your expertise.

What has fascinated me about brain function are the subtle hidden features that we all have in one form or another. For example: (Giving no credit to myself), I’ve always wondered why I can add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers without thinking. The answer just pops into my mind. Doubting the solution, I check with a calculator and I’ve always been correct. My wondering ended when I saw young children in a Japanese academy solving even larger math problems in the exact same way. What they told me is it’s a natural right brain function called “rapid math calculation”. (Google Shichida Child Academies)

There’s a lot more that I share on my site based on my experiences and the experiences of others which point to functions of the brain that go beyond what science has been able to prove. I feel the unique gifts we all being to the table can be developed by almost anyone. In my opinion, rapid math calculation, and other “genius” abilities, are brain functions that can be developed with the proper training, which I will be putting on my site.

The site will include exercises, games, tips and training methods which help develop what some call “right brain senses” (please see my last entry). I have a lot to write and prep before it’s launched though. I’m building the entire site myself while holding a full-time job, holding a family together and helping others through my freelancing business. It’s taking some time!

What I can add is, these controversial and unorthodox learning methods I hope will spur interest and experimentation. They just may awaken abilities we never knew we possessed.

Again, many thanks for your tremendous insights!

Take care,
Brad

###

Hi Brad,

Thanks. Just one thing: please don’t put your URL in the body text or it comes off as comment spam. These will be getting deleted/blacklisted in the future, so please keep your URL to the URL field.

Thanks!

Tim
Reply
Continuous Learning & Development » Blog Archive » The key factors for successful learning - continued 2 — February 18th, 2008, 3:38 am

[...] Now I found an excellent example of a filter for language learning by Timothy Ferris in his blog post: How to learn (but not master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor). [...]
Peter Palme — February 18th, 2008, 3:47 am

Please continue to write more about this subject. This is an excellent approach to leverage language learning.
Reply
I WANT YOU to Become the Editor of a NY Times Bestseller and Travel the World for Free | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — February 20th, 2008, 1:06 am

[...] to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks Relax Like A Pro: 5 Steps to Hacking [...]
Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Learning Languages Fast - Can you Flush the Toilet in Zulu? — February 20th, 2008, 4:18 am

[...] Tim Ferriss has a penchant for languages. His post How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour got me thinking because he gives eight sentences that you can use to get a really good understanding of how a particular language is constructed. [...]
Krischan — February 21st, 2008, 3:41 am

Sorry. Not helpful at all. You might overlook this comment, 300 positive are more than enough to boost your article. But.

“[German/Russian noun cases] This is one of the reasons I continue to put it off.”

This is only one example why I found your article uninteresting.
Treating languages as sports? Fine, but giving up on a particular sport/language before you begin just because you gained the insight that you won’t ever become a true master of it is … unsportsmanlike.

If you are interested in another culture and thus its language you just won’t care about the difficulty. As most foreign speakers won’t really care about your mistakes as long as you can communicate at all.

So the only gist of your article I really find interesting is the decomposing and “… pick your target”.
Reply
Isaac Gonzalez — February 21st, 2008, 6:17 pm

Very good post, although it is a short one, it gives good pointers that will make learning a new language faster, but in my direct expirience people focus on learning a new language they need and not one for a hobby, so looking for the fastest or easiest to learn is not an option, so i would like to learn more about the deconstruction of languages to make the learning easier regardles of background.
You are on the right track on this and I wish this technique for learning a foreign language was abailible to me a few years sooner (it would have make it easier for me to learn the 3 extra languages i’m conversational in)
Reply
A Fan — February 22nd, 2008, 4:40 pm

I would love to hear whatever else you have to say about languages. I’m trying to learn as much as possible. I know a decent amount of german but would like to learn (at least grasp) a few other languages.

PS, I just found your blog yesterday and am really enjoying it.
Reply
sean savage — February 22nd, 2008, 9:19 pm

Tim, most impressive. Methinks you are a Jedi.

OBI-WAN: These are not the droids you’re looking for.
STORMTROOPER: These are not the droids we’re looking for.

TIM FERRISS: This blog post will teach you how to learn any language in 1 hour.
HUNDREDS OF COMMENTERS: This blog post taught me how to learn any language in 1 hour.

Teach me your secrets, o Jedi master!
Reply
Diego — February 23rd, 2008, 9:20 pm

Hi Tim,

Are there any locations where one could find such information for particular languages? How would one go about utilising this method?
Reply
Jonathan — February 26th, 2008, 9:13 am

Hi Tim,

Just a vote for you to please continue this series and post more on it if possible. A list of your Language Hacking tips tricks and resources would be great.

JD
Reply
Language Hacking at LimbicNutrition Weblog — February 26th, 2008, 9:42 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) [...]
Language Hacking at Belgrade Foreign Visitors Club — February 26th, 2008, 9:43 am

[...] How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor) [...]
Oliver — March 8th, 2008, 5:09 pm

Chinese is quite hard to learn but there are many good websites making it easier, like Chinese-Course.com
Reply
Debbie Daim — March 12th, 2008, 4:53 am

Great! I’ve been trying to find a way to learn Danish and thought of a way to learn it faster. I wil try this method. Thanks!
Reply
anne — March 13th, 2008, 3:36 am

Answer to Debbie,

Regarding Danish, i have learned it a few years ago in DK in a school called KISS (Koebenhavn International Sprog Skole) and it has been the most efficient way for me to learn a language (maybe not in 4 hours but in a few months). I already mentionned that school before on this blog. Although it was a very boring way to learn danish, it has been the most efficient so far. (on my fifth language) Unfortunatly i have heard it is closing (or is closed) but you might be able to get the course and/or teacher that will be willing to help you . The way they teach was basically to repeat sentances as many times you could and change just one word in it. No creativity but tremendously efficient!
Good Luck!
Farvel!
Reply
Debbie Daim — March 13th, 2008, 8:18 pm

Thank you anne for the info. I will ask my danish fiance about the school. No worries if it is closed. We will look for another school. Tak!
Reply
Tim — March 14th, 2008, 2:18 am

Hi Tim,

This article was how I found you, your book and the inventright guys. You mention in the original article that the sentences listed are some, but not all of the sentences you use in your language deconstruction. I would love to see a list of ALL of the sentences you use, so that I might use them as a basis for teaching my ESL students English as well as a basis I can use to learn Japanese.

Thanks Tim
Reply
Benson Wallace — March 14th, 2008, 4:32 am

Tim,

I just want to weigh in on the Mandarin Chinese debate here, and support calls for an article specifically dealing with Chinese learning – in particular, I’d like to see your take on learning to read Chinese. I’ve been learning Chinese for many years and my speech is near fluent, but I still struggle with reading; I’m a long way from being able to read everyday media and just using Chinese versions of software and Chinese websites is a struggle that requires 100% attention. As on blogger already commented, the Chinese culture currently doesn’t really fit with anlaytical techniques for language learning – ask a Chinese person and they’ll just tell you to sit down and memorize characters, because that’s how they did it.

Re: Portuguese and Spanish, could you elaborate on why learning Portuguese is bad for your Spanish? I also speak Spanish proficiently, and am considering attempting to cross-over to French, Portuguese and Italian (and the sad thing is, after all these year of Chinese study, I can still read more French!), because, like you said, it’s a path of less resistance. Do you have any caveats about doing this?
Reply
Steve Kaufmann — March 14th, 2008, 1:27 pm

Benson,

I would like to answer your two questions, 1) how to improve your reading skills in Chinese and 2) how much of an obstacle Spanish is to learning Portuguese.

The simple answers are:

1) to get better at reading Chinese you need to do two things. a) have an efficient system for learning the first 1,000 characters and b) do a lot of reading while continuing to add characters efficiently. You need to get to the point where you can enjoy reading Chinese, and even enjoy reading a novel. It will always be easier to read an alphabetical language. I speak Chinese fluently and have been studying Russian off and on for 2 years. I do not speak well but can read Tolstoi. I prefer to read Russian, even with 10-20% unknown words, to Chinese where I have very few unknown words. Our (non-Chinese) brains have been trained on reading alphabets.

Still, I learned 4,000 characters in 8 months and read Chinese quite comfortably and can provide more information about what I did if you want.

2) Spanish is a the easiest entry point to the world of Romance language speakers, a world of close to 750 million people. The biggest task in learning a language is mastering the vocabulary. Once you have one Romance language, and Spanish is the easiest in my opinion, the others are all “low hanging fruit.” Again I can elaborate on a strategy for leveraging your Spanish to learn the other Romance languages if you are interested.

Steve Kaufmann
Reply
- Bill — March 14th, 2011, 4:41 pm
  
  Steve,
  
  I wouldn’t mind learning the strategy of leveraging my Spanish to learn other romance languages. I am trying to learn french and italian. Merci beau coup in advance.
  
  Bill
  Reply
Paul — March 15th, 2008, 12:16 am

Steve Kaufmann
please “elaborate on a strategy for leveraging your Spanish to learn the other Romance languages”.
Reply
Steve Kaufmann — March 15th, 2008, 2:59 pm

Paul,

You can click on my name and read my latest blog post on how I choose the next language to learn. Here is what I said in answer to your specific question.

I briefly tried to learn Portuguese a few years ago, since it is so similar to Spanish. I did a lot of listening to content from the Living Language course book, and the Colloquial Language series. It really did not penetrate. I dropped it. Recently, because of the large number of LingQ learners from Brazil, I took it up again. This time I took a different approach.

You need a certain amount of beginner learner content, in short doses, in order to get your brain familiar with a new language, so that it is no longer just noise. Then you have to move to interesting authentic content as soon as possible. In other words, language learning is content based, not lesson or instruction based.

If you know a very similar language, with very similar vocabulary, as is the case with attempting Portuguese when you know Spanish, you can essentially skip the introductory stage. You do not need a course book. Living Language or Colloquial Portuguese etc. are unnecessary and boring. You just need to listen and read and save words and phrases from content that you like. You can do short articles at first, but then you should move to lengthier content, including novels. You can listen and read at the same time, and you listen while not reading, and you also read without listening. The main thing is to enjoy it and do a lot of it. If you like, you can even listen in Portuguese while reading in Spanish, using translations of famous books, for which translation and audio books are available. Otherwise you just do a lot of listening and reading, and reviewing new words, word forms, and phrase patterns. I ordered audio books from Brazil and after a few weeks of listening and working on LingQ my Portuguese improved quite rapidly.

With a lot of listening and reading, and a systematic review of words and phrases that come from this listening and reading, you will be surprised at how naturally the language starts to penetrate your brain, without you having to think of grammar rules or needing to identify the differences between the two languages. It is important not to convince yourself, as Tim Ferriss tries to do, that it is going to be difficult. You also need to be motivated, to like the language and to choose content that you like. I found some really interesting material in audio form, where the text was available. We have also been increasing our Portuguese content at LingQ thanks to our helpful Portuguese speaking members.

Unfortunately ( for my Portuguese) I remain more motivated to learn Russian for now, since I have not yet reached the level I want to get to. When I do, I will get back to Portuguese, unless I go after Korean first (if we have it on LingQ by then).

###

Dear Steve,

Please don’t use my blog to plug the bejesus out of your products. It puts off both readers and bloggers (me). I really like some of your suggestions, but especially after bad mouthing my approaches to language elsewhere on the web, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use the comments on my site to sell people.

I appreciate the contributions that don’t call me an idiot, but I will have someone delete your comments if you start to constantly refer to your products and site.

Cheers,

Tim Ferriss
Reply
Paul — March 16th, 2008, 3:15 am

Steve Kaufmann,
I agree with your comment that “You need a certain amount of beginner learner content, in short doses, in order to get your brain familiar with a new language, so that it is no longer just noise”.
When I 1st heard some languages they sounded like the people were from outer space. It’s only after some meaning is acquired that the learning begins, and as you said, “the language starts to penetrate your brain”.

I also agree with you regarding attitude: “It is important not to convince yourself, as Tim Ferriss tries to do, that it is going to be difficult. You also need to be motivated, to like the language and to choose content that you like.” Negative thoughts impede the learning process, regardless of the subject.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Paul

###

Hi Paul,

Just to defend myself here, I’m not advising being negative at all. I’m suggesting that people know and expect the challenges in each language they pursue. If you expect a dip in proficiency in country around month 6, which is my trend, than I can overcome it rather than quitting out of frustration.

Hope for the best but plan for the hard stuff is what I was trying to convey.

Cheers,

Tim
Reply
Sandra Stimson — March 16th, 2008, 4:19 pm

I still speak a bit of French and Italian, left over from college. I have been putting off learning Spanish, (which would be a much more useful language for me) afraid that 3 languages with a Latin base will just mush together in my brain. The few Spanish words that I have picked up already sound so much like Italian to me that I sometimes can’t distinguish between the two. What is your experience with this?
Reply
Steve Kaufmann — March 16th, 2008, 7:24 pm

Sandra,

In my view you need to focus on one Latin based language for a while. If you only “speak a bit” of a language it is easy to get confused when learning a little bit of a similar language.
Spanish is the best “entry door” into the world of Romance languages, because of its consistent spelling, relatively easy pronunciation and wide use. Just go for Spanish, spend a year on it if necessary, do a lot of listening and reading of material that you find interesting. Try to do a little bit almost every day, listening in the car, while doing chores etc. Always carry a little Spanish reader around with you.
Do not worry too much about how well you speak, at least for 6 months. Do not try to nail down the grammar. You may want a small grammar book for reference, but mostly you just want to get used to the language and learn words. And try to find a way to enjoy the language. Use the Internet where you can find lots of content and use online dictionaries. Your bits of French and Italian, and the Latin based words of English will help you.
Once you have a good grasp of Spanish, you can go back to French and Italian and you will find that you have improved in those languages without having studied them.
Reply
Steve Kaufmann — March 16th, 2008, 7:36 pm

Dear Tim,

I will respect you wishes and will keep my comments constructive and general. Although we have our areas of disagreement, we also agree on many aspects of language learning. I think it makes for a lively discussion of language learning if a variety of perspectives are available for the readers.

Regards
Steve
Reply
fabrice — March 19th, 2008, 10:53 pm

tim…this is extraordinary… although most people i know are bilingual. this is where it stops..
i had latin in mid. along w/ english, spanish, and french (native). the latin has been a tremendous help for thinking in roots.
i can read italian (main), portuguese (and speak), then catalan, aragones, occitan, navarres, languedoc, lombard, normaound, they are juste the same language…
but what is the code?…
once i was working w/ some chinese friends on a project…they blurted out some directives to one another…and i understood!….didn’t know any chinese at all.. where is that from…i also picked up some tagalog, thai, and others…
so i figured this :
a child knows nothing but start speaking around age 1 1/2…
2 to be more certain.
well to master anything, that seems to be the magic number…2 yrs…
to get your black belt…2 yrs; to get proficient in dancing…same..
but what is mastery and proficiency?…
how is it related to a child?
when thinking of the meaning of a black belt…it is only the certification on having learned the basics…only!
thats when and only then that the real journey begins..
same at 2 yrs old…there comes the click for the child..
begining of independance.
i had been dancing salsa for 15 yrs..and i decided to take formal salsa (rueda) lessons.. first, thought i new nothing!!! looked like i could not fit my 2 feet together for a few weeks…8 mo later i was excellent…but the real epiphany happened 2 yrs later…
exactly what i had been told at the beginning by the instructor.
so how does that apply to cracking the language code?…
well the 2 yr break out got me thinking… what had changed?…wasn’t the knowledge a month earlier and a month later had not made a difference…
salsa had become me.. so i happened to hag out w/ some old filipinos friends of mine…and same…tagalog was part of me…. i can think in portuguese (recent for me)..as if i came from brazil.. i don’t translate..
so i got to read some of the above languages..and same thing…some i had never even heard of… where is that coming from?…
well as most of you know ( i see lots of pro linguists in here) language is just the expression of inner emotions. and so all living beings have these basic emotions… even plants…
so how can a dog/cat understand your command…as well as your state of mind…
how ca a horse know your intentions?
or koko the gorilla could look at a pic of an animal and tell the feelings of the animal?
how can we ‘get’ that from writings of an unknown language? the refined thoughts and emotions behind the pen?..
physically, sounds and words accounts for 7-10 % of communication…but when written?
breaking the pattern of thoughts…
formed by cultural point of views…
deformed by personal experiences..
reformed by other beliefs..
and tainted by local idiosyncrasies.
so fun!

in the end…what is being said is more important than how… or is it!
salut…
F.
Reply
Robert Humphreys — March 25th, 2008, 7:46 am

Thanks very much Tim. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this.

I had a few of your other articles from some time back – How to Learn Any Language in 3 months, Why Language Classes Don’t Work….., and The Art of Wrapping Your Mouth …….

I’ve found them all really good, informative and thought provoking.

I’d love to see more.

I’m going to Vietnam to teach spoken English in May and I hope you don’t mind if I use some of your insights and techniques. If you object, please let me know.

Would you be interested in a JV, to see if your tehniques work in the other direction? Or won’t it matter that English has so many phonemes?

Please keep up the great work.

Regards,
Rob

###

Hi Rob!

More coming, for sure. I’d LOVE to see what you can do with English in Vietnam! Ah, the jealousy I hope to be in Vietnam in late 2008 or early 2009.

Good luck!

Tim
Reply
Nathan — March 26th, 2008, 11:26 am

This post is very interesting, but I caution that your example sentences would not effectively expose the workings of a language such as Basque, with complex, alien verb structures. I would suggest diversifying your sentences to include differences between: 1) transitive and intransitive verbs:

“I will not change” [intransitive]
Ni ez naiz aldatuko

“I will not change my name” [transitive]
Nik ez dut nire izena aldatuko

“The dog wants to eat” [transitive]
Txakurrak jan nahi du

“Dogs are good” [intransitive]
Txakurrak onak dira

2) Grammatical number of subject and direct object:

“The dog wants to eat a cat”
Txakurrak katu bat jan nahi du

“The dogs want to eat a cat”
Txakurrek katu bat jan nahi dute

“The dog wants to eat cats”
Txakurrak katuak jan nahi ditu

“The dogs want to eat cats”
Txakurrek katuak jan nahi dituzte

Basque not only has the “much-dreaded noun cases”, but it has a hell of a lot more than German does. It distinguishes subjects of transitive sentences from subjects of intransitive sentences [Ergative case/Absolutive case], it has a behemothly complex auxiliary verb system, and that’s not even the most exciting part.

I think your system would work well for languages like French or Spanish, but I would be more cautious about touting its efficacy, as it seems a bit euro-centric [despite the fact that it "works" with a language like Mandarin.... which is admittedly much like English in syntax].
Reply
Kate — March 26th, 2008, 2:36 pm

It is interesting that you say Russian in an hour but Asia language in less than an hour. I found this site, http://www.claritaslux.com/blog/2007/04/22/the-hardest-language-to-learn/ which would agree with what you stated above that Slavic languages are harder than Asian languages at least my understanding of what you wrote above because you do not spell it out for us, pun intended.
Reply
thirtyplus — March 26th, 2008, 8:50 pm

Tim,

What do you think about the impacts of trying to learn two languages at once — is it your opinion that this would result in a net increase or net decrease in the efficacy of learning each one?

My own guess is that it depends on the languages….two very disparate languages would not be good, but two very similar languages…Spanish and Italian for example…would be good.

Thoughts?
Reply
Maxine — March 27th, 2008, 3:25 pm

Loved your article on learning languages. It may explain why on my recent visits to Shanghai, that learning my way around the tonal qualities was not as difficult as I had expected.

On the other hand, a recent visit to Barcelona, rendered me completely tongue-tied, despite my light knowledge of French, and classes in Castilian Spanish. I was mixing up french and Spanish constantly.

As I have discovered in the past, the method of mastering a skill can be acquired in numerous ways, so this discussion was of particular interest to me. I’d love to hear more.
Reply
Sabine — March 29th, 2008, 8:32 am

Hey Timothy,

I have a proposition for you:

you teach me to dance the Tango like a pro and I show you around in Amsterdam and teach you how to hand paint 17th century tulips. It’s all about having fun in life, learning and loving, right!

How about it……. would you like to take this chance?
Reply
Zach Beauvais Online » Blog Archive » An hour to learn any language? — April 1st, 2008, 1:53 pm

[...] and interesting. Having done a degree in applied linguistics, I found the his item about learning a language in an hour interesting, if slightly [...]
Richard — April 1st, 2008, 5:02 pm

I use GR. As well as the GR texts like Chinese Primer and Mandarin Primer, I use software tools (which I wrote myself) to convert pinyin to GR, so I can grab any learning materials off the web and display them with GR. For example, I downloaded CEDICT, converted it to GR, and imported it into Wenlin as supplementary C-E dictionary.

GR is not suitable for most people, simply because of pinyin’s dominance; and also because some find GR too complicated or less natural, or because they are less visually-oriented learners who pick up the tones more by listening. But for people who are good at spelling, GR can be very useful, because the tones are embedded in the spelling.

McGinnis’s study, which found that GR did not lead to better tonal production accuracy, did not take into account individual differences in people’s learning styles or their proficiency in spelling. I would suggest that people who have good visual memory, and can recall the shape (spelling) of words would benefit from GR. Those who struggle with spelling might find GR frustratingly complicated, but may learn the tones well by listening to spoken Chinese.
Reply
Rachel Henke — April 7th, 2008, 5:54 am

Hi Tim

I am just reading your book now and have found it so far to be one of the most inspirational I have ever read. And I have read many!!!

Most of the suggestions are really step by step and self-explanatory which is awesome. With regard to the languages… aside from this blog post do you have a recommended system for actually learning the language after you’ve chosen which one to learn? Any tips on learning conversational French quickly (aside from the obvious one of going to France!)

Thanks in advance
Rachel Henke
Reply
How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — April 10th, 2008, 2:48 am

[...] Happen (and Weapons of Mass Distraction) How to Outsource the Inbox and Never Check Email Again How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour digg_url = [...]
Robert — April 18th, 2008, 7:51 am

You are not the first linguist to say to cheekishly admit you’ve put off learning Russian.

I didn’t.

Russians think language is a method, not a goal. You treat language acquisition as the goal, so you pick and choose which trophy you will hang on your shelf.

I agree with you, one thing that Russian has taught me is Russians are kind of mean spirited little buggers.

But, I will point out that I learned Russian. You didn’t. So in internet parlance, I basically own you.

[From Tim: You own me? LOL... try learning to read and write Japanese and Chinese, then we'll talk ]

The key to learnign Russian is to follow none of your advice by the way. Learn to speak it first, then go back and learn the rules.

Here is my advice, in a nutshell:

Brute force memorize about 5000 words.
Now, you have enough you can start picking up sentences.

It will be rare for a Russian to have the patience to help you, but if you find one, that person is gold, treat them as such. If not, just bully your way into conversation after conversation while they relentlessly ridicule you…so what, you can get them back later)))

Then, after this awkward phase which lasts a year or two, you can begin normal conversations…once you are at a certain level, you can escape the ridicule that Russians heap on top of all learners.

(You say, thats not my experience!…if its not, you aren’t actually a learner, as the author of this blog noted: if you are talking in English about your DESIRE to learn Russian…you are escaping ridicule because you are not actually a Russian learner…to see my point about Ridicule, never leave the Russian language…and see what happens:)))

OK, finally when you get to a certain level, go back and learn those grammar rules and get the academic background, etc.

After that its all gravy.
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Simonsen — April 18th, 2008, 4:33 pm

Ola, gostei do que observei no site, solicito ajuda para que eu possa aprender uma nova lingua, necessidade trabalho. Tenho interese em aprender inlges, chines e japones. Fico no teu aguardo. Um grande abraco

###

Ola Simonsen,

I recommend you learn English first, since you can then use English books to learn Japanese and Chinese. I hope that helps!

Um grande abraco tamben

Tim
Reply
Brian — April 19th, 2008, 8:00 am

Your 1 hour language article was great! However, since you’ve already done the work on a dozen or so languages, might you post your lists (for example, easiest to hardest of those languages for a native English speaker) and notes for those languages?
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Michael Prince — April 19th, 2008, 6:24 pm

Wow, its amazing that you can pick up that many languages so fast. You should definitely consider making your techniques into an information product of some sort. You would make millions.
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Tim — April 25th, 2008, 9:37 am

Thanks for the article Tim. I added it to a post on my genealogy blog of to 15 language sites.

I’m one who has put off learning a second language for a while and your article may be just the thing to help motivate me to actually do it.

Tim
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An English Teacher in China » Weekly Roundup: Love China; Learn Chinese — May 2nd, 2008, 6:30 pm

[...] TheFourHourWorkweek.com is a great site with some unique thoughts on productivity and life. Here is a thought provoking post on how to learn any language including mandarin: how to learn, but not master, any language in one hour. I have been struggling with learning tones of Mandarin and even still use my fingers now to draw the correct tone as I speak. I like how Tim recommends using an older system called Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GW) method. This method was co-created by an amazing Chinese author Lin Yu Tang, whose works especially The Importance of Living are absolute masterpieces. Even though I’ve been learning Pinyin for the past three years and believe my pronunciation is pretty good, I’m now attempting to use the GW method to improve my tones. [...]
David — May 2nd, 2008, 8:22 pm

Interesting article. It would be great if you listed the easiest languages for english speakers to learn based on your knowledge
Reply
100 Simple Ways to Change Your Life for the Better « David Wourms’ Weblog — May 8th, 2008, 9:34 am

[...] Learn a new language: Broaden your horizons by learning how to speak a new language. [...]
abaybay — May 16th, 2008, 8:29 pm

MORE LANGUAGE ARTICLES
PLEASE!!
Reply
chathura Jeewantha — May 16th, 2008, 9:50 pm

well greate
But please give some idea to learn SINHALA……as well
itz very important to me
I hope you will take steps
Reply
Chicago — May 20th, 2008, 5:40 am

A good man would prefer to be defeated than to defeat injustice by evil means.
Reply
HoSoo Kang — May 28th, 2008, 7:01 am

Hi,
I think your sugestion of learning Language is very good.
But, I think it is just for basic grammar and expressions.
After mastering basic grammar and expressions, how can I enlarge vocablary and many expressions?

I’m Korean, and I learned English more than 10 years during my school time. But, I always have difficulty in English, especially in hearing and speaking. Can you sugest good Idea?
Reply
Andrew — June 8th, 2008, 7:02 pm

I think this is just great. After reading this, I went and started learning Japanese. Next year, I think I’m going to take a class on it at my school. Right now I’m fluent in two languages: English and Spanish. I’m learning Maori, and I naturally picked apart the words, sentences, verbs. I figured out how it works at its roots, and I am now speaking it with a cute native New Zealand girl that recently moved here. Thanks for all the help! Gracias por todo amigo! Kia ora hoa, kia ora.
Reply
will — June 9th, 2008, 3:07 pm

Could you possibly provide a breakdown of how one might go about using this system to learn a language in an hour? Possibly providing an example for, say, french ? Or Spanish? Just so we can see the process you wrote about in action!!

This is a great post and I think a semi-detailed example would really drive the point home… Or at least let us view full-size versions of the images in the post!
Reply
Hacking Japan: Inside Tokyo for Less than New York - Part 2 | The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — June 10th, 2008, 7:55 am

[...] Tokyo is like NYC but full of Mr. Rogers-like eagerness to help… if you make the effort with a few words of Japanese first. [...]
Dario — June 12th, 2008, 4:10 am

Have you heard of Pimsleur? He was a linguist that created a new form of language study. The way schools all over the world teach any language is by a visual method (reading and writing). But the truth of the matter is that a language is a hearing and speaking thing.

I bet there are a lot of Mexicans that can talk but can’t read spanish. However, give me a Mexican that can read spanish and not speak it and I’ll give you… I don’t know what I’ll give you…something nice.

So check it out. Pimsleur created a new language learning experience based on repetition and anticipation. In other words, he makes you think. Instead of telling you to repeat after him all the time, he teaches you how to say something and 5 minutes later asks you to say it once more but without telling you how you’re supposed to say it.

Anyway, more info here. Nice blog. I’m looking forward to buying and reading your book!

Dario
(spanish, english, italian, japanese, chinese and some german)
Reply
eduFire » Blogs — June 19th, 2008, 11:36 am

[...] Tim Ferriss’s posts *aren’t* about learning languages but the ones he has posted (e.g., How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour) are very interesting and the comments tend to be well worth the read as well. Let’s hope Tim [...]
Doug — June 25th, 2008, 6:35 am

Guten Tag von Berlin!

Partly after being prompted from your book, I was able to go on a study abroad trip this summer in Berlin. I´m leaving in a few days, but I have to say I understand why this is one of your favorite cities. Anyway, the type of learning you described here helped me significantly during my study of the German language. Since I speak decent Spanish, I just put everything in context of what I knew of that, and then spent extra time focusing on things that were different i.e. Ich möchte ins Kino gehen vs. Yo quisiera ir al Cine. Good post. Also, I´ll be gone by the time I read it, but for next trip, what was your favorite thing in Berlin? I´d have to say mine was the Paul Löbe Haus, even though I didn´t get to go inside. Finally, do you know any Dutch? Neat language.

Auf Wiedersehen,
Doug
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Stan — June 29th, 2008, 12:16 pm

Dear Tim, Thanks for your book, website and blog! Please continue on deconstructing languages. I certainly would appreciate it.I stated learning German seriously in Switzerland, in my late 40s, early 50s. More recently I began Russian.

After excellent traditional grammar instruction without much progressI realized I needed to understand and get a grip on the written alphabet before I could move ahead with the grammar and vocab. For typewriting there is an excellent, very good though pricey program, Virtuoso, that really drills the correct fingering. Be sure to enable Russian typewriter, though, as at least one character will not function in the program without it.
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vivien — July 4th, 2008, 5:00 am

hi all

just let you know this site italki.com

Not sure if you guys have seen

italki.com is a global online community for language learning. – With italki.com, you can learn a language naturally by talking with native speakers of that language. It’s a great way to practice what you’ve learned in class and to study how native people really speak. – You can also make friends from all over the world, and learn about foreign countries and cultures.
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Nathalie — July 29th, 2008, 11:44 am

Hi Tim,

Thanks for the inspiration. As a language teacher, I couldn’t agree with you more – the way languages are taught traditionally is mind-numbing and ineffective.

I also love the Michel Thomas series – has anyone tried the new Arabic and Chinese courses that they published?

I was wondering if you would give me permission to publish your article “Why Language Classes Don’t Work” in my free e-zine “Language Learning Express.” I’m going on vacation and a guest article would be most welcome ) Plus, it’s right on the mark and I think our readers would greatly benefit from it.

Do you know about Vera Birkenbihl? She wrote “Sprachenlernen leichtgemacht,” which I think is brilliant. (“Language Learning Made Easy,” not available in English…)

Thanks for your commitment to live life to the fullest – it’s the only way!
Nathalie
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mrshadeed — August 19th, 2008, 12:54 pm

In my own travels and approaches to learning new language, I’ve always focused on the verbs followed by the pronoun.
It has been my experience that if I at least focus on the ‘action’ in the words I’m trying to communicate, the listener can pick up the rest.
Reply
Charlie — August 20th, 2008, 10:12 am

> “Joe, I didn’t know that ASL uses SOV. That is too cool! Esperanto, anyone?”

Esperanto encodes specific grammatical functions into each word. In theory it can be SOV, SVO, VOS, VSO, or whatever you like. In practice it tends to mirror the sentence structure of the speaker’s native language. Because most of the Esperanto that I read comes from native speakers of western european languages, it is mostly SVO.

But the word order can (and does) change radically when needed for poetic effect.

Try Esperanto sometime if you haven’t already. It’s sort of like a highly simplified Latin derivative with a healthy dose of eastern euro vocabulary, some germanic agglutination, and a major shot of English helper-verb influence. You’d probably find it easy and fun.
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Ashlee — August 23rd, 2008, 5:09 am

This was awesome! I would love more language articles. And more step-by-step & how-tos would be very helpful! I found the 80-20 rule incouraging…now I’m less nervous studying and speaking new languages!

Thanks!
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Liron — August 27th, 2008, 8:08 am

Antoher Great post !

An Idea:
To illustrate the point you make in the post, how about any “non-English” people out here translate the sentences above into their languages and we can all get a taste and understanding ?
Reply
chris — August 28th, 2008, 9:08 pm

wow this is so helpful. encore!!!
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One Number That Has The Power to Change Your Life | Billionaire Woman.com — September 4th, 2008, 11:23 am

[...] age as an excuse against learning a new language is like cheating your abilities. If you want to learn a new language, no matter what your age, just dive right in. It’s another one of those good for your brain [...]
Ikalil Tima — September 9th, 2008, 11:45 am

Tim, could you efficiently conquer the spiritual world too: God-Realization/Enlightenment/Samadhi, etc?

What are the short-cuts to succeeding with ajapa (ceaseless mantra of Divine name) and/or meditation to experience and function from that all-knowing, ever-new, continuous Bliss, the Brahman?

*Also how do you feel about the GMO/cloned foods that are filling supermarkets and fast-food? Or the fluoridation of drinking water? I remember reading somewhere that Japan rejected some of these GMO foods because they found it could cause a resistance to certain antibiotics. Japan, Greece, and some other countries also don’t put fluoride in the water because of bad effects, as Nazis had used it to keep others more docile. Do you use really good water filter? BTW it does not seem that Japan or Greece have worse problems with cavities.
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Jamie — September 9th, 2008, 1:20 pm

Very interesting article and theory! As an ESL instructor, I’d be curious to try and pose this technique to new students, maybe as a way to help them get comfortable with learning English more easily. Your approach at least demystifies some of the things that could later intimidate a language learner.

One thing I’m curious about in your “test sentences”–why no passive voice (“The apple was given to John (by me)”)? I remember learning that in German and it just completely threw me. For a lot of language learners, that’s a tough thing to grasp and acquire.
Reply
nadav — September 14th, 2008, 12:34 pm

WOW
this language thing is really cool
i am working on French with this home study curse.
Reply
Tower of Confusion » Blog Archive » Learn to Speak Fluently in No Time — September 19th, 2008, 1:05 pm

[...] remember this fellow? Tim Ferriss posted in his blog a while ago an article “How to Learn Any Language in 1 Hour“, which ended up attracting thousands of readers. No, he did not mean to take it seriously. [...]
Prof. Larry M. Lynch — September 21st, 2008, 9:55 am

This is an excellent, original take on an oft-referred to topic. With globalization expanding at an unchecked rate, more and more of even the proverbial “one language speakers” – Americans, are learning foreign languages. In my blog post, “How to Learn a Foreign Language in One Hour”, I discuss how author Tim Ferris’ view are somewhat similar to mine, but with some differences. My blog post gives examples using the English and Chinese languages to illustrate some of our mutual views. Whether a language is potentially difficult to learn or not, with incentives and motivation it can be done – and done well using a variety of techniques including Tim’s method of “de-constructing” the foreign language.

Thank you for this insightful article.

Sincerely,

Prof. Larry M. Lynch
Santiago de Cali University
Cali, Colombia
Reply
Casey Johns — September 21st, 2008, 12:35 pm

Very helpful post, Tim.

First, where is your article “Why Language Classes Don’t Work”? I would like to read that article. Nathalie mentioned it, in her comment of July 29th, 2008.

To get back to your article “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour”, I have been looking for detailed explanations concerning why, for a particular student, some foreign languages might be easier or more difficult to learn. Since I am not fluent in anything but American English, your post gave me specific reasons as to why effective foreign language teaching needs to be tailored to account for the structure and idiosyncrasies of the student’s native language, as well as the target language. That would seem obvious, right? Well, it is not, for many people.

But more important, and harder to find, are suggestions on how, exactly, to develop effective lesson plans and drills that will ease the transition from the student’s native language to the target language. Your article took that extra step.

It is also very interesting that some criticized your original post as not useful, because you made “complex leaps in thought-processes” that “normal people” cannot be expected to understand, although “academic linguists draw the inferences all the time”.

This ignorance, or deliberate disregard of differences between languages, has led to the adoption of some stubbornly simpleminded and unproductive methods of language teaching. These methods unfortunately became long running fads, such as the direct method (used by Berlitz), audio-lingual method (Harcourt’s ALM), and most recently, Rosetta Stone, with their dynamic immersion method. Why people continue to deceive themselves with these ineffective methods is a mystery to me.

The very strange case of Rosetta Stone throws an additional cloud of doubt over the truthfulness of anonymous online reviews, as well making me doubt the accuracy of reviews published in reputable newspapers and magazines. Whether online or in reputable print media, those who review Rosetta Stone are praising and recommending it, rather than criticizing it, by a margin of a hundred to one.

Please share more of your thoughts on the subject of how to effectively teach languages to students of different backgrounds.
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Tim Ferriss — September 21st, 2008, 9:16 pm

@Casey,

Thank you for the excellent comment and intelligent observations. Thanks also for the reminder. I’ll try and track down that article and put it up soon.

More to come

All the best,

Tim
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Steve Kaufmann — September 21st, 2008, 9:19 pm

Casey,

I agree on the limited usefulness of Rosetta Stone. However, as someone who speaks 10 languages, Asian, Romance, Germanic, Slavic, I feel that the differences between languages do not matter that much, in terms of how to go about learning them. The key issue is your motivation to learn the language. After that, the next most important thing is to avoid being obsessed with grammar or perfection. Just focus on exposing yourself to a lot of content, listening and reading, some writing and talking, and try to accumulate words.

It is easier to learn a language with a lot of vocabulary common to languages you already know. It is the common vocabulary, rather than any “deconstructing” that will determine how easy the job is. But it is motivation that will determine success, based on my experience as a learner and from watching others.
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Steve Kaufmann — September 21st, 2008, 9:58 pm

Tim,

I look forward to the article on “Why Language Classes Don’t Work”? I firmly believe that the emphasis on classroom instruction for language and literacy teaching represents a tremendous waste of money ( I am talking billions of dollars of public money alone) and ends up discouraging many people from learning another language.

Unfortunately the established language teaching establishment, including Adult English instruction for immigrants and general literacy teaching is based primarily on the expensive and ineffective classroom model.

The Internet offers many ways to enable people to learn languages more effectively and with a much smaller expenditure of money. I wonder if the people involved in public education will ever get the picture.
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julia eva — September 22nd, 2008, 8:03 am

Hello Tim,

Your articles and the book are very inspiring and we love the way you think about language learning/teaching.

We are a start up business and put language courses onto mobile phones. We want to make learning available for everyone, everywhere, ideally for free (at least the basics). This will be big- and you would be the ridiculously most suitable (English) language course creator for our adventures.

We know you are absolutely too famous for us, but if you are interested we would be delighted hearing from you.

Julia
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Casey Johns — September 22nd, 2008, 10:51 am

Hi, Tim.

Is your Princeton thesis research available? How much did your research focus on that neglected deconstruction step, for language learning?

And you were involved in redesigning curricula for Berlitz?

When I encountered Berlitz and ALM, many years ago, it was mostly listen and repeat, and wait for a miracle to happen. No analysis, please! It was against the rules of the methods, at least according to the instructors that I encountered. Perhaps some students experienced the long awaited flash of comprehension, but I never saw either method work, with anyone. Lately, the old fads are back, recombined as Rosetta Stone.

Interesting, that you drew the analogy that ones brain needs to be “formatted” for a new language.

I am not a teacher. However, I have always felt that language learning requires four steps.

– First, learn model sentences. Understand the individual words and how the words work together, to produce any idiomatic meanings. (Of course, we assume capable instructors have chosen the model sentences.)
– Second, learn how the language’s grammar puts words together into sentences.
– Third, learn as many idioms as possible.
– If one wants to converse in person, a fourth step is required, learning pronunciation.

I don’t know exactly how and when pronunciation should be blended in. Your article pointed out that the optimum study strategy will vary, depending on each student’s prior knowledge base.

For the first step, learning the model sentences, your “Six Lines of Gold” analysis could be one technique for picking the model sentences.

For the second step, grammar, it seems like learning grammar might be the brain formatting task that you mentioned. Get the formatting right, and we ease the task of pouring in the content. However, not every expression that is grammatically correct has meaning. And often, if it has meaning, the meaning might be completely contrary to what you might expect.

Hence, the third step, idioms, which is rarely mentioned. As hard as grammar can be, learning idioms is probably the most difficult and time consuming task, in my humble opinion. There is no rhyme or reason to idioms, and there are so many of them, some with slippery nuances of meaning.

What is your experience with learning idioms? Any insights? Or is it the grim march that I envision?

And idioms continue to provide material for comedy writers. To choose a rather coarse example, don’t ever do a word for word translation of the innocent sounding English phrase “I am hot”, without prior verification of the possible meanings.

Casey
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Steve Kaufmann — September 22nd, 2008, 11:52 am

Casey,

From my experience in learning lots of languages, I have to disagree with you.

Stage 1:

Listen to and read a limited amount of simple content for which translation is available. Do this repetitively, to get over the strangeness of the language. Consult a simple short reference grammar if necessary. Speak and write ery little

Stage 2:

Move to interesting authentic content, again listening and reading and learning vocabulary. Speak and write a little more.

Stage 3:

Continue listening and reading, and focus on refining the grammar using material written in the target language.

The pronunciation and ability to speak will come. Avoid focusing on idioms, they are hard to use and a distraction. Do not try to understand or remember the rules of grammar, you won’t be able to until you have had a lot exposure to the language.
Reply
Why Language Classes Don’t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate (Plus: Madrid Update) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — September 22nd, 2008, 5:13 pm

[...] is one of several articles planned as supplements to the original “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour.” This piece focuses on acquisition of new material; for reactivating “forgotten” [...]
Q — September 23rd, 2008, 2:16 am

Tim, why learn to read or write whats the point, your gonna lose it later unless you keep up, and are you going be really effective? Learn conversation thats it, learn enough reading to get by…

Drop all congegations…they are unnessessary. Just learn a broken language…as long as you can communicate …thats the point.

QuinnDarrin
Italy, China, Korea, Japan

I train people on how to speak english….(kind of)
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Tom Sanderson — September 23rd, 2008, 3:22 pm

HI Guys,

I am possibly going to spend 6 months in CHina and am looking for the best way to prepare myself to learn the language. I’d like to spend several hours before I go and once I arrive I’ll use a combo of classes and practice as per Tim’s suggestions…

Can anyone direct me to a good beginners Chinese course that I can use asap?

I currently speak French and SPanish and am English
Reply
Jennifer W. — September 23rd, 2008, 10:53 pm

More. More. More. More on language.
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Why Language Classes Don’t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate (Plus: Madrid Update) | rob-thompson.com — October 3rd, 2008, 3:25 pm

[...] is one of several articles planned as supplements to the original “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour.” This piece focuses on acquisition of new material; for reactivating “forgotten” [...]
Joe — October 5th, 2008, 4:09 am

Ladies and Gentlemen,

If you would like to speak fluently any language at a conversational level, give a serious thought to the Pimsleur Method.
It is a bit expensive, (about $150 when I bought Russian and German courses) but I can personally attest of its efficiency.
It will require initially about 30 minutes of your time daily; just follow the instructions and repeat the words and phrases at the required intervals.
Before you know it the whole world opens up and you start picking up the rest. Of course you must be among natives to get the most out of it (as with any other method)
The principle of this method is that anybody, even babies pick up any language or dialect phonetically, before understanding alphabet symbols and rules such as declensions, which tend to clutter our initial learning.

Regards

Joe
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Anderson Fleming — October 5th, 2008, 6:54 pm

Fantastic! I love your approach. I believe that this kind of active approach instead of just sucking in regurgitated lessons, is of r-e-a-l help. A sort of think-for-yourself-schmuck-approach.

Would only add that if you use a system that can help you memorize words more quickly, you would be up an running speaking a foreign language in a very short time. You can check out my site, for I typically spend 40 to 60 minutes a day memorizing foreign words, being able to learn 100 words in that hour. With about 100% recall rate.

Of course, living in the country itself would be a bonus, but the way I see it it’s 1) Grammar, 2) Vocabulary and 3) Pronunciation. Well, and 4) Practice.
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Jeremy — October 29th, 2008, 3:32 pm

Ok this is great! I discovered most of this on my own, but loved the sentence translation for language decrypting. Only problem is that I don’t know anyone personally that speaks both English and Romanian. How do I get the sentences translated and transliterated for me?

By the way this question is not only intended for Tim, but to everyone out there that can help.

Thanks Everyone
Jeremy
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Ayame :] — November 3rd, 2008, 3:13 pm

Uhm. Okay You Lost Me At The Big Words xD Lol. But Im Pretty Sure People Over 12 Years Old Will Understand What Your Trying To Say… And It Sounded Pretty Smart To Me. [[yes, I Continued To Read It Even Though I Had No Idea What The heck You Were Saying...]] Aha Soo Uhm. Yeah Haha.
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Weekly Roundup: Love China; Learn Chinese — November 9th, 2008, 6:11 am

[...] TheFourHourWorkweek.com is a great site with some unique thoughts on productivity and life. Here is a thought provoking post on how to learn any language including mandarin: how to learn, but not master, any language in one hour. I have been struggling with learning tones of Mandarin and even still use my fingers now to draw the correct tone as I speak. I like how Tim recommends using an older system called Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GW) method. This method was co-created by an amazing Chinese author Lin Yu Tang, whose works especially The Importance of Living are absolute masterpieces. Even though I’ve been learning Pinyin for the past three years and believe my pronunciation is pretty good, I’m now attempting to use the GW method to improve my tones. [...]
Raphael — November 9th, 2008, 8:44 pm

This is a response about you mentioning the website from the Harvard business school. This site is much more user friendly and populated than the one mentioned. It comes from the Rosetta stone. http://www.sharedtalk.com/
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lisa duncan — November 10th, 2008, 1:52 pm

I like the language acquisition topic.
I am a teacher of Japanese (11 years) as a second language and recently started studying Spanish. What helps me is that the phonetic pronunciation of Spanish is very similar to Jpn and it has the same vowel sounds plus my knowledge of French and English helps me in guessing the meaning of many Spanish words. I think in any language it helps to understand sentence order but first mastering the sounds is also crucial to being understood. Some languages seem daunting-yes Jpn has 3 writing systems but so much of the grammar and verb conjugation is so easy that once you learn the writing overall it is quite basic. What I do is use a lot of mnemonic devices to help my students learn words plus repetition so that in time they are speaking/understanding without much hesitating. Last but not least it does help having the ability to mimic sounds and of course use the language with real live humans.
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fate — November 19th, 2008, 2:54 am

Very interesting. Though I must say that I never start learning the language before I have motivation for it, and already know some of it (that is, being exposed to it before). For example, I live in Denmark, and I was taking classes for 4 years! (those who did not, can hardly speak). I have a Portuguese boyfriend, and, after 4 years, I’m starting to speak a little and understand many things without too much extra effort (only speaking for fun, music, and some textbooks). I’ve been exposed to Spanish in various ways, and only after many years I’m finally taking classes, and planning to live in SA. Same with other languages… first comes the reason, only them some (pleasant and easy) effort to learn more.
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Monika — November 19th, 2008, 4:44 pm

Well, this is what the first class of any language course should be about: just making students realize how much effort they are bound to put into learning this new language… Smart list of questions for determining the difficulty level of each language.
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LeAnn — November 29th, 2008, 10:02 am

Helpful. I like the think for yourself and dig-in approach.
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i-Immersion News Blog » Blog Archive » Best Web Tools to Teach Yourself a New Language — December 16th, 2008, 12:22 am

[...] How to Learn (but not master) Any Language in 1 Hour: The Four Hour Work Week blog offers tips for cramming your language study into an hour. [...]
Retire in Mexico: Immersing Yourself In Mexican Culture | Mexico Real Estate Investment | Mexico Real Estate, Retire in Mexico, Living in Mexico — December 17th, 2008, 1:30 am

[...] A good grasp of Spanish can come in quite handy when living in Mexico and comprehending a new language is not easy. A Spanish immersion program that is hosted abroad in Mexico can accelerate your Spanish learning while also helping you acclimate to life in a new country. There are also several learning resources available for free on iTunes (see Top 10 Free Spanish Lesson Podcasts). There is also an interesting article by time management guru Tim Ferriss that is titled How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. [...]
James NomadRip — December 18th, 2008, 12:52 pm

Yes, I would also love more on this.
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Conor — December 25th, 2008, 3:25 pm

Tim, I really appreciate this article. The more the better
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100 Simple Ways to Change Your Life for the Better | Work SMART not Hard! — December 27th, 2008, 3:41 am

[...] Learn a new language: Broaden your horizons by learning how to speak a new language. [...]
Learn Any Language In An Hour? - Learn Spanish On Your Own — December 29th, 2008, 3:56 pm

[...] Anywhere, and Join the New Rich) posted a long and fascinating post on his personal blog entitled How To Learn (But Not Master) Any Language In 1 Hour. In it, he gives an overview of his process for “deconstructing” a language to distill [...]
Robert4556 — January 4th, 2009, 10:16 pm

I admit I once criticized this article, but now I’ve come to appreciate it.

The reality is, in context of the enormity of learning a language, it really does no harm, and probably does a lot of good to take command of the grammar.

Just spend one evening to map it out, what I did, was simply place all the russian cases on a chart, what they mean, and what the endings become…both plural and singular. I did this for nouns and adjectives.

Then I spent an evening reading a book. I’ve already gotten where I can read fairly well…amazingly enough without ever doing this before (I don’t recommend my method, its far too slow a way too learn).

To my surprise, suddenly the choices were making sense. Take a movie title like ?????? ? ??????? You cannot understand this title by context, if there is no context and all you have is the title. Is it letter in america, or letter to america? And if it is ‘letter to America’ where is the verb of motion?

Well, after mapping it all out, obviously the accusative case, implies a verb of motion. It makes sense, a letter travels.

I thought this was great…why didn’t I just spend one little day on this.

However, this ‘learning about’ a language in one hour, is not the same as being able to speak a language, which will still take one year of immersion, or 5 to 10 years of traditional study (if you cannot get immersion possibility).

Figuring out how to allow someone without immersion opportunities to also master a language within a year….would be most helpful.
Reply
A Better Man Bloomed? » Lexicography and/or Japanese — January 8th, 2009, 10:39 am

[...] Then I decided to check out the blog it was posted on, Leximo. The very next post was about learning languages and also linked to “lifehacker” Tim Ferris’ blog post on how to learn (but not master) any language in less than an hour. [...]
Five Things You Can Start Doing (Today) to Get the Girls | Ryoni — January 11th, 2009, 2:00 pm

[...] Tim Ferris’s post on the subject and start small. Pick a language that’s useful to you (something like Spanish, [...]
Retire in Mexico: Immersing Yourself In Mexican Culture | Mazatlan Mexico, Travel, Real Estate, Hotels, Resorts, Culture & Leisure, Tours & Activities Weblog — January 13th, 2009, 3:54 pm

[...] A good grasp of Spanish can come in quite handy when living in Mexico and comprehending a new language is not easy. A Spanish immersion program that is hosted abroad in Mexico can accelerate your Spanish learning while also helping you acclimate to life in a new country. There are also several learning resources available for free on iTunes (see Top 10 Free Spanish Lesson Podcasts). Check out this article by time management guru Tim Ferriss that is titled How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour. [...]
How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months — January 20th, 2009, 2:09 pm

[...] in turn. This post will focus on vocabulary and subject matter. For learning grammar, I suggest you read this short article. For “reactivating” forgotten languages — like high school Spanish — this [...]
arjun — January 21st, 2009, 1:03 pm

hey! i have a friend in norway .i want to learn the language ,people use to.can anyone help me to learn the some .i ‘ll be very thankfull to u.
Reply
Thiry — January 27th, 2009, 2:37 am

Je ne connais pas l’anglais et je voudrais l’apprendre ainsi que l’allemand est -il possible d’avoir la traduction de ce site?
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jerry — January 27th, 2009, 11:52 am

This may have been said already but another very helpful technique I’ve found for many of the latin-based languages helped immensely with my Spanish, and I’ve applied it since to Italian, French, and Portugese.

Focus on committing to memory conjugations at first, in only 2 tenses. Present and Past. For future, simply conjugate the infinitive ‘to go’, and use the infinitive. Take for example the phrase “I shall speak”. Traditionally this would be the future first person conjugation “hablaré”. No no no. If you said this in Mexico, it would be very clear you were not a native speaker. Instead, conjugate “to go”, “ir”, and add the infinitive for “to speak”, or “hablar”. The result is “voy a hablar”, or the equivalent of “I am going to speak”. Bang, done.

My note on learning only past will have some of you saying “But the past imperfect is the correct tense in many cases.” And you’re right. It’s the difference between relaying a story to someone and saying “I was speaking to my son…” and “I spoke to my son…” The first is the past imperfect and the right tense. The second is the past simple and is not… BUT PEOPLE WILL UNDERSTAND YOU and you get off the ground in the language that much faster.

Learn Present simple, and Past simple, and for future conjugate ‘to go’ and use the infinitive verb.

I’ve used techniques like these to become fluent in Spanish in 2.5 months. The other languages came easier once the patterns are recognized.

Hope this helps!
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Christine — February 3rd, 2009, 6:16 am

Hi sir/madam,
Im Christine 22 years of age and a registered nurse here in the Philippines. I enrolled myself into a norwegian class here in my native land but I have found it difficult to learn. Can you give me the sites where I can learn the language faster and easier? I am very eager to learn so I can work in Norway. Please help about this matter. Thank you and have a good day!
Reply
McNeill Hall — February 3rd, 2009, 5:51 pm

McNeill Hall is learning french, japanese, and english all at once so wish her good luck!

Sincerely,
McNeill
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Sweet-Sugar — February 6th, 2009, 2:55 am

I didn’t learn anything!
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??? — February 10th, 2009, 8:57 am

I come from China.And I can speak chinese and russian.Nice to meet you?I hope you become a Friend.
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GreenTea — February 12th, 2009, 5:00 am

Great website. Does this apply to Latin? I am learning it at the moment and it helped me a little bit to learn the language. However, since Latin is an unspoken language, I think this technique may not apply to it. It is still very hard to learn Latin. (eventhough I can speak 4 languages). Nevertheless, your website is still great! Keep up the good work! Looking forward to the next updated book!
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Christopher Hurtado — February 12th, 2009, 5:44 pm

Yes, this is helpful. No, it isn’t too dense. Yes, I’d like you to write more about this topic. Thanks for asking and thanks for sharing!
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Alexander Parij — February 13th, 2009, 1:51 pm

I’m not sure about the 1 hour strategy …..
I’m learning a new language and when I’m a bit busy ( but not too busy !) I would open winamp or last.fm with my favorite French songs and have the French lyrics in front of me and sometimes it helps to have also the translation. It’s very subtle and not demanding activity but subconsciously you still learning the language.
So I created a small utility – “Sing and Study” to help me organize the whole process of having everything on the screen. The lyrics + finding the lyrics + translating them
It’s free utility , install and enjoy .
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Anon — March 2nd, 2009, 5:50 am

Quite an interesting article.

For learning foreign languages, I highly recommend the “Pimsleur” and “Berlitz” courses. Basically with both there’s a lot of repitition done, which allows you to absorb commonly used words and phrases within a relatively short amount of time (I remember once reading somewhere that in most every language there are a 100 words that come up in about 90% of everyday conversation, so if you’re keen on learning a foreign language it’s important to learn these words, words and phrases such as
“I,” “good,” “thank you,” “I want,” etc.).

With both of the above-mentioned methods, one of the things I find helpful is that there’s much less of an emphasis on grammar than in others on the market. I think many get discouraged because of the gramar of a foreign language, which can seem quite daunting, but once you begin to recognize patters then the process of learning the foreign language becomes much easier.

I also find that music is very helpful, as you get to learn a lot of simple phrases. I learned Portuguese mostly by listening to songs in the language (of course it helped that I grew up speaking Spanish, which is closely related, at home). I’m currently trying to learn Russian and have learned a lot by listening to (a lot of times in bed right before sleeping!) pop music in the language, and find that I’ve learned many words and phrases this way.

And most important–don’t get discouraged! It’s not easy to learn a foreign language, but neither, in my opinion, is it as difficult as many may think it is.
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Project Hitchhiker » Tim Ferriss-ize Your Language Learning (plus: Rocking Out In Kyushu, Japan) — March 13th, 2009, 7:35 pm

[...] How To Learn But Not Master Any Language In One Hour [...]
Tristan — March 14th, 2009, 4:26 pm

I’m curious, what other sentences have you used to help you in your deconstruction of languages? I’m trying to find out how to develop a career in linguistics, specifically gathering information from a wide array of languages and am looking for information on how to realize this dream of mine.

Thanks.
Tristan
Reply
online urdu reading — March 25th, 2009, 2:57 am

thanks for the article, it seems very useful. However, this ‘learning about’ a language in one hour, is not the same as being able to speak a language, which will still take one year of immersion, or 5 to 10 years of traditional study (if you cannot get immersion possibility).
Thanks
Mark Brown
Reply
2009 Quarter 1 Update | the 9 to 5 alternative — April 1st, 2009, 8:57 pm

[...] searches, I have compiled a list of the top Spanish action verbs and spoken words. I will use the Tim Ferriss method first – deconstructing the language grammatically – then I will undergo a calculated memorization [...]
sri — April 4th, 2009, 1:46 pm

linguists studying chomsky, etc.

anthropologists, etc. studying origins of language, etc.

english professors studying deconstruction, etc.

etc.

same subject, right? what’s different about these groups, or approaches?

maybe… it’s the language they speak. vocabulary.

chomsky may be right that there is uni grammar. but that may be more to do with how people think. that is, how they communicate with “themselves”. in other words, how they “see the world”. the metaphors they employ. metaphors are built from language. deep structure (chomsky) may give clues to another person of one’s thinking, to one’s metaphors, to intent, to whatever you fancy to know about them, but….

the anthropologists and their colleagues in “closely related fields” know (or should know) there’s a form of communication that predated language. it didn’t disappear when language evolved. we still use it.

unlike language, and all the cognitive debate, it is (or at least we expect it to be) *transparent*. no ‘guesswork’ involved.

it starts with an “e”.

@mitch ronco – this is what would be ‘worth patenting’. going with the IP metaphor. the language patent holder would need a license. because (effective, or should i say ‘affective’) language uses this ‘other means of communication’.

soon come
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sri — April 4th, 2009, 6:41 pm

The point that seems to be overlooked here is that all people learn differently.

Is prescribing *one* way to learn the wisest or most effective course to take?

An oversimplified example that illustrates this fact, i.e. that people learn differently, is the typical live lecture/home study options of many courses, be they language, exam preparation, etc.

This is a very simplified example. I believe it goes much deeper than this. The more you know yourself the more you may understand how it is you learn. And it may not be the ‘prescribed ways’ that you have been exposed to, whether you’re earning a degree at an Ivy League university or studying a language on your own or… the list is endless.

I undertand it’s very difficult to go outside the prescribed methods. Especially if you are in academia.

I sometimes see a tremendous amout of effort placed by students in what amounts to learning someone else’s learning technique. This is wholly apart from learning the subject matter. But they are only doing what they are told to you, and indeed compelled to do. Some adjust to the system of learning, some do not. Again, this is wholly apart from the subject matter.

The point is that the system is not what’s important. Learning the subject matter is what’s important.

I advise people to aim, at all points along the path, to understand how they learn. Pay attention to what works. Forget about what doesn’t work, no matter what anyone tells you. Develop your *own* system, tailored by you, for you.
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Sin — April 17th, 2009, 1:18 am

just try to write dutch. Good Bye amazing language techniques, welcome home, pain in the ass.
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Project: Decalinguality « Productivity and Projects — April 22nd, 2009, 5:58 pm

[...] He’s written two articles that I really, really like. One of them was his process of deconstructing a language to learn most of it quickly. (Which I have already done for all 10 languages.) and his article on [...]
Ryan Hartwig — April 23rd, 2009, 10:10 pm

I like your ideas about learning a language. That’s a smart way to do it.

What languages do you think would be easiest for me?

I am fluent in english(native language) and spanish.

Thanks for the tips!

-Ryan
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lyzazel — April 24th, 2009, 2:19 pm

Well, some good ideas for deconstruction but this doesn’t have anything at all to do with the actual language learning.
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DJ — May 1st, 2009, 3:06 pm

Thanks for the site. I am working in China and need to learn the language (mandrian) yesterday. I will soon be visiting Japan and Korea. I have tried to learn languages all my life. I am now 47, not much has stuck. I am not dense just working up to 16 hours a day so I could use some assistance with the deconstruction of the above languages including English and/or American English. If you have another site or a book that would help me let me know. It has been a few years since high school English classes.
I have already spent a fortune on programs that haven’t helped me much.
My children want to learn different languages also so anyone that has a language deconstructed, please email me.
coffeebreak61@yahoo.com please no spam.
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Jack — May 7th, 2009, 10:56 am

More please. This is gold!
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OWAIS — May 8th, 2009, 12:56 pm

GOOD approach man
it helped me a lot
thanx
looking forward to read more articles like this
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John Christian Brannigan-Odehnal — May 13th, 2009, 10:37 am

As a linguist and language teacher I’m very impressed with your grasp of the principles of language. I’m also interested by the method you propose – no beating round the bush with pedagogical niceties, just straight onto academic concepts. While I personally like this approach, my experience suggests that it would not be suitable for the majority of learners.
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Tracy — May 16th, 2009, 7:00 pm

And if you want to read Kanji, get Remembering the Kanji. I was able to learn 2000 Kanji in a month. Got a job translating for a computer company, now I am a freelance translator working from a virtual office.
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Shane — May 25th, 2009, 9:20 am

Hi Tim,
While I didn’t get to read your article completely, I must say that while scanning through it just there it seemed to be really interesting and innovative and I shall be reading it over the weekend.

It would be useful is someone could create a ‘dependency chart’ for native English speakers to suggest which languages to learn in what order. This could mitigate the risk for example of someone mixing up languages thinking that ‘Portuguese is just slower Spanish with a few different words’.

~~Shane H.
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shh — May 28th, 2009, 12:20 am

Dear Tim,

Would you be willing to share your Russian learning techniques in the future? I was planning to begin taking courses at Berkeley, but after reading your posts I’m going to try teaching myself first.

I’m quite amazed by your Mandarin btw, can’t really hear an American accent – same with your Japanese, though it’s much easier to pronounce, I wouldn’t be able to tell you weren’t native just by listening.

Thanks!
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MV3 — May 31st, 2009, 5:42 am

This is great! I’m in the middle of expanding my Japanese vocabulary and have considered other languages (ie. Korean, re-vitalizing my Spanish, Hebrew, German, etc.) This is a great approach. I will keep this article in mind.

Cheers.
P.S. any websites on language learning (especially the ones mentioned) that are easy enough to use this approach? Cheers!
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Skeptical — June 4th, 2009, 1:42 pm

Correct me if I am missing his point, but this is just an approach to how to start and choose a language, not a way to actually gain skills, right? There’s a reason some people take years of study to learn basics in another language and I don’t think it’s only because they forgot to spend 45 mins deconstructing it first.

No offense to all the fans of this method, but take 60 mins to learn a new language before posting. I mean it’s only 60 mins.

“How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months?” Fluent? Most people are not fluent in a second language (YES, I’m including Europeans). They might be very good, but fluent is an entirely different level of skill and understanding. In 2-12 months? I’ll take a wild stab and say that 2-12 months of intense immersion and hard work is how they do it.

Sorry. I’m not meaning to complain. It just seems very disrespectful to say that people have wasted years of their lives trying to learn something because they didn’t have your silver bullet.

It may be a great learning tool for anyone serious enough to sit down and really TRY to learn, but can you all at least agree to avoid jumping on the bandwagon of devaluing the life experience of some very smart people who have been practicing a new language in a foreign country for years until you’ve actually tested it?
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Kelly Ho — June 24th, 2009, 8:41 am

Thanks Tim. Try Dzongkha – Bhutan’s national language.
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nydia — June 27th, 2009, 3:43 pm

por favor é possivel indicar algo mais sobre como estudar outro idioma de forma facil.
Tentei ler teu artigo mas com o tradutor do google.Pessimo ao entendi nada.
aguardo resposta.
na realidade gostaria de ser fluente no ingles, ja fiz varios cursos mas acho dificil ser fluente na lingua.Quero tambem o frances e o espanhol.
Comprei teu livro e amei.
beijos
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Mumei007 — July 5th, 2009, 11:20 am

Converse in Japanese with me on Skype for even a few minutes (in Japanese) and I’ll believe you.
Reply
- Tim Ferriss — July 12th, 2009, 8:04 pm
  
  Mumei,
  
  I’ll save us some time — just watch “Trial by Fire”, the show I did with History Channel in Japan, and you’ll hear me speaking Japanese.
  
  Cheers,
  
  Tim
  Reply
Talk to Me: 5 Great Translation Tools | google android os blog — July 9th, 2009, 4:30 am

[...] Ferriss believes you can learn (but not master) a language in 2-12 months. But what if you don’t have that much time? Whether you’ve managed to find a last minute [...]
Joe Ball — July 9th, 2009, 5:19 pm

The infinitive trick is dope!

I started learning Spanish on my own and couldn’t stand going at the pace of instruction books. I wanted all the rules right there in front of me. So i created an excel spreadsheet, a worksheet for each part of speech, and put all the rules i could find at the top of the page. Then as i learn words, i add them to the spreadsheet, and write sentence examples for each language.

This method has worked beautifully and in very short time i am able to decipher just about any Spanish sentence, and know what part of speech each word is despite not knowing the definitions.

It’s all in the grammer in my opinion. thanks for touching on this point and giving me some shortcuts.

To answer your question, if you were to undensify the post i’d def read.
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Joe Ball — July 9th, 2009, 5:33 pm

By the way,

Here is a good multi level marketing strategy that i developed indirectly through reading your book. (nothing to do with language, sorry)

(I call my good friend chuck)
Me: “Hey chuck, you got $20″
Ch: “ya”
Me: “great, have it ready, because i am buying you a book. I can tell you to read it but you probably won’t get around to buying it. I am at the bookstore now. Can you have the $20 ready?”
Ch: “I was planning on getting some guerilla marketing books”
Me: “well, i’m getting you this book and your going to read it first”
Ch: “Okay”

This was the 4-hour workweek of course. The principle could apply to inexpensive MLM, if you believe in the product. Just tell the guy to get out his cash.

Anyway, i have recently felt rather religious in dissemination of your book. Thanks for communicating that which i totally agree with, yet everyone seems to be ignorant of.
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Dave Myers — July 12th, 2009, 10:38 am

Very good thoughts, but I’m left wondering how often people have such freedom to choose which languages they learn. Of course, they *can* do whatever they want, but I’d think more often the case is that someone is traveling/relocating to a new country, and they *have* to learn the language no matter what. But even so, your thoughts are still helpful, but more helpful for those who set their own agenda.
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Michael — July 16th, 2009, 6:30 pm

Well this is certainly a new way to look at languages. Despite being a writer I have always had an issue with languages yet, can pick up swear words in many languages no problem. I shall study your method as there is a certain logic to picking a language to pirces to get at the source of it.
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6 Tips for a Better Global Team | Humor That Works — August 4th, 2009, 9:51 pm

[...] programs such as Rosetta Stone, sites like Busuu, and techniques like those from Tim Ferriss, learning the basics of a language isnt as hard as it once was. You can also use sites like [...]
Ash Bhardwaj — August 14th, 2009, 3:32 am

Tim,

Thank you for your work on languages, as well as body, fitness and health.

I’ve recently discovered I have a half-sibling born and raised in Norway to a Norwegian mother! As such, I am planning a trip there to get to know my sibling and the country better. I’d love to use your methods to increase my effectiveness in learning Norwegian.

I notice you have learnt Norwegian (and have a Scandinavian heritage) and was hoping you might point me in some useful directions in learning this fascinating language. Any notes on its deconstruction you would be happy to share would also be very useful. As for interesting topics: for me its all about sport, culture and the outdoors: skiing, hiking, environment, geology, the sagas. If any of these overlap with your interests and you’ve found good Norwegian material on them, please let me know.

Any other people out there learning or teaching Norwegian, please get in touch!

Many thanks,

Ash
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Daron Jones — August 19th, 2009, 9:08 am

Is that teeline shorthand that i can see in the diagram to the right of the face drawings?
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Michael C — August 20th, 2009, 12:14 pm

Enjoyed the book; moving to Scotland for grad school. Can a VA help find, maybe help clean up essays, scholarships? Do you have a reference? Seems I could even use a VA to find housing? I’ve been discussing with a couple other readers of your book and thinking of ideas to get going on the internet bus. while in school; can this be done inexpensively? I noticed some of the prices out of my budget (e.g. researching hits on a name/URL, using a VA, making DVD’s, etc.)
Thanks,
Michael C
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Steve Cowie — August 23rd, 2009, 4:52 am

Great Work!

I came to similar conclusions after ‘relearning’ the structure of English and listening to the language tapes by Michel Thomas. He works on structure and leaves you to learn the vocabulary.

I also found ‘marking out’ the sentence kinaesthetically and spacially also helped in the beginning..

People WILL compliment you on your word salad BECAUSE you made the effort. The owner of the Jazz Club in BlissStrasse, Berlin loves to hear my attempts at ‘getting it wrong’ in order to getting it right.

I hope to brush into you in Kolwitzstrasse sometime Tim!
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Jay Belle Isle — September 7th, 2009, 12:40 pm

Great article, Tim! Love your book (2/3 of the way through) and would love to see more language articles, like everyone else.
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Brad — September 11th, 2009, 10:02 am

Tim,

I noticed you had a note in the first image above that said “Dubai, 3 bedroom, $2000.

I moved there from the United States 3 years ago to promote skateboarding. Would be stoked to show you around if you plan on coming.

Hope all is well,

Brad
Reply
- Tim Ferriss — September 11th, 2009, 9:31 pm
  
  Thanks, man! Will definitely keep that in mind. It’s on the list, for sure…
  
  Pura vida,
  
  Tim
  Reply
jc — September 15th, 2009, 8:46 am

This actually reminds me the school of phenomenal memory method of remembering languages. Everyone should check it out.
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Bill Dawson — September 25th, 2009, 3:51 pm

I just wanted to say that I find it so cool that a blog post can live so long and remain so lively. That’s testimony to how interesting and well-written it is.

Neat stuff. Loved this article and of course “The 4-Hour Workweek.”
Reply
Etienne Levesque Guitard — September 25th, 2009, 6:04 pm

Seriously, you make me want to switch career from programmer to linguist. That’s how good your explanations are.
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- Tim Ferriss — September 27th, 2009, 8:09 pm
  
  Thanks so much!
  
  Tim
  Reply
Suresh — September 29th, 2009, 5:56 am

Another view point. As per educational psychologists, the best way to master a language is to learn through a favourite subject of yours. That is what made the products of Espoir Technologies made a huge success. They have products like “Smarten Your English through Love & Romance”, “Smarten Your English through Success Secrets”, Smarten Your English through Movies” etc.
Language is directly linked to your passion, isn’t it?
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Krang — October 17th, 2009, 5:13 pm

Hey Tim,
I’ve started Thaï from scratch, I’m gonna use your tips on languages.
When I started Chinese with my book, I knew the name of 10 fruits by the first week, but couldn’t ask my way back home … Lets do it differently this time
Reply
Farid — October 21st, 2009, 11:06 am

I like the Arabic handwriting.
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Peter — October 23rd, 2009, 10:57 pm

CNN.Com recently published this article on online language resources: http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/23/learn.language.online/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

I particularly thought that Livemocha would be useful as it leverages on social teaching along with sound recordings of sentences in foreign languages.
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Emily — October 31st, 2009, 5:50 pm

I am amazed that I have never heard of the GR system used to learn Mandarin. Whilst pinyin allows you to visualize the tones and is a good starting point to establish an awareness of the phonemics, GR naturally creates the tones when reading the word. How much simpler this would have made my endeavors to conquer the language!
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Xixi — November 9th, 2009, 9:07 pm

Hi Tim,

This is my first time on your blog. I love your posts.

How do you maintain and remember the language after you learn it? I learn quickly, but I also forget quickly.

Thank you!

Xixi
Reply
psykhe — November 17th, 2009, 3:33 am

I have just discovered my passion for learning languages. It is the first time I am trying to learn a language by myself. I found it pretty easy to get free materials over the internet, also to listen to native speakers. I think this helps a lot at the beginning… than in order to master the language I am sure you need real conversation.
I am looking for tehniques and any material in order to improve my learning tehnique.
I am fluent in romanian and hungarian, in italian (also venetian dialect) and english. I have some knowledge of german and french, but never really studied them, even if I can mostly understand them and can say a few simple phrases.

I am learning swedish now. Many people say it is no point in learning this language but I have a good motivation and I enjoy learning it. I’ve started 10 days ago and try to learn something new every day.
Reply
Brian — December 2nd, 2009, 2:13 pm

Wonderful post. I might apply this to Irish at some point!
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Hannah — December 4th, 2009, 11:49 am

Hi!
thanks for this
I’m 16 and teaching myself Korean, its really annoying not being able to spend as much time as i would like and require to study korean as i also have my school subjects to study for too… so i’m assuming it will take my some time to even get to intermediate level!
but thank you very much this does help
thanks
<3
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Jay — December 6th, 2009, 5:32 am

The title of this post is a bit misleading, but i agree with your conclusion.

What i advice everybody:

- Learn English and learn it well. It has the most native speakers and used as a “lengua franca” in most of the world. A lot of documents, websites, … only come in English, … the reasons are endless.

- Next to that, pick a language that’s useful and interesting to you. Don’t start Japanese one sunday just cause you think it sounds cool. Motivation is the biggest factor why people succeed or fail.
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pat — December 6th, 2009, 7:07 am

excellent article. I did the same thing with Arabic script and deconstructed the alphabet from written material, and a library copy of Rosetta Stone (as my… um… rosetta stone).

RE: your question:

No, this is not too dense. More material like this would be great.
Reply
Nina — December 12th, 2009, 6:16 am

Hi Tim

I was wondering what the best method was for learning Korean. As you stated above, it doesn’t follow the auxilliary verb pattern that many European languages do. It is making studying Korean a pain in the arse.

Nina
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Disapointed — February 1st, 2010, 9:49 am

Can somebody delete this fake “linguist” Steve Kaufmann from here?! I’ve tried his idiotic method and it doesn’t work at all!
Mr.Kaufmann please stop annoying the people here and let us read some useful info.
Reply
Rstepa — February 2nd, 2010, 10:44 am

I WANT MORE!
Reply
Joseph Santoyo — February 6th, 2010, 4:10 pm

Hey Tim,

Great post. What books would you recommend for learning Korean? I am also trying to learn piano and get in shape in the process so I have a lot on my plate. Do you suggest that I pick up some Korean piano books–killing two birds with one stone?

Thank you for this wonderful post.
Reply
Aaron — February 7th, 2010, 3:58 am

I can’t wait until I actually NEED this kind of information. Awesome stuff.
Reply
Tori Harvilchuck — February 11th, 2010, 11:32 pm

Whoa dude you have got a few wierd bugs on your page about parse error unexpected T String in line 18
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Sofian Rahmani — February 12th, 2010, 3:36 am

Hi!

That was a really interesting article. Though I must say, you seem to have been very unlucky in your choice of Arabic speaker. The Arabic phrases you “deconstructed” were mostly inaccurate, or spelled wrong.

You see, the thing about Arabic is, no one really speaks it. Really. Arabs speak their own dialects of the language (sometimes more mutually unintelligible than some Romance languages), which are *not* standardized, but we study a… version, you could say, of Arabic that is called ??????? ?????? (al-3arabiyya al-fus7aa) at school. This is called Classical Arabic or Modern Standard Arabic in English. This is the kind of Arabic the Quran (or, more accurately, al-8ur2aan) was written in, and the one you hear on TV, read in newspapers, books, etc.

So it’s basically the same case as an Italian being made to study Latin, to read and write in Latin, to watch TV in Latin, while having absolutely no way whatsoever of expressing himself in his native language in writing. Add to that the unbelievably convoluted intricacies of the Arabic language, and you end up with innumerable grammatical and orthographic mistakes everywhere, from official newspapers to religious chants.

Fus7aa Arabic is a beautiful, beautiful language, with an inherent musicality and an elaborate grammatical system that facilitates incredible brevity and eloquence. It is, however, *not* the native language of Arabs, so they tend to write very poorly and ungrammatically in it (most of the time). But really, who can blame them?

Anyway, I would just like to point out a few serious errors in the sentences you deconstructed:

“I eat the apple.” Would be:

????? ???????????

Transliteration: Aakulu ‘t-tuffaa7ata. (do not pronounce the ‘. It just marks an absent alif (moon and sun letters; long story))

N.B.: The vowel “Aa” in “Aakulu” is different from the vowel used in the original sentence. It is called “madda”, and it is long and extended, while the normal “alif” of the original has a staccato sound to it.

The numbers represent Arabic sounds impossible to accurately transcribe using Latin letters. For more information on these, read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_transliteration#Online

The original literally means: “You (feminine) ate the apple.” It is misspelled though; there should not be a yaa2 in “akalti”, but a kasra.

Dhabee7a more literally translates to “kill”, as in “The lion proceeded to devour his kill.” A better word would be “la7m”. This is the generic word for “meat”.

If you’re interested in learning more about this elegant and poetic language, do email me. However, if you merely want to communicate with Arabs, I’d suggest learning one of the myriad Arabic dialects spoken today in the Arab world. Egyptian Arabic would be good, since almost everyone understands it, but it sounds slightly… umm, rough and sort of, crude. Lebanese Arabic is much sexier, and extremely fun to speak.

Anyway, hope that helped, and good luck learning Arabic!
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Jonathan — February 18th, 2010, 9:22 pm

Great idea. Yes, please continue posting more ideas Let us know when you do. Thanks.
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Tyler Carter — February 22nd, 2010, 10:11 am

Tim,

You’ve mentioned your thesis paper several times on the site and in the book, would you consider posting it?

TC
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- Tim Ferriss — February 26th, 2010, 2:12 am
  
  Hi Tyler,
  
  I would consider it… if I can even find it! The thing almost killed me, so I wasn’t to eager to keep it in view
  
  Will take a look once the new book is done.
  
  Tim
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Casey Johns — February 25th, 2010, 4:37 pm

Interesting explanation of modern Arabic, Sofian Rahmani. Could you comment further, on the following? I ask, because I suspect that the magnitude of effort required to learn Arabic has been underestimated in the west. Further, westerners do not understand that most Arabs use Arabic principally as a written form of communication, but speak face to face in local languages, that are usually mutually unintelligible with each other, as well as Arabic. Arabic is nowhere near an international language in the sense that English is. A speaker of English can easily communicate in spoken or written form, with any American, Canadian, or Australian, as well as the English, the Scots, Irish and most Scandinavians. Not to forget a more limited ability to communicate with the Philippines, Singapore, and other oriental countries were English is used as a second language.

On the other hand, a knowledge of Arabic might not give someone a similar capability to understand all written and spoken communications, across the entire Arab world.

If I can believe what I read in the history books, Latin served the same purpose in Europe, before modern languages emerged, after the year 1500 A.D., approximately. At that period in history, the printing press and the Protestant Reformation led to the development of national languages, from local languages. For example, Italian developed from the regional language of the city of Florence, not Rome.

So… at one time, in the distant past, your hypothetical example of an Italian needing to learn Latin was actual fact. Further, before the year 1500 A.D., the principal way Christian scholars and clergymen could communicate, across the vast territory of Christendom, was to learn to read and write Latin.

To give a factual example, by about 1600, English was established as a national language, through the works of Shakespeare and others. However, as late as 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his universal theory of gravitation in Latin, not English, doubtlessly for the widest distribution of his ideas.

On the other hand, I wonder how often Latin was actually spoken, in face to face conversations, outside of the Pope’s territory. I doubt that Isaac Newton actually spoke Latin in a face to face conversation, but I cannot find any information on that.

You mentioned that Modern Standard Arabic is rarely spoken, out loud. When Arabs speak, face to face, do they usually use a local language, their primary language, learned from their parents? Is that the case?

But today, in the Islamic world, I gather that Arabic does serve as a common language, permitting communication across a wide territory. But as you pointed out, Modern Standard Arabic is very difficult, leading Arabs to many mistakes and confusion in printed media.

I ask, from the standpoint of learning Modern Standard Arabic. In the west, I suspect that the difficulty of teaching and learning Arabic has been underestimated. It just ain’t as easy as learning to speak French, Italian, or German, for example, languages with relatively clear and standardized styles of speaking and writing, and a large population that uses the language for both spoken and written communication.

Please explain further, if you can, concerning that mysterious language, Arabic. Is Modern Standard Arabic used in a similar manner, as was Latin, some 600 years ago? Instead of the broader manner in which English is used, in the 21st century?
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Casey Johns — February 25th, 2010, 4:43 pm

How are you, Tim?

Please delete my post of 22Feb. My 25Feb revision got to the point, faster, and with more clarity. Believe it or not! LOL.

Casey
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heather — February 25th, 2010, 11:10 pm

love this post and find it useful, inspiring and definitely not ‘too dense’
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svs — March 3rd, 2010, 1:39 am

I also found the following sentences to be helpful:
* I should have/would have done something (for conditional)
* If I were a rich man (for subjunctives)

Also the thing that helped me the MOST in achieving fluency was filling notebook after notebook with conjugations. When verb forms are available to the brain and tongue on demand it adds a whole new dimension to fluency.
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Sofian Rahmani — March 3rd, 2010, 5:11 am

Casey,

The amount of effort required to learn Arabic is not really that much different from that required to learn another case-intensive language, such as German. Of course, for native English speakers, learning German would be much easier since both languages are Germanic, and since both share the same alphabet. Here, this might be of interest:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/german/the-awful-german-language.html

Now the trickiest thing about Arabic is the “harakaat”, or the diacritic marks. These are not written, most of the time, and when learners try to read unmarked text (and even native speakers), it is *extremely* difficult to get them all right. Consider this:

I see the man.

(Anaa) 2ara ‘r-rajula. (my note about transliteration in the previous post applies here)

(Anaa) –> I. This is optional (like in Spanish) and sounds quite odd if used.

2ara –> imperfective first-person singular form of triliteral root ra-alif-ya

‘r-rajula –> the man. Notice how the “a” in “al” (the definite article) assimilates into the vowel preceding it, and how the “l” is not pronounced, but rather the consonant following it is geminated (sun and moon letters). And notice how the final vowel is “a”.

Now let’s flip the roles:

The man sees me.

Ar-rajulu yaraanee.

Notice how the root ra-alif-ya is conjugated. Conjugation is extremely complex in Arabic and I have encountered many, many Arabs (including a few teachers) who mixed up their masculine and feminine verb conjugations.

Okay, now notice how the final vowel in “Ar-rajulu” is “u”. Now this may be extremely frustrating for learners since there’s absolutely no way of knowing which case-ending to use (or to assume is being used when you’re reading a text) unless you analyze the position of the word in the sentence carefully. The example I gave is rather straightforward, but sometimes it can get unbelievably complicated.

So yes, Arabic grammar is *extremely* difficult to learn, but it’s not really much more difficult than, say, Finnish or Japanese. (Finnish grammar is devilish!!)

That aside, I don’t think it would really be accurate to say that Arabs speak mutually-unintelligible “local languages” among themselves. An analogy might be drawn within the Anglosphere, where everyone can speak, understand and write in standard English, but the dialects different people speak may sometimes be mutually unintelligible. Of course, it’s much more… err, polarized, so to speak, in the Arab world, but when was the last time you had any clue what the heck Sean Paul was singing about? Some Scottish sitcoms are even subtitled when broadcast on American TV. Though you wouldn’t say that they’re speaking a different language, would you? And you could always communicate with them using Standard English (unless they’re really uneducated). This might be of interest:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1711

So basically, this is what it’s like in the Arab World:

Everyone understands everyone else most of the time but most Arabs have a hard time trying to understand Maghrebi (Algerian, Tunisian and Moroccan) Arabic. Communication is possible most of the time among educated speakers (though, interestingly, I was attending a lecture about Ottoman art last year—given in Arabic—and I was surprised to see that after the lecture was over, all the Arabs that were there: Syrians, Iraqis, Moroccans, Lebanese… they were all speaking with each other in French!! I think that’s because French would allow them to express themselves more freely in intellectual terms and using Classical Arabic would simply be too cumbersome. Dialectal Arabic in this case is hopeless).

So basically, it boils down to this:

Advantages of learning Classical Arabic:
- you get to read written Arabic
- communication is possible 90% of the time, unless the person you’re speaking to is uneducated
- everyone understands it, but not everyone can speak it fluently
- you can convey more complex concepts
- lots of learning resources (thanks to the huge worldwide Muslim community)

Disadvantages:
- frustratingly difficult to learn
- you would not understand dialectal Arabic. This means you won’t understand what people say amongst themselves, you won’t understand most songs, and you won’t understand what is being said on certain TV and radio channels

Advantages of learning one of the many dialects of Arabic:
- you’d be able to communicate with the speakers of that dialect more freely
- you’d be able to understand songs and common people’s conversations
- if you learn Egyptian or Lebanese Arabic, everyone should be able to understand you (though you might have a tough time trying to understand others)
- they’re much, much, much, much, much (this cannot be overstated) easier than Classical Arabic

Disadvantages:
- written Arabic would be all but inaccessible to you. (though you could learn both Classical Arabic and one of the dialects, and many people do this)
- understanding other Arabs might be pretty hard at times
- you can’t write it down; there’s no standardized orthographic system. This means fewer resources for learning

Now, if you wish to live in the Arab World, you *should* learn Arabic, since not that many people speak English or French, and those that do may not be sufficiently proficient in the language for you to be able to have meaningful and deep conversations with. And, if you learn Classical Arabic, I daresay that 90% of the time, you’ll have very little trouble communicating with Arabs, no matter where they come from. Thanks to the pan-Arab policies our governments adopt, people are exposed to CA a lot, and communication shouldn’t really be all that difficult. A bit awkward at first, perhaps, but for all intents and purposes, assuming you’re good enough at the language, communication is possible with most (80-90%) Arabs.

When Arabs speak with each other, they usually use their own dialect, which most of the time is understood by the other person. EXCEPT Maghrebi Arabs, such as myself, who quite often happen to find themselves in the precarious situation of having to speak Arabic with a person can’t speak French or English, and who thinks they can’t speak Arabic at all and who doesn’t understand their dialect (it’s really frustrating how most Arabs actually believe Maghrebi Arabs speak “Frenchified” Arabic or Berber, and how they don’t realize that the only reason we understand them is because of their popular TV shows, not because their dialects are any more “Arabic” than ours are).

So when we DO speak with other Arabs, we either use our own dialect just to spite them, or try to imitate their dialect (conversations of this sort are hilarious at times) or, for Maghrebis who live in the Gulf, use a form of Levantine Arabic that pretty much everyone understands. I’ve been mistaken for a Lebanese many a time, and I’m starting to think I should just speak in my own Eastern Algerian dialect whether or not people understand it, as a sort of cultural statement.

As for your last question, well, that’s kind of hard to answer. I’d say Arabic neither acts as a liturgical, written language that no one speaks (like Latin in the 15th Century), nor as a spoken language with certain mutually-unintelligible dialects (like English). It’s somewhere in between.

I think, though, that the really great thing about learning Arabic is being able to read and listen to poetry in the language. Arabic is known for its poetry that can move men to tears even if they don’t understand what is being said. There’s just something about the structure of Arabic that makes it so… emotional, so emphatic. Research it.

Anyway, hope this helped!
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Nick Kemp — March 14th, 2010, 3:54 pm

It is all about agressive focus when learning a language. It is amazing what you can achieve when you put your mind to it.
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How to Learn Spanish « ME, BOB & SURLY: THREE FRIENDS BIKE SOUTH AMERICA — March 19th, 2010, 4:32 pm

[...] B. Compare the following sentence constructions until you begin to see patterns. They will make understanding Spanish grammar, in particular verb conjugations, much easier as you read the 501 Spanish Verbs Book. Do not worry if you don’t understand the following sentences right away. You should come back to these sentence constructions throughout your studies until they make perfect sense. For the reasoning behind this method feel free to read Tim Ferris’ informative article. [...]
Berniece Kosofsky — March 19th, 2010, 5:24 pm

I think you could pick up that comment and use it as a blog post. What you wrote is great advice any way that you look at it.
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Glenn — March 21st, 2010, 3:38 pm

Your ideas are very interesting, and I’d really like to learn more. I’ve been playing around with something similar to this to learn Spanish and French…basically learning the grammar of the languages first, because vocabulary comes pretty easy after that, but you’re lightyears beyond where I am. I’d be VERY interested if you chose to elaborate on your methods and techniques…in a new book or learning product perhaps?

Thanks for “The Four Hour Work Week”. Although I don’t really plan to ever work only 4 hours per week, your book has helped me to see a lot of possibilities I may have otherwise missed, and helped me to put into words an idea that has nagged at me for almost 15 years – the idea of making a living as an entrpreneur. By that, I meant learning about and putting into practice those things that REALLY interest me, and by the way, making a few bucks while I’m at it. I tried explaining this once to someone, and that person thought that I was saying that I didn’t want to “hold down a job” and “work for a living”. In a sense I suppose that person was right, But, while it’s true that I don’t want to “hold down a job” or “work for a living” in the futile, meaningless sense that most people mean it, I actually LOVE working, which is why I doubt I’ll ever have a four hour work week. What your book has done is to help me see how I can spend my work hours doing things that actually MEAN something, to me, and to others as well. Thank you for that.
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Gintaras — March 22nd, 2010, 2:24 am

It looks very interesting. A couple of years ago I tried to learn English in two months but I failed. Probably because I didn’t know how to do this I was really frustrated. Later I realized that I used the old school methods to learn single words and it was a big obstacle. I tried to guess how to say this or that word in English. That was real nightmare
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Elena — March 24th, 2010, 12:36 am

Hi, I found this page very interesting!
Being born in an english-speaking country despite being a native Macedonian speaker. I started Spanish this year and we were comparing the different forms of ‘the’ (el, la) to other languages. I was asked what the word for ‘the’ was in Macedonian, I had to repeat phrases such as the chair and the apple before I realised like Russian, there isn’t one but instead is represented as a suffix depending if on its size, associated gender, possesion etc.

Your post helped me understand grammar in languages which I have never fully understand (only today did I find out what a adverb, pronoun or a adjective is)

Thanks!

After star
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Martín Alejandro Carmona Selva — April 13th, 2010, 10:12 am

Tim,
Great post -as usual!- I speak Spanish as my mother tongue -I’m from Argentina, though I live in Barcelona- and I *MUST* learn Italian in one month. Is there any good book that you would recommend me?

Thank you so much for the book and the blog! I’m getting the new version as soon as I got my next payment! -The old edition is now with my friends, who loved it so much that they won’t give me it back to me-

Take care,

/m@cs
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Ryan Riegner — April 15th, 2010, 8:22 am

Hey Tim,

just briefly, I’ve just begun learning Mandarin and have spent a considerable amount of time searching for a good learning tool to approach the Gwoyeu Romatzyh method. What is your recommendation as to the best method to learn GR? The internet has proven illusive in giving me anything significantly easy to identify with and understand.

And as you hear from everybody else, the blog and book is simply fantastic. Looking forward to hearing from you!

All the best,

Ryan
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Jean-Paul Setlak — April 27th, 2010, 7:29 pm

As a long-standing lover of grammar (French, English, spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Hindi, Punjabi, medieval Punjabi ) I agree with you up to a point. It is invaluable to get a quick overview of the general system. It would work better in Hindi than in Mandarin. Word-order rules are more fixed and systematic. In Mandarin it would be hard to induce the difference between:ta zài zhu?zi shang tiào and t? tiào zài zhu?zi shang. I also think that the semantic difference between rén lái le and lái le rén le would be awfully tough to get. Things like coverb use and adjectival verbs are also very alien to westernerss. Word order has such vastly different criteria and rules that deconstruction would be very tough without guidance.

@Tim
I would use standard pinyin. FInding materials, online dictionaries will be very difficult with any other system. Google translate tool and all internet web translate tools use the same official Chinese Pinyin. Once you break the code and understand the equivalence, it is extremely efficient and systematic. The tonal accents are highly convenient and there are many free online tools that will help you type if you need to write.
Start learning characters at the same time, you’ll be glad you did!. Use Pinyin to really get the sounds, learn basic vocab fast and decipher characters.
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Dante Harker — June 4th, 2010, 6:25 am

I don’t quite see how this post tells anyone how to learn in one hour? It seems vague.

It would be great if there was something written that said one should learn a, then b, then c, to memorize this and that – so that it’s not just a leap in the dark all the time.
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Martina — June 17th, 2010, 11:26 am

Hi there!
I find your way of learning languages very interesting, I am a teacher and a learner of languages and it fascinates me! Especially the fact that you focus on the most used, frequent words of a language is very useful!
I saw you first in your TED speech, where you talk about how the table of 1000 Kanji characters helped you learn Japanese. I am really interested in learning Japanese, but could you explain more exactly how you used the Kanji? Did you just repeat the symbols over and over again? Can anyone else tell me how to master this language and their ortography in “Ferris Style”? I’d really appreciate it!
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Cecil Ponsaing — June 18th, 2010, 10:41 pm

Hello Tim,
Thank you for your ideas. They get me on my track. I do sense that what you have given is only the bare skeleton of your process. And I do suspect that the time you suggest for the learning is very shortened from what it will really take, although I do believe that you will save a lot of time.

But what I think you missed or have not got to yet on this page, is in my mind a major step; get the list of the most commonly used words/ ideas for 1. your own language, 2. the general average of languages, 3. the language you are working on. – And then learn them as the most urgent words! Well learn the ones of top level urgency first, and then the next level urgency, and the next and so on.

I suppose that this is a step after the above steps, and in that case, great. And since I came from Swedish, with a natural love for, even if ignorance of Finnish, which I have only touched on learning, now I can use this developed idea for that, because I am sure that I still haven’t covered those words of urgency.

By the way, when you learn Finnish you realize that cases is only an attached form of prepositions (/postfixings). (Prepositions in all languages are very hard to learn to accurately use.) So what is the problem with cases, well in Finnish they have a complicated sound harmony system, which is not just spoken as in English but written as well (in English t becomes d between vowels, in Finnish k disappears altogether, and much more). The complications of cases in German (and probably Russian) is that being a form of preposition, the language(/s) do/es/n’t need the cases any more, so the cases become like the Spots on a peacocks tail, mainly just something fancy, and complex for no reason.

So the sound harmony is what complicates cases/affixed post positions in Finnish, and unnecessary decoration is what complicates the cases in German (and probably Russian)

But somehow prepositions are also very complex, in their meanings, so I suspect that this is an element that adds to the complexity of cases, as in you cannot always be sure which case to use, of 20 or more.

If life were only as simple as Papua New Guinea pidgin, with two prepositions, long and blong (the first more abstract and the second more concrete).
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Beth Parker — July 29th, 2010, 8:17 am

I think the more important question is not how difficult a language will be to learn but rather why do you want to learn it? Will you use it? If you are planning a trip to Japan, it makes no sense to start learning Spanish no matter how much easier it might be.
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Duff Watkins — August 1st, 2010, 1:45 pm

language as sport, eh?
then I’m wrestling with portuguese (because I married a brasileira) and it’s undefeated.
but with your helpful info, maybe I can get a takedown and score some points.
muito obrigado!
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Cecil Ponsaing — August 2nd, 2010, 2:57 am

Hello Duff, I wish you luck and energy. You can probably get a lot out of Tim’s ideas, but the most you will get anything out of on your way to command of the Portuguese language is honest and systematic work and effort.

Vocabulary is the biggest mountain in any language, automatic vocabulary. If you learn 10 words a day, or 50 a week, or 200 a month, you will have 1200 in a year, You will have 10000 in 5 years, – yes 6000 plus 4000 because the help from your own language must be included when you know by the language system how to convert many of them correctly. From then you would be fluent, but still, if sensible, learning words at the same rate.

List any word that you come across that obstructs your understanding into a list called “to learn, Chose 15 for each day, and learn at least ten, both ways as immediate response and correct spelling. List those ten in a list of “to revise” and cross them from your list of “to learn”, Every day you should pick 15 from your “to learn” to work on, and then you need a revision approach.

If the first revision happens at an interval of 1 unit of time, then the second revision has to happen at least at an interval 7 such units of time. Otherwise you forget it. I would work on 5 times. And split the day up into 5 segments for 5 revisions of the items you learned today, Then I would revise them once tomorrow and once in a week (not 5 days), once in a month (not 25 days or 5 weeks) and once in half a year (not 5 months), and once in 1 year, and once in 5 years and then forget it. The revision obviously happens whenever you use a word in speech or thinking, so in the start your revisions have to be more spot on, but later when you know you know it, ….

Creating a revision system that works systematically that way can probably be done by numbers; i.e. every word labelled with a number, representing next revision. You could have a number of books with a vocabulary for a particular interval before revision.

I’m not clear on exactly how, but Start religiously with the (15, down to) 10 words per day and work on not forgetting the words by revising them, in a developing system, starting with a number of revisions of the day’s ten words and with the gradually more space out revisions for the others. Today’s words need (5) revisions today, yesterday’s words need 1 revision today, the words from last week on this day needs 1 revision, the words from last month on this date needs 1 revision, and the words from exactly 6 months ago needs one revision and the words from 2 to 5 years ago need one revision. This means that every day you learn 10 words, and revise 10×5+60 words every day. So once you have learned your words, you revise a total of 110 words, which won’t be hard because on the second run through you will have them, because you already really know them.

Spend all your free time on it, because it is fun after the event, and it is your future! Even if your Brasileira decides to walk; even then it will be your future, because of the things you will be able to do with it. Make it, not “her language”, but “YOUR language”. I still know dutch from having learned it from my Dutch-Australian now ex-wife, and it is MY language, the only way to be. She learned a lot of Danish from me, and used it in visiting Denmark.

Speak it as much as you can with her, and if she corrects you, which she won’t much, usually, take it in if it suits or not if it doesn’t, and get on with your own learning.

Tell me I talk too much. But that is how I now can surf the web in Espanish. I have books and books of spanish vocabulary. Also I have done a lot of listening, and whatever words you are learning do not have to be tied to the items you are reading or listening to, because the words crop up, absolutely. Learn which ever word was a problem, and it will turn up again! for you to be able to apply your knowledge.

Oh well I think I talk too much so I’ll stop. But I wish you well and just zest for it which you only get by getting stuck into it. Muy bién, créo que no acabo nunca de hablar, y por eso, ahora basta. ¡Fuerte! Cecilio.
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Cecil Ponsaing — August 2nd, 2010, 5:18 am

Hello Stefan, re your article nov 14th, 2007.

No, No suggestions. They do not exist. People do not waste their time on halfhearted language learning. To learn a language you jump in boots and all, or you don’t. Then you either drop it or keep jumping in. Teachers and course makers of other kinds ONLY worry about those who would jump in boots and all because that is what they assume in a learner. Vocabulary is your task, your mountain. The grammatical structures and pronunciation, as whispy as clouds, are so minimal in the task of learning a language that nobody would create a course book in solely the structures and in ENGLISH for another language?

Other than ME of course, I suggest you read especially Steve Kaufmann’s comments. He seems to know it right. I waffle and carry on unsystematically, but he knows, and seems to be able to explain!

He mentions listening, vocabulary and fun. I can’t help thinking that he also would have mentioned somewhere to hear the language all day everyday if at all possible. VOCABULARY. And revise it. And revise it. And revise it. And revise it. That is the only way. The structure happens nearly by itself. That’s how kids get it right. They just learn words! The rest happens …
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Cecil Ponsaing — August 2nd, 2010, 6:20 am

To Benson Wallace, March 14th 2008:

Will Your Spanish interfere with your learning of Portuguese? Yes and no, but I agree with Steve Kaufmann, that Spanish becomes your entry point to the Romance world…. I learned Spanish so that I could read it, and vaguely follow the news in Spanish, not much better, but I felt good about my ability. Then I watched and collected VHS tapes of Portuguese speaking soap operas, and finally, through my Spanish, got the gist of what they were saying with all those strange sounds. So with simply having watched a lot of Portuguese language soaps, and having learned Spanish much more thoroughly, I have here read and comprehended fully a number of articles in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as in my earlier French.

Portuguese sounds so different that you will never mix it up with Spanish. It’s probably like my Danish and Swedish, around the table at a summer job, I spoke Danish to my boss and Swedish to his wife, at an extreme switch rate. It was no problem even if many would consider the closeness of those two languages terribly confusing. To me it was the sound, as if you sing country music or the blues or jazz. It is indeed the same between Spanish and Portuguese, not to mention a similar difference to French and to Italian. Italian singsongs and dances around, Spanish has its feet on the ground, Portuguese whines and twists and nazalizes, French is neat and formal with its nazalization. They are all so beautifully different that, NO, you will not mix them.

Cecil
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marciano guerrero — August 17th, 2010, 7:48 am

When I worked in Elizabeth, NJ, where there’s a large population of Portuguese speaking people, I learned Portuguese in 2 months. I spent 2 years in Germany and I learned the language fairly well. So I speak Spanish, English, Portuguese, and German–but I am afraid to try a language with a different alphabet. Maybe I’ll give it a try and deconstruct it first.
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Bryan — August 25th, 2010, 6:27 am

I love these articles. Please write more. You also said you would do an extensive verb post, “acquiring vocabulary is a simple process of proper spaced repetition, which will be the subject of a dedicated future post.”
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Cedric — September 6th, 2010, 6:19 pm

Here’s my contribution, as a native French speaker.

The apple is red. La pomme est rouge.
It is John’s apple. C’est la pomme de John.
I give John the apple. Je donne la pomme à John.
We give him the apple. Nous lui donnons la pomme.
He gives it to John. Il la donne à John.
She gives it to him. Elle la lui donne.
I must give it to him. Je dois la lui donner.
I want to give it to her. Je veux la lui donner.
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- Tim Ferriss — September 6th, 2010, 7:56 pm
  
  Merci, Cedric!
  Reply
  - Cedric — May 18th, 2011, 6:22 pm
    
    De rien. Si tu as besoin d’aide ou tu as d’autres phrases à traduire, tu peux me contacter.
    Reply
- Nik — November 10th, 2010, 11:50 am
  
  Thanks! I’m learning French and tried to translate using Google, which didn’t come out right. Your comment is spot on! This method really helps pull together concepts I’ve been learning; it’s simple and makes sense.
  Reply
- Lori — October 2nd, 2011, 9:51 am
  
  Thank you!
  
  Currently, I only speak English, a smattering of Spanish and recently decided I’m going to learn Korean. After reading Tim’s article (which I LOVED) I started an Excel sheet with his sentences to which I will add new languages. I didn’t know enough French to do it so… Thank you!!!
  
  Next I will look to see if I can find that thesis he was talking about.
  
  Lori
  Reply
  - Hyori — September 8th, 2012, 11:32 am
    
    Thank you, Tim, for the articles!!! I just wanted to give feedback on your system that I applied to learning German and French. I’m not a linguist or bilingual from birth. I do think the fluency bit in your claim is overhyped (depends if you go by international standards as in the EU framework), but getting to the intermediate level with good pronunciation has been tested and achieved with your method. And I can sometimes even hear some different accents in the language.
    
    I hope the poster above me is doing well with her studies in Korean! I wanted to point out though, she might have missed one of the points of Tim’s article. Korean, for example, is tempting because it’s very easy in terms of reading/writing, but when you do a bit of research, the phonemes are very very difficult for non-Koreans to hear. The honorifics and verb conjugations are also quite complicated relative to English. Japanese pronunciation is much purer and easier to hear. The grammar is not particularly complicated (just a bit different at first), and the number of grammar constructs/vocabulary used in daily conversation is rather repetitive. So if you’re a Westerner not living in the country where you’ll hear native speakers daily and you want an East Asian language, I recommend to try Japanese first. (And if you’re a man, try finding a Japanese boy as a language partner! Otherwise, practicing with a typical Japanese girl, you will sound much too cute and feminine in your speaking.) Reading takes a while.
    
    Anyways, back to me. Your system was great! I did not learn German in 3 months, but after 6 months of living in Germany and no classes, I could communicate comfortably, understand the basic themes of newspaper articles without a dictionary, and people were amazed because they can’t always hear where I am from unless they listen carefully for a while. Such as my blind linguist/speech coach not guessing where I was from. I took one weekend seminar on German pronunciation taught by her plus one actual German class, and 6 months later, I passed the TestDaF (equivalent to TOEFL) with 18/20 across all 4 sections. That puts me about the B2.2.-C1 level, or university-level studies, which takes about 5-6 years of formal classroom instruction to get there, and I did it in 14 months. (C2 is fluency or native speaker). It is still difficult to get the full nuances of complicated textbooks or literary German, and my brain poops out after too many hours speaking, so I can’t say I’m fluent yet.
    
    For French, I was able to achieve this level in 6 months, but that was because I had studied Latin in school and was more familiar with the vocabulary.
    
    I just wanted to add some things that helped me: a) prime myself in the sounds of a language like a child before hitting the books and b) learn not so much word-for-word translations but what I call “language chunks”. I at least sound less like a foreigner. For example, when I learned German, I first learned children’s songs before I seriously studied the grammar and watched dubbed episodes of TV shows or films whose plots I knew. You get a feeling for the natural rhythm and cadence of the language. For example, German has a tendency to drop in tone at the end of sentences or with certain types of verbs. Plus you know what words rhyme or at least ought to sound similar or helps you remember stuff like when a D becomes a T. You can choose any type of music really (rap really is good too for this). The advantage of children’s songs for beginners is that they’re repetitive and easy to stick in one’s head. After one year of German, I still struggle with noun cases and other advanced grammar. But people can’t tell where I come from based on my accent, and they don’t have a problem understanding me because of pronunciation. I took one class to make sure I had the grammar properly, and 6 months later, I took the TestDaF and scored 18/20 across the 4 sections.
    
    When I learned French, I realized the problem with the language wasn’t so much the grammar as the auditory part. Words aren’t so distinctly pronounced as in German. Plus there are a lot of “silent” sounds, despite the spelling (like aient, ait, ais, etc). So I learned the language by chunking. Instead of ” tu” “es”, I just learned “tues” as if it were one word.
    
    After learning these two representative languages of western Europe, it was easier to move on. Dutch is hard to speak because of the phonemes, but I can read a lot of it and if someone speaks slowly/clearly, I can understand a lot of it. I can read basic Norwegian and Danish. Spanish and Italian are pretty easy to read now. I have not touched into the Slavic languages at all.
    
    Just wanted to thank you again!
    Reply
    - Ed Love — March 1st, 2013, 5:36 pm
      
      I love your language posts, and often share them. Please do keep ‘em coming.
      
      Thanks from down under!