Sure, some people may say it’s because they don’t have time to study, but what that usually means is that they haven’t organized their learning plan well enough to take advantage of the time they do have.

That’s where audio courses come in.

Use Every Free Minute

Audio courses help you make use of the little scraps of free time you have through out the day. Put the course on your MP3 player or Walkman and it’s ready to go

It also lets you keep your hands free, so can go for a walk, make coffee, clean the house, or just about anything else while you’re studying. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend getting too deeply involved in something else because it will distract you from what you’re trying to learn and reduce your retention of the material.

The up side, though, is hands-free study will take away the feeling that there’s “something more important” you should be doing instead of sitting on the sofa with a textbook in your lap.

The Best Audio Courses

If you’ve read a few articles at FasterForeignLanguageLearning.com, you’ve probably noticed that I’m a huge fan of Pimsleur. The reason I like them so much is the course is very well organized to help you actually remember what you hear. It’s not just someone reading a list of words followed by a few dialogues.

The only downside, however, is that Pimsleur is rather expensive. If you’re not ready to splash out $200 or more, give Living Languages from Random House a try. These courses do come with books that include vocab lists, example phrases, and quizzes, but the audio alone is still useful.

Make you Own “Course”

Not having a professionally designed audio course available doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage audio to improve your language skills. The internet gives you access to a huge variety of audio in the more common languages, but you’ll probably be able to find something in all but the rarest languages. This includes talk radio, interviews, music clips, movies, and even ads.

While it’s true this audio material won’t be neatly organized for language study purposes, you’ll find that just listening—daily—will help your listening comprehension enormously. Keep adding your seven (or however many) words a day and you’ll find yourself able to understand more and more of what you hear. The repetition will also help get the words into your long-term memory.

One caveat, though: if you’re the type of learner who needs to see new words in writing or write them out yourself before you can remember them, an audio-only course may actually be slower for you than a traditional textbook-based course.

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1. A Real Answer to “How Fast Can I Learn a Language?”
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3. What if You Only Have Eight Weeks? Can You Learn a Language That Fast?

To give you a general answer, though, if you’re strongly motivated, can time for daily study, and have basic study material available, you can probably reach a basic “survival fluency” in three to six months.

What Level do You Want to Reach?

If you’re self-taught or taking an average-speed (not intensive) language course, you’ll probably be able to reach Intermediate Mid or Elementary Proficiency in three months.

At this level you’ll be able to hold simple discussions on basic, everyday topics and get the gist of printed material meant for a wide audience. Buying something in a shop, ordering a meal in restaurant, checking into a hotel room will pose minimal problems.

The reality is, though, that if you have plenty of opportunity for interactive practice (ideally daily, face-to-face conversations), you can get a lot farther in that time.

There’s something about the way the human mind learns language that requires live interaction to really absorb a language quickly. We hear words repeated in context and hear examples of how to use various grammar features all while paying close attention to the person we’re talking to because we need to exchange information.

How You Can Get There in Three Months

Language teachers will tell you the average person can learn seven words a day without getting overwhelmed. You may be able to learn 20 words in one day, but try 20 words a day for a week and you probably won’t remember much of what you studied.

So, learn seven words a day for three months (minus one day a week for review) and you’ll have a vocabulary of around 550 words. In most situations, that will be around 90% of what you need to communicate comfortably.

Of course, it’s not all about vocabulary. You’ll also need a good grasp on the most common verb tenses, cases, prepositions, possessives and other grammar essentials. In three months, you probably won’t be able to get in enough practice to be able to use them flawlessly, but you can get comfortable enough with them that native speakers can understand with little trouble.

The trick to getting a good foundation in grammar relatively quickly is knowing when you move on to something new. For the most part, when you feel like you can use a particular grammar feature well enough to communicate (you make mistakes, but few that interfere with communication).

So, the answer to “How fast can I learn a language?” is that it depends a lot on your foreign language learning skills. If you have your tricks for getting vocab words to stick and learning to use grammar without having to stop and think about it, then you’ll learn significantly faster than average. The book Faster Foreign Language Learning provides just that. In contains all the “tricks” and “shortcuts” I’ve learned in the past 15 years of language learning and teaching.

The Whole Answer

No matter what your learning style, these tools can not only halve the time it takes you to reach conversation level (or fluency, if that’s your goal), but also make getting there more fun and less stressful.

Related posts:

1. Learn a Language Fast with Audio Courses
2. Three Things You Need to Learn a Language Fast
3. What if You Only Have Eight Weeks? Can You Learn a Language That Fast?

And yet, with the right techniques, it is possible to get the strikingly fast results of intensive and immersion-style language courses even if you never set foot in a classroom. Here’s a little more about how you can do that.

Focus on the Essentials

Lack of focus is one of the main reasons many people aren’t able to learn a foreign language faster than average. When you’re deeply interested in a language, every word and every aspect of grammar seems interesting and useful. It’s easy to overwhelm yourself with long vocab lists and copious grammar notes. In attempt to get the basics of everything in general, you end up learning very little thoroughly enough to actually use it in a conversation.

In a Hubpages Hub on learning a foreign language in eight weeks I laid out a plan for getting conversant in any language in just a month and a half.

It will help you with two things: 1) choosing exactly the vocabulary you need and 2) choosing exactly what grammar features you need. By tightly restricting your focus to the absolute essentials and mastering those, you’ll get conversant (or reach the next level in your studies) much faster than if you browse around for “interesting” words and grammar features.

Choose Learning Material That’s Right for You

There is no one best language learning method. No matter how many people out there love Pimsleur or the Teach Yourself series or any other given language learning method or program, that doesn’t mean that method or program is the best one for you.

If you’re an auditory learner and need to hear the foreign language in order to learn it, you’ll do great with Pimsleur. If you the kind who wants everything laid out in need tables and charts, the Living Languages, is probably a good bet for you.

It’s equally important not to limit the amount of study material you collect, especially when it comes to workbooks and authentic material (newspapers, songs, etc.). While you want to choose a good course for you main learning resource, any extra practice and input you can get will both build your knowledge and skills and prevent boredom.

Use Memory Techniques

Memory “tricks” are the ultimate in what sets fast language learners apart from average learners. To some extent, this is also a matter of knowing your own learning style. Another thing holding a lot of people back from learning a foreign language faster is that. Unfortunately, language classes rarely teach you how to learn a language. They just give you the material and expect you to learn it somehow.

That means beginning language learners are left to discover what works and what doesn’t through trial and error, wasting years trying out ineffective techniques before they (with luck) stumble across the effective ones. For instance, beginning language learners often try to learn vocabulary by listing the foreign words alongside their translations and “reviewing” this list several times a day. It’s hard to think of a less effective way to learn vocab.

One better way to get vocab words to stick is the link-word technique. If you want to remember the Spanish tijeras (scissors), you might link it to the English words “tea” and “hair.” Make up a story like, “My sister was using scissors to cut her hair at the the kitchen table while I was making tea, and now there’s a hair in my tea.” Now that is far from a perfect example, but check with yourself tomorrow and see if you don’t remember how to say “scissors” in Spanish.

Often all you need is just a slight push to jog your short term memory enough times to get the words in your long term so you no longer need a trick to remember it.

Another good practice technique is the diglot weave—mixing two languages in one sentence. This helps you practice words you know even before you know much grammar. If you’re learning Arabic, you might look at a crowd and think, “There are a lot of nas [people] on the shari [street] today.”

“Tricks” list this exist for grammar, too. And there are literally dozens of these so you won’t have any problem finding ones that are effective for you.

All three of these elements—focus, study material, and memory techniques—are vital to being able to learn a foreign language fast. In the Faster Foreign Language Learning book, I’ve covered each in depth so you can skip the years of trial and error and become one of the “fast learners” now.

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1. Learn a Language Fast with Audio Courses
2. Foreign Language Vocabulary Learning Made Really Easy
3. A Real Answer to “How Fast Can I Learn a Language?”

Where are You Starting From?

First of all, keep in mind that easy to learn languages to you depend on your mother tongue and the other languages you know well. For example, German is easier for an English speaker to learn than it is for a Japanese speaker. That’s because German and English have more vocabulary and grammar in common than German and Japanese do. On the other hand, if a Japanese speaker already speaks fluent Dutch, than German will be much easier for him.

Motivation Makes a Difference

Motivation throws those lists of easy to learn languages out the window. If you can’t stand the sound of French and have no real feeling for the culture, but the Czech language, culture, and people have completely stolen your heart, then the reputedly difficult Czech language will be easier to learn than the “easy” French language. This is a huge factor that should not be overlooked. A sincere longing to learn a language beats “easy” every time.

Esperanto

We’ll start with a language that was specifically designed to be easy to learn: L. L. Zamenhof’s Esperanto. Although it is an invented language, many speakers deign to call it an “artificial language” because they do actually use it to communicate amongst each other when no other language is available. This language has a huge following, with up to 2 million speakers worldwide, according to Esperanto.net.

You can also find Esperanto clubs around the world that help out travelers who speak this language, so it does have a practical use. There’s also some evidence that learning Esperanto first helps you learn other languages faster. That only makes sense, since you develop your language learning skills more quickly with this easy to learn language.

Afrikaans and Dutch

Often cited as the “best” of the easy to learn languages for English speakers, Afrikaans has nearly 7 million speakers living in five countries in Southern Africa. It’s also spoken among expats of that area (that is, southern Africans in Europe or elsewhere), so it could be useful if you’re traveling to an area with lots of African expats.

Now, I don’t speak either, but it’s said that Afrikaans and Dutch are largely mutually intelligible. If that’s so, the difficulty level will be largely the same. So, if you don’t think you’ll be getting to Africa anytime soon, you might want to pick Dutch instead.

Romance and Germanic Languages

Yes, I know the above two are Germanic languages and I know “Romance and Germanic languages” is a broad category. Generally speaking, though, we’re looking at languages like French, Italian, Spanish, and even Romanian in the Romance group and Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish in the Germanic group, with actual German being rated a little more difficult.

Once you start looking at these more widely spoken languages, though, you’re probably interested in more than just how easy the language is to learn. If you’re totally fascinated with Germany and have been planning a six month stay there, then someone telling you that Spanish is “easier” won’t change your mind about which language to learn.

Again, the “easy to learn languages” for you comes down to motivation and which language and culture draws you in more. Also check the post on how to how to decide what language to learn for tips on that topic.

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