Benny Lewis - Fluent in 3 Months

In Luxembourg, the language of instruction changes every few years. As a result, children come out of school fluent in French, German, and Luxembourgish. If any of us had been brought up in that environment, we would have learned the same languages just as well, regardless of our genetics.

If you happen to be British, don’t forget that we are genetically about the same as any multilingual European and it’s more a question of culture than ability that has tended to be a barrier in our attitude to language-learning up to now. Somewhere in your family tree someone very likely communicated in more than one language. Pulling the genetics card when this is the case in your own family tree is quite silly.

The fact that a monolingual culture breeds monolinguals doesn’t say anything about an individual’s inherent potential. When it comes to language-learning, there is no room for doubt: you decide your own success. Do the necessary work to learn a language, and you’ll catch up with – and even overtake – the ‘naturally talented’.

3. I Don’t Have the Time

It’s all well and good for those with no full-time job or responsibilities to go gallivanting around the world and spend all day studying languages, but some of us have to work .

Definitely a fair retort, if it were true that successful language learners were only those who practise language-learning full-time. But this is very far from what actually happens. If anything, those doing it full-time are a rarity, and pretty much all successful language learners I have met have done it while also working a full-time job, completing their undergraduate studies, helping to raise a family, taking care of loved ones, or juggling a host of other responsibilities.

For instance, the second foreign language I seriously took the time to learn was Italian. And though I did move to Italy while I was learning the language (though you really don’t have to, as I’ll discuss later), the job I took in Rome required me to work more than sixty hours a week, so I know better than most what it’s like to have a really demanding schedule and still find a way to make language-learning work.

It’s not a question of having enough time. I’ve seen more cases than I care to list of people who had all day, every day, for many months to learn a language but squandered that time. It’s all about making time. Even though I only had every other evening free in Rome, I used that tiny amount of time to focus on improving my skills in Italian. And while working as a receptionist at an international youth hostel, I often studied during the odd quiet moment when nobody was around.

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